Old Journal Entries Never Die... circa '99
Ahhh….on the road at last. I am passing thru the metropolis of Shade, Ohio, which thoughtfully erected a sign announcing themselves but I look in vain for a town, or a sign saying "Leaving Shade" until I realize that maybe the other side of the sign said "Leaving Shade".
Country folk have the capacity to surprise. One apparently sane person planted a road sign in his front flower bed, just between the tulips and pansies. It is a big Route 33 sign. Whatever works... At the local McDonald's there is an old guy dressed…for what I'm not sure, but he sure is dressed for a Monday morning. He is wearing a western suit, light beige in color, with matching white-piped pants and an expensive looking white cowboy hat. Does boredom lead people to these things? I go by houses with the Ohio River literally in their backyard, and on the other side of the bank a big nuclear power plant. These folks must be compartmentalizers on the scale of Clinton. I guess they can say, "I just look at the river, don't pay no mind to those Chernobyl towers".
I like the signs of small towns - saw one outside a restaurant that said, "Welcome. God food." Probably good too. Along the same lines in Racine, Ohio one said, "Free!!! Heart transplants from Jesus." Another announced, "We now have soft-serve ice cream." What's next, whipped cream? Save that for the new millenium.
April 12, 2003
April 11, 2003
Movie
Yesterday I watched the movie “Monster’s Ball” starring Halley Berry & Billy Bob Thorton. I try to stick to Westerns or “Black & Whites” - i.e. 40s/50s movies, so this was rather a shock. There was gratuitous & sudden violence (like an electrocution) and gratuitous & sudden displays of flesh. But around those craters there was a heckuva a good story. The loneliness of going to an old folk’s home was dramatized perfectly; I can think of few things more terrifying than that vision of autonomy stripped, of banality imposed. Thorton was dead-on: I’ve met a few blue collar, straight shooters like him in my life and he portrayed it pitch-perfect. The plot was about love overcoming prejudice, and I could cynically say that it was lust overcoming prejudice. Halley Berry overcoming male prejudice is sort of like a 7-footer succeeding on a high school basketball team.
Yesterday I watched the movie “Monster’s Ball” starring Halley Berry & Billy Bob Thorton. I try to stick to Westerns or “Black & Whites” - i.e. 40s/50s movies, so this was rather a shock. There was gratuitous & sudden violence (like an electrocution) and gratuitous & sudden displays of flesh. But around those craters there was a heckuva a good story. The loneliness of going to an old folk’s home was dramatized perfectly; I can think of few things more terrifying than that vision of autonomy stripped, of banality imposed. Thorton was dead-on: I’ve met a few blue collar, straight shooters like him in my life and he portrayed it pitch-perfect. The plot was about love overcoming prejudice, and I could cynically say that it was lust overcoming prejudice. Halley Berry overcoming male prejudice is sort of like a 7-footer succeeding on a high school basketball team.
Today at Vespers my heart almost broke. It was 7:15pm, the sun streamed in the unbearably beautiful church and it touched memories barely extant. There were eight or nine souls already tending the beautiful liturgy and I felt a longing for all the saints that surrounded me to pray for me – St. Dominic, St. Ephraim, St. John, St. Judas Thaddeus, St. James…
Thanks go out to Hernan Gonzalez who provided me with a modified comment feature, a vehicle to effortlessly send email. I've resisted having the usual Haloscan comments because a) they screw up 9 out of 10 times b) promise to more completely addict me to blogging (I'd be checking for comments every ten minutes) and c) have a chilling effect on the more self-indulgent posts such as those titled "Old Journal Entries Never Die...", "Fictional Forays" and, of course, the poems. Self-consciousness, after all, is the ruination of blogging.
Friday five
via Fructus Ventris & Dylan
1. What was the first band you saw in concert?
The band "Yes" at Miami's Millet Hall, 1983.
2. Who is your favorite artist/band now?
Gaelic Storm
3. What's your favorite song?
Adeste Fideles
4. If you could play any instrument, what would it be?
Fiddle.
5. If you could meet any musical icon (past or present), who would it be and why?
Musicians, like painters, are most interesting for their art. I guess David the harpist. But he was famous for other things too.
via Fructus Ventris & Dylan
1. What was the first band you saw in concert?
The band "Yes" at Miami's Millet Hall, 1983.
2. Who is your favorite artist/band now?
Gaelic Storm
3. What's your favorite song?
Adeste Fideles
4. If you could play any instrument, what would it be?
Fiddle.
5. If you could meet any musical icon (past or present), who would it be and why?
Musicians, like painters, are most interesting for their art. I guess David the harpist. But he was famous for other things too.
Restraint, RIP
I've been lately pondering the increasing political polarization of the news biz. We see left slant (like NPR) or right slant (Fox News). The three networks undeniably lean left and have for years. I wonder if it has always been so, or if it is more a product of the 60s when restraint, in all its forms, went out the window?
Because it does take restraint to write for a television news show and not slant it. Blogdom is a "celebration" of lack of restraint, a venting of things you can't say in polite company. And you also notice the lack of restraint extends to never letting the other guy get the last word. (Bill O'Reilly cracks me up on this score - he's always saying, "I'll let you have the last word" but half the time he will sneak in a couple words thereafter).
I embrace the emergence of Fox News and conservative talk radio because I am a conservative and because it provides another point of view. But the shame of it is that so few even try to be objective. The notion of an "honor code" that used to define more chivalric wars (i.e. don't kill civilians) also used to define the journalist profession - they were bound to describe, with equal enthusiasm, both sides of an issue. But now that code appears more and more moribund.
I've been lately pondering the increasing political polarization of the news biz. We see left slant (like NPR) or right slant (Fox News). The three networks undeniably lean left and have for years. I wonder if it has always been so, or if it is more a product of the 60s when restraint, in all its forms, went out the window?
Because it does take restraint to write for a television news show and not slant it. Blogdom is a "celebration" of lack of restraint, a venting of things you can't say in polite company. And you also notice the lack of restraint extends to never letting the other guy get the last word. (Bill O'Reilly cracks me up on this score - he's always saying, "I'll let you have the last word" but half the time he will sneak in a couple words thereafter).
I embrace the emergence of Fox News and conservative talk radio because I am a conservative and because it provides another point of view. But the shame of it is that so few even try to be objective. The notion of an "honor code" that used to define more chivalric wars (i.e. don't kill civilians) also used to define the journalist profession - they were bound to describe, with equal enthusiasm, both sides of an issue. But now that code appears more and more moribund.
I'm adrenally tired due to the war, the 24-7 news cycle, the constant notion that I may be "missing something". Call it data smog or information overload, but I'm ready for some bible reading. And to listen to the birds sing in the morning.
Two quotes; I don't recall who said them:
There's more to life than increasing its speed.
The problem with instant gratification is that it's never quick enough.
Two quotes; I don't recall who said them:
There's more to life than increasing its speed.
The problem with instant gratification is that it's never quick enough.
April 10, 2003
This just in...
Congrats to two bloggers getting married, announced here. May all their posts be happy ones!
Congrats to two bloggers getting married, announced here. May all their posts be happy ones!
April 09, 2003
Interesting/scary quote from The Challenge of Peace by the U.S. Conference of Bishops
"Pope Paul VI called the United Nations the last hope for peace.The loss of this hope cannot be allowed to happen."
"Pope Paul VI called the United Nations the last hope for peace.The loss of this hope cannot be allowed to happen."
Neo-cons versus Realists
The debate in the US over the nature of a post-Saddam Iraq pits democratisers (most often those of "neoconservative" views) against pragmatists (usually "realist" by school). Many realists, like Henry Kissinger, support the removal of Saddam's regime but oppose a protracted high-profile US-led occupation of an Arab capital and an attempt to impose democracy on peoples who do not know or want it.
The biographies of contemporary Islamist terrorists show the majority to be well-educated, semi-westernised young men on the periphery of traditional societies. Force rapid change on such societies with revolutionary ideas like liberal democracy and globe-spanning market economics, and the result will be an accelerated dislocation that will produce more terrorists, not fewer.
--More here
The coming experiment is going to be fascinating. Scholar Bernard Lewis is optimistic. I think Belloc might've been less so. Paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan: the great conservative truth is that culture swamps politics. The great liberal truth is that politics changes culture.
The debate in the US over the nature of a post-Saddam Iraq pits democratisers (most often those of "neoconservative" views) against pragmatists (usually "realist" by school). Many realists, like Henry Kissinger, support the removal of Saddam's regime but oppose a protracted high-profile US-led occupation of an Arab capital and an attempt to impose democracy on peoples who do not know or want it.
The biographies of contemporary Islamist terrorists show the majority to be well-educated, semi-westernised young men on the periphery of traditional societies. Force rapid change on such societies with revolutionary ideas like liberal democracy and globe-spanning market economics, and the result will be an accelerated dislocation that will produce more terrorists, not fewer.
--More here
The coming experiment is going to be fascinating. Scholar Bernard Lewis is optimistic. I think Belloc might've been less so. Paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan: the great conservative truth is that culture swamps politics. The great liberal truth is that politics changes culture.
Books & Presidential Candidates
Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey....readily offered that his favorite book was Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel that depicted the aimless existence of a soldier-turned-stockbroker named Binx Bolling. His answer may have revealed too much. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd pounced, claiming Kerrey's confession would worry voters, given that Percy's work was an "anthem of alienation" about a war veteran "out of touch with the rest of America." As The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert later put it, with 20/20 hindsight, "Here was a man proposing himself as the next leader of the free world while apparently identifying with a character who, to all outward appearances, seems to have completely lost his sense of direction." Ouch.
Kerrey holds no grudge against the press for engaging in such psychoanalysis. In fact, he says, there was some truth to it.
--Brent Kendall
Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey....readily offered that his favorite book was Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel that depicted the aimless existence of a soldier-turned-stockbroker named Binx Bolling. His answer may have revealed too much. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd pounced, claiming Kerrey's confession would worry voters, given that Percy's work was an "anthem of alienation" about a war veteran "out of touch with the rest of America." As The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert later put it, with 20/20 hindsight, "Here was a man proposing himself as the next leader of the free world while apparently identifying with a character who, to all outward appearances, seems to have completely lost his sense of direction." Ouch.
Kerrey holds no grudge against the press for engaging in such psychoanalysis. In fact, he says, there was some truth to it.
--Brent Kendall
Updike Quote
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. Art, out of its own freedom, should excite and flatter our sense of our own. Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
--John Updike
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. Art, out of its own freedom, should excite and flatter our sense of our own. Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
--John Updike
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