“Unaware”, by Allen Stone
Watching these musicians makes me miss, at some deep, soul level, playing music with others. There’s a guttural, sonorous ecstasy in this sacrament, and you can see it written all over their faces and movements. A painfully good music video.
In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero
But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. Internet Explorer 6 was minimized then maximized. The Compaq Presario was unplugged then plugged back in. The old mouse was brought out and plugged in beside the new mouse. Still, The Google did not load.
Read the rest at McSweeney’s. I laughed till I cried.
Sleep
Some choice words from Martin Luther King Jr. (via thenewinquiry):
“I’m sure that you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Rip Van Winkle. The thing that we usually remember about this story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked: it was a sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip looked up at the picture of George Washington, he was completely lost; he knew not who he was. This reveals to us that the most striking fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not that he slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up on the mountain, a great revolution was taking place in the world - indeed, a revolution which would, at points, change the course of history. And Rip Van Winkle knew nothing about it; he was asleep.
There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, ‘We want to be free.’ And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.”
- Oberlin College Commencement Address, 1965
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I wasn’t planning to post anything, as I don’t think that blogging is necessarily the best way to honour the man. But then I read this quote, and it lays bare some of the questions that I’ve been thinking about lately.
There are times when I wish that I had lived in the 60s, so that I could have been a part of the great peace and justice movements of that era. But along with that wish comes a sense of dread that I am living in an era where the Spirit is moving just as lucidly, and yet, like many folks in the 60s, I am too blinded by my privilege and social location to see it; too comfortable, sadly, to act.
What are the great revolutions of this day? What am I missing out on? What have I chosen, subconsciously or consciously, to block out of my sight for the sake of mere convenience?
How will history judge me?
Who is my neighbour?
I wonder.
3rd
The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship. And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal agape or caritas, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God. I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.
The centrality of this love in our culture is so ingrained that it is almost impossible to conceive of a world in which it might not be so. And this is strange in a society in which the delusions and dangers of such love are all around us: the wreckage of many modern marriages, the mass of unwanted pregnancies, the devastation of AIDS, the social ostracism of the single and the old. Even those sources of authority that might once have operated as a check on this extraordinary cultural pre-eminence have caved in to the propaganda of eros. The Christian churches, which once wisely taught the primacy of caritas to eros, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love, are now our culture’s primary and obsessive propagandists for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs. Far from seeing divorce and abortion and sexual disease as reasons to question our culture’s apotheosis of eros, these churches see them merely as opportunities to intensify the idolatry of eros properly conducted and achieved. We live in a world, in fact, in which respect and support for eros has acquired all the hallmarks of a cult. It has become our civil religion.
And this, my friends, is why I so enjoy being married to Sarah To. We know, starkly, barefacedly, that we are not each other’s ends.
Happy 3rd, love :)
(via wesleyhill)
Mary Karr, “Descending Theology: Christ Human”
Such a short voyage for a god,
and you arrived in animal form so as not
to scorch us with your glory.
Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk,
sticky eyes smeared blind,
limbs rendered useless in swaddle.
You came among beasts
as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying
as we all do, because the human frame
is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime.
Any wanting soul lain
prostrate on a floor to receive a pouring of sunlight
might—if still enough,
feel your cross buried in the flesh.
One has only to surrender,
you preached, open both arms to the inner,
the ever-present hold,
out-reaching every want. It’s in the form
embedded, love adamant as bone.
In a breath, we can bloom and almost be you
(via wesleyhill)
I am finally, officially, releasing this track: Magnificat. It was originally recorded as part of a compilation for the people of North Korea, entitled Let Morning Shine. (That’s the first line in the North Korean national anthem. Brilliant, I know.)
I can’t think of a better day to release this than on Christmas Eve, after the passing of Kim Jung-Il. While that may sound somewhat dark to some, the song is about the raw and inflamed longing for a different sort of ruler. You can download/find out more about it at richwu.bandcamp.com.
Oh, and also, two people whom I don’t know somehow found and purchased the song from Bandcamp last month! I’d never shared the link with anyone, so I’ve no idea how they found it. Sharing music is always quite scary for me - akin, really, to an intimate disclosure of the soul - so those two downloads made my day :)
Singularity. I made a video for my homework. 3000 word essay or 3 minute video? I’ll go with the video.
Love this kid. So proud to have watched him learn, grapple and grow. Leave a comment on Youtube and he’ll earn a higher grade!
Of course, this isn’t Bryan’s first video.
All The Angry People
Kachel had four hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred and fifty, you could travel to New York City on a Greyhound bus. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, and so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely find a place to exist. On the last night of September, he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear thought: This is exactly what I’m going to do.
Kachel didn’t tell his few friends about his plan. But on the night of October 3rd, on a Wordpress blog that he had set up, he wrote, “About to board a bus to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle… . I have had some moments of panic, asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was travelling with only a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes of clothes, a portable hard drive with some of his movies, and a “relatively stupid” cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight. At five in the morning on October 6th, Kachel arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, in Manhattan. By 10 A.M., he had made his way downtown to the occupation.
A very, very well told story. We would be remiss not to listen.
(via givemesomethingtoread)
Unbelievable footage of the recent UC Davis pepper spraying incident. It heartens me to see such a strong and disciplined non-violent ethos being embraced by these students. Their willingness to endure rather than attack clarifies their message and ripens it with potency and authority. Andy Baio, the compiler of this video, writes:
I was stunned and appalled by the UC Davis Police spraying protestors, but struck by how many brave, curious people recorded the events. I took the four clearest videos and synchronized them. Citizen journalism FTW.
Also, John Gruber’s comments are spot on:
Batons, pepper spray, guns, and body armor on one side. Peaceful protest and cameras on the other. Fascinating dynamic. Peaceful protest can be powerful. Check out this video of UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi — under pressure to resign in the aftermath of the pepper-spraying — walking to her car, surrounded by utterly silent protestors. Profoundly effective.
Make sure you watch that second video, which John refers to. It is beyond worth it.
From the other side
Remember too that the battle for full equality will be won in the political center. Liberals are with us already; homophobes will never come around. We have made progress by persuading the persuadable center that our loves and our families pose no harm to others, no threat to mainstream values. Especially now that majority support is swinging behind us, going the extra mile to be reasonable, and to seem reasonable, is essential. Not every religious accommodation is valid, and it’s not always clear where to draw all the lines. But the smart approach is to bend toward accommodation, not away from it, whenever we can live with the costs. Of course, any kind of discrimination exacts a cost, if only to our dignity. Tolerating intolerance is painful. But the Indiana University students who took their cupcake order to another bakery and called for dialogue got it exactly right. If evangelical students want to have a campus Christian group that requires allegiance to biblical (read: antigay) principles, we can live with that. If Catholic Charities doesn’t want to place children for adoption with same-sex couples in Massachusetts but lots of other agencies will make the placement, we can live with that too. Even if you don’t happen to believe, as I do, that religious liberty is, like gay equality, a basic human right, the pragmatic case for religious accommodations is clear: Being seen as a threat to religious freedom is not in our interest.
Interesting.
(Via ayjay, who strongly recommends reading Rod Dreher’s comments in response.)
