A Disorder of Things

Martin Luther King Jr Day

2012-01-16T23:31:00.000+11:00

DRUM MAJOR FOR A DREAM 23

Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him

Build monuments to his glory

Sing hosannas to his name

Dead men make

Such convenient heroes.

They cannot rise

To challenge the images

We wouldfashion from their lives

And besides,

It is easier to build monuments

Than to make a better world.

So, now that he is safely dead

We, with eased consciences

Will teach our children

That he was a great man ... knowing

That the cause for which he lived

Is still a cause

And the dream for which he died Is still a dream,

A dead man's dream.

- CARL WENDELL HIMES JR.

Top Nine Albums of 2011

2012-01-12T01:46:00.000+11:00

In no particular order...

9. A. A. Bondy - Believers

8. The Antlers - Burst Apart

7. Frank Fairfield - Frank Fairfield

6. Monster Rally - Coral

5. Delta Spirit - History From Below

4. Scott and Charlene's Wedding - Para Vista Social Club

<a href="http://scottandcharleneswedding.bandcamp.com/album/para-vista-social-club">Para Vista Social Club by Scott & Charlene's Wedding</a>

3. Tom Waits - Bad As Me

2. Low - C'mon

1. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Notable exclusions due to conflicts of interest...

The Atlas Mountains - A Splendid Diagnosis

Plastic Palace Alice - Like A Light

<a href="http://plasticpalacealice.com/album/like-a-light">Like A Light by Plastic Palace Alice</a>

Oh and...

The Wild Frontier - Friends as Lovers

<a href="http://thewildfrontier.bandcamp.com/track/friends-as-lovers">Friends as Lovers by The Wild Frontier</a>

Bonhoeffer on Wasted Years

2012-01-03T02:16:00.001+11:00

Yesterday I heard someone say he felt the last years have been completely wasted as far as he was concerned. I have never felt like that, not even for a moment. Nor have I ever regretted my decision in the summer of 1939,* and strange as it may seem, I am convinced that my life has followed a straight and even course, at any rate so far as its outward circumstances are concerned. It has been an uninterrupted enrichment of my experience, for which I can only be thankful. If I should end my days here like this, that would have a meaning I could understand. On the other hand my time here may be a thorough preparation for a fresh start, for a new job of work when peace comes again...

From Letters and Papers From Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 11th 1944.
*Bonhoeffer's decision to return from the US to Germany.

Dreaming of a Christmas Card from a Hooker

2011-12-25T07:33:00.001+11:00

Considering Jesus was more likely to get a Christmas Card from a Hooker than see a White Christmas, this is a perfectly appropriate song for the season.

Merry Christmas,

See you when you're on parole.

The Pseudo Ethical Scrooge and Immunity from Change

2011-12-24T08:53:00.002+11:00

In Western societies such as Australia, UK, or the US, Christmas is a consumer driven festival with a slight veneer of religious significance. One does not need to be a Max Weber or Emile Durkheim to draw this conclusion.

In step with the proliferation of Christmas identities such as Father Christmas (aka Santa Claus), Carol-ers, elves, reindeer, and snowmen etc. a relatively new addition has emerged: the Pseudo Ethical Scrooge. Distinct from the regular Scrooge or Grinch, the Pseudo Ethical Scrooge does not dislike Christmas per se, but what they regard as unethical spending on consumer goods. These Scrooges make statements such as "if everyone in [insert country] didn't buy gifts for one year and instead gave money to [insert ngo] then we would eradicate [insert catastrophic event] undeniably."

Despite strong arguments that the eradication of events such as famine or poverty don't occur through mere donations or redirection of fundings - see here - it is difficult to deny the Pseudo Ethical Scrooge's point. People do buy a lot of stuff during this period. Some of the stuff is good, some is useful, some is edible and a lot is utter crap. Almost all of it is unnecessary. However, almost all of the stuff that fills our shopping carts (real and virtual) for the other 364 days of the year is unnecessary. This is the point that these Ethical Scrooges neglect, and through this neglect reveal themselves as no more sincere than a 'peace on earth' Hallmark card.

Unlike the Dickens Scrooge who proclaims 'a pox on all your houses'* and goes to bed in a cold empty mansion, these Pseudo Ethical Scrooges inform us of the catastrophe to which we all contribute while still participating in the party. Like a vegetarian lecturing on the vice of meat eating, while wolfing down the last pork roll.**

To be clear, I am not talking about activities like the TEAR or Oxfam Gift Catalogues, but the cheap comments made in a falsetto register that use global poverty as a vehicle for self-love. I use cheap and falsetto intentionally. Like the gifts received in the office KrisKringle and drunken attempts to sing 'O Holy Night' - these concerns over the Western excess and global poverty are little more than inexpensive, poorly constructed and weak thoughts broadcast through a false register that mimics sincerity.

Exhibit A: Starvation Ornaments

Exhibit B: Popular 'web-posters' juxtaposing starving children with Christmas consumerism***

Exhibit C:

The problem is not drawing attention to the excesses of Western consumerism or the suffering of others, but the use of 'poverty-porn' as an immunity mechanism that enables rather than prevents further consumption.

The early practice of smallpox inoculation serves as an example of this practice. In order to be protected against small-pox, an individual would have smallpox scabs rubbed into incisions on their body, delivering minimal infection yet immunity from the disease. Similarly, by exposing oneself to the graphic horrors of global poverty in the context of excessive of consumerism, the effect is not a revaluation of values, but protection from such a revaluation, thereby enabling the continuation of consumer practices.

Through 'poverty-porn' the Pseudo Ethical Scrooge is able to cleanse their conscience of the guilt associated with excessive consumption, continue with the festivities and avoid the difficult process of revaluing and restructuring their existence for the other 364 days of the year.

To be clear, the conclusion here is not that global poverty or excessive consumption should simply be ignored, or even that the Pseudo Ethical Scrooge is a kill-joy. Rather the consumer excesses that take place on every other day of the year AND the systemic injustices of global trade, resource distribution and political economy require sustained critical reflection. Critical reflection that doesn't come through a song or an image.

Giving gifts to friends and family - with or without acknowledging the symbolic significance - is an important cultural practice. To refrain from this practice for the sake of global poverty, could be a noble gesture, but it could also preclude the formation of significant bonds and relations. These bonds not only characterize us as humans, and enrich life, but also provide the conditions for the communal and social change necessary to confront problematic issues like consumerism and poverty.

So I will be giving my family and friends Thomas Pogge and Amartya Sen books for Christmas. Just kidding- you'll still get your iPads and Steve Jobs biographies.

*I know Scrooge didn't say this - but Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.
**OK, I admit I may have been this person...oops
*** I won't provide an image because I think these posters are crass but you can see some here

Searching For My True Self Yesterday: The Malaise of Modern Man I

2011-12-17T08:57:00.004+11:00

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.- Walt Whitman, 'One's-Self I Sing', Leaves of Grass.

In contrast to Whitman's Modern Man - of life immense in passion, pulse, and power - Butler's Modern Man is trapped in a moribund grind. Further, unlike the insight of the Kids, Butler's Modern Man lacks comprehension - ‘in line for a number but you don't understand’. In ‘Modern Man’ Butler sings of the Modern Man as not only unable to understand but through Kafkaesque waiting Modern Man wastes the time of the ‘chosen few’ and makes it that they ‘can’t sleep at night’.

In ‘Ready to Start’ Butler positions himself between the Modern Man – the businessmen – and the Kids, again it is the Kids that can see clearly: ‘If the businessmen drink my blood like the kids in art school said they would, then I guess I'll just begin again.’ Butler’s personal reflection on his time in art school and naïve remedy ‘beginning again’ to the bloodlust of businessmen highlights Butler’s concern with the Kids and Modern Man tension, but also wider thematic of present-nostalgia.

‘Ready to Start’ and ‘City with No Children’ reveal that Butler occupies the space between the Kids and Modern Man. There is a strong hint that the ‘kids in art school’ were right when they prophesied that the businessmen would drink his blood. The line from ‘City with No Children’ – ‘never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount, I used to think I was not like them but I'm beginning to have my doubts’- introduces the question that perhaps Butler is fast becoming the Modern Man. No longer part of the Kids, Butler and perhaps a generation along with him, can see the reflection of Modern Man in the mirror. Rather than accept this reflection there is a turn toward the past to find the true self and attempt to map the point that turned ‘every good thing to rust’.

Searching For My True Self Yesterday: Kids Know Rococo

2011-11-30T12:08:00.000+11:00

Perhaps the exemplary song of ‘present-nostalgia’ (Part I and II) is 'Wake-Up' off Funereal. It speaks of pure childhood destroyed by growing older and being fed lies, presumably by ‘Modern Man’, which turn ‘everything to rust’.

Powerfully used to promote the film Where the Wild Things Are, ‘Wake Up’ was further enshrined for mid-to-late twenty year olds as an anthem of nostalgia, wistfully reminding the listener of a not-too-distant past when being locked in one’s bedroom was the worst thing that could happen, before the realities of divorce, unemployment and sickness came crashing through. The corruption of childhood through waking up to adulthood is repeated through the tension between ‘kids’ and ‘modern man’ that runs under the surface of Funeral and Neon Bible to emerge as a dominant theme throughout The Suburbs.

7th N 3rd Street, Philadelphia

Half the songs on The Suburbs explicitly mention ‘kids’ or ‘children’, while the other half refer to ‘kids’ activities like riding bicycles and kissing in parks. Butler’s ‘kids’ first appeared in 2003 on Arcade Fire’s self-titled EP in ‘No Cars Go’, later to re-appear on Neon Bible. Butler builds on the ancient theme of the insight of children by positioning ‘kids’ as privileged knowers.

In ‘No Cars Go’ the ‘kids’ know where the car-free utopia is, where women, babies and old folks go; notably ‘modern man’ is excluded. However, the ‘kids’ as knowers in The Suburbs are more complicated. They are still the privileged knowers in ‘Rococo’ who ‘have always known that the emperor wears no clothes’, however there is a certain wryness when Butler sings that t‘they bow down to him anyway’ because ‘it’s better than being alone.’ So while the ‘kids’ may see the reality of the Emperor’s wardrobe malfunction, the fear of isolation and rejection leads to false worship.

But the ‘kids’ can’t be blamed for their bad-faith. In addition to knowing that the Emperor is without clothes, they also know ‘so much pain for someone so young’. In ‘Month of May’ Butler sings of the ‘kids’ standing there with their ‘arms folded tight’ unable to lift a thing. Perhaps these are the same poser ‘kids’ in Butler's more sardonic ‘Rococo’ who are all the same and using ‘great big words that they don’t understand.’ However, to understand the (dis)affectedness of these kids we need to understand the malaise of 'modern man'...

Searching For My True Self Yesterday: Take Me Home

2011-11-22T02:01:00.005+11:00

The three distinctive features of present-nostalgia, introduced here, come into greater relief when Butler’s ‘kids’ and ‘modern man’ are compared to those of Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman. Whitman’s ‘modern man’ is a song to be sung and future anticipated, while Dylan’s ‘kids’ strive to claim the future as their own. However, the tension between ‘kids’ and ‘modern man’ in Butler’s lyrics, and present-nostalgia more generally, can be read through the social theory of Charles Taylor as an attempt to secure authentic selfhood and construct meaning out of fragments of the past. Taylor can help us know whether the longing for a near-past is a matter of growing up too fast, or not growing up at all.

‘Two-Thousand Nine, Two-Thousand Ten Gonna Make a Record How I Felt Then’ Month of May

Eulogizing the simplicity and innocence of a near past that has become complex and tainted by adulthood, responsibility and economics, The Suburbs builds on themes introduced in Funeral and Neon Bible. In many cases the temporal gap between the present and the past event being eulogised is narrow. This is seen in the recurrence of the childhood home as a site of (in)security and drama across all three Arcade Fire albums.

The home is undeniably a significant cultural site, however traditionally ‘rock and roll’ as been more about leaving home for a new world rather than continually recalling its complexity. At the time Funeral was released Butler was twenty four, yet the album is imbued with mixed ‘homesickness’ for a home that could still be seen, and perhaps was still being lived in.

In The Suburbs ‘City With No Children’ Butler intones the return home, ‘Dreamed I drove home to Houston’, however the journey is interrupted by a failing engine and collapsing tunnel. In ‘Sprawl I’ Butler reinforces this longing for the childhood home when he mournfully sings ‘Took a drive into the sprawl to find the house where we use to stay’. But again the attempt of return is interrupted when they ‘Couldn't read the number in the dark You said let's save it for another day’.

This longing for the childhood home is powerfully established in the interactive film-clip The Wilderness Downtown. This film speaks of over-indulgence as much as it does genius. Asking the viewer to submit the street address of their childhood home the viewer is taken on a journey through their old suburb with a jogger and Arcade Fire as guides. While Butler sings ‘now our lives are changing fast, hope that something pure can last’ Google Street View takes the viewer through the streets of their childhood suburb incorporating it in the film; at the crescendo the childhood home takes centre stage. Clearly this film demonstrates Chris Milk’s creative ability, but it is also evidences of desire for the everyday of not-too-distant past and a narcissistic celebration in middle-class mediocrity.

The home is certainly not absent from earlier forms of popular music, but it plays a different role as source of identity and future direction.

Requiem for an Occupation?

2011-11-15T22:52:00.003+11:00

Early this morning police cleared the protesters from Zuccotti Park, the initial location of the Occupt Wall St. movement. While the Occupy Philadelphia camp is still in place, the events in New York perhaps signal an end to this phase of protest in other cities.

Here are some images and quotes that gesture toward the complexities within the movement itself and the wider concerns it draws attention to.

'This is what democracy looks like'
Occupy Philadelphia: 10/20/11

[I]n our societies, critical Leftists have hitherto only succeeded in soiling those in power, whereas the real point is to castrate them...
But how can we do this? We should learn here form the failures of twentieth century Leftist politics. The task is not to conduct the castration in a direct climatic confrontation, but to undermine those in power with patient ideologico-critical work, so that although they are still in power, one all of a sudden notices that the powers-that-be are afflicted with unnaturally high-pitched voices. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, p. 7.

Occupy Philadelphia: 10/20/11

The widening gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all) and realization (the benefit of a small ruling class) is now all too visible...The more neoliberalism is recognized as a failed utopian rhetoric masking a successful project for the restoration of a ruling-class power, the more the basis is laid for a resurgence of mass movements voicing egalitarian political demands and seeking economic justice, fair trade, and greater economic security. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, pp.203-204

'Bless are the oppressed'
Occupy Philadelphia: 10/20/11

It is not true at all that the earth belongs to the meek. What the Beatitudes say is against all reality. Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p.170

Apple Store, Philadelphia: 10/20/11

Asceticism is not a flight from society and the world, but a communal attitude of mind and way of life that leads to the respectful use, and not the abuse, of material goods. Excessive consumption may be understood to issue from a worldview of estrangement from self, from land, from life, and from God. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I

Imagine, Imagine, Imagine

2011-11-12T15:36:00.000+11:00

I have just arrived home from the Candle Light Vigil held at Penn State in recognition of the victims of child abuse at the University, and more broadly. I will reflect further on the evening before posting here, but an immediate response to the event that continued to resonate during the walk home was the singing of John Lennon’s Imagine during the ‘service’.

While I have flirted with Imagine over the years, the despairing emptiness of the song was brought home tonight. To be clear, I am not pushing some “you have to have religion or nationalism to have meaning” agenda, but you need to try a lot harder than the insipid and vacuous lyrics of Imagine if you want some substantial meaning. Religion (in the abstract) may be full of paradoxes, knots and apparent contradictions, but at least it is full of something. Lennon’s Imagine is merely careful constructed platitudes in an attempt to mimic depth and gravitas.

The sheer hollowness of the lyrics was driven into my bones like the near freezing wind blowing across the lawn. Apart from the complete detachment from reality, the sentiment promotes empty thinking rather than critical thought. The imaginary of ‘Penn State’ provided the conditions for these abuses to occur and the hubris to attempt to cover them up. The last thing that is needed is imaging. What is needed is mourning, humility, reflection and silence. Not circuses and children’s song about some utopia (literally no-place) where it is always school holiday and ice-cream is served instead of vegetables.

Tragedy and Anger in Happy Valley

2011-11-11T07:58:00.007+11:00

"Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides"
- William Shakespeare, King Lear

"This is one of the saddest weeks in the history of Penn State"
- Rodney Erickson, Interim President of Pennsylvania StateUniversity

I will not recount the details of what has occurred at Penn State over the past 47 years to lead to this point of 'sadness'.* And I do not think it is an exaggeration to appeal to Shakespeare or the notion of tragedy to make sense of the fall of mighty men, the unravelling of moral pillars and the tearing of identities. This is not just about football or Penn State. If these events are isolated to either, then a narrative that allows us to create distance from the actors will cover the many lessons of this tragic drama.

A danger is to isolate victim and villain, innocence and guilt, and wounded and perpetrator to self-contained individuals. To be clear, the role of victim intensely belongs to the boys who suffered sexual abuse under the care of a senior football administrator. I do not want to reduce or take away from that. But the victimization does not end with them. Rather it emanates in concentric circles. Similarly the perpetration of the crimes can be isolated to an individual. But this also does not end with them. Rather it emanates in concentric circles, which expand to exhaustion and overlap with the expanding circles of victimization. In this area of overlap there is confusion, anger and frustration. Perhaps a lot of the students and wider Penn State community feel positioned between the overlapping waves of the expanding circles of victimization and perpetration – far removed from the either actions but effected by both.

From my observations, a bulk of the student body are experiencing deep confusion over these events, their place in them, who is to blame, and what can be done. Emotions for this institution, community, football and coach run deep. To see these sources of identify and selfhood scrutinized is extremely troubling.

As the seeds sown 47 years ago have revealed their bitter fruit this week, some students and alumni have turned their anger and confusion toward the messenger - the media. Viewing the media as the only participants in this drama standing to gain, students have directed uncontrolled emotion toward them. Culminating in a riot.

In response to the riot, the Penn State Facebook page requested students vacate the downtown area. However, a number of comments to the two messages (on the right), supported the students rioting and suggested the media presence justified, if not required violent action. For example:

Adam: tell the media to vacate. not the students

Nicole: So glad they are making a point of attacking the media, what goes around comes around media!!!

Brian: Should have thought about that before handing the legend over to the mob media. Penn state gets what they asked for tonight.

Tarrie: What a shame that a brilliant career is ending over this. I can't believe that this honorable man is as deeply involved in this as the media is making out. I've been a Penn State fan for as long as I can remember and I"m 52 years old. I think you should protest, protest and protest. Let your voices be heard loud and clear.

Mardizone: show luv for JOE PA yall...shame on da media!!!!!! shame on PSU!!!!

David: Susan, the media is what caused this. The media is the one who villified Joe Paterno. The media is the reason his career was called to end. The media is the reason his legacy has been entirely destroyed. The media is entirely at fault.

Susan: My son has just been pepper sprayed trying to help a girl that tripped-thanks b of trustees and media.

Kvision: Joe Paterno did not deserve to be fired! All those that are protesting against him are victims of the media and miss information. This is what the media does because they have no morals either. They are about making the buck just like Penn State.

As is clear from these comments there is a lot of anger and confusion. While it is important that certain actions are taken quickly and decisively, it is also important the quick solutions and answers do not satisfy the need for deeper inquiry. Slow thought and careful consideration is crucial in order to learn from errors of the past. Some of us may be victims or perpetrators of these errors, and some of us may be an uncomfortable mixture of both. However, it is important that artificial stories are not grasped for as quick remedy to our discomfort. Time has unfolded what plaited cunning hides, and likewise time should be allowed for somber rumination, sensitive dialogue and ethical consideration.

*Most major US newspapers have adequate summaries - NY Times, USA Today, FOX News or Centre Daily Times

Searching For My True Self Yesterday: Present-nostalgia in Win Butler’s Lyrics

2011-11-09T09:39:00.001+11:00

Over the past six years Arcade Fire has (for some) become something of a barometer through which certain aspects of popular social and cultural trends can be understood. I suggest that a close listen to Win Butler’s lyrics reveal the repetition and layering of particular motifs dealing with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, or in Butler’s parlance from ‘kids’ to the ‘modern man’. These themes are not exclusive to Arcade Fire and reflect a strong thread in contemporary culture that valorises and commemorates a past that has barely passed. This valorisation of the near past or what I call ‘present-nostalgia’ is also evident in the lyrics of Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom, embodied by Michael Cera and Zooey Deschanel, and dispensed through Urban Outfitters. Despite diverse examples Butler’s lyrics provide the clearest window through which to peer on the phenomenon of present-nostalgia.

The trend among mid-to-late twenty year olds who long for adolescences despite only very recently leaving adolescence is represented in Butler’s lyrics by the tension between the world of ‘kids’ and the world of the ‘modern man’. The ubiquity of ‘kids’ in Butler’s lyrics and the tension with adulthood represents a distinctive use of nostalgia in the contemporary. Clearly nostalgia has played an important role in the commemoration of the past in a variety of art forms, however, what is distinctive about the nostalgia employed in Butler’s lyrics and the contemporary indie scene more widely is the quotidian or everyday subject matter, temporal proximity to the present, and distrust toward the future. In the next few posts I will explore these features of present-nostalgia.

Tree of Life Revisited

2011-11-03T00:19:00.003+11:00

I recently moved from Sydney to State College, Pennsylvania – home of the Nittany Lions, JoePa and student partying (especially when someone gets assassinated). The town is picturesque, with manicured lawns, flowering pears and leafy lindens, squirrels and jackrabbits, and svelte co-eds jogging along the sidewalk at all hours. New to ‘small town America’ the streets, homes and people evoked Hollywood images from Leave it to Beaver, Stand By Me, and on the more depressed edges, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?

In my first week here I was fortunate to be able to re-watch Tree of Life at the State Theatre. Located on the main street (College Ave) the State Theatre is an elegant, yet understated theatre built in 1938 that continues to show new release, art house, and classic films. Tickets are $8.50, wine is $7 – next time I think I’ll go dry.

Watching Tree of Life, a very American perspective on the human condition, from the fringe of ‘the heartland’ further added to the satisfaction of revisiting Malick’s enigmatic film. Like the screening at the Sydney Film Festival, some viewers were frustrated enough to leave, while others continually looked at the glow of their smartphones – presumably looking at the time, or perhaps trying to find a review that provides some meat to the skeletal gestures and subtle whispers.

I would not claim to have a certain interpretation of this film or suggest the meaning, but on second viewing a few scenes and themes struck me:

Architecture

Both physical structures featured (family home(s), church, office space, and city scape) and the occupation of Jack (Sean Penn) as an architecture echoed the act of divine creation. Importantly, the interaction between the natural and created, or environment and world, served to underscore humanities imitation of the divine and desire to control, order and design.

Control

The will to control, both the environment and world is evidenced by Mr O’Brien’s (Brad Pitt) fastidious concern over property boundaries, garden maintenance and the front lawn. These concerns are deeper than mere aesthetics but represent the character of the person and their place in the world among others – the first audible dialogue is Mr O’Brien telling Jack where the boundary between their yard and Spencer’s yard lies.

A specific example of O’Brien’s will to control is in an early scene where Mrs O’Brien is publically grieving with her friends and Mr O’Brien insists that ‘we are alright’ while simultaneous choking the garden hose in order to halt the flow of water. Whether this is an expression of control over himself, his wife or his world I am unsure. However, the limit or superficiality of O’Brien’s control is highlighted by his inability to revive the boy at the swimming pool. The power over life and death is beyond O’Brien’s grasp.

Love & Death

Immediately following Jack’s first experience of death is his first experience of romantic love or attraction. However, this is soon skewed into something illicit when his object of desire shifts from his young peer to the neighbor’s wife, breaking into her house and stealing her underwear.

Wisdom of Job’s Friends

An obvious point is the parallels the narrative shares with Job. However, without reading too much into each scene, the ‘wisdom’ or comfort offered Mrs O’Brien after her son’s death reflects the cheap sentiment or simple comfort offered to Job. This is particularly pointed when the Priest says, presumably after the funeral, “he is in God’s hands now”, to which Mrs O’Brien responds “he was always in God’s hands”, highlighting the emptiness of the Priest’s words.

For an insightful discussion on the philosophical influences on Malick and themes in his films, this interview with Robert Sinnerbrink on the Philosopher's Zone is very good.

The End of Obesity: There is something happening here, but you (we) don't know what it is...

2011-10-29T03:08:00.001+11:00

The rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the 'obesity epidemic' serves the interests of politicians gaining headlines, journalists selling papers and the fitness industry acquiring customers, however in a recent book and interview Michael Gard argues that such statements are not supported by scientific and epidemiological literature. Rather than consensus and clear evidence of continued rise in obesity rates, and the more fundamental question of the relation between body mass and health, the literature demonstrates a plateauing of obesity and disagreement over the significance of body weight.

For a short and insightful discussion of these issues I recommend Michael Gard's interview with Michael Duffy on ABC's Counterpoint. Discussing the epidemiological, public health and political context of the 'obesity epidemic' Gard addresses key questions around health impacts, schools and children, class and life expectancy.

A point I found particularly interesting was Michael Duffy's comment in relation to class - “You hardly see an obese person in parliament or representing a company on television.”

This comment reveals an important aspect of optics and class. There are a number of overweight and obese people in Australian parliament (and the business community) yet we don’t see them because they don’t fit our idea of what an obese person looks like. We don't see their body as obese, not because they are physically hidden by the party, but they are hidden by our ideas of class and social status. Occasionally the obese body does emerge, as with Bob Hawke’s reported comments to Kim Beazley that he could never be Prime Minister unless he lost weight, but on the whole we don’t see their obesity as it is masked by their position, status, suit – their class.

However, it is also important to note that some in the 'Fat Studies' community argue that fewer fat people are promoted due to social prejudice against larger bodies. Like short stature, race and sexuality, they argue that social norms serve to exclude fat bodies from positions of leadership and power in business and political communities.

Resurrection, Botox and History

2011-10-24T21:42:00.001+11:00

The new icon of the Resurrection © St Andrew Holborn

In blessing a new icon (above) depicting the Resurrection, Rowan Williams reflected on the relationship between history, age and the body (or more specifically the face). His sermon echoed and harmonized with aspects of Michel Foucault’s essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, as well as Mike Featherstone’s recent analysis of cosmetic surgery. Rather than comment on these points of harmony, I will lazily present three quotes.

Michel Foucault on the body and the imprint of history.

The body is the surface of the inscription of events (raced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of the dissociation of the Me (to which it tries to impart the chimera of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.
Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Penguin, London: pp.375-76

Mike Featherstone on plastic surgery and the attempt to erase history’s inscriptions.

Cosmetic surgery and associated techniques promise to repair the [ageing] process, by restoring a more youthful face, hence allowing greater congruence and expressive potential for the inner ‘ageless self’. An interesting development here is the increasing use of Botox (a diluted form of the neurotoxin botulinum toxin)…Botox is marketed as an anti-ageing technique to ‘clear’ wrinkles. It does so by blocking the nerve impulses that control muscle movement and therefore restricting the ability to contract facial muscles. The problem with Botox is that it makes it impossible for the face to form certain expressions and so limits the capacity to emote. It impairs the recording of the reactions to everyday events on the face, which normally leads to an accumulation of patterned muscular responses, which eventually mark the face with lines and wrinkles. Botox not only limits the potential for expression, but also the need for impression, the face as a recording device, a surface on which events are written, which shows the marks of time. Rather, the lived face, which is marked by experience, the emotional reaction to events, which is an archive of the accumulated memories one has lived through, which some people claim to be able to ‘read’ for signs of character traits, gives way to the new beauty ideal in line with the goals of the cosmetic industry.

Rowan Williams on the resurrection and transfiguration of the historical body.

The resurrection is the beginning of the new creation; the resurrection is the rising not only of Jesus, but of Adam and Eve. Then you look more closely at Adam and Eve in the icon, and you see that this is Adam and Eve grown old. They are not the radiant, naked figures of the first beginning of the story. Their faces are lined by suffering and experience, by guilt, by the knowledge of good and evil, scarred by life and by history. This is Adam and Eve having lost their innocence – the Adam and Eve who are of course ourselves, we who carry around with us the marks of history, of experience, of the knowledge of good and evil, hurts received and hurts done. Those are our faces on the icon, Adam and Eve 'four thousand winters' on, as the carol rightly puts it. Because the history of Adam and Eve is a wintry one, and we know that in ourselves.
So, when we speak of the resurrection as a new beginning, a new creation, it is in the sense that the risen Jesus reaches down and touches precisely those faces: Adam and Eve grown old. He doesn't wave a wand and make them young again, strip off their clothes and leave then standing in their first innocence. What he deals with is humanity as it has become, our humanity, suffering and struggling, failed and failing. The resurrection is not about the wiping out of our history, pain or failure, it is about how pain and failure themselves – humanity marked by history – may yet be transfigured and made beautiful. Perhaps the most poignant feature of this and indeed all such icons is those aged faces. Adam and Eve four thousand years old in winter, turning to their spring, and being renewed.

The Celebration of Death and the Cycle of Violence

2011-10-15T02:04:00.001+11:00

Bruce would undoubtably be proud of the use of 'Born in the USA'

In the Introduction to Sayyid Qutb's Social Justice in Islam, Hamid Algar points to Qutb's experience of America in the late-1940s and early 50s as influencing his turn from secularism to the Muslim Brethren. According to Hamid Algar, a catalyst for this transition in Qutb's thinking was the celebratory response of the American's to the news that a founder of the Muslim Brethren had been assassinated. Algar writes,

Sayyid Qutb had been increasingly well disposed to the Muslim Brethren ever since he witnessed the ecstatic reception given in America to the news of the assassination, on February 12, 1949, of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the organization. Hamid Algar in Social Justice in Islam, Islamic Publications International, New York, 2000: 3.

Despite completing a master's degree in education at the University of Northern Colorado and being initially open to US democracy as an example of political governance, the American character and way of life left him disturbed and disenchanted. This disturbance led Qutb to return to Egypt and join the Muslim Brethren in the struggle against what he regarded as the corrupting and deleterious effects of the West.

Perhaps had there been little more loving of enemies in 1949, or as a compromise, not loving and rejoicing over their demise, then the radicalization of Qutb and the escalation of resentment resulting in the 9/11 attacks may have been averted. But perhaps Jeremiah 13:23 is more apt in this context than Matthew 5:44.

Taking Food to Bed

2011-10-04T01:33:00.001+11:00

Hungry Jack's Angry Angus - it's not a kebab, but just as cheap and regrettable.

"Discussing his love of take-away food, Victor talked about regularly taking a doner kebab home at night while sober and extending it to the morning after (he did not use alcohol as an excuse-account for his actions). Victor said he would reheat leftover kebab meat in the microwave for breakfast because he enjoyed it so much. If Campos (2004) talks about 'food porn' then doner could be described as a cheap, casual lover who is so good partly because she has a reputation for being so bad."

Lee F. Monaghan Men and the war on obesity: a sociological study, Taylor & Francis, 2008: 55.

Picasso's Normal Bodies

2011-06-20T12:08:00.000+10:00

Recently Picasso's Jeune fille endormie was donated to the University of Sydney "on the strict understanding that it would be sold and all the proceeds directed to scientific research." (see)

The painting will be auctioned tomorrow (21st June) in London with the proceeds going toward the new Centre for Obesity, Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease.

The irony of this event is depressing in the extreme. Placing the utilitarian approach to art and the myopia over the sciences to one side. The fact that a Picasso is being auctioned to fund a centre targeting obesity is absurd.

Obesity is a category created to define the body that exceeds normality. Obesity science is on a quest to find a way to normalize bodies the exceed regulatory measures such as BMI.*

Picasso however is notorious for his depictions of the body as anything but normal. For example see Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avigno

(From the Art History Archive, here)

Across the different periods of Picasso's work he depicts the body as anarchic, excessive and unbridled. To auction one of his works to advance a science - however well intended - that seeks to confine, constrain and regulate the body is a disgrace and embarrassment.

* I am not focusing on a critique of obesity science here. Merely stating that it seeks to normalize bodies. For a critique see Michael Gard's work. He is interview here.

Tree of Life: An instant classic in every way that Inception was not

2011-06-16T10:33:00.002+10:00

A mix of Job, Romans, Nietzsche and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not a lot of dialogue. Quite a number of people walked out.

As suggested by the opening quote, Job is the interpretive key. Like Job this is more prayer than narrative, more poetry than theology, and raises more questions than answers.

Not quite sure what to make of it all; still digesting. I would love to watch it again…soon.

Obama and Springsteen on Solidarity, Love and Justice

2011-06-14T14:53:00.001+10:00

Bruce Springsteen’s 2002 album, The Rising, reflects on the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the New York city landscape, national consciousness, and the lives of ordinary people performing sacrificial acts.

The album in its entirety provides an important window into the emotion and sense of solidarity felt among New Yorkers (and the rest of the world with America) in the days following the attacks. In a similar vein President Obama’s speech announcing the assassination of Osama Bin Laden recalls the solidarity of the time.

On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.

Amplifying this solidarity and sacrifice is Springsteen’s song “Into the Fire”. Drawing heavily on 1 Corinthians 13 “Into the Fire” entwines the sacrificial heroism of the fire fighters with the redemptive love of Christ. In a repeated refrain Springsteen sings of the fire fighter leaving loved ones, as ‘love and beauty called you someplace higher, somewhere up the stairs, into the fire.’ Through sacrificial love the darkness of the terrorist act is overcome. Springsteen underscores the sacrificial act with ‘you gave your love to me, lay your young body down.’

The hope placed in the fire fighter’s sacrifice is that it will transform grief, anger and hate. That death and hate will give birth to life and love. The chorus cites the three ‘theological virtues’ of faith, hope and love, proclaiming: ‘May your strength give us strength, may your faith give us faith, may your hope give us hope, may your love give us love.’

However, listening to this song post-5/2 the sentiment of “Into the Fire” and incantation of these ‘virtues’ undergoes a hollowing transformation. Rather than demonstrating faith, hope or love – the non-virtue of Springsteen’s quartet was expressed.

Rather than the solidarity, sacrifice and love of “Into the Fire” it is Springsteen’s “Empty Sky” that most resonates in President Obama’s speech and the assassination of Bin Laden.

Evoking the grief and pain felt at the time President Obama describes the horror of the plane’s tearing into the towers yet acknowledges ‘that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table.’ Taking a pained and angered turn from “Into the Fire” Springsteen brought the ‘unseen’ emptiness to view in “Empty Sky”.

From the perspective of someone suffering the loss of a loved one Springsteen gives voice to the hurt and fury: ‘Just an empty impression in the bed where you use to be. I want a kiss from your lips I want an eye for an eye. I woke up this morning to an empty sky.’ The sacrificial love of the fire-fighter/Christ figure is transfigured into Old Testament rage wanting ‘an eye for an eye’.

Having staged two wars and an unknown number of extralegal raids, attacks and assassinations it appears that the US could not and did not follow ‘love and beauty…someplace higher’, but rather the desire of an eye for an eye has dictated the response from 9/12 through to the present.

Hyper Obedience - NYC Cycling

2011-06-12T10:20:00.000+10:00

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault provides an analysis of a number of themes of counter-conduct in relation to the Christian pastorate in the Middle Ages that “redistribute, reverse, nullify, and partially or totally discredit pastoral power in the systems of salvation, obedience, and truth”.

Foucault suggests that as a pastoral counter-conduct asceticism functions as an “exaggerated and exorbitant element” of obedience. Rather than disobedience against an authority, asceticism is an intimate work of the self on the self that excludes the pastor; “a sort of close combat of the individual with himself in which the authority, presence, and gaze of someone else is, if not impossible, at least unnecessary.” Through a hyper-obedience the ascetic is able to counter the conduct affected by the pastor. Ascetic produces a different conduct that “stifles obedience through the excess of prescriptions and challenges that the individual addresses to himself.”

see Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. (p. 200 - 201)

Here is a contemporary example:

C.S. Lewis and MasterChef

2010-07-20T19:03:00.006+10:00

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act - that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Collins, 1988: 82.

If the feverish desire for MasterChef and "food porn" in general weren't enough, it has been announced that the leader's debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott will be moved an hour earlier to make way for the MasterChef final.

Cause of death...unknown

2010-07-19T17:21:00.008+10:00

My grandmother died at 85. They put "obesity" as her cause of death. Just how old does a fat person have to get to die of old age?

- Fat Lip Readers Theatre performance, 1985. Cited in The Fat Studies Reader, p. 83.

The Soul is the Machine

2010-07-02T09:14:00.007+10:00

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991: 30.

The body is shaped, subjected and brought into existence not from within, but without. It is not the soul inside that animates the body subjectifying it, but the soul outside as pedagogy, psychology, and increasingly the electronic machines surrounding, mediating, and broadcasting us as subjects.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that
machines are determining, but because they express those social forms
capable of generating them and using them. - Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

From societies of discipline to societies of control; from regulation and segmentation of space, to circulation and speed. No longer is the gaze of the panopticon a feared limitation of conduct, but a desired circulation and production of conduct. To be watched, monitored, surveyed and followed is not the fear of the paranoid schizophrenic, but the desire, hope and need of the subject of control.

iPhone4: 'This Changes Everything. Again.'
While everyone else was busy trying to keep up with iPhone, we were busy creating amazing new features that make iPhone more powerful, easier to use, and more indispensable than ever. Apple advertising

The soul as machine becomes a powerful affect on the body. Shaping, transforming and enabling certain relations and delimiting others. The soul as machine becomes indispensable to self, and its relation to itself.

I forgot my headphones today and I feel dis-eased.

True ecologists love waste...

2010-06-23T13:58:00.000+10:00

The idea of a human nature that is fixed, stable or essential has been disputed on the biological (Darwin) and philosophical (Nietzsche) grounds. The latter I have some sympathy with, the former I find it a little harder to accept - particularly in its John Harris manifestation. I am not entirely sure what Žižek is getting at when he says further alienation from our roots in nature is required rather than a return to nature to deal with the 'ecological crisis'.

Politics is Evil and Poisons Everything

2010-06-17T08:37:00.000+10:00

'I maintain only that to speak of the evil of religion or to desire its abolition is, again, as simpleminded as condemning and wanting to abolish politics. [Daniel] Dennett, for example, on several occasion in Breaking the Spell proclaims his devotion to democracy, a devotion that one can assume remains largely undiminished by the knowledge that democratic governments – often in the name of protecting or promoting democracy – have waged unjust wars, incinerated villages or cities full of noncombatants, abridged civil liberties, tolerated corruption and racial inequality, lied to their citizens, aided despotic foreign regimes, or given power to evil men'.
- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, Yale University Press (2009), p. 13-14.

Through the rhetoric of the “New Atheists” in which distinctions are blurred and particularities made universal, Christians are called on to defend the purity of “religion” in the abstract. This, of course, is a trap. No one is loyal to “religion”, just as no one is loyal to "politics".

The Christian is loyal to Christ, as Dennet is loyal to democracy. The former does not need to defend “religion” against the charge of violence, just as the latter isn’t require to do the same for “politics”. Furthermore, just as Dennet sees no inconsistency with remaining loyal to democracy despite the horrors it has produced; there is no inconsistency in the Christian remaining loyal to Christ while denouncing the Spanish Inquisition.

Of course, “if the analogy fails in any respect, it is only that Christianity expressly forbids the various evils that have been done by Christians, whereas democracy, in principle, forbids nothing (exception, of course, the defeat of the majorities will).”

The Evil Hour

2010-06-16T12:48:00.000+10:00

332 - The Gay Science

The evil hour. - Every philosopher has probably had an evil hour when he thought: What do I matter if people don't accept my bad arguments, too? And then some malicious little bird flew over him and chirped: 'What do you matter? What do you matter?' - Nietzsche

I am trying to finsih a draft of my final chapter. The evil hour has come. However I am not concerned about whether or not people accept my bad arguments, but whether I can make(up) my bad arguments.

Weber: the Light Cloak of Goods or the Iron Cage

2010-06-15T13:14:00.002+10:00

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p. 123)

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge Classics, 2001.

I have been re-reading Weber for reason other than the connection between Christianity and capitalism, however Byron’s question Can Christians be capitalists? reminded me of this rich paragraph.

Considering that Weber’s thesis puts the blame for the birth and growth of capitalism at the door of Protestantism, perhaps it is appropriate to re-turn to Protestantism (or at least Christianity) for a solution to throwing off the 'iron cage' before the last ton of coal is burnt and our lives are fully determined.

Hate Speech: fat, gay, queer, nigger

2010-06-09T13:22:00.000+10:00

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will forever define me.

Whether terms of abuse can be positively reclaimed and transformed into a self-given name is questionable, but either way we still need to call and be called something. If the hate is present, perhaps the speech is irrelevant.

Violence and Protest

2009-05-31T19:36:00.004+10:00

A peaceful protest without violence is nothing more than a broken down car.

The obscene underside of the war on terror...

2009-02-15T15:44:00.005+11:00

The obscene underside of the war on terror is the refugee who sutures his lips and eyelids to mark his abjection, the child in the Woomera detention center whose response to the trauma of her incarceration is to repeat, "Don't touch me I'm dead," the Mexican migrant whose death in the desert constitutes a strategy of "deterrence" that is necessary to prevent others from attempting the crossing, the SUV driver whose realization of "the American dream" is fueled by the persistence of war and its pervasive economy of death.

- Elizabeth Dauphinee and Cristina Masters 'Introduction: Living, Dying, Surviving I', from The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror.

Neil Young - Rockin' in the Regulated World

2009-02-11T15:46:00.021+11:00

On Saturday 24th January 2009 I went to the most sterile of venues to see one of the most potent of performers over the last forty years of popular music, Neil Young. I last saw Neil Young during his 2003 Greendale Tour - an album and tour which railed against post-September 11 politics, the destruction of the environment and The MAN in general.

Neil Young - like Bob Dylan - has largely been defined by his political messages and protest songs; despite his "other" songs being musically superior and lyrically more profound. In contrast to Dylan, Young's political agitation has been more open, blunt and spanned across his career - from the chilling Ohio (1970) to 1989's anthemic Rockin in the Free World and finally to 2001's Let's Roll and 2006's Living with War which has the not-too-subtle Let's Impreach the President.

So here I was going to see the Godfather of Grunge, the man who bucked the system so hard and shattered the genre boxes so completely that he was famously sued by his record company for not producing "Neil Young" albums. It should have been a night of illusionary liberation and bourgeois emancipation. It was suppose to be a night when those of us in Sydney who could afford the $140 tickets felt good about ourselves because we could sing-a-long with Neil about “Rockin’ in the Free World” while the free-market nose dived. A night where we could absolve our collective guilt for having been manipulated yet again by a politics of fear.

But alas I was rudely awoken from this dream of freedom and significance when I was reprimanded by a "security" officer for taking pictures during the concert.

Just after the climatic conclusion of “Cinnamon Girl” or it could have been “Cortez the Killer” I took this photo.

Then this body appeared in front of me shouting and I took this photo...

The body kept shouting - which I quickly discovered belonged to a "security" official - in spite of the loud cheering. It took a few attempts on the part of the "security" official before the message was passed on to me: YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO TAKE PHOTOS! IF YOU TAKE ANOTHER PHOTO YOU'RE OUT!

I then said something to the tune of: "That is crazy! Do you think I am going to sell these pictures? What is the harm in taking these pictures? (NB I wasn't using a flash) Keep on Rockin in the free world!"

The security officer then repeated the above and threatened to keep her eye on me.

Well that was it. I was not a free and happy neohippie - salt was rubbed into my wounds as Neil Young launched into "Rockin in the Free World" about two songs after this incident - it seemed that Neil was in on the joke. And now it all seemed contrived.

Anyway to quiet my revolutionary heart and to prove my zeal in the fight against all oppressors I took the below picture just after the finale - I counted the cost and figured if they throw me out now I will only miss about 30 seconds of cheering, yes I am a regular Che.

Stolen

2009-01-22T17:17:00.008+11:00

My bicycle was stolen late last year.

Here I was trying to be an eco-warrior and all and then some thief comes along and takes my bike. Harming not only me but the planet - not really, I now just catch the bus again which was running and emitting regardless of whether I rode or not.

My mother was grateful for the thief, I was not.

Eve - my wife - said that the bike was cursed from the start (I also hurt my back and required a bit of physio because of it), she said it was cursed because I didn't ask her if I could buy it. I asked her how long had she kept that under her hat? Not long - I only had the bike for a few months.

Anyway I got Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski for Christmas. Here is his poem:

Stolen

I keep thinking it will be outside
now
waiting for me
blue
front bumper twisted
Maltese cross hanging
from the mirror.
rubber floormat
twisted under the pedals.
20 m.p.g.
good old TRV 491
the faithful love of a man,
the way I put her into second
while taking a corner
the way she could dig from a signal
with any other around.
the way we conquered large and
small spaces
rain
sun
smog
hostility
the crush of things.

I came out of last Thursday night's
fights at the Olympic
and my 1967 Volks was gone
with another lover
to another place.

the fights had been good.
I called a cab at a Standard station
and sat eating a jelly doughnut
with coffee in a cafe and
waited,
and knew that if I found
the man who stole her
I would kill him.

the cab came. I waved to the
driver, paid for the coffee and
doughnut, got out into the night,
got in, and told him, "Hollywood
and Western," and that particular
night was just about over.

Crime for Me, Punishment for You

2009-01-14T14:55:00.007+11:00

'You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others. You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence.'

- Albert Camus The Rebel, 36.

Clearly you can have both. The point however is that there is a contradiction. George W. Bush was certainly one to revel in this contradiction, and no doubt Obama will be drawn into it; though I suspect he will be less comfortable with it.

Words of Waits: II

2008-06-28T11:51:00.008+10:00

Apparently Coldplay have done an advertisement for Apple - this is not all that surprising for Coldplay, but what does Tom have to say about musicians and advertising?

Interviewer:

Do you ever get approached by major advertisers?

Waits:

I get it all the time, and they offer people a whole lot of money. Unfortunately I don't want to get on the bandwagon. You know, when a guy is singing to me about toilet paper - you may need the money but, I mean, rob a 7-Eleven! Do something with dignity and save us all the trouble of peeing on your grave. I don't want to rail at length here, but it's like a fistula for me...I have been offered money and all that, and then there's the people who imitate me too. I really am against people who allow their music to be nothing more than a jingle for jeans or Bud. But I say, "Good, okay, now I know who you are." 'Cause it's always money. There have been tours endorsed, encourage and financed by Miller, and I say, "Why don't you just get an office at Miller? Start really workin' for the guy." I just hate it.

From Innocent When You Dream

Words of Waits

2008-06-25T12:10:00.008+10:00

Tom Waits on New York City

When you see a leg come out of a cab with a $150 stocking and a $700 shoe and step in a pool of blood, piss, and beer left by a guy who died a half hour before and is now lying cold somewhere on a slab, you just take it all in. But it doesn't really apply anywhere else. It's like being in a very bizarre branch of the service. "I was in for four years." I read that there's a barge that goes out into the Atlantic with all the limbs from all the hospitals, and it got into a storm and capsized, and all the limbs washed up on Jones Beach. People were swimming and all of a sudden things got a little odd, a little dark. You've got to love it here, though.

Perhaps if Tom had written Sex and the City it would have been interesting.

If She Drowns then She is Not a Witch...

2008-05-23T15:50:00.006+10:00

Today I came across the diagnostic category, drapetomania. Drapetomania was defined by Samuel Cartwright as a "mental illness" in 1851. According to Cartwright it was 'a disease peculiar to Negroes, manifested in a behavior evident in blacks but absent in whites: the tendency to run away from slave plantations.' (Rose, 2007: 156)

According to Wikipedia, Cartwright suggested the preventive practice of "whipping the devil out of them" if the slave showed the early symptoms of drapetomania, an unhappy disposition.

The whole thing sounds like a Monty Python skit, unfortunately it isn't.

If people didn't rot would they get buried?

2008-05-07T07:43:00.008+10:00

The final wishes of a dying person are generally seen as sacred. For instance this week on 2Ser I was listening to a story about a Japanese man who spent the last 25 years of his life in Papua New Guinea recovering the bones of his comrades who died during World War II because he had made a pact with them and felt bound to honour it.

But in the literary and artistic world things are very different. Albert Camus and Patrick White both made specific requests that there unfinished works would be burnt. Both requests have been denied. Vladimir Nabokov made a similar request, but it appears that this too will be denied.

I am not so misty-eyed about all this, I will buy the Nabokov novel, but it does make me wonder whether the requests I have made in my will are worth anything. I mean, if I don't get shot out of a cannon á la Hunter S. Thompson I will be mightily disappointed.

The Power of Words: Conflict Without Objective

2007-12-15T09:51:00.003+11:00

In the opening paragraph of The Power of Words Simone Weil notes that while technology has provided a degree of security by giving a measure of control over nature, the threats of conflict and destruction between groups of men cancel out any potential benefit or security that technology brings. Weil however, suggests it is futile to blame technology for the creation of weapons that deliver mass destruction as 'it is dishonest to blame inert matter for a situation in which the entire responsibility is our own.' (p.239)

In observing (and participating in) the conflicts of her time, the Spanish Civil War, the conflicts between communists and fascists, or between factory workers and capitalists, Weil concludes that the true danger of these conflicts is that 'they are conflicts with no definable objective' (p.239) and that history attests to the fact that conflicts without objective are the most bitter and the most bloody.

A conflict with a clear objective provides a measure of proportion and a guide for the effort and cost necessary. However, a conflict with no objective allows for no assessment of proportion or balance of alternatives. In a conflict without an objective, the very conflict and sacrifices already incurred becomes the justification for continuing the conflict and sacrifice. Weil grimly remarks that in such conflicts 'there would never be any reason to stop killing and dying, except that there is fortunately a limit to human endurance.' (p.240)

Weil is interested in examining the root of such conflicts, and not their symptoms. Despite her Marxist background and anarchist activity in the Spanish Civil War, Weil does not see it as necessary to explain conflict through economic, colonial or religious struggles. She baldly states that 'there is no needs of gods or conspiracies to make men rush headlong into the most absurd disasters. Human nature suffices.' (p.241)

Let your yes be yes and your no be no...

2007-12-10T09:27:00.005+11:00

Ok, on thinking about this whole blog situation. I thought that I would not move to wordpress, that the grass wasn't necessarily greener and that I wouldn't necessarily blog more profoundly just because I have a sweet template. Having said that I decided I would change the template and name of this blog. Starting something new out of the old.

This new start also coincides with another couple of news.

From the 4th -8th December I was in Hobart for the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference. It was my first time in Hobart (and Tasmania) and also the first time that I presented at a philosophy conference. On the whole both were very pleasant first time experiences. Here are some photos of parks that I went to on the first day.

I also ripped my pants at a wedding on the weekend. Eve was very keen to take this picture and laughed a lot. I don't think she would be so keen to know that it is now on the internet.

Medical Missionaries

2007-06-28T10:08:00.004+10:00

This quote isn't irrelevant to the contemporary political landscape.

Medicine followed trade and the flag. A direct response to colonialism, it did not merely expedite such expansion but provided a justification for it: was it not part of white man's mission to bring medicine to the deadly tropics? All too often it was conveniently overlooked that the white man was in large measure responsible for making them so unhealthy in the first place.(Porter, 2002: 90)

If Howard is sincere about resolving the problems in remote Aboriginal communities then shouldn't there be an acknowledgment of white man's role in creating such situations in the first place?

Judging Books by Their Titles

2007-04-26T19:23:00.004+10:00

Today while shelving books at the library, two titles caught my attention for opposite reasons.

The first, How to Get Your Dream Job Using the Internet: The Only Book That Takes You Straight to Thousands of Jobs Worldwide!, made me laugh and think of Homer Simpson. This book is 350 pages long, surely someone who wants to make money off/through the internet isn't going to have the attention span to read such a long book. Incidentally it is selling for $0.01 on Amazon if anyone is interested.

The second book however, The Anthropologists' Cookbook, sounded so interesting that I borrowed it. It is an edited work comprised of leading anthropologists detailing recipes from the regions where they have worked. The only problem is that most of the recipes take a very long time to prepare and with ingredients that aren't readily available at Coles. Although "corrupted" versions of the recipes are given. There are even instructions on how to make Earth Ovens for roasting dogs. This is selling for $50.00 on Amazon.

Lest We Forget?

2007-04-23T09:43:00.003+10:00

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
- Adolf Hitler

Tomorrow, 24th April, marks the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. A genocide that the Turkish government continues to deny. It was in response the Armenian genocide that familiar phrases such as "crimes against humanity" and "holocaust" were first coined.

Tom Frame, writes in the most recent issue of Quardant that Turkey, and nations generally, do not need to apologise for past wrongs. But it seems that Frame confuses acknowledgment/recognition for apology. While Turkey may not have to apologise or compensate victims, it cannot be allowed to continue to actively deny the past. Would Europe tolerate a Germany that denied the Jewish Holocaust?

It has been proposed that Turkey will enter the European Union in 2015, if this is to go ahead, sadly it will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in which more than 1.5 million Armenian Christians were butchered. But if Turkey has its way, which it has so far, the Armenian genocide will remain unacknowledged and denied. And those who choose to acknowledge it in Turkey will do so at their own peril.

Info: Armenian National Institute or The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response

Kierkegaard and Sickness

2007-02-03T12:10:00.008+11:00

The physician knows that just as there can be merely imagined illness, so too is there merely imagined health. For the latter, therefore, he takes the first measures that will bring the illness to view.
- Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (53)

In SUD Kierkegaard outlines various sicknesses or states of deapair that affect the spirit. According to Kierkegaard no one is free from despair, not even one. Yet there are diffferent kinds of depair. The most horrific form that despair takes is that which is hidden, 'so concealed in a person that he himself is not aware of it!' (57) This person lives their life unaware of their 'spiritual' state and looks on their existence as a series of particular moments or actions, but not with a 'conception of an infinite consistency in themselves.' (140) That is they have no understanding of their spiritless existence of their beingbut only consider the external. So they live with either 'child-like naivety, or with empty mindedness' (140) weighing up 'particular good deeds' against 'particular sins'. For this person the scales will always tip toward the former and they will then be at ease. But our sins of action are to the state of our spiritual health what the puffs of smoke coming from a locomotive are to the engine.

In SUD and The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard (or Anti-Climacus and Haufniensis) is trying to remind his apathetic and nominally Christian contemporaries of their sinfulness so that they are motivated to be saved. If you don't think you sin then you won't think you need to be saved. Kierkegaard as physician is trying to tell the sick man who claims to be healthy that he is in fact ill and in need of attention.

On Blogs: Part 1

2006-06-07T17:51:00.003+10:00

The art of writing letters consists in not letting what one says become a treatise on the subject but in making it acceptable to the correspondent. But on the other hand it also consists in preserving and fulfilling the standard of finality that everything stated in writing has. The time lapse between sending a letter and receiving an answer is not just an external factor, but gives this form of communication its special nature as a particular form of writing. So we note that speeding up the post has not improved this form of communication but, on the contrary, has led to a decline in the art of letter writing.

- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Continuum, London, 2004) p. 362

This passage from Gadamer’s major work, Truth and Method (first published in 1960), has always made me question the depth and permanency of email and online forums as a mode of communication. Often debates on internet forums occur at such a pace that poorly thought out or regretful comments are made. The luxury of rumination is no longer available and the quick quip or rehashed, hackneyed arguments rule the roost. I am not saying that there isn’t a place for these modes of communication, but like Gadamer, I wonder whether the speed of communication has resulted in a decline in the art of letter writing (in broad sense).

It is this that has brought me to the world of blogs, or blogdom as one blogger referred to this magical land.

From what I have gathered blogs are informal and a certain flux about them that avoid the pitfalls of ‘letting what one says become a treatise on the subject.’ This is not fixed or beyond critique. Blogs also allow for more time for the writer and reader to ponder on the words, rather than people rushing in to post their witty remark before someone beats them to it. Basically, Blogs appear to offer the flux and pace for a return to the art of letter writing to which Gadamer refers.

Whether this blog can achieve this remains to be seen.

There will be more On Blogs to follow in the future….