Zone of Totality

Savannah Solstice 2011

2011-12-22T10:33:00.007-05:00

Savannah

Forsythe Fountain

Our stay in Savannah has been rejuvenating. Mornings of meditation on our terrace have given me new perspectives to inform days ahead as we return to Atlanta and move on to the mountains of Tennessee. The Solstice is sacred to me, not because of the birth of Jesus, or Mithra (same day) or any other particular incarnation of godhead. It is sacred to me as a Pantheist, as the seasons shift like Yeats' Gyres, and the longest night passes. The shadows change. There is a noticeable alteration and we all sense the beginning of a New Year. I feel a sort of completion as the Solstice passes.

To be here in this warm, sunny climate, drinking tea in the courtyard, or sipping champagne on the porch, reading Murakami in the spacious living rooms, surrounded by paintings, and decorative arts, is to be transported to an Epicurean garden where the wars, famine, capitalist conquests, political posturing, and man's inhumanity all momentarily dissolve. I recall Lars von Trier's Melancholia, and wonder if the world will meet its doom in 2012, after all, as some say the Mayans predict. What should one do if the world is going to end? I can think of nothing better than a walk along the shore, breathing sea air, watching the waves roll in.

Of course the Winter solstice is a time for feasting and merriment as well, right? We have done that too. Day and night after day of seafood. Wine. Good company. It is a time to let go of the planet's woes and just "Let The Sunshine In," to quote a wonderful play I saw in New York some 40 odd years ago.

Peace and Ataraxia...

http://youtu.be/-5-Q8igwxDw (listen)

Jack

Thoughts and Reviews-- the Film, Shame

2011-12-10T22:05:00.005-05:00

My view is the film should have been named "Desperation," not "Shame," since the main character never seems to show or to feel shame about anything. There is much to ponder here, and to tell the truth, the film is profoundly disturbing. I suppose it could also be called "Alienation," since there has never been a man more alienated from other people. Here are some reviews and other comments from my Facebook page:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/movies/shame-directed-by-steve-mcqueen-review.html
Yet another great review. Love the ref. to William's Sonnet #129 which I'll post below. Amazing.

‘Shame,’ Directed by Steve McQueen - Review
movies.nytimes.com
In “Shame,” the new feature from the British artist turned filmmaker Steve McQueen, the protagonist is a handsome, youngish Manhattanite who is hooked on sex.

William Shakespeare - Sonnet #129
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Another Excellent Review:

"Recorded in explicit but never pornographic detail, this is some of the most joyless sex ever put on screen, a compulsion to climax in which emotional connection plays no part. It's the fixation of a tortured individual aghast at the self-destructiveness of his addiction but unable to change his actions or escape the shame they cause."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-shame-20111202,0,2750231.story

'Shame' review: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan are raw forces
www.latimes.com
‎"Shame" is a dispassionate treatment of a disturbing topic, and therein lies its power. Sexually graphic enough to earn its NC-17 rating yet made with a restraint that's both unflinching and unnerving, this is a psychologically claustrophobic film that strips its characters bare literally and figuratively
Movie Review: Shame—Michael Fassbender Stars as a Sex Addict in this NC-17 Film | Entertainment | TI
entertainment.time.com
Magneto lets it all hang out. Michael Fassbender — the German-Irish Adonis of the art house, who also played the young Magneto in this summer's X-Men: First Class — is on full-frontal display in the grinding sex drama Shame.

Rilke's Birthday

2011-12-04T11:54:00.000-05:00

A poem from Rilke:

Love Song

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Koan

2011-11-29T16:04:00.005-05:00

Bodhidharma and Huike

Years ago A Zen Monk gave me a Koan to meditate upon. The Koan was, "Who is Jack Miller?"

A Koan is a rung on the latter to enlightenment. I am still here on the first step. So far, I have reached preliminary answers. First, in my case, "Jack Miller" is nothing. The name does not name me. If I have a name, it is Jack Jameson. Elsewhere in this blog I have answered the question from Romeo and Juliet, "What's in a name?" By citing my academic accomplishments and giving an account of my history. Am I my history? Not if Simone De Beauvoir and her beau are right.

I share thoughts with another Zen Master-to-be these days who has given me the same Koan: "Become the person you want to be." The phrasing of course is different, wiser actually, more to it. Again, preliminary answers come to mind-- writer, lover, poet, philosopher.

Part of the answer may also be who I am not now. I am not a Zen Master, and I write about this in a poem:

http://pearsandapricots.blogspot.com/2011/11/without-zen.html

I have not resolved if a Zen Master is the person I want to be; and I suspect that saying, "in the future," is what De Beauvoir calls "Bad faith or mauvaise foi."

I want to be on the path for now. The person I am and want to be is alive, full of passion, growing in compassion, knocked over with feelings of emotional pain and pleasure-- melancholy and joy. The person I want to be is learning to want less to attain a higher awareness.

Huike

According to the Denkoroku, when Huike and Bodhidharma were climbing up Few Houses Peak, Bodhidharma asked, “Where are we going?” Huike replied, “Please go right ahead---that’s it.” Bodhidharma retorted, “If you go right ahead, you cannot move a step.” Upon hearing these words, Huike was enlightened.

Weekend

2011-11-28T11:19:00.000-05:00

Because the following review is so well written and accurate, I will forgo writing my own review. Instead, I want to add that I found the film to be a look into the heart of homosexual love. There is something unique and wonderful about two men loving one another that is not the same as heterosexual love. This film reveals what that is in a way that is authentic and moving. Both kinds of love have their own beauty and truth, but there is a fascinating difference we are often too ready to overlook or deny. Weekend gives us a more profound understanding.

Weekend – review

A lo-fi, tremendously convincing account of contemporary gay life

- Peter Bradshaw

Something urgent to say about the windows of opportunity in our lives … Weekend

"Weekends, like life, are short." That melancholy reflection from Kind Hearts and Coronets does justice to some of Andrew Haigh's unassumingly excellent lo-fi feature: a boy-meets-boy love story extending over a single weekend, and filmed with a kind of real-time realism. There is sadness here, as well as romance, and a sense that sexual experience is not merely exciting for its own sake, but an adventure in defining one's sense of self: what one character here calls finding both partner and your self as a blank slate. Weekend has something urgent to say to both gay and straight audiences about the windows of opportunity in our lives.

Russell is a gay guy in his 20s who seems happy enough. We see him first at a party being thrown by his straight friends, with kids. He leaves early – to his hosts' disappointment – claiming to be tired, but on his way home on the bus he stops off at a gay bar, and meets Glen, who works at the local art gallery. They go home together for what both assume will be a fleeting, pleasurable fling. But in the morning, their conversation continues, and they wonder if they might have a future together. But first, they have to make some decisions on the subject of monogamy and what they want from life in the first place, and they discover they have far less time to make these decisions than they thought.
Russell is gentle, thoughtful, introverted; Glen is bold, worldly and a little confrontational in his need to assert his gay identity. In these roles, Tom Cullen and Chris New give tremendously relaxed and utterly convincing performances, very well directed by Haigh. It is the kind of film-making that looks easy, but isn't. For a lot of the time, nothing much is actually happening. Glen and Russell are hanging out, or drinking, or doing drugs, or having sex, and all these activities have an unselfconscious reality to them.
A more traditionally conceived "issue" movie would have included a scene of gay-bashing, but Haigh takes what looks like a conscious decision to defuse this particular dramatic firework. Glen yells at some gay-baiters from Russell's 14th-floor window, and on a railway platform, and he gets into a row with a straight guy in a pub, but there is no violence. Haigh's concern is always to refocus our attention on to a lower-key, but in its way far more sensational, subject: how Glen and Russell are going to work out their problems and find love. It is a tender, humane film, with an easy, unforced cinematic language: a film that doesn't need to try too hard.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/03/weekend-film-review

Jack

Melancholy

2011-11-20T19:46:00.003-05:00

Melancholia

Trier at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival

from Wikipedia-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholia_%282011_film%29

On seeing Melancholy...

Melancholy will pass us by... such is the prediction of science in Lars Von Trier's stunner of a film, Melancholia. Following the opening celestial prelude to Melancholia featuring the very music I have been listening to recently and sharing with those close to me, Wagner's wondrous Prelude to Tristan and Isolde, comes what many of us think of as the antidote to sadness, a wedding. Gathered in a grand lodge, complete with eighteen hole golf course, are all the family, friends, and colleagues of the voluptuous bride, Justine. She and her groom arrive late, delayed by the over-sized limo making the ascent to the lodge. Should I write "spoiler alert"? So many things in this film are so foreshadowed that only the dullest of viewers will fail right away to know what is coming. For Von Trier the devil is in the details; and in the details reside his genius and the profound view of life that is his vision.

Suffice it to say that the wedding is not a success. The groom makes a ridiculous, bumbling attempt at a speech, the bride's mother discourses on her contempt for marriage, and the bride herself leaves the bride chamber to fuck a possible future colleague who is voluptuous himself, out on the golf course. The emptiness of money and corporate greed all manage to play their part in the failure of the ceremony.

Meanwhile Melancholia approaches.

We learn early on that Melancholia is so vast, so substantial, that it has taken the form of a planet, once hidden by the Sun, that is headed straight for the Earth, though most of the reasonable scientists assure everyone that the rogue planet will not impact the Earth, but rather be a near miss. Von Trier is not giving us believable astronomy and clever science fiction here. he is giving us the power of metaphor. The amazing thing is how well it works. What we see in the darkness of the multiplex theater is something far different from what the prisoners in Plato's cave saw, not mere images of images from the empirical world, but rather the archetypes themselves, the very Forms of reality Plato thought invisible.

We see the very real archetype of Melancholy and no, it will not pass us by after all. How do we face the collision? The main characters embody the possibilities. Justine's response is cynicism, or at best, irony. Her sister swoons with Romanticism and anxiety, sweeping up her innocent, uncomprehending son with her. Her husband gives us nihilism. And Von Trier gives us one of the most philosophical, psychologically penetrating films I've seen in years. Among an audience quiet and horrified by what they were witnessing, my philosophically-minded friend and I found ourselves laughing aloud, repeatedly, at the raw, dark behavior of the multitude of poignant characters, Justine's capitalistic, fascist boss, the cursing of her mother, the outrageous scene of the bride in full gown riding a golf cart over the grounds, catching her dress on the cart, as Tristan and Isolde swelled on the soundtrack. Romanticism warred with cynical irony, over and over, until the final cataclysm of the two sister planets.

If you think film should be about vision, this is the film to see. If you want to be dazzled by metaphor... well, you get the picture.

Jack, 11/20/11

BTW, Yes, the acting was superb. There is much praise from the critics, and if that is what you crave, let me suggest: http://www.metacritic.com/movie/melancholia.

And for the most brilliant pan of the film, and I submit, reasons for its brilliance, despite the contempt of old Rex, http://www.observer.com/2011/11/eat-your-heart-out-harold-camping-the-trite-apocalypse-porn-of-von-trier-is-anything-but-a-revelation/
Read this after, repeat after, seeing the film. It is part of the reason we laughed so hard at times viewing the film.

Unfettered Capitalism is a Dead End (even for CEOs)

2011-11-16T20:53:00.003-05:00

The Occupy Wall Street and Beyond actions offer a glimmer of hope for taking control of the country (and World) away from Bankers and Corporations (which are not even remotely people). The Guardian offers a comprehensive overview of the events and the meaning of the protests and the organizations forming:

Occupy Wall Street: be part of the why occupy conversation
We asked Occupy protesters in Wall Street, London and around the world to record video messages to each other for our whyoccupy project. Upload your video and join the conversation
27 comments
Occupy protests mapped around the world
Where are the Occupy protests taking place in the world after the camps in Wall Street and Madrid? See the full list of places we have found so far - and help us collect more
Occupy Oakland clashes - in pictures
The Californian city of Oakland is braced for further violence between protesters and police after an Iraq war veteran was injured by a police projectile

Occupy Oakland

99% v 1%: the data behind the Occupy movement - animation
Video (5min 41sec) Animation: It has been the rallying cry of the Occupy movement for the past two months - but is the US really split 99% v 1%?
Scott Olsen, Occupy Oakland's soldier for peace
Clare Bayard: Occupy Cif: After what happened to Scott, we have a right to be angry that our tax dollars go on tear gas instead of schools and healthcare
45 comments
Global Occupy movement evictions - in pictures
Gallery (12 pictures) Police evict protesters from encampments in the US, Canada and Switzerland
More from Occupy Oakland

Occupy international

Pictures of the global movement

Add your photos of demonstrations and events linked to Occupy to our Flickr group
Occupy Wall Street, London and Frankfurt – your questions answered

Protesters from Occupy Wall Street, and two of the protests it inspired discuss the movement
346 comments

Latest comment

Michael Bloomberg's brave new world
Amy Goodman: The destruction of Occupy Wall Street's library, as the NYPD evicted protesters by order of the mayor, was grimly symbolic
45 comments
Interview with a yogic monk arrested at Occupy Wall Street – video
Occupy Cif video: Dada Pranakrsnananda is a monk of Ananda Marga who was arrested on Brooklyn Bridge by the NYPD on 1 October
16 comments
What makes Occupy different: inclusion
Manissa McCleave Maharawal: The great thing about this movement of the 99% is that it will listen to any voice – even to what it does not want to hear
83 comments
More comment

#whyoccupy

Be part of the whyoccupy conversation

We asked Occupy protesters in Wall Street, London and around the world to record video messages to each other for our whyoccupy project. Upload your video and join the conversation
27 comments
- Sidy Toure at Occupy Wall Street
- Sara Hake at Occupy Wall Street

Latest from Occupy Wall Street

Occupy movement 3hr 11min ago
Occupy Wall Street: protesters regroup after eviction - Wednesday 16 November

16 Nov 2011: Some protesters are gathering at Zuccotti Park this morning as planning continues for a 'day of action' on Thursday. Occupy Wall Street has said it will shut down Wall Street and occupy the subway. Follow live updates here
28 comments
Occupy Wall Street 4hr 16min ago
Occupy protesters prepare for day of 'solidarity' across US

16 Nov 2011: Series of events planned to support evicted Zuccotti Park activists by highlighting growing inequality and need for jobs
New York 22hr 35min ago
Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park re-opens – as it happened

15 Nov 2011: • New York police clear Zuccotti Park in 1am swoop on plaza
• Court denies Occupy bid to restore full encampment
• Police re-open access to plaza but ban 'tents and tarps'
• More than 200 arrested as mayor Bloomberg defends action
• Media fury as seven journalists arrested in aftermath
• Read our earlier live blog here
• All times ET
193 comments
Occupy Wall Street 1 day ago
Occupy Wall Street: engage, don't evict
15 Nov 2011: Editorial: The Occupy movement must engage in a battle of ideas, not just spaces, in order to survive
109 comments
United States 1 day ago
Occupy Wall Street protesters return to Manhattan park despite ruling

15 Nov 2011: New York mayor wins legal battle to have them removed, but activists make Zuccotti Park their base again

Latest from the Occupy movement worldwide

We must fight this Occupy eviction
Letter: It is beyond irony that the most undemocratic institution in UK local government is using its powers to attempt to suppress this flowering of democratic debate within its area
Occupy London: eviction notices attached to tents outside St Paul's
Notices from City of London Corporation tell activists to move by 6pm on Thursday or face legal action
206 comments
The law is not the enemy of protest but an essential tool of impartiality
Carl Gardner: A rejection of the legal apparatus by some 'freemen' Occupy protesters will only make social progress and justice impossible
71 comments
More from the Occupy movement

How it started

Occupy movement: from local action to a global howl of protest

A month after its launch, more than 900 cities around the world have hosted protests affiliated to the Occupy cause
Occupy Wall Street: the protesters speak

The anti-capitalist protesters who have set up camp in lower Manhattan are becoming a fixture of the area, writes Paul Harris

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/occupy-wall-street

George's Guitar

2011-10-05T23:16:00.003-04:00

Martin Scorsese's film--

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (click)

is a revelation of how artists create great music and songs. It is also a profound look into the evolution, first of the Beatles, and then of Harrison, as they all search for meaning beyond material success. Whether it is LSD, Reefer, going to India, learning from Ravi Shankar, meditating with the Maharishi, or bringing the genius of Eric Clapton in to play My Guitar Gently Weeps, we see the progression toward personal enlightenment and achievement as the film presents so many aspects of their lives from many perspectives. And that is just part one.

Part Two follows Harrison into the post-Beatles years-- never idealizing him however much his wife or son might. His ties to Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and a host of others from Monty Python to car racers to his ongoing work with Ravi Shankar is viewed with remarkable insight and humanity. The handling of his death, Ringo Starr shedding a tear but keeping his humor, the accounts of others, and an ending in keeping with Harrison himself works well, I thought. Eros and Thanatos again and all the creativity they inspire... I've added another review Dar sent me from Salon. But, Hell, see the film first.

From Rolling Stone:

George Harrison Hits the Big Screen in Scorsese Doc

Epic new film illuminates the inner life of the most enigmatic Beatle

by: Brian Hiatt

George Harrison and his wife, Olivia, in London, circa 1983.

Tom Wargacki/WireImage

As Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison dug through their archives to assemble the Beatles Anthology documentary in the mid-Nineties, Harrison made a private vow to his wife, Olivia: "One day, I'll do my own anthology." The ex-Beatle, who died in 2001, never got the chance, but his wife made sure his wish came true in grand fashion. In October, HBO will debut Martin Scorsese's two-part documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World – and Olivia has compiled a lavish companion book packed with unseen photos and letters. "I'm fairly awed by what Marty has put together," says Olivia. "It's a story that truly captures the essence of George."
The project had its start in 2005, when Olivia attended the London premiere of Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. She shared her hope for a similar movie about her husband with the film's producer, Nigel Sinclair. After discussing possible directors for months, the pair "delicately approached" Scorsese. "To our surprise and delight, he said he was very intrigued by George's story," Sinclair recalls.
The center of the film is Harrison's spiritual quest, a search for meaning in life that began with a Beatlemania-era revelation that material success wasn't necessarily accompanied by fulfillment. "He was trying to find a way to simplicity, a way to live truthfully and compassionately," Scorsese says. "It was never a straight line, but that's not the point. I think he found an understanding: that there's no such thing as 'success' – there's just the path."
The documentary includes new interviews with McCartney, Starr, Yoko Ono, George Martin, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton (who recalls watching Harrison write "Here Comes the Sun") and many more. But Scorsese and his team relied heavily on archives kept by Harrison himself: footage of the Beatles on vacation; a recording of Harrison's first sitar lesson with Ravi Shankar; home movies of Harrison fooling around in his recording studio with his son Dhani. "We set up a little production office in our house," says Olivia. "George lived in the house for 30 years, and he would just throw things in this drawer and that drawer. So every cupboard had something in it." The production team set up research offices in New York and London, working for years to find footage and photographs, including every filmed Harrison interview they could track down.
From their sleepless Hamburg days to their Let It Be-era squabbles, the Beatles' story has been told again and again, so Scorsese took great pains to use rare or unseen footage for the first part of the film. "The scenes of them running from hotel rooms and airports and such are just a little bit different than the ones you've seen," says Sinclair. "He approached the Beatles story from George's perspective, so it becomes a more inside, more first-person experience."
The film doesn't shy from Harrison's darker side, showing footage of a ravaged performance from his 1974 solo tour, and hinting at challenges in his marriage. "He never said he was a saint, but he always said he was a sinner," says Olivia. "He wanted to do everything in life. He really did."
The surviving Beatles provide some of the film's most powerful moments: McCartney makes an impassioned argument that anyone who thinks only he and Lennon were important in the group is wildly wrong; Starr begins to weep when he recalls visiting Harrison as the guitarist battled terminal lung cancer.
The post-Beatles section of the film has the most surprises, from intimate footage of Traveling Wilburys jamming to Olivia's harrowing account of a 1999 home invasion by a violent, deranged fan. It also gives equal weight to Harrison's nonmusical ventures: his work as a movie producer; his motor-racing fandom; his loving efforts to restore his country estate. "George thought hard about how to live his life after being a Beatle," says Sinclair, "and what I take away from this film is that he figured it out."

Related• The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: George Harrison

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/george-harrison-hits-the-screen-in-scorsese-doc-20110823?print=true

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

George Harrison’s inner light

His new documentary about George Harrison is as serious and sometimes mystifying as its subject

By Matt Zoller Seitz

George Harrison (Credit: AP)

Topics:George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Who is your favorite Beatle? If you prize humility, generosity and gratitude — or if you’re a kid who loves the sound of his funny name –you might answer Ringo Starr. Otherwise it’s probably a two-way race between Paul McCartney, who stands for sentimentality, old-school musical craft and ceaseless productivity, or John Lennon, whose name still epitomizes rebellion, sarcasm, soulfulness and martyrdom. I’ve rarely heard anyone answer “George Harrison,” and Martin Scorsese’s two-part HBO documentary “Living in the Material World” (Oct. 5 and 6, 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 Central) incidentally suggests the reasons why. Harrison was the most studious, elusive and impenetrable Beatle. And as he got older, he became increasingly uninterested in celebrity except as a vehicle that could expose him to new experiences, and bring him into contact with artists and thinkers from whom he could learn something.

George — as I will refer to him from now on in this review, because calling the Beatles by their last names seems too formal — was the youngest of the Beatles, but by consensus he was the most mature. From a shockingly early age, he was a student of life, cultivating the demeanor of an acolyte on an endless pilgrimage to an unknown destination. John Lennon had a questing spirit, too, but his life had a wild, often deliberately comical performance-art aspect that George’s mostly lacked. Where Lennon’s personal evolution was a series of diary entries that he invited the world to read, George’s happened, or seemed to happen, in private. The outward evidence of whatever quest George was on (hair length, wardrobe, sitar lessons, Hare Krishna chanting) seemed mostly unconnected to his life as a public figure. He explained himself in the media only because, as one of the world’s most famous men, he had to — and because he hoped his celebrity might encourage strangers to try whatever he was excited about.
“Living in the Material World” foregrounds these qualities so pointedly that it seems to be channeling the personality of its subject. It’s a problematic, at times off-putting, but ultimately fascinating work, moving through George’s life with its own mysterious internal logic.
Scorsese and his brilliant editor David Tedeschi — who also edited Scorsese’s “No Direction Home,” about Bob Dylan; “Shine a Light,” about the Rolling Stones; and “Public Speaking,” about Fran Lebowitz — disregard many of the conventions of nonfiction films about famous artists. Sometimes the movie identifies interview subjects, other times it doesn’t bother, and there’s no obvious reason why it does or doesn’t. It mixes new interviews and never-before-seen material from George’s personal archive (including off-the-cuff shots of the Beatles cavorting all over the world, and home-movie footage of George’s very first sitar lesson from Ravi Shankar) with expected, familiar stuff, but very little of it is identified by date or location. There are interviews with record producer and convicted murderer Phil Spector, who produced the Beatles’ “Let it Be” and several Beatles solo albums, including “All Things Must Pass”; presumably these were conducted right before he went to prison (he seems awfully peppy and untroubled), but there’s no easy way to tell.
Sometimes the film’s lack of specificity seems artistically justified; for example, the long opening montage of shots of World War II and postwar England are haunting and lovely and require no explication, as any Beatles fan knows that John, Paul, George and Ringo were children of that time and place. But other times the film’s contents seem erratic and disorganized. Near the end of Part 1, for instance, there’s a snippet of a British newscaster announcing the 1970 breakup of the Beatles, but the rest of Part 1 and the start of Part 2 cover events that occurred in the two years before the breakup; because the movie unfolds in a more or less linear way up till then, it feels almost like an editing mistake. Considering Scorsese’s typically obsessive attitude toward history, one has to assume these are deliberate artistic choices. But what’s the thinking behind them — that in this story, journalistic housekeeping isn’t important? Maybe in the greater scheme of things it isn’t, but it matters to history buffs, and to anyone who likes to keep a documentary’s timeline straight.
The film’s choices of what to emphasize, minimize and ignore will surely frustrate some Beatles fans. “Living in the Material World” devotes plenty of screen time to George’s fascination with Eastern religion, the production of his masterful 1970 solo debut “All Things Must Pass,” his founding of the influential independent production company HandMade Films, and the 1971 concert that he and Shankar masterminded to benefit cyclone-and-war-battered Bangladesh. But it tells us little about George’s cultural roots or the impact of his family and community on his personality. And it mostly glosses over his troubled first marriage to Pattie Boyd Harrison, except to note her tempestuous affair with George’s close friend and musical collaborator Eric Clapton — a relationship that inspired Clapton to write “Layla,” a song prominently featured in Scorsese’s gangster epic “GoodFellas” alongside George’s magnificent “What Is Life.” (George’s second wife, Olivia, is credited as a co-producer on “Living in the Material World” and gave Scorsese a lot of of the footage used in the project; maybe this explains the near-absence of Pattie?)
The film’s editing rhythms are distinctive, bordering on peculiar, especially its treatment of George’s music. Sometimes Scorsese and Tedeschi will let a song play out for much longer than most modern documentaries dare, letting us actually listen to the music while the screen shows silent footage of George, the Beatles or other significant figures. The effect is transporting, almost meditative; the approach befits the Beatle who was most dedicated to transcendentalism, and who introduced many fellow Westerners to the transformational power of chanting. But then the song will abruptly cut off instead of slowly fading, and drop us right into an interview with a new historical witness who hasn’t been properly introduced. The effect is like getting lost in a blissful trance, then having some interloper shatter it. It’s a style choice, and not an inherently bad one, because it feels like an attempt to reflect George’s struggle to find inner peace in a world that continually bombarded him with distractions. But it takes some getting used to, and sometimes feels like an affectation.
My viewing notes on “Living in the Material World” are filled with such phrases as, “Why would they do this?” and “Odd choice” and “Doesn’t work — or does it?” But such reactions are appropriate for the subject. George was an experimenter whose whole adult life was defined by a willingness to try new things without worrying whether they were going to pay off in the long run; indeed, phrases like “Pay off in the long run” seem entirely inappropriate to a discussion of George as a musician and a person. By the time that “Living in the Material World” finally draws to a close, we’ve gained some insight into George’s life, work and evolution, yet he remains a question mark. Most of the witnesses admit that although they knew George, they never really knew George. The filmmakers respect this verdict, just as they respected the enigma of Bob Dylan in the “American Masters” documentary “No Direction Home.” Scorsese is obviously more interested in George’s work than his personal life, except in those cases where the personal life is so dramatic, and so intimately connected to his work, that avoiding it would amount to gross negligence.
At the same time, though — and this is the film’s single finest quality — “Living in the Material World” grants George’s spiritual questing a weight that’s equal to, in some ways greater than, what he accomplished as a singer, songwriter, recording engineer and public figure. The film points out that nearly all of Harrison’s greatest songs — not just “Living in the Material World,” “What Is Life,” “My Sweet Lord,” “Beware of Darkness” and other post-Beatles works, but “Here Comes the Sun,” “Something” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” as well — were ultimately not about George’s relationships with friends, lovers or spouses, but his attempts to understand God. The section about the creation of George’s epic three-record set “All Things Must Pass” — the greatest of all Beatles solo albums — is the heart of the documentary, a stirring account of a young musician’s evolution to a higher artistic and spiritual plane. The devotion with which this documentary depicts George’s religious impulse — his ceaseless attempt, from adolescence onward, to get outside of himself — is admirable and moving. It’s a necessary corrective to the popular perception of George and so many other ’60s musicians as slaves to fashion, people who were just “into” non-Western religion and culture because it was what people did back then, and who couldn’t possibly have been “serious” about any of it — as if non-Western culture’s effect on the West isn’t a fascinating subject in itself, and as if a gesture toward changing one’s consciousness is only worth making if it sticks.
Glancing through my own obsessive collection of Beatles books, I’m struck by how often biographers diminished the spiritual quests of the Beatles and other 1960s pop culture icons as “experiments” or “flirtations” or “forays” — as if the very idea of a rich and famous artist worrying about his soul, and the possibility of a life beyond the material plane, is laughable, or at least worthy of suspicion. Western civilization resists the idea that life is not about success or failure, but simply experience, and it’s deeply hostile to the concept of a non-material world, a realm beyond the senses that’s illuminated by the title of another George song called “The Inner Light.” “A lot of people are going to hate me because they fear the unknown, you see?” George tells an interviewer. George didn’t fear the unknown; he embraced it.

http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/10/05/living_in_the_material_world_martin_scorsese_george_harrison/

Life Imitates Art: Films that are Life Enhancing

2011-10-01T14:58:00.014-04:00

Oscar Wilde recognized the truth that Life Imitates Art, not the other way around. His example? The Ubiquitous London Fogs brought on by the Impressionists.

Sunrise by Monet

The influence of art on life today is most obvious in film. Great directors and great films shape our perceptions of reality and alter our lives forever:

Dar, for instance, owes his personality to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard,
to Gloria Swanson and William Holden.

Norma Desmond (click)

Films that have shaped my life and my understanding of life include:

1900 (socialism and friendship)
(click the blue or purple ones)

American Beauty (modern living)
Cabaret (gay 30s Berlin, Liza)
Casablanca (noble character, war)
Chinatown (capitalism, evil, making of L. A. )

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (it's bad to be bourgeois)

Fanny and Alexander(it's good to be Bourgeois)
The Godfather (pure evil, crime world)
Harold and Maude (suicide, ageless love)
The History Boys (the joys and sorrows of Teaching)
Home at the End of the World (love and threesomes)

Juliet of the Spirits(the Beauty of fantasy)
Midnight Cowboy (New York, love)
My Own private Idaho (alienation, existentialism, the Road)
Night of the Iguana (Tennessee Williams, Mexico)
Shortbus (genuine sexuality, love, and the psyche)
(click)
Slaughterhouse Five (All's bad in war)
Some Like it Hot (Marilyn Monroe, drag)
The Wizard of Oz (Yellow Brick Road)
Women In Love (D.H. Lawrence)

Rashomon
by
Akira Kurosawa

(truth is subjective)

But this is just a sampling.
It is also essential to mention the great directors whose films have shaped my life:

Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Werner Fassbinder, Ken Russell, Peter Greenaway, Lina Wertmüller, Derek Jarman, Pedro Almodovar, Ang Lee, John Waters, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Pier Paulo Pasolini, Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, John Cameron Mitchell... even Woody Allen
(all are clickable)

The one
Dar and I sat down
and had a drink with:
John Waters--
Wikipedia

The Guardian has quite a list
of 40 current Film Directors
(click)

Current Films

Keep viewing

Jameson

Rembrandt and My Mother

2011-09-26T23:11:00.006-04:00

To celebrate my mother's 88th birthday today, I watched Peter Greenaway's film about Rembrandt, my mother's favorite painter. Twelve years ago we visited Amsterdam, Dar, my mother and I, and saw a show centered around The Nightwatch at the Rijksmuseum. (click).

Rembrandt: The Night Watch (click to enlarge)

Here is a review of the film--

Movie Review

Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2009)

ContentFilm International

Jonathan Holmes and Michael Tiegen in "Rembrandt's J'Accuse."

The Man Who Watched the Watchers

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: October 20, 2009

“One must always apologize for talking about painting,” the French poet Paul Valéry wrote. To which, I suspect, the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway would say, “Nonsense.” In “Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” his generally absorbing if sometimes fog-inducing feature-length documentary investigation into the mysteries of the Rembrandt painting “The Night Watch,” Mr. Greenaway talks and talks and talks as the image of his head pops on and off the screen in a box, much as Jambi the Genie’s did on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

The movie is an addendum to “Nightwatching,” Mr. Greenaway’s 2007 fictional feature about the painting that was part of a larger project of the same title that he created for the yearlong 2006 celebration of Rembrandt’s 400th birthday in the Netherlands. That project included an opera and a “re-presentation” of the painting. Mr. Greenaway was also the author of a handsome accompanying museum catalog. The “Nightwatching” project was, in turn, the first in an ambitious series Mr. Greenaway has undertaken titled “Nine Classical Paintings Revisited” that has, to date, included inquiries into Leonardo’s “Last Supper” and, as part of this year’s Venice Biennale, Paolo Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana.”
Mr. Greenaway has described the “Nightwatching” installation as “a combination of art and technology designed for an attentive audience that will be intrigued by a world of light and moving images and the single frozen moment.” That pretty much sums up “Rembrandt’s J’Accuse” and, of course, most of cinema. Certainly Mr. Greenaway’s movie will work for, or perhaps on, only the attentive. His filmmaking style, with its accretions of images and text (and words words words), requires focus. In this case some casual knowledge of Dutch and European history probably also helps, as does a level of tolerance for Mr. Greenaway’s snobbism. “Most people,” he announces early, “are visually illiterate.” This, he continues, staring hard into the camera (j’accuse!), helps explain why we have such an “impoverished” cinema.
In brief, the movie functions as an art historical investigation of “The Night Watch,” into which, Mr. Greenaway forcefully argues, “Rembrandt has scrupulously painted an indictment of guilt in paint.” A crime has been committed, the filmmaker asserts, and “it is imperative that we reopen the case.” Completed in 1642, the year that Rembrandt turned 36 (he died in 1669), the painting depicts a large group of guardsmen, along with two women (or girls or dwarfs) and a dog. The painting is said to show the civic guard about to march off to protect Amsterdam, but where others see might and honor, Mr. Greenaway sees a murderous conspiracy and other calumnies. Furthermore, he maintains, Rembrandt lost his commissions, falling into poverty, directly because the painting exposed these crimes.
Mr. Greenaway builds his case on more than 30 mysteries he himself has detected in “The Night Watch.” As he moves through these mysteries, toggling between the painting and scenes from Rembrandt’s life (with Martin Freeman as the great man, and the likes of Jonathan Holmes offering support), Mr. Greenaway trains his eye — and ours — on seemingly every inch of the canvas. Everything is grist for his analytic mill, from the Italian influence to a dead chicken hanging from the waist of one of the female figures. Here a spear isn’t just a spear or even a phallic symbol, but also Rembrandt’s commentary on the prowess and deeds of the militiaman holding the weapon. Mr. Greenaway’s verbal argument is more persuasive than his visual or, more specifically, filmmaking one, which tends to divide the image into intersecting and overlapping squares that greatly resemble software windows, effectively turning the movie screen into a computer monitor.
It’s unfortunate that Film Forum hasn’t put “Rembrandt’s J’Accuse” on a double bill with “Nightwatching.” Both have been packaged together on a recently released American DVD by E1 Entertainment.

REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Peter Greenaway; director of photography, Reinier van Brummelen; edited by Elmer Leupen; music by Giovanni Sollima and Marco Robino; produced by Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix; released by ContentFilm International. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Martin Freeman (Rembrandt van Rijn), Eva Birthistle (Saskia Uylenburgh), Jodhi May (Geertje Dirks), Emily Holmes (Hendrickje Stoffels), Jonathan Holmes (Ferdinand Bol), Michael Teigen (Carel Fabritius), Natalie Press (Marieke) and Peter Greenaway (Himself/Public Prosecutor).

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/movies/21rembrandt.html

The film's analysis of Rembrandt's satirical portrait of Ganymede (urinating) is priceless:

Rembrandt: Ganymede from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_%28mythology%29

A Dozen Great Films with Gay Lead Characters

2011-09-06T22:55:00.003-04:00

As Oscar Wilde saw, Nature imitates Art, not the other way around. Thankfully, Human Nature now has for inspiration great films that offer us brilliant artistic vision:

1) Shortbus

2) Beautiful Thing

“ A feelgood movie about two lower-class boys who start to feel more for each other than friendship. Moving and funny, a classic!

3) Home at the End of the World

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Hours" comes a story that chronicles a dozen years in the lives of two best friends who couldn't be more different...

4) Wilde

The story of Oscar Wilde, genius, poet, playwright and the First Modern Man. The self-realization of... (118 mins.)

Director: Brian Gilbert

Stars: Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle

Alexstam54 rated this .

“ I saw this movie in the cinema. After the movie ended the people staid on their seats... Stephen Fry is simply fantastic as Wilde, Jude Law is also good as Bosie. ” - Alexstam54

5) Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

The story of a forbidden and secretive relationship between two cowboys and their lives over the years. (134 mins.)

Director: Ang Lee

Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid

“ One of the very best gay movies. And certainly not only made for a gay audience! Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are great.

6) Love Songs

7)Summer Storm

Summer Storm (2004)

Tobi and Achim, the pride of the local crew club, have been the best of friends for years and are convinced...

Director: Marco Kreuzpaintner

Stars: Robert Stadlober, Kostja Ullmann, Miriam Morgenstern, Jürgen Tonkel

“ Beautiful German movie about growing up and the homosexual feelings of one of the young friends who go on summercamp together. ”

8)Maurice

Maurice (1987)

Two male English school chums find themselves falling in love at Cambridge. To regain his place in society... (140 mins.)

Director: James Ivory

Stars: James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant, Denholm Elliott

“ Touching movie about the love between two young men. One wants to live the gay life, the other (Hugh Grant) is too scared. The story is by E.M. Forster (I loved the book too!). ”
9) Cabaret

10)Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin (2004)

A teenage hustler and a young man obsessed with alien abductions cross paths, together discovering a horrible, liberating truth. (105 mins.)

Director: Gregg Araki

Stars: Brady Corbet, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elisabeth Shue, Chase Ellison

Alexstam54 rated this .

“ In my opinion one of the best movies by Gus van Sant (next to 'Elephant' and 'My own private Idaho').
11) Milk

Milk (2008)

The story of Harvey Milk, and his struggles as an American gay activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official. (128 mins.)

Director: Gus Van Sant

Stars: Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna

“ The story of the life and death of activist Harvey Milk. Sean Penn has done a great job! ”

12) My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Two best friends living on the streets of Portland as hustlers embark on a journey of self discovery and find their relationship stumbling along the way. (104 mins.)

Director: Gus Van Sant

Stars: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert

“ Wonderful movie from openly gay director Gus van Sant, with Keanu Reeves and the late, great River Phoenix as two hustlers. ”

13. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

An ambitious Asian Briton and his white lover strive for success and hope, when they open up a glamorous laundromat. (97 mins.)

Director: Stephen Frears

Stars: Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke

Alexstam54 rated this .

“ The first movie I saw with 'normal' gays. The atmosphere is very '80-s, Daniel Day Lewis is very sexy! A true classic by director Stephen Frears. ”
14) Boy Culture

Want more? Many of the above links come from:

Holiness and Beatitude

2011-08-25T15:52:00.003-04:00

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is Holy! The skin is holy! The

nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole

holy!

Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy!

Everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

(from Howl)

ON THE HOLY ROAD:

THE BEAT MOVEMENT AS SPIRITUAL PROTEST

Stephen Prothero

Georgia State University

Although there was a smattering of early critical acclaim for the beat

writers, neither their literature nor their movement fared well with the

critics. One reviewer called William Burroughs's Naked Lunch "a prolonged

scream of hatred and disgust, an effort to keep the reader's nose down in

the mud for 250 pages." Kerouac's On the Road was said to distinguish

itself from true literature by its "poverty of emotional, intellectual, and

aesthetic resources, an ineptitude of expression, and an inability to make

anything dramatically meaningful." What bothered the critics most about

the beats was their negativity. Life claimed they were at war with everything

sacred in Eisenhower's America-"Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the

Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League

Suit and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher,

the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean,

or peace-provoking H-bomb." The Nation dismissed the beats as "naysayers";

even Playboy called them "nihilists."

The beats responded to this critical chorus with one voice. "Beat,"

Kerouac asserted, stood not for "beat down" but for "beatific." "I want to

speak for things," he explained. "For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star

of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German

(Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak

out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out." To those who called "Howl,"

a "howl against civilization," Ginsberg replied that his signature poem was

a protest in the original sense of "pro-attestation, that is testimony in favor

of Value." He too described his protest in religious terms. "'Howl' is an

'Affirmation' by individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity," he

explained. "The poems are religious and I meant them to be."

My thesis is that the beats were spiritual protesters as well as

literary innovators and ought, therefore, to be viewed at least as minor

characters in the drama of American religion. If, as Miller argues, transcendentalism

represented a religious revolt against "corpse-cold" Unitarian

orthodoxy, the beat movement represented a spiritual protest against what

the beats perceived as the moribund orthodoxies of 1950s America.

A "NEW VISION"

The beat movement began with the meeting of Kerouac, Burroughs, and

Ginsberg in New York in 1944, coursed its way through the San Francisco

poetry renaissance of the 1950s, and spent itself sometime in the early

1960s. It was led by three main figures-a working-class French-Canadian

Catholic from Lowell, Massachusetts (Kerouac), a middle-class Russian-

American Jew from Paterson, New Jersey (Ginsberg), and an upper-class

Anglo-American Protestant from St. Louis (Burroughs)-and included a

large supporting cast of novelists, poets, and hangers-on. What united these

men (and the vast majority of them were men) was a "new consciousness"

or a "new vision."

Like any spiritual innovation, this new vision included a rejection of

dominant spiritual norms and established religious institutions. Neither of the

two most popular spiritual options of the early postwar period-the new

evangelicalism of Billy Graham and the mind cure of Rabbi Joshua Liebman's

Peace of Mind (1946), Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen's Peace of Soul (1949),

and the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)-

seemed viable to the beats in the light of the long postwar shadow cast by

the Holocaust, the bomb, and the cold war. Thus Burroughs, Kerouac, and

Ginsberg joined neo-orthodox theologians H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr

in rejecting any easy return to normalcy and in damning the evangelical and

mind-cure revivals as vacuous at best. For this beat trio, neither positive

thinking nor evangelical Christianity could make sense of God's apparent

exodus from the world. But somehow Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the

West, a book the beats studied and discussed in the late 1940s, could.

Inspired by Spengler's apocalypticism, the beats announced the death of

the tribal god of American materialism and mechanization. ("There is a

God / dying in America," Ginsberg proclaimed.) But in keeping with

Spengler's cyclical view of history, they prophesied that a new deity was

arising from the wreckage. (Ginsberg called it ". . . an inner / anterior

image / of divinity / beckoning me out / to pilgrimage.")

In 1938, two years after his graduation from Harvard, William Burroughs

wrote a humorous yet foreboding short story entitled "Twilight's Last

Gleamings." Loosely based on the sinking of the Titanic, this cynical

satire is a dark allegory on the fall of America and the refusal of Americans

to accept the inevitability of their own deaths and the demise of their

civilization. Burroughs's characters are Neros with urban savvy: con men

conning, robbers robbing, preachers preaching as the ship goes down. The

moral of this story is well expressed in a later poem by Lawrence

Ferlinghetti:

The end has just begun

I want to announce it

Run don't walk

to the nearest exit.

Along with this preoccupation with America's eschaton, the theme of

individual suffering and death looms in beat writing. Unlike Liebman, Sheen,

and Peale, who resolved to will into existence a "placid decade," the beats

devoted their lives and their literature to understanding and explicating the

private hells of those who remained on the margins of postwar prosperity.

Burroughs's first four books-Junkie, Queer, Naked Lunch, and Yage Letters-

document in factualist style the horrors of addiction to "junk" in its

many forms (drugs, sex, power). Much of Ginsberg's work, including "Howl"

and "Kaddish," explores madness and death. Three of Kerouac's novels-

Maggie Cassady, The Subterraneans, and Tristessa-are odes to lost loves;

and his Big Sur depicts his own alcohol-induced breakdown.

If the beats had stopped here, critics' categorization of their work and

thought as morbid or mad might have been accurate. But like the Lutheran

preacher who hits her congregation with sin only to smother them with

grace, the beats sought to move beyond predictions of social apocalypse and

depictions of individual sadness to some transcendental hope. "The Beat

Generation is insulted when linked to doom, thoughts of doom, fear of

doom, anger of doom," Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky protested in 1959.

"It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets," John

Clellon Holmes added, "a perfect craving to believe. . . the stirrings of a

quest." Thus the beats' flight from the churches and synagogues of the

suburbs to city streets inhabited by whores and junkies, hobos and jazzmen

never ceased to be a search for something to believe in, something to go by.

From the perspective of Religionswissenschaft, the beats shared much

with pilgrims coursing their way to the world's sacred shrines. Like pilgrims

to Lourdes or Mecca, the beats were liminal figures who expressed

their cultural marginality by living spontaneously, dressing like bums, sharing

their property, celebrating nakedness and sexuality, seeking mystical

awareness through drugs and meditation, acting like "Zen lunatics" or holy

fools, and perhaps above all stressing the chaotic sacrality of human interrelatedness

or communitas over the pragmatic functionality of social structure.

The beats, in short, lived both on the road and on the edge. For them,

as for pilgrims, transition was a semipermanent condition. What distinguished

the beats from other pilgrims, however, was their lack of a "center

out there." The beats shared, in short, not an identifiable geographical

goal but an undefined commitment to a spiritual search. They aimed not to

arrive but to travel and, in the process, to transform into sacred space every

back alley through which they ambled and every tenement in which they

lived. Thus the beats appear in their lives and in their novels not only as

pilgrims but also as heroes (and authors) of quest tales, wandering (and

writing) bhikkhus who scour the earth in a never fully satisfied attempt to

find a place to rest. This commitment to the spiritual quest is expressed by

Burroughs in Naked Lunch:

Since early youth I had been searching for some secret, some key with

which I could gain access to basic knowledge, answer some of the

fundamentaql uestions.J ust what I was looking for, what I meant by

basic knowledgeo r fundamentaql uestions,I foundd ifficultt o define. I

would follow a trail of clues.

On the trail that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs followed after the

war, one important clue was provided by Spengler: the suggestion that the

solution to their individual crises of faith (and to America's crisis of spirit)

might lie outside western culture and civilization, in the Orient and in the

"fellaheen" or uprooted of the world.

Inspired by a populism akin to contemporary Latin American theologians'

preferential option for the poor, the beats looked for spiritual insight

not to religious elites but to the racially marginal and the socially inferior,

Recalling Dostoevsky's "underground men," Ginsberg dubbed these characters

"subterraneans." Kerouac, assigning them a place a little closer to

heaven, christened them "desolation angels."

Of all these fallen angels, the beats were especially enamored of Herbert

Huncke, who according to Ginsberg "was to be found in 1945 passing on

subways from Harlem to Broadway scoring for drugs, music, incense, lovers,

Benzedrine Inhalers, second story furniture, coffee, all night vigils in

42nd Street Horn & Hardart and Bickford Cafeterias, encountering curious

& beautiful solitaries of New York dawn." Huncke embodied for the

beats both marginality and spirituality.

In his anonymity & holy Creephood in New York he was the sensitive

vehicle for a veritable new consciousness which spread through him to

others sensitized by their dislocations from History and thence to entire

generations of a nation renewing itself for fear of Apocalyptic Judgement.

So in the grand Karma of robotic Civilizations it may be that

the humblest, most afflicted, most persecuted, most suffering lowly

junkie hustling some change in the all-night movie is the initiate of a

Glory transcendingh is Nation'sc onsciousnesst hat will swiftly draw

that Nation to its knees in tearful self-forgiveness.

Initiated by Huncke into this "holy Creephood," Ginsberg, Kerouac, and

Burroughs now identified with the beat-up and the beat-down. Kerouac

dropped out of Columbia, and the same university expelled Ginsberg.

Burroughs began what would turn into a life of participant-observation of

the netherworlds of gangsters, addicts, and hustlers. Kerouac explored the

jazz clubs and marijuana bars of Harlem. Ginsberg investigated the lives of

the working class in Paterson, New Jersey. All three men attempted to

transform their experiences into literature worthy of Rimbaud or Baudelaire.

By venerating Huncke (who according to beat lore was the first to use the

term "beat") as a saint, the beats risked transforming their "new vision"

into an amoral, nihilistic apocalypticism. What prevented this outcome, at

least for Ginsberg and Kerouac, was the arrival in New York in 1947 of

Neal Cassady.

The "secret hero" of Ginsberg's "Howl" and the inspiration for the ecstatic

Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's On the Road, Cassady was born, quite

literally, on the road (in a rumble seat in Salt Lake City while his mother

and father were making their way to Hollywood). His parents separated

when he was six years old, so he was raised by an alcoholic father in western

pool halls, freight yards, and flophouses. While a teenager, Cassady supposedly

stole over five hundred cars and seduced nearly as many women. He did six

stints in reformatories before landing in San Quentin in the late 1950s.

Kerouac and Ginsberg celebrated and romanticized Cassady as a "holy

goof." Kerouac, who by 1947 had grown tired of the apocalyptic intellectualism

of Burroughs, greeted the lusty Cassady as a "long-lost brother."

Contrasting Cassady to Huncke, Kerouac observed that "his 'criminality'

was not something that sulked and sneered; it was Western, the west wind,

an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he

only stole cars for joy rides)." Ginsberg also embraced Cassady, who

soon became his lover, in mythic terms-as "cocksman and Adonis of

Denver." Burroughs, however, dissented, dismissing Cassady as a con

man. Thus Cassady's arrival precipitated a split of sorts in the nascent beat

movement. The pro-Huncke Burroughs persisted in a more absurdist and

apocalyptic reading of the "new vision" (beat as beat down) while Ginsberg

and Kerouac attempted to incorporate in their new, pro-Cassady consciousness

some redemptive force or transcendental hope (beat as beatitude).

Cassady redeemed the beatific beats' "new vision" by pointing the way

to what would become two major affirmations of Kerouac's and Ginsberg's

spirituality: the sacralization of everyday life and the sacramentalization of

human relationships. If Dean Moriarty preaches a gospel in On the Road,

it is that every moment is sacred, especially when shared with friends. And

if he incarnates an ethic, it is that since all human beings are of one piece,

every person must share in every other person's sorrow just as surely as all

people will be delivered to heaven together in the end. Thus Cassady personified

for Kerouac and Ginsberg the sacred connections of communitas.

While Huncke symbolized the misery of lonely individuals suffering and

dying in dark Times Square bars, Cassady symbolized the splendor of cosmic

companions digging the open road.

Shortly after their initial encounter in 1947, Ginsberg and Cassady bowed

down together at the edge of an Oklahoma highway and vowed always to

care for one another. Seven years later Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky agreed

to "explore each other until we reached the mystical 'X' together" and

promised "that neither of us would go into heaven unless we could get the

other one in." Such covenants expressed ritualistically Ginsberg's credo

"that we are all one Self with one being, one consciousness." They represented

an attempt to routinize the group's communitas, to incarnate

Whitman's vision of "fervent comradeship" in a spiritual brotherhood of

beatific monks.

Cassady inspired in this way a shift in the beatific beats' writing from

the pessimistic, Dreiserian realism that would mark Burroughs's work to a

more optimistic, even transcendental realism: literature as "a clear statement

of fact about misery... and splendor [my emphasis]." Like Burroughs,

Ginsberg and Kerouac would continue to depict the suffering of the fellaheen,

but unlike him they would insist that such suffering was both revelatory

and redemptive. And thus Kerouac insisted that while authors must "accept loss forever,"

they should nonetheless "believe in the holy contour of life."

Ginsberg took Burroughs's advice, and by mid-decade the novels and

poems of Kerouac and Ginsberg were filled with references to Buddhism.

In one eighteen-month period between 1954 and 1956 Kerouac meditated

daily and still found the time to write five books with a decidedly Buddhist

bent. Three of these works, Some of the Dharma (a thousand-page personal

meditation), Buddha Tells Us (an American version of the Surangama Sutra),

and Wake Up (a life of the Buddha) have never been published. A book of

Buddhist poems, Mexico City Blues, and a beat sutra entitled The Scripture

of the Golden Eternity appeared in 1959 and 1960 respectively.

In 1955 Ginsberg and Kerouac met Gary Snyder, a mountain poet and

Zen initiate, who contributed greatly to their understanding of Buddhism

and their commitment to it. Just as Neal Cassady appeared as Dean Moriarty,

the hero of On the Road, Snyder was immortalized as Japhy Ryder, the

thinly veiled protagonist of Dharma Bums. Although Kerouac was clearly

intrigued by Snyder and by Zen, he devoted a good portion of Dharma

Bums to arguments between Ray Smith (himself) and Ryder (Snyder) and

to criticisms of Zen. Smith, who presents himself not as a Zen Buddhist but

as "an old fashioned dreamy hinayana coward of later mahayanism," clashed

with Ryder and his Zen on a number of occasions. One of Smith's arguments

was that showing compassion (karuna) was more important than

achieving insight (prajna). Smith was especially critical of the violence that

sometimes attended uncracked Zen koans. "It's mean," he complained to

Ryder, "All those Zen masters throwing young kids in the mud because

they can't answer their silly word questions." "Compassion," Smith contended,

"is the heart of Buddhism." Unlike Ryder who had no use for

Christianity, Smith revered not only Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of

compassion, but also Jesus Christ. "After all," he explained, "a lot of people

say he is Maitreya [which] means 'Love' in Sanskrit and that's all Christ

talked about was love."

Despite such disputes, Kerouac, Snyder, and Ginsberg agreed on a few

crucial points that they shared with Buddhism (especially the Mahayana

tradition's Yogacara school). They believed, for example, that life is char-

acterized by suffering (dukkha) and impermanence (anicca). Yet they also

believed that this world, at least as it appears to our senses, is ephemeral

and illusory. "Happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange

dream," Kerouac wrote in Lonesome Traveler. And he echoed the sentiment

(albeit in decidedly biblical grammar) in Dharma Bums: "Believe that

the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live."

This shared awareness of what Ginsberg called "the phantom nature of

being" was tremendously liberating for the beatific beats. It enabled them

both to confront suffering and death as major obstacles in this relative

world of appearances and to see their ultimate insignificance from the

absolute perspective of heaven or nirvana. It empowered them, moreover,

to deny the absolute reality of the material world even as they affirmed

enthusiastically our spiritual experiences in it. Out of such paradoxes came

the this-worldly joy of statements like "This is it!," "We're already there

and always were," "We're all in Heaven now," "The world has a beautiful

soul," "The world is drenched in spirit," "everything's all right."

There is a constant tension in beat literature, therefore, between misery

and splendor, between an overwhelming sadness and an overcoming joy.

"The world is beautiful place / to be born into," Lawrence Ferlinghetti

observed, "if you don't mind happiness / not always being / so very much

fun / if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then." In the beat cosmos

God is both absent and everywhere. Dualisms between sacred and profane,

body and soul, matter and spirit, nirvana and samsara do not hold. Thus

Ginsberg's celebrated encounter with the poet William Blake in Harlem in

1948 incorporated both a vision of death ("like hearing the doom of the

whole universe") and a vision of heaven ("a breakthrough from ordinary

habitual quotidian consciousness into consciousness that was really seeing

all of heaven in a flower") And so one of Ginsberg's most profane poems,

"Howl," contains his boldest affirmation of the sacred camouflaged in

the profane:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is Holy! The skin is holy! The

nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole

holy!

Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy!

Everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

CONCLUSIONS

After the beat generation graduated from young adulthood to middle age

in the 1960s, beat writers went in different directions. Following an extended

stint at the wheel of the bus of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters,

Cassady collapsed along a railroad track and died of exposure in Mexico

in 1968. Kerouac's seemingly endless cycles of exile and return to his

mother's home in Lowell ended in 1969 when he died an alcoholic's death

of cirrhosis of the liver. Burroughs, perhaps the least likely of beats to

make it past middle age, is alive and well and enjoying the acclaim of

European critics. Ginsberg too has survived even his transmigration from

literary rebel to de facto poet laureate of the United States. In this way beat

writers have earned a place in the history of American letters.

What I have argued here is that the beats also deserve a place in American

religious history. More than literary innovators or bohemian rebels, the

beats were wandering monks and mystical seers. They went on the roadfrom

New York to San Francisco to Mexico City to Tangier-because they

could not find God in the churches and synagogues of postwar America.

They venerated the poor, the racially marginal and the socially inferior

because they saw no spiritual vitality in the celebrated postwar religious

revival of mainstream white preachers. And they experimented with drugs,

psychoanalysis, bisexuality, jazz, mantra chanting, Zen meditation, and new

literary forms in an attempt to conjure the gods within.

Like the transcendentalists who inspired them, the beats were critics of

"corpse-cold" orthodoxies; they were champions of spiritual experience over

theological formulations who responded to the challenge of religious pluralism

by conjuring out of inherited and imported materials a wholly new

religious vision. Like Emerson, the beats aimed to make contact with the

sacred on the nonverbal, transconceptual level of intuition and feeling, and

then to transmit at least a part of what they had experienced into words.

Like Thoreau, they insisted on the sanctity of everyday life and the sainthood

of the nonconformist. And like George Ripley and his associates at

Brook Farm, they aimed to create a spiritual brotherhood based on shared

experiences, shared property, shared literature, and an ethic of "continual

conscious compassion." With transcendentalists of all stripes, the beats

gloried in blurring distinctions between matter and spirit, divinity and humanity,

the sacred and the profane.

The beats diverged from their transcendentalist forebears (and toward

their neo-orthodox contemporaries), however, in maintaining a more sanguine

view of the problems of human existence and the possibility of social

progress. In the beat cosmos, society is running toward apocalypse; individuals

are doomed to suffer and die, and perhaps to endure addiction or

madness along the way. But in the beatitudes according to Kerouac and

Ginsberg, those who suffer are blessed, and the sacrament of friendship can

redeem a portion of that suffering. In the last analysis, "The bum's as holy

as the seraphim!" and everyone- junkies and criminals, beats and squares,

Catholics and Buddhists, culture-peoples and fellaheen- is raised up from

the dreamworld of our quotidian existences and "buried in heaven together."

From:

The Harvard Theological Review
Vol. 84, No. 2, Apr., 1991

Elegy for Neal Cassady (a poem by Allen Ginsberg)

2011-08-17T00:08:00.000-04:00

Elegy for Neal Cassady

by Allen Ginsberg (Feburary 10, 1968, 5 - 5:30 AM)

OK Neal
aethereal Spirit
bright as moving air
blue as city dawn
happy as light released by the Day
over the city's new buildings --

Maya's Giant bricks rise rebuilt
in Lower East Side
windows shine in milky smog.
Appearance unnecessary now.

Peter sleeps alone in next room, sad.
Are you reincarnate? Can ya hear me talkin?
If anyone had strength to hear the invisible,
And drive thru Maya Wall
you had it --
What're you now, Spirit?
That were spirit in body --

The body's cremate
by Railroad track
San Miguel Allende Desert,
outside town,
Spirit become spirit,
or robot reduced to Ashes.

Tender Spirit, thank you for touching me with tender hands
When you were young, in a beautiful body,
Such a pure touch it was Hope beyond Maya-meat,
What you are now,
Impersonal, tender --
you showed me your muscle/warmth/over twenty years ago
when I lay trembling at your breast
put your arm around my neck,
-- we stood together in a bare room on 103d St.
Listening to a wooden Radio,
with our eyes closed
Eternal redness of Shabda
lamped in our brains
at Illinois Jacquet's Saxophone Shuddering,
prophetic Honk of Louis Jordan,
Honeydrippers, Open The Door Richard
To Christ's Apocalypse --
The buildings're insubstantial --
That's my New York Vision
outside eastern apartment offices
where telephone rang last night
and stranger's friendly Denver Voice
asked me, had I heard the news from the West?

Some gathering Bust, Eugene Oregon or Hollywood Impends
I had premonition.
"No" I said --"been away all week,"
"you havent heard the news from the West,
Neal Cassady is dead --"
Peter's dove-voic'd Oh! on the other line, listening.

Your picture stares cheerful, tearful, strain'd,
a candle burns,
green stick incense by household gods.
Military Tyranny overtakes Universities, your Prophecy
approaching its kindest sense brings us
Down
to the Great Year's awakening.
Kesey's in Oregon writing novel language
family farm alone.
Hadja no more to do? Was your work all done?
Had ya seen your first son?
Why'dja leave us all here?
Has the battle been won?

I'm a phantom skeleton with teeth, skull
resting on a pillow
calling your spirit
god echo consciousness, murmuring
sadly to myself.

Lament in dawnlight's not needed,
the world is released,
desire fulfilled, your history over,
story told, Karma resolved,
prayers completed
vision manifest, new consciousness fulfilled,
spirit returned in a circle,
world left standing empty, buses roaring through streets --
garbage scattered on pavements galore --
Grandeur solidified, phantom-familiar fate
returned to Auto-dawn,
your destiny fallen on RR track
My body breathes easy,
I lie alone
living
After friendship fades from flesh forms --
heavy happiness hangs in heart,
I could talk to you forever,
The pleasure inexhaustible,
discourse of spirit to spirit,
O Spirit.

Sir spirit, forgive me my sins,
Sir spirit give me your blessing again,
Sir Spirit forgive my phantom body's demands,
Sir Spirit thanks for your kindness past,
Sir Spirit in Heaven, What difference was yr mortal form,
What further this great show of Space?
Speedy passions generations of
Question? agonic Texas Nightrides?
psychadelic bus hejira-jazz,
Green auto poetries, inspired roads?
Sad, Jack in Lowell saw the phantom most --
lonelier than all, except your noble Self.
Sir Spirit, an' I drift alone:
Oh deep sigh.

Ginsberg reading the poem in San Francisco two months before we met:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ginsberg/Intersection-1971/Ginsberg-Allen_13_Elegy-For-Neal-Cassady_Intersection-For-The-Arts_San-Francisco_08-71.mp3

De Soto Beach Hotel

2011-08-15T00:19:00.003-04:00

Birthdays

2011-08-11T21:08:00.003-04:00

Neuschwanstein Castle (Wikipedia)

For a long time, I have thought birthday celebrations ridiculous. That hasn't prevented me from celebrating my own or those of others with great enthusiasm. Darryl certainly made my 50th a huge deal, with 50 long stem red roses and 50 bottles of Veuve Clicquot Champagne. He invited so many guests I lost count. Starr was here, and virtually everyone I knew then. People came from all over, not just Atlanta. He created a similar if somewhat less extravagant bash for my 60th 4 years ago. And in return, I helped him celebrate his 40th in Vermont with tennis and a civil union, and his 50th in New Orleans, with Starr and Katie.

Because my birthday is in August, I have had many exotic ones overseas, beginning with my 23d birthday in Mad King Ludwig's glorious Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, two fellow travelers buying me a stein of German beer and toasting my day. My 30th is the subject of a poem and a short story I've written. My journals record other such birthday high times. So, while I mock the foolishness of singling out one's birthday as anything special in the course of life, I must have, at least subconsciously, the expectation that the day of my birth will be pleasant and adventurous.

That may be why last Sunday was disappointing. Nothing materialized. Darryl hardly acknowledged the day (I had simply given him a card on his day weeks ago). Will had called Saturday to say he wanted to spend the day with me, possibly even taking a short road trip. But on Sunday he showed up hung over at 4:30 with plans of his own for the evening. I got a number of calls, and might have gotten a dinner invitation, had I not had company. I spent the evening alone, watching True Blood.

Curiously, perhaps, the evening alone made me realize how much I miss the sea. How fine it would have been to take a walk on the beach, listen to the waves, enjoy fresh air, rather than the sultry, polluted air of Atlanta. At 64 I have to make major decisions where to live soon, to get on with living and writing while I still have the prospect of change. I came across another poem by W. S. Merwin today that expresses so well what I desire:

W. S. Merwin
A Birthday

Something continues and I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones

these nights we hear the horses running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house
down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes

the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you what is already yours
it is the morning of the mornings together
breath of summer oh my found one
the sleep in the same current and each waking to you
when I open my eyes you are what I wanted to see.

Jack

Beyond good and evil?

2011-08-01T22:34:00.008-04:00

"Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the place of good and evil, according to what you make of it." Montaigne, quoted in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Simone de Beauvoir.

Photo by Gisèle Freund

As I reread the copy of Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity which I bought on sale today, the dialog of sorts in the New York Times is timely. Are there ethical truths that transcend moral relativism, and if so, what are they? Are there ethical absolutes we can use to examine, say, a menage a trois? Stay tuned for further thoughts.

July 24, 2011

The Maze of Moral Relativism

By PAUL BOGHOSSIAN

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/the-maze-of-moral-relativism/

Response:
August 1, 2011, 8:30 pm

Does Philosophy Matter?

By STANLEY FISH

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/does-philosophy-matter/

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." WS
Given that Hamlet is the speaker, the statement wants thought, itself.

Jack

Simone De Beauvoir

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Monogamy-- Capitalism Personified?

2011-07-31T14:30:00.006-04:00

Article from Salon discussing "Sex at Dawn."

Echoes a long discussion we had Friday night until well past midnight...

Love and possessiveness are mutually exclusive, as I see it. Jealousy erodes love. Ownership of another human being, in any way, excludes care and compassion. Enforced monogamy, which brings the end of so many otherwise rich relationships, is rooted in insecurity and fear. Ideally, love should be transitive, not a closed equation. This article and the book it covers raise fascinating questions about how we think about society and about those we love.

"Love is not a victory march..." -- Leonard Cohen

Saturday, Jul 30, 2011 19:01 ET

Is monogamy like vegetarianism?

Just as we're omnivores who can swear off meat, we're a promiscuous species capable of change, an expert argues

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Stockphoto/Salon

Psychologist Christopher Ryan is out to defeat an archetypal figure in the mythology of monogamy. No, not prince charming; he's after the widespread belief in a prehistoric hunter who would slay an antelope on the plains and heroically haul it back to his nuclear family.
You might wonder what this has to do with monogamy. Well, Ryan argues that in actuality the meat would have been shared with the entire tribe, because pre-agricultural societies shared everything -- including sex. This is a key point he and co-author/wife Cacilda Jethá make in "Sex at Dawn," which was released last year in hardcover and this month in paperback. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were nonmonogamous, they argue -- the implication being that, biologically speaking, sexual exclusivity is unnatural.
The book challenges much of the previously accepted wisdom about the sex lives of our ancestors, although the authors admit they haven't exactly proved their case. Regardless, they have gained praise and admiration from sexual radicals like sex columnist Dan Savage. That makes Ryan an ideal final interview in Salon's monogamy series, which was originally sparked by Savage's thoughts in a New York Times Magazine piece about "monogam-ish" marriage.
Salon spoke to Ryan by phone at his home in Barcelona, just as he prepared for a road trip with Jethá. They planned to set out without a destination in mind, enjoy the drive and figure it out as they went -- which is awfully similar to their attitude toward monogamy in their marriage.
Why is it wrong, as you argue, to assume that women are the choosy sex and men just want to spread their seed indiscriminately?
Well, there's a grain of truth there on a biological level. There's no denying that women make a greater biological investment in pregnancy and gestation than men do. There's no denying the fact that men produce millions of sperm cells in the amount of time that a woman releases one egg. But when you look at highly intelligent, highly social species -- particularly primates but also dolphins -- what you find is that that's not the way things happen. The assumption that women are choosing mates based on their access to resources is simply not the way it works in primates that are intelligent and social. In fact, there are no social, group-living primates that are monogamous.
What you find in highly social species is that resources tend to be shared, particularly in bonobos and to some extent in chimps. When you look at pre-agricultural human societies, there really is no private property. Even the best hunters gain their status by sharing what they catch. The worst thing you can do in those societies is hoard food. We're not saying these are "noble savages," we're not slipping into that "oh, they're so much better than us" mindset -- in fact, they're just like us. They're just in a very different situation in which the best way to spread risk is to share. Today I might kill an antelope, but I'm probably not going to again for a week or two. You don't just go out and shoot an antelope like you go to the grocery store. The way to make sure that everyone eats, especially in a situation where there is no refrigeration, is to share what we find.
They share their shelter, defense, childcare, food, access to the spirit world -- why should we believe that sex is the one thing that they don't share? What we argue is that's an economic issue, it's something that happens with the advent of agriculture when suddenly men became obsessed with paternity because they had this accumulated property that they wanted to pass to their children.
You mentioned love briefly -- how does it figure into all of this?
Cacilda and I don't dispute that love is a very important human emotion and is deeply embedded in our nature. In fact, one of the things that we do best is love other people. But what we do dispute is that it's necessarily linked to sexual exclusivity. I think that's something that's very much culturally encouraged in our possessive, imperialistic society. Whereas in many of the societies we discuss in the book, there's not a lot of accumulated property like in agricultural societies, and there are rituals that are expressly designed to discourage that possessiveness and jealousy. That might suggest that there is a natural inclination toward jealousy and that these societies are working intentionally to minimize that response, whereas we live in a society that works to maximize it.
How natural is sexual jealousy, then?
I think it's as natural as any other sort of insecurity or possessiveness. In these societies there are also rituals to expressly minimize and discourage selfishness about food, because in that sort of system, selfishness results in disaster for everyone. Any sort of antisocial behavior, including sexual jealousy, is discouraged in hunter gatherer societies, all based on whether or not it's ultimately positive for the society.
In our society, it seems to have had some pro-social function, namely knowing whose kids were whose and keeping inheritance lines. But I think we're at a tipping point now with birth control, adoption, gay couples -- all these biological concerns are dissipating, so maybe we're at a point where we're starting to look at a gradual shift to a more hunter gatherer approach to these issues.
So in the future people will look back at the advent of birth control and say it changed the course of sexual evolution?
Yeah, and I think a lot of those changes are a return to earlier ways of thinking. People talk about the sexual revolution in the '60s, which was largely brought on by the pill. For the first time ever, women could have sex with different partners without worrying about it -- at least before AIDS. But in prehistory, I think women were largely having sex without worrying about it, at least in the sense that you didn't need to worry about who was the father of your child, because you lived in a society where resources were shared.
Even if we accept that our ancestral roots are nonmonogamous, we're still living in a dramatically different time now. Does it really make sense to navigate open relationships in this day and age?
[Laughs] Good question. This week I'm substituting for Dan Savage on his "Letter of the Day" column, and I just wrote a response to a letter asking a similar question. What I try to articulate very clearly is that we're not advocating nonmonogamy. What we're advocating is a realistic, informed understanding of what sort of animal we are so that when you enter into whatever sort of arrangement you choose, you do it with your eyes open, you do it with an understanding of the difficulties and the risks. You take a compassionate approach to the problems that you're gonna run into.
We're very careful not to tell anyone what to do; in fact we say very explicitly that we don't know what to do. Casilda and I have been together 12 years, and we always talk about this stuff. It's a live issue for us and it has been since the beginning. There's a lot of guilt-tripping out there, people saying, "This should be easy for you because you're in love, and if it's not easy for you it means you're not in love." I think that's really destructive and corrosive to the human spirit, and to love itself.
What I say in this column is that monogamy is like vegetarianism. All the evidence points to the fact that we've evolved as omnivores, but that doesn't mean that living as an omnivore in today's world is inherently superior than choosing to be a vegetarian. Being a vegetarian can make perfect sense, it can be ethical, healthy and smart -- but it's not going to come naturally, right? Just because you've decided to become vegetarian doesn't make you an herbivore. You're an omnivore who's chosen to live as a vegetarian, but bacon is still gonna smell good and you shouldn't feel guilty about that. I think it's offensive when social institutions like religions and governments and even some scientists say, "Hey, this should come naturally to you. This is human nature. If you get hungry when you smell bacon, there's something wrong with you."
It's interesting, the idea of it being a "live issue," something that's revisited and talked about in the relationship.
Relationships are living things, they're constantly changing. When we were working on the book and anticipating what sort of questions we'd get, that was of course at the top of our list: They're gonna ask us about our marriage. One of the first interviews was with Dan Savage and he asked that question and I said, "Our prepared answer is: Our relationship is informed by our research." He cracked up; he said, "That's gonna be my answer from now on, too."

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More: Tracy Clark-Flory

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/07/30/monogamy/index.html

August, Riding the Wave

2011-07-29T16:58:00.003-04:00

On Hapuna Beach

Riding the wave that's riding the wave-- lyrics I heard a few nights ago at a near empty cafe off Amsterdam Street. The image conjures so many waves-- past, present and future; waves personal, in the lives of my friends, and in the country and world, at large. As the tidal wave of the world economy threatens to wipe us all out financially, all of us but those on the oil tankers or basking upon the vast yachts of the bankers, I think instead of all the healing waves that have washed over me and those I love. When I was a child, I delighted in building sand castles and watching the rising tide fill the moat, wash away the walls, inundate the castle. With the ever approaching financial limits of retirement, I see my present sand castle slipping away into the salty water, imagine all the comforts of my years of contented bourgeois life becoming austerity, or at least parsimony. And when actual retirement arrives, I plan to live as close as possible to the sea.

In my view, nothing can take the place of a walk on the beach. For decades I have lived in Atlanta, having to drive at least 250 miles to the ocean. Each year I have lived here I have driven or flown to oceans and seas all over the world. How do I love thee? Let me count the seas, from the Aegean to the Pacific coast of Hawaii, from Glacier Bay in Alaska, to Bergen's coast of Norway, to the Straights of Magellan, to the Straight of Georgia in Canada to the beaches of San Juan, Puerto Vallarta, and Manzanillo, and those long golden sand strands of shore in Australia. Whether the wild beaches of Big Sur or along the Oregon coast, or the tame Gulf of Mexico powder beaches of Santa Rosa Island, there is a sublimity to being beside the ocean, an "ataraxia," that transcends the tensions and anxieties of life in the crowded suburbs of society.

Jack

Pacific Ocean, Hawaii


Photos from my visits to Hawaii

Malick's Tree of Life

2011-07-17T18:46:00.000-04:00

Two paths intertwine in this film, the way of Grace and the way of Nature. Either way, love is the only way to achieve happiness. Such is the explicit message of Terrence Malick's film, "The Tree of Life." All else impacts us visually, soaking our psyches with visual metaphor and reaching the depths of our emotional selves with memory, gesture, and whispers from a dream-like world. The film has the sweep of Koyaanisqatsi, the struggle for the sacred in Nature vs. the destructive forces of development, money, and the quest for power. The visual beauty of Kubrick is also here along with similar metaphors of birth, death, and the archetypes of human existence in an indifferent world. At times I even sensed David Lynch's nightmarish details, especially in the extended point of view of Jack in pre-adolescence.

There is a glimpse of the Zone of Totality, as we see the total eclipse of the sun in a series of celestial images that give the film its mysticism. At the gathering on the shore, the characters apparently forgive one another for all their transgressions. As with Kubrick, though, there is no final meaning or happy ending, and we leave the theater with as much a sense of meaninglessness as Sisyphus came to accept. The cosmos and all human existence within in, connected or not, may have great beauty, and perhaps like Keats, Malick presents the case that this beauty and the love within it are the only truth there is.

The San Francisco Chronicle gives a thorough review of the film, noting the two ways I mentioned above and offering excellent insight into the film's merits:

Merie Wallace / 2011 Twentieth Century Fox

Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt, top, are the parents of three boys in "Tree of Life."

The Tree of Life

Drama. Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. Directed by Terrence Malick. (PG-13. 138 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
If someone gave you, as a gift, a bag of diamonds and rocks, you would not see it as "a mixed bag." You would see it as a bag of diamonds with some rocks that can be easily pushed aside, and you would be happy to be rich. In the same way, Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" is at times trying and perplexing, but it also contains some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.
Malick shows you the world that you know, but he shows it in such a fever that you see it, not differently, but completely. It's a vision so alive to the mystery in everything that the simple depiction of a man walking into an office building feels like a feast of limitless possibility and geometric variety. To see "The Tree of Life" is to wish you could go through life seeing things in this way. There would be no fear of death because each moment would be so full as to contain lifetimes.
From the first moments, Malick presents his film as a contrast between two ways of understanding human existence. There is the way of nature, which sees only struggle and looks for reasons to be unhappy, and there is the way of grace, which is in touch with love and the broad movements of the universe. The way of nature is embodied by Brad Pitt as a hard-charging husband and father - it's a lovely performance from Pitt, whose control-freak facade never completely hides the vulnerability motivating it. Jessica Chastain, as his wife, embodies the way of grace. They live with their three children in a Texas suburb in the 1950s and are seen through the memory of their eldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), looking back from the present.
As in "The New World," voice-over narration, to the accompaniment of subjective shots of trees and sky, gives us the characters' inner thoughts. These produce a unique effect. It's as if we're seeing a dream of the past and hearing mental vibrations that, either randomly or because of their particular strength, happened to survive time. The feeling is one of privilege, to be picking up on precious currents of consciousness, seemingly lost to the world.
At its most basic, "The Tree of Life" vividly replicates, in cinematic terms, the way we remember. There are general memories, moods and sensations, and then there are incidents and bits of conversation that are recalled with absolute present-tense lucidity. And so the incidents of voice-over are interspersed with straightforward scenes showing this 1950s family. Malick is trying to give us life as it is consciously experienced, the unceasing inner monologue and its interplay with the outside environment, the thoughts of the past mixing with the suspended and yet always available present.
The ambition behind such an attempt is enormous, and Malick's success is complete. But he doesn't stop there. In "The Tree of Life" he doesn't only want to show what life and consciousness feel like. He wants to capture the nature of life - what life is. To this end, he films waterfalls and mountains, gives us long minutes of churning, multi-colored ooze floating in space, and even includes a brief dinosaur interlude. He is trying to give us the mind of God. No, more than that. He is trying to film God.
When he stays within the multiple minds of his various characters, Malick is working here at the level of genius. His handheld camera hovers with a sense of impending revelation. The beauty is beyond description. But when he ventures into explorations of the universe and its origins, the work becomes general and less interesting, liked warmed-over Kubrick.
Still, there is little doubt that "The Tree of Life" will stand as the cinematic achievement of the year.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Jack

The Blazing Summer of 2011

2011-07-15T16:05:00.011-04:00

Will, Jay Brannan, Jack

Club One, Savannah

We celebrated the Summer Solstice with visits to Savannah. First Dar and I drove down for visits with John and with Dad and Kathy, the latter at Johnny Harris. We stayed at the familiar Bed and Breakfast Inn, having breakfasts of shrimp and grits and, second morning, strawberry pancakes. John and I walked the beach with its air of burning cyprus all the way from the Okeefenokee Swamp.

The second jaunt to Savannah came after Dar, Will and I heard Jay Brannan's sold out concert at Eddie's Attic in Decatur. When the show was over, Dar departed, but Will and I stayed long enough for Will to take over the piano and sing such songs as Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" accompanied by opening act singer Tristan Clopet. The night was too good to end, so we drove to Savannah, stopping at the Waffle House at 2AM where Will performed some Cee Lo Green covers for the ecstatic staff, one of whom recorded his singing.

After the meal, we drove on to Savannah, stopping at my brother's house. John then drove us to Tybee in his Cadillac to watch the spectacle of a sliver of crescent moon rising over the ocean, followed by sunrise as we stood on the windy beach, letting the cool waves wash our feet.

Sunrise over Savannah Beach

Will, John and I wound up downtown atop the Bohemian Hotel as a tropical storm blew in, walls of rain and lightning dramatizing the Savannah River, the bridge, the cobblestone streets below. Will performed again in the lobby, singing "Crazy" on a wandering musician's guitar, and pleasantly startling the guests running in from the rain. The friendly concierge or whatever he was, having heard us talk about Jay at Club One that evening, arranged to take us to our car by shuttle. He saved the day, we got in a decent nap, and arrived on time, which was too early, for the Encore performance of Jay Brannan in Savannah. Jay and I talked a good while and he mentioned his fans from the Atlanta show onstage. It was a great performance, though Jay seemed a bit depressed and tired. This was his last show of the tour. (see the vid. below from the show)

Starr's Porch, Lookout Mountain

A week later I followed up the trips to Savannah with a week on Lookout Mountain. It was restful and relaxing and cool there, as I house sat for Starr who was in Michigan. She returned late on Friday and we attended a dazzling pool party Saturday, culminating in an intimate swim with Starr, Donna, Katie, Brook, and me which Will happily joined as midnight approached. He serenaded us all poolside after the swim. On Sunday after a leisurely breakfast cooked by Starr and Donna, Will and I hiked to the Waterfall at Cloudland Canyon, concluding my summer trips thus far.

Here are the two main collections of photos from our trips:

http://youtu.be/MTFqt61NL5IFrom the show in Savannah- Vid by John Miller

Super Bass (Nicki Minaj cover)

Jay Brannan - Rappin - Savannah, GA 06-28-2011

www.youtube.com

Jack

Music, New Orleans, and the Creative Process

2011-06-01T17:42:00.005-04:00

Treme continues to be a revelation about New Orleans, not simply about the spirit of the place, how it rose Phoenix-like out of the waste of Katrina, and all the other dismal disasters it has encountered, yet also about how music is created, about the struggle to make it as an artist and a musician. This article from Salon (click) reveals how even the food of New Orleans is connected to its creativity and exemplifies its qualities. The series literally makes me want to live in New Orleans again.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 09:32 ET

Musicians and cooks talk shop on "Treme"

HBO's drama is about post-Katrina life in New Orleans -- but it also brilliantly captures the creative process

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/05/31/treme_season_two_episode/index.html

By Matt Zoller Seitz

David Simon's New Orleans drama "Treme" is very good at many different things, but it has a special knack for showing how artists make art, and what it actually means to make a living from creative work. It's not easy; in fact it's often infuriating, because society at large tends to see creative work as somehow "easier" than other kinds, and because artists themselves tend to be somewhat more eccentric or even volatile than other kinds of people, and more likely to be disconnected from mundane reality.
To say that "Treme" gets all this would be an understatement. In fact, the creative process is often the glue holding the show's other disparate elements together. The most recent episode, "Feels Like Rain," moved this element into the foreground to such a degree that it practically subsumed everything else. It showed the similar thought processes that connect chefs and musicians, and then went further, illustrating how all of life is a creative act, one that's ultimately about creating newness and joy (if we're lucky) and connecting the lessons (and creative achievements) of the past to the present. I was struck by how many of Janette Desautel's lines echoed conversations occurring among the show's many musicians, and how Albert Lambreaux's discussions of sewing mirrored his son Delmond's struggles this season with finding his own voice as a jazz man, a composer-performer trying to reconcile a modern sound with his New Orleans roots. There was a sense that it was all connected, all of a piece. "Treme" always insists on this, of course, but "Feels Like Rain" (written by Tom Piazza and series co-creator Eric Ovrermyer, and directed by Roxann Dawson) put a spotlight on it.
A stray voice overheard during a school marching band rehearsal warned, "We cannot be as good as...You must be better than..." Davis McAlary sounded almost like a restaurant critic reviewing a dish when he said his new band was "Brass funk hip-hop with a bounce twist, heavy on the bass." There was a wonderful bit with Janette very carefully arranging capers on a very thin salmon fillet -- the capers faintly reminding us of the beads that Delmond needed but could not get for his sewing -- and saying, "I think I finally, I don't know, hit my groove with this one." Janette ate what looked like a fabulous meal with Delmond (every meal on "Treme" looks fabulous!) and explicitly connected food and music -- how could she not, with a chef and a musician sitting across each other at the same table? Delmond said, with a touch of wonderment, "I don't think you get to pick to do what you like."
The Dallas developer Nelson Hildalgo had lunch with one of his main connections in town while Annie performed with a trio onstage, and Hildalgo's contact, who's New Orleans to the bone, singled out the clarinet player and said that he reminded him of another clarinet player. (It wasn't dismissive, but complimentary; he was just making an observation.) Antoine decided to hire somebody else to handle the unpleasant administrative grunt work of his band after firing the perpetually tardy Sonny and getting cursed out by him in Dutch; the scene was staged in a way that made us aware that Antoine was hiring a right hand man, or a "straw boss," and this in turn connected that scene with the subplot about Janette returning to New Orleans from New York to help her longtime sous chef, who'd ended up in jail for lack of papers. (The straw boss = the sous chef.)
There was also a wonderful thread running through the whole episode that dealt with the intent behind creating art, and the effect it has on the art itself and on audience response. How political do you want your art to be? How explicitly should the political aspects be expressed? Does getting too political make the art less universal, or more dated? Is art more effective when it makes you think, or when it makes you feel? If you have to choose just one, which should it be?
Davis' "Brass funk hip-hop with a bounce twist, heavy on the bass" described the sound of his new band, but not its purpose, which was to call attention to the plight of New Orleans citizens post-Katrina; he even cited Public Enemy and the Clash as primary inspirations. But will the music that results from this new venture prove inherently more worthy, more important, than the music of John Hiatt, whose performance of his classic "Feels Like Rain" gave the episode its title?
"Treme" itself seemed to have doubts, and they were expressed in the sequence where Annie and her mentor Harley (played by the great singer-songwriter Steve Earle, one of the show's many refugees from "The Wire") watched Hiatt perform the song and then discussed it afterward. Annie's struggle to become a songwriter rather than "just" a player gave this installment -- indeed, much of season 2 -- a through-line, and that really came through in these bits. As she talked about Hiatt, and about that song in particular, you could sense her working through her own purpose as an artist, and asking, in so many words, "What am I about? What do I want to express?"
She thought the song perfectly captured what it was like to be alive in New Orleans in the years following the flood. But then Harley pointed out that Hiatt "...wrote that song 20 years ago, darling, when you had training wheels on your bike and nobody had even heard of Katrina." In other words, it was the perfect song for that moment in New Orleans history, and that point in Annie's own personal history, because it wasn't trying to be anything but an expression of whatever the songwriter happened to be feeling when he wrote it. (The song Annie was heard working on near the end of the episode sounded much more natural and affecting than the one she was working on last week; whatever lesson she learned must have stuck.)
Has there ever been a dramatic series that talked about art in such a nitty-gritty way? If so, it's not springing to mind. The talk about music and art and food and the creative process generally reminds me of being a kid and hearing my jazz musician parents talk about music, and writing and performing, while playing records for each other on the family turntable. That brilliant early scene with Antoine telling his students about jazz, and pointing out that jazz improvisation is essentially writing music in real time, reminded me of something that my dad, a jazz pianist and composer, told me years ago: "Most people don't realize that improvisation and composition are different versions of the same thing. Improvisation is composition speeded up. Composition is improvisation slowed down."
"Treme" is valuable for a lot of reasons, but one of its subtle, at times almost secret values is its ability to demystify the artistic process and show that it's slightly mysterious in its heart but ultimately practical in its details. It's like any other pursuit: you just keep working at it and working at it until it feels right, and if you're experienced and are paying attention, you realize you've made your point, and know when to stop.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/05/31/treme_season_two_episode/index.html

Wilde Love

2011-05-27T16:29:00.010-04:00

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") in 1893 (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library)

David Hare's The Judas Kiss provided much food for thought, and like the food Oscar Wilde eats in the British hotel room, it is a bit cold and fishy. The acting at the Actor's Express last night was powerful and moving, yet it could not overcome the sense that the story isn't believable. Was Bosie a boring snob who used and abused his older friend? No doubt. Yet the story has to show us why or how Wilde came to love the man so much. After all, both Bosie and Wilde had sex with many beautiful boys. What was it about Bosie that seized Oscar's heart and held it? This play doesn't even give us a clue. I don't buy it.

The Judas Kiss turns the Love that dare not speak its name into an unspeakable obsession. Not only does Bosie betray Wilde, so too does his first male lover, Robbie Ross, who is alternately jealous, guilty, and in cahoots with Oscar's wife Constance. Perhaps the play isn't homophobic, but despite its love of Oscar Wilde, himself, it portrays Oscar's affections as misguided and destructive.

It was not Bosie and not Robbie who caused Oscar Wilde's imprisonment and ruin. Wilde clearly loved both of these men. Neither relationship was the cause of his arrest or conviction. Bosie's homophobic father's insults, Wilde's suit, and Queensberry's counter charges brought the trial. Neil McKenna's 2005 biography, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, reveals all the interconnected political and social intrigue. Still, few realize that were Oscar Wilde tried in Atlanta, Georgia today, he would be sentenced to far more years in prison. Having any kind of sex at all with boys under eighteen, as many who testified at his trial were, would lead to up to ten years in prison. Clearly, it was the testimony of these underage rent boys that, after two trials, produced the desired conviction.

What strikes me as oddest of all is that this predicament is not so different from what happens among the so-called straights. Men marry, their wives grow old, often uninterested in sex (at least with them) , and the men go out looking for much younger women. No doubt liberated women have a similar experience. On the purely physical level, the quest often descends into materialistic prostitution and/or dangerous liaisons. The road to sordid decadence is busy with drivers of all persuasions.

All of which brings me back to love. If Wilde was anything, he was wildly romantic. Ultimately, we shall never know why he loved Alfred Lord Douglas so passionately. Love is intimate and private. I dare say no two genuine relationships of love are the same. The very word, love, has become inadequate to describe the passion existing between those who deeply care for one another. Our world's pressure to conform, to follow the accepted, deluded path of monogamous marriage, children, work, and religion (or to pretend to do so) has become even more of a straightjacket than the Victorians wore.

The existentialist Gabriel Marcel points out the vital difference between being and having. Do you want to have a partner or spouse, or to be a partner or spouse. Our passion for others should be about merging our being with theirs, not about possessing them and controlling them. Once again, Simone De Beauvoir wrote about and exemplified this passion. I think Oscar Wilde did as well.

Jack 5/26/11

Here is an excerpt from De Profundis, Wilde's letter to Bosie, written at the end of Wilde's prison term:

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Ageism: the New Racism

2011-05-18T19:24:00.015-04:00

Simone De Beauvoir

Simone De Beauvoir wrote in Coming of Age about the prejudice against the elderly in Western society. In the decades since, the maltreatment of the aging, especially in the United States, has worsened. The worship of and obsession with youth and the assumption that the old are repulsive, deranged, and damaged are the perpetual themes of the mass media. Only the bravest of artists and most radical of counter-culture voices decry the "secret shame" of the bigotry against the old. Often that bigotry is subtle and sophisticated.

Take, for instance, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. Under cover of attacking the privileged rich, she calls the 62-year-old suspect in the Strauss-Kahn case "a crazed, rutting, wrinkly old satyr charging naked" into the room. Whether or not this man is a rapist, her statement indicts all old men as repulsive. Yes, there are certainly old rapists. There are young rapists. If you want a portrait of young women child molesters and rapists, read John Irving's Until I find You. The generalization that one member of a class of people is evil, therefore the whole class is bad, is at the heart of most bigotry. Dowd, of all people, should realize this.

Today I read an essay in the Paris Review about Andrew Lytle ** written by a man who took care of him when "Mister Lytle" was 92 and the author 20. It is a tribute to both men. Despite the fascinating twist on sexuality in the story, I loved the author's precise, vivid description of Lytle after which he writes,

"I found him exotic; it’s probably accurate to say that I found him beautiful."

At 63 I am just beginning to be aware of the prejudice against me as an old man. I'm used to decades of experiencing prejudice from those who know I am gay. This second bigotry is far more insidious, and potentially far more isolating. All I can think to do by way of combat is to post articles like the one above on Lytle and a few portraits of other old human beings I think are beautiful:

Louise Bourgeous and art piece

Bertrand Russell
With pipe

See also:

‘Frankenfolks’ And The Rise Of Ageism

Agewise: Fighting The New Ageism In America by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press, 2011

Jack Miller

(White Male, Age 63. Beautiful)

** Lytle was famous at Sewanee, where I got my undergraduate degree in Philosophy. I knew Allen Tate, of the essay, who was there when I was. We introduced Mr. Tate to our new, blacklight, hippie coffeehouse in 1968.

Hallelujah!

2011-05-04T14:44:00.002-04:00

Having heard this song many times since hearing Leonard Cohen, himself, sing it in concert, having recorded Will singing it, and talking about it and about the moving Jeff Buckley version of the song, this article Dar forwarded to me yesterday is a revelation.

(The version I love with "Dark" replacing "Dove")

Hallelujah!

One haunting ballad has been the soundtrack to many lives recently. But why? Bryan Appleyard on Leonard Cohen’s uber-song

Songs are everywhere. We buy them and play them, of course, but we are also subjected to them in pubs, cafes, lifts and shops. You see people in cars singing along to the radio, and on trains they nod and rock to their MP3 players. Unthinkingly, we stroll along humming the latest pop pap. A visiting alien might reasonably conclude that we are sustained by songs rather than air, food or water. Songs are thus the dominant expressive form of our time. Yet most of them barely exist in our consciousness at all. Mass-produced drivel, they drift around the charts for a week or two, insinuate themselves into some particularly indiscriminating part of our brain for a while, and then are gone. Some have an afterlife as instant mood music for television shows, films or advertisements. But, by and large, songs are the supremely disposable art form of our time.
The exceptions are obvious. A few songs or performances are good enough to last, and some are just bad but evocative, and are therefore continuously recycled. Abba’s songs aren’t as good as everybody says they are, but they work in a way that makes them eminently usable. Equally, almost any rubbish that struck it big in the late 1960s can now be used to sell stuff to the moist-eyed middle-aged, who have discovered, to their infinite sorrow, that they were not, in the event, born to be wild.
All of which brings me to the story of one particular song that seems, through some mysterious alchemy, to have done everything a modern song can do. Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah has been papped, drivelled, exploited and massacred. It has also produced some very great performances, and it is, in truth, a very great song. In a fundamental sense, at least partly intended by Cohen, it is a song about the contemporary condition of song.
Even if you think you haven’t heard it, I can guarantee you have. It has been covered by, among many others, Allison Crowe, kd lang, Damien Rice, Bono, Sheryl Crow and Kathryn Williams. Bob Dylan has sung it live, a performance that has, apparently, been bootlegged. It has been used in films and on television. Rufus Wainwright sang it on the soundtrack of Shrek, Jeff Buckley’s version was used on The West Wing and The OC, John Cale sang it on Scrubs, and so on. Cale’s is the best version I have heard — pure, cold and scarcely inflected at all, it sends shivers down the spine.
Other songs may have been covered more — in Cohen’s oeuvre, Suzanne, with 124 versions, and Bird on the Wire, with 78, come out ahead of, at the last count, Hallelujah’s 44. And other songs may have made it onto more soundtracks. But there is something unique about Hallelujah, something that tells us a great deal about who we now are.
Cohen recorded it on his 1985 album Various Positions. It seemed destined, at that point, to remain in the same memory vault as most of his work. Fans would love it, aficionados would acknowledge it as a fine piece of songwriting, but otherwise it would just be an addition to the repertoire of great Cohen songs, a large though highly specialised musical sector.
Then, in 1994, Jeff Buckley released a version on his album Grace. This sold millions worldwide, and Grace’s status was finally and fully elevated to “legendary” when Buckley drowned in the Mississippi in 1997. He was the son of Tim Buckley, an extraordinary singer-songwriter who had also died young in mysterious circumstances. A wild and fatal romanticism seemed to hang over the family, over Grace and over the song that everybody found themselves singing from that album, Hallelujah. It was, unquestionably, Buckley’s version rather than Cohen’s that was to make the song universally recognisable.
This is fair enough. Buckley, like his father, had a phenomenal vocal range, and Cohen, famously, has not. Many of Cohen’s best songs — Alexandra Leaving, Famous Blue Raincoat — are exactly suited to his low groan. But Hallelujah is not. It needs to be sung, and Buckley really sang it, whispering and screaming his way through its bitter verses. His interpretation is a little lush for me, but it was better than Cohen’s, and it was exactly that lush- ness that projected it onto all those soundtracks and caught the attention of all those other singers.
What then became really odd about the song was the utterly contradictory way in which it was used and understood. This was, in part, due to the fact that Cohen seems to have written at least two versions. The first ended on a relatively upbeat note:
“And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah!” It was this ending, curiously, that Dylan especially liked, as he told Cohen over coffee after a concert in Paris. Cohen sang him the last verse, saying it was “a rather joyous song”. (Incidentally, during the same conversation, Cohen told Dylan that Hallelujah had taken a year to write. This startled Dylan. He pointed out that his average writing time was about 15 minutes.) Anyway, for once, Dylan’s taste had led him astray, because the bleaker ending in the Buckley version is much better, in the sense that it is more consistent. There is no redemptive Lord of Song, the only lesson of love is “how to shoot at someone who outdrew you” and the only hallelujah is “cold and broken”.
Encouraged by this apparently official duality, subsequent covers tinkered here and there with the words to the point where the song became protean, a set of possibilities rather than a fixed text. But only two possibilities predominated: either this was a wistful, ultimately feelgood song or it was an icy, bitter commentary on the futility of human relations.
It is easy to justify the first reading. There are the repeated hallelujahs of the soothingly hymn-like chorus, and there is a gently rocking tunefulness about the whole thing. This, if you didn’t listen too closely, was what made it such perfect material for that supremely vacuous show The OC. Young, rich people — especially in California — often feel the need to look soulful and deep on camera, and the sound of doomed, youthful Buckley sighing Hallelujah as they all pondered the state of their relationships must have seemed about right.
But, of course, Cohen doesn’t write songs like that. What he most commonly does is pour highly concentrated acid into very sweet and lyrical containers. Never in his entire career has he done this as well as he did in the second version of Hallelujah. The song begins with a statement about the pointlessness of art. Addressing a woman, Cohen writes of a secret chord discovered by King David. But he knows the woman doesn’t really care for music. Nevertheless, he describes the lost music, as if to Bathsheba, the woman whose beauty overthrew David:
“Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor fall and the major lift The baffled king composing hallelujah.”
The art is futile, because the woman doesn’t care. Instead, she humiliates and destroys the man, though, even as she does so, “from your lips she drew the hallelujah”. Man needs woman more than he needs art. The ejaculated hallelujah — a cry of praise to the Lord — is drawn forth not by David’s secret chord, but by his subjugation to Bathsheba. The remainder of the song brilliantly weaves this theme through a cinematic description of a failed affair, combined with strange but delicate images of a military parade, a “holy dove” and a western shoot-out. The fourth verse comes close to a genuinely optimistic eroticism.
“But remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew was hallelujah.”
But the lover concludes that there is nothing more to love than a “cold and broken hallelujah”. Sexual love is, sadly, what we need, but is it what we want? It is hard to imagine a more bitterly subversive and countercultural question.
The aesthetic trick at the heart of this is the undermining of the word hallelujah. It means praise to the Lord, but it is, basically, just a musical sound, like lalala or yeah, yeah, yeah. Describing the chord structure in those three lines in the first verse makes the words, sort of literally, into the music. Similarly, the chorus, which consists simply of the repetition of the word, is pure song, in which the words and music are inseparable. And it is a pure pop song or contemporary hymn — a catchy, uplifting tune and a comforting word. It has almost a sing-along quality. The words become the happy tune, the tune gets into your head and, once there, reveals itself as a serpent. For what you will actually be singing along to is arid sex, destroyed imagination, misogyny and emotional violence.
All of these have to be gone through to get to the “hallelujah”: a romantic affirmation, certainly, but only of the pain of our predicament. After that conversation with Dylan, Cohen compared himself to Flaubert, meaning only that he was a slow writer. But he was more right than he knew. Like Flaubert, he sees the erotic as a kind of poison, deadening the artist and dragging him back to earth; and, like Flaubert, he delights in describing this awful insight.
So, the Hallelujah that adorns the flaccid sexual crises in The OC and adds soul to the babbling shenanigans of The West Wing is a brilliant fake. It sounds like a pop song, but it isn’t. Like the Velvet Underground’s Heroin, Bob Dylan’s Leopard-Skin Pill- Box Hat, John Phillips’s Let It Bleed, Genevieve or even Frank Sinatra’s I Get Along Without You Very Well, it is a tuneful but ironic mask worn to conceal bitter, atonal failure.
Of course, this is such an effective aesthetic trick precisely because of the way songs have seeped into our lives. Instrumental versions of Heroin or Let It Bleed, Genevieve — the first advocating the nihilism of addiction, the second about a man who cares nothing for his girlfriend miscarrying in the basement — would go perfectly well in a lift or clothes shop, just as Hallelujah can slot into almost any television show you can imagine.
These works use familiarity, even banality, as a weapon. They remind us that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there is a real world beyond the pap, that perhaps we should try listening rather than just hearing, that words like hallelujah just need a brief touch of genius to be brought back to life, and that Leonard Cohen, who was 70 last year, needs to be with us for a good few years yet. Check out the Cale version: erotic failure never felt so good.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article409551.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

http://youtu.be/Pid0nCrsQxM (Jeff Buckley Version)

The John Cale version: http://youtu.be/vEOZLQ3d1FI

Jack

Treme Returns and so does New Orleans

2011-04-25T08:33:00.002-04:00

Good review of Treme. It was great seeing John Boutte on the show-- Heard him and talked with him at length last summer at dba.

Jack

Steve Zahn and Lucia Micarelli in "Treme."

Credit: HBO

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/review-hbos-treme-returns-for-season-2

As we return to the post-Katrina New Orleans of "Treme" for the start of season two (Sunday night at 10 on HBO), things are in many ways much better for the musicians, chefs and other locals we met in the drama's first season.

Itinerant trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) decides the time is right to form and front his own band, while his ex-wife LaDonna (Khandi Alexander) coincidentally decides to expand her bar's business by adding live music. Trouble-making DJ Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) tries to start a record label to promote his love of the city's bounce music, while his violinist friend Annie (Lucia Micarelli) finally starts establishing herself in the local music scene. Mardi Gras Indian chief Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) gets to work patching up the home that was destroyed in the storm, while his trumpet-playing son Delmond (Rob Brown) sets out to reinvent his sound and, in the process, reconnect with his New Orleans roots.

Most of these characters have moved past mere survival now. Their lives have found some level of post-Katrina equilibrium, and now they're all looking to build something. It's an attitude exemplified by one of this season's two new characters, Nelson Hidalgo (Jon Seda), a carpetbagger from Texas looking to get rich by helping to reconstruct the devastated city.

But even as many of the people of "Treme" are doing much better than when last we saw them, the city itself - only 14 months removed from the storm - is in more dire straits than ever. At this point in time, people have returned to New Orleans, but so has crime, at a rate and volume that's far more than the city's police force - represented by the show's other new regular character, Lt. Terry Colson (David Morse) - can handle. Half the city is on anti-depressants, and there's a sense the other half probably would be if they had a minute to pause and recognize how they're really feeling.

That mix of ambition and indecision, of construction and devastation, provides the backdrop for a second season that's unlikely to change the series' reputation as The Wonderful Show Where Very Little Happens, but only because change to the show seems to only come as incrementally as it does to the city.

"Treme" was co-created (with Eric Overmyer) by David Simon, whose last HBO series was the densely-plotted great American novel for television "The Wire." So the new show's focus on atmosphere over story, on small character beats over big developments, has been a tough transition for some viewers, even the ones ready to follow Simon and fellow "Wire" alums Pierce and Peters anywhere thanks to their work on The Best Show Ever.

I understand the reluctance to embrace the laid-back aesthetic of "Treme," even though I don't share it. But I will say this: in season two, the strengths of "Treme" remain strengths, while some of the show's weaknesses have been much improved.

First, the stuff that worked before and continues to do so: The atmosphere, sense of place and absolute love of that place are all second to none on television. As a love letter to the city of New Orleans, to its culture and food and (especially) its music, "Treme" was, is and will likely continue to be fantastic. And the performances remain among the best you'll find. Alexander and newly-minted Oscar winner Melissa Leo continue to shine as a pair of strong women still grieving over the loss of, respectively, a brother and a husband. Pierce is still a superhuman reservoir of charm, Kim Dickens (as Janette Desautel, a chef who has fled to New York after the post-storm failure of her restaurant) still so touching and vulnerable (and this year has material largely written by celebrity chef/foodie Anthony Bourdain), and Morse (who appeared briefly last season) such a natural fit as a wise but weary veteran cop with no idea how to keep his district together, nevermind the city.

And, hell, the music alone (with the actors, other than professional violinist Micarelli, largely faking it while working alongside real-life fixtures of the New Orleans music scene) is often worth the time investment. Regardless of the style - traditional jazz, bounce, funk, classical and everything in between - the musical numbers are done with so much joy that it doesn't matter if they're only sometimes informative of character or plot.

As for the areas that were more problematic a year ago, the new season definitely feels like it has more forward momentum. It takes a while to get there - I've seen 5 episodes, and had a conversation with a friend who had only seen 3 and felt like the pace was just as ambling as before - but after a while there's a much clearer sense that there are stories being told here beyond "character X tries to pay the bills and hold onto their sanity," and that many of the stories tie together in a way they didn't before.

The simple fact that Batiste - the closest the ensemble show has to a lead character - has a storyline at all this year, as opposed to what was essentially an ongoing situation last season, is a huge step forward in that area. Characters seemingly cross paths more frequently than before, and even as Delmond and Janette spend much of the early episodes off in New York, an effort is made to keep them tied to life in New Orleans.

And some of the new character combinations feel more promising than what was there before. Last season, Annie was dating Sonny (Michiel Huisman), a bitter junkie resentful of her greater talent and determined to hold her down at his level. Being paired instead with Zahn's goofball Davis brings out more of Micarelli's inherent sunniness. And once Sonny is no longer a weight at the ankle of Annie and has only to deal with the limitations of his talent in a city with no shortage of better musicians, he becomes a much more interesting and, dare I say it, sympathetic figure.

There are still frayed edges that haven't quite been dealt with. Where the Baltimore of "The Wire" was filled entirely with fictional characters and events - even if many of them were heavily-drawn from real ones - "Treme" has an at times awkward mix of the fictional and the real. Lt. Colson, for instance, spends a lot of time discussing real-life New Orleans PD scandals that are in his recent past but took place 5 or 6 years ago for us, and those scenes never quite feel connected to the lives of the show's characters.

Leo's crusading lawyer Toni Burnette again has to play private detective to find out what happened to a young man who died in the storm's aftermath, but where last year that quest had a personal stake for the audience because the man in question was LaDonna's brother, here it's the son of a new character we meet briefly and don't see again. (Leo gets much better material in showing how Toni and daughter Sofia, well-played by India Ennenga, are coping with the aftermath of her husband's suicide.)

And while the show takes a fairly nuanced approach to Nelson Hidalgo - he could easily come across as a caricatured opportunist, but instead is written and played as a guy who wants to make a buck but also seems to genuinely fall in love with his adopted new city - Seda is still largely off in his own show for most of the 5 episodes I've seen. He represents the theme of building, but I'm hopeful he gets more integrated with the other regulars before the season's out.

Still, the great vastly outweighs the problematic from where I sit, and the small detail work remains wonderful. The first 5 episodes are packed with great moments, not only for the main characters, but for the people of the city as a whole. Antoine winds up with a music teaching job to help pay the bills, and during one class, the kids are thrown into an utter, understandable panic when a rainstorm gets a little too intense. A later episode features a funeral for a local jazz man attended by what seems like every player in the city; as the man's coffin is being loaded onto the horse-drawn hearse, we see a beautiful tableau of every musician holding his or her instrument aloft as a show of respect.

Even with slight tweaks and an upward narrative trajectory, "Treme" is never going to be a mass-appeal hit - is unlikely, in fact, to even become a fiercely-cherished cult item like "The Wire" was. But I don't think Simon, Overmyer or anyone else involved has any illusions of broad success with this project. Like so many of the characters on the show, if they wanted to hit it big, they'd be doing something else; they do this out of a deep, unbreakable love for this city and its traditions.

Or, as an incredulous Delmond says when an interviewer asks him how his new album is selling, "'Selling'? It's jazz, man."

Alan Sepinwall

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/review-hbos-treme-returns-for-season-2

Leonardo's Birthday

2011-04-15T10:04:00.002-04:00

Mona Lisa model was a male say Italian researchers

By Eleanor Ide (AFP) – Feb 2, 2011

ROME — Italian researchers who specialise in resolving art mysteries said Wednesday they have discovered the disputed identity of the model for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa -- and claimed he was a man.
Silvano Vinceti, chairman of the Italian national committee for cultural heritage, said the Florence-born Renaissance artist's male apprentice and possible lover Salai was the main inspiration for the picture.
However his claim was immediately disputed by experts at the Louvre in Paris, where the painting is on display.
Salai, real name Gian Giacomo Caprotti, an effeminate young artist who worked with da Vinci for 25 years, is thought to have served as a model and muse for several of his paintings. The pair had an "ambiguous" relationship and were probably lovers, Vinceti said.
Comparisons between the facial characteristics of figures from several of da Vinci's works -- such as "St. John the Baptist" and the "Angel Incarnate" -- reveal striking similarities with the Mona Lisa's nose and mouth, he said.
"There are remarkable similarities," Vinceti told reporters.
What is more, Vinceti said da Vinci had left clues to the model's identity in tiny letters L and S which he and his team found painted into the eyes of the Mona Lisa.
"Close examination of a high-quality digital copy of the portrait had revealed an L for Leonardo and an S for Salai," he said.
But Vinceti's claims have been disputed by the Louvre museum.
The museum said it had carried out "every possible laboratory test possible" on the picture in 2004 and then again in 2009, and insisted that "no inscriptions, letters or numbers, were discovered during the tests."
"The ageing of the painting on wood has caused a great number of cracks to appear in the paint, which have caused a number of shapes to appear that have often been subject to over-interpretation," the Louvre told AFP.
The museum also said Vinceti's had made his claims without having had access to the painting itself.
The Italian aficionado, whose team gained notoriety with their claims surrounding the death of Caravaggio last year, said he felt sorry for the embarrassment the museum must feel on having missed the clues all these years.
"I can understand their incredulity and amazement -- after all this must be the most studied picture on earth," he told AFP, but added "they're really blind."
"They have to be serious and accept that they didn't see what was right in front of their eyes," he said.
In order to clear up any lingering doubt over his theory -- worthy of Dan Brown's 2003 bestseller the "Da Vinci Code" -- Vinceti said he would be willing to take his team to France and collaborate on further tests with the Louvre.
"We're ready to go to Paris and extract a tiny bit of paint from the numbers and see whether they match the rest of the painting, to see if they were done at the same time or are marks that have appeared over time," he said.
Whether the prestigious art museum will take Vinceti up on his offer is yet to be seen.

On the Eve of our brief April Break

2011-04-06T22:41:00.001-04:00

The video below (posted April 4) is one I made a couple of weeks ago with Will. We've become good friends and I greatly admire his musical talent.
Tomorrow after a two hour stint at my school I shall have the remainder of Thursday and Friday off. I had thought of going to Savannah, but decided instead to relax here, with warm evenings on the porch. There are financial items, including my taxes, that I need to do. I also look forward to continuing to read John Irving's Until I Find You. What a superb writer he is.
This spring, my reading, my nights of dialog with Will, and the approach in a year or two of retirement have flooded my mind with nostalgia, with memories especially of Jim and Jake and Julian. Completing a first typed draft of my novel has added to all of this remembrance as well.
Spring has also brought storms and shifts in feeling with the shifting extremes of temperature (today began at 36 and went in mere hours to 76). And so it goes.

Atlanta Lightning

from Wikipedia

Jack

Will Thigpen - Crazy - Gnarls Barkley cover

2011-04-04T21:33:00.005-04:00

Video By Jack

Also, See Will's cover of Can't Always Get What You Want:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI2ob8PIDHs

Enjoy.

Jack

Spring Break 2011

2011-03-13T12:53:00.002-04:00

Spring Break Photos:

Walnut Bridge,
Chattanooga

https://picasaweb.google.com/dargossett/CloudlandAndNGa?authkey=Gv1sRgCOGKwrnzg8fmwgE#

and

https://picasaweb.google.com/dargossett/ChattanoogaMarch11?authkey=Gv1sRgCIqn5vjU1430Rw#

Darryl at the upper falls

Cloudland Canyon

Howl

2011-03-07T20:05:00.001-05:00

Jack Miller
http://www.lafferty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ginsberg_howl_naropa_1975.mp3
Listen.
Ginsberg Howl Naropa 1975
www.lafferty.ca
March 18 at 9:14pm ·

The review below of the film is as much about Ginsberg, himself, as the film, which is why I like it so much...

Colin Carman

Howl
Directed by Rab Epstein
& Jeffrey Friedman
Werc Werk Works Production

“I’M COMING thru a stage of puberty and new horizons are opening up. ... I am no longer bored by life in general because of my extra-curricular activities. I haven’t the time to be bored.” The author of this diary entry from 1941 is the famed American poet Allen Ginsberg who, at the tender age of fourteen, vowed to never be bored, or boring, again. When Time profiled the writer and his circle in 1959, the magazine mocked the 33-year-old poet as that “recognized leader of the pack of oddballs who celebrate booze, dope, sex, and despair and who go by the name of beatniks.” “Howl,” Ginsberg’s landmark poem and preface to the Beat generation, has been called a lot of things since its publication in 1956—radical, visionary, vulgar—but the one thing it’s not is boring.

    Neither is Howl the movie, co-written and co-directed by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet), which opened last year’s Sundance Film Festival and stars James Franco as the counter-cultural icon. The film is a composite of three interlocking narratives: a candid interview with the writer on the genesis of both his poem and his proud homosexuality; an incantatory reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in the fall of 1955 (with Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg’s sexual muse, Neal Cassady, in attendance); and animations by art director Eric Drooker, whose hallucinatory renderings of the poem’s “angelheaded hipsters” and “saintly motorcyclists” breathe new life into Ginsberg’s lines. There are kaleidoscopic visions of copulating couples, saxophones that shoot fire, and a graphic representation of what Ginsberg called the “heterosexual dollar” in which the pyramidal eye on the dollar bill explodes into scenes of childbirth and fellatio. This triptych makes Howl less of a biopic than a genre that scarcely exists on the big screen: a “lit flick,” an explication de texte, a work of literary exegesis on film.

    Recreating the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl and Other Poems, Epstein and Friedman stage a veritable round-robin of name actors: David Strathairn for the prosecution and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm for the defense, along with Treat Williams, Jeff Daniels, and Mary-Louise Parker as witnesses who either defend or deny the poem’s artistic merit. Then there’s Franco, a surprising choice to play Ginsberg, spurring Vanity Fair (Oct. 20, 2010) to quip: “I saw the best movies of my generation destroyed by miscasting.” Franco’s goyish glamour is indeed distracting—he’s a veteran of the “Spider-Man” franchise and a Gucci model—but he faithfully captures the poet’s north Jersey accent as he beds Jon Prescott (as Cassady) and Aaron Tveit (as Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s lifelong partner) with all the playful tenderness that defined the poet’s persona. Not your typical leading man, Franco recently appeared in drag on the cover of Candy, a magazine devoted to what it calls “transversal,” and in 2008 he played Scott Smith to Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk. Coincidentally, Franco is enrolled in a writing program at Columbia University, Ginsberg’s alma mater (from which he was suspended in 1945). He told The New York Times (Sept. 12, 2010): “I’d have the little book with me, and I’d listen to him, and I’d just read along with him to just ingrain that voice in my head.”

    Howl poignantly explores the writer’s irrepressible need to shock. Ginsberg, after all, went to incredible lengths never to bore his lovers or his listeners. When a heckler at a reading in Los Angeles in 1957 shouted “What are you trying to prove?”, the author exclaimed “Nakedness!” and promptly disrobed on stage. Howl the film examines this impulse from a more personal angle, giving us those excruciating moments when Ginsberg’s dirty jokes fell flat in front of his first loves, Kerouac and Cassady. Catching up with the two after the road trip that inspired Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg spent what biographer Jane Kramer called in Allen Ginsberg in America (1969) an “awkward month” with the pair, feeling every bit the “lonely college boy who needed love ... and a lot of attention.” Howl the film undresses that need, suggesting that nakedness in both its physical and verbal forms was Ginsberg’s idea of perfection. The film’s most revealing moment comes at the end when the poet, fixing himself a cup of tea and reflecting on the cultural movement he defiantly inspired, tells his interviewer that “Howl” is not the “promotion of homosexuality” it was perceived to be, but a promotion of honesty more generally. “When people are frank about homosexuality in public, it breaks the ice,” says Franco in a fake-looking beard, “then people are free to be frank about anything, and that’s socially useful.”

Colin Carman, PhD, is a frequent contributor to this magazine, and teaches English literature at Colorado Mountain College.

http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=316

Ouroboros

2011-03-04T15:40:00.004-05:00

Ouroboros

From Carl Jung's

Red Book

From Egypt's and the North Africa/Middle-East's uprisings and revolution to Carnival and Mardi Gras in such cities as Rio, Sydney, Venice, and New Orleans, the quest for primal unity and Dionysian ecstasy coincides this year with the arrival of springtime and the approach of the Vernal Equinox. A Tidal Wave is arising from the Collective Unconscious. 2011 is becoming a year of upheaval.

Last night I watched the Jung themed episode of the UK version of Skins in which key character Tony fucks his beautiful Jungian Anima and finds wholeness for himself and his loved ones. It is a remarkable 46 minutes as full of meaning and rich symbolism as Jung's Man and his Symbols.
(I know this is hard to believe- I was amazed)
(Watch it yourself-- though you won't know a few details.)

http://watch-skins-online.com/skins-uk-season-2-episode-6-tony/ (click)

There is a new film soon to appear about Jung and Freud-- A Dangerous Method

If it generates new interest in Jung, so much the better, though I wonder how much it will expand over the provocative relationship the 30-year-old Jung had with his creative, voluptuous 18- year- old patient Sabina.

Today, I have read about Octavio Paz and reviewed material on Marx and the existentialists, especially Sartre. Along with Simone De Beauvoir, they all write of the alienation and dread the modern world has brought. Here is the heart of what is amiss in the world and that Jung recognized so well-- We have been cut off from the essence of life, we are cut off from nature ecologically, from life by our meaningless jobs or our need for money, from one another ethnically, from our collective unconscious wholeness by our lost and competitive egos. We crave festivals, drunkenness, drugs, oblivion to remove the alienation and loneliness of life in a materialistic world ruled by greed and war.

Such has been our condition since the industrial age, worsening in the emptiness of the Eisenhower years and the wrong-headed war in Viet Nam. The Beats, Ginsberg, Kerouac, poets, song writers, artists have all seen the alienation and spent their lives trying to reconnect us with our holistic center, our Buddha Natures, Our beatitude. It takes art, poetry and music to bring us to our authenticity. And I still wonder whether it is possible to go beyond isolated communes of awareness, little gardens of Epicurean wisdom, to an expanded state of global consciousness that will save us from our doom.

For now, for the first week of March, a glass of champagne, Michael Cunningham's new novel, and ten glorious days with no obligations other than a hike in the woods along the trails of Cloudland Canyon.

Here is a fascinating Audio of an interview with Jungians. (CLICK)

2045

2011-02-21T11:21:00.001-05:00

Immortality is just decades away

Aubrey de Grey

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

By Lev Grossman

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.
On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")
Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.
But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.
That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away. (See the best inventions of 2010.)
Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.
True? True.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.
If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.
Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity. (Comment on this story.)
The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.
See pictures of cinema's most memorable robots.
From TIME's archives: "Can Machines Think?"
See TIME's special report on gadgets, then and now.
People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there's more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language. (See "Is Technology Making Us Lonelier?")
The Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an "intelligence explosion":
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good's intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that "within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He'd been busy since his appearance on I've Got a Secret. He'd made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology. (See pictures of adorable robots.)
But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence."(See the world's most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.)
In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He's good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I've looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?
Kurzweil's interest in humanity's cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. "Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project," he says. "So it's like skeet shooting — you can't shoot at the target." He knew about Moore's law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It's a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.
As it turned out, Kurzweil's numbers looked a lot like Moore's. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900. (Comment on this story.)
Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.
See TIME's video "Five Worst Inventions."
See the 100 best gadgets of all time.
Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we're not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. "It's not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we're trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it's going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains."
Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today. (See how robotics are changing the future of medicine.)
The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.
Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.
In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology. (See TIME's computer covers.)
At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James "the Amazing" Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.
After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.
For example, it's well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger. (Comment on this story.)
Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."
Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father's genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.
From TIME's archives: "The Immortality Enzyme."
See Healthland's 5 rules for good health in 2011.
But his goal differs slightly from de Grey's. For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.
It's an idea that's radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailing to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. "There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people," he says. "But the idea of significant changes to human longevity — that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that's the major reason we have religion." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2010.)
Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.
The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet.
Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit. "Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits," he argued, in a talk titled "What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't," "they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. (See how to live 100 years.)
Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?
Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?
Kurzweil admits that there's a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that's impossible to refine away, simply because we don't know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don't have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error. (Comment on this story.)
If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. "It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban," he says. "It wouldn't work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we're counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools."
Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He's tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.
See TIME's photo-essay "A Global Look at Longevity."
See how genes, gender and diet may be life extenders.
Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. "Generally speaking," he says, "the core of a disagreement I'll have with a critic is, they'll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don't believe I'm underestimating the challenge. I think they're underestimating the power of exponential growth."
This position doesn't make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's called the Blue Brain project, and it's an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram's team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat's brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you'd then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?) (See portraits of centenarians.)
By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. "When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept," he says. "So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I've tried to push myself to really look."
In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.
We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species. (See the costs of living a long life.)
Or it isn't. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.
But as for the minor questions, they're already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?
Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn't strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits. (Comment on this story.)
A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century's answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they'll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney's Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.
But even if they're dead wrong about the future, they're right about the present. They're taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

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http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html

Wisdom from Epicurus and Diogenes

2011-02-03T20:45:00.003-05:00

Egypt. Photo by Dar

As the world in general and my inner circle in particular struggle with the riddles of existence in this new millennium, I find Epicurus and his compatriot Diogenes to offer sage solutions:

The fundamental obstacle to happiness, says Epicurus, is anxiety. No matter how rich or famous you are, you won't be happy if you're anxious to be richer or more famous. No matter how good your health is, you won't be happy if you're anxious about getting sick. You can't be happy in this life if you're worried about the next life. You can't be happy as a human being if you're worried about being punished or victimized by powerful divine beings. But you can be happy if you believe in the four basic truths of Epicureanism: there are no divine beings which threaten us; there is no next life; what we actually need is easy to get; what makes us suffer is easy to put up with. This is the so-called 'four-part cure', the Epicurean remedy for the epidemic sickness of human anxiety; as a later Epicurean puts it, "Don't fear god, don't worry about death; what's good is easy to get, and what's terrible is easy to endure."¹

"What's good is easy to get." We need food, water, shelter from the elements, and safety from hostile animals and people. All these things lie ready to hand and can be acquired with little effort or money. We don't need caviar, champagne, palaces, or bodyguards, which are expensive and difficult to acquire and keep. People who want more than they need are making a fundamental mistake, a mistake that reduces their chances of being satisfied and causes needless anxiety. While our bodies need food, water, shelter, and safety, all that our souls need is to be confident that our bodies will get what they need. If my body is contented and my soul is confident, then I will be cheerful, and being cheerful is the key to being happy. As long as we are cheerful it takes very little to keep us happy, but without cheerfulness we cannot really enjoy even the so-called 'pleasures' of life. Being cheerful is a state which is full of pleasure—indeed Epicurus calls it 'the limit of pleasure'—and it is a normal state, but if we suffer from anxiety we need to train ourselves to attain and maintain it. The discipline of Epicurean philosophy enables its followers to recognize how little they actually need, to enjoy possessing it, and to enjoy the confidence that they will continue to possess it. On the other hand, there is no reason not to enjoy occasional luxuries, if they happen to be easily available. There is nothing wrong with luxury in itself, but any dependence on luxuries is harmful to our happiness, as is every desire for unnecessary things.

"What's terrible is easy to endure." There is no denying that illness and pain are disagreeable, but nature has so constituted us that we need not suffer very much from them. Sickness is either brief or chronic, and either mild or intense, but discomfort that is both chronic and intense is very unusual; so there is no need to be concerned about the prospect of suffering. This is admittedly a difficult teaching to accept, especially for young people, but as people get older and more experienced in putting up with suffering, they tend to recognize its truth more and more, as did the Roman philosopher Seneca, whose health was anything but strong.² Epicurus himself died in excruciating pain, from kidney failure after two weeks of pain caused by kidney stones; but he died cheerfully, he claimed, because he kept in mind the memory of his friends and the agreeable experiences and conversations they had had together. Mental suffering, unlike physical suffering, is agony to endure, but once you grasp the Epicurean philosophy you won't need to face it again. Know the limits of what you need, recognize the limits of what your body is likely to suffer, and enjoy the confidence that your life will be overwhelmingly pleasant, unless you poison it with anxiety.

"Don't worry about death." While you are alive, you don't have to deal with being dead, but when you are dead you don't have to deal with it either, because you aren't there to deal with it. "Death is nothing to us," as Epicurus puts it, for "when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist."³ Death is always irrelevant to us, even though it causes considerable anxiety to many people for much of their lives. Worrying about death casts a general pall over the experience of living, either because people expect to exist after their deaths and are humbled and terrified into ingratiating themselves with the gods, who might well punish them for their misdeeds, or else because they are saddened and terrified by the prospect of not existing after their deaths. But there are no gods which threaten us, and, even if there were, we would not be there to be punished. Our souls are flimsy things which are dissipated when we die, and even if the stuff of which they were made were to survive intact, that would be nothing to us, because what matters to us is the continuity of our experience, which is severed by the parting of body and soul. It is not sensible to be afraid of ceasing to exist, since you already know what it is like not to exist; consider any time before your birth-was it disagreeable not to exist? And if there is nothing bad about not existing, then there is nothing bad for your friend when he ceases to exist, nor is there anything bad for you about being fated to cease to exist. It is a confusion to be worried by your mortality, and it is an ingratitude to resent the limitations of life, like some greedy dinner guest who expects an indefinite number of courses and refuses to leave the table.

"Don't fear god." The gods are happy and immortal, as the very concept of 'god' indicates. But in Epicurus' view, most people were in a state of confusion about the gods, believing them to be intensely concerned about what human beings were up to and exerting tremendous effort to favour their worshippers and punish their mortal enemies. No; it is incompatible with the concept of divinity to suppose that the gods exert themselves or that they have any concerns at all. The most accurate, as well as the most agreeable, conception of the gods is to think of them, as the Greeks often did, in a state of bliss, unconcerned about anything, without needs, invulnerable to any harm, and generally living an enviable life. So conceived, they are role models for Epicureans, who emulate the happiness of the gods, within the limits imposed by human nature. "Epicurus said that he was prepared to compete with Zeus in happiness, as long as he had a barley cake and some water."⁴

If, however, the gods are as independent as this conception indicates, then they will not observe the sacrifices we make to them, and Epicurus was indeed widely regarded as undermining the foundations of traditional religion. Furthermore, how can Epicurus explain the visions that we receive of the gods, if the gods don't deliberately send them to us? These visions, replies Epicurus, are material images travelling through the world, like everything else that we see or imagine, and are therefore something real; they travel through the world because of the general laws of atomic motion, not because god sends them. But then what sort of bodies must the gods have, if these images are always streaming off them, and yet they remain strong and invulnerable? Their bodies, replies Epicurus, are continually replenished by images streaming towards them; indeed the 'body' of a god may be nothing more than a focus to which the images travel, the images that later travel to us and make up our conception of its nature.⁵

If the gods do not exert themselves for our benefit, how is it that the world around us is suitable for our habitation? It happened by accident, said Epicurus, an answer that gave ancient critics ample opportunity for ridicule, and yet it makes him a thinker of a very modern sort, well ahead of his time. Epicurus believed that the universe is a material system governed by the laws of matter. The fundamental elements of matter are atoms,⁶ which move, collide, and form larger structures according to physical laws. These larger structures can sometimes develop into yet larger structures by the addition of more matter, and sometimes whole worlds will develop. These worlds are extremely numerous and variable; some will be unstable, but others will be stable. The stable ones will persist and give the appearance of being designed to be stable, like our world, and living structures will sometimes develop out of the elements of these worlds. This theory is no longer as unbelievable as it was to the non-Epicurean scientists and philosophers of the ancient world, and its broad outlines may well be true.

We happen to have a great deal of evidence about the Epicurean philosophy of nature, which served as a philosophical foundation for the rest of the system. But many Epicureans would have had little interest in this subject, nor did they need to, if their curiosity or scepticism did not drive them to ask fundamental questions. What was most important in Epicurus' philosophy of nature was the overall conviction that our life on this earth comes with no strings attached; that there is no Maker whose puppets we are; that there is no script for us to follow and be constrained by; that it is up to us to discover the real constraints which our own nature imposes on us. When we do this, we find something very delightful: life is free, life is good, happiness is possible, and we can enjoy the bliss of the gods, rather than abasing ourselves to our misconceptions of them.

To say that life is free is not to say that we don't need to observe any moral constraints. It is a very bad plan to cheat on your friends or assault people in the street or do anything else that would cause you to worry about their reactions. Why is this a bad plan? Not because god has decreed that such things are ‘immoral’, but because it is stupid to do anything that would cause you to worry about anything. In the view of some moral philosophers (both ancient and modern) this view makes Epicureanism an immoral philosophy, because it denies that there is anything intrinsically wrong with immoral conduct. If we could be sure that nobody would find out, then we would have no reason to worry about the consequences, and therefore no reason not to be immoral. True, admits Epicurus, but we can never be sure that nobody will find out, and so the most tranquil course is to obey the rules of social morality quite strictly. These have been developed over the centuries for quite understandable reasons, mostly to give ourselves mutual protection against hostile animals and people. The legal and moral rules of society serve a good purpose, although it is not worthwhile to exert yourself to become prominent in public affairs and have the anxiety of public office. Much more satisfying and valuable is to develop individual relationships of mutual confidence, for a friend will come to your assistance when an ordinary member of the public will not. In fact, friends are our most important defence against insecurity and are our greatest sources of strength, after the truths of Epicurean philosophy itself.

Friends and philosophy are the two greatest resources available to help us live our lives in confidence and without anxiety. Perhaps the best thing of all would be to have friends who shared our Epicurean philosophy with us; many Epicureans lived in small Epicurean communities, as did the followers of Pythagoras in earlier times. These Epicurean communities were probably modelled on the community that Epicurus established on the outskirts of Athens, called "The Garden." We know very little about the organization of these communities, except that they did not require their members to give up their private property to the commune (unlike the Pythagoreans and some modern religious cults) and that they probably involved regular lessons or discussions of Epicurean philosophy. They also included household servants and women on equal terms with the men, which was completely out of line with the social norms of the time, but Epicurus believed that humble people and women could understand and benefit from his philosophy as well as educated men, another respect in which Epicurean philosophy was well ahead of its time.

The membership of women caused scandalous rumours, spread by hostile sources, that "The Garden" was a place for continuous orgies and parties, rumours apparently supported by Epicurus' thesis that bodily pleasure is the original and basic form of pleasure. But Epicurus believed in marriage and the family, for those who are ready for the responsibility, and he disapproved of sexual love, because it ensnares the lover in tangles of unnecessary needs and vulnerabilities. Here's the typical pattern: first lust, then infatuation, then consummation, then jealousy or boredom. There’s only anxiety and distress in this endlessly repeated story, except for the sex itself, and Epicurus regarded sex as an unnecessary pleasure, which never did anybody any real good—count yourself lucky if it does you no harm!⁷ There is nothing intrinsically wrong with casual sex, but much more important than either love or sex is friendship, which "dances around the world, announcing to all of us that we must wake up to blessedness."⁸

One of the remarkable features of Epicurus' philosophy is that it can be understood at several levels of subtlety. You don't need to be a philosophical genius to grasp the main points, which is why Epicurus coined slogans and maxims for ordinary people to memorize, to help them relieve their anxiety whenever it might arise. There were signet rings and hand mirrors, for example, engraved with the words 'death is nothing', so the faithful could be reminded while going about their daily business. Suppose, though, that you're not convinced that 'death is nothing', for example, and you want proof before you organize your life around that idea. For people like you, Epicurus wrote letters outlining his basic arguments, which circulated freely among those interested in the topic. Suppose, again, that you already have a philosophical education, and you want to assess Epicurus arguments against the competing arguments, from other philosophers, for example. For this purpose he wrote elaborately careful and thorough memoranda of his arguments; his main treatise on natural philosophy ran to a staggering thirty-seven volumes. This extremely long book was given an intermediate (but still quite detailed) summary by Epicurus, and there may have been other levels of length and subtlety. If on a certain topic all our evidence seems superficial, that is probably because the more extensive discussions of that topic have not survived.

* * * * *

Alexander the Great meets the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope circa 335 BC.

(Both died in 323 BC.-- some say on the same day)

Diogenes of Sinope

The most illustrious of the Cynic philosophers, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.E.) serves as the template for the Cynic sage in antiquity. An alleged student of Antisthenes, Diogenes maintains his teacher’s asceticism and emphasis on ethics, but brings to these philosophical positions a dynamism and sense of humor unrivaled in the history of philosophy. Though originally from Sinope, the majority of the stories comprising his philosophical biography occur in Athens, and some of the most celebrated of these place Alexander the Great or Plato as his foil.It is disputed whether Diogenes left anything in writing. If he did, the texts he composed have since been lost. In Cynicism, living and writing are two components of ethical practice, but Diogenes is much like Socrates and even Plato in his sentiments regarding the superiority of direct verbal interaction over the written account. Diogenes scolds Hegesias after he asks to be lent one of Diogenes’ writing tablets: “You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 48). In reconstructing Diogenes’ ethical model, then, the life he lived is as much his philosophical work as any texts he may have composed.

1. Life

The exceptional nature of Diogenes’ life generates some difficulty for determining the exact events that comprise it. He was a citizen of Sinope who either fled or was exiled because of a problem involving the defacing of currency. Thanks to numismatic evidence, the adulteration of Sinopean coinage is one event about which there is certainty. The details of the defacing, though, are murkier: “Diocles relates that [Diogenes] went into exile because his father was entrusted with the money of the state and adulterated the coinage. But Eubulides in his book on Diogenes says that Diogenes himself did this and was forced to leave home along with his father” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 20). Whether it was Diogenes or his father who defaced the currency, and for whatever reasons they may have done so, the act lead to Diogenes’ relocation to Athens.
Diogenes’ biography becomes, historically, only sketchier. For example, one story claims that Diogenes was urged by the oracle at Delphi to adulterate the political currency, but misunderstood and defaced the state currency (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 20). A second version tells of Diogenes traveling to Delphi and receiving this same oracle after he had already altered the currency, turning his crime into a calling. It is, finally, questionable whether Diogenes ever consulted the oracle at all; the Delphic advice is curiously close to Socrates’ own injunction, and the interweaving of life and legend in Diogenes’ case is just as substantial.
Once in Athens, Diogenes famously took a tub, or a pithos, for an abode. In Lives of Eminent Philosophers, it is reported that Diogenes “had written to some one to try and procure a cottage for him. When this man was a long time about it, he took for his abode the tub in the Metroön, as he himself explains in his letters” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 23). Apparently Diogenes discovered that he had no need for conventional shelter or any other “dainties” from having watched a mouse. The lesson the mouse teaches is that he is capable of adapting himself to any circumstance. This adaptability is the origin of Diogenes’ legendary askēsis, or training.
Diogenes Laertius reports that Diogenes of Sinope “fell in” with Antisthenes who, though not in the habit of taking students, was worn out by Diogenes’ persistence (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 22). Although this account has been met with suspicion, especially given the likely dates of Diogenes’ arrival in Athens and Antisthenes’ death, it supports the perception that the foundation of Diogenes’ philosophical practice rests with Antisthenes.
Another important, though possibly invented, episode in Diogenes’ life centers around his enslavement in Corinth after having been captured by pirates. When asked what he could do, he replied “Govern men,” which is precisely what he did once bought by Xeniades. He was placed in charge of Xeniades’ sons, who learned to follow his ascetic example. One story tells of Diogenes’ release after having become a cherished member of the household, another claims Xeniades freed him immediately, and yet another maintains that he grew old and died at Xeniades’ house in Corinth. Whichever version may be true (and, of course, they all could be false), the purpose is the same: Diogenes the slave is freer than his master, who he rightly convinces to submit to his obedience.
Though most accounts agree that he lived to be quite old— some suggesting he lived until ninety— the tales of Diogenes’ death are no less multiple than those of his life. The possible cause of death includes a voluntary demise by holding his breath, an illness brought on by eating raw octopus, or death by dog bite. Given the embellished feel of each of these reports, it is more likely that he died of old age.

2. Philosophical Practice: A Socrates Gone Mad

When Plato is asked what sort of man Diogenes is, he responds, “A Socrates gone mad” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 54). Plato’s label is representative, for Diogenes’ adaptation of Socratic philosophy has frequently been regarded as one of degradation. Certain scholars have understood Diogenes as an extreme version of Socratic wisdom, offering a fascinating, if crude, moment in the history of ancient thought, but which ought not to be confused with the serious business of philosophy. This reading is influenced by the mixture of shamelessness and askēsis which riddle Diogenes’ biography. This understanding, though, overlooks the centrality of reason in Diogenes’ practice.
Diogenes’ sense of shamelessness is best seen in the context of Cynicism in general. Specifically, though, it stems from a repositioning of convention below nature and reason. One guiding principle is that if an act is not shameful in private, that same act is not made shameful by being performed in public. For example, it was contrary to Athenian convention to eat in the marketplace, and yet there he would eat for, as he explained when reproached, it was in the marketplace that he felt hungry. The most scandalous of these sorts of activities involves his indecent behavior in the marketplace, to which he responded “he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 46).
He is labeled mad for acting against convention, but Diogenes points out that it is the conventions which lack reason: “Most people, he would say, are so nearly mad that a finger makes all the difference. For if you go along with your middle finger stretched out, some one will think you mad, but, if it’s the little finger, he will not think so” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 35). In these philosophical fragments, reason clearly has a role to play. There is a report that Diogenes “would continually say that for the conduct of life we need right reason or a halter” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 24). For Diogenes, each individual should either allow reason to guide her conduct, or, like an animal, she will need to be lead by a leash; reason guides one away from mistakes and toward the best way in which to live life. Diogenes, then, does not despise knowledge as such, but despises pretensions to knowledge that serve no purpose.
He is especially scornful of sophisms. He disproves an argument that a person has horns by touching his forehead, and in a similar manner, counters the claim that there is no such thing as motion by walking around. He elsewhere disputes Platonic definitions and from this comes one of his more memorable actions: “Plato had defined the human being as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s human being.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 40). Diogenes is a harsh critic of Plato, regularly disparaging Plato’s metaphysical pursuits and thereby signaling a clear break from primarily theoretical ethics.
Diogenes’ talent for undercutting social and religious conventions and subverting political power can tempt readers into viewing his position as merely negative. This would, however, be a mistake. Diogenes is clearly contentious, but he is so for the sake of promoting reason and virtue. In the end, for a human to be in accord with nature is to be rational, for it is in the nature of a human being to act in accord with reason. Diogenes has trouble finding such humans, and expresses his sentiments regarding his difficulty theatrically. Diogenes is reported to have “lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, ‘I am searching for a human being’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 41).
For the Cynics, life in accord with reason is lived in accord with nature, and therefore life in accord with reason is greater than the bounds of convention and the polis. Furthermore, the Cynics claim that such a life is the life worth living. As a homeless and penniless exile, Diogenes experienced the greatest misfortunes of which the tragedians write, and yet he insisted that he lived the good life: “He claimed that to fortune he could oppose courage, to convention nature, to passion reason” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 38).

Diogenes
Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884)

3. References and Further Reading

Billerbeck, Margarethe. Die Kyniker in der modernen Forschung. Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1991.
Branham, Bracht and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Dudley, D. R. A History of Cynicism from Diogenes to the 6th Century A.D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937.
Goulet-Cazé, Marie-Odile. L’Ascèse cynique: Un commentaire de Diogène Laërce VI 70-71, Deuxième édition. Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. VRIN, 2001.
Goulet-Cazé, Marie-Odile and Richard Goulet, eds. Le Cynisme ancien et ses prolongements. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers Vol. I-II. Trans. R.D. Hicks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Long, A.A. and David N. Sedley, eds. The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1 and Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Malherbe, Abraham J., ed. and trans. The Cynic Epistles. Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1977.
Navia, Luis E. Diogenes of Sinope: The Man in the Tub. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Navia, Luis E. Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Paquet, Léonce. Les Cyniques grecs: fragments et témoignages. Ottawa: Presses de l’Universitaire d’Ottawa, 1988.

Epicurus:

http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/ier.html

see also: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

Rejecting Christianity (Be Happy; Be Pagan)

2011-01-20T13:40:00.010-05:00

All one has to do to see the error of being Christian is look at this illustration from Martin Luther's Bible:

Regardless of what a sweet man named Jesus had to say as he gathered ancient Jewish people on hillsides around today's Israel, an organized church grew out of his teachings and those of Paul who rejected Jesus when he was alive.This church wed itself to Roman emperors eventually and became the establishment of Western Europe for centuries, even after it divided between Roman Catholic and protestant.

The world view of this Christian church and hence Christianity in general was that there is a god in whose image humans exist, never mind which humans, and that the universe is an Earth-centered work of art god has produced, wheeling about like so many spinning tops all interconnected and following precise mathematical laws. Everything Christianity insisted for centuries to be certain truth, all the perfect spheres within spheres, is now universally rejected.

All that is left to defend Christianity at all is the part of it that is humanistic. Love thy neighbor as thyself. OK. That is ethical. Kant had an Ethics that goes way beyond that maxim. So let's praise the love Christianity claims to have, despite the Crusades and countless other religious wars and the centuries of persecution and burning people at the stake for lack of orthodoxy, and let's move on.

As we toss out the absurdity of most of the worldview of Christianity, we must also throw out the mindless taboos and forbidden fruit that have gone with it since before Augustine. As the Earth revolves around the Sun, so does human existence revolve around sex and bodily pleasure. There is a twisted inversion of natural desire in the sacraments of Christianity. Rather than loving the body, we eat the dead flesh of god. We drink his blood weekly, if not daily. We do that so he will forgive our sins of the flesh. How absurd is that?

If we want communal sacraments, we ought to have a weekly orgy with people whose company we really enjoy. Let us share love and intimacy with people with whom we would like to have genuine communication, rather than practicing some mumbo-jumbo with an invisible, vengeful, jealous, spiteful demon god.

Jack

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http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/movies/shame-directed-by-steve-mcqueen-review.htmlYet another great review. Love the ref. to William's Sonnet #129 which I'll post below. Amazing.

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Jack Millerhttp://www.lafferty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ginsberg_howl_naropa_1975.mp3Listen.

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1. Life

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3. References and Further Reading

Rejecting Christianity (Be Happy; Be Pagan)

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/movies/shame-directed-by-steve-mcqueen-review.html
Yet another great review. Love the ref. to William's Sonnet #129 which I'll post below. Amazing.

Jack Miller
http://www.lafferty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ginsberg_howl_naropa_1975.mp3
Listen.