nevermind the bricolage

Evolution of Storage

 

Curtiss Spontelli's infographic offers a vivid look at changing technologies and their effect on or ability to save information. The transition from wax cylinder to digital music devices in the music column is a great example of how the digital expands our capacities. No comments obviously about less is more or quality over content. I remember packing up my portable record player and a box loads of albums and taking the bus to a friends house for an evening of listening and now I carry more songs on my iPhone than I ever could back then

White Rabbit

Cool promotional for Syfy channels, Alice. It's part of a multi-media campaign by Fallon.

Strong Look

My friend Al would call this runway style a "strong look"--not bad on the telephone box, little dodgy on the geezer if you ask me!!

Spoelstra



Narrominded, which is a pretty cool music blog, has released a free download of a Christmas song. Go Tell Them It Is Christmas by Spoelstra is quirky to say the least, especially if you watch the video for the song, which features the usual creche characters plus some Star Wars characters?! Kind of a cool electronic groove that makes the whole thing musically interesting. Of course it isn't Christmas yet, but who's  being picky?

War Is Over

On the 29th anniversary of her husband's murder, Yoko Ono has released the War Is Over poster in more than forty languages--would that war was over.

Ouch!!

Have had a bit of a tooth infection, look like a chipmunk, feel like I've been smacked in the face, ouch!

Boy Lilikoi

If you like Sigur Ros then you've probably already discovered the side-project, Jonsi. There is a beautiful new song called Boy Lilikoi, available for download here, sung in Englsh, but filled with the usual majesty, beauty and tenderness of all their songs.

Life After Shopping

I made it to the Hammer forum event featuring Benjamin Barber and Reverend Billy of the Church of Life After Shopping. It was an interesting evening, although a little frustrating at times. The evening began with a 'sermon' from Rev. Billy basically a recount of his groups Black Friday shopping interventions. He is pretty entertaining, parodying a televangelist--lots of 'amens' and the like and very committed to his cause. He addressed consumerism as a preacher would address sin, complete with call to repentance and a remedy for our moral failure. His answer to consumerism--just say no to shopping, felt simplistic, something that Benjamin Barber addressed in his more formal lecture right after Billy.

For Barber the current situation is more complex and there are no easy answers. He feels that consumerism is essentially a perversion of capitalism and a perversion that is now so deeply embedded in our cultural psyche that breaking it will take more than a just say no campaign. He spent a lot of time addressing the difference between advertising and marketing, the infantilization of adults and the campaigns to create ever younger consumers. Much of what he said rang true, but he kept referring to marketers and media types as "them" as though they are somehow like Big Brother, molding humanity to their whim and will--I am not sure that is an effective analysis either. To demonize the "other," in this case principally marketers and those who create films that infantilize us, seems a cheap shot to me. It is not that I don't think these issues are real, because I do and I worry about those things as well, but I just think that a lot of marketers and film makers are just as lost in all of this as the rest of us, and I don't think they exist as a sort of ruling class above the fray as it were, manipulating and pulling puppet strings. I guess this tension--the chicken/egg issue--is seldom easily resolved.

Ultimately an issue this complex is not going to be sorted out in one ninety minute forum, especially one where there were a couple of quite disruptive anti-consumerists in the audience who thought nothing of interrupting and co-opting the conversation with obnoxious comments, almost railroading the audience participation part in the process. Barber's book, Consumed, looks as though it is an expansion of his lecture, and might hold some deeper insights into his thinking.

World AIDS Day

Wrapping Up

Today we are finishing up the Art, Cinema and Theology course and, as usual, we have run out of time and have much left to cover. We still have Francis Bacon, Warhol and Basquiat  movies on the table. Bacon, who lives on in the works of Damien Hirst, is featured in the film, Love and Death, surely one of the best cinematic representations of an artist's life. The film slips into blurred and surreal moments that echo Bacon's painterly style. Although I must say that this term has been much more about framing a theological approach, or rather using art as a model for theology, so the cinematic element has become more of a device and a way in to the other disciplines--that is not a bad thing but it changes the dynamic and focus of the class. I think it also points towards the fact that there are more and more artists coming to the seminary, or let me rephrase that, more people coming for whom the arts are a principle lens through which they explore their faith and theology. Last week we made a field-trip to Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum where we checked out the small but interesting exhibit featuring the demonic in Tibetan Buddhism, plus the other regular galleries which hold a treasure trove of stuff from Rembrandt to Picasso. It was good to stand before some real works of art and discuss our varied responses to particular pieces. The scope of Picasso's creative arc is evident in the paintings and sculptures on display, you can see connections and disconnections between his ideas--a man fully engaged in his own creative process. Today's class will be a feeble attempt at wrapping up some loose ends and offering a few new threads by which to practice theology.

The Great Unwashed Congregation

Okay--so Jeff Beck has to be the best guitarist around today if his playing on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary celebration was anything to go by--wow! Two nights of musical collaboration and celebration rolled into a four-hour tv special what a great way to spend a Sunday evening--like going to church or something! Bono, offered up the metaphor of the rock and roll audience, gathered in the New York temple of rock (Madison Square Garden) as the great unwashed congregation--pilgrims and pioneers, saints and heretics, poets and punks, all lifting up the power of music. Rock is essentially about liberation he proclaimed, "political, sexual, spiritual," different kinds of liberation for different people and there were all kinds of liberation offered up.

Mick Jagger injected some feral sexual liberation into U2's Stuck In A Moment, and Bono looked almost rattled when Fergie and Jagger traded leers and licks on Gimme Shelter, but ably backed by Edge and the boys it was a fierce rendition of a classic song. Classics from Smokey Robinson to Ozzy were infused with new life by the fan/bands that backed them. Perhaps the highlight for me was Sam Moore (Sam+Dave) backed by Bruce and the E Street band--Hold On I'm Coming and Soul Man never sounded better. Stevie Wonder, Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, BB King--there were some great moments, but more than the sum total of its parts there was the deep sense of magic and wonder that inhabits popular music, or at least has up till now.

I don't know if music matters the way it used to, I don't know if it even can be (or ever really was) generation defining the way it was in a much less connected and digitized world. I think it still matters and still means stuff, just not in the same way. I am not a nostalgist, I don't think all the best music has already been done, in fact, I think the past couple of years have been amazingly creative musically--but it is a different world and different worlds make meaning in different ways--music plays a role just not the same one, but for one night in New York (two really) a congregation was assembled, a liturgy prepared and a people in darkness caught glimpses of light.

Questionnaires?

Arise cool cats and do some powerful goodness--Beatniks versus Benjamin (Franklin, that is)

Shopocalypse

Hot on the heels of my post about consumption/black friday etc., comes news that this coming Tuesday at the Hammer Museum there is a forum called, Life After Shopping, featuring Benjamin Barber, The Reverend Billy and Savitri D of the Church of Life After Shopping. The church apparently warns of the coming shopocalypse and seeks to turn peoples attention away from the 'sins of branding while praying for local economies and real experiences, not those mediated through products.' The blurb on the lecture/forum notes that the economy is 70% dependent upon consumption, so no east answers will suffice it seems. I am trying to rearrange my schedule to make this I think it will be worth the effort.

Sexile

The teenager is back from University for the Thanksgiving weekend and is a wealth of information about the contemporary student world. Sexile was the most interesting piece of our dinner conversation. When your roommate, in a two-person dorm room, needs time with their 'special friend' apparently the other roommate is sexiled--forced to find somewhere else to hang out--yet one more example of the new hybrid language emerging around us.

Black Buy Nothing Friday

Everything is defined by consumer activity these days it seems. And never is this more exemplified than around holidays. Take this weekend for instance, nn the one hand we have Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving, where deals aplenty are offered to entice consumers into the spending frenzy that is Christmas, and on the other, Buy Nothing Day, the culture-jam event designed to break our addiction to contemporary consumer lifestyle. Both ideas bug me, although I lean more towards Buy Nothing, but that is mostly for two reasons--I have no money to spend and I don't like crowds, so it is easy for me to stay away from the shops. Less easy is the un-plug from cyberspace-turn off the lights and everything else bit that goes along with Buy Nothing Day. I have to pick up a friend from the airport and for him to make his way here via public transport is just shy of torture in my book, but perhaps that is just an excuse. Unplugging from the system is difficult, perhaps even more so in the short term, not impossible, but difficult. And the difficulty highlights just how dependent we are.

I was in the bookstore at the seminary I teach at the other day and stumbled across a book in the $1 section written about Christianity and the economic systems. The book was published in 1922, pre-Wall Street Crash, pre-Great Depression, pre-WWII, and yet the issues and questions it raised seem strangely prescient--a call to rethink how we view economics, how we practice faith and how we think about money in general. I seem to have spent much of this past year dealing with economics on some level, nearly all of it from the challenging side, and have been really shocked by the resistance to change that seems to swirl around the economic questions of our time, conventional wisdom seems to rule the day.

One of my favourite websites is Paleo-Future, here's an ad from the 1964 touting the longevity of Scheaffer pens, but there is also the conceptualizing of a 'credit card ring'--this is how we imagine the future, novel extensions of what we already have--our life, just a bit more futuristic. You can still buy a Scheafffer pen I think, but the pen has succumbed to the keyboard and the typepad. As for the credit card ring, well, maybe next year.