BarryTaylorBlog

On answering questions

I came across a comment from Julia Child on Twitter the other day (@rorysutherland). She was asked what kind of wine she liked, to which she replied, "Gin!" Don't always allow the question to define the answer was Sutherland's takeaway from her comment. I couldn't agree more. All too often questions are way too loaded, so loaded that the answer is anticipated, expected even--questions like this are something of a trap. I think about the encounters that Jesus had with his detractors whose questions were often front-loaded with assumptions, expectancies and agendas--to answer the question as anticipated would have done no-one any good, I doubt that it would have even satisfied the questioners--because they probably weren't looking for the answers anyway, they just wanted to hear their own opinions spoken back to them.

I was watching a video of Rob Bell in a bit of an intense conversation with another bloke in England, where he was being pressed to answer a specific question--which he did well to not answer--he actually kept trying to re-direct the conversation, not, it seemed to me anyway, to avoid it, so much as try to take the conversation into less predictable, cul-de-sac territory. This got him nowhere, except to a place of frustration. I found it sad to watch (even though I felt rather proud of him for being willing to take hits), mostly because, as he rightly declared--this kind of bullshit is what keeps people away from churches.

I realize I am probably a long way from Julia Child's original comment, and a fair distance away from Sutherland's interpretation in talking about this in theological contexts, but that is where I live and it is where the comment resonates. Certain questions comes with certain answers. For instance, in Rob's conversation, which, if you haven't heard, was essentially about homosexuality, the other guy, Andrew somebody, I forget right now, seemed to reduce his sense of all things gender down to genital activity--that is what he kept coming back to again and again--and of course, the issue isn't as simple as genitalia and bedroom activity--except of course, it is, if you live with a certain set of questions and answers.

I would go as far as to say I think we need to lay some questions aside completely--they aren't the right ones to be asking anymore, they were borne of a different time, a different set of criteria, and yes, I do think many questions are contextual and that they become burdensome when the context shifts. I don't say that because I want to avoid certain questions or am afraid to answer things in a forthright manner, its just that I think its time to move past some of them.

Julia Child's reply was a reminder that the world is bigger than one kind of beverage, there is, if you will (with all apologies to the French), more than wine to be drunk--and when it comes to theology, there isn't just one easy, prescribed and expected answer to every set of issues--that's why perhaps Jesus constantly answered a certain question with another question--they were looking for wine, he was drinking gin!!

tattoo you: bodies of subversion

I like tattoos, not all of them, there are many epic fails that I have seen and wouldn't wish on anyone, but overall, I find them a fascinating glimpse into who we perceive ourselves to be. As part of some doctoral research some years back I did a body-piercing/tattoo field research project and found it both fascinating and enlightening to discover from both tattooists and their customers, the reason for inking themselves. Ultimately I think it is a phenomenon related to late 20th cenutry loss of stability and security in external sources--be they insititutional or relational--and that the body is often perceived as the last 'permanent object' a person feels they have and thus it becomes the site of self-perception and inscription.

The rise of tattoos from the margins to the centre of cultural life has been something I have witnessed over the course of my life. There was a time when tattoos singled a person out as a less than deisrable type-to be tattooed was to enter the realm of the morally questionable and corrupt, but these days it seems to be a rite of passge for many people, and begins quite early in life. First tattoos can be quite naive, but even then they are often infused with some meaning however percious or destined to be eclipsed by life as it unfolds.

I came across a fascinating article today on tattoos, wth particular focus on the rise of female tattoos, apparently there are now more women with tattoos than men for the first time in recorded history. the article is based on the latest edition of Margot Mifflin's book, Bodies of Subversion, which is due out this month. Lutheran minister, Nadia Bolz-Weber is featured in the latest edition, she has some fine work on her person, as colorful and insightful as she is.

The article, cites Kat Von D as a major link in this chain. For the unitiated, KVD is a fixture on the LA scene, a majorly tattooed artists, whose reality shows have made her perhaps the world's best known tattoo artists. Anyway, the article is well worth a read, and the book will be as well.

melt the guns

I have been watching and listening, like most people it seems, with a heavy heart, as 26 people, 20 of them children are wiped off the face off the earth by a man with a gun. There is lots to say, but actually, I have nothing of value to add, I can't even begin--it's huge and there is probably no simple remedy, although we would all love one right now.

I am sickened by the repsonse of some high profile religious people, who have an amazing ability to either defend god or make him look like a complete arsehole, or both at the same time. So I offer Andy patridge and his compatriots in the always provocative XTC. It's simplistic, idealistic, and decidedly, not where the conversation is going but...MELT THE FUCKING GUNS!!!

The song is a critique of violence as entertainment and entertaining violence--surely a contributor somewhere along the grid of human incomprehensibility...

Programmes of violence,
As entertainment,
Brings the disease into your room.
We know the germ,
Which is man-made in metal,
Is really a key to your own tomb.

Prevention is better than cure,
Bad apples affecting the pure,
You'll gather your senses I'm sure
Then agree to,

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

Children will want them,
Mothers supply them,
As long as your killers are heroes.
And all the media
Will fiddle while Rome burns,
Acting like modern-time Neros.

Prevention is better than cure,
Bad apples affecting the pure,
You'll gather your senses I'm sure
Then agree to,

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

I'm speaking to the Justice League of America.
The U S of A,
Hey you,
Yes you in particular!
When it comes to the judgement day and you're standing at the gates with your weaponry,
You dead go down on one knee,
Clasp your hands in prayer and start quoting me,
'Cos we say...
Our father we've managed to contain the epidemic in one place, now,
Let's hope they shoot themselves instead of others,
Help to civilize the race now.
We've trapped the cause of the plague,
In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If we listen quietly we can hear them shooting from grave to grave.
You ought to,

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more to fire them.

Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
Melt the guns,
And never more desire them.

italo calvino

 

Had he not passed away so suddenly of a cerebrl hemorrage in 1985, the Italian writer Italo Calvino would have been 89yearsold today. I like Calvino's work and have found two pieces of his work helpful in some of the work/teaching I do. I use his book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which tells a series of tales using tarot cards as the framework, in one of my ad school classes as an exercise telling stories with images rather than words. Six Memos for the Next Millenium, which was drawn from a set of lectures he was due to give at harvard at the time of his death, was central in some of my thinking when I was in the middle of shaping my doctoral thesis. The six memos: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and well...you'll have to read to discover the last one--it was unfinished at the time of his death, which only serves to make th ebook even more helpful--formed part of the framework of my method.

I came across this little film on the always necessary, Brain Pickings. 

after the apocalypse

I have been thinking a fair bit about this fascination that there seems to be with the idea of post-apocalypse, post-technological collapse. It's evident in things as diverse as The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead andnow, even more, the new JJ Abrams produced, Revolution, which explores the world post-electricity. It seems to echo the on-going love/hate relationship we have with technology. On the one hand we are enraptured with what technology can accomplish and how connected it allows us to be, and what it can deliver, literally into our hands. On the other hand, we speak a lot about the downside of technology-the loss of face-to-face communing, i-pod isolation, hyper-individualized mediation, and these shows seem to be wrestling with those duelling forces at work in our lives.

I begin a class next week on Theology and Media Culture and I might begin with this question, this issue, in the class, get us thinking about the role/s technology plays in enhancing and diminishing our lives. There is an interesting article in Esquire magazine online about this very thing--a worthwhile read. This is something that Marshall Mcluhan addressed with his laws of media tetrad, putting forward the view that technology, any technology, causes four major effects upon the user-it (whatever it is)enhances, retrieves, reverses and obsolesces. We seem to live somewhere in the tension between those dynamics, each of us being pulled by various preferences, positions, access etc. 

There are often times when I would happily give up my cell-phone, but the idea of going back to a pre-electric world--one that would also herald a return to the 'dark' in so many other areas, is not one that I care to visit. I think we have to find our own balance with technology and its use, misuse, disuse.

Much like Hunger Games--Revolution presents a sort of frontier-survivalist mentality--both interestingly, are heavily led by females--the girl with the crossbow in the NBC ad would not look out of place at all in the HG artworks, advertising and narrative ideology--this idea of living close to the land, technology-free, surviving off of ones wits and ancient-or older, close-to-earth wisdom, holds great appeal.

We rely so much on technology--and for most of us, most of it is a mystery in terms of how it actually works--i'm still stuck on radio-waves!!! Derrida used this idea to great degree in his writing on knowledge and our relation to technology. For him, the space created between our reliance upon and ignorance of, technology, was precisley the cause of a revived and renewed interest in animis, magic and mystery--i.e. religious belief is affected by technology relation.

And of course, all these shows draw heavily upon the American Obsession with all things apocalyptic--which continues to be expressed at the heart of much of our culturally mediated imagination. Oh, and AC/DC are still cool!

olympics and all that

I watched the Olympic opening ceremony late Friday night after a number of people had texted me to say how moving they found it. I doubt that I would have nothered had I not been contacted by such a group of people, I am not much of a sports person and the Olympics? Whatever--sorry. Anyway, I watched with great joy as the ceremony unfolded--it was so decidedly British full of all the things I celebrate, cherish and miss--the collective sense of humour, the jokes we are all in on etc. I loved the music, the celebration of all of it from classical to pop--gotta love an opening ceremony that has a slice of the Pistols in it--Evelyn Glennie hammering away with a vast army of drummers. The element I most appreciated was the section that involved the doctors and nurses--that dance with the hospital beds, celebrating the relation between children's writers and childrens hospitals (GOSH--Great Ormond Street Hospital) and of course the NHS. I said to a couple of people that you probably wouldn't find a number celebrating a national healthcare system as part of a U.S. Olympic opening--would be nice, but not going to happen. But it wasn't the politics of that moment, and it wasn't the pomp and circumstance--it wasn't the quotes from Shakespeare or the maybe slightly preposterous notion that the Industrial Revolution heralded all the changes it appeared to make--but there again, it was a fucking dance number so...lighten up, it was something less obtrusive that appealed. It seemed to me anyway that what the opening captured was a sense of British self-understanding, amongst all the claims and demonstrations of achievement and accomplishement, of ingenuity and creativity, were another set of ideas about how the British see themselves.

Things like care and compassion, inclusivity and a quiet unassuming strength, the enjoyment of life and sense of humour. Humour cropped up a lot and I think thats 'important--there is an elelment of pomp and inflated self-importance that inhabits the sports world--no offence to those who dedicate themsleves to various events, but for most of us, they get elevated to a fevered scale of import every four years--it's almost as if our lives depend upon this or that event, so the humorous element helped to deflate that a little---and perhaps even the humour and self-deprecation that came this time from the very top down--the Queen, in on the joke with James Bond--so many people have said that they didn't realize she had a sense of humour?! Again, amidst all the obvious energy and focus of this event--an occasional nod in the direction of 'let's not get carried away with our own importance here'--I appreciated that.

We got William Blake's Jerusalem--of course we did, but even that, demonstrates something of the British view of things eternal in the 21st century I think--there is ambiguity and complexity in the poetry of Blake and it's reflected in the wider culture's approach to the realm of spirit--it was there--not obvious, not out-front, but not avoided either--a secular spirituality--not organized, just infiltrating, just there, subsumed into the rest of life. I realize that for some, this is not enough, they want all things god outfront, but I don't think they are going to get that much these days.  

It was also a bit of a peoples event too--volunteers, not professionals everywhere, performing, coming together to make things happen. Elsewhere there have been comments about whether or not this event was a secular liturgy etc. it was an opening cremony, a unique and quite creative one, but an opening ceremony--not to be repeated but to be remembered and recalled. It was riddled with meaning on a number of levels and it was a celebration of many things, about what it means, not just to be British, but to be human, and that is a good thing for my money.

 

goddamn!! a much better name

handbags

According to comedian Bill Maher, it's the outfit on the left that is crying out for a handbag. I agree.

Lightbulbs

I don't know how much attention has been paid to the 'lightbulb wars' but in the past few months there have been a number of debates surrounding a 2007 law that essentially brings an end to old lightbulb technology and replaces it with newer, more energy efficent, longer lasting and slightly more expensive incandescent lightbulbs. This has touched a nerve, bringing up issues of government control and the like. Michele Bachmann for instance said, "The American people want less government intrusion into their lives, not more, and that includes staying out of their personal light-bulb choices"(there we go with the mythic 'american people' that politicians of all stripes claim to speak for!).

I don't really want to wade into that debate as much as use it as an access point for thinking about some shifting cultural moments. I was reading an interview with media ecologist Douglas Rushkoff on the always enlightening TNI, in which he used lightbulbs as a way of understanding how media functions,

"So it’s like the lightbulb is a media environment, right? You turn on the lightbulb, and you have a different environment because of that medium. But print is a media environment that encourages certain ways of looking at the world. Television changes us. Internet is a media environment. Somehow our media environment, combined with our economic environment, can really amplify one another’s effects in dangerous ways."

He also spoke about the important shift of the past few years which in his mind is a shift from futurism to what he terms presentism, that essentially we aren't a forward-looking society anymore (this could be a sign of the final end of modernity or not, but it would seem to signal a significant shift in the cultural psyche away from a dominant perspective rooted in the Enlightenment project). Elsewhere, Rushkoff has defined presentism as this,

"We shifted to this leaning forward futurist viewpoint to a “woah we’re here” presentism, it’s the shock of “Oh my gosh, we’re alive right now, but I’m not living for the now.”Nothing changes where you are right now, but we don’t think that way. The new thing that’s supposed to change our lives, when it doesn’t, we don’t know what to do."

Now, I think of two competing, or at least parallel, ideas about the present here. The one is the 'spiritual' discipline of being present in the world, and the idea that it is an important thing to be alive to the present moment, and we use any number of techniques, meditation, prayer and the like to condition ourselves to being 'in' the present moment. It's interesting to me that Rushkoff finds that living in the present, in the now, seems to eradicate the potential for change, and perhaps more importantly, challenges the idea that we are supposed to be changing. Presentism seems to be about media demands for us to paying more attention, and this partly seems to be a bit of a negative for Rushkoff and he goes on to posit that things like Asperger's and ADD are perhaps resistant mechanisms to the demand from media to be more attentive? The Sex Pistols line, 'no future' was going through my head whilst I was reading the article.

Again, I don't want to debate that as much as point out, that however we parse it, something is changing in the cultural psyche and that this is important. There are going to be any number of ideas about the present moment, but I do think Rushkoff is pointing out something important here--the path he takes with it has appeal and non-appeal for me--but nonetheless, there seems to be a tangible shift in the way we are processing the world around us and a certain inertia accompanies that--noone seems to know what to do, or is perhaps afraid to make a move. I can only apply this anecdotally to my own small worlds, that of a certain acedemia and the diverse church environs and economies that I inhabit--all of them characterized by inertia as the future-lean gives ways to presentism.

 

on premature death and pregnant vacuums

I have read a couple of things of late that seem to have some resonance with other conversations I hear in the various realms I inhabit connected to church futures etc. The ongoing debate over emerging church and the like, and particularly the continuing, although admittedly more muted lately, discussion over the demise of the emerging church. I tend to refrain form the immediacy of these flurries because I think they require a bit more reflection, at least they do for me personally in order to get to the heart of my thinking. But I wanted to wade in on that conversation a little bit because I think it points to an important point about how we deal with historicity. In Networks Without A Cause, which I am enjoying immensely, Lovink quotes McKenzie Wark, in connection with the future of media studies, but the comment seems to have some ramifications beyond that realm in my mind. Wark says,

"Having to always declare something over is connected to refusing to historicize. There are two ways of situating (media studies) historically. One way is to see new media as add-ons or extensions of old media. Start with cinema for example, and position the new as same-but-different within this space of thought and disciplinary organization. The other way starts with the phenomena before us - games, mobiles, internet - how do they call into being entirely new (long range) genealogies? How do they call us to reject or revise exisiting histories? It needs to be allied with three methodologies: the conceptual, the ethnographic and the experimental. The mere reading of "texts" does not serve us well at the moment."

Now, as I have already noted, there is a very specific context at work here, namely media studies, but nonetheless there are similarties at work within the church horizon in my mind. Not the least of which is to declare something over or dead, in order to get around dealing with the implications. I am not so much pitching in support of emerging church as I am seeking to address a tendency which I have noticed quite a lot in my few decade relation and involvement with church stuff. Wark offers two ways of dealing with an issue--and in my mind when it comes to new church paradigms, the former has governed the conversation but what if the second approach is taken. What if different questions are asked of the issue? What if the questions related to things like alternative/emerging whatever-the-fuck-name-they-pick-church are more probing of both the new arena and the old?

We have lived through the death of so many things--god, modernity, secualrism, sprituality, rock, hip-hop, on and on, but in virtually every case, those death-clarations are--well, wrong, especially if death is viewed as some kind of finality! None of those things has really 'died'--it's just laziness I think, and perhaps fear, fear of being eclipsed.

The second component is from an article by Slavoj Zizek in the Guardian about the next steps for the Occupy movement. Again, a couple of comments that seem to have resonance beyond their context. He speaks of the Occupy protesters as having created a vacuum in what he calls, the hegemonist ideology, but more importantly that "time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New." The movement isn't new, it opens up space for the New and at present we are in a pregnant vacuum. I think the same may be true of the newer Christian movements like emerging/emergent/alternative etc.--they are not the new movement--they just made the space, the pregnant vacuum.

Something is waiting to be born. Now we can debate whether anything in this world can truly be New (guess it might depend on how one interprets Solomon and how we interpret what 'new' means), but something needs to change, that is the message of those rag-tag groups--change, not for changes sake, but because it is needed, desparately needed within religion in my mind. So let's not rush too quickly to declare things over--let's wait and be around to give birth to something.