The Dallman 3 is out to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to see Twyla's grandma and grandpa, and for some non-Chicago r & r. See y'all on Monday. Have a great weekend.
ANOTHER WAY TO SAY HOUSEN'S STAGE-FIVE AESTHETIC RESPONSE
From Telegraph, and an article by art critic Rupert Christiansen:
Virginia Woolf used to read every book she reviewed twice: the first time surrendering to the author, the second questioning every point and not letting him or her get away with anything. It's a practice that every critic should follow.
The point about the return visit is not the infantile pleasure of repetition, but the possibility of surprise. A good work of art never stays quite the same: it ambushes you, outwits you. A first exposure can provide the primitive excitement of wanting to know what happens next, a second provides the opportunity to register details, a third brings a sense of the underpinning joints and girders that make up the structure. And so it goes on.
Virginia Wolf's cool experiment aside, how does this refer back to Housen's aesthetic response theory? From my article that summarizes her work:
Stage V: Re-creative At Stage V, Re-Creative viewers, having established a long history of viewing and reflecting about works of art, now "willingly suspend disbelief." A familiar painting is like an old friend who is known intimately, yet full of surprise, deserving attention on a daily level but also existing on a more elevated plane. As in all important friendships, time is a key ingredient, allowing Stage V viewers to know the biography of the work-it's time, its history, its questions, its travels, its intricacies. Drawing on their own history with the work, in particular, and with viewing in general, these viewers combine a more personal contemplation with one which more broadly encompasses universal concerns. Here, memory infuses the landscape of the painting, intricately combining the personal and the universal.
Or in my words (those are Housen's)...At this stage of aesthetic response, the viewer/audience member is able to perceive the artwork object for what it is—the product of energized intuition clothed in the mystery which resides at the very core of our being. Thus the question of what an artwork essentially means is equivalent to the self-reflective inquiry, 'Who am I?' The answers, needless to say, unfold; and really aren't 'answers' at all, but rather are resonances we recognize, whether slowly or as a flash.
I had a feeling that with the understandable hysteria begot by the spectre of tens of thousands of lives in danger, a few of the outrageous-sounding stories about New Orleans would prove to be, well, true to form. Cue Roeper, in today's Chicago Sun-Times, and he starts with a doozy:
Hurricane victims ate corpses to stay alive: Urban Legend. On Sept. 2, a writer on Arianna Huffington's Web site led off his blog with this startling assertion:"It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive."
Really? Four days into the crisis? The contestants on "Survivor" last that long with just rainwater and maybe a little rice. The blogger later retracted the statement, mainly because it was a crock of s---.
From the excellent article by NRO's John Derbyshire on the new Scorcese documentary on R.Zim (which the fam watched last night and enjoyed) comes this kosmic kwote:
Dylan, in fact, had done what all great artists do. He had begun by attempting dead-on imitations of his own idols: 1950s pop singers like Johnnie Ray, country singers like Hank Williams, the black blues and gospel singers, early rockers like Gene Vincent and Little Richard (the caption to Dylan’s high school yearbook photo declared his ambition “to join Little Richard”), and of course the older line of gritty folk and protest balladeers — Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie.
Then, somehow, from all that stuff banging around in his head for years on end, all day long for years, there emerged a sound that was his own; not a mere blend or a mixture (in the chemical sense), but a compound (in the chemical sense), a new substance with new properties, as far removed from its components as salt is from soft shiny sodium and stinking chlorine. There you have the miracle of art.
And then on the timeless question of Where does the art come from?, Derbyshire even quotes Socrates:
I went to the poets … I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them — thinking that they would teach me something. … I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. — The Apology
And so these have two of my themes of late expressed on The Daily Goose; one, namely that the notion of post-conventional artwork production is a usefully vague term but fundamentally requires the artist to hone and master conventional skills, first, in order to earn the right to be post-conventional; and two, artists who create on their edge of intuition are true artists, and we ought be skeptical of artists who can fully articulate the vision they have for their particular artworks. Some capacity for articulation is certainly a welcome offering from artists, of course. Like Dylan, artist commentary tends to be wonderfully elliptical, a Sphinx-like puzzle that attempts to verbalize the mystery.
That is, in order, how many short films were submitted to this year's Chicago International Film Festival, and how many were accepted. Hannah's A Whirling Tango is one of those 42. We found out this rather startling statistic last night. Hannah is one lucky lady (who of course worked her patoody off on this film).
To read the description of the particular program within this year's Chicago International Film Festival that is showcasing Hannah's film (in three screenings), click here. It starts out this way, then goes into the particular films, including Hannah's film.
SHORTS: HOMEGROWN
Celebrating the contributions to cinema by local artists, this program offers ten exciting films that range from thought-provoking experimental works to tension-driven dramas from Chicago and Illinois bred filmmakers and those making use of many beautiful local settings. Total running time: 90 minutes.
Less than two weeks away!
UPDATE: Tonight was the first festival pre-screening of A Whirling Tango, at Columbia College Chicago for Columbia students, and it went really well! Seven student films (by students from around the world) screened, and Hannah's, dare I say, really shined. Then the Q & A afterward was with Hannah as the featured director. She answered questions from the crowd of about 50 about the creative process for this film, as well as the process to apply for festivals. She was great (must be that undergraduate training in acting), and she had the crowd laughing (and her hubby enormously grinning).
I have to tell you how much I liked the film short. It was a little slice of immediacy that highlights the beauty of the ordinary. The divergence of the beat track and the piano actually serves as a soundtrack for the soundtrack. The timbre of the piano goes with the stadium and the feel of the 'great American pastime,' while the rhythm underscores the cycles of the days like an eternal heartbeat, and yet it's all wildly cohesive. Cool!
By the way, I think I fixed the code so that all Windows/PC users ought be able to view the film. So check it if this applies to you and let me know if it doesn't work.
ERIK FABIAN HAS RETURNED FROM A MEDITATION RETREAT
Read his most interesting post-retreat reflections posted at his ErikandTheAnimals blog, including these thought-provoking questions:
How should it be taught, what is an artist’s responsibility to their society, what freedoms should artist be allowed that are beyond the norm, what is good art and what good comes of good art, and so on. How do you place any restrictions on art at all without censoring expression in a negative way?
With regard to the last question, my perspective is that, realistically, there will never again be restrictions placed on artists that aren't placed upon all citizens. Ours is an age that is 'post-taboo' and so our canvases can be colored in infinite ways. Mediums and channels of distribution present their own technical/formal restrictions, of course. Yet beyond these formal limits there are, so to speak, a kind of set of restrictions that artists deal with. These are not imposed but are rather present in our genetic makeup. I speak of humans capacity to be able to respond to artwork. It is the last chain of the circuit that connects subjective artist intuition with subjective audience intuition through the objective artwork.
My composition teacher, W.A. Mathieu, has taught me to consider what the human ear can reasonably be expected to hear and process. I could put any and all notes I want into one of my compositions, but the reality is that the average human ears are only going to be able to really hear—and thus truly resonate—with certain of the notes in certain patterns and combinations. The artistry of composition, in fact, involves skillfully dancing on the edge of the known and the unknown, in ways that keep the ears of the audience simultaneously engaged and in a rapture of surprise. These lines and limits of perception are pre-given to a certain extent (only tones in a certain frequency range can be perceived, for example), but also evolve. Our ears tolerate far more sonic ambiguity than those of previous epochs of culture.
The same goes for human speech, when we can or cannot process what someone who speaks unconventionally has to say. People are able to hear at different tempos, but everyone has some linguistic velocity that is too fast for comprehension. If you carry this principle through all the arts, you will find that aesthetic response factors everywhere, in theory. (See my essay on Abigail Housen's aesthetic-response research here.)
Thus the multifaceted area of audience response is a de facto limit, not on what artists can make, but on what artists can make and reasonably expect will be understood and absorbed by audiences. As Housen's work suggests (not proves), people operate at different levels, or stages, of aesthetic response. At the extremes, some people see next to nothing in art but their own egocentrism, and some people are able to suspend all disbelief and intuitively and objectively absorb artwork at extremely discreet emotional touch-points.
My overall point is this—audience response does act as a humanistic limit upon artwork, but that does not mean the imposition of hard and fast rules upon artwork production or artist intentions. The artwork is a holon—a whole unto itself as the product of the free artist's intuition extended into form; and a part of a larger negotiation of meaning between the presented object, the artist's intentions, and the audience response. Many artists, and art lovers, seem to favor either the wholeness or the partness of the art object; few persuasively show that they favor the holonic view of artwork, which in fact is the most accurate and truthful.
In some ways, you still never quite know how people are going to respond to your artwork, response theory (and all theories) aside. At the heart of the artwork game resides a deep, profound mystery, for both artists and audiences alike. To the extent something such as this could be called a 'certainty', it is. Our attempts to understand the artwork process beyond that fact can be informed, educated, planet-centric, and scrupulous, but at the bottom line, we are all flailing in the wind, as so much sand blown asway on the beach of a great, nameless ocean.
It is still growing, but you can watch my essay, "Polysemy: The Core Principle of Integral Artwork", grow if you >click here and continue to check back every once in a while. I've let the yeast in this idea of 'polysemy' rise several times since I first covered the word 'polysemy', and so I already know that it is going to be a pretty good bread whenever it is ready for larger consumption.
He makes several good points in his commentary on the debate as well as my own post. As a sidenote, while I agree with him that Galloway isn't the weightiest anti-war spokesperson out there, he did galvanize the anti-war folks with his recent appearance before a US Senate subcommitte, and thus gained a certain degree of statue from it. (And yes, Hitchens v Chomsky would be out-of-this-world riveting.) For me, it wasn't just the intellectual heft of the two combatants, but also the high-profile media coverage and on-the-edge-of-their-seats-howling crowd that made things weighty. But TG's more fundamental points are all well-taken, such as this one:
...Hitchen's performance resurrects the spectre of the pro-war humanitarian argument. That's not to say Hitchens is without his own faults; his keen intellect and superb style will often allow him to string out a thinly supported point, sounding right even when he's on shaky ground. However, his consistent humanitarian advocacy blazes a trail between shaky isolationism and the often unclear neo-conservative democratic motifs. The post-war rise of the insurgency and the ever-spiralling death toll have muted all pre-war humanitarian arguments; Hitchen's eloquent defense of the war is an important reminder in what may soon became a heated environment.
"Pro-war humanitarian" is spot-on, and describes Andrew Sullivan's own view pretty well, as well as mine.
Not so good, according to this article. No prescriptions, but an interesting analysis.
My view about newspapers, stated before, is that the industry will consolidate in a way that leaves the Associated Press and like pure-news-distributors as the main game in town. The vacuum will be filled by ever-increasingly collaborative blogs and team-blogs that serve to maintain and even raise editorial standards.
And with regard to movies, I see the continually connective web providing new films that stream over the internet, into people's homes on their HD equipment, personal computers, and even iPods, all for a fee. Even theatres, the number of which will likely decrease, will project digital films that the theatre pays to have online access to. The web is simply too quick and effiecent of a distribution channel for it not to be the primo line for pretty much all broadcast media. The web-savvy among us, and that includes web-savvy artists, will continue to lead the revolutions in media and media presentation.
Polysemy means, literally, 'many signs'. I've liked that term for art at the leading edge because it easily lends itself to the desire for artwork to speak to people on many levels, a desire conscious to the artist, though who (at best) is only semi-conscious of all meaning contained and suggested by the artwork. Semiotically speaking, from the view of artwork as polysemy, it is easy then to investigate the 'full spectrum of potential referents' available to artists in their work, which could be summed up as 'material, conceptual, and spiritual' but also could be body, mind, spirit.
I've always had a particular love for music that makes you move your body, jog your rational mind, and turn you on at your most ephemeral core—all simultaneously in a single composition or piece of music. 'Social, serious, and sacred' was an early version of my own ideas for musical polysemy. The notion of 'total art' leads in one way towards polysemy, in a way that suggests total on the surface (or 'eye of flesh') level, ala Wagner's operas, Pollock's or Kandinsky's paintings, Ginsberg's Howl, or Coltrane's free jazz.
However, polysemy goes deeper than mere 'total' on the surface, to evoke to audiences multiple layers of meaning that can be uncovered through direct contemplation of an artwork. Thus the eye of flesh gives way to the eye of reason and the eye of essence, all to uncover more and more meaning in artwork, thus enhancing the art experience all the more. Knowing these eyes are available to audiences means the creative artist must attune their own intentions to both take these eyes into account, and push further to allow more and more artistic light to illumine these three eyes, via the artwork.
Overall, the most transdisciplinary manner in which to speak of polysemy in art is that artwork, no matter the discipline or medium, can entertain, educate, and enlighten—the 3 Es. This tripartite matrix can be further subdivided if necessary, but this essential structure of polysemy will remain intact. Every piece of art, beit a painting, composition, sculpture, piece of metalwork or jewelry, textile, graphic design, poem, garden, building, dance piece, film, tattoo, or meal—any of these can potentially act as a polysemy that satisfies, in one intuitive way or another, forcefully or passively, directly or subtlely, the essential nature of the 3 Es.
Sufficed to say, the many potential signs of artwork, the spectrum of potential intuition/referents available to artists, the spectrum of audience responses, and the spectrums of compositional form in every medium of art suggests an extremely ripe territory for conscious investigation. This is why I want to start an art-magazine-for-artists called POLYSEMY, to do all this and much, much more. So look for a 'call for submissions' in the near future. POLYSEMY will be nothing short of a platform for the next epoch of art.
While Ken Wilber is certainly no professional social psychotherapist, I do believe he's shed a certain degree of truth (or at least a new perspective) on the issue, one that acknowledges that terrorism doesn't necessarily equal Islam. We might take such an idea for granted, but the rest of this country does not. But yes, I agree he should do better research and attempt to give more than just his midwestern American take on it all.
The point that 'terrorism doesn't necessarily equal Islam', if indeed Wilber's intention, strikes me as pretty elementary, nonetheless. Americans can be excused, I think, for the opinion that, for all intents and practical purposes, 'terrorism' is equated with Islamofascism if for no other reason than recent history both in this country as well as in Europe. (30 incidents, 16 countries, 5000 deaths, etc., positions al Qaeda at terrorism.org #1).
Islamofascism is clearly the most prominent brand of terrorism in the world today. The general populace doesn't split hairs about these sorts of things (problematic but also inevitable). Thus the 'pop view' that connects terrorism with Islamofascists is basically a reasonable one, for the purposes of most people in the West. And if Wilber wants to tackle just this 'pop view' on the merits, by all means have at it. But please get your statistics right, even in the "chatty, non-debate setting" of WilberNaked that Tuff Ghost accurately diagnoses.
If there is one thing I'd like Wilber's new book on terrorism to provide, it is a couple useful generalizations about terrorism that don't have anything to do with his attempts at distance-based psychoanalysis (which I simply don't trust). Rather, I mean useful distinctions between the ridiculous plethora of definitions of terrorism in use in the world today. I'm tired of the vagueness of the word; much in the same way I'm tired of the vagueness and imprecision of postmodernism, applied to the art world. I would be very happy if Wilber provides material that makes a more narrow and focused definition out of 'terrorism'.
My own view is that the label ought be confined to incidents of small sects of people who commit acts of destruction and fear advertised as 'against a country'. PR, of a particularly repellent kind, is part and parcel of this definition of terrorism. Terrorists in this way take an entire nation as their enemy. Destruction and fear used against smaller collectives or organizations, and without the anti-nation PR, would thus not be terrorism, but simply criminal activity. We need not elevate all crime to the level of 'terrorism', else the term means nothing. We ought not be 'Jungian' and participate in excess elevation to 'terrorism' of activity long-tempered by local/state/federal law.
It has become common to refer to terrorism as a tactic. In other words, it is a kind of behavior. But this is certainly not all that terrorism is. A view of terrorism through the quadrants yields three more factors: psychology (regardless of Wilber), culture, and societal structure. These four factors emerged through a quadratic view, which illumines the core relationships stitched into the fabric of being.
This is why I find Wilber's 'psychology-only' public statements about terrorism so faulty. Even if I were to assume that the psychological makeup of Timothy McVeigh was the same as Mohammad Atta and Michael Griffen (which I don't unless we make the most broad, and therefore meaningless, generalizations possible), you still have to consider three other factors in order to make any kind of comprehensive conclusion about 'terrorism'.
Are the behavioral, cultures, and societal components of McVeigh, Atta, and Griffen the same? Obviously not, so our striving to see 'unity in the world of terrorism' gets a little murkier, complicated, and less-tolerant of generalizations of the kind Wilber excels. Or simply, terrorism is way more than an issue of psychology. Wilber has focused on psychology in his public statements on terrorism, and this is the assumption I have sought to question. (And which I'd be less apt to do if Wilber was, well, professionally trained in the field.)
Please do read that entry from Victoria's blog (from 9.17.05). Moment that made me cry:
We talk about Great-Granny no longer being on Earth. "Mom, is Great-Granny in OUTER SPACE?!?" We talk about how the part of her that made her Great-Granny keeps going forever. I figure he can contemplate all that 2 drop/merge with the one/retain the individual soul stuff when he's older. We talk about how she keeps living in our hearts.
"I can't call her on the phone?"
"No but you can talk to her whenever you want."
"Can I blow her a kiss?"
"Sure."
"Right now?"
"Anytime."
[Skyler blows a big kiss.]
"Can I throw her a hug?"
"Of course!"
[Skyler hugs himself and then flings his arms open wide.]
THE POWER OF YEAST—ON ARTIST COLLECTIVES AND ARTISTIC SEMIOTICS
In two posts on what he calls "The Power of the Posse", Salamone is talking about a revolution. Here. And here. Dan Allison, over @ The (W)hole, comments.
My view is that all great art is communal—Sherman Alexie famously said 'all art is tribal'— or in other words, it comes from communities. What is present is creative communities (could be 5 people, 35, or 155, no matter) is a binding agent that is ineffable. But it is akin to yeast, in its organic self-sustainability (given a couple proper ingredients (flour, a touch of sugar, water) and the right temperature—there are always conditions).
The best sourdough bread is made from yeast that is 100 years old or more. From the continual 'mother yeast starter' comes innumerable loaves of bread, all offspring from the central, living source, which is itself reborn in material around the pregnant mystery. Bread dough, a living creature before it enters the oven, is a community of active and passive agents, of food and that which feeds off of that food.
Humans are a social creature. This is why the paranoia about techonology's supposed effects of isolation (witness the hubbub around the iPod) is misguided. The smallest human unit is two. Identity is forged in the alchemistry of constant measurement against others. We feed off of each other. Extended periods of isolation breeds neuroses, the remedy for which is simple socialization. Humans need periods of isolation and communion; this relationship is self-corrective and over time, like water, tends towards equilbrium, though never actually reaches it.
Artistic meaning, too, is produced through the smallest human unit. Every artwork enters the vast pool of already created artworks, and tempers its meaning against that oceanic pool. Today's art feeds off of other contemporary and older artwork. Artistic Semiotics of the kind central to my work includes the four-part relationship between artist intuition, material parts, the material whole (artwork), and the response by...someone else. Artists need to display their artwork, a simple but crucial act, to complete the energetic circuitry (from artist subjective to audience subjective, via objective form) and thus establish an artwork's manifest identity in the world. Artwork, like love, is impossible without someone else to experience it. That audience microgenetically finds meaning through the pool of already-experienced artwork that colors people's individual psychologies.
Creative collectives of any level of organization (preschool, neighborhood, scholastic, extra-curricular, weekend/afterwork, adult-ed, and so on) act to enhance potential semiotic yeast. A good collective puts 'meaning in the air', or 'food on the table'. Or better, collectives instill breath-force (the original meaning of 'spirit') into artistic semiotics. People, together in the same physical, mental, and spiritual spaces or clearings, foster animation—of ideas, of materials, of presentation, of emotions, of artists' edges. Meaning, which begins as shared intuition, is given the potential for life, to then be harvested, cooked, and then digested.
The same potential life that artist communities create is in every block of fresh yeast. Yeast is reproducible, flexible, easily transportable, and the basis innumerable applications, or recipes. Yeast can go in any direction, for nearly any reasonable purpose, and can create nearly any kind of bread. And see, as well, how the best bread recipes keep things simple. There are breads the require complex planning, ingredients, and mixtures, but sourdough, for example, has yeast, flour, water, and salt.
Artist collectives that likewise keep things simple—through restraint, patience, the avoidance of over-planning and over-intellectualization, the acceptance of native differences in people's temperament. In this way collectives can provide to artists the three things that they can—a shelter for meaning, a reception for visionary artifacts, and yeast (to take from the 'mother yeast' of the group) for your own work, through intuition.
Just as extracted yeast can live on when the mother yeast starter dies, so too does intuition taken from a collective live on long after the collective collapses. We all carry in our body/mind/spirit the inherited yeast from our ancestors. So...what can you do to pass on the crucial components of your yeast to others, so it lives on after you die? So you, too, foster sustainability? So your wholeness of identity becomes the partness, to support future generations?
Or simply, in what way can your productions be food? And what is the mother yeast of your artist collective?
On the nature of the writings of Marquis de Sade, who for Paglia represents the height of Late Romanticism's Decadence, and who in her view prefigures American Romanticism (the likes of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, James, and Dickinson). From Sexual Personae, p. 243:
Sade, a philosophe casting the church out of his universe, ends by making sex a new religion. His lavish sexual ritualism dramatizes the natural hierarchism of sex—a hierarchism having nothing to do with sexual custom, for women can be masters and men slaves. Sadomasochism is coldly formal, a condensed expression of the biologic structure of sex-experience. In every orgasm there is domination or surrender, open at all times to both sexes, in groups, pairs, or alone. Richard Tristman remarked to me, "All sexuality entails some degree of theater." Sex contains an element of the abstract and transpersonal, which only sadomasochism forthrightly acknowledges. Tristman continued: "All sexual relations involves relations of dominance. The desire for equality in women is probably an attenuated expression of the desire to dominate." Hailed in the Sixties as a sexual liberator, Sade is actually the most scholarly documenter of sex's subjection to hierarchical orders.
Hannah's short film, A Whirling Tango, has been accepted to the Chicago International Film Festival! Holy crap wowsers we are thrilled!
We know that it will screen three times at the state-of-the-art AMC River East theatre in downtown Chicago, just off the Magnificent Mile.
Hannah is overwhelmed, joyous, and deeply honored. This is the film she made right after she found out she was pregnant, in a burst of creativity that brought forth the entire piece pretty much in just a couple hours work.
I'm excited too that I will hear one of my compositions (for marimba) in this big space. The Dallmans are pumped!
In his most recent free video offering, called "Terrorism, Part 1", at his site, Integral Naked (a clip that is only free this week, unfortunately) Wilber makes the following claim:
I looked at perhaps the last 100 major terrorist acts around the world. And many of these, frankly, a lot of people think, well, they are like, al Qaeda and so on. And that is actually a very, very small portion.
He presumably means "a very, very small portion ... of the last 100 major terrorist acts around the world". And this is preposterous. Al Qaeda's acts comprise a very, very small portion? Um, not exactly. From this source:
There have been 30 major mass casualty attacks directed against the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and North Osetia. 14 of the 30 attacks were conducted prior to the invasion of Iraq, making claims of the occupation of Iraq as a casus belli for al Qaeda’s terrorism to be disingenuous at best. 4,895 people have been killed in these attacks, and 12,345 plus have been wounded. The majority of the countries attacked are Muslim countries. And although not stated, the vast majority of the victims of al Qaeda's violence are Muslims.
Under no scale I can think of would these statistics suggest that al Qaeda terrorism is a 'very very small portion'. Almost 5,000 deaths, over 12,000 people injured. 30 mass casualty attacks. 16 countries. Wilber is straight-up wrong. This basic error does not bode well for the book on terrorism has said he has finished.
That he goes on to connect al Qaeda with Timothy McVeigh and US abortion clinic bombings is a provocative point, for at the very least the purposes of demagoguery, but outside of self-verification of his philosophical model, I'm not at all convinced it is a useful connection. Nor do I think it is one born of, ironically, an integral analysis, that takes all evidence into account before drawing conclusions. You basically have to strip away culture, social systems, and behavior to see the one way al Qaeda perhaps might connect with McVeigh and the clinic bombers, namely psychology, of the particular levels and lines variety that Wilber, the spiritual philosopher turned untrained theoretical psychologist turned political sociologist, favors in his work.
Is anybody arguing persuasively that al Qaeda, McVeigh, and the abortion clinic bombers weren't wrong under the most basic moral test? No sane view would say each are not viciously immoral. I have previously argued that a 'levels and lines'-based analysis of sociology and culture is highly problematic. And this is another reason why. It makes connections that have surface appeal, but collapse when examined for practical, rubber-meets-road guidance. Analysis that offers no practical guidance is useless masterbation.
I come away from Wilber's little video piece thinking, 'so the fuck what?', which to me is not a good thing when you are supposedly listening to the "internationally acknowledged leader of the integral revolution gathering momentum around the world." (from here). Frankly, I expect more. If Wilber was just a dude with a little web-savviness putting ideas and formulations up on the web for others to consider, that would be one thing. But he has a whole institution of his own creation around him, and so the stakes are raised considerably. We ought expect more than this elementary analysis based upon faulty and partial premises.
To me, Wilber is taking integral theory far too close to 'no way out' rhetorical territory. Few people have the time to rescue the merits of integral from this kind of misguided analysis of terrorism. There is a small but dedicated group of bloggers and writers who are trying in nothing but good faith, in areas beyond just terrorism, and I gladly count myself in that group. I'm definitely not part of a group that minimizes 5,000 deaths from terrorism in the way Mr Instant Gratification does.
"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again."
"In the life of this nation, we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force, and that all life is fragile. We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s. Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood and storm to build anew and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature and we will not start now."
"In this place, there is a custom for the funerals of jazz musicians. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, the band breaks into a joyful "second line" symbolizing the triumph of the spirit over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge, yet we will live to see the second line."
It happened. While there is always more to say about nearly everything, in terms of symbolic forces of rhetoric, in a receptive public forum broadcast over the internet, radio, and television, I just don't think there will be much more weighty a representation of pro-war and anti-war in Iraq than the debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway. The question posed for formal debate was simple—was the Iraq War just and necessary? The passions, provocations, and reasoned arguments were laid bare. This is why we cherish democracy, to participate in debates such as this.
The situation is perfect, with an electrified hall and audience, the air is ripe, and the combatants educated and were in good form. The debate did veer at times to the personal instead the topical (inevitable to some extent) but in fact that was revealing as well. (The pluralist worldview is known for valuing such ad hominem investigations, it is worth noting.) But there was plenty of important points made entirely on topic. I was entralled.
I ought say that I fall squarely on Hitchens' angle on the war, for what it is worth. His is essentially a planet-centric pro-war angle. (Yes, a planet-centric anti-war angle is entirely possible, though Galloway did not make one, in my estimation.) And I have held my face to the fire of most of my friends and family on this issue for quite some time, and frankly I usually just keep my views private on this issue. My reasons for my position are a longer story, for another post.
To listen to the entire, riveting debate, click here. If you want to get right into the action, without the pre-debate commentary, then under 'Direct Links' click 'three', as in the third MP3 file.
From indieWIRE. Spread the word. As I have said before, Van Gogh's brutal murder by an Islamofascist is a watershed moment in the creation of a post-pluralist morality at the planet-centric level:
Buscemi, Tucci and Blaban to Remake Van Gogh Trilogy as Homage to Murdered Director
Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci and Bob Balaban have signed on to direct a remake of a trilogy by murdered Dutch director Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh, a descendant of the painter, was killed because of "Submission," a short film he made with liberal Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who fled an arranged marriage. The film portrayed violence against women in Islamic societies and was shown on Dutch television. Van Gogh's last film "06/05: The Sixth of May" will have its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday, Sept 15 as will "All Souls," a compilation of sixteen vignettes from seventeen Dutch directors based on episodes surrounding van Gogh's death.
"It was always Theo's dream to come to America and make films in New York, and this is a way of fulfilling those dreams," said Gijs van de Westelaken of Netherlands-based Column Productions and Bruce Weiss of New York-based Ironworks Productions who made the announcement Tuesday. "The films all have a central and very universal theme, the battles between men and women. Anybody who has ever been in a relationship will identify with these films and since these are such actor-driven films we felt it was important to have directors who are also great actors. We are really touched that Steve, Stanley and Bob have come on board this project to help realize Theo's dream."
The three films are: "06 (1994)" -- the Dutch submission for the Oscar that year -- is a story of two people who meet on a phone sex line and go through an entire relationship without ever meeting in person. "Blind Date" (1996) is a story about two parents who have lost a child and then reinvent themselves over and over again as different characters through personal ads trying to rebuild their relationship. "Interview" (2003) is a story about a top political journalist who has a falling out with his editor and then against his will has to interview the country's most popular soap actress. With some of the revenue from the films, Westelaken and Weiss will set up a fund in Van Gogh's memory to support freedom of speech in filmmaking. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
Watch a clip of Submission, which got van Gogh killed, at iFilm.
More on why I believe New Orleans must by rebuilt, or at least must be attempted to be rebuilt. From a comment I made at his Coolmel blog:
Sup Rommel,
I think you are creating a distinction without much of a difference, and I don't think you ought rest your case, because, really, you haven't made one (i.e., why is rebuilding impractical, counter-intuitive, etc., what are your reasons?, beyond just stating your conclusions).
Yes, obviously, the Chicago Fire is generally not thought of as product of the forces of nature and the Gulf disaster ostensibly was. (Some think a comet caused the Chicago fire!)
But I believe that misses the key point of what happened in New Orleans. Why? Because as the photo-essay I linked to on my blog shows (as well as countless other accounts), New Orleans survived the hurricane. The city was fine even through the second day post-Katrina. It was the breaking of the levees that did the city and its inhabitants in, starting on the third day or so. Check the photo-essay if you haven't, because it is fascinating.
(The causality of which, in the foreground, is the hurricane, yes, but in the more fundamental background, is their construction, the repairs of which we have found out were tied up in the clusterfuck that is the local/state/federal mess of things.)
Thus my parallel with the Great Chicago Fire holds—the levees, like the wooden nature of pre-20th century Chicago, were man-made. We can make the levees stronger, we can move the flow of the Mississippi (as the article you link to suggests), we can renew the marshlands that used to protect New Orleans from storms (but have been cleared out in the last decades for various reasons), and we can have a better plan to temporarily evacuate people should a threat of another storm emerge, which it likely will.
All of which would make New Orleans a perfectly livable place in the long-term, preserve its standing as America's cultural epicenter, economic inlet, and locus of Dionysian revelry.
And I'm frankly surprised and shocked that there is even this Meme circulating around the blogosphere. I mean, for chrissakes, Manhattan is on an island, Madison on an isthmus, San Francisco on a fault-line, and anyone can be struck by a bolt of lightning, tornado, electrical storm, and a car at anytime. Living in Chicago, people are throwing hot dogs all the time, and I just know one's gonna hit me in my eye sometime, just in the wrong spot.
Is a rebuilt and re-protected New Orleans within a reasonable amount of daily risk? We will see, and we won't know unless we try. I certainly think it is within human ingenuity to make it so. I'd rather we rise to this challenge than sulk into a protective shell. Life is worth living, especially at the revelrous zones that only New Orleans provides (at least in this country).
This country gets a whole helluva lot more boring if we lose New Orleans (and not just the Quarter, but all of it). As someone who has drank his fair shair of hurricanes amidst near-naked women (and men), smoked his fair share of doobies listening to late-night jazz sessions at the Funky Butt, and has dropped his fair share of gell caps while watching the creepily-engaging Mardi Gras street parades, not to mention walked its beautiful streets and utterly sublime above-ground graveyards, I know just how subversively vital New Orleans is.
As the womb of jazz, and thus the American character, we must try to rebuild. If we fail, we fail. But we must try. It will be a slog, but the American will-to-live has overcome greater tragedies, and I believe we will overcome this one.
Hannah, Twyla, Lori Beth (our primary doula, in red), and Leah (our assistant doula, in brown). Our midwife, Martha, is not pictured. This is about an hour after Twyla was born.
THE "WHATCHU B HATIN'?" EXPERIMENT A Letter to Tuff Ghost, On Western Classical Music Appreciation
The creator of Vomitting Confetti wondered aloud about where to start with Western classical music. So as usual, I rather went on about this and that. What follows is a slightly edited version of what I wrote as a comment to his blog.
The best place to start is wherever you start. That may sound glib but the beauty of music, as the most subjective of all arts, relies nearly completely upon a listener's disposition (a mixture of psychology, openness in the moment, physical location, previous listener experiences, mood). Our favorite pieces of music recall instantly a certain time and place of first deep resonance for a reason. Like water, music fills up completely whatever space it is released in.
I write this listening to Bartok's First String Quartet, performed by the Emerson String Quartet. For me, these pieces are tied to a period in my life when Hannah and I lived in Minneapolis and I was starting to take my study of music compositions seriously. I was really struggling with a semblance of a compositional voice. The Bartok Quartets I have grown to love, but it was a journey. I rather hated Bartok and everything he composed for quite sometime, it was so much as dissonant garbage to me. However I decided to follow one of my favorite pieces of advice for composers -- isolate a work by a composer that you utterly detest, and listen to it regularly for one year.
When the year is up, do what you will with the piece, but give it that year, because the things we detest usually have the capacity to release an open space that for whatever reason is in emotional lockdown. A year's time has been just enough to allow the interior forces to work their sequence of 'witness the constriction, breath into the constriction, witness the expansion' with the music we truly hate. Music that truly holds no value for us we simply ignore as leaves that fly by in a windy, autumnal day. Passionate hate, on the other hand, is a sign of lockdown that bears closer examination.
For me, a year with Bartok's string quartets allowed me to see that dissonance is a dynamic that I wanted to incorporate more into my compositional sense. And it just so happens, I really like the string quartets now, as these radically unfolding muscular expansions of tonal color, emblematic of Bartok's own search in his native Hungary for rhythms, harmonies, melodies, and subtler gestures of the folk. But his string quartets now, in my view, signify the struggle the world faces and will face in the reconciliiation of self and community at a planet-centric levels.
So maybe start with something you be hatin'. Call this the 'Whatchu B Hatin' experiment. Sit yourself down in a local library, put on the headphones, and start spinning CDs that span the spectrum of premodern, modern, and postmodern. Find what you like, and what you hate, and listen to both till the wolves howl down the moon.
(Sidenote—will I ever be able to get traction with the integral community to use 'experiments' instead of the Wilber-approved 'injunctions'? The latter is such a silly term, and so immediately uncool. The more classical term of 'experiments' is so much better because that is what happened when conscious intention meets behavior. And non-jargon folks know what you are talking about, taboot.)
Here are a couple other notes, before I list a couple of my recommendations. There are a lot of misconceptions about 'how to like classical music'. First of all, as I discussed in my review of the book The Agony of Modern Music, we can't let intellectuality get in the way of creative juices. And this goes for music appreciation, too. Music of any kind is music to us because it rattles our bones and hits us in our stomachs. It may be that you just don't dig classical music, and that's fine. But my guess is that there are some composers out there who will get you in the same places where you favorite music now gets you.
'Classical music' is really a fuckload of possible music. Basically it is anything created by a single man or woman, who has arranged directions for others to execute in sound. These 'arranged directions' could be a expressed verbally (such as in 'early music'), on a notated score (the famed 'classical' period), or through written words (postmodern experimentalism). Someone who arranges directions (verbal, notated, written) is distinct from a singer/songwriter (the classical archetype of 'troubadour') through the objectification of musical gesture. Fewer works by troubadours retain the sonic juice when performed by someone besides that troubadour (or singer/songwriter) whereas to have someone else perform one's music is the hallmark of the 'composer'. Of course there is overlap in these two distinctions.
Furthermore, what makes up the 'classical canon' is usually the best-loved examples through history of composed music, as well as those works that theorists/commentators have cited as illustrative of certain musical principles. (Music theory is nothing but the intuitive tendancies of visionary composers that theorists have noted creates a rather impersonal pattern.) But this is a long history, and frankly, it is better in my view to forget about history and lineage when you are looking for something to listen to and like. And certainly forget about all 'shoulds' and touch that which touches you, for whatever reason. Sometimes the 'canon' gets in the way of authentic discovery of older works of music on each's own terms and native, formal value.
I suggest starting with contemporary, or relatively contemporary stuff, and working backward. Steve Reich, Ravel, and Bartok are composers that are both informed by history but create unique sonorities. If you can listen to Reich's simple repetitions, then you can actually listen to 12th century Perotin, who has inspired many a minimalist. If you can listen to Ravel's string quartet, then you can listen to any such chamber music from the repetoire. And if you can listen to Bartok, than you can listen to anything dissonant and earthy created in the 20th century.
Of course, the foundation of the last three hundred years of Western art music is Bach. There, I would check out his Suites for solo cello, because those are achingly sublime, and encapsulate his own personal spiritual journey (in my view). For High-Renaissance Italian-style, check out Gesualdo, the murderous composer who fostered an avant-garde within the tight conservative constraints of his time (16th century). For early Renaissance, check out Machaut's 'Motets' (Hilliard Ensemble), which prefigure the swing and sycopation of jazz. These compositions are highly provocative and sonically quite engaging. For medieval, my eternal recommendation is Hildegard von Bingen's plainchants performed by the group, Sequentia. Plainchants are pure musical prayers, intended for evocation and enunciation of God (in much the same way Sufism operates, musically).
My advice with jazz—pick up 'The Ellington Suites' by Duke Ellington or 'Standards in Silhouette' by Stan Kenton—this is composed/arranged big-band stuff that has as much musicality, composer intention, and sonoric narrative as Mozart or Beethoven. The big-band is the contemporary symphony, a fact nearly drowned out by the proliferation of retro-classicism that fills our large music halls.
Also consider that while the Western classical tradition is commonly conceived of as composed, a composition is simply a slowed-down improvisation, gone through layers of revision. Everyone of any genre of music is making it up, at the barest level. That is the open secret of music creation. Tis why the words 'play' and 'music' go so well together! That small-combo jazz employs improvisation so much bespeaks, in my view, the need that America in the 40s-60s had for social experimentalism. And of course jazzers didn't improvise all the time. Dizzy Gillespie said that if he had seven gigs a week, he was only innovative in two of them.
Good luck with the search, and let me know how things go.
Farmers are dreamers of the first order. The most romantic of dreamers. Feet in the soil, head in the clouds, backs bent in today's tractors. They are most wishful of all those who have inherited the earth as their legacy and work with their bodies as well as their minds. Who else depends so strongly on the unknown and goodwill of the unexpected as a farmer does?
The impending birth of calves inspires dreams of the calf being the right calf and growing into being the right cow. The planning, the haying, even the milling all being controlled by forces within the realm of knowledge and experience and yet controlled by a force far stronger than one can even begin to imagine. There are years when only the steadfast grim concentration can carry one's step to the barn. And days when all goes so well that life is as close to perfection as is possible on this earth.
