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  • Coming Down off a Techno High

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                         New Moon

    Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

    Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

    Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.


    Cinema and Television GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Buddhist After-Life and the Killing Fields

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  93%  27%  omph NNW bar 29.77 windchill25  Winter

                      New Moon

    Had a summary of our gathering (Woollies) at the Istanbul Bistro, but lost in a multiple cascading of Internet Explorer browser pages.  Probably a sign I should go back to Firefox.  I used to use it, then I abandoned it, used it again, and abandoned it again.  Just like Darth Vader I keep coming back to the evil empire.

    Mark, Warren, Paul, Tom, Frank, Bill and Stefan showed up.  We spoke of politics and Rome, of Green Knights present and long dead. A brief comment was made about the Istanbul not being a sportsbar, a positive.  It’s quiet and it has a round table around which this latter day collection of Knights Errant can sit.  That does mean knights in error, doesn’t it?

    Mark has a gig in Bangkok designing teen sex exhibitions for Unesco/Thailand.  It’s a campaign to promote safe sex in a nation where AIDS among youngsters has become a problem again.  After that he will return to the US, then go back to Cambodia to construct an exhibit near the killing fields, one dealing with the Buddhist afterlife.  To continue the international theme Paul Strickland will host a trip to Syria in November and his organization will co-host a trip with the Hindu Temple of Maple Grove to Southern India.  Stefan chimed in with the fact that he’s taking his kids to Rome to visit a person he knows who works in the American Embassy there.  Makes for good dinner table conversation.  Those who’d been to Rome all agreed the most memorable moment was the first coffee. 

    We discussed the political scene.  All of us were happy with the real choices represented by the candidates.  Of course, SuperTuesday will eliminate any chance for us to pariticipate in candidate selection and after we will have 7 months of attack ads, but right now it is glorious.  Tom wondered if any of us had supported any candidates financially.  Frank said, yes, he and Mary had sent money to Obama.

    Warren reported good news about his mom and dad.    

     The retreat and a theme came up, but we put it off until Paul’s.  Mark will not attend since he’s got to be in Thailand the first week of February.  I’m leaving early for Hawai’i.  One of those years.

     Forgot to mention here I watched Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast the other night. It’s one of the Janus Films collection I got for my 60th birthday, 50 films from 50 years of their distribution of foreign films in the US.  This movie floats across the mind like a dream, a fairy tale given form and substance.  It’s images have remained with me.  It sat in my DVD player for a long time because I didn’t want to watch it; but, like each one of the films from the collection I’ve watched it had its own unique charm.


    Art and Culture Politics Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Is Obama the Liberal Reagan?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33 90%  31%  1mph  NNW  bar29.75  falls windchill31  Winter

                         New Moon

    The speakers first, then the short story.  Then my Asia tour.  May take until Tuesday with the Woollies tonight at the Istanbul Cafe and my workout.  Made a decision last night to shift the resistance and flexibility work to T/Th/Sat which will put aerobics only on Monday and Friday, the days I have the most conflicts with working out.  The aerobics are easier to time.

    This chilly, humid weather I left Indiana to avoid.  I feel about this in-between weather the same as Martin Luther did about sin.  He said, “If you’re going to sin, sin boldly.”  I say, “If it’s going to be cold, let it be cold.  And snowy.  And all the other appropriate winter stuff, not this melty coldish yuck.”

    Tomorrow New Hampshire.  A Gallup poll release yesterday showed Obama out in front of Clinton 41% to 29%.  He will probably do well in South Carolina, the next primary.  I can feel the optimism of the African-American community viscerally.  The analysis I’ve read, however, says even wins in all 3 races may not be enough.  The SuperTuesday primaries are states where the Clinton organization has built solid leads, according to reporters on the ground.  We’ll see. 

    David Brooks, of all people, suggested what might happen.  If enough independents find Obama to be the liberal Reagan, an optimistic voice helping to redefine America in a time of shattered national confidence, and African-Americans and young people do, too, then it will become Obama with the sense of inevitability, knocking the dull, hack-type politics of Hilary out of the race.  As far as issues go, I’m a Kucinich guy, and in the three way race, Edwards gives voice to what I believe, but the prospect of electing an African-American or a woman moves me, too.  Feels good to have legitimate choices for a change.

    Speaker wire here I come, awake and opposable thumbs in the right places. 


    General Politics 📎and tagged

  • Obama and Huckabee

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    16  85%  26%  omph S  bar 30.07 falls windchill 16  Yuletide

                   Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

                             Iowa Caucus Night

    Oh, the political junkie in me is humming tonight.  Obama takes Iowa.  Huckabee takes Iowa.  Who knew all these folks wanted Iowa in the first place?  It would have been fun to be in Iowa tonight. 

    If you’ve never submitted yourself to the pleasures of an Iowa subcaucus evening, you haven’t lived politically.  The DFL here in Minnesota adopted the Iowa subcaucus process.  In three hotly contested elections I subcaucused in Minneapolis.  It’s sort of the political version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  How many gender neutral, pro-labor, anti-gun McCarthy voters are there?  If there are a few left over for a viable caucus, who can we cut a deal with to get  more for our issue?  It’s wild and if there are a lot of people it’s exciting.  Horse trading and dickering at a fast clip.

    It also makes tallying up winners an interesting process as Wolf Blitzer kept saying all evening.  In the end CNN counted the total of Iowa state delegates each candidate got, created percentages and called their winners.  The more sedate Iowa Republicans took straw votes and went home.  Much easier, but not nearly as much fun.

    What does this mean for the race as a whole?  Well, Hilary doesn’t look inevitable anymore.  Obama is far from having it locked it up, but, as a commentator on CNN said (not poor bewildered Wolf Blitzer), if he carries two predominantly white states, Iowa and New Hampshire, black voters will flock to him and quite possibly away from Hilary.  They won’t want to stand in the way of the first black president.  By February 5th, a quick time in politics, it may done since AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, GA, IL, MN, MO, NJ, NY, ND, OK, TN & UT primaries plus New Mexico, Idaho and Kansas Democratic primaries are on Tuesday, February 5th.

    That would mean the general election race would begin that night and last until November.  What does that mean for an election process usually compressed in the days following Labor Day?  Don’t know.  Anyhow, lots to keep us junkies up nights until then.


    News of the Strange Politics 📎and tagged

  • Tomorrow, In a Cornfield Near You

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    1 77%  22%  0mph WSW bar 30.73 falls  Yuletide

               Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

    Today is the day I devote to marketing my work, an idea suggested by Scott Edelstein.  A day a month on it, then put it away, he said.  That way it has time set aside and does not weigh on the work.  I’ve done just that since September and I have finished all my short story edits.  Next month I will have some to submit.

    I heard from my brother, Mark, who told me a while ago he was afraid the political unrest in Thailand might set off violence.  He was right, as he says, regrettably.  

    United States democracy, and democracies in most of the developed world, are a reasoned trade-off between the power of violence and the assertion of authoritarian government.  The nation’s focus on Iowa tomorrow has such edge because the result in that agricultural state might change foreign and domestic policy in the world’s strongest economy backed up by the world’s most expensive military.   That is, we expect a peaceful transition of power between one government and the other, in fact, we insist upon it.  Not all countries can harbor such expectations.

    It is just this peaceful transition that Al Gore protected when he refused a public challenge to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Florida voting discrepancies.   His graciousness was necessary, I think, in spite of the horrors that resulted directly from it.

    Some people call it the silly season.  Others turn off their TV sets and stop reading newspapers.  I call it the best show on earth with the exception of the greatest spectacle in racing, the Indianapolis 500.  A presidential election year.  What a year it is.  The first time in 80 years that no incumbent president or vice-president is on the ballot.  Think of that.  This is the first time in two generations, my whole life.

    The first chapter opens tomorrow in a corn field near you.


    Politics 📎and tagged

  • What Rough Beast Comes?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26 83%  28% 2mph NNW  bar 30.15 rises windchill25   Yuletide

                              Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

    The assassination of Benazir Bhutto chilled me, chilled me more than the air temperature outside.  My reaction surprised me since I have no Pakistani friends, feel no special affiliation with the Pakistani people and know only a little about Ms. Bhutto.  Yeats comes to mind:  The center will not hold.  This targeted political violence is the rough beast that slouches toward the Bethlehems in every country and toward the calm in our souls.

    There is no place on the globe any longer that does not affect us, no matter how remote from our understanding or apparent sympathies.  This is good in a general sense and perhaps bodes well for the long term future when these kind of strong links bind us together even more strongly; but now, in the short term, the ripples will have unexpected consequences.

    The material below is interesting.

    From Scientific American Online: 

    People who describe themselves as being politically liberal can better suppress a habitual response when faced with situations in which that response is incorrect, according to research that used a simple cognitive test to compare liberal and conservative thinkers. Tasks that require such “conflict monitoring” also triggered more activity in the liberals’ anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region geared to detect and respond to conflicting information.

    Past research has shown that liberals and conservatives exhibit differing cognitive styles, with liberals being more tolerant of ambiguity and conservatives preferring more structure. The new paper “is exciting because it suggests a specific mechanism” for that pattern, com­ments psychologist Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who was not involved with the study. In the experiment, subjects saw a series of letters flash quickly on a screen and were told to press a button when they saw M, but not W. Because M appeared about 80 percent of the time, hitting the button became a reflex—and the more liberal-minded volunteers were better able to avoid the knee-jerk reaction.

    The study’s lead author, psychologist David Amodio of New York University, emphasizes that the findings do not mean that political views are predetermined. “There are a lot of steps be­tween conflict monitoring and political ideology, and we don’t know what those steps are,” he says. Although the neurocognitive process his group measured is so basic that it is most likely in place in early childhood, he notes that “the whole brain is very malleable.” Social relation­ships and other environmental factors also shape one’s political leanings.


    Politics 📎and tagged

  • Will Reading Continue to Dwindle?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    17  909%  25%  0mph W bar 29.99 steady windchill17 

    A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
      – Friedrich Nietzsche

    The Twilight of the Books offers evidence of a decline in reading.  Here are a few excerpts to prove their point:

    “In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

    In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.””

    The rest of the article provides further evidence to support these contentions.  One hypothesis is that reading will return to its pre-modern era state as an activity of a specialized reading class.  Back in the 19th century that class had some caché, this article suggests that may not be the case in the future; reading will be arcane.  Fine by me, but bad for a democracy relying on an educated electorate.

    Something the article touches on only obliquely is the degree to which we may return to an image intensive culture, much like the middle ages where architecture, painting and other image creating crafts were primary teachers of the illiterate.  The article does talk about a second orality, a return to the type of communication common among pre-literate cultures where memorization and story counted for a great deal.  A potential downside of this return is diminishment of critical analysis since writing allows for side by side comparison of two ideas where in an oral culture only one notion at a time can hold sway, making critical thought difficult.

    There are, however, contradictory trends not covered in the article.  The explosion of blogs, in the tens of millions, certainly represents a degree of literacy and creative writing not explained in the dismal statistics.  It also doesn’t cover the unusual merging of image and words in manga and graphic novels, nor does it expand on the second orality which in this case will have a cultural context supportive of critical analysis and, therefore, presumably available for transmission in more oral friendly forms like you tube, tv news, podcasts.   Still, a provocative look at tomorrow. 

    Wouldn’t you know, just when I get down to serious writing…


    GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged