TzimTzum A blog by Daniel Imburgia

The Tree Of Life

2012-01-10T21:54:00.000-08:00

So, to continue a response to Malick’s “The Tree Of Life,” posted earlier. There is a scene of a dinosaur lying on it’s side in a stream bed (I don’t know why but I felt that it was a girl dinosaur, maybe even in labor, it’s hard to decide). The Mesozoic world is strange and largely unknown to us, but we know enough of how things work here, in what we have named the “natural world,” that any animal that appears defenseless, weak, wounded, is in great risk. I am afraid for her. Then, my fear proves prescient and another dinosaur appears out of the foliage and spots the vulnerable one. I don’t really know much about dinosaurs but this other dinosaur is clearly some kind of larger predator/raptor. It charges toward the vulnerable one just laying there like a waiting sacrifice. Then, in a seemingly cruel act, it takes it’s clawed foot and forcefully pushes the face of the weak and dying one into the ground. I cringe and wait for the predator to start tearing into the flesh of the helpless one, to consume it’s life-blood; but then the predator does a peculiar thing, it lifts it paw for a moment, letting the wounded one raise it’s head just for an instant. Then, almost gently, it pats the dying one on it’s head once more and then scurries away, stops, looks up towards the the heavens...and end of scene.

All the actions of these creatures (within this structure of representation, that is, attending to Guy Debord’s insight that ‘spectacle is capital accumulating until it forms an image’) are *made* intelligible to us through preexisting systems of symbol and meaning that we do not create or control; convenient fictions, in a web of significations as complex as Malick’s gestating universe. Merleau-Ponty in “The Primacy of Perception” argued: “The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities.... There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness” (PofP, p. 453). Merleau-Ponty I think agreed with Heidegger that ‘being-in-the-world,’ is too complex, too mysterious (even too glorious?) to ever be understood simply through materialist teleology, empiricist notions of cause and effect, clever logical-positivist syllogisms, or patterns of technologically mediated consumption engraved as absolutes As M-P says “...In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”

This I think is why the actions of the predator are so disjunctive. Malick (a Heidegger scholar and translator (and Chaldean Christian?) who taught his students Merleau-Ponty, DeBord and Husserl) disrupts the established narrative structures by which we understand the world of dinosaurs, the world of power and weakness, the world of master and slave, of kill or be killed--as well as the world of sacrifice and mercy. But could a dinosaur be merciful? How do we interpret the predator’s action with any certainty? What meaning do I impose on it and how do I interpret my own experience of this action and then choose myself to act in a meaningful way? All the while maintaining the awareness that it is all a spectacle orchestrated by another being mired in another equally inter-referential matrix of significations as I am? “The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man,’ or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” (PofP preface) MP is arguing that whatever I know of the multiplicities of my self is always and only in relation to others (and I would add to the ‘Other’). Sarte’ some time ago wrote something like, ‘we are all thrown into this world not of our making and not of our choosing....’ Even so, we seem to be, pacing Sarte, Heidegger, Levinas and Jesus, ‘condemned to freedom,’ which includes the freedom to wound, exploit, consume, and kill others, even the Other!

The narrator has asked into the void, into the consuming chaos of the Eye of God: “Who are we to you,” then we witness this predator that has been given the power of life and death over others look to the heavens for a fraction of an instant, and in the next scene we see this giant asteroid hurtling toward earth that will destroy all the dinosaurs, the strong and weak alike, and most all forms of life on the planet. Is this what the predator was looking up at? After one act of mercy the world is changed forever? One instant I was watching and pondering the possibility of compassion in the heart of a predator and in the fabric of creation (and it’s Creator?) when ZOOM-CRACK, both predator and victim are wiped out by the same act of chance/choice...and then life begins again, is worlded into existence. Will the new world be better than the old? By what measure will we decide? What choices will we make? What will we do?...Is this what you are asking us?

Obliged.

2011-12-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

So, today, another war ends?

Awhile back I posted a video of a murmuration of starlings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vhE8ScWe7w ; it showed how an entire community of individuals could move in graceful concert and create something astonishingly beautiful. I have just finished reading “In the Garden of Beasts,” by Erik Larsen. It chronicles the experience of a US embassy family, the Dodds, in Berlin during the rise of Hitler. In part, Germans becoming Nazi-fascists, is an example of how a community of people behave in concert to create something terrifying. Do you think there is something that can be called a “murmuration of evil?”

Festivals of murder and massacre in Rwanda? The rapturous faces of picnicking families celebrating at a lynching in Alabama? A school of beautiful, plump, white, children pledging allegiance to a flag or a cross? Larsen writes of how difficult it was to determine just when a society makes such a profound pathological shift. One day a shopkeeper is assaulted by two thugs; the police are called, the perpetrators are arrested and jailed, the shopkeepers wounds are compassionately attended to by his neighbors, there is a general lament and questioning of how such an unthinkable thing could have occurred. But on the next day that same Jewish shopkeeper is attacked by two brown shirted thugs, and some passers by applaud and encourage the attackers, others hurry by without pause or comment, the shopkeeper is left wounded in the street, familiar neighbors quickly shut windows and doors and ignore the plight of their former friend. There is a general and unspoken consensus that the Jewish shopkeeper is not the victim but his very being-in-the-world is a crime that demands punishment; and what are God’s people if not the very hand of God’s wrath here on earth? Is it to be hoped that the people of God are chosen to be-in-the-world as a *murmuration of love?*

So today’s reflection is from Thomas Merton: “Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.” It always seems so obvious after Merton writes it down! Choose wisely, a ‘murder of crows,’ or an ‘exaltation of Larks?’

Obliged.

2011-12-12T19:12:00.001-08:00

I love this picture of my wonderful wife Thursday morning @ the occupy seattle encampment. Folks just waking up, hungry, cold, gray, bleak, (and a little cranky) nevertheless, the running-dogs of the capitalist imperialists are surely feeling the pressure now! But damn if that Starbucks across the street don’t look warm and cozy, and with free wifi I can catch up on my lost shopping days! Oh the reeking Irony my comrades--and then their is the lure of a hot, double, machiatto with foam, just the way I like it (or there will be hell to pay!). Let me know when they need folks to occupy Makaʻalae Beach in Maui! (alas, people like me may be why the Russian and French revolutions had so many problems, we still don’t know if the Jesus revolution will succeed or not, but it’s not looking good...). From Lenin on his deathbed: "I have deluded myself. Without doubt, it was necessary to free the oppressed masses. However, our methods resulted in other oppressions and gruesome massacres. You know I am deathly ill; I feel lost in an ocean of blood formed by countless victims. This was necessary to save our Russia, but it is too late to turn back. We would need ten like Saint Francis of Assisi, with ten Saint Francis’s we could have saved the revolution." Reminds me of the belief by some Jews that the world is saved and sustained by 12 Tzadiks (saints). And if they should die then the world will be destroyed. Take care, no one knows who these 12 saints are, but as you might guess they will be found among the bottom of the 99%. Obliged.

2011-11-21T13:59:00.000-08:00

A reflection on Terrance Malick’s film: “The Tree Of Life.”

“I presume to speak to the lord, dust and ashes that I am.” (Gen 18:27)

First, let’s just cut through all the bullshit right off the bat; the *question* is an old one, old as that first ‘Homo Erectus’ that banged his head on the cave ceiling as he ran out to see what his child was screaming about and witnessed his only son, still alive and struggling and being carried away in the mouth of a saber-toothed tiger and screaming to his father for help. Now these first peoples weren’t the squeamish type, so it wasn’t just the image of his son skewered in the massive tiger’s teeth, blood running from his mouth and nose and from holes where there shouldn’t be any holes that haunts him; it was that look on his son’s face asking his father ‘how could you let this happen.‘ Maybe religion was born into the mind of the world that day when this Homo Erectus then looked...up (?) and maybe crying his first tears of sorrow asked god (like the character Mrs O’Brien ask in the movie about the death of their son) “...how could you let that happen.”

This was a new question for god too though, not that god hadn’t been anticipating that something in creation would be getting around to bringing this issue up. But god is also not the squeamish type and its hard to catch god in denial or unawares. And of course god would throw a similar question back at us further evolved, homo-whatevers, someday when god’s own begotten son was being killed by us, skewered by spikes, hopelessly struggling to get free, blood pulsing from his mouth and nose and from holes where there shouldn’t be any holes; and then at the last god’s begotten looks (up?) into his father’s face and ask ‘how could you let this happen?‘ Since then, most humans have usually just let that question be, until it was inescapable, until maybe we found our own selves skewered in the jaws of death, and then we might start asking questions for which the answers may be more painful than the silence. Until then however we usually tend to write the whole thing off as “mystery,” or else come up with really lame and offensive ideas like ‘god wants more company in heaven,’ or that ‘somebody’s getting there comeuppance for secret sins,‘ or that somehow some sort of bizarre justice is accomplished by punishing everybody in the world with pointless suffering and death for what some Eve woman did eons ago. Kinda like what the priest tells Mrs’ O’Brien at her son’s funeral in the movie: “Father Haynes: He is in God’s hands, now. Mrs. O’Brien: [not willing to let the priest off the hook so easily] He was in God’s hands the whole time. Wasn’t he?”

No, maybe it’s better to just let the question be. But then along comes Malick and “The Tree Of Life,” and starts bringing the whole uncomfortable situation up again. Like right at the opening of the movie where he starts with that scripture from Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” Now WTF kind of a question is that? We weren’t anywhere, maybe we were amoebas, or maybe some other sort of squiggly carbon based life form, or maybe on some other planet, or just not invented by god yet or...and why the heck is god asking us anyway? Oh...I get it, its a rhetorical question; somebody or something called ‘satan’ burns my house down, kills all my critters, destroys my crops, murders my wives and children, and now god gets miffed when I ask why? WELL EXCUUUUSE MEEEEE!!! But then, maybe god wasn’t miffed at all, maybe god had always anticipated, even desired that question from us, maybe that’s when we all really first became ‘Children of God.‘

“And said the Lord God: Behold, Adam hath become as one of Us, knowing good and evil, and how might he not stretch forth his hand and take likewise of the tree of life, and taste, and begin to live eternally.”

So God talks to his/her selves like I do, so what? In Martin Heidegger’s “The Essence of Reasons” (that Malick translated into english in 1969 btw and that permeates the movie) Heidegger writes that “Transcendence constitutes selfhood,” and that “...transcendence can be said to denote the essence of the subject or the basic structure of subjectivity. To be a subject means to be in and as a transcending being.” And later: “....all the modes of being of entities within-the-world are founded ontologically upon the worldhood of the world, and accordingly upon the phenomenon of Being-in -the -world. From this there arises the insight that among the modes of Being of entities within-the World, Reality has no priority, and that Reality is a kind of Being which cannot even characterize anything like the world of Dasein.” Now I take all that to suggest that, first, God may not be a Kantian (but then I‘m not really smart enough to say for sure) and second, that the ‘Reality’ of Being in the world as “Being towards death” is not as transcending as ‘Being for the Other,’ not just for the created but for the Creator as well, and that the death of the Other encountered as Being transcends this ‘Reality’ (I will admit my obvious Levinasian infatuation here).

Now if, as Heidegger argues that for humans meaning precedes perception, that we move from the whole to the particular, that we “World” the world by our questioning existence then ‘The Tree of Life’ was always already a tree of death as well, and that what we could have learned from the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ was how to ask, how to ‘World,’ the important question, which is not what’s the *difference* between good and evil, hell, it doesn’t take an evil snake to tell us that, but rather, what is the difference between life and death. That question is the earth destroying asteroid that is hurtling itself towards us at breathtaking speed even as we speak. But it isn’t coming from ‘outer’ space this time, but from inner space, from our own hearts.

“Mrs. O’Brien: [voice over] The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.” What’s that Malick? you mean no innocent children ever get eaten up by saber-toothed tigers, or leukemia, or starve or get nailed to crosses or....? “Mrs. O’Brien: [voice over] The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.” Ok, but if I choose grace will God heal my dying son or bring his mother back to life? Will God protect my other children from all harm? “Mrs. O’Brien: [voice over] Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” And if I do all that, if I really try, will God love me then? Will God take away this pain? Will God save me? “Mrs. O’Brien: [voice over] Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.” But where is all this ‘smiling’ and ‘shining’ to be found, mostly what I see are shit and blood and pain lording over ME! Where do I find this happiness among the wreckage of this world? “Mrs. O’Brien: [voice over] The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” But what if all I ever learned of love was abuse, betrayal, exploitation, indifference; what if all I see is ‘the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative assuming such proportions through out the earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd" (M.H.). “Mrs. O’Brien: [voice over] Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.” Forgive? forgive who? You mean forgive my friends or even harder my enemies, or maybe you mean forgive myself...no, that’s not it, you mean forgive God don’t you....

In Fra Angelica’s painting of the “Annunciation of Mary” above, like so many other paintings, there is a beam of light that pierces the Virgin Mary in the heart like a meteor from heaven. In some depictions Mary is holding forth her hand to the light in a way that one could read as resisting it’s ‘invitation.’ In Reuben’s version Mary turns as if to flee and the angel poised above her seems almost ready to force her acquiescence. In Fra Angelica’s picture though, Mary seems to bend over in pain as if wounded by God’s Spirit, but she does not flee or push the angel away, instead she ‘Worlds’ a ‘Yes’ into this world and becomes the God-bearer.

So, it may be that It wasn’t Neanderthals praying Kaddish Avelim for the death of all the innocents, or cringing from God in naked fear, or our philosophical hermeneutics that made the first human to be a human a human. Maybe it’s more like in Malick’s movie, maybe it was a woman who looked into the terrifying, infinite abyss of the Helix Nebula, the ‘Eye of God,’ as we named it, and said: “ [voice over] ‘I will be true to you. Whatever comes.’ [last lines]” Obliged

2011-10-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

This blogging business can get very snarky can’t it! This is a comment I made over at “The Politics of the Cross Resurrected” and I’ll be danged if he didn’t censor me!!! Well, i will repost it here and y’all can read their blog then mine and make up your own minds.

And I quote myself, "Hey Y’all good to pop in here at TPotCR again (but gosh darn it DanO just what did you write that got your expunged? You must have really stretched brother Craig’s forbearance to the breaking point!) Anyway, hard to believe y’all are still here engaging in this same kind of discourse, shouldn’t everyone be out occupying something? Me, I been researching Tennessee’s Williams play and movie “Suddenly Last Summer,” and I highly recommend them both (T.W. is Germany’s favorite play write you know, and those Germans are usually right about such things. Really, one could write all of Freud, Lacan, Foucault and half the Bible out of this one movie!). TW’s work, (like Beckett’s?) could be engaged as a lifelong argument with God, sort of like what the Bible itself is, only vice versa. I don’t see much evidence that God has changed many folks minds these last 6000 years though, and that makes me wonder just what God is getting out of this whole exercise (one wonders if God shouldn’t have consummated with the Cro-Magnon's instead?). “Even if one should come back from the dead they would not believe,” the gospels tell us, how much less so from a bunch of cleverly disingenuous syllogisms. “Suddenly” dramatizes this point and how we refuse to acknowledge truth, and the extremes we will go to to destroy the truths we just can’t bear to face. It is untrue, however, as these things are reckoned, that TW wrote “Suddenly” after psychiatry was unable to “cure” his homosexuality in 1957 (rumor has it he went down on ‘The Doors’ Jim Morrison at Warhol’s factory, but I digress). I would be careful about over-identifying TW with his main character ‘cousin Sebastian’ who used Kathryn Hepburn (Mrs. Venable) and then Elizabeth Taylor (Catharine Holly) to procure fresh young boys for him. That, of course, is the truth that Mrs. Venable wants Montgomery Clift (Dr. Cukrowicz) to cut out of Lizzy’s brain! Oh how often we would all like to wield our own truth expunging scalpels on one another! But apparently that’s not how Jesus rolls (or is it ?).

Mrs. Venable, Scene One:

“...but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn't written about...the sand all alive as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh....Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God...”

I think that for a good part of my life I have felt like one of those baby turtles in a death-defying scramble for the life-saving sea while being tormented by ruthless predator-drone-angels sent by a merciless God. Truth is, I’v really been feasting on turtle tacos seasoned with pity and self-righteousness. Well, to make a long story short, cousin Sebastian perishes in an omophagic orgy; thay is, he devoured by the street children and beggars, who literally 'feed on his flesh.' Of course there is a strong reference to Christ and his "flesh being real food" and that unless we "eat his flesh and drink his blood we have no part of him," ahhh... you gotta love those writers of the "Christ soaked south." Then again, he was buggering these vulnerable youths, and taking advantage of their poverty, but to be fair he also molested rich French and Italian boys. Well, as you can imagine, in 1959 the censors of Catholic league of Decency took their own scalpels to TW (there’s nothing Catholic potentates hate more than molesting children) and they lobotomized Gore Vidal’s screenplay, but it’s still a damn good movie. Of course, things have changed for the better, nowadays one can go on one of those ‘eco tours’ and actually pay to rescue baby turtles from the seahawks and gulls! It’s really a flourishing business (see link below). We don’t know what the hungry gulls and hawks think about this (or God for that matter) but I like to think that Jesus would be pleased to have Christians pitch in and rescue some turtle tykes and maybe give his image a positive boost after the beating he’s been taking by the Gay/God-less, liberal, Hollywood media. Like this example from TW at the end of the movie: “Of course God is cruel, we didn’t need to come to the encantadas and look at the turtles to find that out. No, we’ve always known about him, the savage face he shows to people and the fierce things he shouts, It’s all we ever really see or hear of him now, nobody seems to know why, the difference is we know about him and the others don’t, that’s where were lucky....” Really, haven’t we all felt that way? “we know about him and the others don’t.” Well, great to visit again and below is a link to one of those eco tours, blessings and obliged, and see you on the beach!, Daniel."

Acapulco Tour Guides @ http://www.acapulcotourguides.com/2011/06/endangered-baby-turtle-release-ceremony/

Oh, and just to be fair and balanced here is a link to great recipe for “Charles Brongers Louisville turtle soup’: http://www.yummly.com/recipe/Charles-Brongers-Louisville-Turtle-Soup-MyRecipes_1

2011-10-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

I found this dead bumble bee in my cardoon blossom! How did it come to die like this? Was it so overcome with the purple beauty of the late bloom and its desire for nectar that in it’s passion the bee’s tiny heart was pierced by one of the sharp spikes? Maybe that’s a pretty good way to die, but honey bees (and thus the world as we know it) are in peril, so it still seems sad to me. Dostoevsky wrote clever things like...‘beauty will save the world,‘ maybe he was right, but then he also wrote, “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” A lot happens in gardens that is beyond our explanations. They are sites of constant death, destruction, decay, competition; as well as rampant, unchecked fertility and an embarassing variety of unspeakable, insect and vegetable sexuality. Only by the most fascist-like discipline am I able to provisionally conquer, control and exploit this small 30x50 foot piece of ground into producing a meagre harvest for the barest needs of my own flesh. Never confuse vegetablism with peacefulness, every day in my garden is like the battle of Stalingrad, only our language makes it thus or otherwise. Bees are of a different sort though. I like to think of bees as if they were little angels sent to gather and share life’s potentiality and to set the whole machinery of life into motion. They are not responsible for how badly we muck the whole thing up, for that we usually blame the maker and the sender of the bees (and remember, bees like angels can be dangerous).

Elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s “Devils,” Terentiev asks Myshkin: "Is it true, prince, that you once said that beauty will save the world?" and then mockingly adds: "What kind of beauty will save the world....beauty is an enigma.” I hate to think of that bee dying for an enigma, I want to think that she gave up her life trying to bring even more abundant life into the world, trying to make the world flourish in both beauty and bounty. Of course, the bee doesn’t belong to us, or work for us, the world is made in such a way that the bee’s lifegiving beeness (beingness--if you will forgive the Heideggerian pun) is pure gift. People are the only ones who figured out how to turn the gift of life-giving beingness into something that is bought and sold, and that can transform life’s gifts into symbolic forms of exchange, and then into a kind of death (isn’t life hoarded just a kind a kind of anticipated death?). Death can be a gift too, of course, if one’s dying makes the world flourish (and when it does maybe that’s what we would call a ‘gospel?’ the gospel of the bees?). But if our forms of life diminish beingness then our death also diminishes death’s being and it becomes a dead loss, a nothingness, evil. In “The Gift of Death,” Derrida writes that death is, “...the gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum only allows me to respond and only rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by making a gift of death, giving the secret of death, a new experience of death.” And what is this secret of death, this ‘fearful mystery‘ that opens up a path to a new experience in death? The dying bee in the terrible/beautiful embrace of the flower knew what it was and she sang it into being. And although I wasn’t there to hear it I am blessed by the gift of her life. Obliged.

Oh, here is a recipe for cardoon:

3 c cream, 1 c chicken stock, 1 bay leaf, 3 lb cardoon, 1 c gruyere, grated. Put the cream, stock, and bay leaf in a large saucepan and season with salt and pepper.

Trim your cardoons, then slice them into pieces around 2 inches long. Heat the cardoons until the cream comes to a boil, then simmer over medium-low heat for about an hour. Remove the cardoon pieces with a slotted spoon, putting them into a gratin/casserole dish and continue to boil the cream until reduced to 3/4 c. Pour the cream over the cardoons, top with the gruyere, and bake at 350 until the top has colored a little bit, about 30 minutes. Serve warm.

Thank you bees.

2011-09-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

I couldn't upload the video by these Israeli vets so I supplied a link and trust you will watch it, but first, I just found the “stat” feature on this blog and discovered that I have 6 followers! I really thought that nobody read this stuff. Turns out almost 1600 folks have popped in (I know some blogs get that many a minute but i thank each and every one of you!). Suddenly I feel a profound sense of responsibility to post something great, alas, all I have is this posting below for now, but I will be working diligently to bring y’all some good entertainment soon. Please leave a comment or at least a “like,” or a don’t like :-( so i know yo stopped by, and visit whenever you get a chance, blessings and obliged.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpaO9DNlAF8&feature=player_embedded

Ethan, Lynda and I left Israel right after the war with Lebanon ended in the fall of 2006 and none of us has returned. Ethan (who was in the IDF) will be posting his thoughts and insights about the video as well. Israel is a terrifyingly beautiful place, and there is much sorrow there. And other than a spanking New Jerusalem falling right out of the sky I do not see how God’s peace will ever reign there (and while some are expecting just that, others are sneering at the golden Dome of the Rock and plotting with high explosives!). Of course, now that Glenn Beck is bringing his wisdom to the holy land maybe there is hope? Here’s a link to Beck’s rally in Jerusalem: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/glenn-beck-boasts-courage-israel-rally-ahead-upcoming-212057148.html (Dear Brother Beck, sell crazy somewhere else, they’re all full-up). I might also add that the movie doesn’t address the settler militias which are sometimes brutal and have less controls on them than the IDF. Of course, everyone in Israel, Palestinian and Jew, has a story to tell and can articulate with rationality and great passion their own position; why their suffering is the most important, why they feel persecuted and afraid, why their rights are being infringed upon, and why they are entitled by (G-d/Allah, tenure, U.N. res. 242, common sense, holy writ, Islamic and/or Jewish prophecies, their own great historical suffering, a superior culture, historical imperative, the bones of their grandparents, etc.) to this or that patch of land. Then if you throw a pathological American Christianity into the mix, you have one politico-theologo cluster fu%#k on your hands my friends! I have no answers, of course. Perhaps we should have thrown our lot in with Barabbas and the Sicarius and their strategy of surgically whacking Romans? I reckon even Jesus may have had some second thought about that whole ‘cheek turning, love your enemies’ campaign while dragging that cross up the Via Dolorosa (for sure his followers never took it too seriously). BTW, you can rent ‘life-size’ crosses in the old city if you are a crucifixion re-enactor, and now they have little wheels on the bottom! They are not all that expensive and some folks even time share them, each one carrying it as far as one of the 14 stations of the cross, makes sense if you think about it. They have these little trucks that then haul the crosses back down to the starting place at the Lion’s or Saint Stephen’s gate--where Stephen was martyred (he was the first Christian martyr you know!). No one ever wants to carry crosses backwards from Golgotha to the Lion’s gate. Of course ‘Christian tourism’ has been big business in Israel since the time of Constantine’s mother Helena, and shops along the Via Dolorosa pay a premium rent. I used to have lunch and coffee most days at a Palestinian owned cafe close to the Damascus gate right across from station III at the Catholic-Armenian church in the Muslim qtr. (where Jesus stumbles for the first time). Seif the owner would try and teach me Arabic and we would sit and watch the endless parade of monks, nuns, the sweaty, plump, white, mid-western evangelicals, the E. Orthodox with their pompous black hats, and the weepy Latin Catholics as they all trudged up the Via. I never saw any Americans carrying crosses though, but lots of Filipinos, Mexicans, Italians and Eastern Europeans. There is always a squad of armed IDF posted right at that corner too, because a violent and deadly riot started there back in the mid-eighties. It’s also the exact spot where Haredi and other ‘Ultra-Orthodox‘ Jews coming into Jerusalem to shop or pray at the ‘Wailing Wall,’ some with big pistols tucked into their waistbands, merge with all the traffic heading up the Via to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and all the exhausted Christians heading back to their air-conditioned hotels, and weary Palestinians, who do most of the dirty work, starting their long trek ‘home,’ and all those tiny trucks hauling crosses and garbage and what not back out of the old city--no wonder Jesus stumbled there first! It’s such a dangerous confluence of irrational passions, religious ecstasies, repressed sexuality, big money, the smell of piss and the G-d whose name none dare speak, and the little-buddy of my personal god some won’t shut up about, and the war cries of the GI Joe Gaaadha, and the GOD of the loudspeaker yelling down at us from his minarets; well, you can imagine the potential dangers. But on the bright and ecumenical side, the Via Dolorosa (the way of suffering) is the only street in old Jerusalem that has one name shared by all the faiths! (true, having one name is in everybody’s financial interest and smoothes the flow of commerce, but why be cynical, they’re all full-up with that too!) Obliged and G(g)oh-dD bless you brothers and sisters.

2011-06-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

OK, for some reason I never write anything much on my own blog; I prefer to write on other folks blogs (see the great discussion over at ‘Jesus Radicals,‘ <http://www.jesusradicals.com/r-r-reno’s-“preferential-option-for-the-poor”/> initiated by a trenchant and provocative posting by DanO over at “Journeying With Those In Exile” <http://poserorprophet.wordpress.com/>) But I am going to try and start posting more new stuff and cannibalizing what I write elsewhere, Starting with our trip to see Werner Herzog’s new documentary movie “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

This movie posits that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens existed at the same time 35000 years ago and that the H.Sapiens. beat out the N.Derthals in Nature’s evolutionary contest. I can’t help but wonder as we reach the end of life as we know it on this planet, (and, coincidently, the nomination of Michele Bachman for president) if Nature badly f#%ked up and bet on the wrong horse. If so, I don’t see why we should believe in ‘Nature’ (phenomenology, Gaia, math,) any more than (G)god(s) (horoscopes, magic, Zeus). Of course, if it’s true (and I believe something like this is true) that the incarnation and death of Jesus is an eternal and consequential event, then Jesus died for the Neanderthals too. But what kind of sins are Neanderthal sins? Experts speculate that Neanderthals wore animal skins so we at least know that they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But there is no evidence of a Neanderthal tower of Babel, or salt pillars testifying to rampant buggery (or sinfully underfunding their socialist safety net) so maybe they were simply wiped out in the flood and their lack of ark building skills did them in? But were the Neanderthals responsible for their their own extinction as we will be? Seems like they were done in by by the encroaching 9000 foot deep ice sheet engulfing Europe and the competition for scarce resources with their hairless cousins with the big foreheads and better spear points. So as we witness Walter Benjamin’s ‘storm of progress’ finally overwhelm us (radioactivity form Japan, colliding with the gigantic pacific island of plastic garbage and the gulf oil spill), and Paul Klee’s “Angel of History” sorrowfully spreads it’s wings over the catastrophic pile of ruin overwhelming us; and as those last few survivors clamber to the top of this heap of wreckage still waiting for Jesus to beam them up even as the rising tide of toxic sludge reaches their nostrils; then maybe we Homo Sapiens will know how the Neanderthals felt as that last starving, and barren couple were driven from a rotting mammoth carcass by selfish and hostile homo sapiens and forced into the barren ice scape to starve. What was their prayer and did God hear it? Obliged.

Frankensteining Christ In America

2011-06-23T21:08:00.000-07:00

When in Rome I make a pilgrimage to his grave.

The American Way

BY GREGORY CORSO

I am a great American

I am almost nationalistic about it!

I love America like a madness!

But I am afraid to return to America

I’m even afraid to go into the American Express—

They are frankensteining Christ in America

in their Sunday campaigns

They are putting the fear of Christ in America

under their tents in their Sunday campaigns

They are driving old ladies mad with Christ in America

They are televising the gift of healing and the fear of hell

in America under their tents in their Sunday

campaigns

They are leaving their tents and are bringing their Christ

to the stadiums of America in their Sunday

campaigns

They are asking for a full house an all get out

for their Christ in the stadiums of America

They are getting them in their Sunday and Saturday

campaigns

They are asking them to come forward and fall on their

knees

because they are all guilty and they are coming

forward

in guilt and are falling on their knees weeping their

guilt

begging to be saved O Lord O Lord in their Monday

Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

and Sunday campaigns

(rest in comments, Obliged).

Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian poli...

2011-02-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

2010-12-02T19:52:00.000-08:00

This billboard is up in Myrtle Beach, S.C.:

I read this roid-raged Jesus billboard as an imaginative update on Kazantzakis’ novel, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” But here, rather than just becoming a reformist Rabbi, settling down with Mary Magdalene, and pursuing the life of quiet scholarship (being nine years into his dissertation on “Messianic Motifs in Post-Maccabeen Revolutionary Folk Songs”) as Nikos imagined it. Jesus, just before giving up the ghost, ‘man’s up,’ shatters the cross, and clubs to death his Roman guards with it like Sarah Palin dispatching a flip-flopping Halibut. Then He sweeps Maggie up into his arms and with the help of reincarnated velociraptors, as well as Chuck Norris on Huckabee-laced steroids, He liberates Jerusalem from the Romans (and settles some scores with many of those recalcitrant Yids to boot). Next, He marches across the levant where he enlists that apologist for empire ‘Saul of Tarsus’ who becomes the Carl Schmitt of the new Jesus-Reich. Upon reaching Rome, Jesus (coached by Mark Driscoll) goes mano y mano against Caesar Augustus in a ‘no-tap-out’ cage fight, defeats him, and is crowned the new Uber-God/Man-Emperor of the world. Later, after setting plagues of microbes loose in the Americas to cleanse and prepare the land for his faithful minions by killing off it’s heathen inhabitants and any emergent and post-colonial theorists, Jesus moves the Reichs-Vatican to Montgomery Alabama and begins a righteous struggle against universal health care and for a lower marginal corporate tax rate, as well as rooting out the last redoubts of the hippie/socialist followers of Saint Francis and the few surviving pacifist Mennonites. After establishing dominion in the USA, He uses the erotically purged U.SA. as a launching pad towards Meggido and the ultimate smack-down against the Kenyan-born, Liberation-theologistic, Marxist/Leninist, LGTB, Harvard educated, Anti-Christ!!! Oh yes, there will be blood, up to the floorboards of His up-armored Pope mobile, as Jesus and 144,000 ‘promise-keeper’ shock troops, covens of free-range twilight vampires, and republican nazi re-enactors left behind after the rapture, smite with furious vengeance all those secular humanists who replaced ‘merry christmas’ with ‘happy holidays,’ and the last surviving stiff-necked Jews, who after 2000 years of mollycoddling by feminized “Christians” still refused to invest in Thomas Kincaid giclee prints.

(of course, given all that, what would be substantially different about much of conservative American Christendom if it were truly so?). Obliged Daniel.

Advent=Coming

2010-11-28T17:59:00.000-08:00

A poem for Christmas by Rowan Williams (the Archbishop of Canterbury). I think you can tell a lot about a theologian by his/her eyebrows, William's has eyebrows that must be taken seriously.

"Advent Calendar," Rowan Williams

He will come like last leaf’s fall.

One night when the November wind

has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth

wakes choking on the mould,

the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.

One morning when the shrinking earth

opens to mist, to find itself

arrested in the net

of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.

One evening when the bursting red

December sun draws up the sheet

and penny-masks its eye to yield

the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,

will come like crying in the night,

like blood, like breaking,

as the earth writhes to toss him free.

He will come like a child.

the link is: http://www.makotofujimura.com/writings/a-letter-to-north-american-churches/

2010-11-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

See the link for all the 8th Letters and about Makoto Fujimura, and others who have written letters, obliged.

A Letter to North American Churches

This was delivered at the Eighth Letter Conference for the Epiphaneia group in Toronto. The presenters were asked to write a letter to the churches of North America in the style of the Revelation letters in the New Testament. The full version will be published in their anthology in 2011.

Dear Churches of North America

I speak to you as an artist.

An artist’s relationship with you has not been easy; we are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are. Artists often sit in the back, if they come to church at all, wear black and look menacing to you. But many of us, actually, sit in the front, we volunteer, and are first to be with the poor. You just don’t notice us. Some of us are even up in front preaching, and you call us pastors, but we consider ourselves really artists of the Word. Some of us are crusading against the wrongs of the world, and we can get attentions of the “Kings” of this world because our songs are so popular.

You began to believe in the late 18th century that we needed rational categories, to try to protect “faith” from “reason.” Reason began to win the battle in this false dichotomy. As a consequence, you began to suspect the mystery of our being and the miraculous presence of God behind the visible. What you call “Secularism” is your own offspring*, given articulation by the division and fragmentation within the church. As a result of this dichotomy, you began to exile artists whose existence, up to that point, helped to fuse the invisible reality with concrete reality. An artist knows that what you can see and observe is only the beginning of our journey to discover the world. But you wanted proof, instead of mystery; justification instead of beauty. Therefore you pushed artists to the margins of worship, while the secular world you helped to create championed us, and gave us, ironically, a priestly role.

Instead of having quality artists at the core of your worship, we were forced to operate as extras; as in “if-we-can-afford-it-good-but-otherwise-please-volunteer”, Extras. Meanwhile, in the institutions called museums, concert halls and academia, we are asked to be gods. You gave away artistic expression to the secular culture. And yet do you not know that Our Father in Heaven owns all of the earth? You might have given back the power of creativity to Egypt, and acquiesced to Babylon, but the true and living God still owns all the powerful institutions, and the hearts of critics and curators. Artists still have an instinct for worship, but they must do so now in sterile, minimalist boxes called galleries to the “unknown gods” of our time. Rather than giving devotion, they had to become a celebrity merchant, selling their goods; instead of giving of themselves to the Giver of gifts, they have become purveyors of a commodity. Artists have insight into the invisible qualities of the Reality; but you have forced them to serve only the visible, utilitarian and the pragmatic.

Do you not know that the first people known to be filled with the Holy Spirit were not priests, kings or generals, but artists named Bazelel and Oholiab, who built Moses’ Tabernacle? Do you not remember that even the Babylonian kings wanted artists from the exiled nation; and they were the first to be exiled? Artists have skills and power that a dictator is afraid of, or want to use; and you, the church, unwisely neglected them.

A painter does not merely reproduce what is thought to be seen by the eye; an artist task is to train the eye first to truly see, and then learn to disregard what we have been taught, to throw away imposed categories -- those easy preconceived notions that lure us to think that we are seeing when we are not, but merely looking. An artist’s task is to see through the eye into the eternal, into the invisible.

One of your exiled poets stated in 1864:

Love - is anterior to Life -

Posterior - to Death -

Initial of Creation, and

The Exponent of Earth -

(#917, 1864)

Who is this love? Who is “anterior to Life,” and “posterior to death”? “Initial of Creation, and the Exponent of Earth”?

This poet, as a teenager, was told by of your leaders in a seminary in Amherst that she had “no hope to be saved.” We know from these poems, Emily always desired to know her Creator. I do not celebrate waywardness, but I am here to seek the lost, and I will leave ninety-nine church members to seek the one lost poet.

One of your exiled painters, from another continent, created a work called The Starry Night in 1889

There is a church, a Dutch Reformed Church, that does not belong in Arles, France, in the middle of the painting, holding the visual balance. Vincent grew up in the church, he is your offspring; and he even wanted to be an evangelist. Notice that the church is the only building that does not have light within. He wanted to tell you, through this visual parable, that though the church still holds these disparate matters together in the world, the Spirit has left the church, and went swirling into Nature and the Cosmos.

When you exiled them, the Vincent’s and Emily’s of the world, you have exiled me.

I AM an artist.

God has always, from the beginning, been an artist. He has spoken through the prophets and poets. The Bible begins with Creation, and ends with a New Creation. Everywhere in between God has chosen broken vessels, his creative creatures to create in love.

Artists: Create for our Father, improvise with the Spirit. Create through the Medium who binds all things together, and then you will begin to hear sounds of “the world that ought to be.” Surely, there will be birth pangs right up to that time. There will be more “Ground Zeros” created by destructive minds, twisting creative impulses into diabolical powers. Undo what they have done. Stand upon those ashes all around us, and open your hearts: look up, to Create in Love.

You must become as one; the Body of Christ. Love one another. Love is creative: Love is generative. Be diligent in the work of bringing unity in diversity of the Body. Art provides a wonderful example of diverse voices, instruments and colors to be brought together for the magnificence of the whole. You are God’s Masterpieces, a tapestry of diversity, created in Christ Jesus to birth more Masterpieces.

Finally, let me address the artists of the far country (Luke 15:13); you are starving though you have much. The corrupt world has given you celebrity, and the ephemeral treasures of the earth. Return to your first love. Come home. Creativity is a gift; art is a gift. Do not make it to be other than that, or you will be crushed by your own gifts: and do not try to numb the pain you feel down inside of you with anything other than drinking in the Holy Spirit. There are also some of you, in the far country, who have also ascetically removed pleasures for the sake of “pure expression.” Do not think that just because you have forfeited the whole world, that you have gained your souls. Return to your first love, be filled with the Passion. As a child, you explored the colorful margins, finding exhilaration in sound, movement and rhymes of words. Come home, and join me in preparing for the Feast to come.

Do you not know that we are planning a wedding feast? Have you forgotten that, Churches of North America? You are wedding planners! What wedding would lack music, art, poetry, dance or delectable foods? Start preparing, begin to breath in the aroma of grace; we need the best artists, poets, dancers, musicians and architects. Become an artist of the Kingdom, preparing for the Feast of grace.

2010-04-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

I reckon the authorities in Arizona will start carrying these skin color charts around to determine "reasonable suspicion" and who can be detained. My guess is that anyone above #14 may indicate criminal propensity. I am about #12 right now but I get out in the sun a bit and I might jump right up to #25! (Damn those Sicilian genes). No retiring to Yuma for me I guess. Down in Mexico a few yrs ago I got stopped going in to a swanky tourist hotel because they thought I was a poor Mexican! but my fair skinned wife and the kids walked right through. Sicilians are said to be the universal minority, we can pass for anything from a Mohican to a Muslim. We are often called "plain clothed Jews." Things keep going this way sunblock will be considered survival equiptment! Of course, most of the murder, rape, genocide, colonization done in the world the last 200 yrs or so was done by people with skin tones 1 thru 10. I ain’t saying that there’s something inside white folks that makes them genetically prone to violent antisocial behavior (I focus more on culture than Genetics). its just that folks 11 thru 36 would be wise to keep on eye on people one thru ten. One of my wife’s doctors is about a #24, and I hope he don't get picked up on the way to do her surgery on Monday! Most of the best docs in Germany were Jewish and the Nazi higher ups would sneak around to see them after it became illegal, until they were sent to the camps.

2010-04-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

My next project is to paint an Icon of Hank (Hiram) williams. Why? see coments

2009-09-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

A poem by John Ashbery, one of my favorite poets:

The Painter

BY JOHN ASHBERY

Sitting between the sea and the buildings

He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.

But just as children imagine a prayer

Is merely silence, he expected his subject

To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,

Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas

Until the people who lived in the buildings

Put him to work: “Try using the brush

As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,

Something less angry and large, and more subject

To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer

That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?

He chose his wife for a new subject,

Making her vast, like ruined buildings,

As if, forgetting itself, the portrait

Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush

In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:

“My soul, when I paint this next portrait

Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”

The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:

He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

Too exhausted even to lift his brush,

He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings

To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer

Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,

Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait.

Finally all indications of a subject

Began to fade, leaving the canvas

Perfectly white. He put down the brush.

At once a howl, that was also a prayer,

Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;

And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush

As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

2009-07-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

2009-07-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

" Ontological Essay" You can get this on a T shirt!

2009-07-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

An explanatory essay requested by the tshirt shop "Eddy's," for a tshirt with one of my paintings on it, I wrote: "Written on the painting is that it is an "ontological essay, yeah, that's somewhat vague and sounds a bit highfalooten, but then that's often an effective trope to enshroud one's ignorance! I have had a long and ardent interest in the relationships among 'Being,' language, and ( little 't' ) truth--and, how these relationships might be explored in the visual arts. This painting addresses this interest head on by making language itself so explicit. Most folks seem to quickly decide that the unfamiliar squiggles, shapes and lines are some kind of language and not just meaningless abstract doodles. This is significant because it suggests that there is some innate ability in human beings to recognize and engage language. Indeed, some have argued that a good definition of 'human' is simply 'language making.' Next, usually people often want to know what it 'says,' and/or what does it 'mean.' There is a predictable assumption that language points beyond itself to some outer meaning to which it merely gestures towards; as if language is not a ' thing in itself ' but a mundane portmanteau thrown onto a train headed for some idealized destination where it is unpacked, deciphered, and put to it's intended use. But, maybe language is more than this; maybe it is the train, the track, the passenger, and, the destination all at once! Maybe there is no 'outside' of language, no idealized destination, maybe language always primarily directs itlelf towards its own beingness; and in that sense one cannot exceed the "prison house of language," as Heidegger wrote, not because it is constricting or confining, but for another reason, because we may not discover it's delimitation. "The limits of one's language are the limits of one's world" is how Wittgenstein put it, and in this painting I want people to encounter the limits of world/word, and then travel just a little bit further. Of course, one could simply paint all this on the canvass, instead of all those delphic pictographs and arcane texts, but then the explanation wouldn't really explain anything anyway, would it?. Rather it would merely obscure the impossibility of determining some ultimate 'meaning' or authorized translation. Now all this may just sound like a lot of metaphysical B.S. to cover up the fact that I just don't know what the hell it means. But I assure you, I believe a good portion of this, and reckon this is about as close to a 'statement' i can get.

Obliged, daniel

2009-07-30T20:59:00.000-07:00

My favorite Icon, commissioned by Justin the first 1600 yrs. ago and still hangs in situ in the monastery. I made this copy with minimal changes, 36'X50' acrylic on board. It is quite unlike any of the other Icons at the monastery. Painted by an unknown artist. One can see the original at wikipedia under "Blessing Christ," though that is not it's actual title. blessings, dan.

2009-07-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

another post over at 'Journeying with those in exile'

I have been busy painting a copy of Van Gogh’s “Wheatfields with Crows,” for a ‘Forgery Art Exhibition’ I was invited to (aug 1 for any who are interested). It is a different experience than painting Coptic and Orthodox Icons I have been focusing on for awhile. Some years ago I read through the 3 vol. set of Vincent’s letters, he was an extraordinary theologian and writer. I have been re-reading them a bit and came upon one of his last letters to Bernard. Bernard had sent him a poem:

“…for hope has pored its neurosis into my bosom—Winter having neither a sou or flowers—Come from the blue plains—Paled by the length of leagues—Twisted on his spiraled cross.”

Vincent writes to Bernard: “But is seems to me you do not say clearly enough what you want to make felt--the certainty that one seems to have, and which one can in any case prove of the nothingness, the betrayal of the desirable good and beautiful things; and that, despite the knowledge, one lets oneself be eternally fooled by the charm which external life, the things outside ourselves, exercises on our 6 senses, as if one did not know anything, and especially not the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. Fortunately for us we remain stupid and hopeful in this way. ‘Twisted on his spiral cross,’ conveys very well the exaggerated leanness of the mystic Christ. But why not add that the anguished look of the martyr is, like the eye of a cab horse, infinitely sad; that would make it more Parisian where one sees such looks in the eyes of the superannuated nags of the little carriages as well as in those of the poets and artists.” Looking at Vincent’s self-portraits I think I see that look in his eyes; my wife says she sees it my eyes sometimes and it worries her. “Wheatfields” was Vincent’s last painting, he put down the brush, got his gun, walked out into the field and shot himself. After the show I am going to paint him into the picture, fallen, clutching his wound, praying, and surrounded by angels.

2009-07-22T11:54:00.001-07:00

I may be sponsoring another "Stock Market Art Show" soon. I think it was an interesting experience the last time 5 yrs ago and worth another experiment. The following is the polemical, explanatory manifesto which was in part, a critique of Guy Debord's and Dave Hickey's excellent essays.

"Stock Market Art: A work of art is a commodity. Art is fashioned through the selection and arrangement of pre-existing elements circulating within an administered, visual inventory. The monetary value of art work increases as the art/artist is able to attract interest/capital by garnering the social investment of one or more of a complex of constituencies (mass consumers, patrons, galleries, media, academic institutions). In commodity culture the accumulation of Capital (money, youth, labor, information, celebrity, etc.) until it forms an image, produces spectacle; 'fine art' is spectacle re-presenting itself in sublime form. A share of stock, like other currency (or art) has no intrinsic value. Rather, stocks or money as abstractions, mediate our commitments, our faith, and our investments among interdependent (though unequal) systems of culturally constructed realities. Stocks, like grace, are public visible signs of private, invisible assets. the dependence of the arts superstructure on the economic base is often elided in promoting art's other functions: decoration, moral instruction, dis-interested aesthetic pleasure, class position, and perhaps most significantly providing power/capital with an impotent, institutionally controlled, avantgarde as a relief and diversion from any consequential challenge to it's authority. The stock market art show was conceived, in part, to make apparent the matrix of relations among visual culture and money culture. but. rather than attempting another superficial critique, this project exposes the sublation of the interests of capital in artistic production and expects to profit from it!"

Here is how it worked, I sold stock in the show for 5$ a share. The shareholders and the artists divided the profits, after expenses, among themselves. Stockholders were payed according to how many shares they held. The art floated on the market without reserve price.

2009-07-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

Reckon I will reprint my occasional posts to other blogs here so I can review them. Over at one of my favorite blogs 'on journeying with those in exile' Dan posted: "In the same way that religion may be considered the opiate of the masses, the Arts should be considered the opiate of the middle-classes." Seems that many folks agree with him, I replied:

“secular religion?” “opium?” “shat upon by Jesus?”

Well, most of the writings of the Iconoclasts were destroyed when the Iconodules reemerged victorious after a couple hundred years of battle. One argument against icons that survived (by an interlocutor of John of Damascus I think) warned that “Icons enter the mind unimpeded by reason,” He went on to say that ordinary folks who possessed Icons in the home were like to have their imaginations stimulated in heretical or licentious ways lending towards magic and fanciful impulses and unhealthy stimulations. One might allow for Icons or stained glass in a church, he hedged, where the images would be surrounded by doctrine and the discourse of the church. Since most folks were illiterate, the church had almost monopoly control on written discourse, but lots of folks could produce or buy simple pictures of Mary or the saints and set up individual alters in their own homes and develop worship practices that sometimes fell out side the orthodox. When someone would get healed of some affliction while praying with an Icon, it would sometimes come to be seen as having special powers, and it’s owner might travel around with the miracle dispensing Icon and charge for it’s services—a kind of early teli-evangelism. Of course writing could become ensnared in biblical prohibitions against idolatry as well. There was a practice of writing out the name of Hashem in letters and wearing or praying with it like a talisman to ward off sickness or evil or even lightning strikes! Hieroglyphics, especially Egyptian, are a kind of midpoint between writing and pictures and are often condemned in early Jewish literature up to the time of Maimonides. The early Egyptians built a sculpture of a crocodile out of lead that is credited with keeping Cairo safe from these creatures. Often people speak of the “art of writing, or cooking, or making love.” An acquaintance has a house filled with the paintings of Thomas Kincaid, the evangelical “painter of Light.” Once a good investment they are now falling in value. Kincaid’s early work was almost void of humans. They strike me like apocalyptic, potemkin villages waiting for the raptured to occupy them in the afterlife. He is battling liver cancer and the paintings seem to comfort him. He chides me for my Romanism, but there is no one to pray to/with in a Kincaid painting; I think he pictures himself in one of those fluorescent English cottages with his wife who passed some years ago. The Icons at St. Catherines on Mt.Sinai survived the Image wars and are worth a visit. I painted a faithful copy of the “Blessing Christ” commissioned by Justin about 1600 yrs ago. I made minor changes. I added the Hebrew letter ‘ayin’ (looks like a Y ) in the center of the Bible Jesus is holding. It is a silent letter, a servant letter, so to speak, thought to represent the ‘eye of G-d.’ It is not the actual eye.

Obliged, daniel

2009-07-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Back from Yakima, Brownstown, and White Swan, on the Yakama reservation in the lower Yakima valley. Visited Joe at his cafe in Btown again, been going there for about 40 yrs. Btown is largely a abandoned, burnt out, derelict 4 corner town and a regional treasure. The 'cafe' is tilted and decrepit but still retains extraordinary character, including a great mural of cowgirls roping cows. Joe was there along with 2, 90+ yr old locals, one (Mancy) a self-described 'Yakama Indian medicine man' with southern Baptist roots. The other a French-Catholic (lots in that area) who covered Mancy's eyes and laughingly told us that he was a "witch doctor who would hypnotize us and steal our souls," I think they were both 'into their cups' as they say but they had lots of insights into local history and current politics to share (over the noise of another young Yakama watching the movie "Dumb and Dumber" on video. I encourage anyone traveling through the area to stop in and say hi and get some of Joe's chili. It's on the way to White Swan, the area of some of the last Indian wars to be fought in this country, as well as one of the few Indian Shaker churches in the Northwest. Lynda (my wife) got some great pics and if i knew how to post them i would. obliged, Daniel

test

2009-05-04T21:56:00.000-07:00

First post, test run.