http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:59:15 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/06/14/175915.php ambaSPOILER ALERT!So this is David Chase's idea of what happens when you get your brains blown out: nothing. (So much for Tony's "There's something beyond all this.") Tony has earlier looked into Uncle Junior's empty eyes and seen that our one shot at quasi-immortality - memory - ain't shit either.Paulie was the double-dealer. Working with Little Carmine, probably.Up until the end, the episode was comic, anticlimactic "life goes on." AJ was easily bought out of his military resolve. Although we've roved around in an omniscient point of view, at the moment of Tony's death we're (arbitrarily, because David Chase is such a prick) solipsistically trapped in his point of view, so we'll never know what happened to the rest of his family. We can assume they were all blown away except Meadow (so much for "something has to happen to Meadow"), whose life was saved by her inability to parallel park. (Somehow it makes me feel just a little better about my own deficiencies in that regard.) But that would be just an assumption. The blank black screen is the ultimate Rorschach blot, and the ultimate "screw you for caring."You can't even be 100% sure Tony got blown away. Ninety-nine percent, okay. Ninety-five percent? But it's also possible Chase just pulled the plug. THE END. What happens next is everybody's guess. Wonderful.In other words, I loved it. (Okay, I'm a masochist.) The way it empowers and disempowers the viewer at the same moment? Like life, the bitch, to the end. And, when you think about it, the one and only way to make the series live on.A deep bow to that prick.I commented over at Althouse, "I started out assuming that was Tony's death. By the end of my own post, I was less and less sure. I think it was the perversely perfect ending. Sort of like -- for a totally absurd comparison -- the way the pilot ends up drawing a sheep for the Little Prince: just a box with holes."This guy gets it: "The episode was brilliant, and here's why ... From the moment that Tony sat down in the diner booth and "Don't Stop Believin" started playing, my heart was racing. It was pounding like crazy. The episode was almost over. The series was almost over. This was it.""Every person in the diner became a suspect. Every time the door opened, I was on the edge of my seat. I was thinking 'when is it going to happen?' Is the guy at the counter going to kill him? Has Carlo given them enough to put Tony away and are the feds on the way? Who are those two shady guys that just walked in? Then I realized it. I had become Tony Soprano. ... That paranoia, that tension, that suspense that I felt watching that scene, was the same paranoia that Tony lived with every day."The Misfit disagrees. I LOVE this. "Build up your image as an artist, and if you then piss on your audience they'll thank God for the refreshing drizzle."[The next morning] You know we're kidding ourselves, right? Tony's dead. That's Chase's idea of what it's like to get shot in the brain. A pretty good death, though it doesn't leave you much time for a "life review." Just as well in Tony's case, probably. Although he had his moments of self-reflection, and that's as much as someone like him (or anyone) can ask for. But I don't remember him using a one of them for remorse, and that's why there was justice and inevitability in his execution.The show, and the viewer, too, were shot in the brain -- put out of their misery. [After writing this I find that commenter Ed at Althouse said, "Tony doesn't get whacked. The audience gets whacked." Perfect!!] Of course, the .01% of doubt (isn't the banality of going on a worse sentence than death?) is sadistic genius. Leave room for wishful thinking, let the fools make fools of themselves thinking there's life after death or life after The Sopranos.If Chase ended it this way because he's keeping the door open for a movie, I'd think a bit less of him artistically, but it would certainly be human: he always wanted to make movies, always hated television, which makes it supremely ironic that his imprisonment in television forced him to burst its bounds and make something you could never cram into a movie, no matter how many sequels, something Dickensian in form, if Shakespearean in girth and loft. (What I'm trying and failing to evoke with those words is the sense of exhilarating expansion, of lung-bursting spaciousness, you get from the greatest works the way you get it from being in the mountains.) But then, a Sopranos movie would not have to follow the series in time. It could be set in one of the long lacunae of the series. It could even begin with Tony's rubout, and be a flashback, a life review, an alternate reality. I hope not. Let the dead rest. I hope Chase gets to make his movie (he's earned it), and that it's about something entirely else. Video65119@blogcritics.org Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:59:15 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/21/203531.php ambaI just got sucked into watching Munich, and found it mesmerizing -- more morally and dramatically sophisticated and paranoid than I thought Spielberg had in him. I admire that he didn't cast stars: it saves the trouble of suspending disbelief (okay, now I'm going to forget that's George Clooney). Only two criticisms: it went on too long, and there were two lines I uttered before the actors did -- "Don't fuck with the Jews" and "Come home." Writing into the groove in the viewer's mind, like a ball socking into a waiting catcher's mitt, is probably what makes Spielberg a popular director; it's also what makes him a little bit of a panderer -- but much, much less in Munich than in any other film of his I've seen. It's that overgrown kid's most grown-up movie.Now that I've seen the film, I don't agree with Leon Wieseltier and others that Spielberg skirts dangerously close to moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli defense or retaliation. On the contrary, the Israelis face the undeniable conundrum that having and defending a beloved nation from such barbarous attacks drags them into the danger of becoming more like, not just like, their enemies. Even though one Palestinian is given a sympathetic but chilling speech about his people's determination to get their land back if it takes 100 years (and the Israeli hero's incredulous response is one of his least sympathetic), the savagery of the hostage slaughter in Munich far exceeds anything the assassins do, and they are seen struggling to avoid killing children, women, and innocent bystanders, though they do not succeed in the last two. (We don't see Palestinians blowing up Israeli markets, cafés and weddings, but we do watch the movie in that knowledge.) The movie actually says something quite unexceptional: that war, not excluding just war, erodes human decency. What's exceptional is idealistic Jews' sense (often honored in the breach, needless to say, Jews being all too human) that human decency is commanded to be the core of their identity, and that finally having a homeland cannot coexist with, but must replace, that core. The bomb- and toymaker makes the point that the Jewish people are called to a uniquely high standard of righteousness, and the movie observes without blame that that's hard to maintain in a real world that includes relentless threats to your home and your existence. Anyone who has killed in war, much less in a secret and illegal assassination operation, would identify with Avner's deep ambivalence about being cheerily backslapped as a "hero." (Spielberg shoots the beaming general who greets him to look greenish and moldering, like the living dead in the sickly-lit moral underworld Avner has come to inhabit.) And it is fascinating that Avner inarticulately chooses to return to exile, the Brooklyn Diaspora, as a way of regaining his "righteousness," as if permanent, insecure homelessness is the price for Jews to even aspire to remain above the common fray. I first saw this dilemma expressed in a striking Harper's Magazine essay by George Steiner, "A Jew's Grief," which unfortunately is not on the Web. Video58492@blogcritics.org Sun, 21 Jan 2007 20:35:31 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/12/26/111541.php ambaMore I cannot say, but for professional reasons, I am obliged to watch the entire first season of The Apprentice on DVD. This is another one of those "Where've you been?" moments. What was this -- four, five years ago? No, only two? But the world long ago exclaimed over the first season of The Apprentice, and moved on. I'm so Rip Van Winkle. It's like walking into Best Buy and looking for a boom box, which I also just did. Hel-lo?Nonetheless, here are my very, very, very belated reactions:1) The damn thing is as addictive as potato chips. I don't know whether any of the subsequent seasons were as gripping. But I'll probably have to watch the new season, starting in January, which reportedly features Ivanka Trump to nip-tuck drooping ratings.2) I was astonished by how quick the women were to fall back on their sexuality, and secondarily on little-girl wheedling, to win their challenges. Hardly a one of them, with the possible exception of Omarosa, banked entirely or even primarily on being a competent, intelligent adult. I almost felt sorry for the men, because the readiness to flaunt sex (and cutesiness) gave the women such an unfair, undignified advantage. When in episode four Trump himself actually called them on the carpet about it, I was like, "Whew!"3) Everybody says how horrible Omarosa was. I've only watched four episodes, but so far I don't see it. She's the only black woman in a dovey covey of white or half-white girls (okay, Tammy is Asian, sort of), and all she has to do is show a little temperament and they all gang up on her. Then she regroups and shows she can adapt, make nice and play their game very convincingly. Maybe she'll unsheath the naked rapier of her ice-cold ambition later on, but so far I don't get why everybody hates her.4) When they go up to Trump's apartment, the absurd faux-Versailles splendor of it struck me as so ridiculous that if I had been there, I would have been hard put not to laugh out loud. The only thing I've ever seen to compare to it was the Romanian dictator Ceausescu's palace. Only a true peasant still holds up Louis XIV as his fulfilled fantasy of the rich life. Okay, I've gotta go see what happens. (Fortunately, I don't remember, though I know I heard it at the time. What's flatter than stale buzz?) Back to episode five. To be continued. Video57483@blogcritics.org Tue, 26 Dec 2006 11:15:41 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/12/23/074801.php ambaI'm slowly working my way through the last two Sundays' New York Times, and was surprised to see that on December 10, one week before Time magazine unveiled its "Person of the Year: You" cover, the Arts & Leisure section headlined with "2006, Brought to You By You." The article, by Jon Pareles (and already in money jail, so there's no sense linking to it -- in the Age of You, the Times insists on remaining them), leads with the recent enormous corporate purchases of MySpace (by Rupert Murdoch, for $580 million) and YouTube (by Google, for $1.65 billion, spawning an entity one wag -- must've been you -- dubbed either Yoogle or Goo Tube). Pareles described these sprawling demotic showcases as "empty vessels," to be filled by whomever (yeah, you) with whatever. (Props to Jon Swift for the funniest take on Time's cover, which inspired me.)You'd think the media bigwigs who decide what leads had been talking to each other, and of course they have. No doubt they all eat at the same restaurants. This coincidence isn't conspiracy, it's just buzz -- the contagion of a meme-sneeze. "User-generated content," which Pareles exposes (less pretentiously, but more condescendingly) as the ancient urge to "self-expression" in hip digital duds, is the hot new gold mine. There's (their) money in (our) narcissism. Like Time's cover, the big media think they've hit on a hot new commodity: mirrors. The first peddler who showed up in town with those in his pack probably got stampeded, too.That's the conventional wisdom about this explosion of technology-enabled amateurism: it's a huge "American Idol," a cattle-call audition of a billion wannabes, seizing instead of waiting for their 15 minutes of fame, dreaming of being discovered by the big camera, like Norma Jean at Schwab's Drugstore. Most of you never will be discovered because your little yawp for attention is not attended by talent and patience and craft.There's something else going on besides, and maybe deeper than, self-display; something that's not about the product or even the person, but the process. It's a kind of Sleeping Beauty awakening, a throwing-off of the great hypnotized passivity of the TV era, and of the high arts before it. Call it the Revolt of the Audience. We've all been taking in and taken in for decades, maybe centuries. There's been an extreme polarity and a severe hierarchy between artist and audience. One was active, the other passive. One was somebody, the other nobody. The flow was one-way. All we could give back was applause, attention, acclaim: nothing more differentiated than a collective yay or boo, and most importantly, and anonymously, our money. We counted, but only as numbers. (Do you hear the "numb" in "numbers"?)We've built up an enormous, pent-up pressure to reverse the flow - to give back, push back, and talk back. We've been doing that in our heads all along, but because there was no place for it to go -- save perhaps office jokes and private journals, letters to the editor and dinner conversations about movies -- all those heartfelt responses, thoughtful critiques, witty rejoinders, and all that commentary died half-born, like a dream not written down. It is that underground river of minds, that cultural collective unconscious that is now becoming conscious, surfacing with explosive, firehose force on Blogger, LiveJournal, and YouTube. Since little of it is likely to be read or viewed by many, what's the big difference whether all that stuff is recorded and published or not? The answer is that the process of creating it makes all the difference. An idea expressed becomes solid, sharp, and actual. It makes a splash in the collective pool and its ripples may reach even those who haven't directly witnessed it. The mind that expresses these ideas is exercised and sharpened. It becomes a producer rather than a "consumer" (a word that deserves to die), a contributor to the culture of more than just a pair of glazed eyeballs attached to a wallet. The availability of a much vaster range of ideas for cultural selection to sort through, and of a much greater number of agile minds doing the sorting, must, you'd have to think, accelerate cultural evolution.Contrary to conventional wisdom, I bet most people posting on YouTube or MySpace don't hope to become famous or fancy themselves the equals of accomplished artists. They're just having fun doing a very human thing that for too long was falsely believed to be the exclusive province of recognized artists and experts. They just can't resist the urge to hit back the hot serves coming at them, to be active participants in the making of culture. Culture57391@blogcritics.org Sat, 23 Dec 2006 07:48:01 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/07/22/143216.php ambaA well-known principle of evolution, whether biological or technological, is that predator and prey refine each other. For every increase in speed or stealth or lethality a predator (or weapon or tactic) achieves, the prey (or defensive or evasive system) becomes more canny and elusive. Faster antelope are chased down and speeded up by faster cheetahs, more sophisticated burglar alarms create more sophisticated burglars, and so on.The exact same thing goes on in the world of advertising. To get past the self-protective filter of ever more sophisticated, skeptical, and overwhelmed consumers, commercials have to become more striking, subtle, and memorable. This evolutionary pressure is turning the commercial into an art form.It's not enough just to grab your attention and lodge in your memory – lots of commercials do so in an extremely annoying way, especially those, like car and drug ads, that directly pester you to buy something. ("HEAD ON! Apply diRECTly to the FOREhead!" repeated enough times will give you a headache.) There's a real danger of provoking an aversion to the product and a hatred of the company you're trying to promote. I have actually vowed never to buy the products of companies whose commercials drive me nuts. The best kind of commercial is a tiny drama as compressed as a haiku, that has only an indirect, metaphorical relationship to the product being sold. These commercials don't force their sponsor on your attention, and paradoxically, they inspire in you a background feeling of gratitude and approval toward the company cool enough to commission them.One recent example is the Bank of Scotland campaign, which featured a man choking while his lunch companions talked about the Heimlich Maneuver (this one was honored by the Heimlich Institute!), and a bride whose groom works a whole pre-nup with escape clauses into his "I do." In both cases, a handsome James Bondish fellow steps in and does what needs doing, embodying the slogan "Less Talk. Make It Happen." The subtext of the ad is that we live in a world devoid of decisive, action-ready masculinity, and the Bank of Scotland will provide a shot of testosterone, slashing dashingly through the dithering and red tape. (The third ad in the series, which involved quicksand, was more heavy-handed and much less effective.)My current favorite is the spot (you can watch it on Windows) in which the haunted-looking Eastern European dreamer-inventor – I don't know where they found this guy who looks malnourished by longing, worn down by hoping against hope, as most Eastern Europeans did in, say, about 1985 – leaps from a bridge over a river with white wings on his arms, watched by a crowd of skeptical but credulous peasants. For a moment, his sad face burns with joy – "Ha HA! I can fly!!!" is what you know he's saying in, probably, Polish (a commenter says it's Czech), and the murmur, "He can fly!" runs through the crowd. Then one shrewd old man says softly, "But he can't swim!" and turns and walks off the bridge as the dreamer unhurriedly loses altitude and glides to a splashdown.It's a Travelers' Insurance ad, but it has the force of a fairy tale.I'd be willing to bet the same director made the Microsoft ad in which a tentative, yet intrepid, American business traveler practices saying "Stradsdvytye!" in Russian with his cabdriver as they drive through disconsolate gray streets, can't quite get it right, but by the time he arrives at the company with which he's to do business, has mastered it so misleadingly completely that all the office personnel start babbling away to him in Russian. Only when they sit him down at a terminal with "Vindows" do they suddenly have a common language. Whoever this director is – is he a Russian or Eastern European immigrant himself? – he captures the plaintive quality that makes the stagnant backwaters of bureaucracy in those countries somehow universally poignant, melancholy, and endearing compared to Dilbert's sterile cubicle. This nebbishy but soulful East Bloc sensibility – the polar opposite of the Bank of Scotland's image – is a rich contribution to the mix of American culture at a time when we are emerging from our go-go national adolescence into a more rueful, resigned maturity, realizing the nearly inevitable human corollary to "Make it happen!" is "...and screw it up."My other current favorite isn't a drama so much as an enigma, bordering on the surreal. You've seen it: a kid dancing nonchalantly and sinuously with a fake cow (two pairs of legs in a black-and-white cow suit) while eating pudding, to these droning lyrics, repeated over and over:Jiggle and a Wigglin' free, in a Wiggle and Jigglin' spree.This one walks a very fine line between being annoying and irresistible. Apparently, it drives other people nuts besides me. It's worse than an earworm, it's like one of those many-legged buggers that goes into your ear in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and eats your brain. This tune burrows under your skin, hijacks your DNA, and sends you prowling restlessly across the 'Net, looking for a download so you need no longer watch kiddie shows in forlorn hope of seeing it again but can mainline it at shorter and shorter intervals till you die of hunger and thirst. Witness this exchange in the comments to a blog post that mentioned it:Anonymous said: Must have wiggle song, pls wiggle song. Need wiggle song, give me wiggle songCJ Sorg said: Man, I can't believe the traffic I'm getting on this post. Especially a post that's over a month old.Jell-o's too dumb and offline to put it on their dorky website. Or maybe there's a copyright issue. It's sung by Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies. Maybe that explains everything.Sorg posts this MP3 of an intro to the song, but it cuts out before the actual wiggling begins.Some people just hate it. Culture50610@blogcritics.org Sat, 22 Jul 2006 14:32:16 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/17/050837.php ambaI thought an American Idol for inventors would be fun to watch. The promos for the new ABC reality show focused on the passion of inventing as a particularly eccentric and obsessive form of the American Dream, that could occasionally give rise to something truly ingenious and useful. I've never watched the early rounds of Idol, though (is that unpatriotic?), so I was unprepared for the formula: the grotesquely bad competitors who get scathingly weeded out by the judges, who sit and squirm as if they had hemorrhoids and make "Oh, please" faces. The first several "American Inventors" and their inventions are so comically bad (one guy invented a sort of garment bag you can zip yourself into if you have to pee in public) that I'm pretty sure they're actors hired to portray losers, and their pitches and their post-rejection interviews are scripted, sore-loser *bleeps* and all. When they get past the really grotesque ones, then they get to the pathetic and heartwarming ones who've mortgaged their houses to invent a new kind of shovel. Instead of squirming, the judges tear up.Where have I been? This is some kind of Darwinian commedia dell'arte, a very stylized farce about the ruthlessness of economic selection, the fact that most of us and our grubby little dreams are just not going to cut it, and are ridiculous for thinking that we could. A strange capitalist ritual of human sacrifice by ridicule. OK, OK, so it's a parody of that idea. Where is my irony? Cruel humor isn't funny to me, even when it's so over-the-top and unreal that it ought to take the sting out. I turned the show off. I had mistakenly thought that it was going to be a real competition between real inventors, some of whom would no doubt be dotty and quixotic, but I didn't expect them to be contrived cartoons set up to take a pratfall. My bad. Video45104@blogcritics.org Fri, 17 Mar 2006 05:08:37 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/06/064119.php ambaFrom a book proposal I'm working on, tentatively titled Outside: Spiritual Nomads and the Way Beyond Religion: ______________________________When you live inside a tradition, and that includes scientific secularism, you agree to view life through its window - an outlook, a way of framing reality, carefully preserved through time. That frame has a fixed form, originally designed by and for a world long gone. It can allow embellishments or simplifications, but not ideas -- not even self-evident truths -- so new or foreign that they would pull it apart and make it unrecognizable. (If a Catholic tries to tell you how open to new ideas his Church is, just say two words to him: women priests.)Every tradition demands that you accept its inherited ideas, even those that violate our evolving understanding -- Jesus' mother was a virgin! the universe is blind, mindless matter! -- and reject or give second-class status to ideas from other sources, even those that might better illuminate reality. These demands are presented as tests of faith, but they are always also loyalty oaths to authority, and shibboleths proving membership in a tribe. Because of people's natural need for security and belonging -- and not least of all, their need just to make some basic assumptions and get on with life -- it can easily happen that the frame becomes the view. Fidelity to one way of looking becomes more important than seeing."Outsiders" have all the same human needs -- for community, for a conceptual operating system, for metaphysical and not just physical shelter -- but they find themselves unable to deny the central fact of our time: that all the old certainties are being shattered by two great new transforming forces, science and globalization. (Science is now evolving so fast it's trashing its own certainties.) To defend any crumbling fortress of certainty today is to go to war not only with the defenders of other certainties, but with reality itself. The reality is that we're being hurled back to square one, to a naked primordial unknowing face to face with the universe that challenges us to rediscover it from the ground up. News of other cultures, other galaxies, maybe even other universes (as in string theory), leaves us feeling we know as little as the hairy primate who stood up clutching those first stone tools of the mind, "What?" and "How?" and "Why?" But the same forces that are stripping away the answers are equipping us as never before to live in the open questions. When you swear exclusive allegiance to no one tradition, their multiplicity is no longer a threat but a vast resource: the record of over 10,000 years of research, a grand reference library for the study of reality (not a "salad bar," the prevailing meme that trivializes outsiders' interest in all traditions). Like the spinning thigh bone that becomes a waltzing space station in the movie 2001, "What?" and "How?" and "Why?" have become the Book of Genesis and the Hubble Telescope, the Rig Veda and the particle accelerator, the Origin of Species and Mitakuye oyasin (Lakota: "all my relatives"), the scientific method and zazen. These great documents and instruments, and thousands more, now belong to all of us. While no one can encompass more than a tiny sliver of it all, no part of it is off-limits to anyone on earth who dares to reach across fading boundaries; it's our heritage. And it's as packed with potential remedies for the crises we face as the Amazon rainforest. Each of us personally, and all of us collectively, can search its entire database for insight and direction as we find our way through a radically reconfigured reality by maps we're still drawing -- a work that, bit by bit, adds up to a new revelation. (Though great prophets may come, or technocrats may bid to replace them, ours is not a messianic age but a demotic one - "of or relating to the common people." I like to think of this mosaic or holographic process of building a new vision out of billions of individual choices and glimpses as "the democratization of revelation." And, of course, it's carried and hurried by technology: the remote satellite feed, the Airbus, and the Internet.)The irony is that every tradition would be a vital tributary to this process if they could only be trusted not to go for each other's throats - or come after the rest of us with a flaming sword. The mutation that turns the benign "This is right for me" into the malignant "This is right for you" can infect any religion, including scientific secularism. Its root is denied doubt -- if everyone else doesn't affirm that I'm right, I might be wrong! - and its fruit is the destruction of vital diversity. God forbid everyone should think alike! The fact that we have not just books or recordings, but living people keeping alive the practice of Amish barn-raising, Talmudic disputation, djembe drumming, and Tonglen meditation is an amazing treasure. It's as important for culture as the preservation of original wild seed stocks is for agriculture - living seeds, not just the genomes of the extinct. If everyone in the world became a "global nomad," the very heritage that "outsiders" draw on would be lost. But if no one did, our chance of a common future would be slaughtered on the altars of a thousand pasts. Some people are called to preserve and transmit a tradition in its purest form. Others are called to try to integrate their inherited or chosen tradition with the new global and scientific realities. Good for them. But "come out, come out, wherever you are" is a calling, too. In fact, it may just be the unceasing call of the Spirit. And each time we humans heed it, as in the myths of the Pueblo Indians, we emerge into a more spacious, more wondrous world.UPDATE: Answer to SethResponding to my request for responses, Seth Chalmer wrote a truly generous post about this post. In it he said: My only little quibble is that my own corner of the spiritual tapestry is not represented in that linear conceptual form. To me, loyalty or exclusivity to one tradition and openness to the world do not make a sliding scale, or a zero-sum game. Both are possible simultaneously.Adherering to one's own beliefs -- and here I refer not only to rituals and cultural flavors, but to actual dogma and specific theology as well -- does not mean invalidating other beliefs. The world is complicated enough to hold multiple truths that may seem contradictory. [ . . . ]I have respect for those of you who are spiritual nomads. You reject a home tradition and roam free. I guess I simply have a different definition of the boundaries of my tradition. I insist I can walk with you, side by side, seeing what you see, learning what you learn, and still stay within my tradition's borders. Those borders are further off than the human mind could ever go. Dear Seth, my post was an excerpt from a book-introduction-in-progress. I want you to know that the passage immediately preceding the above was what follows -- and that you were one of the people I was thinking of as I wrote it: __________________________________The crucial divide, as this new millennium opens, isn't "God or Not" -- the title of a monthly duel between devout and debunking bloggers. It's between those who are sure they know the answers (or know the only place to find the answers), and those who are living the questions. This could actually prove to be a matter of life and death. Daring not to know may be the only way humans will survive our fraught, nuclear-armed reunion, because it's our bedrock ignorance and wonder that unite us. Even two groups of people who are killing each other over their answers have the same questions. What is real? What is good? Who are my people? What do we owe each other? Who says so? Why do innocents suffer and evildoers prosper? Where did I come from? Why do my beloved ones and I have to die? Then what? How can I live without knowing?It should be said right away: there are religious people, and there are atheists, who are living the questions. You'll know them by their fearless openness to differing points of view. Their devotion to one way of approaching the mystery doesn't rule out every other way. They are capable of coexisting, and even collaborating with people of different traditions, or none, to explore and honor reality. Yet it's a rare mind, especially in the West, that can really hold both belief and openness. The tension between the two is always threatening to become a flat-out contradiction. The believer's sincere interest in other views is often tinged with condescension or defensiveness, ready, if provoked, to break out in a fight.That's why I'm outside. _________________________Seth, you went on to say: Besides, the truly pious of every tradition are humble before the miracle of existence. The truly pious are also open enough to be able to explore the world through their own traditions for their entire lives, without running into limits beyond which they may not look. The truly pious don't fear knowledge. The Talmud says that there is nothing in the world which the Torah does not contain. This means that any question can be asked. Ah, if only this were true. I'm sure it is true of an exceptional soul like Rav A. J. Heschel. But the sad story of the banning of Nosson Slifkin, the "Zoo Rabbi," shows how often, within the mystical depths of our own tradition, it is not true. But I'll always be happy to walk with you, side by side, learning not only with you, but from you.UPDATE II: Here's another great response, at Ales Rarus. A put-down, actually, of the narcissistic fence-sitting self-idolizing Spiritual Nomad -- but an eloquent one. I am out to refute the assumption of traditionalists, on display in this response, that you can't be a serious, moral, committed,communitarian, sometimes self-effacing person outside tradition, that if you were such a person, you would by definition be found properly inside one tradition or another. So it will be interesting to watch the sparks fly.More from the proposal:First, I just want to rush some refreshments and reinforcements to the front lines. My sense is that the morale of "outsiders" -- my people -- is low. And no wonder. We're five times as numerous as the more organized and vocal atheists, yet we're neither seen nor heard except to be dismissed as crystal-gazing new-age caricatures, resembling no one I know. We are sidelined while the defenders and the would-be destroyers of religion slug it out, but between rounds, they team up to beat on us. The one thing traditionalists and atheists can agree on is that the "spiritual but not religious," or SBNR, as we're called for want of a better name, are cop-outs, flakes, and narcissists. To the godless, we're soft-headed suckers who moon around reading deep meaning into random coincidences. To the godly, we're runaways from discipline, responsibility, and community, seekers of nothing but self. "The problem with cafeteria-style spirituality," finger-shakes religion scholar Huston Smith, "is that Saint Ego is often the one making the choices at the salad bar. What tastes good is not always the same as what you need." A steady diet of such condescension can get you down. I'm going to cheer you up, and soon. To start to play our rightful and central role in the culture wars, we will need high spirits.We will also need an ability to stand together, to make common cause, and that's my second purpose. Both the other camps in this fight for the soul of the future are organized and unanimous, and that's why you hear from them and not from us. Religious traditions are "organized" by definition, and their stress on doctrine, dogma, and creed insures that each has a set of core ideas its members agree on. Beyond that, religious conservatives in opposing fortresses have now banded together in a united front to defend the walls of Tradition itself. Despite their virulent differences, conservative Christians, Jews, and even Muslims often say they have more respect and understanding for each other than for anyone who would lower those walls, much less leave them. So the traditionalist position is as clearly defined as it is fiercely defended. Atheists, meanwhile, have joined forces across the blogosphere to become much more organized and "of one mind" -- strengthening their perverse resemblance to the religion they despise. They have a coherent culture and ideology, with strong, witty memes that crop up again and again, like the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" and the practice of calling a believer's God "your imaginary friend." They even have their own "old man with a long white beard" - Charles Darwin (and his Saint Peter, Daniel Dennett, the rock on which his antichurch is built).By contrast, to describe "outsiders" as a group, a tribe, or a movement sounds as absurd as "herding cats." If we define ourselves by anything it's our spiritual individualism: the fact that no two of us hold quite the same worldview. We think that's as it should be, since each human being is so uniquely made, each nervous system so fine-tuned to its own precise frequency. But combined with our respect for mystery and our comfort with uncertainty, this total lack of consensus leaves us helpless in a debate. It's not that we're out to win hearts and minds away from tradition; we're too "live and let live" for that. But we can't even define or defend our own position. All we know for sure is what we're saying no to, and that that "no" is a matter of gut-level integrity; we are outside organized religion, not because we don't want to be inside it, but because we can't. I identify with "Donaldito," born Catholic, who posted on Beliefnet: "I consider myself a seeker, and returning to the place that started me on that journey feels pretty good . . . until I actually listen to a lot of what's being said." How many times has my heart been warmed by the deep familial glow in a synagogue, only to sink into my shoes as the Bat Mitzvah girl stumbles uncomprehendingly through some recipe for animal sacrifice from Leviticus? It took me years of reading, thinking, talking; tiptoeing temptingly close to two traditions -- dancing with the women at my Orthodox cousin's daughter's wedding, going to see "The Passion" with my Pentecostal friend and bowing my head as she laid her hands on it and prayed; and a year of intensive blogging, deep in debate with traditionalists, atheists, and "outsiders" like myself - to fully understand that my "no" has protected a gestating "yes." Underneath (and including!) the wild variety and deliberate tentativeness of our spiritual practices and principles, we "outsiders" do, in fact, share a coherent culture, with its own strongly held values, its own ways of making community and sense. It's a culture native to the here and now, looking to the future more than the past, drawing on the human heritage according to present, urgent need rather than ancestral dictum. And it's a culture on the move, a new lifeform evolved to survive the flood of change not by resisting it with arks and dikes and dams, but by swimming in it and breathing it. It's a culture stripped down and lightened up for a journey without a destination. It is, you could say, nomadic. And in that sense, perhaps, it's a high-tech return to our hunter-gatherer roots. Culture44513@blogcritics.org Mon, 6 Mar 2006 06:41:19 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/04/120540.php ambaWe just watched Brian De Palma's Stephen King-inspired 1976 classic Carrie for the umpteenth time. But it's the first time I ever saw it quite so clearly as a parable, or ever identified so completely with the film's most ineffectual character, the good, liberal, psychologically enlightened Sue. The movie is about the defeat of reason, the laughable impotence of well-intentioned understanding. Poor Carrie reaches so eagerly for the deceptive bait of sanity and science, the mirage of a daylight world where breasts are only breasts, blood is a happy milestone, sex is healthy and good, and even telekinesis is just a natural phenomenon. But she hasn't got a chance, and she may be right to feel betrayed and mocked by those who seemed to offer her this refuge from her mother's firelit fundamentalist hell.Brian De Palma is a Hollywood guy who, 30 years ago, already saw fundie fervor as driven by sexual shame and obsession, and its paranoia about Satanic evil as a self-fulfilling prophecy that created what it feared. Piper Laurie's over-the-top performance as Carrie's sin-maddened mama climaxes, literally, in her simultaneous crucifixion and orgasm, done in by the child of her lust, who proceeds to bring down the house. The petty evil of the mean teen slut, played by Nancy Allen, is in perfect league with the mother's dire expectations, and drives Carrie right back into her arms. The do-gooders are unknowingly conscripted into an enabling role in the scheme. They're too naïve in their well-meaning to do any real rescuing, to be anything but pawns. And, of course, if Carrie had escaped her fate, there would be no movie.De Palma approves of the gentle good kids, Sue and Tommy, but as a filmmaker he adores the bad kids, Chris and Billy, and he sees that primal stuff like blood, sex, and telekinesis can't be tamed or demystified. Hellfire-and-brimstone may be a human fantasy, but it's one our species is fatally in love with. I'm beginning to think that if you don't naturally see through those blood-tinted lenses -- and I don't -- you're missing the real story, if only because so many people do, and by sheer force of numbers and starkness of vision they are creating the world we all have to live in. Maybe the real Fall was when we fell into their thrall. Now, in the spirit of fighting fire with fire, we need the fervor of one lot of them to defend us against the other, far worse lot. It's the war they were born for, and they are greeting it with great joy, like a long-lost friend. God help those of us who can't help feeling vaguely that none of it should even have been necessary. We're as clueless as Sue, and we will not wake up from the coming nightmare. Video44460@blogcritics.org Sat, 4 Mar 2006 12:05:40 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/18/200534.php ambaIn the car the other day, we were listening, as we always do, to WBGO, Jazz 88.3, which justifiably bills itself as America's greatest jazz station, when we heard a really arresting piano trio performance of the song "'Round Midnight": assured, modulated, haunting. The piano "voice" was not immediately recognizable, but it was clearly one of the greats. I waited for the end of the tune to hear who the pianist was -- some famous name in his 60s or 70s, most likely, or maybe some younger classic-jazz aspirant who had mastered the idiom and the depth of feeling of his mentors, like Jacky Terrasson, only better. Only great. The song ended and WBGO's deejay said in his droll way, "That was EL-DAR." Just the one name.Eldar? Sounds like something out of "Star Trek," no? I pictured some ultra-cool black dude from the Marsalis generation. I vowed to Google him. Whoever the hell he was, I wanted that CD.Well, brace yourself. I try to be polite on this blog, but this time I have really lost it: ELDAR IS 18 YEARS OLD, AND . . . AND HE IS FROM FUCKING KYRGYZSTAN.Yes, you heard me. Kyrgyzstan. His name is Eldar Djangirov. He's been playing the piano since he was 3, and playing jazz since he was 9, and when he was 14 and 15 years old he won top prizes at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and the Peter Nero Piano Competition. Benny Carter said, "He's one of the most outstanding [or "astounding," in another version of the same quote] artists I've heard in a long, long time." A couple of years ago, Dr. Billy Taylor said, "At age 16, Eldar Djangirov's playing shows brilliancy, complexity, and discipline." He composes and arranges. He's been called "the Tiger Woods of jazz." This kid is the closest thing there is to proof of reincarnation: he seems to have been Art Tatum in a previous lifetime. Go listen for yourself. Here's his website, with streaming samples.What's Art Tatum doing being reincarnated in Kyrgyzstan?? That's like the 15th Dalai Lama showing up in Iowa. Well, stranger things are happening in this ever more mixed-up, liberating world. Not only migration but transmigration is getting globalized! Seriously, back in the early '90s there was a jazz club a block from us that had an open jam on Monday nights, called Visiones. Some of the very best musicians we heard there were Russians, or from the former Soviet Union. This is not as surprising as it sounds. Russians, broadly defined, have bottomless soul and high intelligence (note their novelists and chess masters), the prerequisites for playing jazz. Russia, despite its much more ancient culture and seven decades of sworn enmity, has a strange through-the-looking-glass kinship with America; another big, raw country, with lots of wilderness and lots of diversity. On the map they're almost like the two wings of a far-flung inkblot. And under Communism, jazz had a deeply subversive attraction; it was the anthem of freedom and dynamism, the one art form that was both uniquely American and world-class in its challenge and profundity. Eldar is too young to remember Communism, but he's certainly heir to a tradition that identified totally with the complexity, defiance and vitality of jazz.Kyrgyz shmyrgyz: What's really astounding is that the kid is only eighteen years old, and he's being compared with justification to Tatum and Oscar Peterson. "He improvises with the skill of someone three times his age," said one critic. And he plays with the feeling of someone three times his age. An old soul, too, I guess. I'm not a literal believer in all that reincarnation jazz, but I am willing to entertain it -- especially in a case like this. Music38138@blogcritics.org Tue, 18 Oct 2005 20:05:34 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/20/033114.php ambaTonight we stumbled on a pair of enthralling documentaries on the Independent Film Channel. "Spaghetti West" interviews some of the greats of the Italian film industry, talking about each other and about the rise and fall, art and politics of the highly stylized homage genre pioneered by Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. (I loved seeing Ennio Morricone, the power behind the music that made those films what they are, a shy, aristocratic-looking old man with eyes magnified by his big spectacles.) That was followed, unannounced, by an even more amazing documentary on the Hong Kong kung-fu movie industry (I didn't catch its name, and it is mysteriously not in IFC's schedule), made in a similar style, probably by the same team. Besides great movie clips and cutting, the best thing about both films is that they interview the directors and actors in their own language, even those like John Woo who we know speak English. You could see and hear these artists steeped in the flavor and rhythm of their own culture and language, watch their marvelous faces -- and read in the subtitles that they were saying pretty much the same things, the age-old, universal passions, jokes and gripes of those who work in the popular arts. (It's not real kung fu, explains a worldly older martial artist who choreographs fights for chop-socky movies. Real kung fu would bore the audience to death.) There was Jackie Chan, with bohemian long hair and an expression considerably more sophisticated than that of his lovable comic hero, discoursing fluently in Chinese about his training in -- no, not martial arts -- in Chinese opera school! We see footage of that extremely harsh, demanding, regimented training, which interspersed beatings with delicate gestures and punishing acrobatics. But it turned out an incredibly skilled, athletic, and versatile performer. Clips are shown from an early Jackie Chan movie called something like Drunken Kung Fu -- no, I see it's Drunken Master -- in which a disciple has to learn his alcoholic master's stumbling and swaying, yet unerring and lethal fighting style. Chan had to invent and choreograph this legendary fighting style, and it is . . . Well, all I can say is, he's a cross between Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, and Bruce Lee, and I adore him. ed: JH Video36499@blogcritics.org Tue, 20 Sep 2005 03:31:14 EDT