Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

If you were to make a list of the ten things you normally wouldn’t talk about with anyone, where would sodomy be on the list? For me I think it is definitely up at the top and yet, somehow, I found myself engaged in this very conversation just the other day. I blame the prevalence of pornography. The ubiquitous nature of pornography has become a playground of the bizarre only the Marquis de Sade could only have dreamed. Why was I talking about Sodomy? Well my friend had recently attended a college lecture where the topic came up. I did not attend the lecture, so I have no idea how sodomy works itself into any public talk. I suppose the choices are 1) a lecture on same sex sexuality or 2) a lecture that included sodomy as a heterosexual practice. In fact heterosexual sexuality comprised the bulk of our conversation. It was his assertion that pornographic images might sanitize certain sexual practices for men and that this would result in men putting pressure on young girls to engage in activities that they might not necessarily consent to.

This is a veritable land mine. One that I find myself second-guessing whether or not to discuss with every sentence I write. But there are a couple of reasons why I am interested in this topic. 1) My wife wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on the topic of feminine sexuality and the Internet and I spent long hours reading her drafts on the subject. 2) I think that it is important for men who have looked at pornography on the Internet to examine the behavior. “I am shocked, shocked to discover gambling going on in here.”

While the ubiquitous nature of porn is an increasing problem, so is the appetite for porn. Pornography is a billion dollar a year industry with pornographic images used throughout advertising, and with the consumption of explicit pornographic materials moving out of “dirty” bookstores, and onto newsstands, cable television, and home video. Our demand is insatiable, so an ever-widening market for porn is created.

I find it unsettling. Frankly I don’t care what a person, or even consenting adults, does in the privacy of their own homes. We enjoy safety, comfort, and prosperity unprecedented in human history -- functionally, we are living in the utopias dreamed of by 19th-century thinkers. The danger is that we live with few interests beyond our own comfort, and few social contacts beyond our narrow circles. Internet pornography is an excellent example of this as it conjures up images of alienation, one fueled by escapist fantasy and excessive behavior, men sitting alone in front of a computer monitor masturbating, is the quintessential image of modern alienation.

I think that this view is fairly wide spread, and there are those that argue that pornography is corruptive and decadent, but there is also a widening group of pro-sex thinkers, feminist and others, that see pornography as empowering and liberating. Sorting through the arguments of these two camps can be mystifying. Anti-porn advocates seem to make little distinction between violent pornography and pornography, between pornography and sex and between sex and violence. Pornography has become the center of a debate on the portrayal and valuation of feminine sexuality, one that decries any portrayal of women as sexual objects on the one hand and the empowerment and ultimate sexual freedom of women on the other.

I am one of those happy individuals who thinks that both are probably true to some extent, however there are obvious pitfalls to taking sides too vehemently in order to avoid being seen as either an enemy of the woman’s movement that seeks sexual empowerment and sexual liberation, or as a moralistic defender of vanilla sex.

I believe we have to ask what is the true definition of sexual freedom, balancing the moralism and absolutism on the one hand with the uncritical acceptance that pornography can be sexually liberating on the other. Alas there are no institutions to support feminine sexuality, civic or religious, and so women are left to fend for themselves, and risk being maligned as a prude or a slut.

The truth is that the distinctions between sexual liberation and institutional liberation are in fact part of the same problem. As long as women are raped and battered and this behavior is sexualized in pornography, and at the same time women continue to be denied equal access to jobs and pay as their male counterparts, we should not look at sexual liberation and social liberation as separate issues. This simplification allows individuals to seek the moral high ground that this or that behavior is socially unacceptable, while ignoring the wider problems of alienation and social repression. We should abandon over simplified or exclusionary categories in the discussion of sexuality and begin the difficult task of understanding the connections between behavior and fantasy, sexual expression and object relations, and sexual activity and ideology.

the master bathroom

I spent the weekend working on the master bathroom. The bathroom has lingered in a state of half-finished repair. We ripped out the shower and put in a new one at Christmas. The old shower was so small, if you dropped the soap you had to get out to pick it up. Once the new shower was in, things got busy and the rest of the room had to wait. So I came home Friday afternoon, changed my clothes pulled out my crowbar a chisel and a hammer and went to work peeling back layers of tile, plaster, and metal lathe until only the studs remained. Saturday was spent finalizing the demolition, ripping out old cabinets and the floor, followed by the laying of cement board and floor tile. The mortar had to dry so I took Sunday off, stocked up on building supplies and grouted the floor Monday morning.

That is the easy version. The real version is a tale of false starts, endless cleanup, and cursing. I am not a great builder. That is, I don’t do it every day, so it always takes a little while to get back on the horse. Building for me is a bit like alchemy, a mixture of exotic ingredients, pseudo-science, mysticism, and prayer. When you think of Alchemy it conjures visions of a fraudulent and inefficient forerunner of modern chemistry. In reality the basic idea of this supremely complex discipline seems to be that of the union of opposites that will result in the transformation and purification of base matter into a higher state of perfect being. Most people think it is simply the changing of physical lead into physical gold. Rather it is an investigation into the spiritual constitution, or life of matter and material existence through an application of the mysteries of birth, death and resurrection.

Artist like Marcel Duchamp like to think of themselves as modern Alchemists. No one more than Duchamp (or Rauchenburg) has as interesting a history in the transformation of the everyday and the ordinary into the extraordinary. His impact on art was widespread, repeatedly crossing over the traditional boundaries of sculpture, painting and graphics.

Why is alchemy so important to Duchamp, and ultimately to the arts? Alchemy, like analytic psychology, is a discipline in which the notion of the subjective and objective as separate and opposing realities is dissolved. The history of western art has oscillated between formal representation and decorative design. However, in the postmodern era, many of these distinctions seem to have fused together into a new synthesis. Art can now be recognized not only for its linear or painterly qualities, Instead art grows increasingly pluralistic.

Artists recognize equally the importance of both the objective qualities of art and the subjective experience of the artist and viewer; a refinement that stresses composition, construction and rationalism married with artistic notions of symbolism, decoration and design. From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative energies of the artist emerge and begin their interaction to bring about an alchemical union. This ultimate union, says Jung, is the basis of the alchemist’s endeavor, the archetypal union of opposites by means of the integration of opposing polarities: conscious and unconscious, reason and instinct, spiritual and material, masculine and feminine. Oh, and one that results in a new Master bathroom.

Slip Slidin' Away

A crisis in thinking

I was listening today to the reports that gas prices have risen yet again, that the price of food, linked to the production and transportation of agricultural products, is likely to continue to rise. Families that used to live on $100 a week in grocery bills, are now finding that money being poured into their gas tanks, that luxuries like the price of air travel has been forever changed by the price of gas. The world is once again becoming a smaller, more expensive, and seemingly dangerous place to live.

The temptation, of course is to believe that this is just temporary, that we need to wait it out. That Congress or the President or the oil companies or opec, will just magically change their minds. Or that there is plenty of oil, and if we just find new places to dig, release new territories to be explored, that there will always be more. These are the comfortable lies we tell ourselves, and meanwhile families pour their grocery money, their savings and their future into a gas tank, to keep the economy running. The truth is, we must begin think about these problems in a new way or we will never generate a new reality; and, in the mean time, we are, in fact, destroying our current reality. 


There are those that will say that I am making all of this up, that the price of gas isn’t too high or that food isn’t that expensive. Neither the gas crisis nor the food crisis is the real problem. (The denial sets in, then the excuses.) The problem is the mortgage crisis, the economy, and the Bush presidency. The truth is none of these things are any more of less true, they are the altruisms that we use to make ourselves feel better, the economy will turn around, Bush will leave office, and thinking about it this way makes it better. Perhaps the real crisis is a thinking crisis. Instead of focusing on how to get cheaper gas, we must think about how to fuel our lives without gas. Instead of thinking about feeding the world today, we must figure out how to sustain a larger global population tomorrow.

We make our own reality; we live in a world of our own making. In order to change our thinking, we must begin to change our behavior. I don’t think myself into right action; I act myself into right thinking. I don’t even know what a better world of tomorrow will look like, but I suspect some of the basic luxuries of life will have to be reexamined. We must learn to value progress over convenience, life over lifestyle.

That is not an easy change, Especially when we are "Keeping up with the Joneses," the desire to be seen as being as good as one's neighbors accumulation of wealth and material goods... Perhaps our worldview needs to be a little broader. We must acknowledge that we are citizens of a global community, and realize that neither nature nor natural resources recognize our superficial political boundaries. (See my thoughts on sovereignty) Maybe then, through new action, can we avert the crisis of thinking.

Night

I read this really powerful blog post from a friend of mine and it reminded me of this experience I had 12 years ago. One I think I can finally put to bed.

Back in the mid 90’s I was working in a Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls S.D. when a customer came in and asked if we had Eli Wiesel’s “Night.” After helping her locate the book I was walking with her to the front of the store and listened as she commented that she just loved the book and that it was “so powerful.” I blurted out that I didn’t like it, and it completely stopped this woman in her tracks. She looked at me for a moment and said something like “some people just can’t handle the truth.” And walked away. I remember recounting this story to a coworker who asked me why I didn’t like the book, and at the time I had a hard time explaining it. It is a powerful book, with symbols of death, faith, and hope. It is also a graphic retelling of the story of the author’s journey from his childhood home to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. In reading the book it is often difficult to separate the authors thoughts from the subject matter, and it is that level of attachment to the horrors of life that makes it difficult for me to navigate the book.

What is it about people that make us respond so differently to the witnessing of suffering? Where some can find themselves deeply affected and immerse themselves in the emotions that arise, others can look on with certain objectivity, even distance themselves from it. I suppose I am the latter, though when I heard about the serial murder Charles Ng I nearly broke into tears, while other times stories of natural disaster hardly affect me. I suppose the one hit closer to home somehow. A person in this country, murdering families, women and children is right in my emotional back yard.

There is something else that I find disturbing. That is the omnipresence of disaster that continually confronts us. In part I blame the media, because there is no news like bad news. But I think the horrible truth is that here is no simply symmetry between suffering and happiness in the world. Suffering outweighs happiness, and at a certain point one has to find some distance to the constant barrage of images of the entire worlds tragedies.

Here is the question: How do you keep perspective? Certainly not by sticking your head in the sand, and not by becoming overwhelmed by images you are powerless to change. Perhaps making a difference begins with knowing your limits, knowing where we are powerless to help and where our voice can make a difference. I have to be of service to my home, my community, and reach to beyond where I can. I would like to think that I can do so much more, that the horror and disgust I feel at human suffering somehow means that I am making a difference in these dark corners of the world, but the truth is, as much as I may want to, I don’t usually reach beyond my home and my community. Perhaps realizing my own limitations as human being is the first step in making a difference.

Summer Days

Big sister gave me a special hair cut the other day, so Mommy and Daddy had to trim my baby locks.



We were all feeling a little tired after Jenny brought the girls home from the Dr.
So while she went to pick up Daryl and fill the prescription, we Had Popsicles...




And took a little dip...




and then everyone felt a little better.

Good night Mr. Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."

Good night Mr. Rauschenberg, and thank you.

Exploring the Beautiful

For my most recent works of art I have been contemplating notions of beauty. People have often commented on the design or decorative qualities of my work, and I have decided, as a matter of interest to make this an integral element in my work. The western concept of beauty has its foundations in the origin of philosophical thought from classical antiquity. Plato imagined beauty as an eternal concept, in which everything wondrous partakes of beauty and every beautiful body shares in the “idea” of beauty. This idea of beauty has been challenged from its inception, particularly by Aristotelian concepts of beauty in which a beautiful thing, “either a living being or a structure which is composed by parts, it must have not only a regular order of those parts, but also proportions not symptomatic- because the beauty is related to size and order…”, (Arst. Poetics 1450b 35). Aristotle looks at the material make up a form to determine its beauty. This notion of beauty has given rise to the language of formalism, or the analysis of the compositional aspects of a work of art

Modern concepts of beauty begin to recognize that beauty is derived from cultural idioms. Literally, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that the eye is shaped by cultural norms. However in a pluralistic society, like America, comprised of many cultures, traditions and beliefs, a definition of beauty derived from cultural norms is difficult to apply. Thus, forsaking notions of culture, beauty has to do with interest, an object that captures our attention, which sounds again like Plato who said beauty is a "wondrous vision," an "everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor ages, which neither flowers nor fades." Notions of beauty, it seems are circular.

This is not surprising when we consider the circuitous route western art has carved around Classical notions of beauty derived from nature and mathematical perspective. From Ancient Greece and Rome, to the Renaissance, and even late into the Modern era, artists have been trying to come to terms with notion of beauty rooted in naturalism and mathematics. Much of contemporary modern art, and postmodern art seems like a reaction to older, traditional notions of (western) art. Western artists continually look for inspiration in art forms of other cultures like Japan and Africa, so called “primitive” art, with their abstract design with narrative and representation that defy western traditions of representational pictorial space and mathematical perspective.

Contemporary artists defying traditional use of space and perspective in art herald from a long line of artists who have sought to challenge these conventions. Artists continually seek to push the boundaries of what is considered art. What is high art, what is low art, what is craft and what is decoration are all question that seek new and fertile ground for exploration. Philosophers like Collinwood have come to challenge popular notions of high and low, suggesting that elitist art, for all of its sophistication, relies dogmatically on a very refined and pure idea of art that serves as a form of entertainment for the elite that borders on religion. If this is true, much of what is considered high art is nothing more than a sophisticated variety of amusement or magical art, (religious art being a form of magical art). It is important that art be recognized in part for the craft or technique that went into the creation of the object, and not as some cold, isolated object. In short modern definitions of art and beauty seek to enhance the language of formalism with artistic notions of decoration and design.

While there are many instances of modern artistic movement that emphasize decoration at a motif, I am drawn to the art of Pattern and Decoration, the painting movement from the 1970s with artist like Miriam Schapiro and Kim Macconnel who explored ideas of the conventionality of fabric art used in quilting and decoration. These artists aggressively rejected the prevailing hierarchy of materials and styles and embraced what was then considered craft material that adorned the ironic riches of kitsch. My own materials and methods draw from the tradition of scrap booking, rubber stamp art and mixed media. At the same time cutting up the works allows me to investigate ideas of textures, layering and history, all of which are fundamental to my art making process.

whatever one loves, is

You may have heard, gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco rejoiced Thursday over a California Supreme Court decision affirming their right to marry. Jenny recently wrote a powerful post on her take of "love the sinner hate the sin" in which she points out the impossibilities of this scenario. I have listen to the hate mongering of people who would deny the homosexual community the right to marry for some time thinking that this does nothing but confer a second class citizenship on this group of people. Homosexual and heterosexual alike, we do not choose who we love. We love who we love, and in honor of this day, I have chosen one of my favorite poems by Sappho to mark the occasion.

To any army wife, in Sardis:

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some again,
will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

This is easily proved: did
not Helen --- she who had scanned
the flower of the world's manhood ---

choose as first among men one
who laid Troy's honor in ruin?
warped to his will, forgetting

love due her own blood, her own
child, she wandered far with him.
So Anactoria, although you

being far away forget us,
the dear sound of your footstep
and light glancing in your eyes

would move me more than glitter
of Lydian horse or armored
tread of mainland infantry

- Sappho

The Road Ahead

We read this prayer at the end of Sunday class today, written by T. Merton, it is called “the road ahead”:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
And you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

It is an amazing prayer. One that realizes the spiritual journey is a voyage of self-discovery adrift on the currents of an unknowable sea. I suppose in this age of reason, the age of enlightenment, it is terrifying to admit how little we know. I suppose much of my own spiritual development is based on the realization that I don’t know what I believe, that one question has lead to another and another. Socrates once said that he knew that he didn’t know. That this lack of knowledge spurred him on to seek the truth wherever he sought it, and much of what he saw, about politics and morality, disturbed him and caused him to challenge authority.

It reminds me of the gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.

There is something unsettling about truth. Truth makes you comfortable in an uncomfortable world. If you know that things are going to be the same today as they were yesterday, the mind becomes complacent. There is no need to expect change, and so ultimately, you stop looking for it. The problem for me is that along the spiritual path we frequently find experiences that transcend explanation. These experience demand our attention. This continued work may lead to your discovering a spiritual connection within, without, and all around you; that you are spiritually connected with everything. Yet how can we understand these connections in human terms? It is like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Because one is always part of the system that one is observing, it is impossible to know anything about the system with certainty. We trust that are following the right road, though we may never know it. We trust that the road we follow will lead us down a spiritual path, but we cannot see it.

Merton’s prayer challenges us as ordinary people. Most of us, myself included, never truly fix ourselves along a spiritual path. We pray, we study, we may even fast or go to services, and still we doubt, we struggle, and we marvel, and yet, along the way find ourselves challenged by the ordinary, the everyday at every turn. Can a red light, and angry cashier, or a crying baby be the challenges of the divine leading us down the path of spiritual awareness? Relinquishing our doubts, we free our minds to the presence of an omnipresent god, one who shows up, not because we are looking for god, but because god it already there.

tempest addendum

I feel the need to make an addendum to my last blog, because, in my ranting and raving, I neglected to mention that the United States and other countries are currently trying to help the peoples of Myanmar, and that this effort has been negated by the Myanmar government, which is currently blocking any form of aid from reaching the victims of the recent cyclone disaster. Sadly the people of Myanmar are compelled to suffer the seeming injustice of the state because Myanmar is a sovereign nation, whose decisions to allow aid or not are granted bys its exclusive right to self governance. Just as when we go to war, we must fight with the State whether or not we feel the justice of its cause. So the people of Myanmar must suffer and die by the decisions of its leaders.

The current worldview of sovereignty is based on the philosophy first laid out by Enlightenment thinker Rousseau in Of the Social Contract. In constitutional and international law, the concept of a government’s sovereignty means that a government possesses full control over its own affairs within a territorial or geographical area, and not beholden to any other power. Now, to be fair, Rousseau tried very hard to make a distinction between sovereignty and government, for sovereignty is an abstract concept that cannot be represented, and consists, rather as the general will of the populace. A will is not represented: either we have it itself, or it is something else. That is, usually, we focus on the leaders as the sovereign entities of a state, but this, I think, is a misconception.

Why is this important? Because for years we have been trying to figure out what sovereignty means. America has had to deal with these issues more than once, in the formation of the Articles of the Confederation, in the drafting of the Constitution, and in the post civil war era of reconstruction. Why? Because, America is made up of independent sovereign states. James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, said "each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is to be considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others.” And argues the right of any state at any time to secede from the union, without threat of intervention by federal powers. States continually test their powers against federal mandate, against the right to own slaves in the civil war and in modern times with the legalization of homosexual marriage. Alas, in recent times the federal government has of exercised greater and greater authority in determining these questions, and in the process raised questions about the rights of states and sovereignty all over again.

Who is the sovereign? And what does sovereignty mean? In a pluralist country torn by the opposing factions of left and right, how can such things be decided? American legal scholar John Chipman Gray once said ‘The real rulers of a society are undiscoverable.’ But with the real rulers goes sovereignty; and if you cannot find them, sovereignty seems to be beyond the reach of human insight.

Imagine for a moment how sovereignty has changed in our time. Environmental laws, human rights laws, global trade laws, have begun to dissolve the borders between men, but slowly. We must still stand in wonder as countries like Myanmar, whose sovereignty has been ignored or gone unrecognized by countries like the United States, rejects aid on principle, of mistrust, and the fear of its authority being undermined by from countries that have rebuked their sovereignty time and again. And for those who feel powerless in the face of such cruelty, to witness the human suffering of a country’s own people for such principles, it is not unnatural to wonder, when a state is sovereign, beholden to none, who is in charge?

It is not unreasonable to look to a world body like the United Nations for understanding and problem resolution. Presumably, we expect it to be an unbiased organization with the necessary power for enforcement. Yet, sadly, the United Nations has more often been a failure in terms of world peace. Divided internally, the UN has seldom (not counting the World health organization) brought enough countries together to form an alliance to intervene meaningfully in the affairs of world politics. Another option is international courts like The Hague, which probably have greater say in the leverage of sovereignty, but lack the official capacity to enforce their rulings. In short, our idea of sovereignty has begun to change, we have begun to create laws with greater scope and cast a wider net, but lack the methods to enforce them.

I am probably not going to make much headway in understanding the complexities of sovereignty. However, I can't help but feel that it is responsible in part for the suffering of the people of Myanmar and a barrier to peace the world over.

Tempest-tost

I remember sitting on the beach in Maui the day after Christmas in 2004, hearing the news of the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and the resultant Asian Tsunami which triggered a series of devastating tidal waves along the coasts of most landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean, killing more than 225,000 people in eleven countries. I remember it vividly, not for the catastrophic damage and loss of life, but because of the look on my daughters face as she suspiciously eyed the ocean in front of her with a look of fear and disbelief. She had never heard of a tsunami before and you could see her trying to work out the logistics of how much water had to be moved as we described it. Followed almost immediately by the inevitable question, “will there be a tsunami here?”

It is almost unimaginable, from the forces necessary to create a tsunami, to the incalculable damage that one creates. These powerful forces are as destructive as they are unpredictable. That is what makes them so tragic. That and the callous way in which we promised relief of some 35 million dollars, quickly revamped our offer to $350 million and then by mid-March listened as the Asian Development Bank reported that over US$4 billion in aid promised by governments was behind schedule. Incredible.

I started to write this blog post because the cyclone in Myanmar reminded me of the Asian Tsunami, and ultimately of Hurricane Katrina. I have sat down several times attempting to put my thoughts together, and have very little to show for it. Try as I might, I find myself unable to write anything thoughtful or meaningful because of the powerful emotions the memory of these disasters raises overwhelms my ability to talk about them rationally. How do you write about disasters over which we have so little control? We cannot prevent a tsunami, and while we have more warning of a cyclone or a hurricane, forecasts are can never positively predict direction, speed, and strength.

Sadly there is Video showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans' flood defenses could be overcome. That is what is so infuriating. Katrina could have been prevented. The most severe loss of life and property damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, which flooded as the levee system catastrophically failed, in many cases hours after the storm had moved inland. People have been arguing the safety of these levees for some time. The 76-mile shipping channel was built about 40 years ago as a shortcut to New Orleans. For years, environmentalists and emergency planners have blasted the channel as a destructive force because it has eroded enormous tracts of wetlands and increased the threat of flooding. Not to mention the fact that it is a hurricane “super highway.”


Then of course there is the fact that some three years later our citizens are still homeless, living in “temporary” FEMA trailers. We are one of the most powerful countries in the world and frankly, compared to the Asian Tsunami and the cyclone of Myanmar, the hurricane had nowhere near the same cost of human life. 1850 died in Katrina compared to the hundreds of thousands lost after the tsunami, and yet we still cannot find homes for these people? It is outrageous! A democracy, a country whose very voice is its people, ignoring those same people, whether of ignorance or for socio-economic status, these people have been ignored and abused by the country prides itself on feeding the weak and sheltering the poor. What ever happened to: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Theses very words, “tempest-tost,” are inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Somewhere along the way we have gone terribly astray.

Obey your art teacher

One of my art students, Alexandra Goitia made this funny anime drawing of me in her art journal.

Friends, Romans, countrymen...

There is something odd about this gas tax rebate John McCain initially proposed, and I can’t put my finger on it. But neither, it seems, can anyone else. No economist in their right mind is supporting this thing, but that doesn’t seem to stop the politicians from debating it. Forget about the experts, says Hillary Clinton, she herself is the expert after “seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven't worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans.” Hillary’s plan differs from the one John McCain proposed by suggesting that the oil and gas companies pick up the tax usually paid by the public.

Normally I would say that anything that sticks it to the oil companies is a good thing, and move on. But the drama here is too good to pass up. Everyone has an idea, by in large all of these ideas are just different shades of grey, and ultimately all of the discussions seem to miss the point entirely, that this countries dependence on oil will be our undoing.

Obama criticized Hillary’s move as political pandering saying “"Only in Washington can you get away with calling someone out of touch when you're the one who thinks that 30 cents a day is enough to help people who are struggling in this economy,"

Whenever I hear politicians promising money to the people I think of Marc Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Antony discovers that Caesar was murdered by group of conspirators and mourns his friend’s death. At the same time Antony must be careful to conceal his loyalties from the conspirators. Meanwhile crowds of roman citizens have gathered, and demand explanation. Brutus matter-of-factly explains to the crowd that they killed Caesar because he was too ambitious. Then Antony makes his speech and with a subtle use of reverse psychology, incites the commoners to riot in grief over Caesar's murder. In the speech, Marc Antony badgered the crowd to turn on Brutus and his co-conspirator. Antony taunts the crowd, holding out Caesar’s last will and testament, but then deceptively hesitates to read it. As the crowd grows ever violent, Antony again and again holds up the will to focus the anger of the crowd, then finally, at the last, reads them Caesar's (supposed) will, wherein Caesar leaves money to “To every Roman citizen he gives, To every several man, seventy-five drachmas.” plus his private Orchard and gardens for the pleasure of the citizenry.

This sets up one of the primary themes of the play and it is what lends it a particular relevance in the America of today: the power of persuasion and manipulation. I suppose I am frequently distrustful of politicians offering tax breaks, incentives, and refunds because it never seems like anything more than political pandering. Throughout the course of the play the masses are eager to support anyone who manages to achieve the enviable position of having the last word on a subject. The different reaction of the people between both Brutus’ speech and Antony’s speech illustrates this point.

Brutus embodies perfect republican virtue with too much constancy, and his stubborn refusal to accept change ultimately becomes his demise. He struggles throughout the play to live by his idealism for a perfect Roman Republic, and is consistently plagued by an inner struggle as to what is the most virtuous course of action. Putting aside personal emotions and reason, his decisions are based purely on his ideas of what is the best for his nation. In an ironic twist of fate though, most every time he follows what he believes to be the most virtuous path, he ends up hurting the very cause he seeks to protect. Thus, Shakespeare begs the question as to why such true virtue can go so wrong.

Antony is easily able to win the crowd to his side from Brutus’ and turn them against the conspirators, being a master of rhetoric. He incites a riotous crowd, and thus divides the nation, preparing it for revolution. His decision to infuriate the crowd has the inevitable consequence that begins a rapid destruction of Republican Rome.

Somehow I don’t think that a gas tax break over the summer is going to have the net result of ushering in the rapid destruction of American society. But is does distract the public from the real problems associated with our dependence on fossil fuels. Although we constitute only 5% of the world’s population, we consume 25% of global oil production. America epitomizes the petroleum-dependent lifestyle. This proposed tax relief provides no incentive to drive efficiently, to rely more on car pools or public transportation, or simply to travel less. It also provides no incentive to drive at speeds that reduce fuel consumption. Nor does it provide an incentive to scrap an old car in favor of a newer one with better fuel efficiency The tax relief to me is no better than Antony’s promise of Julius Caesar “To every several man, seventy-five drachmas” that distracts the citizens from Antony’s true aim for power. Through his powerful speech and lack of forethought, Antony creates civil war in Rome and he has no concern for the welfare of the citizens who will suffer in the strife.

Forever Young

In honor of Scout's second birthday here are some images taken by my sister leading up to her birth,

Sins of the Father

This morning my children were embroiled in the typical Saturday morning argument that involved, toys, television, parental attention and pecking rights. Now, in the past I have to admit I have had a very hard time with these kinds of fights, but have learned that to some extent it is better to let these things play themselves out and see what happens. Often the children are able to come to some resolve without my interference, and it is usually best that way, though admittedly I grind my teeth quite a bit waiting for the resolve to happen.

This morning however the fighting escalated quite quickly and rather than wait for blows I opted for a cooling off time and sent the instigators to their respective corners of the ring a.k.a. their rooms. My oldest, of course though this was completely unjust as she had done nothing wrong, and just needed to explain why she was completely in the right, and yet I sent her to her room anyway, as I later explained to her that I was uninterested in the politics of the fight, right/wrong, true/untrue, good/bad and merely wanted the two of them to have a time out from their argument before they proceeded any further.

In truth, from what I gathered from the argument that I heard, I think my oldest, Daryl, was probably right, and had this been a court of law, she probably ought not have had to face the same consequences. Or should she?

I am often amused by the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. One of the tactics of the Obama campaign is to continually point out that Hillary Voted on the unpopular war in Iraq. Hillary in turn, seems to say that she has no regrets about the vote, and that the real problems in Iraq stem from the Bush administrations mismanagement of the aftermath of the invasion. Interesting.

As I recall the mentality of the pre war American was WMD? There’s WMD? Let’s go kick his ass! I remember feeling very powerless as what I perceived to be the raging mob marched us down the street, breaking windows and looting national pride as they led us inevitably into war. That might be a little heavy handed, after all time does blur these images. But if a mod did march down the street, breaking and looting, who is responsible? David Miller in his book on national responsibility writes, “ If we identify with their group and its common ethos. These facts are sufficient for us to hold members collectively responsible for the results of that ethos, without having to trace the exact causal relationship between the actions of any one particular member and those consequences.” The long and short of it? We are all of us responsible, regardless of whether or not we broke a window or stole a television.

Alas Daryl, Hillary and Barak, if you subscribe to a common public culture, (Family, Nation) despite individual differences in belief, you participate in mutually beneficial practices whose shape you can influence. Miller, “The more strongly these conditions obtain, the more appropriate it is to hold nations responsible for their political actions, and the consequences that flow from these.”

Is this what the Bible means when it says the son shall pay for the sins of the father? Well the nice thing about Hillary and Barack’s debate is that it goes something like this: “It wasn’t me, it was the one armed man.” Suggesting that despite Millers claims, individuals are differently responsible. To which it could be argued that those difference might be more or less important depending on the political or cultural make up of the system. A family is not a purely democratic state, and in a totalitarian state its members have no say on its country’s policies. There are exceptions galore. Still in a democratic state I think we take national responsibility very seriously, we are in for the good, we are in for that bad, that is why, when the invasion of Iraq is handled so poorly, we take it very personally. We are all responsible.

There are times when I go insane listening to my children fight and squabble, I don’t always react with patience, and I intervene too much. On more than one occasion I have found myself owing them an amends for getting involved in situations that they were handling quite nicely, but to which I had to poke my big fat mouth and made things worse. The important thing for me is to take responsibility for my actions in those times, learn from my experiences and try to make better decisions in the future.

barbershop lament

For those of you who have been following my laments about graduate school finals… Well the good news is all that nonsense is behind me as of noon today. The bad news? I need a haircut. I have a love/hate relationship with hair. In humid weather it can be pretty unruly, curly and the like, in the summer long hair is too hot, in the winter short hair is too cold. The problem? Well, honestly I am terribly picky about my barber. First of all, there has to be ambiance. If you enter a barbershop that has too many women (I know, I know) you are in the wrong barbershop. It should smell like a cross between musk, rust and bay leaf, with numerous combs floating in a yellowish liquid and a safety razor mounted proudly beside a selection of scissors. The drip stain in the porcelain sink is optional. I prefer a barber who has a few years on him, but not one too old as the “chatty” conversation can become stale and random.

You know a good barbershop the moment you walk into one, and no amount of neon and tacky posters about aftershave are going to conceal the fact. I don’t mind paying for a haircut, I usually drop about $20 with tip on a good haircut, simple, efficient, honest, but have paid much more (and much less) for the same job elsewhere. I like it short on the sides, a little length on the top, trim the sideburns (I won’t pay extra for this) and the hot foam lather and straight edge for the trim around the neck and ears is a must. If they don’t do this, run, don’t walk to the door, a hot foam shave along the neck and ears is as good as most sex when properly applied, (the shave I mean, not the sex). I suspect there is a feminine equivalent in ladies hair salons, but my wife won’t divulge it

I don’t mind the wait in a good barbershop, it should be equipped with Popular Mechanics, National Geographic and a few magazines about hunting, fishing, and cars, none of which are less than two years out of date (and yet so terribly current) The interesting thing is that you can visit the same barbershop a month later and there will be an entirely new selection of out of date magazines for your viewing pleasure.

Alas, in my early thirties I decided to grow my hair long for a couple of years, I had always wanted to do this, and for some reason, being a jobless artist without prospects seemed like the opportune time to adopt the bohemian haircut. The problem was that I fell out of touch with the local barbershop community and much changed in that time, the barbershops that I had identified as “noteworthy” had mostly changed hands, and none for the better. Ultimately I opted for the home haircut solution, which is, to state it plainly, unglamorous. I shave my entire head to one half an inch of hair every two and a half months, with occasional trims on the sides that occur about every intervening six weeks. She ain’t pretty but is sure does do the job. I have tried looking for new barbers, but with children, work and school, I find it increasingly difficult to spend the time searching, especially when the home solution is so readily available. And yet, I can’t help but feel a tinge of sadness during these times, It is probably nostalgia, like the fond remembrance of a lost love like the time you had that killer set of blue jeans that finally wore out and never got replaced. So I shrug my shoulders and rub my hand through my curly locks and count all the blessings of this life and mutter “someday” as I make the trip to the bathroom to pull out the clippers one more time.

Final thoughts before the Final

Jenny and I have been doing a number of collage pieces since the beginning of March. Jenny attended the Art and Soul Retreat in Portland with her mom, her friend Mara, my sister Libby and Scout. (Libby Generously volunteered to watch Scout while Jenny was in her classes.) While there she picked up a lot of interesting techniques for collage and we tried putting some of them to use by compiling an inventory of found images, bits of paper from the recycling bin and odd scrapes found here and there. We made a couple of dozen, then Jenny started to record them digitally. It was during this process that she realized we could print out our collages, cut up the printed image and use it again as further collage fodder.

I have been reading about this artist Ross Bleckner. Bleckner began to camp another art style known as Op art. Op art, also known as optical art, is a genre of visual art, especially painting, that makes use of optical illusions, and I have been reading about it in preparation for my final review. Bleckner sublimates op arts strict geormetry opting for blurred lines that allows the viewer to see Bleckner’s use of abstract patterns, which, while still strikingly optical, create images that are simultaneously playful and still resonate in bold relation with lyrical, living forms.

I saw an immediate relation between the stripes of collage paper that we had made from digital images of other collages and the camp of Bleckners work. For one thing, the image of the former collage is still resident in that latter work, but is distorted and reformed, creating a new, potentially more vibrant work, which seems to camp both op art and Bleckner and poke fun at other media of art like collage or scrap booking that fine artist would typically disdain.

Fine artist hate the idea of art as decoration, or more precisely, decoration for decorations sake, because of the idea of formalism in art, namely In visual art, formalism is the concept that everything necessary in a work of art is contained within it. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. However in order to talk about art, unless you are indoctrinated into the language of art, like a wine connoisseur who knows wine, it is difficult for people to connect with art without context. They see line, texture, rhythm, but are unaccustomed to talking about art and might feel intimidated and unsure how to use these terms, None the less people know what they like and know what they dislike and unless abstract painting can insert itself into the world of public discourse, it remains caught in the cul-de-sac of late formalism.

For myself I see a connection between the optical illusion of the floating pipes and the deconstruction of the collage image to form a new image. Looking at these collages is like looking at op art, trying to discern the image within the image, while remaining lighthearted and playful.