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1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 27,February,2004 | ................................. playwriting oscar party ................................. i'd like to interupt our regularly scheduled programming to let all PLAYWRITING alumni that you're invited to the RUDDS at 7 pm on Sunday night. This years prolific playwrights will be coming too. Please pass the word along to your peers who I've lost contact with! Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 26,February,2004 | ......................... just about perfect ......................... inappropriate blog disclosure number 543: 543. I go to the bathroom to find peace. solace. respite. You know there's something to be said for just being by one's self. the advent of toddlers in our world has decreased the privacy of the loo -- but not gotten rid of it altogether. strangely enough, i think that going to the bathroom urlLink here would be perfect. You still have the solace, but you don't have to worry that you don't have the perfect reading material. its endlessly entertaining. even a little thrilling? may your trips to the lavatory be full of -- peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 25,February,2004 | (a modified version of a talk i gave to the general faculty body yesterday) Its Ash Wednesday. A day when much of the Christian world chooses to wear a sign of humiliation and weakness upon our foreheads. My friend Dave resigned from his job this past fall without knowing where he’d go. He’s my age with a wife and family and a mortgage. urlLink Ryan blogged about the discouraging dimensions of this stage in her life . She’s a bright, talented, driven writer who is struggling to find a sense of vocation in the jobs available to her. “Somewhere along the way I have lost this strong sense of self/identity that has always been a very prominent part of me. I have become really weak, which is hard for me to admit, because I am such a dominant person, but this is something I have had to face also.” Dez’s dad has even worse frustrations with a job he’s poured his heart and his career into. One of my cousins has all kinds of shit happening to her right now. One of my brother’s jobs is full of it, too. As I drove home from work the other day, I had a slow motion moment. Do you have those? Where something, for whatever reason, captures your attention and stands out? Slows down the time you’re experiencing? A dad and a little girl stood hand in hand poised and ready to cross 25th street. The Malone Rush Hour Traffic kept pouring by, though. I’m sure to her three year old eyes the crossing of that road seemed as wide as the Red Sea, or maybe as daunting as forty years in the Siani Desert. For Dave, for Ryan, for Dez, my cousin, my brother, for the three year old girl ~ waiting. Is hard. Being between is shitty. I mentioned urlLink Lubrano’s book LIMBO before -- where he talks about the experience of growing up in a blue collar home and living in white collar middle class society. He calls himself a “STRADDLER” someone with one foot in his blue collar heritage and the other in the occupation and social network of a white collar world. And I know the idea of liminality isn’t a new concept for you blog readers – I write about it a bit on my urlLink front burner site . Anthropologist Victor Turner refers to this position of between-ness – as a LIMINAL state. Limin simply means threshold. When you’re in a threshold you’re neither in the hallway nor in the room. No longer that, but not quite this either. Turner was intrigued by the possibilities of liminality. Limin offers a unique opportunity to its inhabitants to transform themselves and it often allows the group who bestows the new status (job, promotion, graduation, membership, completion) the opportunity to clarify the standards of the community. Are you already seeing how the college experience is one that’s full of liminal experiences? At Malone (my front burner employer), demographic data suggests that many of our students, as first generation college graduates, will emerge from college as “straddlers” – Lubrano writes ambivalently about this experience for him – “the academy renders you incomprehensible to the very people who formed you.” But its not just students. For all honest people, there are dimensions of our work and our families and our identity which we experience as being profoundly between. Between that which we’ve come from, and that which we work toward. On the other hand, one of the difficult parts of life is that for everyone who feels between – there are several people around her or him who are finding the world to be their oyster. Josiah and Nathan won a debate tournament this weekend. Dave decided on a job. My friend Garry wrapped a movie last week. Cliff finished a really great documentary film. I got tenure. Lynn’s big inservice at the downtown school district went really well. The world feels underwritten by a big generous disco beat and flashing glorious rotating light bulbs. It is fun for us to emerge into status, isn’t it? To find a job, to find meaning in our job, when our friendships feel good and secure, to finally reach safely the other side of twenty fifth street. the finish line of a long race, a promotion, a graduating child, a completed campaign. Crossing the Jordan. Leaving behind the wilderness of temptation and wandering and fasting. It’s natural to enter in to the celebration of completion and accomplishment. But its less natural to want to enter into the shit. But Lent is the season of the church year when we choose to go into the shit. I hope you’re not hung up on the word. I hope the severity of its ugliness just draws you into thinking about the exquisite complexities off its reality. Shit is stinky and vulgar and mushy. Until relatively recently in history it was pervasive (for many people and places, it still is). You couldn’t separate yourself so easily and completely from the ugliness your body produces with a quick flick of a silver lever. Some of the tribes Turner studied in employed shit to mark the liminal beings. It’s disgusting but true – they would smear themselves with it as costume, marker and protection (from the evil spirits). Which reminds me that we shouldn’t forget the liminal nature of shit – the fertilizing capacity of our own waste… In lent, we choose to enter this middle ground. This difficult, ugly betweeness. We choose to lay aside status, step away from stability, reduce our comfort. We enter the wilderness, we don sackcloth. We do not sate our appetites. When we enter in to lent…we recognize the fullness of our own weakness and our dependence upon God’s mercy and grace. In lent…we remember the depths of darkness that lie within our own histories and lives. The virtue of hopefulness & anticipation, become vital in that darkness. In lent…we experience solidarity with the under-resourced, with the liminal, as a celebration of faith and reconciliation. And maybe most of all – we participate in the Great Divine Gesture – we give up our riches to participate in the suffering of the world. We choose to become less. Like Jesus, we go – into the shit. I know that there’s a rich diversity of faith tradition in the readership. Whether you’re giving something up for lent or not – can I invite you to participate in the spirit of lent? When you realize you are losing some control. When you feel overwhelmed by the flow of tasks. When you recognize that the light at the end of the tunnel is far away and getting dimmer. Or when you miss desperately that thing you’ve chosen to abstain from. Now. Here. In weakness, in humiliation, in darkness. Join in the Great Divine Gesture. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 24,February,2004 | which reminds me of the theory that my friend Greg used to have -- that there are two types of people in the world. People who are skinny and sad and hungry and people who are -- happy fat. and so -- happy fat -- became a kind of entelechial state. something to admire, to aspire toward. hope y'all are wolfing down your paczis today -- a last celebratory moment in the season of epiphany... peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 23,February,2004 | I've been thinking a lot about the uses and meanings of urlLink space lately. (go and read -- its very good -- a bit of a kindred spirit) the debate tournament happened in a place called the Philomathesian Lecture Hall at Kenyon College. It felt like a pub, and britain and dead poets society and like the place where all the honorable white guys have been gathering for all these centuries to think collectively about how they're going to shape things. so no wonder -- since they've been shaping things for so long -- no wonder that i like the way that space feels. sometimes i feel like i have more of an emotional connection with wood. but then i wonder if that's real or just conditioning. most of my office is old metal surfaces and concrete block, cement floor with an industrial weave rug over it and (worst of all) ceiling tile. Do you already know how i feel about ceiling tile? but sometimes this space can be a little bit sacred. mostly in moments when people are sitting in the yellow chair. some of you know the yellow chair, others do not. Here's a photo: urlLink Its been in my office ever since Grandma Erman's altzheimers forced her to give up her old house on the Erle Farm (century old log house, carefully covered and recovered in shiny white aluminium (please use british pronunciation on aluminium)). My father in law, Garry and my brother in law Brian looked at me as if I were a space alien when I suggested that I wanted the chair, and no, they shouldn't throw it out...but its lent itself to brilliant creative brainstorming, honest confrontation, broken expressions of pain, and mostly -- laughter and mundane conversation. I think that the yellow chair, when read as an icon, indicates that i live a fortunate life. Sacred space in the profane world of concrete, steel and drop ceilings. hope you find a yellow chair -- an airport where God can land in your day -- peace ~ (btw ~ if someone you know asks for prayer requests maybe you could mention the yellow chair. She's fallen on hard times, and I'm not sure if her springs are worth salvaging...any suggestions?) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 23,February,2004 | but there's never any new posts. It's been like a week. crazy! i travelled to Kenyon College with the Debate Team this weekend and as i drove through the hills and curves of southeastern ohio i listened to local radio. it's like a whole different world. they're still playing the hits on the pop and country charts, but the rest of the programming sounds like a completely other universe than format radio in the city sounds. There's none of the ethereal other worldly zooms or zaps or beeps. No thunderously echoing DJ voices giving station promos between each ad and after each program. The ads don't sound like they rolled out of New York and Nashville. Instead, DJs chat with their call-in listeners for twenty minutes. They chat about characters around town. Old friends hijinks. They laugh about ridiculous what-ifs. They speculate about the high school basketball game in two nights. The ads are read by the business owners and sound as raw as spoofs on Saturday Night Live. The drive-time DJ makes guest appearances at Spitlers restaurant every weekend and broadcasts live from Fiedler's Ford every thursday morning. He also calls the high school ball game, and intersperses his commentary with information about recent team injuries, family facts about the players and stories about how the two coaches got along when they were on the high school team together way back in the day. Local radio reminds me of blogging. The broadcasts seem idiosyncratic, quirky and unpredictable. The cast of characters on many blogs is as expansive and unique as any one person's world. But usually you can take comfort that no matter what happens in the lives of the DJs down at WTNS or WHBC -- the broadcast signal will not keep rolling. So...I'll try to do better. The plan is NOT to slack off on my backburner since i have tenure. the *plan* is to slack off on my *frontburner* -- but I've got such a conscientious streak runnin through me...it's so hard to leave behind those habits...but that's a different blog. peace out, faithful listeners~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 06,March,2004 | .......................... technology is sexy .......................... what is meant by that word anyway? (sexy) i'm reading: urlLink love the overall tone and direction of what she's saying -- i object to many of Ellul's critiques & Postman's logocentric thinking... BUT she writes about the slippage of meaning in words and how they mask things more than they mean things-- she offers the example of the phrase 'user friendly' -- it masks the meaning of friendship far more than it means a machine which is easy to use. but this word -- sexy. could a word possibly slip farther from its origin of meaning. and at the same time mean exactly the same thing as it always has. i use it a lot. I call a lot of things 'sexy.' i want to continually make people think about their bodies and desire and how their bodies and desire do and don't matter in the virtual world. metaphors are like terrorist bombs in the hands of hyperbolists. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 04,March,2004 | .................. .................. a while back i had a urlLink post where i talked about blogrolling and its connections to institutional life -- social movements -- etc... bumped into a different metaphor today -- the idea that blogrolling is a kind of a urlLink collecting game -- makes great sense to me -- ties into my earlier analysis, and will intrigue a few of you, i'm thinking... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 01,March,2004 | ........................................ thinking about story... ........................................ I really enjoyed reading urlLink this article -- a story about 'a newspaper's commitment to a Truth of Voices, to be set against the Truth of Numbers'. it seems like a lot of really important issues are being raised in this story -- epistemological questions the primacy of narrative the threats of metanarrative the precarious dependence of democracy upon media institutions. but, best of all, its pretty darn readable... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 01,March,2004 | ............................................................ who ever said that optimism is a virtue? ............................................................ i say yes to too many obligations. i make too many friends (i love them all, mind you). i expect to finish work in less time than i do. i see the spark of beauty in people who haven't muich more than a spark. does it sound like i'm a good guy? i'm not. ask my wife. living with an optimist is a special kind of hell. that should be the name of a song, eh? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 01,March,2004 | ......................................... rant on 'the good old days' ......................................... grading, grading, grading (spring break whispers from around the corner, 'you're almost there...)...but for now...another paper, another, another. here is the most commonly recited thesis: Things used to be better than they are now. it has lots of different contexts and language, but that's the jist of it.... for some older people...i don't mind so much when they cling to this thesis...i mean, i get it: they fear irrelevance, feel lost and confused by the changes...but a class full of first and second year college students?! what motivates them to argue for their own irrelevance? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 01,March,2004 | ....................... The Psino ....................... I was never sure why I was a psino (silent p); if it was something i had done; something i should be embarrassed about or something that was generally true of everyone. it was certainly true of everyone that was in my sunday school classes. Jesus loves me, the psino, for the bible tells me so. Perhaps 'psino' was a theological term describing the comprehensiveness of original sin? It was a ridiculously long time before I figured out my error. this, I know. and i thought of it this weekend when Jaelyn asked me and Lynn very insistently and repetitively: 'What is Cruisey - Violence?' It took a lot of conversation to realize that this was her take on the crowds maelovelent chant in the JESUS film (which she's been watching) as they chant, 'crucify him!' She'd been walking around muttering the magical dangerous phrase 'Cruisey Violence' all day. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 10,March,2004 | ...................... on simmmer ...................... alls well, y'all. i'm just travelling for the next six days. the back burner will resume its regularly scheduled cookin' next monday or tuesday... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 08,March,2004 | ......................................................................................................... a critique of birthday celebrations...and the possibility of unique selfhood ......................................................................................................... i turned 34 last week. on the one hand, I agree with birthday critics. birthdays should not be celebrated because they only signify the very dubious achievement of: --> congratulations! you managed to stay alive. those critics (with whom i partially agree) would advocate celebrating anniversaries, promotions, ordinations, graduations, achievements. it seems like if we weren't so fixated on birthdays then we could devote a lot more time to celebrating the things people actually do, eh? but alas, i do not *simply* agree with these critics -- because on the other hand -- aren't birthdays more than just celebrations of selfhood? aren't they actually a ritual which affirms the social world in which the individual exists and is embedded. isn't it a mutual celebration of accomplishment? where the community says, Hey! Look who we managed to keep alive for another year! Skylark gets a big honorable mention for celebrating my existence / our relationship in a limin-flavored way. i was going to post some pictures of her vast array of limin flavored gifts -- but alas -- i'm having publishing photos right now. it felt very overwhelming to be so remembered by a student. students can often live toward their teachers as if they were simply teachers and less-so-people. (not that i'm bitter about that! isn't that what the system teaches us to do?!) so within such a normative context -- her thoughtfulness was extraordinary. And my parents and my brothers and sisters and my coworkers and my wife (all bringing very thoughtful gifts and words and presence) and even my daughter (who made about fifteen imaginary cakes for me for my birthday) and several very dear friends from far away who called. The whole thing has the final effect not of drawing my attention to who i have been and who i might just grow to be (which would be what would happen if the birthday critics took over) but to who i am to these people and who they are to me. And that feels richer and more rewarding than all the ideals of the truly free, truly enlightened liberal individual, eh? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 19,March,2004 | addison fandom ....................... my parents gave us this remake of the 'Jesus' movie -- the one that missionaries cart all over the world to show in villages where we don't have time to learn about their cultures or languages or problems, but that probably need to say the sinners prayer sooner rather than later given the impending end times and all... (but wait, i digress, apologies to my dispensationalist friends and family for my sarcasm...) the jesus movie is *way* better than the other two videos that my parents have given me for my kids -- urlLink the cedarmont kids & urlLink Ms. Pattycake (for these two gifts alone, i'm guessing that my parents will languish in Limbo for several years before they find the pearly gates -- who knew that there was anything worse than those dreadfully stepfordian Barney's children -- trust me the cedarmont kids are two levels of hell worse)...BUT.... Addison is obsesed with it. Anytime there is a question about what we will do next -- where we will go next -- how we should pass our collective time? His answer? Let's watch the Jesus Movie. We were sitting in a restaurant last night and he noticed that they were playing a radio in the background...his idea -- we should go home and bring the Jesus Movie and listen to that instead. Hey Addison -- want to go outside and play? Yeah, then we come in side, and eat and watch the Jesus movie. Me: No, buddy, we've watched enough media this week... Addison: Then we go to sleep and wake up and THEN we watch the Jesus Movie. Me: Add. You've watched that movie enough. Why don't we act it out together. Addison: we play Jesus movie, the dead part, (his other obsession -- along with Mel), THEN we watch the Jesus movie. Me: Addison, we're not going to watch the Jesus movie right now. His entire countenance falls into a mixture between enraged and despondent. ADDISON: HOW we going to watch it? Me: You mean, WHEN are we going to watch it? ADDISON: HOW we going to watch it? We never EVER get to watch Jesus movie. so you take that obsession and braid it with the cultural critics' obsession over the Passion -- and you have a very crucifixion centered lent.... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 16,March,2004 | .............. weak ties .............. the other day i was blogging about how my students are all always saying that: things used to be better than they are now. and... today's youth [but fill in your favorite scapegoat] are going to hell in a handbasket. I've been under the impression for a long time that nostalgia serves a *very* important and useful function -- it helps people to relocate themselves in the social milieu in a way that is not identity threatening. but i've also been pretty damn sure that its a load of crock. that in fact, things are not getting worse and worse... (*not* that they're getting better and better, mind you.) but i bumped into urlLink this post the other day where the idea of urban tribes and weak ties is Ethan Watters' way of responding to the kind of generational contempt that has been lavished upon the up-and-coming for as long as 'youth' has been a commodified category in the market of media images... He's suggesting that FRIENDS (*not* the show -- though they're a kind of an urban tribe with fewer-than-the average-number-of-weak-ties) account for milieu of political and social action that more traditional agencies and institutions used to.... These social networks are very hard to see. It's a type of 'dark matter': a force that's hard to see but that holds everything together. But they can make a difference: A web of weak acquaintances resulted in the toppling of the Berlin Wall. ....weak ties..... i love this stuff... weak ties -- from what i gather here (not enough to know yet) -- Watters is affirming the idea of weak ties in the way that Weick affirms the value of 'loose coupling' -- that there is a unique (even emergent) kind of power/resource/ability -- that pools in these kinds of connections, but it's a kind of an inverse power.... ...and he goes on to write that we're lacking enough substantial narrative to explain that new way-of-being-in-the-world to ourselves... i haven't read the book, but i'm intrigued. i think if you've ever thought: hmm friends today are what family was fifty years ago for people.... you may enjoy this interview. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 15,March,2004 | ................................ Truth is overrated ................................ (the following are characters based loosely upon an actual conversation) Joe: We're gonna win it all. We're gonna get to the tournament and win everything. [silence on the van.] Joe: Well? Andrew ? Whaddya think? Andrew: I think you've got two of the three principal virtues going on -- faith and hope -- so that seems good. Ryan: do you really believe that those are the three principal virtues? Andrew: Um. They're Pauline. The church affirms them. That's my tradition. I guess so. Ryan: Well it just seems like there might be other virtues. Andrew stares out the van window at the passing cornfields. Lots of passing cornfields. It's Ohio after all. Ryan interrupts his reverie. Ryan: What about truth? Shouldn't that be one of the virtues. Loud anthem-like Rock music fades up in Andrew's head. YEAH, that's the point, Ryan, he thinks. Truth is overrated. It's not a commandment. It's not a fruit of the spirit. It's not one of the three principal virtues. Ryan: Or integrity. Shouldn't that be in there. Exactly, Ryan. Integrity must be understood in the shape of LOVE faith hope patience gentleness humility LOVE. truth is contextual, relational and communal. And THAT truth is underrated, i'm thinking. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 14,March,2004 | my friend cliff's film urlLink Immaterial John just got accepted at the Nashville Film Festival. I've seen it. it's great. cliff's great. i shot pool with him yesteday and can't wait for the opportunity to make a film with my moviemaking-genius friend... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 25,March,2004 | Look what I found... Jaelyn's name in chinese: urlLink and Addison's: urlLink cool, huh? (click them for info) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 22,March,2004 | ....... phth ....... the great thing about that word is that you can say it longer than almost any other word with consonants. give it a try. and for those of you who don't know what phth is -- it's the feeling on your skin procured when rubbing cordury, velour, velvet, etc... while velvet is high culture, velour -- low, they have been related by the larger family of how my brother daniel experiences them. i, unlike my brother, like phth. jaelyn, like me, except more, LOVES phth. (she has a bit of a heightened sense of texture, though. She won't hug me when I'm wearing wool sweaters and sport coats. occasionally, randomly, she'll disappear upstairs and bring me down an alternate sweater. Not at my bidding, mind you. Before i even remember how offended she is by wool -- scratch wool, particularly. I wonder if someone has heightened texture awareness as part of one's DNA code or whether it can be socialized. If its the later, Summer Barry is to blame -- she used to take McKenzie to fabric stores to close her eyes and feel the difference in the fabrics. Of course I was hooked -- seemed like a good way to develop the mystic sensibiliity -- so off went Jaelyn and I to the fabric store.) daniel, abhors phth. I have to agree with him in the rare case that anything in the phth family touches the skin that my freshly clipped fingernails reveal. Yesterday I walked outside, overcast, warm, drizzly, and I said this day feels like Phth to me. I'm thinking that not enough people embrace moderate weather. there's always a flurry of conversation around 'sunshine.' Well what's so great about sunshine? I think its a little too, too. Like Jim Carrey's 'acting.' (which I hear is completely non-stylized in Eternal Sunshine -- which I can't wait to see this weekend, and already recommend based on the praises and critiques I've heard) Let's hear it for the Grey! Let's hear it for the Rainy! Let's offer a gentle round of applause for the gentle patter of drizzle outside. The water is almost invisible, almost not there, but there, still. Being a pisces, i'll plunge into any opportunity to move through water...no matter how thick or coherent it is. And the more I think about it -- the more I think -- YEAH. That underwater sequence in The Graduate -- and then sampled in so many other great movies (particularly, laudably, Rushmore) is all about phth. and grey days. and beethoven's moonlight sonata -- played ppp . my brothers are over on the urlLink Faces of Dave arguing about whether God knows everything or loves completely. I prefer grey days. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 22,March,2004 | ........................... scrolling headlines ........................... this weekend the family quarantined ourselves into the house all weekend. Lynn had some kind of debilitating illness on Friday night and healed slowly and gradually across the weekend. Our limited range of motion made for a slower pace of life and more centered feeling in general. i think my life has been so defined by workaholism and frenzied action that i feel guilty when my life is moving at a pace that i can almost keep up with. i've said to a few people -- and should have (if I didn't) say it here -- that last semester, I felt like the question every day was not 'would i disappoint someone today?' it was -- 'who would feel betrayed by me? and how egregious would that betrayal feel?' I know I'm still a bit disappointing this semester, but less so. besides, i've got to at least *seem* human so that people don't feel too overwhelmed by me... ..................... Jaelyn is transitioning from 'good nights' to all-night-sleeping-with-panties. This means that I'm waking up once or twice a night to carry her into the bathroom, helping her onto the toilet and then cuddling her back into the warmth of her bed. There's something overwhelmingly beautiful and wonderful about the whole thing. It seems like all aspects of waste production / removal / management. Should be the most awful part of parenting. But I think that right now -- with Jae turning into such a little girl -- shedding all the last vestiges of baby-hood -- that fragility is dear. I feel the timeless ache which binds me backward into the fabric of her being during these midnight forays. This person! (I feel in the darkness of the bathroom) I am bound to this person forever, by love!! She's almost too heavy to carry easily now, but the weight of her body and the way she burrows a cuddle into my shoulder as I stumble back toward her room, makes me feel like the very quiet smile of the universe is shaped exactly like the short walk from the bathroom to the bedroom in this creaky, beautiful old house. ........................ i watched the news last night. Is it true that there are people who still conflate the 'War on Terrorism' with the 'War on Iraq?' This blog is mostly not a political diatribe, but last night I heard a soldier's family saying that he died in the 'war on terrorism.' He was a victim of mortar fire in Iraq. I am pained and saddened by all of the deaths in Iraq... I am enraged though, that our president has chosen to name the problem with terrorism with a rhetorical move 'War on...' which annoints more violence in response to violence. Are the limitations of our language / our culture? So rooted in a notion of us / them that we can only imagine the flourishing of democracy premised upon a jihad of our own. Ugh. .............................. snow - sun - snow - sun - rain - snow - sun - rain - sun. This morning it is sun, but the weather, these days, has multiple personality disorder. .............................. Christian said in the early days of the backburner that he admired my choice to have one blog to deal with family / friends / politics / work / ideas / theory. Well, Christian, maybe you didn't quite say *all* of that. So anyway, lately I've been feeling the tension of multiple audiences / diverse friends / complicated identity / multiple - back - burner - interests. And these tensions all exist in my life world -- but it feels odd to have feelings re-performed in the act of publication. ............................. I finished three ten minute plays in the last two weeks. I'm going to host a reading at my house soon to try to 'workshop' them. I love these shorter forms of publication, but long to have FINISHED a play or a movie of more length / substance / gravity. ............................. i'm obsessed with the sauces in indian food right now. ............................. great _alias_ episode, last night, eh? i'm of the strong opinion that J.J. Abrams had to spend the first half of the season reconstructing a new rock and hard place within which he could employ the formula we know and love so well. ~peace... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 03,April,2004 | ………………………………………….. At the Humana Festival for New Plays ………………………………………….. I woke up this morning with sunlight on my face. I opened my eyes and could see across the Ohio River to Indiana, the state where I was borne. There’s a big steel clock on top of what looks to be the long brick manufacturing plant for COLGATE. Ironically, I had to borrow toothpaste from the front desk. The bridge which emanates from almost just below my window has intermittent steel peaks that punctuate its otherwise square architecture. I couldn’t really see the peaks when the bridge was outlined in green lights last night. I see the peaks now in the severe shadow it casts next to it on the grey green water of the river below. If you train your eye to just focus on the the line of the bridge and the line of the shadow particularly where they meet…They form the perfect figure of an eye – so gigantic that it could only be the reflection of God checking out the spring morning in Louisville. I saw my first of 9 (maybe 10!) urlLink plays last night – urlLink Sans Culottes in the Promised Land . It was a very solid, profound, aching funny play about the “promised land” of America and the ways that that promise gets played out for black women. One of the characters was a 10 year old African American girl who was the only person of color in her riding class, her ballet class, her private school. She was obsessed with Disney heroines and over the course of the play transformed herself into (literally) Snow White. Ouch. I listened to a bunch of Mars Hill tapes that Matt let me borrow. I because more deeply convinced of how important it is that mainstream Christianity be exposed to the ways that Social Constructionist / PoMo thinking meshes with Christianity. The tyranny of Natural Law thinking, Platonic ideals & Allen-Bloom-like-devotion-to-High-Culture sometimes make me feel claustrophobic… …But the freedom to think and listen and drive en route (!) …The Persian food I had for dinner last night(!) …the prospect of three plays this afternoon (!) It’s funny how I feel a little bit guilty about blogging from the place of delight. (as if the very nature of blogging belongs to the world of mundanity – to the quotidian) But I know that the delight of the weekend is only as sweet as it is because it is bounded on both sides by a return to my world. Hope a little of delight surprises you whether you're a weary sojourner, in a hospital in florida, or juggling children, house-showings & a speaking engagement.... Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 02,April,2004 | ……………………………………………………… is “community” a mask for ugly oppression? ……………………………………………………… One of my favorite students said to me the other day, you know X class hasn’t really turned out to be a community of learning. People are all just doing their thing as usual. I was at Home Group last Sunday night and we were wrestling with the controversy from Hebrews 6:6 and one of the insights that my wife keeps feeding back into our talk about Hebrews is – to think about the ways in which any writer addressing Jews must be thinking of the problem of the individual and the community. Steve suggested that in many ways Jesus, his teaching, and the teachings that radiated out from Him were probably fairly radically individualistic for that time and place. And I think that both of them were pointing out that people (like us) who live in a radically individualistic society really struggle to figure out the hermeneutic wriggle we must do in order to apply such passages to our life. If you live in a world where faith is so collective that you struggle to have a sense of personal agency (and piety) then Hebrews (and other scriptures) make perfect sense – but when you live in a world so jagged with individualism, how do you read the salve of “community” into passages written to the collectivist world? We came up with some decent answers, but I did get stuck on the question a little bit. I’ve noticed that Community has become a kind of ideological battleground. People from the right and left in almost every setting are vying for it – and I’m not just talking about governmental politics now. At the little evangelical school where I teach, the fundamentalists (who currently control Student Life) have a term called the 'community agreement.' Rhetoric which COULD BE a helpful way to get students to own their own role in taking responsibility for their own actions as well as the actions of others. A way to figure out that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Ironically, instead it’s actually a cloaking device by which an increasingly Byzantine set of rules and regulations is enacted and perpetrated by an incredibly centralized oversight mechanism. The term is also used well (read: in ways that resonate with my experience). Romanowski uses it as one of the key challenging points for contemporary media mythology. I participated in a group (at work again) called a learning cluster – part of a larger national (and beyond?) movement toward learning – in – community. The same favorite student told me that he had experienced a sense of community amongst filmmakers on campus.... I feel embedded in community these days. There are several axes around which these social networks form. But I also feel keenly the precariousness of all of them. Set adrift from the assumption that anyone will live for their whole life in just one place. That language patterns, family systems, land or work set few constraints on our mobility. Aware that some of the patterns of interaction in these groups are just being initiated and realized. Aware that other patterns have reached a pattern of rigidity which threatens some of the members. I wonder if there is sometimes a temptation to confuse community with the feeling of social support? Or the experience of celebration? A sense of shared aesthetics? What * is * essential to community? Here’s my start: Continuity (Balancing) Coherence (and) Diversity Relationship Tradition Movement Shared Experience (somewhat) shared vision (which is a kind of coherence) (partially) shared past (a kind of continuity + tradition) Elements of community that I'm suspicious of: (and please feel free to deconsruct my suspicion) intimacy (i'm not suspicious of it qua it -- i'm suspicious of it as an assumption and prerequisite for community -- since it seems most likely to emerge within homogenous, mutually satisficatory relationships...) stability (b/c it seems like communities that over-fixate on finality -- tend to become rigid more quickly and maybe even get confused about whether they've arrived at their destination long before they should...(?) i'm reflecting my derridean tendency toward the endless deflection of final meaning....) impermeability (both from within and without -- i *know* that this is a reflection of my individualism -- but i just get so stuck on the PROBLEMS of small communities which are non-integrative (both abstractly and in terms of their members)...) Is there an irony in Me (one voice, one man) announcing autonomously what community is? There would be if it weren’t an invitation…. Your thoughts? sorry to be so long winded.... i'm off to see a bunch of plays at the Actors Theater. It's a birthday weekend. Thanks, Lynn! ~peace |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 30,March,2004 | ................................ when we were young ................................ erik and i used to sit around strumming our A chords, our G chords and our C chords til there was nothing left of our fingers. We talked of faith and politics and work and relationships. marcaus let me drive his vehicle around a roundabout and several other areas of Melbourne. We talked and laughed and prayed and mugged. david and i discovered the shock of email together, chatting in computer labs seven hours apart, shocked by what the world used to be and could never be again. revelling in our rudd-ness, parsing the world with our gigantic intellects. when i first knew my students, Skylark thought 'feminist' was a four letter word, Bemis threw her shoe or her notebook at me (I forget), Mandy listened and cocked her head to the side and seemed both baffled and intrigued. ....and look, this set of blogs is like a fabric with patches from all of them woven in.... i know such nostalgia, such gee-whiz-aint-that-internet-somethin is neither hip nor erudite -- but I just wanted to say thanks to all of the aforementioned for stopping into the blog. I *love* the timbre of your voices in my life... ~peace |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 29,March,2004 | ......................................... intergenerational acceptance ......................................... when my wife was growing up her family used to hide their VCR everytime Grandma came up the drive. VCRs were an unreasonably extravagant luxury; she would not have approved at all. my grandmother sent me a letter the first time she saw in a picture that I had grown a ponytail. She wrote: 'So and So asked, 'does Andy have a ponytail?' I said no, that must be some shrubbery.' My cousins referred to my ponytail as shrubbery ever since. My Grandfather slipped a little handwritten clip of paper into the same envelope. He wasn't the writing sort; as far as I knew the last letters he had written were to his mother when he was in the military in WW II. The clip of paper read: '1 Corinthians 11:14 - Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?' That's all. No personal note. No context. Judgement had been rendered and imparted. It seems like a telling anecdote because it condenses all that I wonder and fear about growing old.... My father in law once told my wife that her mother thought I was drinking too much. (we were in France -- where its actually a sin if you *don't* drink too much). A different day, my father suggested that perhaps i shouldn't tell my mother about my drinking. (and for the uninitiated, this is *not* a drinking problem -- this is a divergence from the fundamentalist position of teetotalling...) and last night i was feeling sad about having to monitor myself when talking to my Grandmother. I know that this is a universal practice -- code-switching for Grandma's, but there comes a point where you just think -- at what point along the playing of a part, the monitoring of selves, the secrets that underlie relationships -- do you cease to really know one another? it's a seam that i'm endlessly curious about -- and not in a dispassionate way? It makes me feel sad, I said to Lynn as I turned out the headboard light. That's its such a fact of existence. Isn't there anyone anywhere who can just love across difference? who can know fully and still love completely? It seems least possible, least likely across generations -- is this what *keeps* generational chasms wide? even after the aesthetic differences of adolescence and the battles surrounding of coming of age have faded from importance...? ~? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 09,April,2004 | a short helpful conversation with Mandy helped me realize that I'm not on speaking terms with my blog right now. Please don't take it personally. It's something we have to work out on our own. In the meantime, I miss y'all. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 14,April,2004 | the sun is fiercely trying and only barely succeeding at warming the day, but if i just stare out my office window -- the blue sky makes me happy. maybe we're all getting that sun - deprivation disease. as a species, you know, humans. everybody. or maybe it just happens when we get old. which, i know, i am getting. ............... what makes me happy right now: 1. reading plays. writing plays. 2. sunshine. 3. leaving work. 4. staying home. 5. walks in the chilly air. 6. the hmmmm of airplanes flying over and that rush of -- 'i'm going somewhere' adreniline in my stomach. even though i'm not really going anywhere. 7. sam smith beers. 8. the whistling song in Kill Bill 1. 9. afternoons at Harry and Laurie's 10. Listening to Lynn tell stories or talk to big groups of people when she's excited. 11. jaelyn's smile. 12. addison's protesting, 'but how we Ever, Ever going to ...(fill in the blank here).' 13. the house on 23rd street. no, really, its just the enormous hope and possibility of the house on 23rd street. ..................... what doesn't make me happy right now: 1. the fact that every time I glance up at the sunshine above my desk, more papers copulate and have babies and the piles get thicker and messier. longer to-do lists. 2. you can never go home. .............. what else makes me happy: the increasing prevalence of orange in our culture. i'll be sad when this phase is over. the birth of malachi keegan (sp?) to my friends... ......... when i first had (both of my) babies. i lay awake with them in a bassinet next to my bed listening for their breath. its hard to hear baby breath. i thought. maybe i'll never sleep again. but if i can keep this baby alive...it'll be worth it. how will i ever keep this ridiculously fragile baby alive? ......... other things that make me happy. 1. small boxes. 2. coffee. ................ what's great about wes anderson movies? - the characters are horribly depraved and the relationships are so completely broken, but there's so much hope. so much love. ............... maybe shutting up every once in a while on your blog makes people stop checking. and you can stop thinking about who you're righting for and start writing for yourself again. maybe. ............... peace~ (and love and hope.) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 23,April,2004 | ****** prayer ........... urlLink contemplative prayers for blogsurfers: God, Loving Parent...slow my clicks....preserve my attention....help me to click links that push me to find more of You urlLink in places i do not know , as well as in the places i expect.... ....and when my blogsurfing becomes a way to hide from faithfulness...inhabit my wrist and my fingers, drag me across the screen like a reticent arrow, a protesting tracking ball and.... help me to click the red EX which allows me to return to people, commitments & work... ...thank you for the shocking eruptions of sabbath on the net.... selah~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 22,April,2004 | . spirituality . 'According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don't transform it, we will transmit it.' - Al Gustafson thanks to urlLink bob . who i don't know, but appreciate just now. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 22,April,2004 | Early this morning (6;30ish a.m.)Jaelyn woke up. The following is her co-authored account of the events leading up to her early rise: Jaelyn dreamed that when she was little and she was playing in a big dollhouse with Emily Livermore – they were playing INSIDE the dollhouse, and all of the sudden, there were big scary things outside of the dollhouse. And all of the sudden, Daddy came up to the dollhouse and he was kind of scary because his hands had turned RED like a monster. So she woke up and called for her Dadddy. Who came running up the stairs, and she burrowed out of her big yellow quilt and threw her arm backwards and up over the neck of her Daddy and pulled him close. The End. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 22,April,2004 | ........................... chick publications ........................... do you know about urlLink chick tracks ? my grandmother used to leave them everywhere, so, if you've read them, there's a good chance that you read one of the ones she left laying in restaurants, public restrooms and phone booths. bemis loves to drop them off in the office, knowing that i collect artifacts of incredible 'christian' kitsch. She dropped off urlLink Trust Me yesterday. The first three pages crack me up. (and i don't mean *crack* in *that* way) urlLink urlLink urlLink i don't mean to give away the ending or anything here, but the kid gets hooked, sells drugs, goes to jail, gets raped, gets aids, dies. Seriously. but what cracks me up is the depiction of the underworld that sucks this kid in. what draws this kid to this unlikely group of friends, drawn from the cast of an MTV reality show? it convinces me that the audience that this book is *really* supposed to hit -- is the kids Grandma. Who sees her good little kid being sucked in by 'the wrong crowd.' and of course its supposed to reinforce all of her ideas about who the wrong crowd is, what they do, and what the destiny of her good little grandkid will be. My grandmother used to take great delight -- secret-agent-identity-delight -- in covertly leaving these books everywhere. It added a great deal of drama. Of course she also passed them out by hand to everyone she met. My grandmother was a bright, educated thoughtful person. She read the classics, knew great art, had impeccable taste. So why jack chick? Fundamentalism baffles me more the further I get from it. Which, I suppose, is the point. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 20,April,2004 | . kill bill (spoiler: don't read) . at the beginning of the movie, Uma / Beatrix says -- I'm going to kill Bill. throughout the whole movie (and i'm referring to both as one, because that's what they should've been/are -- though i probably wouldn't have gone to see a 4.5 hour movie), she works toward the opportunity to kill Bill. (although it gets less clear about how/why she had to kill the entire Deadly Viper Assasin Squad in order to get to Bill. Why didn't she just start with him?) In the previews she says, you bet i'm going to kill bill. so how!? how?! how in the world -- does the major dramatic question which continues to keep us interested manage to be: will beatrix kill bill? it seems a little bit brilliant. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 20,April,2004 | .................................................................. my grand theory of the universe is falsifiable. .................................................................. which, i guess, according to my training, makes it a good theory. if grand theories of the universe can ever be good theories. so what is my g.t.o.t.u.? i've already shared it here a couple of times, but i've honed the wording a little bit. i'm still waiting for the stream of comments to barrage me with reasons it isn't true or instances where it isn't true, but so far nothing. here it is: People make most of their decisions because they believe their choices will salve their greatest wounds. that's it. it's a theory of human motivation. which seems essential to any of us who ever want to inspire / persuade / understand / study / enlighten / enliven / liberate / titilate / entertain / educate other people. right? can't do any of those without understanding motivation. but i was saying that i discovered its falsifiability. children. i know that i'm constantly blogging about my children which makes me categorically unhip. parenting just reeks of anti-cool, but.... i gotta say... children don't have to live in response to their greatest wounds, because their greatest wounds haven't emerged yet. They're able to live much more in the immediate present. I already sense that Jaelyn is developing a sense of how the world responds to her -- and embedded in that sense (for all of us) is an understanding of the world's limitations, betrayals and cruelties: the incipient wounds which will scar us throughout our development.... but its nice that they're not poured in concrete yet. i have a related question, too. is a person's level-of-reflectiveness affect how aware they are of their wounds (and therefore how stable their wounds are)? peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 19,April,2004 | ............................ teaching/friendship ............................ my brother urlLink the bishop has a thread about who teachers should teach to -- the 'get it's or the swine. i think if the choice is to be made (?) the swine have it in the Kingdom of Heaven.... but i've been thinking a lot recently about some of the costs of teaching -- but its really not just about teaching -- its more about mentorship / discipleship / person-development. whatever... that process of investing yourself into someone who you have hope for. so i've just been reviewing some of the complications of that paradigm for living. implications that maybe i couldn't see while i was still living like a gypsy -- but feel more and more valid the longer i live as a farmer: 1. when you invest in relationship -- you end up caring about that person in ways that are not always shared. this tension is particularly keen if the mentee / student/ disciple sees your relationship more as a process of the institution / body / community that you've been formally matched by. 2. when you've become friends inside the institution -- staying friends outside of the insitution demands a different set of expectations. this is almost the flipside. some of my most rewarding relationships with students from malone are those with alumni. however -- as soon as the person leaves the context that's afforded us the opportunity to develop relationship -- our continuing relationship has to fit into the fabric of my 'non-work' life. 3. when you choose to go about your teaching / discipling / mentoring with the people you work with -- those relationships end up spilling over into your 'non-work' life. so that the concrete choices that you make about each day / each hour -- end up affecting your family, your 'non-work' friends (as if it were possible to have those!), and then all the other family and friend relationships you have far away. am i complaining? no! clearly, a profession that allows me to be relational in meaningful ways is one of the luckiest gifts in the universe -- but feeling the strain of these tensions lately has alerted me to this (newly discovered by me) domain of institution / identity strain. the rigidity of institutional life is much to blame here. people's default assumptions about time and relationship are structured not only on genuine need and desire , but also based on the structures of time and space that the institutional clock provides. its this clash that makes for a tension between the-way-it-is and the-way-it-ought-to-be.... hope your day is filled with flashes of the-way-it-ought-to-be.... peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 18,April,2004 | .............................................................. things we hear mostly inside of our heads. .............................................................. 1. the sound of a towel drying your hair after the shower or a swim. you hadn't thought about it, had you? but its a sound that's very singular, and relatively enjoyable -- particularly when you think about how *yours* it is. possibly those with very short locks will not have the same delightful experience. 2. the sound of your own voice. i mean really -- is it surprising that people are delusional? given the unreasonable amount of influence that we have upon ourselves? peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 27,April,2004 | Sisyphus - A cruel king of Corinth condemned forever to roll a huge stone up a hill in Hades only to have it roll down again on nearing the top. The American Heritage Dictionary we're redoing the kitchen floor in response to all the potential buyers who can't see through to the possibility of redoing their own floor. so today josiah and i were unhooking the water line into the frig and we just COULDN'T get the bolt to turn and when we thought we were, it was just turning below too. And suddenly with a flash of clarity i realized that we were not operating under the simple limits a particular bolt gone bad. this was the entelechy of our universe. i knew when we went ahead with the water-bearing-refrigerator-door that we were inviting the anger of the pantheon, but suddenly i realized that my mythic existence had already come full circle. 'Sisyphus had it easy compared to us,' I mourned, 'at least he could see that the rock was about to roll back down again.' 'Can you give me a hand down here?' Josiah interrupts... 'We don't even know if we're pushing the rock up or watching it roll back down. We're not even cognizant of our futility. The universe has gotten so small, that no tool, no fire, no deus ex machina could ever rescue us now. We just fiddle a little bit to the left and right.' In moments like these, I want to write science fiction, but then i remember that that means i'd have to *read* and *watch* science fiction, so i decide, enh... ...i'll blog about my futility.... may the tedium of the quotidian swallow you blissfully whole and unaware, rendering your world full of.... ~peace |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 26,April,2004 | one of my brothers is being hunted in a good'ol salem-style witch hunt. one of the hunters sneaked onto his urlLink blog and tried to use my brother's humour as proof that daniel is, indeed, a witch. (i only wish he would have come to me first, as i have much more interesting proof -- for instance the one evening at our family cottage when daniel levitated while humming latin phrases so ancient, that even my father, who was high school latin king at Soo High Blue Devils (ahem, see?) - Go Devils!, couldn't translate it. once daniel started spinning on the ceiling he got sent straight to bed.) so anyway. Daniel is forced, on his blog, to say some straightup stuff to any other potential witch hunters, and he writes: You may find what you are looking for, but it won't be a satisfying as you think it will. i love this. the idea that work done out of vengeance and revenge and malevolence of any kind -- yields nothing but more of the same. it seems like the yang principle to the yin i promised in my title. it's in a little prayer that i read in playwriting -- ascribed to Ray Bradbury -- Remind us to know that the more we create out of love of an idea, the better our work, our lives, our influence, becomes. Tammie, my friend who i work with, gave a talk three(?) four(?) years ago where she said this more pointedly about the work that we're (hopefully? mostly?) up to in our academic department...(i can't quote -- but i'll summarize) Work done out of love brings us joy, makes us whole, gives us meaning, gives us LIFE. That's the kind of work we try to do here (in the theater). Not work done out of fear. That kind of work just brings DEATH. So much of the work of the world is done out of fear.... (BTW ~ thanks to my friend Clifford for passing the Bradbury prayer on to me (read whole thing in the comments). His urlLink film finds its urlLink first big audience tomorrow morning & is a great example of work done out of love...) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 26,April,2004 | . if we don't make decisions together, what, ultimately will we share? . if we don't make decisions on our own, how, ultimately will we grow? . if we don't make decisions, who, ultimately will decide? . if we decide, who, ultimately will not? . |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 06,May,2004 | my dad is the greatest dad. urlLink 1. he's a virtuosic public speaker. but not the kind of virtuosity that makes you (the audience) walk away feeling like -- WOW, he knows everything and i learned one thing. but instead the kind of virtuosity that looks like -- WOW, i care so much more about that issue now! and i understand the fundamental questions at stake. 2. he's the kind of dad who never made his virtuosity an excuse for being a better or worse father. in other words, for most of my childhood i grew up with a profound sense that who my dad was as a preacher was largely unrelated to who he was as a father. the people who lived around me contradicted that notion, but the strongest influence was always my dad -- who was always most interested in me and our relationship and our family's relationship first / foremost / and regardless of his professional career. 3. my dad prepared me well for the world. He taught me how to: chop down a tree -- chainsaw or axe, tie a boat to a dock, shoot a gun, blaze a trail, clear a trail, navigate the woods, catch a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, run (or walk) a distance, how to try uncomfortable things, how to persist in the face of great sorrow, how to change the oil, frame in a wall, hook up basic electric, fix my plumbing, carry my books by my side not in front, act like a gentleman -- hold open doors, end any song by ascending up the keyboard on 1-5, 3-5, 1-5, 3-1, 3-5, 3-1, etc. (of whatever your resolving chord is) introduce anyone to anyone else in a social situation, how to cook eggs and french toast, how to study both sides of everything, how to listen, how to grow with grace, how to act in institutions (politically, expediently, yet with integrity). But he also taught me BIGGER things like -- getting burned by someone who you choose to extend grace to is better than not extending grace. And -- 'if you want to find Ed Rudd (*read: the best you can be) find the darkest dirtiest hole where no one else wants to be, and you'll find Ed Rudd* shoveling in the bottom of that hole.' And -- that faithfulness means making fifteen sandwiches every morning before school for your kids and always being vigorous about proclaiming the most beautiful features of the woman you love and sitting in a very cramped nursing home corner learning the habit of birdwatching just to recover some of the beauty that your confined father can no longer walk toward. 4. My dad cares about me. In college he wrote me a letter every single day. Seriously. Every day. At least once a month my WHOLE LIFE he took me to a long breakfast and listened and talked and cared about everything I said. Everytime we talk he tells me how much he loves me and how proud he is of me. Every horrible day of high school. Sitting alone at a table I would open my paper bag and pull out a napkin that said 'We are SOOOO proud of you son...' and on many of those days the napkin would name a specific thing they were proud of. 5. My dad wants to have a relationship with me as an adult. That's uncommon. I know it from my friends, and I'm incredibly grateful for it. on May 6. each year we celebrate his birthday -- but its his life that I celebrate. I feel grateful and fortunate for being the lucky guy who happened to get assigned this dad. Happy Birthday, Dad! |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 05,May,2004 | words of the day. ............................ he had convinced himself that his increasing urlLink embonpoint would be welcomed by the committee when they met again next year. That they would find such news startling, yes, perhaps, but also heartening. We must all needs become more substantial at some time or another, musn't we? We shan't be able to truly make any impact anywhere if we're light enough for a breeze to blow us away. Speed is one thing. That is true. Speed is a virtue that should not be poo-poo-ed by anyone. But ultimately? Really? It can't be a core virtue. Can it? Nor can change for that matter. Right? Nor innovation ? and of course not revolution ... They're all dependent upon the status quo. Status quo is the thing. And what is status quo if its not GIRTH? If its not substance? if its not presence? He looked at himself in the mirror from the side. Gravitas. Significance. There were all sorts of clear arguments marking out how this change was Growth. Development. Evolution. He had bought all new suits across the past two years. Increasing waist sizes, its true, are disheartening for almost everyone. But he focused upon the fine thread of the suits. The flattering cut. The tailoring of the fit. None of these could have been possible back when he was his old self. The self the committee had chosen initially was good for them and good for him then. When speed was what they needed. But now they needed something else. He had convinced himself. (he nodded in the mirror to affirm that it was all true. it is all true isn't it?) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 04,May,2004 | semester over! ......................... grades aren't completed, but the end is in sight. sorry the blog is so silent. hope to be back at it soon... hope y'all are well. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 15,May,2004 | . virtues and vices . the new blogger user interface asked me if, because i push snooze on my alarm clock, i was lazy. nope. i typed. just tired. and if i were to go into it -- i'd go so far as to say that its much more of a symbol of my ambition in tension with my finitude. it is my ambition that drives me to set my alarm clock to 5 or 5:30 every morning -- mostly so i can have writing time. it is my exhaustion that often motivates me to take a few minutes of rest before i attack the day. so laziness isn't my vice -- nor is ambition my virtue. i'm quite confident, though that *distraction* is my vice -- is well roundedness the accompanying virtue? ambition + distraction is the equivalent of a driverless vehicle careening forward on a full tank of gas. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 14,May,2004 | . a near miss conversion on drop ceilings . grading is done -- all turned in. i'm still 200 emails behind. weather is finally beautiful consistently. office is such a disaster that i (literally) can't open the door to get in. jaelyn has strep throat (again!). graduation was filled with happy / odd endings with many student/friends. i'm writing a play about superheroes and lumberjacks. Sort of. Lynn and I are both teaching Summer One Session -- so til June 10 or something like that. its only one class each which seems much more manageable. finished the kitchen floor, too, for those of you who have a better ability to keep up on such details...its much more squishy beneath our feet. i've been a strict opponent against linoleum for as long as i can remember -- along with wood paneling, drop ceilings, and formica countertops. now that i know how cushy this rolled vinyl is -- i'm thinking that i should give up all my elitist preconceptions regarding natural vs. synthetic surfaces -- tammie challenged me yesterday on my non-formica stance anyway -- she said as someone who has a moniker of retrorudd *really* should give formica the time of day. so maybe i should embrace the simulacra...enter more fully the swirl of popcult... it really is the drop ceilings that is holding me back. They just feel like a crime against hope. always squishing us down -- making us feel like we should live in low slung spaces.... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 09,May,2004 | urlLink Have you met my mom? You don’t have to stop and think about the answer to that question. If you’ve met her she’s unforgettable. If you haven’t….well then, I guess you’re just marking time until you do… My mom is motivated by what’s to come. In all the time that I’ve known her, most days she would remind us that what we’re doing matters MOSTLY based on how it builds God’s Kingdom. And she lives that reality very concretely. She chooses to pay attention to people who aren’t gratifying to know. Have you ever had a conversation with someone and you’re thinking in your head -- while you’re being polite and nodding – will this person ever realize how long they’re droning on? And have they ever asked anyone a personal question? Or listened for just a minute? Or do they spend their whole life obsessing (in longwinded ways) about themselves? The answer to these questions in your head depends upon whether or not they’ve met my mom. Because my mom patiently listens to these people – in church foyers, in her living room, in grocery stores, on the telephone, at school – but she doesn’t just politely nod and wonder when its going to be over. Instead, she makes contact with that person again. Asks them questions about their crisis (real or perceived), she keeps contact with them, tells them honest things that they may or may not have already observed, introduces them to the network of other people who she’s collected and continues to pour her time and her energy and love into them for as long as they need it or will receive it. My mother collects needy people. And she pours her life into them. Several years ago, she won the Muskegon, Michigan Mother-of-the-Year Award and when it was time for essays to be submitted for judging – her four children all submitted our essays, but these other people who she has poured her life into testified to her mothering too. Because once Gloria Rudd has collected you, your life will not be the same. When I was a little boy, we would listen to music on phonographs together. Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven. She would beckon me into the music helping me feel the music with my body as well as my ears. Thumping the downbeats of the song on my chest with her powerful pianist hands. Drawing my attention to the dramatic, inevitable, driving fatedness of these composers she loved. The cellos and the basses and the timpani gave their music gravity, intentionality, purpose and direction. The majesty they generate is tinged by a sense of the tragic and the profound. They march toward the kind of greatness that can only be earned by understanding the great sorrows that life affords. My mom’s motivation, purity of vision, and passionate devotion is rooted in a deep understanding of sadness. I’ve never known anyone else who could cry as deeply and quickly and genuinely as my mother. Goodbyes. Deaths. Conflict. Illness. Loss. Disappointment. My mother’s ability to Understand these emotions so personally also gives her the fortitude to live in a way that is so clearly directed toward helping people into the Kingdom. My mom does not wear beige. She does wear turquoise, dramatically draped black, exotically patterned fabric, gold lame. And Red Hair. So when some well meaning friend advised her before my wedding that the mother of the groom wears beige, it became a running joke through all three of her son’s weddings. She didn’t and doesn’t wear beige. I suppose people who wear beige do not produce musicals either. My mother does. She has an amazing sensibility of balancing spectacle and story. In the twenty or so theatrical productions that she’s directed and produced, every one of them has had (intentional) surprises so breathtaking that the audience erupts in applause. It could be costumes, lighting, explosions, pulleys, multi-media, casts of (literally) hundreds. When I started getting surprising hair cuts, wearing clothes from different decades and wearing glasses that I did not need – my mom teased that I thought of clothes as costumes. But we both always knew where I got a respect for the spectacular and the theatrical. People who wear beige do not know how to tell good stories. One of the most enjoyable moments to watch my mother is when she’s telling a story to three-year-olds. She loses herself so fully in the story that she becomes every character – unique voices, ridiculous gestures, dramatic pauses, thrilling conflicts. I try to channel her whenever I’m telling stories to my children or when I’m in the three year old class at church. The ability to commit fully to a story is more than a way to entertain three year olds – it’s a way of being in the world more completely and fully. Beige wearing people don’t know a good glissando when they hear one. In The Lovely Bones – the main character is a fourteen year old girl who dies long before she should have. When she arrives in Heaven, she’s surprised to find that it’s a series of soccer fields, playgrounds and wide open, well mowed spaces. This particular heaven is only shared by others who would have found that space to be perfect on earth. If I had to pick a heaven, it would be a tough choice, I’ve had a really good life, but one of the top choices would be – Lying in bed with the lights out and down the long hallway of the ranch house echo the gentle fingers of my mother playing and playing and playing the piano. Sometimes she would be practicing a particularly troublesome phrase, more often --just playing. Laying there hovering just above sleep I would feel profoundly that the music was a kind of visceral fabric that bound my brothers and sister and father together throughout the otherwise quiet house in the rhythms, the melodies, the countermelodies and always, the sweeping glissandos. My mom drags her finger up the keyboard, but then slows each of the last notes to one by one keys at the top of the scale and just before the next musical phrase starts there is the slightest of pauses, too brief to fit all of these words into, but long enough that your soul starts to yearn expectantly toward the resolution of the chord, the forward motion of the music, the next great possibility. This is what my life with my mother has been like. A dramatic, spectacular, creative, expressive sweep up across a keyboard, but then, as the next movement is almost ready to begin there is that very intentional movement of those strong, short fingers over two maybe three notes – to remind me and us that our lives, that my life, are to be lived toward the future. We work toward the resolution of the chord, toward the possibility of the next movement, and with the clear careful intentionality of someone rooted in the sadness but celebrating the joy that defines the most perfect music. thank you for that music, mom. Happy Mothers Day |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 21,May,2004 | . housekeeping . i've been cleaning out my office, scrubbing under my kitchen sink and now i've fooled a bit with the links bar over yonder... went back to my old format of including some recommendations along with the blogs of friends and family. i've decided *not* to include student blogs -- an arbitrary 'line' demarcating where my confusing 'front burner' and 'back burner' leave off from one another. Some of you will recognize that former students who have now been promoted to official 'friend' status have been retained. Been having wierd dreams where my college friends go on trips with me and my students and my family members morph into old acquaintances. they feel like a metaphor for the contents of the FIVE trashcans i filled with paper two days ago (and i'm only half way done!) -- an amalgam of all material evidence for the fragmented and profound experiences that have constituted the 'me' many of you know... peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 20,May,2004 | on a lighter note (than the last post), here's some more residue from my conversation with mark...and from a hundred conversations with many of you... here's urlLink a list of my top five films . i regret that there are no john sayles movies on this list...a better list will someday include LIMBO and others... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 19,May,2004 | . the danger of letting your prophets get in bed with your prostitutes . i'm so upset by this news. this is from urlLink sojourners : Disney slips a mickey to Michael Moore movie The Walt Disney Company, corporate purveyor of mass-marketed media and entertainment, has pulled the plug on Michael Moore's latest film project, 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' which probes the Bush family's financial ties to illustrious Saudis (including Osama bin Laden's family), going back 30 years. Disney's Miramax division had financed the film and was set to release it this summer, when Disney CEO Michael Eisner objected, citing his fear of the movie's 'partisan nature.' Another top executive expressed concern that the politically provocative content would alienate some of the more conservative patrons of Disney entertainment. Moore and others critical of Disney's decision say Disney fears the controversial material in the documentary would jeopardize the company's tax breaks in the state of Florida, where Jeb Bush is governor. Moore's anticipated release, following his blockbuster 'Bowling for Columbine' (which grossed $22 million in North America) is rife with his signature predilection for hounding wealthy and elite profiteers and politicians. Disney has refused to renege on its decision not to promote the film, though it now appears that they will sell it back to Miramax for independent promotion. Unbelievable! I was really banking on the populist appeal and the resonance of Micheal Moore's voice to help in the great unseating of November... After perusing urlLink Michael Moore's website a little more, I see that this scandal has been in the press for about a month. Where have i been ?! |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 19,May,2004 | . ten minute posts . i've been reading plays lately. lots of tragedies. do you know what tragedies are? (i know you do, i'm not trying to be pedantic. i've just realized anew what they are.) tragedies are endings where characters realize something about themselves that they've been avoiding. so last night as i polished off a few glasses of mark's homemade great wine -- i had a moment which, if i were to have died or been raptured (imagine my surprise at *that* moment) or a curtain come sweeping across his porch and thunderous (or measly applause) followed, would have been tragic. i asked mark to be honest as i pitched him the play i've been toiling over for a few days. i love how well mark's b.s. detector works. he was 'intrigued,' but he said words that were a deathknell even through my buzz and the beautiful summer air. 'sounds therapeutic.' shit. 'therapeutic.' ugh. so now i'm back to trying to figure out what story to spend my summer developing. i've had brilliant and confusing conversations with my friends urlLink gary and urlLink cliff -- these in-the-process-of-succeeding filmmakers who i'm *so* glad to have as friends. (they weren't confusing. i think that they have life much more by the balls than i. its me and what i want and what i've done and where i am thats confusing.) didn't it seem like everyone you knew who was thirtysomething was a little more sure of what they were up to than you feel like you are now that you're (t/)here. i love (/hate) these the the lyrics: Mirror, mirror on the wall You've watched me grow since I was small So what will I regret the most The things I do or the things I don't? The deeper you peer into my soul You'll find that I already know But I can't say it Because I can barely face it My life is halfway through And I still haven't done What I'm here to do so my new plan is: (my new plans! -- if i had a nickel for every new plan) ten minute posts only... so rants might get curbed in the middle.... the happiest part of my day? i get to go out with Lynn, my girlfriend, who i miss lately, but i think is incredibly attractive. i'm hoping to get lucky... peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 18,May,2004 | . Haves and Have Nots. . caveat: I wrote this before i read the urlLink pirate-bishops response to my urlLink politicoblog . i'll respond to his erudite argument next time out. I don’t believe, as do many of my democratic peers, that one of the primary problems in our country is the widening gap between the haves and the have nots. At least not as long as the haves and the have nots are measured with income and wealth and possessions and net worth. I’m trying with all my energy NOT to believe the lie(s) of the advertising-industrial complex that buying things / having things will make me: More fulfilled. More happy. More secure. More sophisticated. More hip. More erudite. More rebellious. More normal. More stable. More excited. On the other hand, I do believe that the widening gap between the haves and the have nots is important when it deals with: Opportunity. Specifically, the opportunity to find work which reinforces people’s humanity, individuality and belonging. Specifically, the opportunity to find work which allows people to have and care for children if they so desire. Specifically, the opportunity to develop your own interests and gift set regardless of the socio-economic strata into which you were born. How are these opportunities pertinent in this election? I’ve been convinced that multi-national corporations are one of the most egregious inhibitors of these specific opportunities. They don’t have to be. I think its perfectly plausible that multi-national corporations could provide all of the opportunities I outline above. I just think that in general, they don’t. Starbucks would be an example of a multi-national corporation that does, more than others, attempt to achieve these ideals. (I know Starbucks has its problems.) Again, the question, Andrew, how are multinational corporations relevant to the election? (Unfortunately, we don’t elect CEOs, CFOs or boards…whether we’re stakeholders or not.) Here’s how: Republicans, in general, believe that the freer a market is, the more wealth (and thus – opportunity) will be created. The opportunities for the have nots emerges from the “compassionate conservativism” – the money from the wealth trickles and/or is donated down to efforts to help the under-privileged. Democrats (particularly progressive ones – like Clinton, Gore & Kerry) believe that while economic development (capital / wealth creation) is an essential force in nation and world building, the free reign of markets must be held in tension with the rights and needs of workers. THAT tension gets played out over and over again in many ongoing campaign issues. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 16,May,2004 | . buying in / selling out . I wrote this in feedback to a student today: Try to detach your experience from your evaluation of the book Ahh! What have I become? One of *them*! |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 16,May,2004 | . Politicoblogging . Oh come on, it’s election year. You knew I couldn’t avoid the subject forever. As some of you know, I am a pretty staunch liberal in my political views. Having emerged from a right wing family / school / lifeworld / upbringing, I think I understand the motivations and underpinnings of conservative political thought. However, I have to say that in today’s political climate – particularly given the pervasiveness of issues of globalization – the categories of political liberal and conservative are often insufficient. So I’ll get into that issue on another day. I want to start politcoblogging with an argument that I think everybody might agree upon. And when I say everybody, I really mean BishopRudd (eg. The Pirate / Coach / etc) – who is by far the most regularly-opposed, but brilliantly-analytical reader that I have. Here it is: People are voting too often for issues as they affect them directly and individually INSTEAD of voting for the good of the country (and mutatis mutandi, the larger world). If voters were more focused upon the general good of everyone when they voted, then democracy would be working optimally (both thriving on participation and encouraging participation). People are far too concerned (on the right and the left) about which candidate will protect their interests. I’m arguing that this self interest can only devolve into worse and worse politics. Effects of this attitude: political rhetoric becomes increasingly partisan, single-issue-focused, and non-wholistic; voter attrition; special interest lobby groups become increasingly powerful in swinging elections. I believe that this problem proceeds from the left and the right equally, and I’d just like to do my part during this election to push every person that I know to think about voting NOT as being about protecting your own interests, but instead as an opportunity to think about – The greatest needs for our country. And then ask: What is the best way to address those needs? Of course this also allows me to explain what I see as the greatest needs for the USA and how those perceived needs influence my vote. But that’s a later blog. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 25,May,2004 | For everyone who has will be given more, and she will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. Back where i grew up, one of the things people did was that they really liked 'verses.' The ancient text of the Bible was parsed into smaller digestible numbered bits a while back and these bits are called 'verses.' What's strange to me now that I'm far away from that world is -- how some of these little bits come to mean strange things for people: 1. people memorize verses. that's right -- just the little bits -- don't give me the whole idea, please, its too much, and not very easy to insert into the myriad of situations that i might like to insert this little bit. 2. people string together verses to create new wholes. this hermeneutic practice is actually widely practiced throughout christendom. the wild and wacky part occurs when the longstanding commercialism braided with Christianity -- and particularly American christianity -- seizes upon one of these strung together bits-cum-wholes and develops an entire discourse around the new whole. Example: The Romans Road. Jeremiah 29:11. 3. oh, and speaking of Jeremiah 29:11 -- people 'claim' these bits. I'm not, honestly, entirely sure what it means to CLAIM a bit of scripture, but I've got a little bit of an idea. One day Lynn and I were walking down a perfectly average sidewalk in our little suburban allotment in Bowling Green Ohio, when my eyes lit upon a small bit of paper. I picked it up. (See, I claimed it.) It had been torn from a little message pad and in loopy cursive letters the note read: 'You can try, but you'll never get rid of me.' I loved this note for all kinds of reasons. For me, most of those reasons were the rich storied-ness that he note evoked. I put it on my refrigerator with tape. I told Daniel about it and he laughed hard. He said that we should try. Try what? I said. Try flushing it down the toilet. Burning it. Burying it. See what happens. Spoken like a true literalist, my brother had succeeded in 'claiming' the note much more totally than I. For him the rhetor I had imagined -- a love-crazed tenth grader, panicked and vengeful, a furtive moment of stuffing a note in backpack too loosely -- had been erased completely. For him the note itself spoke. It taunted us from our refrigerator much like Dagon, god of the philistines, and Sampson, his faithful worshipper taunted the Hebrews. And I can imagine any number of crazed characters who have paraded through our house taking the note a different way. Can I have a drink? she asks. Sure. I say. Help yourself. nodding toward the kitchen. And as she stands in front of the refrigerator, water streaming into the cup, she looks at the note. 'Did he send me to get this water so i would look at this note? Are the Rudds threatening me? They don't think I can get rid of them? *That's* why he told me to go get this water.' And with the cup of water still sitting on the formica counter of our BG kitchen, she fled to her car and oddly enough, we've never seen her again. Again! She claims it DIFFERENTLY. This seems like the power and horror of stories moving across time and locale. Their meanings shift so profoundly. And so fast. Likewise these bits of paper / scripture.... When I came to this job at this 'evangelical' college -- someone asked me (as someone is prone to ask everyone when they come here): 'Whats your life verse?' Which means, I guess that you're clinging to one particular bit more than any other, right? I want to be the guy who follows one of the EIGHT MILLION urlLink jeremiah 29:11 thieves and announce that mine is: 'in your family line there will never be an old man. Every one of you that I do not cut off from my altar will be spared only to blind your eyes with tears and to grieve your heart, and all your descendants will die in the prime of life.' You can find it urlLink here if you want to claim it. Or better yet, my brother's favorite: urlLink Ezekiel 23:20 . My point? That excerpting scripture and divorcing it from context in order to affirm yourself / your strength / your confidence is bad? mmmm, not completely. My point was actually that in the middle of the scripture reading at church on Sunday, I leaned over to Lynn and said, 'Hey. urlLink That's my new life verse.' (referring to that bit at the top of this blog...) You'll have to read urlLink the whole story yourself to confirm my interpretation -- but this interpretive hook that Jesus offers to me turns the world upside down. Here's my down and dirty rendering of what this story is saying: 'You wanna be rich? treat what you have like its the best resource *ever*. you wanna be poor? Treat what you have like its not enough.' Ouch. and Wow. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 05,June,2004 | summer schedule is less strenuous. tho' its harder to deal with the tasks that do vie for our attention with this season in full swing. we're lucky to spend much more time with the kids these days. both of whom are very winning and delightful. Addison is much more charismatic the older he gets -- and simultaneously -- more prone to temper. Jaelyn is increasingly nurturing and kind. its funny that sometimes when your kids are in a phase where they aren't really *struggling* behaviourally -- you start to notice and think about some of the kinds of emotional battles they might face internally across their life. but i'm not blogging about those. its one kind of irresponsibility to blog about one's own inner terrain. to discuss one's child's inner life seems an altogether more heinous kind of sin. We show our house to disinterested buyers 3 - 5 times a week. we're beginning to rethink our move. we've been able to see more friends and family over the last few weeks -- a quick trip to michigan, several dinner parties, lunches, coffees and beers with old students. One of Lynn's students was killed in a car accident this week. This kind of thing is deeply horrifying. It makes the whole universe feel SO fragile and random. Lynn's moved her birthday to July 25th in case you hadn't heard -- so -- if appropriate, you should start thinking about what card you'll be sending. We'll be at the cabin, so send it early. i'm preaching (!) at my church in a few weeks. a funny byproduct of telling old 'preacherboy contest' stories at a party after too many glasses of wine.... our day to day grind: Lynn teaches secondary teachers at the downtown school every morning. i teach an upper division 'persuasion' course to five students on tuesday nights for four hours. we're both mired in 'assessment' tasks -- an ongoing reminder that the *business* of school is a bueracracratic maze of self-perpetuating, navel-gazing, oft irrelevant set of hoops that oftener than not rewards hoop jumpers. which, i suppose, is a good lesson for everyone: hoopjumpers and asskissers get rewards when living and working in highly rationalized instutions. and a reminder of the thing that i said to my student/friend russ the other day who was apologetically telling me that he was thinking of looking for a corporate pr job. NO! i insisted to him. I WANT you to go work for Hoover or GM or GE or MONSANTO or MTV or NIKE. If nobody GOOD goes to work there -- than the evil and the greed can never be undone. EVERYONE who wants to change the world on a systemic level -- must decide to work within institutions where they BOTH comply and RESIST! I didn't say it then, but in retrospect, i should have said: isn't it HARDER to have good values and work in an institution that disagrees -- finding places where you can comply / resist with meaning and purpose -- than it is to only work in environments that are self-confirming? and... speaking of working for the man -- i agreed to be the department chair next year. i'm right on track for the career i THOUGHT i wanted when I was graduating from college 12 years ago -- to be the PRESIDENT of a small college. A job / life / career that i *do not* want now. NOW? i want to tell stories. help more people to tell stories and live by stories. and find more ways for justice and peace to eek out into the world. ... we've taught our children the following axiom to which nathan and josiah have objected: 'violence always escalates.' doesn't too much compliance to institutions yield violence ultimately -- which will, in turn escalate? and doesn't resistance to insitutions ultimately yield peace and justice. but do peace and violence ultimately escalate? de-escalate? it seems like some buddhist htinking might be helpful on this question. or some mennonite thinking. anyone? peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 02,June,2004 | some people are offended when i say that i don't watch adam sandler movies or jim carrey movies. i've undergone several phases of thinking regarding the usefulness and value of these texts -- so thought i'd put some of my thoughts into the blogosphere for some reflection. the free dictionary dot com offers this definition of a: mug - the human face (`kisser' and `smiler' and `mug' are informal terms for `face' and `phiz' is British) so mugging -- would be -- really using the face for some use, right? and that seems, in my opinion to be mostly what Jim Carrey & Adam Sandler (the cultural products, not the people or the actors) are about. They both have the ability to MUG in inspired ways. Hilarious ways. When they use their face (or bodies) to perfection -- these guys are VERY very funny. So why don't I watch their movies? For me its always been a sort of dis-ease about the ways that MUGGING does not serve the story that they're telling. I liked both of these guys in sketch comedy shows -- and IF i watch a portion of either of their movies -- I laugh. Hard. But then, if i happen to try to watch a WHOLE story -- I don't. I groan. I grow weary. I turn them off. Because it seems like (in most cases) the story becomes incidental to the punchline of their gloriously funny faces. Like the story is the setup and their FACE is the punchline. I used to say that I didn't like them because they weren't acting. I still think that this particular STYLE of 'acting' while it doesn't at all serve the story (or their 'character' within the story) -- it also probably isn't who THEY are -- so it probably is a kind of performance -- 'acting' might be an appropriate name. But ultimately, I don't think there's anything BAD about what they're up to. I think it just belongs in sketch comedy shows. Not in movies. Even the GOOD stories that some of their movies started out as -- are -- it seems -- ill served by this MUGGING. Mugging does, now, however, serve up juicy 'quotes' -- which end up getting bantered about in social groups -- weaving a textual fabric of continuity around most social networks like a warm media blanket. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it seems like a really great side benefit. Clearly the biggestt and most central benefit to this kind of punchline-driven approach to character or story -- is that each MUG -- each quotable bit -- each hilarious gesture -- memorable line -- BECOMES a kind of an advertisement that is ongoing for the franchise which is -- Adam Sandler. or Jim Carrey. which is why, I suppose that these movies are considered 'vehicles' for their stars....but what gets eroded in a world where most people JUST see these movies INSTEAD of movies with more subtle humor -- which reward the patience and attention of a faithful audience is -- story. and particularly comic story. Kenneth Burke calls the Comic Frame -- 'equipment for living.' and unless we can weave a comic perspective back into our understanding of WHOLE characters -- and broad sequential and consequential sweeps of human action -- we lose valuable equipment for living. i'm not the culture snob i once was who sneered at these movies or anyone who watched them -- but i want to remind people that they're just watching sketch comedy when they engage these films. And that, while sketch comedy is a VALUABLE way to start building our comic frames -- its insufficient to build hearty structures which will allow us to the see the world more truly. i'm eight minutes past the ten minute post rule. So that means you're asleep. Not reading anymore. But if you are awake, I'd love to be engaged on this topic... peace~ ** in a technology-gaffe-deletion -- Gary makes the worthwhile contribution that *Punch Drunk Love* & *Eternal Happiness* are worthwhile exceptions. I concur and add *Man on the Moon* and *Truman Show* |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 01,June,2004 | i wrote a post that i self-monitored (and decided not to post) while i was in michigan. a wall of depression broke over my head for no rational reason in the middle of a conversation / debate -- around the table-o-great-fun. it was the old: i'm from here? i'm from here. i'm from....? malaise. my post was all about. Ahh. We can never go home. *Home* is eroded by globalization and mass media and monopolizing capitalism. the good news is that it was a brief wave of hysteria -- passed quickly -- had a fun weekend -- and by the end was able to say again. i am from there. there is where i come from. i think i recently rediscovered the part of my fundamentalist heritage which had me entering (and winning, goshdarnit) preacher boy contests -- here on the blog. as a result i started sketching out a script -- a short & long version of _Preacher Boy_.... but from everything that i've been reading -- urlLink SAVED is a story straight from the same universe.... in some ways its hard to say with pride that i'm *from* a fundamentalist world -- but i think the difficulty is more in that i've chosen to emerge to a position not to far off from it -- still very associated with the structures and institutions of evangelical christianity -- more that loose connection than it is about any personal responsibility i bear for the horrible things i used to say and do and believe. i'm thinking of switching to a new tagline for the backburner --> Stories:Here & Now:Eachother . Dot . Blog I've been thinking that that moment when you pull up next to someone on a city street -- at a stopline or in the passing lane, and you both look over at each other -- that that moment is pretty profound. its like a hyper-performance of all kinds of cultural meaning. Here we are: we think at each other: strangers. Staring at each other. How embarrassing. How normal. How fleeting. How ridiculous. And then we don't think, but our milieu hums to itself: How Identical They Are! How Oblivious! How they rush together to an anonymous simultaneous secret! How they move in tandem! But how unrecognizable their dance is to themselves! Its getting late isn't it? Today the world feels cruel and steely and absurd to many of my student/friends. And for them, to me it does too. I'm thinking of you all day, mourning friends. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 31,May,2004 | . security / obscurity . favorite memory of an adult sunday school teacher: 'I think its important for us to remember that ANGER (poignant pause) is one letter away from DANGER.' how i wish i would have raised my hand to say with equal seriousness: 'And lets don't forget, too, then that DANGER is one letter away from (poignant pause of my own) DANCER.' Mmmm. Serious nods all around. Seriously, though, I'm locked out of my email account (and that is an excuse and apology to those of you who are waiting for an email from me) because I forgot to change my password. And on the one hand, I love living in a world where knowing MAGIC WORDS actually beckons an alterante reality (passwords / internet), but on the other hand -- in moments like these i remember that passwords always stand for something more than just SECURITY. Even in castles where little windows with grates over them in huge oaken doors slid open to hear (or not to hear) a password) -- passwords meant the same thing. In groups. Out groups. Most of the time I am annoyed when I lose my access to the internet -- frustrated if I go a day without an email fix -- aggravated if I can't jot a thought into the blogosphere. But rarely do I take a moment to recognize that my password stands for privilege. That indeed all the varieties of obscure numbers and letters that are tied in some mnemonic way to my past and thus to my avatar presence in the www --> should simultaneously remind me that not everyone has such a bother in their world. Some of you cram a few minutes in at the library. Some of you leave your connection streaming and open around the clock. But at least we all have passwords of some kind or another. In keeping with my new life verse -- I want to recognize amidst my annoyance with I.T. today that -- this annoyance is great wealth. I want to invite you to, with me, name the privilege that you have of looking at the glowing screen in front you. And, for our Estados Unidos readership -- Happy Memorial Day -- may our memories of sacrifice move us closer to -- peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 30,May,2004 | . hair . Both kids got major hair renovations today...i chopped addy's fro off -- while Jaelyn had her hair relaxed... Jaelyn's thrilled with her newly long hair -- for the first time -- she can comb through it herself... if you're interested in urlLink family pictures from our trip to michigan... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 11,June,2004 | I went upstairs last night because I could hear that Addison and Jaelyn were playing upstairs an hour past bedtime. I told them to give each other a hug and say goodnight before I took Addison back to his room. They exchanged a heartfelt embrace, and just before I lifted Addison away, Jaelyn said: “Wait a minute, Daddy, I want to say a prayer.” I paused, she folded her hands old-school style. “Dear Jesus. Please help me make good decisions with my toys and not bring them into bed. And please help Addison stay in bed when I call him to come over. Amen.” . |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 10,June,2004 | urlLink this artist: urlLink this urlLink children's book author : urlLink urlLink this book: urlLink a possibility of a date with this woman: urlLink to celebrate 12 years of partnership... BTW ~ i won't say i'm *renouncing* my obsession with the Center for Progressive Christianity, but reading further in -- i'm disappointed to find that they're operating from a really different place then I am. Why am I such a bandwagon jumper? Too many years in church makes it hard to stay in the interstices... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 09,June,2004 | bumped into this fragment: Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand. - Henri J.M. Nouwen and it SO reminded me of urlLink the point that i was talking about from the parable of the stewards . I've rarely felt such convergence around my spiritual life and its connection to the rest of my life... and the wierd thing is how its been sustained in so many small and seemingly unconnected ways for the past few weeks. But on patience for a moment. last friday Jaelyn, Addison and I went garage saling. For like four hours. They were even more into it than I was. I made them chant the four things we were looking for before and after each sale: 1. balls 2. bats 3. mitts 4. helmets that way if they saw other stuff - i could say -- enh. its not on the list. in the end we bought: 1. a toy bow and arrow 2. two frog puppets 3. a pottery mug. but when it was time to go home for lunch, Addison was desperate. We couldn't stop! he insisted. We hadn't found a helmet. We have to be patient, I reminded him. It's so hard to be patient isn't it? We should go to a store. He said. But I reminded him that waiting for the universe to unfold karma in her time would be much better for us. We would learn about waiting, we would remember that good things take time. We would *earn* the helmet. Ok so i didn't say the stuff about karma. but i thought it. And later Jaelyn was feeling impatient for dinner. She was persevorating on the point. Daddy, I'm hungry. When is it going to be ready!? And so we talked about how it had been hard for Addison, because he was only thinking about that helmet. Being patient means that we choose to let go of the future possibility. The thing we want but don't have and focus on something RIGHT HERE. . i have, historically, referred to myself as a gypsy. but suddenly find that i may just be developing some place-roots. which is freaky and not completely comfortable. the UTNE reader had an article two issues ago about urlLink how long it takes to really see something ... and this idea that patience is a prerequisite to seeing is one that I learned a hundred years ago at the Cabin sitting on a rock in the lagoon. And one that I tried to learn while I researched my dissertation at a hundred garage sales, but suddenly it feels so big... such a vast invitation... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 08,June,2004 | or at least thats how i feel today when i accidentally bump into urlLink the center for progressive christianity .... while i saw at least one name floating around who thinks quite differently than i do (Marcaus Borg and I disagree (in a parasocial way -- since he doesn't know me) about reading the Bible as 'truth')... the urlLink core teachings they articulate *really* resonate with me -- much more fully even than the articulations of 'emergent church' that i've encountered. so in case you've been wondering whether andrew *really* believed anything at all (since he's more likely than not to raise one eyebrow at a good deal of evangelical christianity) -- the answer, today is -- i believe! |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 07,June,2004 | i had a girlfriend named shannon in high school. We 'went together' for two years. During tenth grade we talked on the phone every night sometimes for close to an hour. I hate talking on the telephone as a rule, but these conversations were worse. We bickered. Sat silently. And she told me how terrible her family was. I told her how much I hated our high school. i'm sure there were happy memories, but i don't remember that part of the relationship. she broke up with me at Dennys after church one sunday. we were sitting at a table that went in a circle with another table. at the other table four senior citizens ate, not speaking, listening to all the gory details. i don't remember the gory details; i just remember that high school seemed much worse now. one day my mom came and picked me up in the middle of the day and took me out of my classes. i was horribly depressed. we had lunch at the brownstone, my favorite restaurant which was in the airport and then sat in our station wagon at the beach in the middle of the winter. The waves were huge. I cried and couldn't talk about much and then eventually we were laughing about something ridiculous. that's the Lampiris (my mom's family) way. last night Shannon and her entire family showed up in my dream. They were being feted at my dad's church for 25 years of faithful attendance. They all have blond hair and were smiling like it was a promotional for a new talk show. People just looked at them in awe. They opened a few presents, but mostly just laughed like they were on stage. back when i went over to their house they yelled at each other like i had never heard a family yell. One of them sat in a chair and didn't talk at all, just watched tv. He didn't go to church either. but he was on the wednesday night prayer list as a result.... we liked going to their house, though, because the were allowed to rent VCRs and Video Cassette Tapes from the local video store. That was still too close to Hollywood for the rest of our families. Ahh the good old days. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 06,June,2004 | urlLink my brother raises a question on his blog which has buzzed around in my head for more than 24 hours, so I thought I’d simmer on it for awhile. He mentions our friend Chad who had one of his most formative experiences in a trip to Australia…he (cryptically) mentions a week in October of 1994 as being formative for him, and then he invites us in: What week has been most formative in your life? I commented that I haven’t had any such weeks – but I have had seasons of life which I identify as transformative and revelatory, but ultimately, even in retrospect, they lack a cumulative property. Instead such months / cycles / seasons / (and frequently) semesters – seem to reform previous insights and directions into wholly other experiences. Directions I had not expected. I don’t want to say that these bursts of discovery and meaning have rendered my life more discontinuous than continuous, but on the other hand…were you to try to turn my life journey into a map, it’d be hard to see a unified direction… And for me that’s the why the question keeps BUZZING. When you use a metaphor like “formative” (the original title for this post) – it automatically renders past experiences meaningful in a sort of entelechial way. In the best scenario – such experiences also render the present eminently more meaningful, congruent and whole. This is not something just my brother does. I do it. You do it. We do it. I’m convinced that the human capacity to tell-stories-in-order-to-survive…is a quite basic phenomenon – maybe even the MOST basic (sociological) human phenomenon. I guess its those moments when you find yourself WITHOUT A STORY – that you feel most precarious. I’m not feeling liminoid right now. David’s question actually provoked me to start thinking about a whole set of stories that render my current life meaningful – but it also provoked me to think about the insufficiencies and partiality of those stories. Hope today is formative - transformative - revelatory and/or (since it is the Christian Sabbath) full of … peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 18,June,2004 | just went back in time to watch a paul schrader flick that i didn't watch back in the day. urlLink urlLink bringing out the dead (and i, too, like some of you, can't help but use a princess bride voice in my head when i say the title.) but in general i liked this movie much more than I expected to. i remember that it got uneven reviews back in the day, but ultimately i really liked the story. schrader seems to be always writing these stories which are straight up redemption stories with a very sort of clear grammar of fall and redemption -- but never so on the nose that you walk away from the movie feeling preached at. in fact, what i think i like MOST about his movies is that often, his *very flawed* hero is weary and desperate, but in some way recovering or doing better than he has been doing -- and then he gets faced with this temptation which is very clearly the point of entry *back* into the darkness that he was starting to emerge from -- and here's where the stroke of genius (for me) is -- Schrader has made the character's self / longings / motivations so *real* to me -- that I want it too. For the character. Even while I don't want it. While I hate it. I, the viewer, can enter pretty fully into the magnitude of the moral choice. Understand the stakes, and then choose the *wrong* road. I don't feel like writers are able to make us feel so much consonance with the characters very often. urlLink Light Sleeper & urlLink Auto Focus really have this same thing going on, too. And so if and when the characters make it out of the slough of despondence that they choose (different outcomes in each of these movies) - it feels *so much more* hard won / lost -- so much more MOVING to me as a viewer. (some of bringing out the dead *is* uneven. use of voice over, jarring camera work which isn't evenly utilized throughout the film. some bits that seem tonally wrong -- BUT ultimately, i'd argue that the story (all the plot points) and the characters *work* really well.) Reminds me of Pedro The Lion's work. Beautiful depiction of the darkness ends up alluding to the beauty of hope and light, too... peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 17,June,2004 | clipping urlLink from sojourners -- When I was growing up, it was continually repeated in my evangelical Christian world that the greatest battle and biggest choice of our time was between belief and secularism. But I now believe that the real battle, the big struggle of our times, is the fundamental choice between cynicism and hope. The choice between cynicism and hope is ultimately a spiritual choice, and one that has enormous political consequences. good words follow these -- all from Jim Wallis' Stanford Commencement address. He talks about vocation -- inspiring and challenging for those of us who often think of ourselves as adrift in that particular river of questions... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 16,June,2004 | go urlLink here. no really. its cool. and if you don't like it. don't tell me. because i might not like you anymore. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 15,June,2004 | my friend Joe Scalzo just won an award...in the Associated Press Society of Ohio's 2003 newspaper competition... First-place honors went to: Joe Scalzo, best sports writer. About Scalzo, the judges wrote: 'Writes with attitude and confidence. All of his stories and columns are a pleasure to read.' Scalzo also finished in third place as best sports columnist with the judges writing: 'Funny stuff, self-deprecating at times. Written to be enjoyed. Columns have attitude and personality without being arrogant.' if you want to write to Joe -- urlLink email me -- and i'll send you his e-mail. those of you who are his friends aren't surprised to hear him praised as a talented writer -- i just want to know when he managed to get that arrogant tone out of his voice... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 15,June,2004 | Given my post yesterday, this email update from Nicole Poston, a woman in my church, (who is studying spanish in Honduras) caught my attention. She's talking about her teacher: He teaches me Honderenismos like the phrase you say when you are about to sneeze and then you don’t. De lo arrenpentidos esta lleno el Reino de los Ceilos. The Kingdom of Heaven is full of repenters already. The idea is that when you sneeze you are repenting, so when you don’t sneeze people say this to mean, don’t worry too much, there are enough repenters already there. sneezing / repenting? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 15,June,2004 | i LOVE sneezing. it is one of the perfect human experiences. if i were starting a religion, one of the ten pillars would have to do with how sacred sneezing is. they expurgate evil fluid. for some they spring from light. they include uncontrolled feelings. they demand complete attention. they sew together the dialectic of profound felt experience with insistent public expression. like spiritual insight, they are almost impossible to conjure or manufacture. a fake sneeze may fool others, but to the faker, its just a stupid irrelevant replica. ~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 14,June,2004 | urlLink urlLink Capturing the Friedmans is a compulsively watchable commentary on the american family, the politics of sex in our culture / suburbia, the nature of hysteria...and more subtly on the voyeurism & documentary-culture which define: the blogosphere. reality television. parasocial relationships / industry exploitation of celebrity culture. i'm not a naysayer of any of these cultural realities. obviously i'm in the blogosphere with two feet...but the mcluhanesque idea that we only understand the ways our technology impacts us -- 'in the rear view mirror and fading fast' -- seems particularly apt in this particular story. the filmmakers have a tenderness for all of their characters -- and it would be easy for them to demonize several of the characters -- so the remarkable ability to maintain the full roundess of David (the amateur documentarian) and the Mom... is amazing. The final shot of Howard Friedman -- is a coup in the whole voyeurism subplot which involves YOU the viewer in a complicated ambivalent relationship with your own watching (a story line arguably initiated with David's dictum, 'If you're not me, STOP watching this! This is PRIVATE!) and on a MUCH lighter note -- but a great documentation of the *beauty* of how a cultural performance can give some otherwise marginal members of a group both a grammar and a voice for participation in (ultimately) the larger cultural millieu is -- urlLink urlLink Spellbound and while we're on the subject -- the other must-see-andrew-list-of-documentaries-for-everybody? urlLink Hoop Dreams urlLink American Movie and urlLink hands on a hard body for a less universal recommendation, but a must-watch if you live in my geographical world -- urlLink Go Tigers is a great depiction of the complexities of how football culture interplays with everything else here in mideastern Ohio. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 13,June,2004 | i mean that title NOT in the way you first read it. there's been a horrific shift in the american political landscape which conflates: celebrity culture *&* infotainment *&* religious discourse and now people say things (regularly) like: but, how you know that he (X politician -- fill in the blank) is _a good christian_. OR at least you always know _where he stands on things_. He takes one position and always sticks to it. OR its our duty to support _men of god_ in their political office. I understand that in the post-clinton / monica-gate / it depends on the what the meaning of is *is*... that the idea of a SIMPLE STRAIGHTFORWARD LEADER seems like a good solution to the danger of legalese shiftyness. but this morning, while reading the news, I bumped into urlLink this story about the 'godly' John Ashcroft whose minions have been working night and day to carefully parse the meaning of SEVERE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL SUFFERING -- words which constrain the define the borderland between torture and coercion within the US consititution.... Of course this stuff probably won't get airtime or real play in the mainstream newsmedia -- but the reality is that politics and government and legislative demand an ability to live in the murky realms of grey which define the ugly land of legalese... why won't the evangelicals pass around excerpts from this memo on email linked up to what a faithful upstanding member of his congregation Ashcroft is? ... and the problem with voting for George Bush because he's a simple, straighforward fellow is this: he *is* responsible for all of the specific policy decisions that have been made on his watch by his people. Cheney's Halliburton fiasco -- is PART of G.W.'s moral character. Ashcroft's careful legal defense for the untenable torture/coercion at various sites in the U.S. occupation --- IS part of of GW's moral character. The new US foreign policy of unilateral engagement based on the simple (and wrongheaded) suspicion of WMD -- is part of GW's moral character. that is -- if moral character is why we vote on presidents or politicians -- I'd much rather vote on their policies and their appointments. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 13,June,2004 | here's the list of recommendations from my last two weeks of (catching up) movie viewing: urlLink Girl With A Pearl Earring I love how the director / cinematographer cultivate this sense that -- there are ways of seeing the world -- that are better and worse. All the good ways of seeing include -- paying attention. by the time Vermeer finds out / connects with / teaches Grete about cultivating a way-to-see-the-world -- we're right along with him. And her. Because of the beautiful filming. And speaking of beautiful filming: urlLink Elephant thanks erik for reminding me to rent this film By Gus Van Sant -- is a great film. I'm relieved to be able to say so, because, though i Liked GoodWillHunting -- I didn't think it had the same courageous VISION that urlLink Drugstore Cowboy & urlLink My Own Private Idaho had. It's like he has this beautiful way of seeing the broken parts of the world. That definitely comes out in this Columbine-esque tale. Both films are slow, but demand patient attention. I had more, but have to go grade... Thinking of you (that is, if you're reading, those of you who I'm thinking of...) peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 24,June,2004 | I spilled coffee (not, by any means, a new phenomenon) on my t-shirt this morning, while I was writing. Today it’s a public television shirt with big bold yellow and red logos, meant to evoke a thrift-store-esque devotion to someone else’s donation / passion / life, recycled and reused in my incarnation. So coffee, I suppose, only enhances the illusion, right? It’s like a value-added mark of authenticity. Last night we were noticing that the purple berries we call mulberries which drop off of the spindly tree next to the driveway and stain the soles of your shoes with their juice in the next two weeks as they ripen – had just started to fall. Lynn reminded Jaelyn that native peoples use exactly this juice to dye their garments. “They stain their clothes with these berries like we dyed our shirts yellow.” It was a few moments later, partway into our nightly walk around our circle when Jaelyn inquired: Mommy, do the native Americans have to wash the stains off of their clothes? Lynn explained that these colors were intentional like the bright trendy turquoise of jaelyn’s pedal pushers, but Jaelyn was fixated on the stain. How do they get those stains off? And suddenly, I’m thinking – why are we always trying to pretend that we don’t have stains….why not treat them with a bit more honor? After all, its not like clean shirts = no eating. Not like we’re embarrassed that we eat the food that makes the stains, or drink the coffee that dripped on our shirts. The food and the drink are not secrets that we’re trying to hide as if we were, say, engaging in liposuction or bulemic purging… And I’ve always said that I liked scars because they’re like bookmarks or hyperlinks on our bodies that assure us that our past genuinely happened to us – was not actually a dream – and that we are in a really concrete way connected to our otherwise unbelievable pasts. And if you think about it – scars are just a more naturally occurring case of the same thing that tattoos accomplish. Someone decides to get a tattoo in order to translate NOW into ALWAYS. They’re kind of like an F-U to mortality. Right? Because they’re only a good financial risk if they’re going to stay around for a long time. And they’re bound to stay around for a long time if you stay around. And they assert that whatever it is you’re feeling or being or loving NOW is something you’re going to feel or love or be THEN. No matter what THEN brings (eg. “I love Billy Bob” turns out to be a bad gamble more often than not). Which is admirable in a world of avatars and fleeting chimeras – someone who actually IS something so completely that they can afford to translate there is-ness to their skin so that people can actually read how is they actually are. And lets face it – tattoos are pervasive enough now, that we all know that they are SO over. And scars do seem like a very hip, edgy alternative, but intentional scarring seems a bit – well – inconvenient -- to me right now. So it seems like stains are the PERFECT way to go. All the permanence and expressive value of a tattoo, sans risk and commitment. That’s why I’m leaving my coffee stain on my shirt this morning… |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 21,June,2004 | all weekend, over and over again, i've been thinking that one of the most poignant ways that our world feels broken is the dearth of storytelling. we have ceded our attention and our voices to multimediaconglomerates....who, i do not feel simply angry toward. i recognize that they are a product of desire, and that they have facilitated possibilities in storytelling that would not otherwise be possible, but... so few people own stories which are their own. so few people knit their lives together with others by using the shared experiences that they rehearse. so few of us allow narrative sensitivity to guide our time instead of clocks, watches and 'minutes' & 'hours' (whatever those are...!) and i? i'm going to do something about it. (stay tuned) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 21,June,2004 | in which a number of wise men sit at a dinner table and discuss a wide range of topics. purge the gender from this one -- and i've found a greek term for one of my favorite activities... Utne's urlLink salons focus on a similiar idea... the urlLink lets talk america people focus the idea upon how the political sphere might be reshaped if people seriously committed themselves to the power of talk... ...but *good* conversation doesn't draw arbitrary lines around what is *political* and what isn't (as if *anything* was *ever* not political)...in fact good conversation really engages *any* topic as being worthwhile... ...food, time, and engaging people seem to be the most important components... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 21,June,2004 | urlLink this draft actually changed just slightly the morning of -- but you'll get the big idea. if you're *seriously* going to slog through it -- you should probably read these stories from the Revised Common Lectionary first: urlLink The Mountain & urlLink The Naked Guy . |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 21,June,2004 | nathan, who understood my lectures better than most students, (probably because he was subjected to more of them) shared debate trips with me, made me laugh often, despite his claims to being 'a wet blanket,' regularly challenged me to think harder about ideas, and who also just happened to (like me) be a part of a group of family singers in his childhood, was united in holy matrimony with shannon. nathan, it just occured to me that i don't know whether the clifton family singers wore matching outfits like the Rudd family singers. we always pulled a metal chair up next to the microphone so my two brothers could be the same height as me and my parents and we could all sing our gaither songs or our ron hamilton songs into just one microphone. i liked our gigs, but i always fantasized about being the Murks. urlLink but i digress... lonette, who is not only a gifted performer, but also a gifted just about everything else. And my former student/ongoing friend married (the fabulous) Steve on the same day. These two are ridiculously in love. And cute (and i mean that in the *good* way) while being able to maintain a bit of an 'oh please with the sentimentality' distance from their incredible cuteness... and rob, who insists upon growing and developing as a person more than most people I've ever met (tae kwon do, the artists way, piano, law, rhetoric -- all just in a span of one year of knowing him) has the ability to _be present_ in a one on one conversation more intensely than anyone you've ever met. And I haven't met Monica (still!) because they, too, got married on the same day. And JAN, for whom my daughter Jaelyn is named, an extradordinary friend/sister type to my wife -- and lucky me (not often that folks (me in particular) say this about our inlaws) as an extension of my wife. Got married on the same day. I took black and white candids during the whole wedding, which resulted in this wierd out-of-body-sensation during the whole time. I was there. I was *busy* seeing....but I wasn't really there as a *person*. I didn't sit in the places I usually would have sat, dance as much as i usually would have danced, talk to as many people as I usually would have talked to. But I liked it. Being distanced by technology was an insightful, enlightening experience as well as being an odd disembodied one... it reminded me of how far i was from the other weddings of the people that i loved that day... which reminded me of how odd it is to live in an era where often the people you love best live far away from you. but because that very same odd world has given me the opportunity to know nathan and lonette and rob and jan. i'm grateful too... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 02,July,2004 | I considered giving up driving for lent last year. The idea got poo-pood enough (for good and bad reasons) that i stuck it on my back burner. It would have demanded a lot of bus riding (so - waiting and patience) reliance on the goodwill of friends and family (so - self-abnegation and humility) and coordination of schedules and expectations (so - talk and relationship). BUT why go through all that when you *have* the other car? sitting there in the driveway!? I'm just getting increasingly convinced that when everybody responds to your ideas with 'ludicrous!' and 'absurd!' -- maybe thats when you know you're on the right path... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 01,July,2004 | this is not an entry about urlLink dictionary.com's word of the day servic . this is not an entry about Andrew's urlLink everyday life . this is not a rant about some esoteric urlLink political issue . this is not a post about what its like to live in a world where googling leads to misdirection more often than it points us to true north. this is not a post about the way that misdirection, short attention spans, rabbit trails and esoteria have become more constitutive of the human quest for knowledge than an old school card catalogue. this is not a blog about how much empathy is required of web-designers who want to create intuitive and inviting web experiences. this is a post about that poem that robert frost wrote where he was walking in a wood and two paths diverged and he, he took the one less travelled by and it has made all the difference. and maybe its a post about stumbling through woods and thinking that you're on a path for a moment and then realizing that you're on a *totally* different path than you thought you were. and then looking backwards at the path you chose and admitting that sure: it has made all the difference...but what the hell path was it...? (BTW ~ i don't mean to be pedantic, but in order for this blog to make much sense you have to hyperlink the title...just a little last minute urlLink disambiguation there...) |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 29,June,2004 | Just finished an hour and a half of writing. He's about to drop the cyanide into the wineglass, but I thought I'd save that for tomorrow morning. I think I've set it up believably, though. Had two cups a joe. One english muffin with lemon curd melted into the nooks and crannies, and in anywhere from one minute to one hour (that's right, i'll be on the precipice of individuality and parenthood for all that time or just that little bit of time), someone will call out: DADDY! and I'll: 1. run upstairs and we'll spend about 30-40 minutes waking up, making up stories, tickling and remembering the good old days (specifically, yesterday and the day before) 2. we'll have pancakes, probably with sprinkles cooked into them. 3. we'll bathe in mosquito spray and then ride training-wheeled-bikes at evil-kneivel speeds (addison carefully removing and then replacing his bike helmet EACH time he gets on and off of his bike) 4. we'll play with little people (rough plot line probabilities: the people go to camp. the people go swimming. the mommy and the daddy go off to work. the honies (which is, for whatever reason, what the kids are called) will misbehave and be punished, and/or there will be a volcano and dinosaurs will attack.) 5. We'll put away our toys (four times). 6. We'll invent a dinner menu. Something on the grill surely. 7. Based on weather, I'll mow the lawn or not. 8. I'll consider, but decide against: - cleaning out the gutters, - power washing the siding - weeding the mulchbeds - painting the entryway and the door 9. a telemarketer will call. I'll politely let them know that its not a good time. 10. we may go to the YMCA pool based on how many good decisions everyone makes. 11. Mommy will return from bringing home the bacon and we will take a family walk around the circle. hope your day is full of: peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 28,June,2004 | It’s a claim I made a few posts back and I wanted to talk about what I meant. I think to own your story, you have to tell stories. Good news: anecdotal party banter does encourage such telling. BS sessions which fall under the general headings: “remember the time when…” and “you think that that’s bad!…” are, I think, one of the great vestiges of oral culture left threading through humanity. I think that this tradition is great – it fits in well with deipnosphistai (below). I’ll wager that if you know someone who you would say – “So-and-so is a great storyteller.” – that they are experts in the two genres mentioned above. So my complaint is not that these stories are bad (again, they’re GOOD!) but that they’re insufficient. Somehow we relish opportunities to swap these stories (which generally affirm collectively held values, demarcate micro-cultural boundaries, and reinforce shared criteria for evaluating humor / art / performance) – but turn to the movies or novels or church or the newspaper – to hear stories that raise and answer the bigger questions of meaning and morality. We lack, it seems, opportunities to tell our stories. And in some ways, I think, maybe its okay that we don’t always tell our dark stories to just anyone or to everyone. Most of us tell these stories to a few people and that’s hard enough as it is. But there’s a middle ground. Another place. A point-of-view, a way-of-seeing, a way-of-being – which both enables us to tell the big stories, but also preserves the delicacy of intimacy and the dangers of disclosure. It’s called: Fiction. I’m convinced that honing your skills as a creator of fiction is a way to own your own Story. And your own stories. Are you skeptical? Delighted? Nonplussed at my rantings? There’s only one good response to reading this blog. Use your imagination and tell one fiction story today. To someone. See what happens to you…. Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 27,June,2004 | *note: the end of the world has been postponed. this world, that is. the showing date has been moved back several months. just one more long boring story summarized under the metanarrrative of: Technical Problems. Some of you read that title and panicked: “I turned that paper, didn’t I? I graduated already. I had to turn it in…they can’t revoke my diploma can they?” Others recognize the title urlLink independent study as a short film that I’ve been talking about making for the last, I don’t know, two years? Well the bad news is final. After an epic number of twists and turns in the road of post-production, a death certificate has finally been issued. Editing Problems Hard Drive Breakdowns Audio Recording Disappearing These are the three specific chapter headings which define the long arduous (and boring-to-tell) post-production of the film that we guerilla shot in 12 days with the hard work and dedication of a fabulous cast and crew. In the end – it turns out that the time it would take to do the necessary voiceovers and audio remixing – make it infeasible for me (or, I think, any of the other ol’ indy-study folks) to manage a final cut of this film that we could actually ship around to festivals. BUT – I am grateful to many of you for your work and patience – AND – I’m increasingly devoted to the importance and value of ritual – so – I’m going to show a not-really-perfect draft of Independent Study as a means to: -reunite a bunch of fun, great people -celebrate art and artists -thank some of the vendors who donated free food (based on the promise of a publicly shown “thank you”) -give myself permission to move on to new projects on SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12th at 9 p.m. in the evening & (probably) in the Malone College Theater. I’m going out of town for the month of July, but I’m scheduling now so that those of you who think of passing this on to other indy-study-folks who I may have lost touch with – can pass it along to them. It will be an event that will be open to the public – but at no charge – I’ll be using copyrighted music in this not-quite-a-real-draft-of-a-movie. So the official word will be: This is a big gathering of friends to watch a movie they made together. Hopefully the RIAA won’t pick up on our sinister little non-money-making plot and name us as co-defendents along with their host of 6 year old Kazaa users… Sorry to those of you who aren’t in the urlLink independent study loop for taking up bandwidth….you’re welcome to come to the party, too! peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 10,July,2004 | The world makes insistent demands. Maybe alarm clocks must BUZZ – BUZZ – BUZZ over and over again to wake us from the free-association world of dreams in order to lay a sense of foreshadowing across all that is to come in the day ahead. Because what will come will be the same thing over and over again. BUZZ. Buzz. buzz. I went to Michigan’s Adventure Land with my brother, the bishop yesterday, and spent most of the day riding carnivals of circles and speed and mountains of height and neck snaps along with a thousand other middle class sensualists. As we took an umbrella stroller full of bags, backpacks, swimming suits, towels & a video camera back to our matching minivans in the parking lot (stuffed full of more twin minis), his cell phone rang. It was our brother-in-law Ryan, who lives nextdoor to David in the postwar suburb full of carefully maintained cape cods, square lawns and cascading Home Depot mulch bed gardens. Emily had escaped again. Emily is the family beagle whose breed, apparently, predisposes her to escape from home and to run away. For two summers past, thought their backyard had been an Eden grand enough for her liking. But this summer….she has fallen from her idyllic original state-of-grace. Every day there is a call or a chase or a penitent Emily awaiting them outside of the fence in the driveway as they return home. How does our world come to torture us in these random, uncontrollable plagues? We choose love and life. Emily, the beautiful, mild and faithful beagle. Love and life is full and beautiful for a season – some seasons long, some short. Emily’s perfection lasted two years. And then from nowhere – certainly not from our decisions – certainly not from our expectations – feasibly, but outlandishly possibly from the inheritance of Beagle Breeding and Neighborhood Fences – but who could know that such benign and recessive predestinations could so persecute us eventually? Emily is exploring another point of weakness in the white picket fence right now – what are you up to? Buying a beagle? Building a fence? Enjoy the temporary – Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 08,July,2004 | in michigan on vacation (high) too many roles / expectations to juggle on vacation (family celebrations / building a fence / telecommuting to work / finishing a script / devoting time to family) -- (low) almost finally sold house yesterday (high) deal fell completely through (low) reading good books (high) too many good books in the world (low) I guess overall -- I'm high. peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 07,July,2004 | A teacher from my past, given to axiomatic instruction, chided me with these words. Today we may be engaging in a series of house transactions that we’ve been working on for a long time. When in the midst of such interactions there are many choices to make, and Lynn and I are committed to making them together. Making decisions together is one of the more difficult features of being human. Consensus becomes truer and truer the longer you know one another, and the longer you talk about any issue. Unfortunately, it also becomes more difficult. In our case, since we’ve made these decisions together before, and because we like each other a lot – we know that there are unique features of each-other’s take on things that are really valuable. But what we don’t know is which feature of which person’s personhood is going to end up mattering in the story we tell ourselves about this decision AFTER its made and completed. We're writhing together. My teacher used to bellow the title of this blog in the Imperative Tone – Amped Up On Steroids. And there’s something about the level of confidence with which one says something that actually weights the credibility of the statement beyond its own merits. Tammie has started pointing out to me that my years of debate have lent me just such a blustery tone of surety which often is attached to statements which are at best – probabilities and at worst – subjective perspectives. Brendon and Janson and I, when we stayed up til three and four in the morning in Lawlor Hall debating the morality of going 57 in a 55 – employed this tactic of false surety with all sorts of permutations: I read somewhere that… There’s been research done… It’s been proven… And the best is always when you include a statistic with a very specific and esoteric number. The truth is (note the surety in my tone) that indecision is not just a skewer – It’s actually a pretty fertile ground where relationships may grow… It’s a rupture in the sometimes stifling surety which we rely upon in the quotidian flow… Looking for a new axiom, I invent: Exult on the rope swing of indecision… Dance through the gloam of indecision… Jump into the pool of indecision… Coast on the surf of indecision… …if only they didn’t want landings and sunset and the solid ground of dry land… may your indecision be full of… peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 05,July,2004 | Before Jaelyn was born our lawyers advised us not to bring her home until after the forty-eight hours of maternal consent had passed. Too many custody cases that they had seen, too many broken hearted adoptive parents, too much risk – they said – to take her home after the 12 hour wait that the hospital mandated. In _The Great Divorce_, the narrator talks about all the reasons that humans choose to turn back to the small dark dingy city that they came from instead of growing into and up-in and through live in the dangerously beautiful new world. One of the stories he tells is of a mother who is so wrapped up in the lives of her children that she cannot bear to let go of them so that she may enter the Great New World. Parental love, like all the greatest parts of being human seems like one of the most dangerous and difficult endeavors. How do we love without strings attached? How can we possibly invest every hope and dream into these people and then love them just as fully when they need to choose dreams that we can’t understand? I see this question being struggled through by college students who are on the receiving end of constricting love. So we decided to bring her home anyway. Those 36 hours felt like one of the top 5 most courageous moments in my life. After a two month wait for her, after a miscarriage and all the brokenness that that brings, after two years of infertility. I read urlLink this blog that inspired me. The question: “What is the bravest thing that you have ever done?” Seems like one of those questions that push us to tell some of our best stories – look for what we admire mostin each other – and become something more courageous than we are… peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 16,July,2004 | no posts for the upcoming week, y'all. may your sojourn in civilization give you peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 15,July,2004 | its vacation -- shouldn't i have more thoughts simmering than time to write them on a blog? 1. shouldn't libertarians *want* the government to stay out of regulating marraige? + if Christians believe (a la Romans 1) that Jesus calls people unto himself by revealing himself throughout the world *&* if marriage is the best metaphor for God's consumation of his love for us *then* doesn't it make sense that *encouraging* gay marraige would allow everyone who partook in that part of God's truth to be led even closer to Jesus? (Do you think I may still have a career with Focus on the Family?) 2.what if everybody thought that part of the legacy they left for their world was some stories. Some people would continue the great oral tradition of storytelling, some people would blog a lot, some people would make children's books for their kids and grandkids, other people would make little movies. And if we started thinking of *our* stories as reconsistituting a seam between our selves and the *place* worlds we lived in -- then even this little books and stories and movies and songs would have audiences... 3. i'm mostly a *post* evangelical because i'm so desperately concerned that the evangelistic / missional impulse to *get it right* and to *convince* an audience makes every story go south. It chokes out the ambivalences that all good stories need. 4. I'm feeling like all my marxism and critical theory is making me feel too heavy about the world. that my stories (particularly the dark play that i'm currently trapped inside) have been too sincere. I love the flitting, easygoing COMIC FRAME that my Grandma Marge and Grandpa Andy use to talk about their complex and difficult lives. And I think that maybe I need to write an essay where Grandma Marge and the narrator of 'Unbearable Lightness of Being' hash it out. Because unlike Tomas' lightness, my Lampiris family heritage is rooted in great tragedy *&* laughter. And unlike the surrealists exisistential irony, the Lampiris laughter is always both self-effacing & heartily *with*... 5. I leave for *the cabin' in one day. 'Treasure Island' (its other name) has been one of the deep resources of continuity and peace in my life, and when our family talked about the eventual possibility of being forced to sell it -- we argued about the merits of using profits to invest in a new family cottage (more accessible)? and honor Grandparents Rudds that way OR -- my dad suggested -- what about the horrific poverty of the world and our relative wealth? Could we invest that profit in a way that would satisfy more people in more diverse ways? It's the question of Mary Magdelene's absurd perfume performance art -- abject generousity VS. settling in the post-babylonic Jerusalem and 'planting gardens' -- investing in the systems that will provide long term resource for the Kingdom and world? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 13,July,2004 | Lynn and I had a weekend rendezvous at a little hotel that we've returned to regularly since our first stay 12 years ago during our honeymoon. when we got back to Gramma Glo & Bampa Bill's house where the kids had been staying and playing with their cousins -- urlLink Patty (a longtime family friend) had arrived to provide Jaelyn and Addison one of the highlights of their vacation... urlLink urlLink a ride on her Harley... otherwise we've been: 1.) celebrating hundreds of birthdays, 2.) building a huge fence, 3.) reading a (very) little, 4.) swimming a (very) little. 5.) chillin with Aunts, Uncles & Livermores. & 6.) looking forward to heading north to the cabin next week... in completely unrelated news, but utterly worthwhile to think about... More info (including pictures) about urlLink The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe has been released. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 30,July,2004 | my friends cliff and mary (and Jack!) are visiting right now. I just love them, and wish y'all could know them, too. Back in the day Cliff and I used to tell stories to each other over frenchfries in the student union at BGSU, and Mary and I brewed exotic coffees in a decrepit pit of a Teaching Assistant Office while wrestling with rhetoric, interpretation & the politics of highered... So anyway Cliff is brilliant culture critic who recently wrote about (mark your calendars!): urlLink Gifted an astonishing swirl of American Dreams, Reality TV & Christianbookstormerica. once. when i was a fundamentalist. I participated in a a pageant called: Most Christian Teen. or Outstanding Christian Teen. or something like that. I found it absurd, but there were scholarships available, and goshdarnit, I was a prize Christian Teen if ever I knew one. And if I wasn't going to get any beer or sex or even movies or dancing, for that matter, than goshdarnit (oops...with that much profanity i wouldn't have stood a chance...i've become quite a pottymouth since then...) why not get some college tuition for it. One of the things that cracks me up about what we used to say to condemn Catholics was that -- 'everybody knows that their faith is just 'cultural'.' As if that was a bad thing. As if ours wasn't. Indeed the *culture* of evangelicals is beautifully satired in the movie -- urlLink SAVED . (if you missed it, you'll have to wait for video, as distribution is waning.) and Cliff closes his piece on GIFTED -- essentially an 'american idol' for the TBN set -- with a quote: “That’s our ultimate goal,” said McIntyre, “to put attention on the Christian world.” his technique: God gives us so many gifts, but we reach for the one with the prettiest wrapping. In a world where MTV dictates trends and pop-stars become idols, Christianity seems to be wrapped in conditions and judgments. It is our goal to wrap God’s message—His love—in acceptance, and in a way that blends seamlessly into ‘pop’ culture while still upholding the values we, as Christians, value most. When presented with this gift, wrapped tightly in respect, we hope that today’s youth will open the trendy packaging to release God’s love—and realize in doing so that we are all truly ‘Gifted.’ So you should expect that America's next 'Gift' will be a 300-something pound somebody with acne, right? but the show's great production values will make us realize that God's gifts of love and acceptance blends seamlessly with pop culture's gifts? right? You know that I love the gifts of pop culture, right? And am all for featuring the immanence of Christ and the Gospel in the cultural milieu -- but the thing is -- the 'christian world' that McIntyre wants to feature is a cultural hybrid where every consumer trend is hastily baptized, blessed & pressed into the service of evangelism -- without considering how good or ill the fit may be... everytime Jesusness becomes a product you can buy -- somebody, somewhere, is trying to serve God & mammon at the same time. i know that Mammon happily accepts their fruity sacrifice... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 29,July,2004 | short downloadable film, urlLink This Land by JibJab, provides some very effective skewering of exactly the sloganeering and bumpersticking that i find so deplorable. only here -- (hurrah!) we get it through a comic frame -- not the angsty overpassionate rant that Rudd posted last... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 28,July,2004 | okay. I'm coming out. *clears throat* no, not that coming out. not in today's blog.... I'm making it a matter of record that i am a democrat . no surprise to most readers...shocking to...? nope, nobody, *but* hailing from the ronald-reagan-republican-christians that I do, I'm aware that politics is sticky point for a number of my readers today. the point of today's revelation is to: 1. commend the democratic party for choosing to highligh / engage Howard Dean's rhetoric that what's *important* about being a democrat is *commitment to democracy*. -- and that this commitment to democracy means that educational reform is rooted in DEVELOPING people's sense of agency, voice and participation, instead of punishing those who do not already have these privileges (eg. 'failing' schools in the 'no' [rich] child left behind policy...) -- that this commitment to democracy means participating in the kind of foreign policy that puts constraints on multinational corporations and multinational political organizations and the industrial-military-complex in favor of DEVELOPING the rights, privileges and opportunities of workers and underpriveleged people around the world -- and that this commitent to democracy means protecting the rights of marginal populations so that they have the ability to DEVELOP their sense of agency, opportunities and contribution to society instead of *targetting* them to preserve the safety and security of the already-privileged (eg. Bush vs. Affirmative Action, Bush-tries-to-make-gays-constitutionally-inferior) 2. excoriate the democratic party -- as well as the rest of the politico-industrial-complex -- for failing to adopt *real* campaign reform which would allow for choice and heterogeneity to flourish *throughout* a political campaign -- instead of foreclosing the pool of candidates as early as possible (for both parties) in order to divorce the political process from grass roots deliberation and transform it into even more sloganeering and bumpersticking. i *do* blame the media-indusrial-complex largely for this quandary, and i *do* (perhaps naievely) register *hope* for decentralization, dialogic media with the advent of digital / wireless / and networked media... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 28,July,2004 | Lynn turned me on to this book that we’ve both been loving this summer – James Paul Gee – writes about urlLink social linguistics and literacies which is situated exactly at the intersection of our interests (she researches / teaches about adolescent literacy). So anyway he has these great labels for concepts that have circling in this blog (and in my discourse) for a long time. He talks about that language use is always rooted in motivations of STATUS and SOLIDARITY: Status and solidarity are the competing, conflicting and yet intimately related fields of attraction and repulsion within which all uses of language are situated. And then he goes on to probe how indicative your use of the oral –in’ or –ing demonstrates which of these dialectical poles you’re featuring more in that particular speech episode. If you’re endin your words with the “n” – than you’re seeking solidarity – with the “g” – you’re positioning yourself for status. Now use of this code (or any other linguistic criteria) is dependent upon your social circle, because there are many circles where the use of the “g” is a bid for SOLIDARITY and STATUS. But these two poles do again mark out the powerful opposing urges to be a part of something (to be “in”) and the urge to be unique (“be yourself, no matter what they say…”) And this feels like a particularly keen truth when it comes to the point that Nathan makes in his blog: Can one really affect the world one person at a time? That is just not good math. […]In order to change the world, you must be able to affect systems. In order to affect systems you must have the backing of institutions. In order to get backing you have to sell yourself to something. I dabbled in everything in college; track, choir, drama, residence life, debate etc...but I liked everything so i did not sell myself to anything. Consequently I have not affected any systems. To have cache you have to (as Mandy puts it) “sell out” , but to make real change – to subvert the rottenness of existing status – you have to be able to maintain a sense of seperateness… so many implications... |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 26,July,2004 | We were walking home from the plastic green playground at our neighorhood school last night. It was a cloudy cool perfect night to be pushing our now-too-heavy-to-push stroller through the streets of suburbia… And I noticed that someone was sitting in her parked car in her driveway. I cycled through the possibilities: she’s a stalker. She’s crying because she doesn’t want to go in. She’s crying because she’ll never go back in again. She’s numb and exhausted and can’t believe that her life has been reduced to sitting here. In this car. In this driveway. And I realized that this image. A person sitting in a parked car has a powerful inonicity. Dr. Don Enholm used to tell us in graduate seminars on classical rhetorical theory about his weekends. His wife perused antique malls all over the state of Ohio while he sat alone in the car reading the latest treatise on the Nuremburg Trials. Sometimes when I found myself sitting in a parking lot, waiting, I wondered what it would be like for your life to eventually simmer down to a quiet read in an obscure back parking lot. Phillip Seymour Hoffman just sat through most of love liza in his car while I watched it last week. Wasn’t it Julieanne Moore's character who was sitting in her car singing in Magnolia? I tell my kids that the “evil robots, programmed to destroy us” from urlLink Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (one of their all-time favorites songs / albums) are probably cars. Cars are robots I tell them. And I hate car culture especially as I snake North on Cleveland Avenue for three miles of strip malls, car mechanics and fast food on the way home every day from work. But I also get what it is to just feel okay about sitting. Staying. For a while at least…in your car. When we take long trips with the fam in (the cleverly named) “Minnie” the minivan, we call it our “Shell.” And I like that metaphor for how cars offer us a bit of shelter. We need it sometimes, don’t we? Our human skin is so soft? A bit of armour in a weary driveway or parking lot or metered spot is like a quiet breath of (slightly polluted) air. Once -- before kids got kidnapped in Malls and before stalkers hid under the cars of wary shoppers in urban mythic parking lots -- my mom would leave eleven-year-old me and my two brothers in the car, sitting in the parking lots of malls. On one of these days, I finally had had enough of waiting. My two year old brother was crying and whining so I buckled him into the stroller and the three of us made our way carefully into Sears. We were all crying or red eyed by the time we were inside and we announced to a store clerk that we had lost our mother. But I think we had just lost our sense of being. People can only sit in parked cars for so long. No matter how much we need them to survive May all of your parked cars be purged of suffocation and fill you back up with – Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 26,July,2004 | my grandmother Linda named our family cottage Treasure Island. She was well-read, and so, I'm sure intended to make allusions to the novel of the same name, but I'm thinking that the name was primarily rhetorical in nature. Rhetorical mostly because Treasure Island isn't. An island, that is. The cottage itself is located on a peninsula of land that juts out from a vast woods and is surrounded by a marshy lagoon and a labyrinthian creek. So why name a non-island, 'treasure island?' My paternal grandmother grew up (as did my paternal grandfather) on an Island. Drummond Island, more specifically -- the largest fresh water Island in the North America. She was the daughter of two Finnish emigrees, but grew up in a house full of siblings, no mother in the deepest woods of drummond. She not only survived two house fires, the death of her mother at a young age, the loss of twin sibling sisters (who were adopted by other families on the island), a difficult stepmother (because of whom, she and her five siblings went to live in a seperate house where they would await visits from their over-worked father visiting his two families), but then went on to earn a high-school and college education by housecleaning and babysitting for mainlanders. I didn't find out how difficult my grandmother's life was until late in adolesence. She was a master-story-teller who described in great detail the idyllic childhood she re-membered on Drummond Island. Running barefoot through vast open meadows, chasing cows with strange exotic finnish names, rolling in the snow after sitting in the Sauna, laughing garrulously with her siblings and father as they sat next to a cozy warm woodburner. She may be one of the first bloggers to influence me. Even though she never once 'connected' to the internet. Her weekly 'Dearly Beloved' letters circulated to family, extended family, family friends, and missionaries around the world. They chronicled daily life, philosophical musings, aesthetic contemplation, and memorializing yesteryear. But the greatest memorializing she did was the careful crafting of Treasure Island. More than just the name, the presence of she and my grandfather benevolently haunts every square inch of the land and cottage. Everything we did and do while we're there have been passed on to us by them and by my parents who learned it from them. Building Fires, Roasting Marshmellows, Fishing from the boat, Fishing from the dock, Wading in the shallows, Swimming through the bullrushes, Building minnow traps out of huge stones, Hunting for Geode treasures, Discovering Crayfish and Clams Hiking through woods, Climbing rocks, Building forts, Climbing trees, Reading in Hammocks... All the time for stillness, meditation, reflection helps open me up to the urlLink psychogeography of the place.... And I always hope that as I return to my work and the rhythms and cycles of everyday that I can retain some of that wonder, that curiousity, that nostalgia, that hope that reverberate around being at Treasure Island... peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 05,August,2004 | ...writing a blog about how I feel. Which is not, typically, directly what I write about. So probably, you should not read it. Probably it will bore you. Probably, later, when I realize that I've been more self-disclosive, or simply too rambly, I will regret this post and remove it. So -- probably, if you want to read a blog which will very probably be ephemeral -- you should check this blog out. So I'm at this academic conference where people are making all kinds of short films: documentaries, narrative films, experimental films, animation... Good stuff. Stuff I like. Stuff which may or may not get seen by anyone except the classes at the particular film school where the film got made and here at this conference which is full of films that will not get seen by enough people. A year ago, half a year ago, something like that, I sort of said: You know what, self? You're probably not going to have a second career in Hollywood...and maybe that's okay. Given what careers in Hollywood typically look like and what a purist you are about the kinds of stories you would not like to tell: A hollywood career would probably not be the place for you. Besides, self, you have a good career that allows you to make little films for small audiences and even spend some of your professional energies developing creative projects. You should *embrace* the goodness of that opportunity. And I'm trying to do that -- but there's another part of me -- a complex part that's motivated by ugly ambition, an evangelical / missional zeal and a profound discontent with the way-things-are... that makes me want to spend my life energies making change. doing something to make the world really significantly better. My friend Matt says that its the profound desire to MATTER. And as I moved through graduate school people kept affirming my academic writing saying that I'd make a great academician. But three parts of me felt ambivalent about such praise. PART ONE: The preachers kid who won Preacher Boy Contests who had his hand pumped incessantly in the church foyers by goodhearted wellwishers who praised him saying: “I just know you’re going to be a good preacher, just like your daddy. “ PART TWO: I secretly still wanted to make movies or write books or something… PART THREE: I had a deeply rooted and abiding suspicion in the frequent isolation of academic discourse from real pragmatic issues…and thus, felt ambivalent about how much I wanted to commit my life to gaining the STATUS and SOLIDARITY needed in the discourse – world of Academic Writing. So…I decided I’d give myself a few years to see if I could gain sufficient VOCABULARY and VOICE in some creative writing venues and make a difference / matter by doing that work. I (capriciously) set a deadline of 35 years old to have achieved said mastery and after that, I said, I’d try to employ other gifts. Ones that had been affirmed by people in the worlds I live in. And see if I could still make a difference or matter in Academic Circles. So I’ve been feeling like I could back away from that dichotomous thinking (lately) by embracing BOTH my academic career *&* creative work completed on a smaller scale for smaller intended audiences. So then when today I was struck by the relative isolation of this audience….of these films…I had this flood of conflictual emotions again. My friend Jay suggests that American Higher Education and especially evangelical schools are too influenced by the Missionary Impulse. (You know – one way to quantify how you matter is by holding up the pelts / souls that you’ve managed to collect during your tour of duty -- ) And so I feel …a little confused. I suspect that such liminal speculation by a man in his mid-thirties – and entrenched in multiple institutions is a little – well, boring. And I’m absolutely certain that such public navel gazing by a man at any age is – well, dull. So I’m off to fraternize at the Toledo Zoo with filmmakers from all around the country…maybe I’ll bump into someone with some big answers there… Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 04,August,2004 | I’m in Toledo at the University Film and Video Association Conference. (Ohio, not Spain…) I’m looking forward to, tonight, seeing a film called: “Licking English.” Seriously. |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 03,August,2004 | Step one of our landscaping resolve: I develop a course in map making where Jaelyn and Addison and I measured the dimensions and borders of the whole property in order to make a to-scale map of the entire place and plot out a long-term plan. In order to create some incentive for the task, I framed our map-making quest inside of the King / Princess / Prince game/alter.reality that we were already playing. ME: We need to venture forth from the Castle and measure the borders of our Kingdom. We shall make a great map… PRINCE HEINRICK: (played by Addison) A big one? ME: Yes, a big map, So that we… P. H. : A rea’y, rea’y big one map? (Addison still has no “L”s) ME: Yes. A really big one. So once we have a map… P.H.: (now the prince is hopping up and down with the every modifier) A rea’y, rea’y, rea’y big one!?! ME: So that with our really big map, we can take better care of our Kingdom’s lands. PRINCESS EMILY: (played by Jaelyn) But Daddy, if we go out into our kingdom, the people from the neighboring lands may see us and attack us! (Really. She said that they may attack us. Is this what it means to grow up under the regime of G.W.?) ME: Oh. Well. That may be true of some of our neighbors, but I’m sure that there would be many neighbors who would be very kind….we could forge alliances with them. P. E.: But if we clean up our borders, then the people from the neighboring countries might come into our borders. ME: So? P.E.: And they might damage our possessions. (Really. She said “damage our possessions.” And really?! Where did she get this capitalist hoarding bent anyway?) So Lynn sprayed massive amounts of poison on the borderlands of weeds and while a couple of them are saggy – I guess I’m disappointed that they didn’t respond a little more like a magic spell. You know – all wither and brown up in one fell swoop. Still we hack away at our weeds – hope you’re finding – Peace~ |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 03,August,2004 | In other words, we’re staying. Which is weird because we’ve been working all year to sell it. But we know that we don’t want to have showings punctuating fall semester so we’re pulling her off the market. We love our house, we’ve always loved it. We just had decided to find a house that had some other qualities that ours didn’t. My urlLink new life verse is a good teaching for us to take to heart at this time: Treasure what you have like it’s the greatest thing in the world, because if you start longing for something you don’t have – not only will you not get it, but what you have will be taken away from you. It’s a fascinating teaching, because by taken itself it would advocate a kind of ethnocentric, status-loving, stasis-endorsing nowness, that would preclude any thought of Then or There. And I have to admit that that’s the scariest religion I can imagine. This teaching is: contentment. And I’m trying to apply the principle indiscriminately to everything in my life: my possessions, my history, my opportunities, my relationships… Which makes it a very hard teaching. It’s a check against: Greed. Regret. (and thus) Bitterness. Jealousy. Selfishness. It does advocate a “now”ness which reverberates with urlLink Buber’s “thou”ness … And now, I’m walking scarily close to a bad impression of Dr. Seuss. So like Tigers who pee to mark their territory and like artists who try to use brushes and colors to revision their worlds – we’re painting the whole house again. Some of you know that we underwent a Beiging of the house sometime in the spring where we bled every Turquoise and Map Blue shade out of our children’s rooms in order to please the realtors / the nebulous “mainstream” housing market. It felt like a ritual of humiliation and hegemony. If I could have I would have played “March Slav” at the top of the stereo speakers voice. Or “Anatevka.” I asked Cliff and Mary and Lynn what book they’d like to write before they finish with their lives – and they all had brilliant books that they’re practically poised to write; I had nothing. Well, I did have a huge plate of Angelo‘s homemade pasta with olives, garlic, pesto and roasted peppers. But maybe I should write a book called The Beiging of of America . I have no idea what its about, but it sounds like an interesting title, eh? We’re also trying to “catch up” with some of the landscaping that Casacommunitas demands. Can you say: rainforest? We bought a bottle of pesticides big enough to kill both our children…And we wish we weren’t going to spray it all over the borders of the yard, but does anyone know how else to undo the fierce garden of weeds that threatens to overtake our neighbors yards as well as our own? |
1,103,084 | male | 34 | Education | Pisces | 02,August,2004 | well who's counting anyway? everybody knows that i have an extraordinary gift for saying the wrong thing at the right time. I was just talking to Kerrie about how it is to revel in your children's newfound independence the older they get. one of the latest child-development-stages that our house is at is: kids can get dressed on their own. mostly. Addison runs into more roadblocks then Jaelyn does, though. And some of them are damnably frustrating... for him, right now, the worst of these is: when his underwear waistband gets folded in or back or under. it doesn't matter which. Addison is a bit of a purist...can't stand dirty hands, cleans up rooms on his own (sometimes) and corrects me about leaving lights on as I leave a room. So you can imagine how HORRIFYING it is to not get his underwear waistband to sit just right. He lets out this EXASPERATED scream which you JUST KNOW is about to give way to tears or punches (depending on the tired-ometer). But (happily) with a simple SNAP of the band....all is righted. He laughs with an 'ow!' when i snap him. (Just think how he's going to love wedgies...) Seems like we're all always getting obsessed over our underwear bands though, aren't we? and then someone comes along and snaps our waistband and we sheepishly laugh 'ow!' and realize how we were persevorating... inappriate disclosure, you ask? whence the title? well i feel like i might be committing the ultimate PK sin -- employing my children's foibles to see the world publicly... so if you would -- nobody mention my indescretion by blogging about his deep personal pain -- as you wish him well on his wedding day... peace~ |
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