Off Road Without a Map

The Tipping Point, Social Networking, Social Networks, Industrial Revolution,

2011-11-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

I read this speech I wrote before the general assembly of Occupy Boston on Oct. 15, 2011.

The tipping point is the critical point at which a system is displaced from a state of stable equilibrium into a different state. Change cannot be stopped.

Systems, whether the chemical creation of life or social networks, are pushed to the edge of chaos and the brink of the tipping point, where they either transform or collapse. If they are to survive, they must adapt by recombining creatively into new forms.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Welcome to the Tipping Point.

Mark Taylor said conditions are right for a revolution as profound as the industrial revolution.

Our actions have led us to the point when we must choose between collapse of our network and change that preserves the best of it. Stagnation of power in the hands of the few at the cost of the many must give way. Either revolution or a spiraling down of Earth into violence and environmental disaster.

This is not about a few tents in a park. It is about a change in mankind.

There is no turning back. Soon things will get very strange. Reality will collide with representation. Reality will triumph. In the Information Age certain unpleasant truths will manifest, and the whole structure of deceit will begin to unravel. We will be left with a void once filled with self-deception. At that point we will have conflict with each other. Decisions will be forced on us all. Sometimes friend will become enemy, enemy friend.

If we are to live together, we have to face ourselves. Progress will force us upward in the long run. The quest is ever forward. Life doesn’t evolve backward, but toward a better place.

Thank you.

Stuart Kurtz

October 12, 2011

The Radical Mind

2011-11-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Occupiers Near and Far:

And so here we are, in the Revolution. Make no mistake. This is the big one. How big, we'll only know when we come out on the other side.

I was thinking: Who are we? What makes a radical, a dissident? I mean, I know many liberal people on the Left who do not protest, but keep the law and go about their business as law-abiding citizens of these states and elsewhere. But who are the ones who actually take to the streets in crisis, or, better yet, the ones who do so when there is seemingly no crisis (but, or course, there is always crisis)?

I used to think there was something wrong with me. Why was I so suspicious of my teachers, my guidance counselors, in fact my family? They all functioned alright. Things got done. The schools processed the kids; the churches saved our souls; the state kept democracy going. But I always resisted, made trouble. Something was wrong with me, the teachers said.

And then, much later in adulthood, I started trying to fit in. I even had a short-term government job. It wasn't the culture around me, so much, I thought. It was me.

Now we are seeing the truth. Our republic is collapsing from under us, and the dissidents don't look so bad now. Maybe we will see that it is not the ones who fit in, but the outsiders who hold the truth. Society moves forward not by the followers but by the rebels, the mavericks, the ne'er-do-wells, the freaks.

So stop asking yourself, if you are, "what is wrong with me?" People, there is nothing wrong with you and everything right. Nature has chosen you to feel the weight of oppression and have the sense to no something is wrong with the so-called just republic.

The ones contented to turn a blind eye will not see the oncoming train. We do and, some of us have always seen it. Now is our time. In a few years the normals might be saying, "What is wrong with me?"

Stuart Kurtz
November 17, 2011 Day of Action in solidarity with Wall Street crackdown

The Blimp's Full of Hot Air

2011-11-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Blimp's Full of Hot Air

A few years back the news featured a story of how Goodyear or Fuji let a man use their blimp's LED board to propose to his girlfriend, who was down in the stadium with her. She said yes. Goodyear probably made out better than the man.

It made me wonder why Goodyear would take away precious advertising time to help
a guy out. Sure, sure, they did it for the publicity. It makes them look good, and so the consumer might be inclined to shop for tires there more. But something else might be going on.

If the man just published a new book, believe me, Goodyear would not promote it with free advertising. If he just one first place flipping the log in the Scottish Games, Goodyear would say sorry, no free ads. So it must be something special about his proposing to his girlfriend that would make Goodyear turn good.

Why would the man's new book contract or the Scottish Games not affect Goodyear's heart? No other personal success, not a new job, or climbing Mount Everest would do the trick. So it's something particular about marriage that Goodyear has an interest in.

Marriage must move along the same processes that keep Goodyear rolling in dough. Now, nothing is wrong with marriage on its own terms. It's the fulfillment of two people's love. But in terms of the Capitalist system there is something wrong. In Capitalist terms marriage creates stable home life, and that means stable workers. It often produces children - more workers for production. In fact, some women have been scorned for being selfish when they say they don't want children. What business is it of theirs? The business is that the production of children fuels the production of commodities, so that offspring themselves become a commodity - in Marxian terms, anything that has exchange value. It is the promise of future labor that makes the worth of new offspring.

Our lives are not just our own but the Capitalist system's. It is not just for the common good but for the production of surplus value - profit for the managers - that the messages of the state creates for all of us a complicity with the methods of production.

The Danger of the Virtual

2011-11-16T12:37:00.000-08:00

The Danger of Virtuality.

Virtual reality has changed our world dramatically. We have Autocad, by which architects can create any structure whatsoever by letting the program configure the possible physics. We have medicine whereby surgeons can go in with a fiber optic camera fed to a computer which can tell the doctors where to go. We have the most advanced games imaginable, that thrust kids into alternate worlds.

Eversion, acc. to Marcos Novak, is the casting of virtuality away from its technological systems and into lived experience. That should send up an immediate red flag to you. When we can't distinguish between reality and virtual reality, it opens the doors for forces to take advantage oof our false sensibility to prey on our very real property and health.

That is why we had the "virtual wheat" scam of 2010, MF Global got involved in unauthorised trading in CME wheat futures. Deceptive speculators created an artificial bubble of grain futures. In 1971 Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, so the promise of paper currency that there was gold in Fort Knox to back it up was false and a kind of early virtuality in a way. Representation through advertising creates images of false worlds where everybody is happy and free from pain. Virtual games, psychologists say, are making kids separate from the real world. And many of us get lost in our technologies, interacting with false Facebook friends than real ones.

Keeping us tuned in to this virtuality, advertisers, business, and government keep us away from the very real foreclosures, layoffs, and medical crisis going on around us.

The Golden Fleece

2011-11-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

What makes us love gold? It's shininess and luxury. Ah, but brass is also shiny and beautiful. But people want the gold. If you were a castaway on a desert island and had some brass, you wouldn't care that it weren't gold. So it's something not about the physical properties of the gold but its relation to something else. What is that something? Well, you are alone on the desert island and in that case do not care whether your telescope is made of gold or brass. So it must be a relation to something absent. The comforts of civilization of course. But some of those are shiny luxury goods, and you don't care about the gold, so you won't care about them. So what is missing?

Other people are missing. When you are back home, they admire your finery, but here you are alone. So the relationship between you and gold is really the relationship between you and other persons. They put the value on the gold (diamonds, furniture, car), but the gold is really the intermediary between you and the appreciator.

Money works this way. On that island the money is just paper. You could make better use of it as kindling, but try to barter with it. So value rests in the relationship one person to others. The greater the value the object, the greater the value of the relationship. But is it?

In many countries people regard people with wealth with greater esteem. Think of how impressed some are with the people who have yachts, private jets, and mansions. The press in America used to have headline features of what the rich were up to: "Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt to Hold Gala Ball." And you get the royal treatment when you dine in Tavern on the Green, but go into a greasy spoon, and the waitress says: "Sit over there. I'll be there in a minute, Hon." So many people dole out respect according to how much wealth you have.

The relationship then is not ego to object but ego to ego. As the medium of exchange in relationships is often gold (or money, silver, commodities in general), relationships are often built on falseness. And, as they are not really built on value of others' spirits or goodness or good deeds but on the wealth they acquire, we can give to relationships a negative premium. It is based on "love thy neighbor"...if thy neighbor owns more.

Technology and Changing Power

2011-11-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

In Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution writer, Simon Schama asserts that the first hot air balloon may have initiated the French Revolution. In 1783 at Annonay, France the Montgolfier brothers sent up the first balloon, and later the Aeorstat Revellion at Versailles with crew of sheep, duck, and rooster, and later a manned flight. It captured the public imagination.

Schama believes it allowed French subjects to imagine themselves as Montgolfier, lofted above the earth and freed in some way from worldly bounds.

Every revolution is precipitated by some new invention.

The Renaissance brought perspective in painting and then the printing press. Marshall McLuhan said this:

Print technology transformed the medieval zero into the Renaissance infinity, not only by convergence - perspective and vanishing point - but by bringing into play for the first time in human history the factor of exact repeatability. Print gave to men the concept of indefinite repetition so necessary to the mathematical concept of infinity. 1

The uniformity and repeatability of print permeated the Renaissance with the idea of time and space as continuous measurable quantities. The immediate effect of this idea was to desacralize the world of nature and the world of power alike. The new technique of control of physical processes by segmentation and fragmentation separated God and Nature as much as Man and Nature, or man and man. 2

The discovery of the New World later in the Renaissance opened up new physical territory and exploded the myth of a flat world. A cognate was found in Renaissance perspective which removed the mystical, godlike space in art the church fed the masses. Renaissance people now wanted rational art and narratives. that ended the unified, all-encompassing space of Medievalism and ushered in the measurable, logical world of Man, in which Man was the center of this world, and God was confined to Heaven.

Turning points in history come in with changes in the political and social sphere, but they are founded on new technological inventions, devices that change the way people look at the world. The old ways of command and control can't work any more, and the power structures in place are shaken to their core.

Take the photograph. Daguerre created the first silver negative in 1839. Photography's reliable reproduction of reality made citizens no longer dependent on accounts of reality fed to them by the press and its government in the way With a new reliance on themselves to observe naturalistic reality in all its starkness, Europeans created the revolutions of the 1840s.

With the end of the 1848 climax of the revolution the Second Industrial Revolution began, in which mass consumption, made possible with advanced industry, was in bloom. People were not only free to revolt but to consume. McLuhan mentions the transience of the photograph.3 An analogy to it is the limited-use commodity, such as the raft of souvenirs created in the mid-19th century. The early Renaissance, prior to printing press and perspective nevertheless brought in a degree of human nature into the art of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and others. From this "invention" came the workshops and guilds, which created a mass market for art for wealthy patrons.

Now we have the very mass media of the Internet and social networking. They have their down sides, as they isolate some of us into an unreal world. And Facebook friends are not your real friends. They do, in fairness though, remove the unilateral nature of earlier mass media. We are not dependent on what NBC has to tell us. We can search the Net for hundreds of news sources. And without social networking we would have no 2009 Iranian uprising, no Arab Spring. The Internet and social networking do not have a command structure as the networks do. Every point (person, that is) is equivalent to every other. As others have said, the dissemination of knowledge is limitless, like Renaissance infinity and the printing press, but much more so. With it power of the elites is weakening into more democratic expression.

The last technology for this essay is the conversion of analog to digital.

NYU Professor, James Carse, once told his class that he opened up his country house and found a leak in the well. So he put his hand over it. But the water shot out at another hole, so he put his hand over that to plug it up. But water came out of two new holes. He said he couldn't figure out the source of the leak until he realized the water was coming from everywhere. And that's the case here. The information revolution is unleashing a wellspring of knowledge in a democratic way. It can't be stopped. It's what we do with information that's the test.

A more abstract development in technology is the conversion of transmissions from analog to digital. Analog technology is structural in its processes. It depends on a hierarchy of steps A - B - C on variable waves. It's frequencies have a theoretically endless number of values. It's cognate would be social organization of the past with kings at the top, then bishops, ministers, knights, merchants, commoners; or president, prime minister, cabinet, and down to voters. Analog depends on a chain of command along a linear path. Its, well, analog in the social and political field is hierarchical power. That is until now.

With digital technology, everything is reduced to binary code...ones and zeros. It is dependent on sampling. Marcos Novak says:

In a world of fields, the distinction between what is and what is not is one
of degree. There can be as many sampling points where something is not as
there are where something is. Sampling involves an intermediate sense of
reality, something between real and integer numbers, a fractal notion of
qualified truth, truth-to-a-point. An object's boundary is simply the
reconstructed contour of an arbitrarily chosen value.4.

While binary leaves itself open to an either/or outlook and can be used to continue a bipolar world view, inviting class conflict, racism, social Darwinism, sampling takes the ones and zeros of binary along a bandwidth of qualified truth, as Novak says. It is not structured the way analog is.

Humanity is becoming more networked, more egalitarian like this digital bandwidth. We are evolving more into one community, certainly not in the short term, but as an impetus for centuries to come.

Stuart Kurtz
November 12, 2011

1. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1964, 1994, Ninth edition 2001)pg. 116.
2. Ibid, pg. 176.

3. Ibid, pg. 196.

4. Novak, Marcos, Transmitting Architecture: The Transphysical City, Edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker,ctheory.net/text_file?pick=76 (published 11/29/1996)

Don't Underestimate the Power of Agression

2011-02-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

Don't Underestimate the Power of Agression
Submitted by Stuart Kurtz on Fri, 02/25/2011 - 5:39pm.
When we ask people all over the globe for their highest values we will always find two at the top. The first is God, or a higher power. That makes sense; humans have held up under extreme adversity, violence, and degradation with the belief that God (or a higher power) will see them through, but, if not, that they will be rewarded with everlasting life in a higher state of being. But let us look at a strange point to the contrary.

In ancient Egypt the pharoahs were not considered to be the gods' representatives on Earth, but gods themselves. You did what the god told you to do; his (or her in a few cases) word was absolute. That is one reason Egypt was so stable for around two thousand years.

Consider though the various plots against pharoahs. According to the Egyptologist, Manetho, bodyguard of King Teti of the 6th Dynasty murdered him. King Amenemhat I of Dynasty 12 probably met his end to murder. Rameses III of Dynasty 20 had a conspiracy against him known as "The Harem Plot," that might have succeeded. King Seqenenre Tao of Dynasty 17 has mortal wounds to his skull. Hatshepsut, the first female pharoah, ruled as regent for Thutmose III until she arrogated the role of Pharoah - unheard of until then - to herself. Some historians believed Thutmose may have murdered her out of a long standing grudge and then took the throne. Some believe Akhenaten, the monotheist, who incurred the wrath of his ministers for his firebrand ways, may have incited them to kill him. And then there was Tut. King Tuthankamen, son of Akenaten, may have been assasinated by those who wanted to remove any vestiges of the reign of his seditious father. Some now say he died of an infected broken leg, but the point remains that there was intrigue at court, and probably the plots or actual assasinations.

How could a subject possibly consider killing the Pharoah, a god on Earth? The gods were the highest value of all; they were the reason the sun rose and set, the Nile flowed, and the crops grew in abundance. So what was this higher value?

The second value people all over the world will claim as most important is probably more important than God, as many do not believe in God or a higher power. That subaltern value, or course, is their children. People will do anything for their children. They will move Heaven and Earth for their children. In fact, that is a bilogical imperative. Mammals will put themselves in harm's way to protect their offspring. For humans, who have the power of abstract thought and so a conception of the future, children are a continuation of us. They are our immortality. Indeed, there is something selfish in that. Be that as it may, we must consider some other strange cases.

We have all heard cases of parents cutting grown offspring out of their wills for marrying out of the faith, or being gay, or engaging in acts the parents believe have shamed the family, such as crimes or scandals.

There are parents who cut children out of their lives for the same perceived infractions or for lesser ones. Parents have stopped talking to their children for the friends they keep or for some terrible insult. This is not only true; it is fairly common.

Then there are the honor killings in some Asian countries. Family members, including fathers, immolate daughters (nieces, sisters, etc.) for dressing inappropriately, refusing arranged marriages, homosexuality, performing trysts, or even for non-sexual relationships that might lead to sexual relations. It is true that these perpetrators believe they do this for a higher calling, God's law; it nevertheless violates the second principle of this article, that people will do anything for their children.

The case of the South Carolina mother who suffocated her own small children because she "wanted to be free" [of parental responsibility] or the other South Carolina woman who drowned her two toddlers in her car for fear that her boyfriend would leave her due to the kids getting in the way.

What was going on here? In one case it was the desire for "freedom" and in the other the fear of lost support.

In both cases there was no higher power, and no insults on the children's parts. Thus, on the dark side of the human behaviour spectrum there must be a higher value than God or the imperative to bring one's offspring into adulthood that they may procreate themselves.

What's higher than God? What's higher than children? For some, those who give in to their deeper, darker impulses, this value is power. And behind power is agression. Many of us do not give in to these impulses, but the cases cited show that many do. That is why hatred and agression seem to be more powerful forces than love in this world. Please prove me wrong.

Stuart Kurtz

February 25, 2011

If you like my writing style, consider hiring me on free-lance contract. Reach me at writerstuartk@gmail.com My blog is www.stuartkurtz.blogspot.com

If You Like My Writing...

2011-01-01T07:10:00.000-08:00

Hey, if you all like my writing style, you should know I am available for hire on a free-lance basis. I do arts reviews, travel, issues, short plays, and comedy writing. Contact me at writerstuartk@gmail.com. Thanks.

Travel Piece: Summer Lodging Maine Style. Book Now.

2010-12-06T14:51:00.000-08:00

Many of the day trippers from Portland disembark from the Casco Bay Line ferry on Peaks Island, Maine and make a bee line for one of the "happening" restaurants there. The first is a whopping 20 yards from the gangplank. They lose their inhibitions and sobriety downing margaritas to the tunes of (who else) Jimmy Buffett. Some will rent bikes and peddle the charming lanes for a few lazy hours. But there is another Peaks that is not so "happening," where you may have a hard time sifting out the past from the present.

Just past Long Point is the Eighth Maine Regiment Memorial, a lodge and Civil War museum. Come for a stay or for the tour alone. Either way you will have the treat of Mr. Dick Adams bending your ear on island lore. And he should know it too. He first came to the lodge as a baby in 1928, and he's been here ever since, save for a few years spent where Mainers call, "from away."

Mr. Adams started approached me for the tour in his friendly way. He wore a purple, green, and navy nylon slicker, faded black jeans, and a cap with a harness racer on it. He has a ruddy complexion and skin that draws around the cheeks, gill-like, when he smiles. His nose is as red as any drunkard's in a Peter Paul Rubens tavern picture. His days of being the manager of the lodge are behind him; his son took the mantle some years back.

Every so often Adams will tighten his neck muscles, purse his lips, and strain out a punch line. Sometimes it's not even a punch line, but some term he thinks might need a little emphasis: "pup tent," or "ping pong."

Before you get into the fun stuff, Mr. Adams will show you to the old double schoolmaster's desk that supports the guest register. You might think it's a relic for you to ogle at. It's actually a work in progress. You sign into the lodge just the way guests have since 1924. Somehow the past doesn't seem so distant.

It's a noble pedigree. The Eighth Regiment Maine Association started in 1872 for its soldiers to get together to commemorate their trials during the Civil War. Colonel William Macarthur led the men in the war's last year. He won $75,000 in the Louisiana lottery. When the wife of Captain Smith, provost of the regiment, told Macarthur the wives were tired of living in pup tents during reunions and that he should build a place, Macarthur built the lodge.

Some things have stayed pretty constant since those days. Each family still gets a little gas burner assigned for cooking their own meals. And they have this status system, being whoever sits closer to the window in the basement dining room, has the most status. One fellow made a reservation and said, "Put me by the window." Mr. Adams told him, "If you come for 40 years or 60 years, you may get there."

The window side table aside, every guest here has no problems with getting his share of the intangibles. You can see Whitehead, a prominence named after Chief Whitehead, and Graham Island Light from one of the many window banks. You can also see "The Witch's Cauldron," a little shoal off shore where Mr. Adams' father once slipped on the slime while fishing and had to be rescued by the fire boats. The only real danger now is to the kayakers who shoot its miniature rapid for a few seconds of thrill.

The Eighth is a hulking, brown structure with wraparound porch. Its weathered shingles cling to it like the scales of some fish that crawled onto land from the sea, some 40 yards from it, depending on the tides.

The summer breezes waft in and blow dappled sunlight around in swirling eddies. It’s hard to feel separate from the waves outside. Memories are arrayed on the walls. You can an etching of the Eighth at Hilton Head, South Carolina. The regiment took freed slaves to Jacksonville, so they could fight The South.

Mr. Adams' great-grandfather, George Cappers was in the regiment.
Adams can only show you the lithographs of Civil War days, but not so when it comes to another war. He is the living keeper of World War Two memories on the island.

He tells you how his grandmother, coming back for the summer on Peaks, couldn't accept that you couldn't drive around the island due to wartime restrictions. So she took a group of folks around on foot. She ignored the sign clearly saying, "military reservation. No trespassing," and got them all in a heap of trouble. A gal whose parents ran the lodge piped up, "Where are you going with my folks from the Eighth?" The officer said they were in serious trouble. This gal, Phoebe, said, "'Well so are you, 'cause if you don't take them back right now, you'll never have a date with me tonight or any other night,' " said Adams. He adds, "This fella she had in the afternoon. She might have had a different one at night."

Adams remembers how some boys his age found the charred bodies of three German U-boat sailors during the war. The cemetery board refused to bury them in the cemetery. There were also 3 live German sailors who made it in from Portland one blustery day in January. They were dressed like shipyard workers with coveralls they probably got from sympathizers, relates Adams. They bought food at the little store that's still there and made it out on a little rubber dingy to a waiting sub. Convoys of our ships used to assemble off the coast within sight of Peaks.

The blackout paper over the transom of one of the guest rooms is a reminder of those perilous days. The only danger around here now seems to be the treachery of "The Witch's Cauldron.

There is danger of another kind these days. Some island folks are losing their homes. Others help out. They want to stay due to a kind of love affair with the island only islanders can understand.

Adams shows you a painting on piece of the old pear tree that Col. Macarthur did not want to cut down when he bought the lot. Visitors used to get engaged under that tree. Love affair.

Adams also shows you a highchair his grandmother from up-country sat in as a kid. Now, all his grandkids and maybe a great grandchild will sit in it. It and that desk register keep the line between the past and present a little fuzzy.

Stuart Kurtz
July, 2009

Eighth Maine Regiment Memorial Association
13 Eighth Maine Ave.
Peaks Island, ME 04108
207-766-5086
www.eighthmaine.org

Tours of the lodge/Civil War museum are daily at noon and 3, closed Mondays. Suggested donation $5 per person. For large parties (over 6), please make a reservation, so we can accommodate you.

Casco Bay Lines
Commercial & Franklin Sts., Portland, Maine
207-774-7871
FAX 207-774-7875
www.cascobayline.com
Email: info@cascobaylines.com
The ride is 17 minutes to Peaks.

Give Peas a Chance

2010-12-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

GIVE PEAS A CHANCE

Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Thiamin, niacin, metabolism, magnesium, potassium
This-ium, that-ium, ium ium ium
All we are saying is give peas a chance
All we are saying is give peas a chance

(C'mon)
Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Legumes, heirlooms, spring blooms, and crop booms
Snap peas, snow peas, wasabis, and Black-eyed, Bye bye, Bye byes
All we are saying is give peas a chance
All we are saying is give peas a chance

(Let me tell you now)
Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout
Can revolution, freezing solutions, innovation, scarification, soil rotation
oxidation, lipid creation, mite invasions, infestations
All we are saying is give peas a chance
All we are saying is give peas a chance

Evr'ybody's talkin' 'bout
Split and sugar, minty marjoram, rosemary,
Little Marvel, Chef Emeril, Gregor Mendel
dominant-recessive, Bean Stalker, Betty Crocker
Ho ho ho Green Giant
All we are saying is give peas a chance
All we are saying is give peas a chance

By Stuart Kurtz
Parody of Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon

Back to Feudalism?

2010-11-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

Have you got your tunic on? Plow hitched to your ox? No?
Maybe you are lucky enough to be a baron or clergyman. Or maybe even luckier. Maybe your a lord.

In feudal times, also called The Middle Ages, land management was in the control of lords, who divided their vast holdings into parcels, or fiefs, and put local barons in charge of them. Barons held local power but still held loyalty, or fealty, to the lords.

The church was the other great governing body, and it held and divided great plots of land.

Ten percent of the population were clergy, barons, or lords. Everyone else was condemnded to be the peasantry, working the land for the lords and barons in exchange for meager food and protection from invaders.

Feudalism still existed in weakened form in Europe and elsewhere for centuries after Medieval times in that an overwhelming peasantry supported a minute noble class (the King, Tsar, Emperor in China.) The French Revolution and the American Revolution put the ax (or the Guillotine in France) to the system and ushered in a large middle and upper-middle class. Soon the French Bourgeosie consolidated its power, and a new consumer class fueled the Industrial Revolution (which had started around 1770 in England).

Pundits say America is doing away with its middle class. This country has the largest one in history, and these events pose an enormous problem. We need a large middle class to purchase imports from China and services from our own country. If we shift the wealth to a larger, but still small upper class, and create a very large lower and working class, we will be, in some way, going back to a kind of Feudalism.

The other problem is that under true Feudalism the serfs were all completely uneducated. In America we have a huge amount of college-educated and skilled people who are being forced to settle for jobs beneath their skills and education, or, worse, to remain among the unemployed or underemployed. You can't maintain a large educated underclass without friction.

The Tyranny of Manners

2010-08-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

Lots of smiling lately. What's going on with all the intense manners? I'm suspicious. In fairness, many people say we are becoming a ruder society of line-jumpers, road ragers, professional sports brawlers. True, yet, at the same time, I notice a politeness trend running concurrently. It is not appropriate to show anger or displeasure in this current. It is not good manners to go against the grain. Do your work. Enjoy all the consumer options. What have you got to complain about? Smile.

There is a scene in How Green was my Valley in which one of the sons of the Morgan family proclaims he will join the coal miners' union to fight injustice. His father chastens him for speaking when not spoken to; it's bad manners. The son, defiant, says good manners or not, he will support the union and move out if he has to. The father's breeding teaches no matter what the social circumstances are one should never defy authority with a show of impropriety.

The idea is that social codes are meant to keep us all civilized. Now what, you might ask, is my point? Is this man saying we should be rude to eachother? Reach over the table to retrieve the salt? I am not. There is a place for civility, and the reason for it is to show respect and kindness to others.

But aside from a necessary binder of respect, the enforcement of good personal manners is used for a far more incidious end. As papa Morgan showed in the movie, manners also keep us from speaking our minds, from speaking up against injustice, for taking on unjust authority. They are appropriated as a form of social control.

Two employees reflected the cowed among us. One has a professor who taught her that we should not complain about the lack of jobs in this economy, as "there are others less fortunate than you." In other words, shut up, and don't make trouble. The other was shocked to hear Michelle Obama wrote a college paper once condemning white America for its ways of keeping minorities in poverty. This employee thought that was wrong of her - in other words "manners before morals."

As antivirus software protects our computers from threats, threats to the extablished order are met with social "viruses," public disapproval, as the main trunk of society clamps down on anyone not with the program.

While manners are the ostensible target, I believe the real threat is those who dare to defy power. That means social and political power, but, in its basest form, it is economic power. That is the greatest threat to those in power.

Something far worse than lack of protest is going on. A loss of individualism is happening to us, the unsuspecting victims. We know what a repressed culture America created under The early Cold War, and its forms returned with the age of George W. Bush and Globalization. In favor of "good manners" many of us are forgoing creative, challenging, and, yes, confrontational thought. We are becoming a country of mesmerized consumers lulled into contentment by shopping networks rather than human networks.

I don't like what I see. It makes the Reagan era look radical. Afraid to speak up for fear of being impolite, most of us keep quiet, while our souls petrify to stone. I won't be intimidated. I won't take it lying down. And I'm not smiling.

Recipe from Chef Robert

2010-07-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome readers,

Below is a veggie recipe from Chef Robert. He conducts food tours of Boston too. He will show you how to navigate the farmers markets in Boston and how to prepare organic vegetarian recipes. Eating without preservatives has been proven to be healthier. See below:

Nutrition & Health Series June 2007 presents: Red Lentil Chili
Lentils are an excellent source of Folic Acid and Iron.
Folic Acid helps in cellular growth and essential for women of childbearing age.
Iron helps in the development of blood and muscles.

PREP TIME: 12 Minutes Total Servings 6
COOKING TIME: 50 Minutes
NUTRITION INFORMATION
RED LENTILS 2 cups red lentils (dry) 278 Calories per serving
4 cups water 42 grams carbohydrates
1 to 2 tablespoon vegetables oil 14 grams protein
1/2 teaspoon salt 10 grams fiber
CHILI 2 tablespoons canola oil 6 grams fat
1 diced white onion
2 minced garlic cloves
14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
1 large carrot and green bell pepper, diced
1/2 teaspoon chili powder, oregano, paprika each
1/4 cup cheddar cheese
2 ounces parsley or cilantro (fresh or ground)

Red Lentils: 1. Place washed lentils into a large pot and cover with 4 cups of
water or to one inch above the bean,
2. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons oil to prevent boiling over. Season with salt.
Gently boil with lid titled for 30 minutes until lentils are tender.
Chili: 1. Heat two tablespoons canola oil over medium high heat. Add onions
and garlic, and cook for 3 to 4 minutes until vegetables are soft.
2. Add tomatoes, diced carrots and green peppers, and cook for 4 to 5
minutes until vegetables are tender.
3. Stir in lentils and herbs: chili powder, oregano and paprika. Heat uncovered for 6 to 8 minutes or until heated thoroughly.
4. Top with cheddar cheese. Garnish with parsley or cilantro.
Serve in bowls.
CALORIE GUIDE
1 tablespoon canola oil 100 calories 1 can diced tomatoes 100 calories
1/4 cup cheddar cheese 135 calories
MEAT & BEANS, Food Pyramid Chart
Choose low fat or lean meats and fish
Bake, broil or grill
Vary your selection of protein
Select more fish and beans
Eat 5 1/2 ounces every day
Meat group includes meat, fish and beans.
The equivalence to an ounce of meat is 2 ounces of cooked beans.

NUTRITION EDUCATION OUTREACH PROJECT: PROJECT COORDINATOR-ROBERT SONDAK
P. O. Box 766 Brookline, MA
(617) 283-2532
bosonma@yahoo.com

NEOP web blog: http://neopneop.site11.com.
Recipe and food clipart from NEOP.

The recipe recipe flyers were designed by Nutrition Education Outreach Project-cProject Coordinator Robert Sondak.Robert is a Apple computer designer witha background in Food Science and Dietetics.Robert worked as a Clinical Diet Technician previouslyfor the New England Medical Center.
bosonma@yahoo.com http://neopneop.site11.com/.Collaboration design http://www.rowatmultimedia.com/ and Jennnifer Goeden logo design.

The Gulf Oil Spill: Thought

2010-05-26T09:10:00.001-07:00

The BP oil platform disaster and resulting spill may be a blessing in disguise. It may convince more world citizens that alternative fuel is the way of the future (and present).

Thought for the Day

2010-05-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

If we didn't have critics, Dumb and Dumber would win the Academy Award.

Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum

2009-10-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

Here's another tip for Toronto: The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). See one of the largest collections of dinasaurs in the world, including a T-Rex and a baby Bronto. There is a top shelf Egyptian collection. Right now the museum is featuring the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The blockbuster show is The Dead Sea Scrolls. The parchment fragments themselves don't make you drop your jaw, but knowing how important this discovery was will impress you. There is also a great Chinese collection featuring a Ming tomb, totem poles, Near East collections, Indian art, fossils, suits of armor, a temporary Wedgewood show, twentieth century design, and on and on. It really is one of the world's great museums. The weird building by Robert Johnston is no slouch either. Here's a link: http://www.rom.on.ca/

The Sleepless Night

2009-10-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

Hey, you all might like to know about this ultra cool yearly event in Toronto. www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca It's called the Nuit Blanche, which means sleepless night. It started in Paris in '02 and has passed on to other cities. Toronto is the only North American city to offer it. For 12 hours, from sundown to sunrise, the city becomes one big art exhibit. There are three zones, each with a different theme, where participants encounter strange, fantastical, and sometimes provocative surprises.

This year, 2009, there was a gigantic L.E.D. light sign suspended above city hall chambers that flashes four letter words (clean kind), codes, and DNA sequences determined by human operators, themselves controlled by computers.

Jeff Koons' giant Rabbit baloon hung menacingly in the atrium of the Toronto Eaton Centre.

Monopoly with Real Money was just what it says. Actors portayed bankers in a "real stakes" game of high finance.

Gone Indian was about a roving truck in pow wow trappings and a First Nation drummer doing his thing at uncertain moments.

Dance of the Cranes was a worked out by a choreographer and crane cab operator (There's a match made in Heaven). Two construction cranes were rigged with eerie blue lights. They circled around to music in the moonligt. Who would have known cranes could be so beautiful.

Cubemmunity was a large cube covered with four screens on which images footage from the neighborhood were projected. As the creator hit particular keys on the keyboard, they threw certain images on the cube. People could dance and interact with the cube.

And Ghost Stories was too bizarre for me to explain. You would have to be there.

Check out the website, and consider going next year. It puts a whole new face on Toronto.

Measure for Measure

2009-08-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

Has anyone noticed that everything seems to have a measurability to it? Machines at bakeries and fast food shops will tell you exactly how many calories your almond croissant has. Rate Your Professor is a website that reduces the quality of teachers to numerical evaluations. There is room for commentary, granted, but the numbers are what sticks. Focus groups ask people to rate their experiences with products based on numerical rating scales. Pollsters gather opinions on candidates and issues using concise clear-cut yes or no questions. Economists look at purchasing patterns over time. Measurements are king.

The problem of reducing everything to measurements and scales is that you lose the grey areas in-between numerical assignments. You don't look at gradations.

Psychologists evaluate patients based on progress they have made, on changes of perception and action over time. Psychologists take in all factors of the patients' case histories and personalities. The total picture is what they view.

The pollsters and chart-masters think every experience is finite and reducable. They are charting the experience, but they leave out the human factor. Humans are complex, unpredictable creatures. Their likes and dislikes are personal, so they depend on all the quirks and aberrations of personality. Economists are now looking at the human factor when they make predictions. The economy and all social sciences are not extant independent of us. We created them. Human nature is the lynchpin that keeps a product or service connected to our habits.

Don't worry about using that calorie counting machine, though. Your waist line is measurable.

Doubtful Quote

2009-08-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

"I thought I said to love one another."

In the spirit of Jesus

Review: Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics

2009-07-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

All the conventions of ceramics you know get thrown and spun around in this exhibit. More craft than trade, Object Factory: The Art of Industrial Ceramics http://collections.madmuseum.org/code/emuseum.asp?emu_action=advsearch&rawsearch=exhibitionid/,/is/,/472/,/true/,/false&profile=exhibitions

at The Museum of Arts & Design in New York City ( until September 13) splices traditional forms with clever visual puns in some cases. In others, industrial designers find new applications for new and versatile ceramics. Come with a sense of humor.

The introduction describes how artists and designers are collaborating with the industry in ways that enhance and subvert the industrial process.

Perhaps the most patent example of this subversion is the the tea set, Spanish Lace, by Edyto Cietloch. The vessels are carved into filigree screens that imitate Spanish lace. Not, obviously, intended for pratical use of any kind, the functional objects turn into art objects. We might question everyday reality by extension.

For more on twists on expectations, look at 5.5 Designers Ensemble Cremiers Coulage no. 2 et no. 4. A sauceboat has some strange hitchhikers, the kind we usually try to keep out of the sauceboat. By having these little guests collect at the top, as if they were the sauce, the artists play with enticement and repulsion. What is food, and what is not get lumped together with the gravy.

Following this questioning of reality theme is the dinner plate series by Robert Dawson entitled Willow Pattern with Uncertainty. The name says it all. Reminiscent of Bleed Pattern English China Trade ware of the 1700's, the floral scene becomes blurry for two thirds of the plate. The effect is a little cinematic and definitely not the way to show off your fine China. The seeming embodiment of China itself is depreciated by this parlor trick, and the art of porcelain becomes the art of the gallery.

Blurring boundaries between objects is what Gesine Hackenberg does with jewelry. In Spoon Set a jewelry ensemble takes the form of the eponymous title. In the artist statement, Hackenberg says, "Occasionally the realm of jewelry and commodities shift together very closely...By using materials, shapes, fragments, and typical patterns out of another daily context as a base for my jewelry, I transfer their meaning and emotional impact in my works." The craft of porcelain merges with the perhaps more rarefied art of jewelry. Industrial design and fine arts cross-fertilize eachother.

Then there are moments when fine arts lock horns with commercial design. In Jo Meesters Ornamental Inheritance, http://www.jomeesters.nl/home.php series the lower portions of vases carry traditional Dutch Delft floral patterns. About midway up flowers recede in favor of a contemporary industrial landscape, replete with McDonalds monopoles instead of marigolds, airplanes, turbine windmills instead of traditional ones, and what looks to be the CN Tower in Toronto. The play on old vs. new, and high culture vs. low is humorous and dignified at the same time.

Paul Scott http://www.cumbrianblues.com/exhibitions.html pushes Meester's idea to the limit. In Scott's Cumbrian Blue[s] series the English countryside of traditional table settings is given a new and candid interpretation. In After the By-Pass a bucolic village is interrupted by tourists on the motorway. Barsbacke 2 substitutes a factory for the English manor house. In Foot and Mouth No. 5 the expected grazing cattle are instead the victims of foot and mouth disease. A bulldozer is assembling them for disposal, as a funnel of smoke belches for its sacrifices. This is a far cry from dinner in polite society. This removes the gentile manners of the dining room and invites controversial discourse. The title may also suggest diner's putting their feet in their mouth as a result.

One gallery in the show omits the tongue-in-cheek (let alone the foot-in-mouth) puns. The mood is serious for serious applications of technology to industrial ceramics. Elisha Tal's, Eyal Cremar's, and Danny Lavie's Nomad series features toaster, kettle, and pitcher. Conductivity of heat with ceramics to this extent was not possible until this point. Ami Drach's Hot Plate extends its heating element over the surface of the plate depression. The artist refers to it as a conductive silkscreen. Here is the marriage of function and design at its height. The function is the design.

The Kyocera knives and cleavers series prove that ceramic cutting tools can now be as sharp as metal. It is cutting edge technology of today.

Of course, visual puns are what give this show its artistic edge. You may want to linger a bit at Khayasar Naimanan's Incognito (Hidden Wealth project) http://www.designmuseum.org/__entry/71239?style=design_image_popup What is going on here is really a challenge to the decorum of the dining ritual. The designer creates the usual floral design and flip-side hallmark, but it is reversed...flowers on dish bottoms and hallmark on dish surfaces. While keeping the decorum of centuries of fine dining, Naimanan disrupts diners' complacency just a tad. Maybe it is enough to make us reconsider the daily customs we take for granted. Or maybe it is just a clever way to inteject an artist's touch into useful objects.

MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN 2 COLUMBUS CIRCLE NEW YORK, NY 10019 212.299.7777

Museum Tue. - Sun. 11:00 am to 6:00 pm Thurs. 11:00 am to 9:00 pm Closed Mon. and Major Holidays
SUMMER HOURS: Due to popular demand, the Museum will be open on Tuesdays from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm throughout the summer.
The Store at MADMon. - Sat. 10:00 am to 7:00 pm Thurs. 10:00 am to 9:00 pmSun. 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

Stuart Kurtz

August 4, 2009

Stuart Kurtz is a free-lance arts, travel, issues writer at http://www.stuartkurtz.blogspot.com/ He is available for hire at decophile@hotmail.com

Quote Me

2009-07-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

Being left high and dry isn't so bad if there's a flood.

I said that.

Review: Land of the Lost

2009-06-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Review of Land of the Lost

The tag line of Land of the Lost reads, "Right place. Wrong time." In the case of theater and showtime, they're actually both wrong. If you get your jollies out of groping primates, dino urine, and unusual bowel obstructions, then you will enjoy this latest Will Ferrell turn. If not, you might be wondering whether Dr. Rick Marshall's Tacheon Amplifier time machine can transport you to the credits.

Dr. Rick Marshall (Ferrell) is a scientist who is looking for his big break. After a dry spell spent initiating sassy grade school kids into the wonders of science, he invents the Tacheon Amplifier, a device which can open up dimensions in time in a sideways fashion. After appearing as a laughing stock on the Today show with Matt Lauer, Rick gets a visit from wide-eyed scientist, Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel). She shows Marshall a modern fossil - excuse the oxymoron - with a connection to Marshall. This seems to prove Marshall's theory of portals into other dimensions.

The two head off for the desert, where, Holly says, Tacheon readings are strong. The hitch is that the area where this is happening is in a tunnel of horrors, a sideshow attraction that two Rednecks, Ernie and Will (Danny McBride of Tropic Thunder). Marshall and Holly have to suffer the indignity of paying admission and getting a pitch on fireworks in order to win the Nobel Prize - maybe. Will acts as guide on their raft trip into the cave. The Tacheon device starts an earthquake that opens up a portal into an alternate Earth.

Prepare yourself for this Earth. It's weirder than the one they started in. The place is populated with dinos, strange primates called Pakuni, lizard men called Sleestaks, and higher- functioning (which is not saying much here) time travellers called Altrusians. The team has to find its way back to the Earth they know to claim their Nobels (or junior high school science prize, whichever comes first). The set up happens way too fast, so that the weird Earth the team comes into doesn't get the initial laughs it might have gotten.

Much of the humor depends on gay jokes. There is a tension between the men's macho heroics and their effeminate sides. There is also a good tension between Rick's and Holly's professional respect and the hots they feel for eachother. The humor is all typical of guy flicks. The team's companion is a primate of the Pakuni tribe named Cha-Ka, who has a penchant for groping his female and male friends. A strange narcotic causes the men to have a strange trip in a stranger "yard sale" version of Earth. Rick has to cover himself in dino urine to get a T-Rex they call "Grumpy" off the scent. And then there is the manner in which Rick gets himself out of the innards of Grumpy...trust me, you don't want to know.

What does work here is that nothing is lost by sacrificing the mystery and danger of the original Sid and Marty Krofft TV series of 1974-76 in place of the comic take in this endeavor. That series suffered horrendous acting and writing that got in the way of the frights and mystery. No loss. There is a loss in the lack of sly in-jokes on the original series. Why can't Rick strum out the full theme song, which was good, on his banjo?

It is not surprising the writers, Chris Henchy and Dennis McNichols dug up a corny Saturday morning series out of the dinosaur graveyard as a repository for all their male sophmoric gags. You can't say they spoiled a classic.

Land of the Lost is rated PG-13 for scads of sexual and bathroom humor.Check out the cameo of The Zarn, vocalized by Leonard Nimoy, but sounding like Jason Robards.

Stuart Kurtz

Review of the Class

2009-05-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here is an insightful review of the movie The Class, which is yet playing in second run houses here and there. It will probably be out on DVD in late summer. My good friend, Geraldine Torf is the author. She is a student of psychoanalysis and former therapist. The political opinions are not all in line with my own, but the overall writing is original. I contributed the idea about the reason why Francois is reluctant to teach The Enlightenment.

The extraordinary docudrama that is the film The Class is an excellent vantage point to examine the particular perspectives that are brought to bear on social structure; namely cultural, organizational, group and individual psychoanalysis. Francois Begaudeau, a teacher in a Paris Public High School in the Twentieth Arrondisement reshaped his novel chronicling his interactions with his students over the course of a year. The demographics consist of a group of fourteen year old students mostly of Caribbean or African descent with one noteable Asian adolescent whose mother is deported to China during the course of the film's progression. The work is entertaining and unlike most documentaries which can be too raw or painfully accurate to be easily assimilated presents viewers with an excellent educational tool.

Francois utilizes his rational legal authority with a generous overlay of charismatic style. This is by virtue of his lean good looks, strong voice and aggressive teaching technique. He stimulates his students through challenging, correcting, teasing and criticizing. Because he is a paid employee in a beurocratic instructional institution, it invokes a managerial capitalist orientation toward the worker students. The class members thereby respond to their teacher's attempts to communicate with a Marxist jargon. This is one of the outcomes of the herd instinct and the group mind, which puts the teacher in a precarious position. Communication with adolescents is an extremely challenging operation because a fine line has to be walked between exciting presentation and the danger of over-stimulation. It is tempting to utilize "administrative system conditions" with its resultant overt condescension. Some "communicative action" is attempted to illicit compassion and understanding but it is done clumsily. Begadeau tries to be a pseudo-buddy and attempts to be open to intimate questioning. He becomes defensive when Sulyman, his Malinese student asks him if he is a homosexual.

Freud's erotic transference and counter-transference saturate the classroom environment. Khouma, the Zoftig Caribbean fourteen year old is newly aware in her unconscious of the sexual dynamic of giving and receiving. Therefore she chooses not to cooperate and resists reading aloud from The Diary of Anne Frank. It is somehow suggestive of the possible sexual exploitation of colonial subjects or female workers in the labor force. Francois is unaware that his unconscious response to her cleavage made him single her out. His ambivalence towards the student body manifests again in his further exchanges with Sulyman. He feels a masculine competitiveness with this poised good looking regal youth who seems to have a strong sense of the true. He is aware that Francois' false attempts at relatedness sometimes stirs up more chaos. He chooses not to do his work in this hotbed of seething oppositional energies. In the workplace or in school anyone who is unusually perceptive of unconscious psychodynamics is rife for expulsion. His photographic talent denies the teacher's meeting verdict that he is 'limited.'

The secondary school teacher's autobiography idea must be analyzed for its reception in a multi-cultural classroom. While the students from the Caribbean might welcome the opportunity for ego assertion some cultures put more emphasis on humility. When Isabel and the other pretty girl representative inform Sulyman of the proceedings of the expulsion hearing, Bergadeau calls them "skanks" or whores. When girls are in early adolescense they need an ego ideal informed by the super-ego to keep them from acting out sexually. Sulyman is righteously indignant because it is likely in Malinese culture that women are venerated for their future respected positions as wives and mothers. His mother is an excellent example of the dignity and bearing of an esteemed woman in the culture. There are probably tribal rites in this culture, which would better enable Sulyman to endure the stresses of adolescence. It could have been helpful to have Margaret Mead reincarnate as a cultural consultant to the staff. The small number of faculty members on staff could have been beneficial if they were not to busy denying their id instincts and projecting them entirely on the 'animal' students. It would be helpful if all faculties in secondary schools could have regular staff meetings led by a communicator psychoanalyst enriched by a background in cultural studies. It would be extremely efficacious if federal funds could be released for such projects. In our own country such interventions would do a lot more to inhibit violence and thus be more life preservative than Obama's politically expeditious move to give full thrust to stem cell research funding.

In Afghanistan the U.S. wants to introduce modernity in this traditional culture too soon. We object to the idea of boys' schools there when it was only five decades ago in American and English educational systems when single sex student bodies were a sign of eliteness and exclusivity. This style still persists in Jewish Yeshivas and some other faith based schools. Certainly girls should have equal educational opportunities but one can't rush acceptances. Our own tribal memories must guide us in the pace we set for change.

Now to return from my digression about culture in foreign relations to go back to my discussion of the film. In the exchange between Bergadeau and his male colleague at the beginning of the film they talk about collaborative efforts to teach literature and history around joined themes. Francois says they were able to absorb 'Ancienne Regimes' but were not receptive to 'The Age of Enlightenment'. This is totally a diminishing derogative judgment against their students. In the sixties my cousin Ralph as a Peace Corps member taught Shakespeare very successfully to his Nigerian students. Literature often transmits universal truths, which are available to all if properly communicated with understanding and compassion. On the other hand my son Hugh who was brought up with a strong immersion in Western Civilization and its literary inheritance was stymied by Shakespeare's ornate language because he was adjusting to the intrusion of four stepsiblings into his household. Bergadeau didn't mean to fail so miserably with Solyman but his cultural and psychological background left him ill equipped to deal with this pedagogical problem.

Now with the multiple homicides in the secondary school in Germany it seems that the misunderstandings and cultural omissions in the docu-drama pale in the wake of this tragedy. The student's addiction to violent videogames and his access to his father's gun collection are grim reminders of the relevance of Trevor Norris' article. Arendt talks about the oikos and agora being diminished with the ascendance of the public realm. Baudrillard in the contemporary vehicle of semiotics illustrates that the consumption of chosen objects signifies the status of participating societal inhabitants.
"Speech has been drained of its power and meaning." If greed and the urgency to make a buck at any ethical cost are not exposed by the proliferation of such products as guns and inciting videogames, nothing can be. Consumerism and lack of proper outlets for the erotic and aggressive proclivities of teens and young adults led to 9/11 and the multiple school shootings extant all over the world. Certainly when Ahrendt cited Sputnik in the beginning of The Human Condition as a sign of the alienation of mankind, she could never predict the rise of Fertility Clinics in the Medical community of our present era. There the private consummation of human reproduction and generativity has been assigned to the public so that it can be considered that anything can be purchased and is up for grabs in our consumer society. In the past if there was ambivalence or reasonable doubt about the wisdom of having children the soma itself could express safeguards or limits to those who had not resolved their resistance. The stem cell hysteria is another way our consumer society feels that with enough expenditure we can abolish all the ills that debauch our health. The unconscious motives and repressed emotions as basis for disease and accident are suppressed. In the rise of the knowledge of splitting the atom propaganda arose that this detonated bomb would give rise to all kinds of scientific discoveries, which would save mankind. Human destructiveness has now escalated to the level where humanity could be annihilated. Too much emphasis has been put on Science and Technology as a panacea for societal ills. It demands conformity, which does not give rise to a philosopher such as Descartes who was allowed to sleep late, and thus out of the loop was able to observe and think without the arbitrary discipline of time control. Too much emphasis has been put on adjustment and assimilation.

On my way home from the film on the subway I talked with a fashionable muscovite woman in her sixties who cast negative judgments on the Hispanic U.S. immigrants. Because our cultural values have been compromised from consumerism and the shrinkage of Family influence, we must question and analyze why total immersion into the existing cultural milieu should be forced onto new immigrants. Students need real relationships from mature leader educators who can encourage individual character development. At a case presentation on March 28, a BGSP student talked about his eighth grade mostly Dominican group. He seemed like the perfect compassionate and low stimulation leader who could build trust over time. His bi-lingual approach to group process shows his respect for the family culture. Too much forced adaptation to a new language is a cruel assault on the mother tongue.

Assimilation marked the cultural history of the German-Jewish society that influenced Hannah Ahrendt. The ensuing betrayal of this population by the Nazis did much in the maturation of this intelligent political philosopher. With increasing anti-Semitism in Hitler's repressive regime, she was chosen by a Zionist organization to reveal this horrifying truth to the rest of the world. Journalistic seeds planted at this time gave birth to her new career when she moved to New York City. She shifted from her temporary strong identification with the Jewish people to claim her 'interspace. How much we have attachment to our cultural heritage should be a matter of personal choice. She was severely criticized for her series of articles on Eichmann in Jerusalem because she was too objective and emotionally distant. Certainly in her disappointment over her relationship with Heidegger she had to focus her attention in The Human Condition on the diminishment of the oikos and the resultant distortion of the Polis.

In Entre Des Murs the teaching philosophy is to impose adjustment in kind of a Fascist way. They forbid the wearing of head scarfs by Muslim women in France because they fear the rising violent protest of the Arab underclass created by National pressure to suspect anything non-French. Retreat into a more classic cultural and religious practice is what many citizens in every country are doing ;sometimes reverting to Fundamentalism in their attempt to decrease the inroads of consumerism and Technology. My middle son, David, immerses himself and his family into a Chasidic lifestyle. They don't have a TV in their household so the children aren't confronted by product bombardment They try to imbue the atmosphere with the spiritual mysticism which influenced Walter Benjamin in his article citing the aura of objects in original representational Art. His older teen-Age and Young Adult children have abandoned the strict structure and have experimented with the dangerous world outside their culture. It is worrisome that the attempt to insulate them from the larger culture left them so vulnerable to its devastations. David himself chose to go to The University of Hawaii to seek diversity in the student body. In the 60's and 70's in his childhood New Hampshire the population was predominately white and conservative. Now he has become the conservative Computer programmer who tries to contain his own family in a homogeneous environment.

The Class as a docu-drama should be used as a discussion tool for teachers and students in multi-cultural schools. It might help disperse the resulting trauma on both sides.

.

Art Review: The Gentlemen of Suzhou

2009-04-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

The glory of The Ming Dynasty (Western years 1368-1644), is best represented in the art of Suzhou (also Soo-chow,Suchou, or Su-chou), a city which was the economic and arts hub of Chiang-nan in southeast China. New directions in a new way of apprehending objective reality, subjective expression, reaction to orthodoxy, and an approach to nature that was honest and personal are hallmarks of the art which a new class of men, the literati artists, created in Souzhou.

An ongoing exhibit entitled The Gentlemen of Suzhou continues through July 12, 2009 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It is a humble show like the humble men who created the art of The Wu School(Wu is Souzhou's ancient name.) Only 17 works adorn two pint-sized galleries. If you are planning the trip from Hartford expecting a major show on Ming art, let your engine sleep. It is just a tiny show. If, however, you find yourself at the MFA making the rounds, by all means stop in for ten or fifteen minutes.

In this city on the Yangtze, a stop on the Grand Canal, whose gardens and canals and favorable climate made it a favorite of painters, art was the industry of choice. As the curator states in the wall text, personal expression was favored over painterly skill, and most of the literati artists, as they are known, did not concern themselves with accurate depictions of nature. Choosing the literati life over public service, these gentile thinkers and innovators took inspiration from local scenery and lived in harmony with the natural and urban worlds.

Never intending to cause social or political upheaval, the gentlemen artists of Suzhou nevertheless held, in quietude, a radical skepticism toward orthodoxy and standard-bearing, according to Wen C. Fong in Possessing the Past (co-authored by James C.Y. Watt). In contrast to the restrictions imposed on artists in Peking, the imperial capital, Suzhou and other southern cities attracted scholar-artists who could live in seclusion (or not) and enjoy the freedom to work on the four arts of painting, poetry, and calligraphy.

The turbulent founding of the Ming Dynasty was seen by two of the early Suzhou painters, Ni Tsan and Wang Meng (not featured in show.) As Maxwell K. Hearn has shown in Possessing the Past, Ni Tsan never recognized the legitimacy of the new dynasty. His friend, Wang Meng, was deeply affected by the disintegrating conditions around him(Hearn, pgs 328-9). Immediately after the founding of the Ming, authorities tried to restore the court tradition in painting. In the 1370's and '80's Nanking was transformed as the capital of that time. Thousands of wealthy families from Souzhou, Hangchow, and other southern cities were relocated to populate Nanking.

As Hearn shows, as if in reaction to this imposed style-making of the court, Wang Meng lived in reclusion except when he participated in literary gatherings with friends. In the late 1350's and '60's these men would gather in their private homes to view painting, listen to music, compose poetry, and paint. This withdrawal was a way to maintain sanity and as "self-cultivation"(Hearn). Wang and his circle of friends was usually in Nanking. Under the purges of the first Ming emperor, Buddhist monks, artists, and officials were persecuted. Wang himself was under suspicion for his association of Hu Wei-yung, who was accused of plotting to kill the emperor. Wang died in prison in 1385.

From all of this, the seeds of a new art effloresced.
In time, by the rise of Chin-ching, emperor from 1522-66, life for artists in court in Peking (having replaced Nanking as the capital) was burdensome, according to Richard M. Barnhart in Possessing the Past, section "Return of the Academy". Suzhou, Nanking, K'ai-Fung, Feng-hua, Canton and others were foils to the restrictions of court (Barnhart).

Even scholars like Wen found life at court
unbearable by this time and so returned to their hometowns, such as
Soochow, to bring to maturity an art that was in essence far from
the by-then mock heroics of the imperial aristocracy (Barnhart, pg
366).

Court style remained even in Suzhou, but the Wu School was stronger.

As to the position of artists in society, Wen C. Fong says,

To begin with, the traditional social distinction
between the artisan-professional and the scholar-amateur started
to break down. (Possessing the Past, section "The Literati Artists of the Ming Dynasty.")

Under the Sung Dynasty scholars passed civil service exams and became government officials...scholar-officials. During the Mongol conquest, when doors were barred from careers, they became artists or professional men of letters. The civil exams were restored in the Ming Dynasty, but they were highly competitive. Those who failed could not become officials, so they became sholars or literati artists, creating a new professional class. The fact that they were, degree-less, commoners, may have contributed to the alternative style they created (Fong)

Now to the art. Shen Chou (1427-1509), known as the father of the Wu School proper, reflected current Neo-Confucian philosopher Ch'en Hsien-Chang, a leader in the Ming School of the Mind, as Wen Fong has shown. Fong says,

he taught that knowledge was received through intuition, or self-possessed
insight (tzu-te)... Ch'en embraced the Taoist and Ch'an belief in the mysticism
of nature and advocated quiet sitting (ching-tso) as a method of
self-cultivation on the path to enlightenment.

Wen C. Fong argues in Possessing the Past, section entitled "The Literati Artists," that Shen Chou radically departed from the Sung period's realism, based on the "objective investigation of things as advocated by earlier philosophers concerned with the Principle of the universe... his...intuitive response called for a new way of apprehending objective reality (Fong). He used an unaggressive and abstract calligraphic brushstroke. Shen Chou followed Ch'en Hsien-chang's concept of te, which is "insight" and 'to possess.' "Because the mind, understood as both intent and meaning, is not separate from sensory data, the way such data are received...is of primary importance. By remaining quiescent, open, and responsive, the mind possesses understanding...kan ying is the state of being simultaneously stimulated by and responsive to the external world" (Fong) For Shen Chou subjectivity was a purposeful construct of the self. "It was intent, fortified by self-possessed insight, that gave the scholar-artist the psychic energy to create...Shen Chou's philosophy of quiescence as a dynamic principle, a condition of both receptivity and action...demonstrate his belief in an intuitive response to nature and the validity of self-possessed artistic knowledge." (Fong)

In the first gallery are Shen Zhou's "Four Leaves from an Album of Eight Landscapes and eight Matching Poems. The leaves on the trees are coarsely painted. Little dots, made by the tip of a brush, represent trees and bushes. They are abstract. One cannot mistake this for any real landscape under the Sung or philosophy of the Principle of the universe. You must take it as a flat surface, and from there make the leap to thinking of nature - all intuition-based. The gold and silver flakes, not snow or rain, and not realistic, are part of the calligraphy but also in the sky of the painting. Reality gives way to a tzu-tze approach to seeing nature.

The mountains in one leaf of the four have coarse, willowy marks to indicate ridges. There are tiny breaks at the edges of the background mountains. Some distant mountains appear to float over the nearer mountains due to white gaps between. Catch the scholar painted without feet.
It is the curator's belief that Shen Zhou blazed the trail in painting local scenery, although Weng Mang earlier affirmed the sense of identity these men shared with earlier scholars over a specific place and personified individuals through landscapes (Hearn, Possessing the Past, section "The Artist as Hero"). In Zhang Hong's "Wind in the Pines of Mount Gouqu the retirement home of the Eight century T'ang poet-painter Wang Wei is linked to the home of a contemporary. It shows the connection to the past and that the literati's lives and thoughts were fused with a specific place.

The research of Yang Xin in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, section,"The Ming Dynasty," relates that Qiu Ying, another artist featured, would not have risen above his humble birth were it not for his technical skill at copying previous masters. He could paint in bright color or monochrome with equal adroitness. He practiced the literati methods of simplicity and subtleness against vulgarity and superficiality (Xin).

In "Landscape with Scholar and Monk in Conversation" there is a refinement, especially in the luminous blue and green ink. See the remarkable way the mountains shade from green to empty paper through the use of streaking. The color runs out. Contrast this to Zhang Hong's subtle gradations in his washes. The trees in the background, and the lower leaves behind the closer ones in the foreground fade out. It is intuitive and impressionistic. The depicition of the foreground tree and the scholar, monk and tiny tea-bearer are elegant; the remainder is subjective. The split and fusion of the two is successful.

In his "Landscape with a Lady Overlooking a Lake" the viewers mind is busied by identifying all the many leaves on the foreground trees and the details of the house. Then the mind is in rest when contemplating the distant landscape. The intricate is objective, like southern Sung paintings, but the background is intuitive and subjective. Te and kan-ying are at work.
In "Red Leaves on Autumn Mountains" Wen Jia (1501-1583) has a loose brushstroke as well. On the hillside, house and temple rooves are devoid of underlying structures. It is all somewhat cartoonish. Three finials want to form written characters. The stippling for leaves goes from tightly-worked to abstract. Leaves have a frenetic energy that charges the painting with movement. The stream coming down the mountains does likewise. You get a sense of the journey ahead for the three men on donkeys, a journey marked by the sequential landmarks of bridges and fences here and there. The progression is ever upward and has a fable-like appeal. Incidentally, you should know the elongated form of paintings in the Wu School was often employed in K'o-ssu tapestry. K'o-ssu was often used as mountings for paintings. Suzhou was a textile center as well as a painting center.

In the second gallery the lighting is dim to protect the precious paper. Wen Zheng-Ming, the leading Suzhou scholar after Sen Chou, and his son, Wen Jia (see above) are represented in calligraphy. The Colophon of the father - colophons were commentaries on paintings- and the son's homage to a literary hero follow the direct and natural approach to calligraphy of Chu Yun-ming, who reacted against the florid and precise court style. Chu revived the classical Chung-Wang tradition of round brushwork and square character formation. It reflects the loose open form of Chung Yu's ancient style of the later Han Dynasty. The lack of precision and flourishes of the chancellery style of Shen Ts'an in favor of a revolutionary calligraphy favoring ancient precedent has a corellate in the Wu painting style.

In "Views of Tiger Hill" Xie Shichen uses Sen Zhou's abstract dots as leaves. Tree branches and rock patterns break certain areas into reticulated patterns of abstraction. People and water buffalo are no more than stick figures. Pagodas and houses are crudely drawn, recalling Wen Jia's cartoonish buildings.

As the curator states, Lu Zhi's "View of Stone Lake" captures the spirit of sixteenth-century Suzhou. It is hardly an objective view, and way out of perspective (see Zhang Hong for Western perspective.) It is a subjective view of the lake, and therefore precious in its particularity of place. It has simplicity, is against delicacy or superficiality, and is certainly not in the orthodox court style. It expresses te and Kan-ying. See how the spit of land is so out of perspective, and how the boats on the right seem to slope down with the "sloping" water. The boats on the upper left seem to float in sky rather than water. you could mistake water for sky in this little world. Some lines are hazier and more dashed and ethereal than others. It is like a mental impression rather than an observation. Like "Views of of Tiger Hill" it is more like a dream than a rendering. Here is something that could not come out of the court. This is a vision created out of individual freedom.

Stuart Kurtz
March 1, 2009

Review: Adventureland

2009-04-04T19:44:00.000-07:00

Review: Adventureland
Stuart Kurtz
April 2, 2009

James Brennan(Jesse Eisenberg) has a problem. He is too smart to suffer fools gladly, but he is surrounded by fools. What's a nice Jewish comparative lit. and Renaissance studies boy to do? He can keep his sanity, even at the cheesy Adventureland amusement park, by seeking out the genuine under the ticky-tacky. He might just find the girl of his dreams. You never know.

James was on the fast track to a brilliant writing career. Diploma in hand, his plan was this: bum around Europe for the summer with his friend, and then head off to Columbia for graduate school. As he says, writing is an old boys network, and you need your credentials. You may have noticed from other flicks that when the hero is too sure of himself, something is bound to go awry. That inciting incident, for you lovers of the classical narrative, is in the form of his pop taking a salary hit and worse job. So much for Europe; James now has to take a financial hit too and find work to pay for grad school.

As James puts it, "I majored in comparative literature and Renaissance studies. Unless someone needs a fresco restored, I'm screwed." Since asphalt roller driver is out, he has to settle for the dregs, that is, to be a "Carny" at Adventureland amusement park near Pittsburgh. Sorry to crush your fondest memories of the amusement park, but James finds a Gamorrah of hedonism, loose sex, small-time cons, drugs, and violence. Wouldn't you know teenagers hang there (and post-teens)?

Two girls activate James's hormones. The hotty every guy wants, Lisa P.(Margarita Levieva) is a schemer and tease who doesn't know she is troubled. The real love interest is Emily, "Em", Lewin(Kristen Stewart), who definitely knows she is troubled. Ms. Stewart hangs her head and raises it to reveal expressions of simultaneous sadness, challenge, and anger. Her toking, adultering behavior is nothing unusual for the park, where she works as another Carny, but she contains emotions as deep as the Marianas Trench.

In fact, that's kind of a clue to finding the heart of this movie - finding depth under the superficial. Everything about Adventureland(the park, that is) is slick and artificial, except a few lost souls who are better than it all. The idea is that the kids work up their fantasies -sexual and otherwise- at the park, and the lucky few work out their family problems. The film never suggests a solution for every problem, but the right attire is to be genuine with who you are.

James has to learn this. His new friend, Joel Schiffman(Martin Starr), the opposite of James's Columbia roommate to be, tells James James doesn't know a good thing when he's got it. The good "thing" is Em. After saving her at his fairway ring toss game from a knife-carrying creep, Em knows James is the coolest guy she ever knew. The two are the only ones with the developing maturity to escape the bad Karma of games of the carnival and interpersonal kind and find something true.

This is not to say the other Carnies don't have potential. They certainly have similar problems to James and Em. Mike Connell, Em's other love interest, was abandoned by his father. Lisa P. feels the anxiety of her father being home-ridden and unable to work due to injury. It is the way they deal with them that is the problem.

Em and James make their blunders too. She handles her father's betrayal of her mother by recreating her father in Mike. James deals with his father's alcoholism with low self-esteem. But they, as said, are genuine people. Joel, the pipe-smoking, Gogol-toting Existentialist is the voice, with James, the voice of the true artist.

Mike Connell is the voice of the false artist. His line about having worked with Lou Reed is just a way to score on chicks. The soundtrack itself resonates with these themes. 80's (the time of the movie's setting) pop ballads deal with love and disappointment: David Bowie's "Modern Love", "Unsatisfied" by The Replacements, "I Don't Want to Know if You're Lonely" by Husker Du strike a false note of romance. The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" and Lou Reed's "Satelite Love" are the real deal.

Adventureland bleeps and flashes and twirls you through the immaturity of late adolescence (and extended adolescence), but it has the complexity to allow sincerity to appear now and then. As for the game of love, there are even two winners. And that's no chance.

Adventureland is presented by Miramax.
It is rated R for sexual situations, drug use, violence, and language.
Directed by Greg Mattola
It opens on April 3, 2009
It features Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig of SNL, and Ryan Reynolds of X Men Wolverine (in theaters May 1, 2009)

Review: The Reader (Final Version) Warning: Spoilers

2009-02-17T20:09:00.000-08:00

Here is my final version of my review of The Reader. I hope you all can see the movie, and let me know what you think. Thanks.

Review of The Reader: Mind, Body and Morality Warning: Spoilers

Cynthia Ozick, and Mahohla Dargis, among others, have roundly criticized Bernhard Schlink's book, The Reader, as sympathetic to Hanna Shmitz for her illiteracy and for excusing her monstrous actions in WWII because of that illiteracy. While these writers build a strong case, the book, now a motion picture (directed by Stephen Daldry, screenplay by David Hare, Produced by Anthony Minghella and the late Sydney Pollack) contains a deeper substrate of themes which the reader can render out. The act of reading, so central to the themes, provides clues to this buried subtext.

Michael Berg, a 15 year-old boy in post-war West Germany (1958) is coming home from school one day when he takes sick from Scarlet Fever in the breezeway of an apartment building. Hanna, a streetcar conductor who lives in this building, comforts him and invites him inside, where she nurses him. The two begin a physical relationship for the summer. Hanna demands that Michael read to her from literature such as Lady Chatterly's Lover. The romance abruptly ends when Hanna disappears one day in order to veil her secret, illiteracy.Michael encounters Hanna by surprise eight years later while he is a law student. She is facing prosecution for a war crime while she was a guard helping evacuate prisoners from Auschwitz in 1944. Michael and his peers evaluate the guilt of their elders, and Hanna still conceals her great secret. The trial concludes, and Michael provides tapes of his readings for Hanna while she is imprisoned. He later faces the daughter of a Holocaust survivor regarding Hanna's crime. The film concludes with an older Michael revealing his affair to his grown daughter.

In Commentary Magazine, "The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination" Cynthia Ozick rejects Schlink's apparent motivation for Hanna. She argues Germany had the most literate population in Europe, yet the "plot turns on...an anamolous case of illiteracy, which the novel recognizes as freakish. Shlink, says Ozick, mitigates Hanna's guilt because she could not read the job notice advertising the factory job. She otherwise would have been a factory girl instead of a war criminal.In "Innocence is Lost in Postwar Germany," by Mahohla Dargis the reviewer says the film asks us to pity Hanna and that the film is about making the audience feel good about a historic catastrophe.These reviewers should look at the subtle clues Schlink offers.

When characters, such as Michael and Hanna, read literature, their choices, if it is a good novel or film, direct the reader/viewer to themes in those novels which are also relevant to the first characters.Michael reads Lady Chatterly's Lover to Hanna in the film, though not in the book. This is what Wikipedia says on the themes of the book:

"This novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically."It goes on to say:"Richard Hoggart argues that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's Lover is not the sexual passages that were the subject of such debate, but the search for integrity and wholeness. Key to this integrity is cohesion between the mind and the body for 'body without mind is brutish; mind without body...is a running away from our double being.' Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the incoherence of living a life that is 'all mind', which Lawrence saw as particularly true among the young members of the aristocratic classes, as in his description of Constance and her sister Hilda's 'tentative love-affairs' in their youth:So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax."

The contrast between mind and body can be seen in the dissatisfaction each has with their previous relationships: Constance's lack of intimacy with her husband who is "all mind", and Mellors' choice to live apart from his wife due to her "brutish" sexual nature. These dissatisfactions lead them into a relationship that builds very slowly and is based upon tenderness, physical passion, and mutual respect. As the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors develops, they learn more about the interrelation of the mind and the body; she learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act and he learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love.

Hanna lives a physical life that is empty and disheartening. She is very good at her job, as it is a repetitive physical act. She is all mechanics. Sex for her is similarly mechanical. In war time she excelled in being a guard for the same reasons, and her life at Auschwitz was all brutality. Hanna knows that "body without mind is brutish," so she enlists Michael to read to her. If she were a heroine who changes, she would integrate body and mind. Schlink perhaps means no such sympathy for her - her crimes are too great.

We may take note that the crimes of letting 300 people burn, and assorted every day barbarism at the camp are physical crimes. After having taught herself to read, Hanna should thereafter have a full human experience of mind-body balance. The fact that she decides to take desperate measures (I won't spoil your trip to the movies that much) indicates that she may realize, as Constance does, that she cannot live by mind alone. She is now literate, but a sexual relationship with an older, wiser Michael is impossible. Now that she is stigmatized in her country, she will probably find no lover. She will also find no job higher than menial labor.

Schlink could be saying that education does not alone make one moral. The Germans who committed these crimes, says Ozick, were highly literate. One needs to be educated and aware of the consequences of bodily actions, as most Germans of the 1930's and 1940's denied.Michael, his law professor (Bruno Ganz), and peers are all highly intellectual and literate, yet they are also aware of the physical crimes of their elder's generation and in their own time. Michael's moral education in these scenes is set in 1966, a time when many more physical crimes were being waged in the world. The student demonstrations -usually physical acts-going on off camera are about that necessary mind/body integration: education + righteous physical action = just and whole human beings.

This is what Wikipedia says about another book Michael reads to Hanna in the film, though not in the book. It is Huckleberry Finn:"Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that 'a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience,' and goes on to describe the novel as '...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.'"

Hanna could learn much from Huck. Huck was illiterate and, in some ways, brutish. The Widow Douglas and Miss Watson try to "Sivilize" him, but Huck doesn't take to it. He shows humanity to Jim, though he knows it is against his conscience. He has been sold a bill of goods by the corrupt culture around him, just as Hanna and all Germans were by Hitler, Goebbels, etc. Huck's good heart allows him to be humane and try to free Jim. Hanna could have allowed the 300 to escape the burning town hall, but she did not due to her brutish sense of duty, a non-intellectual act of following orders. Germans might have listened to their hearts rather than the sense of conscience the Nazis imbued upon them. The Cartesian duality between conscience and heart is another split on which right and wrong action impinges.

Another great work, a play, Michael orates is Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1772). Wiki says this:"Emilia Galotti is a drama of the Enlightenment that doesn't precisely follow the standard French model of the era. Although love is a central theme, in reality Emilia Galotti is primarily a political commentary. The practically arbitrary style of rule by the aristocracy is placed in stark contrast to the new and enlightened morality of the bourgeoisie. All more feudal ideas of love and marriage thus come into conflict with the greater move by the population to marry for love rather than tradition and power. This combination proves to ensure a rather explosive situation."It is another case for the morality of standing up to oppresive cultures and social mores for a higher moral standing.

The Odyssey is yet another great book Michael reads to Hanna. In the text Circe and Calypso abuse men. Circe turns Odysseus's crew into pigs, and Kalypso makes him her sexual slave. Hanna does not treat Michael as a mature woman should treat a lover. There has been little critique of the fact that she commits yet another crime by abusing- and statutory rape is abuse- a minor. Hanna is unskilled in the act of reading, but Michael is yet unskilled in the art of love or physical act of love-making. This is a sick relationship based on a kind of power each has over the other. One reviewer called it Nazi Porn, but it is not that. The Night Porter is that and execrable for being so. This is a relationship that should arouse repugnance in us.

We must look at all the other works Michael reads to Hanna from the book, though not in the film. Below are themes by every other author but one.

The Slovak National Theater describes Friedrich Schiller's Intrigues and Love, another work Michael reads to Hanna, as "...a picture of bondage and loss of freedom - not only the loss of social freedom and of status - but also a picture of the most intimate and private bondage in love and passion. The themes of this great play by Schiller are power and the loss of power. Love that wants to possess the other, love that seeks to manipulate the other. Love as duty - love that can never have a happy ending. It breeds distrust, jealousy, and death." This is the kind of love Hanna has for Michael, and the Nazis had for Germany.

Cummings Study Guides indicates two themes of War and Peace are: 1. Love and compassion are the keys to a successful and fulfilling life. Pierre Bezuhov searches for the meaning of life and discovers this. It does not matter who the bestower or recipient is - whether peasant or nobleman. 2. War is brutal and barbaric, not grand and glorious.
As for the reading of Schnitzler, we might note that his themes are love, sex, and death...not necessarily in that order. He deals with how the three intersect. The sick relationship of Hanna and Michael fits well into his arc.

Keller, cited, handled the role of the individual as a virtuous and sympathetic public citizen, free from the extremes of moral and relative fanatacism. Michael and his law school peers would be of this kind.

Heine and Morike dealt in their poetry in the hopless joy of love. Heine supported the ideals of the French Revolution, and he attacked German anti-Semitism. The Nazis tried to delete him from written works, but it was this Jewish writer, along with Goethe and Shiller, who made other countries more aware of German writers.

Kafka deals with violence and persecution.

Frisch was against totalitarianism and establishments. His early works of the 1930's deal with First World War (not Second) German guilt and the origins of Nazism. The protagonist of Stiller, Jim White, is arrested on the border due to a sham passport. While in prison he writes his story for the public prosecutor. He claims he is not the sculptor, Stiller, but that is a lie. Hanna pretends to be literate and hides her past. Andorra, by Frisch, deals with anti-Semitism and racial prejudice.

Uwe Johnson presents World War Two, the suffering the Nazis inflicted, and the resulting division of the country.

Ingeborg Bachmann struggled against Fascism, including Fascism in subtle, everyday forms that still go on. The student protests taking place in The Reader might allude to other forms of oppression.

Siegfried Lenz's novels, short stories, and plays are about how the Nazis affected Germany. He was one of three writers who served as the German conscience. He won the German book trade's peace prize in 1988. The German Lesson exposes Nazi injustice (highbeam.com).

In Chekhov's stories "Protagonists are disillusioned by events that force them to reevaluate their personal philosophies and understanding of the world, and this disillusionment usually happens near the end of stories" (Sparknotes). It seems by this reference we may posit that Hanna undergoes a realization about her past behavior. Consider other literature the older Michael finds on her cell's shelf. It is the literature of the victims. There are books by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Jean Amery, and Tadeus Borowski, as well as the autobiography of Rudolf Hess, and Arendt's report on Eichmann in Jerusalem. It is very noteworthy that Borowski, author of This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, commited suicide by gas in 1951.

Hanna's last act hinges upon her education in moralism she attains from the above writers. Her values of earlier days, based on the idea that literature is heroic and thrilling give way to a maturity about life's meaning. She would not be reading Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel if she had no perception of the crimes of wartime. It is also not sufficient to say she makes her final decision and action based on the slim chances at meaningful work or finding someone to love her. It is not firm enough to say Michael is the only one who has a path to discovery. Though we justifiably revile the monster, Hanna, we might consider that evil doers sometimes, sometimes come to realize their evil.

According to Mahohla Dargis, Michael is a victim and a survivor. It comes out in the trial that Hanna forced young women at Auschwitz to read to her, and then dispensed them to the gas chambers (to cover her secret). Michael would have been designated to the same fate had he been at the camp. The act of reading must, after learning this, be a kind of brutal act for him. He must feel dirty for having done so. Again, intellect without a moral responsibility for bodily acts brings peril.

Therefore, if we plunge the depths of this novel and film and get into the murky themes, we see that maybe Schlink is not creating sympathy at all for Hanna Shmitz. She is not a heroine who comes to change when she realizes something. She does realize something; that is that intellect alone doesn't make a full person. She doesn't realize what Michael and his colleagues know; that is that intelligence does not make us moral. We are physical embodiments too, and we can't deny that. We need to integrate the two sides, and we need to act with humanity, whether we can read or not.

Stuart Kurtz
January 16, 2009 and finalized February 17, 2009

George Bush's Legacy

2009-01-20T07:55:00.000-08:00

Solemn and sad day! King George is saying farewell to his subjects. Let us pray that the new president does not betray us with higher taxes and, God forbid, social programs for the poor and undeserving. Do you know what a higher tax bracket will mean for the Waltons of Walmart, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdock, Warren Buffet, and those others that are really needy? Needy of government non-interference, that is.

Now that our true American hero is about to leave the throne, it is time we talk about legacy. Yes, he has taken some hits for policies, but legacy is another matter. Legacy is about the long-lasting effects King George's actions will have. Here are some:

*His Majesty promised to cut taxes. He did so. With the savings we can buy a little food, maybe enough gas to drive home, and put the rest on credit cards.

*He got government out of business. Now we can buy cheap goods from overseas and export jobs. That's what I call a balance of trade.

*He was "The Education President." He taught us the meaning of words like freedom and democracy. Who needs Pell Grants for college when you have that vocabulary?

*Under his reign, foreign relations are better. You're either with us or against us -easy choice. You don't need the U.N. when you've got a simple choice like that.

*The environment: His Majesty promised to clean up the Everglades with the help of the Crown Prince, Jeb. They have restored the Everglades, but it was in New Orleans.

*Communications have improved. You can now have a conference call between you, your friend, and the government without asking or paying for it.

*Treatment of prisoners has improved. Now they get non-stop Heavy Metal music and hydrotherapy (on boards) treatment whether they like it or not. Just ask them at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

*Respect for the U.S. is now very high. Other countries just keep buying it up.

*He's increased commerce. Foreign tourists come over to raid our department stores. The dollar is such a bargain!

*He has decreased government spending...except on the military. You've got to have one guilty pleasure.

*He has increased aid to those in need: oil companies, timber companies, mining companies, you-name-it big companies.

*We have brought peace to Iraq. We could be there another twenty years to enjoy the peace.

*His Campaign Manager, Karl Rove, brought such integrity to the electoral process. Bugging your own offices and then having the FBI investigate your opponent is not really a crime, is it? I mean, wasn't it the Communists who burned The Reichstag?

*Individuals have prospered under the King. Just ask Cheney and anyone holding Haliburton stock, or the Boys of Enron.

*He has promoted family values. Domestic life is better, except that families don't actually have houses to practice that domestic life in.

*He has increased tourism. If you seem to be an enemy of the U.S., his men will send you to other countries known for their "physical therapy", like Syria.

*He's a man of the people. Now he can join some of the people on the unemployment line.

*We entered the New Millenium with a sense of new understanding between nations and peoples of the world. Barriers between cultures are coming down. French fries are now freedom fries.

Therefore, go proudly, our deposed King, into your new life in Dallas. We know you and the Queen will find some way to spread your grace on the world. And, if it doesn't work out in Dallas, I'm sure you can find some abandoned shack in the lower ninth ward to set up house in.

Freedom.

He's a man of the people.Now that King George is out of a job he can join the people on the unemployment line.

Aren't We Working These Kids Too Hard?

2009-01-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

Hey, here's a link to a fascinating article on how some kids are getting the opportunity to get health problems from overwork:

Hunter College High School is on New York City's Upper East Side. I love this part:

Elite, which opened in 1986, is one of several cram schools in New York
that has imported the year-round enrichment programs of the Far East, giving
students the chance to forfeit evenings, weekends, summer break and winter
vacation for test preparation.
Maybe we can curb their sleeping habits to optimize time for studying vocabulary. They may grow an inch or two less, but they'll know what deleterious means.
Technorati Profile

2009-01-06T20:49:00.000-08:00

Readers, here's a link to my arts reviews for The Epoch Times Just turn on the language you need, and type Stuart Kurtz in the search bar. Thanks.

The End of Humanism?

2009-01-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

Humanism was a secular movement of the Renaissance and following (c.1400-1650) that taught personal independence and individual expression. It moved away from the fixed points of Medieval mysticism and toward the potential of man.

Human experience, man himself, tended to become the practical measure of all things. The ideal life was no longer a monastic escape from society, but a full participation in rich and varied human relationships. ~Steven Kreis, 2000 (see above link)

Think about the following from the International Humanist and Ethical Union:
Minimum Statement
All member organisations of the International Humanist and Ethical Union are required by IHEU bylaw 5.1[4] to accept the IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism:
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
Apart from the need to ensure that member organisations are bona fide Humanist (or like-minded) organisations, Humanism rejects dogma, and imposes no creed upon its adherents.[5]

The statement of the American Humanist Society is this:

The AHA's definition from its website:
"Humanism is a progressive Lifestance lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity." —Humanism and Its Aspirations

I believe we in technological nations are moving away from Humanism under Globalization and open markets. These forces put pressure on lives to compete in a global society. People are constantly put upon to produce more, seemingly for individual good but really for the common good. I argue that neither is benefitting.

When work hours increase, workers have less time to educate themselves through reading, taking courses, pursuing hobbies, attending cultural events. We spend too much time producing and then taking care of errands. We are letting the spirit of Humanism suffer by not reaching our potential. When we do that, we are not aiding the greater good of humanity.

As quoted above, we need to practice reason and free inquiry to be Humanists. These need to go hand-in-hand with leisure time and the means of supporting oneself available to everybody. For those people who have no work or are in such low paying jobs that they have no time for anything but survival, there is little chance of reaching potential.

There is a large industry built on culture in America, but that's just the problem. It is an industry, not an avenue for expressing the vitality of human emotion, in most cases, or a direction for change for the greater good.

In the Renaissance art was the vehicle for expressing this new philosophy. True, it was used also to shore up the power of the Medicis and Pazzis and by the Church to intimidate (The Sistene Chapel), but the power of human independence flourished.

Globalization and a disintegration of civic values are eroding Humanism. Most culture is crass and exploitational, buffeted around by market forces. We do have individualism, but too much of it is about acquisiton of goods and expression of style and not about each person expressing him or herself for his or her betterment. It is certainly not done with an eye on civic good.

When we act in this way we hurt ourselves, we hurt every other member. And when we hurt everyone, we hurt ourselves.

Not My Quotes of the Week

2009-01-06T09:43:00.000-08:00

Here are some old quotes you've heard before. I don't think we should take them for granted just because they are famous and put to text.

1. "Less learnin', more earnin'"
Maybe if we had less of this, American students (up to high school, I think) could identify Mexico and Canada on a map.

2. "Might makes right."
That's the kind of p.r. Ivan the Terrible had.

3. "Nobody ever said life was fair."
What's wrong with this quote? Throw up your hands because life isn't fair?! Isn't it our duty to work to make it fair? Don't resign yourself to defeat because the world stinks.

Fools On Parade

2009-01-06T08:54:00.000-08:00

Hey, here's a link for you to put into your "more gall than a gall bladder" file:
Referring to Madoff, a.k.a. Ponzi sending jewelry and other gifts to family members and violating terms of his bail

I think it was the mittens that did him in.

फूल्स ओं परेड

2009-01-05T20:56:00.001-08:00

Quote of the Week (last week)

2008-12-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

“Chief Scagnelli will say, ‘Let’s not forget why we’re all here: We’re here to move traffic, move traffic, move traffic, reduce injuries, move traffic, move traffic, move traffic, reduce accidents, move traffic, move traffic, move traffic, reduce fatalities, move traffic, move traffic, move traffic,’ ” Mr. Pilecki said.

~referring to methods the city of New York employs to collect traffic fines. See "Adding to the City's Coffers, One Ticket at a Time," Nov. 27 The New York Times

Reality TV: Will You be Voted off the Island?

2008-11-22T16:21:00.000-08:00

Since "Survivor" debuted in 2000, so-called reality TV is all the rage. The situations vary from show to show, but the premise is always the same: a group of eclectic people from various (often dysfunctional) backgrounds come together to compete in some humiliating events for a prize only one will claim.

It's not in the Olympic spirit of competition, mind you. While they pretend to be cooperative, they are really back-stabbing each other aside. These moments come out in the little alliances team members make on "Survivor", and in the little "confessionals", the little private interviews between the action when we get to hear the private thoughts of the participants (is there anything private any more?).

These people have dollar signs in their eyes and are ready to come to loggerheads with any opposing member who gets in ther way. It's all for one, and one for himself game. They even rank members of their own team according to importance to the team on "Survivor." Of course, whether it's that show, or "America's Top Model", "Project Runway", or that one with Donald Trump ("You're fired!"), the climax is, I'm sue you know, the vote. That is the moments when one unlucky participant gets voted off. They can't cut it, so they're ousted. Hey, life is like that.

Public television is not immune to this. I guess its ratings were falling, and the producers decided to jump on board. Of course, they disguised it. "We don't do reality TV. Go to the networks for that." (quotes my own). About four years ago, however, PBS put on "1900 House", "Frontier House", "Manor House", and "Colonial House." On the last one participants in a mock Jamestown colony had to eat flour studded with weevils. Take that, "Fear Factor"...our weevils are as bad as your hissing beetles. Oprah Winfrey's appearance in 17th century fashion (the latest from Holland) sealed it for me. She was there to steal as many viewers from the networks as she could.

So, what does it all mean, and isn't it all in clean fun? I don't think so. The idea of forcing people to do humiliating tasks, eat revolting foods, and betray their companions is not how most of us would spend a weekend. There may be something symbolic going on.

I believe this horrible shows reflect the savage competition happening from Globalization, job outsourcing, lack of job security, and now the worldwide economic crisis. I don't want to get on a mountain top on this - they're still ridiulous shows. Consider that it's not acceptable to act in those vicious ways to your family, co-workers, and people in your every day life. So we do it vicariously through "Big Brother."

Workers feel the pinch of job outsourcing, lack of stability, tanking wages and consumer power, but it is a little abstract. You can't strike out at Globalization. So we have these shows. If you can't be up to par, your teammates vote you off the island. If you are not performing all the time and pleasing your managers, you'll be voted out of your job or out of the Middle Class. And there is no immunity idol, so watch out. You may be voted off the island too.

Quote of the Week

2008-10-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

Pres. Bush: Forgotten but not gone.

~Marcia Mercer, Washington bureau chief of Media General

Quote of the Week

2008-10-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

"The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats."

~Noam Chomsky

Consumer Subjects Deconstructed

2008-10-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

In the book, Hypersurface Architecture II, edited by Stephen Perella, the author relates a parable for the new age. A father, intrigued by his small daughter's sleeptime blather, bends down to hear the refrain she utters out of her unconcious. Was it something mystical, some mantra keeping its secrets? No. The "mantra" she repeats is "Toyota Cressida. Toyota Cressida."

To me this is our very dreams being appropriated by consumer culture. Our identities are interwoven with our spending habits.

Perella writes of the "deconstruction of the capitalist subject through the very modes of production and technologies that proliferate due to the instrumentalism inherent in consumer economics."He uses this parlance in an architectural context, now that the philosophy of Deconstruction (Post-Structuralism) is united with architectural theory. Perella sees capitalism as the engine that is changing our conception of reality. He says "the reality of a Disney phantasm and the unreality of the O.J. Simpson trial" makes it hard to know reality. The technologies that proliferate in consumer economics (see above) are the images from a paripatetic media which reaches into every part of our lives in the developed world - indeed, into our dreams.

It goes farther than that, much farther. Perella holds that consumer capitalism is changing more than subjects; it is swaying our constructs of space (time too, but I'll leave that to later). Consider this passage from his email to Brian Massuni of September 2007:

In mathematics, a hypersurface is a surface in hyperspace, but in the context of
this journal the mathematical term is existentialised. Hyperspace is four +
dimensional space, but here hypersurfaces are rethought to render a more complex
notion of space-time-information. This reprogramming is motivated by cultural
forces that have the effect of superposing existential sensibilities onto
mathematical and material conditions, especially the recent topological
explorations of architectural form. The proper mathematical meaning of the term
hypersurface is discussed here as being challenged by an inherently subversive
dynamic within capitalism. While in mathematics, hypersurfaces exist in
'higher', or hyperdimensions, the abstractness of these mathematical dimensions
is shifting, defecting or devolving into our lived cultural context. Situated in
this newly prepared context, hypersurface comes to define a new condition of
human agency, of post-humanism: one that results from the internal machinations
of consumer culture, thereby transforming prior conditions of an assumed
stability. Instead of meaning higher in an abstract sense, 'Hyper' means
altered. In both contexts, ideal abstraction and the life-world, operation is in
relation to normal three-space (x, y, z). In mathematics there are direct,
logical progressions from higher to lower dimensions. In an existential context,
hyper might be understood as arising from a lived-world conflict as it mutates
the normative dimensions of three-space, into the dominant construct that
organises culture. In abstract mathspace we have 'dimensional'constructs, in
cultural terms we have 'existential' configurations; but the dominance of the
mathematical model is becoming contaminated because the abstract realm can no
longer be maintained in isolation. The defection of the meaning of hypersurface,
as it shifts to a more cultural/existential sense, entails a reworking of
mathematics. (This is similar to what motivates Deleuze to reread Leibniz.) This
defection is a deconstruction of a symbolic realm into a lived one; not through
any casual means: it arises and is symptomatic of the failure of our operative
systemics to negotiate the demands placed upon it. If one could describe an
event whereby cultural activities could act upon abstractions so as to commute
the normative, etymological context into a context of lived dynamics, what
activity has that capability? The term hypersurface is not simply attributed new
meaning, but instead results from a catastrophic defection from a realm of
linguistic ideality (mathematics). If ideals, as they are held in a linguistic
realm, can no longer support or sustain their purity and disassociation, then
such terms and meanings begin, in effect, to 'fall from the sky'. This is to
describe the deterritorialisation of idealisation into a more material real. In
the new sense for hypersurface, 'hyper' is not in binary relation to surface, it
is a new reading that describes a complex condition within architectural
surfaces in our contemporary life-world.

When we are seeing infomercials exalting the age-reversing properties of coral calcium and James Van Praagh, Ghost Whisperer for our time, contacting Marilyn Monroe at Forest Lawn, we can see what Perella means. Lived conditions, these existential sensibilities, altering our perceptions.

Let's get back to the deconstructed, deterritorialized consumer subject. When political analysts are scrutinizing Al Gore's snicker at George Bush in the 2000 presidential debates and Sarah Palin's folksisms ("you Betcha"), we are seeing people deconstructed by their attributes. When reality TV assembles contestants to evaluate them on performance, motivations, teamsmanship, personality, we are seeing people indiscriminately broken into components and judgements heaved upon them. The ideal image of the contestant is cooperative, hard-working, tireless, and holding celebrity status. It is not based on reality but on promotional image. When a writer's blog features a workshop on the power of personal branding, you know for sure we are being deconstructed. I never thought of myself as a brand; I am a person.

When we in the industrial world are evaluated for our celebrity, for our status, for our selling power, we are somehow not ourselves any more. We are deconstructed and deterritorialized images of ourselves, like our bodies (evaluated for sex appeal) up on some LED board in Las Vegas hustling for Benetton. I believe fleeing capital due to the unjust paractices of mishandled Globalization creates a crunched market and necessitates hyper competition. So, we disgard weakness in favor of uber selfhood. We see image and not the reality of starvation, AIDS, and poverty in our own post-industrial landscapes. We cannot see how we are being lost in a sea of signs, a mediatized culture consuming the consumer.

Qoute of the Week

2008-09-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

One who would know the secrets of nature must practice more humanity. ~Henry David Thoreau

Revealing the Truth about Revealing the Truth

2008-09-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

In 1949 Martin Heiddeger delivered four lectures to the Bremen Club that eventually became the essay, "The Question Concerning Technology." He relates how technology is to him not about technical and scientific methods of production nor inventions based on those principles. It is a way of revealing beings. Poiesis, bringing-forth, is what the craftsman does when he produces an object.

Revealing in the sense of technology has the inherent danger that the revealing will not reveal truth. Heiddeger reveals the essense of technology as a setting-upon of man and nature to turn the earth into a standing-reserve, that is, a storehouse of resources which Man masters. Man extracts from nature everything he needs. The Rhine River is for the purpose of creating hydroelectric power.

Ge-Stell, enframing, is that challenging claim which allows man to reveal nature as standing-reserve. That is a dangerous way to look at the world:

Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger.
This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed
no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve,
and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the
standing-reserve, then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall, that is,
he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-
reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself
to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to
prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his
construct. This illusion gives him in turn one final delusion: it seems as
though man everywhere and always encounters only himself...In truth,
however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself,
i.e., his essence.

While enframing endangers the truth by keeping up the standing reserve, man can be the agent by which the truth will be revealed.

I have to give ghost credit to a web page I read about a two years ago that said the way we use information now is like Heidegger's standing-reserve. Please let me know, readers, whether you can find this page. Think about this. Don't we just mine Google and other search engines when we need information? Are we doing deductive reasoning now? With a vast reservoir of info at our disposal, we have become mesmerized by information. Knowledge could be an arsenal of intellectual weaponry to use to fight subjugation. We could use the database to fight the official narrative and then come up with our own dialectics, each person his own inventor of new ideas. This poesis, bringing-forth, could help us redefine our world and our place in it.

I believe the powers that be want to keep us dependent on the standing-reserve of knowledge so that we do not shake up the power structure. The powers are pulling a Svengali's trick on us by having us dependent on factoids and mesmerized by the Internet. Few people use the expansive standing reserve to generate new configurations

Just as the railroad coralled people off the farms and into the factories in 1820's and 1830's England, the Internet, when it is used as standing reserve, restricts thought. As Heidegger warned, with ubiquitous information at our fingertips, we encounter only ourselves. We are part of the standing reserve. Our consciousnesses are becoming part of the system. That system is Capitalism.

You may have noticed that any time at all you invoke a term on the search bar, you get ads. Knowledge is now associated with consumption. This is a dangerous development, as knowledge is tainted with powerful forces more than ever. It always has been, but now it is ever-present that it is second nature to us that we are in buying mode when we go to the storehouse of knowledge.

Consider the ways that computers alienate us from eachother. People talk less to others. Email precludes personal interactions -phones, while distancing, allow give and take and emotional connection. Answering machines do not. How many minutes at the outer limits would you stay on hold? The IRS kept me on hold for one hour and thirty seven of them. And answering machines confine your choices. How many times have you had a question which couldn't be found on the directory?

Our identities themselves are getting alloyed with Information Age technology. The pervasiveness of Facebook and MySpace underscores this. A friend of mine didn't contact me in over two months while abroad. When she did, it was in the form of a brief email saying, "Hey, check out my Facebook profile!" So much for asking how I was or having a human interaction. We become virtual selves, and the danger is great that we are losing touch with real, physical and mental, suffering in the real world. I am sure forces are aware of this, and that this is not coincidental.

Heidegger relates the meaning of technikon, part of techne (technology) as more than the work of the craftsman bringing forth objects. It is also about art. And poiesis, bringing-forth, is poetic.

Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the
beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arets was
also called techne.

Heidegger tells us how in Ancient Greece art was not an aesthetic enterprise. It was a revealing that aimed at the safekeeping of truth. Its job was to reveal truth. That is possibly what John Keats meant when he wrote, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth." So, it was the supreme danger that the enframing and challenging Heidegger wrote of would reveal only himself, but not his essence. That is the false revealing through the techne. Art is the technikon which can reveal the truth of man's existence.

If we allow our minds and identities to rely on all information as something we extract, and we do not deduce our own thoughts, we will become victims of our own exploitation of resources. Deduction is artistic in that we take information from other sources and then creatively reconfigure ideas.

The act of making art is a search for truth. We should make sure our mastery of the earth and information does not confuse what we know from what we could know.

Quote of the Week

2008-08-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure ~ Laurence J. Peter

Feeling Confined Lately?

2008-08-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Some processes eat away our rights, yet we can't see them in action. We feel the pinch, but accounting for our diminished rights and happiness is elusive to most.

I was reading today about the system of Enclosure, which existed in England and Wales between the 12th to the 19th centuries. Lands, whether in common hands or private lords' hands were held in common for the use of anyone who cared to farm them. During the Tudor period especially, lords discovered they could make more from the lands by grazing sheep there. Arable lands were now pasture lands.

The Inclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries took common lands out of public hands by escheat whether they were solely from common trust or were already privately owned and used by commoners. This system reached its zenith between 1760 and 1832. Middlemarch deals with land enclosures in service of another animal, the "iron pig" of the railroad.

Marxist scholars assert the act of enclosing space extended private yeomanship and created a landless laboring class who were forced to seek work in the new industries. Those were sheparding and shearing, and, from 1780 to the 1820's, factory work.

I see a new form of enclosure happening in industrial nations. It is the kind that sneaks up on us and is so insidious that we may not see it. It is a kind of virtual enclosure for the virtual age.

There is, to start, a physical delimiting of actual space. There are fewer public places where we can speak our minds. The ancient Greeks had the agora. We really have few spaces for citizens where we can speak our minds freely at any time. You need permits for protest marches. There are few Speaker Corners (London's Hyde Park). Colleges, libraries, and meeting halls are about all we have.

If we speak our minds and displease the owners of private property, they claim the power of private property. Owners can "trespass" you (notice how trespass became a verb about 2002). You can be trespassed lately for being rude to the desk staff or for complaining about policies. This is a way of shrinking individual rights and tightening the gag on freedom of speech.

You can even be trespassed for sleeping in the public library. And have you noticed that public libraries are letting the private sector creep in? There are cafes and restaurants in libraries now. The fees on copying have risen. I was also told I would have to buy a copy card for $1, which I could keep. The librarian said, "you get three free copies. Copies are 15 cents." That begs the question: what happens to the other 55 cents? The manager told me it goes for upkeep. Shouldn't we just pay for the copies? This is a public institution bilking the public for revenue just as a private company would.

A man I know suggested the city of Boston keep out the "troublemakers" by closing off the pedestrian thoroughfare section of Washington Street and covering it with a glazed arcade, such as the Galeria Emmanuelle in Milan. Maybe we should turn Boston Common into a private park, Sir, and have Verizon sponsor it.

Have you noticed that stadiums are now sponsored by companies? There's the Verizon Wireless Arena, the Tweeter Center, Gilette Stadium. This nomenclature tells the public that companies own more and more of our world.

All those security cameras create another enclosure of space and restriction of our freedoms. Surveillance keeps us in line. We don't have the same sense of freedom of expression or mobility.

Most of us have to work harder and longer to keep up with bills. We are getting shut out of our money, property, and leisure time while the billionaires and hudreds-millionaires, the new lords, are expanding their "estates."

It is not all virtual reductions. Lords are now finding ways to reduce the property and spaces of the common people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the lords of real estate. Instead of common land enclosure, we have mortgage forclosure.

What scares me even more than those developments is the true virtuality of land-grabbing. Information, which should be free and accessible to all is now restricted in ways. For about four years after the terror of 9/11 American news networks broadcast very few stories criticizing the Bush Administration, especially over the Iraq War.

Consider that the Web was, before 2000, the equivalent of the card catalog at the library, wherein most of it was text and images related to subjects. Starting in 2000 the advertisers caught on and, since then, it is a forum for ads. No matter what subject you tap in, you are bound to get an ad that may have nothing to do with the subject. In this way the Net is eroding free thought (as long as we comply). We have to use it as the expansive tool it is.

Let's be wary of how space, whether real or virtual, is shrinking at the hands of the lords of industry. We have more to lose than vegetables.

technoratipost

2008-08-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

TechnoratiProfile

A Problem with Finances

2008-08-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

Now, I'm no Marxist scholar, but here is how a friend of mine who is put it. He said capital must realize itself for it to work. I found the below on the Web.

The product is therefore not only a commodity, but a commodity pregnant with
surplus-value." ...

These commodities - "pregnant" now with
"surplus-value" - are "commodity capital." They must be sold - transformed into
money - to realize their "value" sufficiently not just to cover the "productive
costs" of wages, industrial materials consumed and the wear and tear of
production, but also to realize their "surplus value" sufficiently to cover the
capitalist's "unproductive costs" - such as overhead, rent, taxes, financial
expenditures - plus a profit. &

According to my friend, one problem with Capitalism is that its Capital is not going to be realized. That is because workers have less free time and smaller wages to spend. I added that workers need to be producers, but they also need to be consumers. They have less time and money to hold up the economy. We are not a big exporter, and so our markets can't expand outside our borders. We need money to be spent here, and that is falling.
I, myself, believe we will further lose our competitive edge due to the fact that workers have less free time in which to educate themselves with the skills of the new global economy. They should be taking adult ed classes, training programs, learning computer skills, and (God forbid) reading. The young are doing this, but the workforce is not only the young. We need to give more leisure time to workers for the sake of education. By the way, hobbies are productive in helping us learn.
So, more leisure time and greater wages will help us stem the loss of our economy. The key to a healthy, productive populace is a happy, rested populace. Let's start with that, and maybe later we can talk on Marx.

Quote of the Week

2008-08-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.~Thomas Henry Huxley

Do We Really Want to be Number One?

2008-08-19T15:43:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article in the May, 2008 issue of Boston Magazine. The Feature editorial was on power, apropos of this post. In the departments section is an amusing article called "Confessions" by Lisa Liberty Becker. It's on her own and parents opposition to all-day kindergarten in Concord, Massachusetts. It passed.

What struck me was her reference to "preschool tutoring" (page 92). What in the Hell is preschool tutoring? You know, I didn't even want to bother Googling it - sort of a tacit protest that such a monstrosity exists. I did anyhoo, and here is a preschool tutoring link. Now I can die. I've seen it all.

You may remember a feature on Nightline called "Inside the Cutthroat Preschool Wars" from 2006 on the savage competition of parents to get their children into elite preschools in San Francisco and New York City.

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago (sorry, I couldn't locate) of one little boy telling another that he couldn't hang out with him now that Globalization has made free time more scarce.

The need to stay on top of the world is now petering down to the way we raise our children. Actually, it has since we've been on top (1918), but we always had the economic fat to fall back on. We generally left competition to Little League and that crucible of preparation for the adult rat race, high school.

But now, market forces brought on by Globalization; the rise of China and India; the Seven Tigers; and, let's not forget, the greater disparity in income distribution is causing some to throw their most precious assets into the marketplace. "My kid will have an advantage, even if it means all day kindergarten!"

Do we really want to keep up our standard of living if it means we can't enjoy life any more, are worked to the bone, and are possibly doing irreperable psychological harm to our offspring?

Maybe it's time we give up on our standard of living. Maybe it's time to get a new standard.

Where Will You Go?

2008-08-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

I am always looking for discrepancies in religion. I think the Bible has to account for its contradictions with proper dialectics. Here's a case. If you are good, you go to Heaven when it is your time. If you are bad, well, you know. That suggests God and the Devil are parties in a kind of supernal court fighting for your soul, that they are subject to an independent system of justice. Therefore, God, wouldn't be the foremost power.

The next contradiction I found has to do with Satan. Why would he take delight in punishing evil souls? He celebrates, encourages, invites, and foments evil. He should want to promote those evil souls to demons.

Another trouble spot is in God's love. If God loves us so much, doesn't he love us in Hell? If we have free will, why can't we redeem ourselves from Hell and choose to love God? Why should our power of free will end when we depart our bodies? And why is this system finite? Systems change on Earth; they should be able to change in Heaven and Hell.

...just some thoughts

Thought of the Week

2008-08-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

Humanity is what we practice when the pantry is full.

I said that

Quote of the Week

2008-08-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

Civilization is a slow process of adopting the ideas of minorities.

Herbert Prochnow

Pat Robertson at the Forum

2008-08-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

The Religious Right spews so much cant in the name of Jesus. You know, if they were alive at that time, they would have denounced Christ. Christ was a radical who defied Roman authority and had a new concept of wealth and human interactions. The Christain Right is composed of ultra-conservatives who try to conserve the old ways of power and of thinking. They would have followed Roman law to the Roman letter.

In Pat Robertson mimicry:

Roman friends, I want you to know that Venus loves you. And Venus loves you so much, she wants you to send 30 Derarii to The United Church of Pagan Idolatry. It will help with getting out the message to our young people to get invoved in any cults they so choose. And I want to say something about this seditious upstart Hippy, Jesus Christ. With all his talk of peace, and love, and universal brotherhood, he is corrupting the youth of Judea. Why, they are not making sacrifices any more. They're not attending orgies or vomotoria. What is happening to our morals? I haven't seen a golden cow in months.

Classic/Fantastic: Apollo versus Dionysus

2008-07-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

We all know examples of the orderly in art. Think of the Classical world of ancient Greece and Rome with art in the form of perfectly-shaped urns and the ideal of the Discus Thrower. We have also seen art from the irrational side of the brain in the work of Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. It is rare to have an art show which juxtaposes the rational and irrational impulses at the same time. In doing so, each side is more illuminating, and we see how we depend on both in our personalities.

An ongoing show entitled Classic/Fantastic: From the Modern Design Collection opened in December of 2007 in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is a minor show, yet sometimes a little can say a lot. The ongoing show demonstrates the dual and dueling parts of the human mind.

In The Birth of Tragedy the Frederich Nietzsche distinguished two principles from ancient Greek philosophy, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Everything that maintains man's or things' individuality and that makes distinctions between things is Apollonian: "...all types of form or structure are Apollonian, since form serves to define or individualize that which is formed..." (Steven Kreis, 2000. See last link). According to Nietzsche (see Kreis' website), rational thought is Apollonian due to it being structured and that it makes distinctions. All types of form and structure are Apollonian, according to Kreis, and "...sculpture is the most Apollonian of the arts, since it relies entirely on form for its effect."

That which is Dionysian opposes that which is Apollonian. Music and bacchanalian debauches from Roman times are Dionysian, as they dissolve man's individualism in favor of mass activity. Man gives up his reasoning power and takes on attributes, i.e. enthusiasm, ecstasy, and instinct. He joins irrational and mass behavior. he submerges himself in the greater whole, says Kreis. Surrealist art represents symbols from the irrational mind.

On the Apollonian side, for example is the "Capiletto Chair" shaped like a capital (in ruins) from the Classical world. It was designed by Studio 65 in 1971. The show's curator, Jared Goss, imparts how the designers were rebelling against the functionalism of the International Style and how the instantly recognizable image is linked to Pop Art. The fact that the chair is made of foam rubber underscores that.

Another take on the capital is the Taccia company's lamp of 1962 by Achille Castiglione. The base is a fluted metal column. A glass cone subs for capital. It is Classic and Modern. One could say the pool of light that emanates is akin to the Apollonian sense of learning.

Let's stay rational for a while longer. The urn may epitomize Greek and Roman rational art, as it positions idealized figures in idealized activities. The urn's face recreates the Classic world as thinkers of the day envisaged. Each character on the urn is individuated and has a singular purpose. The form of the urn itself individuates its own forming (see Nietzsche link).

A wonderful urn of porcelain by the famous Gio Ponti called La passaeggiata archeologica is somewhat Art Deco in its cartoon-like stylizations. According to the show's curator, Gio Ponti was a Modernist who respected tradition. I myself believe that Modernism, in its rational concern for the betterment of man and rejection of irrational waste and corruption is felicitous to the Apollonian concept. The urn presents Classical imagery from ancient Rome, the Renaissance, and the NeoClassical age. The Modern stylings work well with the Classical vocabulary.The masonry motif is particulary whimsical. Note that each figure is individuated.

On the Dionysian side - and, incidentally, side is quite literal here, as the two galleries are side-by-side - are strange works of art that may defy rational explanation. Consider a serving dish for fish (presumably) by Henning Koppel of Denmark. Its clam shape is more than the odd stylizations of fruits de mer on bouillabaisse pots of the Renaissance. Here the object is the concept. It seems to be Apollonian at first due to the intact nature of its form, that individuates the clam. The "clam" is the form, after all. What could be more Apollonian? I think the reason the dish is on this side of the divide is that it borrows heavily from Surrealism. Think of Paul Klee's fish against the black void, or Dali's ants and tigers. The clam is no idealized form such as the Discus Thrower. There's nothing noble about a clam. In Surrealism like in no other art style, emblems from Jung's Collective Unconscious come to the fore and supersede logic. The clam, then, is Dionysian as it loses its individuality by being part of an art movement, Surrealism, and therefore out of the collective world of dreams. Surrealist and Dionysian art should let the viewer submerge with the greater whole of nature. The clam is more than a clam.

A hand table - not what you are thinking - makes its bizarre appearance. It is by Costa Achillopoulo and from 1934, in the heart of the Surrealist movement. Mr. Goss indicates that the table also functions as sculpture. Disembodied hands were prominent in Surrealism -the left hand in particular symbolized the irrational. The cloudlike element from which the hand emerges, Mr. Goss says, may represent the transition from the unconscious to the conscious. You cannot use it as a functional item without a feeling of discomfit, I believe. It must have elicited unusual conversations at cocktail parties.
The "Architettura" drop-front desk by Piero Fornasetti and Gio Ponti from 1952 is a tour de force. The illusionistic work seems to depict one palace or public building, but look again. the three levels are incongruent, and the leaves of the front may or may not be of the palace facade. There is an architectural inset hovering on the staircase. It conjures up the technique of collage in Modernism and Surrealism, whereby incompatible objects are juxtaposed in time and space to disorient the viewer and, hopefully, access his unconscious.

My favorite items are textile samples circa 1900 by an unknown designer. Mr. Goss says the organic quality may have been inspired by advances in medical science, namely serums and antibiotics, as the motifs look like microscopic specimens. Here rational science meets the incongruence of the bedroom, parlor, or dress. By turning microscopic organisms into decorative designs, the creator entered the realm of the illogical mind. The germs and bacilli become monsters ready to devour the family at home (if they were wallpaper) or wearer (if they were for a dress). The comfort of scientific, rational study degenerates into the uncertainty of the world of chaos, violence, terror. While the other art in the show kept on either side of the Apollonian/Dionysian credo, these textiles give us an uneasy alloy. It's not so easy to keep the two kingdoms apart always.

Quote of the Week

2008-07-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'd say I'm doing just peachy, but peaches are now $1.79 a pound.

I said that

Egyptian City of Akhetaten: Does this Remind You of Anything?

2008-07-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Between 1347 and 1332 BCE, also understood as in the late Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom, a remarkable transformation took place in Egypt. Over a fifteen year span existed a city, Akhetaten (today called Tell el-Amarna) which broke the rules of two millenia of gods worship and artistic expression. It was a radical new concept of monotheism after eighteen dynasties of polytheism. Art was now naturalistic instead of formal and static. People, too, changed their ideas and created a new lifestyle.

The mastermind behind this transformation of minds was Akhenaten, the son of Amenhotep (Amenophis)III. The one god his devotees followed was Aten. Although Aten, the sun god, existed for centuries, his cult was now the only game in town - town being Akhetaten, "the horizon of the Aten." Akhenaten built his first temples to Aten in Karnak but, wanting to remove his followers from past associations, took his court and many subjects to the east bank of the Nile to construct the new city.

According to Professors Barry Kemp and Jerry Rose of the Amarna Project, a very high proportion of the people, according to paleontology, suffered from short stature and early death due to iron deficiency in childhood. Add to that an epidemic, and life must have been very hard prior to the Amarna period.

Akhenaten might have responded to the desperation of his new subjects by rejecting the older generation's ways in favor of a new set-up. He and his wife Nefertiti and their up to six daughters set up court in the new city. Tuthmose was his most famous artist who created the groundbreaking style. To quote Dr. Kemp: "We must assume that Akhenaten incurred the hostility of the priests of the old cults, particularly the powerful priests of the god Amun at Thebes.

Let's see. Crisis of the old regime. A lack of faith in the old ways. A questioning of authority and religion. New concepts of art. New depictions of reality. Young people speaking their minds. Does this all remind you of anything?

If you're going to Akhetaten
Be sure to wear some lotus in your hair
If you're going to Akhetaten
You're gonna meet some monotheists there

For those who come to Akhetaten
Sunny rays descend from Aten's flair
In the streets of Akhetaten
Aten's children with lotus in their hair

On the east bank of the Nile, throw out your sundial

People in motion

There's a whole new art style raising old cult priests' bile

People in motion people in motion

For those who come to Akhetaten
Be sure to wear some lotus in your hair
If you come to Akhetaten
Temple time will be for Aten there

If you come to Akhetaten
Akhenaten grants the sun to share

"Hey, Man, try this Frankincense. It'll get you real high."

"I'm tired of my folks and there Middle Kingdom values."

First Egyptian:"Hey, Man, we're going to a party at Tuthmose's Papyrus Factory, you know 'The Factory.'
other Egyptian: "Yeah, isn't he the artist who did Hatshepsot's image repeated like 20 times?"
First Egytian: "Yeah, and his iconic 'Karnak's mallow soup can 20 times."

See insets below. It's a love-in (with some unwanted guests)

These young people are followed by the National Guard sent by the old priests in Thebes. Some kids under Abu Haaf-Aman tried to levitate the chariot house of Ay.

"What a field day for The Heat, a thousand devotees in the street."

"Why don't we paint these in day-glow hieroglyphics?"

Thebes doesn't fool around. Akhenaten has to reign in the Vizier's "Gestapo tactics."

These are the "people in motion."

"Free stuff for everyone! More stuff at the Wart Hog Farm!"

Veggie food, of course.

This girl band is part of the Mo-Town (Memphis Town) music scene. Mo-Town is where they make all the chariots.

You've got it. A commune. But what's this about work? We feel the rays of the Aten. Groovy!

Remember readers: There's nothing new under the sun. Akhetaten and its subsequent revolutions will come around again.

Life, Man

Credit to Scott McKenzie for the lyrics to "San Francisco". Credit to Buffalo Springfield for "For What it's Worth" (1966). Credit to Googleimage for the photo of the Ankh. Credit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, U.S.A. for the far out show, "Pharaohs of the Sun" in 1999-2000. Thanks go to Professor Barry Kemp of the Amarna Project.

Quote of the Week

2008-07-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

I was doing a telemarketing pitch (your opinions of me probably just went down a few pegs) to a limo co. on possibly selling gift cards to them for their employee incentive program. The woman there said: "I'm sorry. We offer other 'infringements' to our employees."

Humor. Har, Har!

2008-07-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

I think George Bush should be up on Mount Rushmore.

He could clean out Lincoln's nose.
Then he could wax Teddy Roosevelt's moustache.

At a classical music concert the condutor should get to the podium and say: "Hey Flower Children, artfully arranged, there is some bad acid going around."

The Tao of the Dow: The Market Creeping into the Soul

2008-07-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

The triumph of neoliberal market Capitalism since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has colored many aspects of our lives. We have seen a "Coke Day" in a Georgia high school, Oprah Winfrey making a guest appearance on "Colonial House" on PBS, and the allowance of private concessions vendors in the national parks (I worked with them).

With globalization we see intense competition in industrial nations and capitalism becoming Hyper-capitalism. Free trade is entering every aspect of our lives. Now, you would think religion was a hands-off affair. Not so, if you take a look at what is happening in some of our places of worship and in the relgious merchandise catalogs.

Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion by J. Carrette and Richard King deals with the corruption of the spiritual realm by very worldly aims. The authors write:

“What is being sold to us as a radical, trendy, and transformative
spirituality in fact produces little in the way of a significant change in one’s
lifestyle or fundamental behavior patterns (with the possible exception of
motivating the individual to be more efficient and productive at work). By
‘cornering the market’ on spirituality, such trends actually limit the socially
transformative dimension of the religious perspectives…”

“A religion of feel-good affluence reassures the consuming public that religion
can indeed be just another feature of the capitalist world with little or no
social challenge to offer to the world of business deals and corporate
takeovers. Spirituality is appropriated for the market instead of offering a
countervailing social force to the ethos and values of the business world.”

J. Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, (Routledge, 2005), pages 1, 5-6, 126.

My search for work in advertising led me to a webpage touting advertising as "a spiritual endeavor."

To get slightly off topic (off road without a map), I want to tack on something you readers might find of interest. Do you remember how advertising was once (60's - early 90's) synonymous with selling out, with slickness, with snookering the unsuspecting consumer? I came across a job announcement I dare not put a link to on this post. It said the advertising position required "honest and integrity." The times have changed.

Thanks to Aaron Ghiloni for the book quotes.

Thanks to images.google.com and flickr.com (seller) for the photo of the Buddha for $49.95.

Curses on Censorship

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

Here's a promising article that should give the on-line community some platform shoes, so we can walk a little taller. It's just another step in making information free and accessible everywhere.

Director of technical research Nart Villeneuve, for example, went to Kyrgyzstan last year just before a controversial general election in February, when internet sites for opposition newspapers were being shut down.

"Eventually we decided to host some of the sites here so that we could document the extent of the denial of service attack and track where it was coming from," he said.

Quote of the Week

2008-07-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

Reality doesn't always look like the map.

I said that.

Health Care Bennies of the Near Future

2008-07-07T15:44:00.001-07:00

In the not so distant future...

at a health care company

Applicant: Do you provide health benefits?
Manager: Oh yes, see for yourself. [opens a first aid kit and shows bandaids, snake anti-venom, iodine, Ace bandages, and syrup of Ipecac]. And the co-pays are reasonable Bandaids are a quarter. Gauze pads are 75 cents. Splints are $4. If you ask for anti-smoking advice, it's $10.

Credit Given

2008-06-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

The post on the Death Penalty of June 28 did not credit the source of the video from The Mission. Here is the link from imdb, the International Movie Database.

When Simon Raised an Eyebrow

2008-06-29T10:50:00.003-07:00

I never thought raising an eyebrow could get you into trouble. Not so. Simon Cowell, the vitriolic judge of American Idol known for skewering less talented contestants, got into a flap over just such an offense. After a competitor finished a song, he made an expression of tenderness to the families of Virginia Tech shooting victims. It seems that, while this was happening, Simon tapped the desk in impatience, rolled his eyes, and raised an eyebrow.

Cowell explained that he never meant to disrespect victims' families. He was, as video bears out, commenting to Paula Abdul on that contestant's use of a nasal tone while singing 'Mayberry.' That shuts that case.

Is anyone else disturbed by this? Even if Simon had been raising the eyebrow in question (It would probably be to sneer at the contestant's motivation behind the comment, such as to win sympathy votes), is it anyone's business on what we do with our eyebrows? He was not vocalizing disdain for this man, or thowing up his arms in displeasure.

In this age of surveillance we don't even have the right to our expressions any more. Everything is now up for public scrutiny. We live without privacy when we are in public. By that I mean what was once the private realm, such as our expressions, gestures, and movements have become public rights.

I read an article that seems to turn something called facial coding into something like a science. The piece describes the trustworthiness of various C.E.O.'s, such as Warren Buffet, based on their smirks, pursed lips, fixed gazes, and the dreaded "wandering eye."

Facial coding is used at a few airports with the idea that terrorists are angry people, and study of their faces would reveal minute but tell-tale signs of that anger. I know many other people who are angry at the airport. guess why. But, if the practice is working, let it be.

The above investigation into our facial ticks, scrunched eyes, and crinkled noses has spilled over into aspects of life completely unconnected with the Pakistan/Afghan border. Simon is a prime case.

There are now books instructing us how to decode body language.

The book The Definitive Book of Body Language by Barbara and Allan Pease (Bantam Books, 2006) claims that "It is a scientific fact that people's gestures give away their true intentions." Maybe it is true, but I don't think we can connect every gesticulation or expression of the face to what is happening at that moment. What do we do about the "bad day"? you know the bad day, those days when we wake up as if we're ready for trench warfare. That mood will come out in a person's face and body, but it may have nothing to do with the conversation in the copy room. Facial coding and body language decoding can detect feelings but not reasons. People have internal motivations. I knew a woman who often entered a room with daggers in her eyes. When you asked her simple questions, she looked contemptuous, as if she wanted to kill you. It turns out she was molested as a child and carried this anger with her all the time. Using the science of facial or body language, I might hypothesize that she was lying to me when she answered questions with a snarl. I know better, however.

I've known fractious, jumpy people who actually have hearts of gold. You can't judge a book by its cover (unless it's the one to the above right). We had a relative who was all smiles all the time, until there was money involved. Then she stabbed us in the backs. You couldn't tell her true nature from her face.

Michelangelo was given to fits of rage and lunacy. Should we have deduced, if we were living in his day, that he was a malefactor? No, because he also created art for the benefit of humanity.

Look at Bob Dylan's kisser. It looks moody, sarcastic, and disrespectful. That's part of his charm. His music is ironic to expose the corruption and duplicity in the world. If we judged Dylan by his face and body language, we wouldn't see the underpinnings of love in his heart.

If we want to define people by every non-verbal cue, we might be shutting off the full dimensions of those people.

And what of the quote they always throw at you in interviewing seminars: "First impressions are last impressions." I have not found it in my experience that that is the case. I've talked to people who were cold at first who then softened over the conversations. I've known people who showed all the facial expressions and body language of being congenial and fully engaged with me but who never called me back to honor favors.

This transparency is not about greater freedom to interpret eachother. It's about limiting freedom so that we don't see the true nature of people, their full dimensions.

Simon can raise his eyebrow any time he wants in my estimation.

For the facial expressions chart

Stuart Kurtz

Fools on Parade

2008-06-29T10:50:00.001-07:00

Foolish Quote of the week:

While my aunt, her friends, and I were talking about the heightened sense of security due to terrorism, her friend looked at me and said, "He's suspect too. Look, he's got black hair."

My hair is dark brown, by the by.

Fools on Parade

2008-06-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Deeper into the Death Penalty

2008-06-22T18:23:00.000-07:00

Some concepts from a panoply of sources can aid us in further discussions of Capital Punishment. Consider the view of the Society of Friends, the Quakers and the Quaker view of the Death Penalty. John Wilmerding's treatise called "Equity-Restorative Justice vs. Capital Punishment", published in THE QUAKER ABOLITIONISTS, spring, 1997 issue (found by clicking Quaker View on the Death Penalty in above link) is about the concept of Shalom. It is about restorative justice, which is in the Bible. The peace of Shalom, as Mr. Wilmerding explains, is the "presence of all creative powers." It contains wholeness, integrity, and other human virtues. "Shalom Justice" places a premium on human relationships, and only then mentions acts of individuals.

The Death Penalty fails to restore Shalom. What can restore it after murder is that the guilty may rectify crimes. Incarceration can certainly be a part of that, but more can occur between perpetrators and victims. Mr. Wilmerding writes of Victim-Offender Mediation. Family members thus derive benefits from meeting killers of their loved ones. In addition, the murderers may receive grace through transformation by way of the intervention of victims' families. In these transformative experiences, seldom though they may be, a small number of killers may become penitent for their crimes and then seek to restore Shalom. Putting criminals to death prevents that small number to find remorse and Shalom. There are no second chances.

The 1986 film, The Mission, by Roland Joffe follows Robert de Niro's character, a vial slave trader, also guilty of fratricide, finds redemption under the tutelage of a Jesuit priest (watch clip embedded below). He then repents in one of Mr. de Niro's best acting scenes. His redemption takes the form of serving the Guarani people in South America. When the church asks the priests to abandon their work and take up arms against the natives, de Niro's character becomes a freedom fighter for the natives. Out of his expiation comes a much greater good. He will try to defend more natives than the victims he created.

To draw out a religious view of justice further consider that, in a higher system of justice, a religious one, Heaven and Hell are fixed and timeless concepts. Why do we commit to Hell (or to oblivion in a secular view) a person who has committed a murder in a single point in time? What happens regarding the good deeds he has done in life or will potentially later do? Looking back in time, we might take into account that he was once an infant with no concept of right and wrong. Now that scientists are postulating as many as eleven parallel universes, we may consider the flaw of condemning persons in one place, in one time. Multiple universes suggest multiple perspectives.

Then there is the question of the legitimacy of our concepts of justice. The teenager who sports black clothing and claims to worship the devil might warrant a call to a psychiatrist. But in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, he would have been burned as a witch. This example shows the lack of stability and constancy of criteria by which we execute.

Don't we all have the potential to viciously kill? Consider those photos of towns in the U.S. from Reconstruction times right into the 1930's of towns people posing in front of lynching victims. (Warning: the preceding link contains very graphic and upsetting images of lynchings).

Are we to capture the few, albeit very old, surviving members of lynch mobs and arraign them with capital punishment being the ultimate goal? We won't. They were protected by the regnant and current system of justice at the time. It was not on the books to permit lynchings, but they were tolerated nevertheless.Yet it is alright for certain states to uphold the Death Penalty. This denies the Fourteenth Amendment of equal protection under the law.

Truth depends on what is currently held to be true, on the vagaries of fashion. Aspects of our justice system today will primitive in a twenty or thirty years. By then it will look barbaric to legally kill. If we perpetuate Capital Punishment, we deny the guilty the chance to receive stays of execution in the next few decades.

Red Sox Brawl - what would you and I get?

2008-06-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Fan outrage over the suspensions in the fallout from the Red Sox - Rays brawl runs pretty deep.
The devoted on both sides are licking their wounds over the decisions: Coco Crisp = out 7 games; John Lester = 5; Sean Casey = 3; 5 Rays suspensions. All tolled there were eight suspensions totaling 38 games. "Where's the justice?," ask some fans. Has anyone considered what you and I would get for taking swings at people in public? Huh? Hello, they call it assault and battery, and it often carries jail time.

Let's take another infamous donnybrook in sports: the 2004 Pacers - Pistons brawl. To summarize: Piston forward/center Ben Wallace was fouled by Pacer forward, Ron Artest. Wallace shoved Artest. An altercation ensued between several players. After shenanigans by Artest, fans got involved. One, John Green, threw a cup at Artest, and Artest took it to the stands. Other fans threw beer and soda; one threw a chair. Pacers attacked spectators, nine of whom were injured. The players got suspended totaling 143 games. A few got charged with assault and battery, out of which Bryant Jackson got two years probation. But John Green? Well, he was acquitted of throwing the cup but charged with punching Artest in the stands. He got 30 days in jail and 2 years probation.

I don't know, readers. Does something seem amiss here? Maybe you are spotting a trend when sports stars/movie stars/pop stars break the law. We should be asking ourselves about the double standard thing.

Take, for instance, the Russell Crowe arrest at the Mercer Hotel in New York City in 2005. The Aussie bad boy got into a lather because the hotel reception clerk could not connect him to his wife Down Under by phone. Crowe chucked a desk phone at the clerk, causing a nasty gash in his head. He was sentenced to conditional release and to pay $100,000 to settle the civil suit out of court. Jail time? Nope.

Leggy supermodel, Naomi Campbell's arrest for assault and battery against two London police officers made quite a stir this year. When hearing her bag did not make it on the flight to the U.S., Campbell kicked and spat at the police and had to be removed from the plane. Her sentence was 200 hours community service, 200 pound fines to each officer, and 150 pound to the captain. She might have gotten 6 months in jail. But she didn't. She's a celebrity.

The incident broaches another bone to stick in our throats. This is a case of Air Rage. Yes, Air Rage, that very unfunny bout of hysterics that is a little unsettling in this age of airtight security. One passenger was jailed for 12 months for assaults on a plane bound to the U.K. from Turkey. Campbell took off a few pounds - 950 to be exact - and has to dole out the cookies on Guy Fawkes Day. But, hey, she still looks terrific!

D.U.I., once earning a night in the slammer or stern warnings by the Highway Patrol, has become more crushing in the last twenty years or so. In California for first offense, non-injury, you could get 48 hours to 6 months in jail, fines of up to $1000, license suspension of 4 months, and 3 years probation. For the second offense jail time can be 90 - 120 days, fines same, and suspension of a year. That is, unless you are a celeb.

Lindsay Lohan's arrests for D.U.I. and hit and run in May of 2007 entailed a plea by the actress. The sentence was one day in the slammer, 10 days community service, and mandatory drug treatment (the last has become very fashionable). She was sentenced to 96 hours but had to serve only 48 of them. She lucked out with credit for time served and ended up with only one day more.

The plot thickens. Lohan was later that year charged with chasing her assistant's mother in her car, drunk driving, possession of Cocaine, and driving on a suspended license stemming from the May charges. She was earlier booked with the May charges. Wearing a SCRAM ankle bracelet and getting routine drug tests was part of the deal. Her jail stay from the May charges was 45 minutes long. What does M.A.D. think of her? I wonder.

In this time of Christian moralism at a high water mark, let's look at the embarrassments of Indecent Exposure. It may have gone over in the '70's on Broadway with Oh! Calcutta! and on a few California beaches, but it you are more likely to cool your body parts in a holding tank these days. Not so Janet Jackson. Her 'wardrobe malfunction', whatever that is, got her bosses at CBS appealing a $550,000 fine. The Superbowl half-time performance also featured Nelly and a crotch-grabbing performance. Jackson and Nelly get nuthin', but check this out: A court sentenced a Montana man to 225 years for indecent exposure. His three counts will run consecutively, not concurrently. He's locked up where he can do no more malice. Jackson is probably preparing her costume designers for the next 'malfunction'. And Justin Timberlake doesn't even get a dishonorable mention award for his 'shagadilic' behavior.

Where would American culture be without its pinnacle? I don't mean Moby Dick. I mean The Jerry Springer Show. Midget transvestites and a guy bragging about his relationship with his pet horse are protected under the First. But when it came to dust ups and chairs flying, the Chicago City Council took action. A 1999 hearing statement was to the effect that, if the violence were real, guests could be arrested for fighting. If it were fake, the producers should be exposed as frauds. The prod's toned it down after that. God forbid the Jerry Springer show should look like The Palace of Auburn Hills (see Pacers v. Pistons).

There goes that little question mark over my head. I mean there are still shoving matches and simple assaults on the Jerry Springer set, albeit minus the chair-throwing. Why is it that any time big money is involved the parties involved don't see or see for only a few days the beams of the jailhouse spotlights?

To be fair, I'll have you know Wesley Snipes was sentenced to 3 years for income tax evasion. Sure, but here's the diff.: The guvment wasn't getting its money. When Janet Jackson and the Red Sox do naughty, the cash registers are cranking.

Stuart Kurtz
June 22, 2008

The previously published photo in this blog was courtesy of >Boston.com. The photo was taken by the Associated Press.