Symmetry's Overrated

From "Dennis"

2012-02-28T21:26:00.001-08:00

Every once in a while those forwards of a forward of a forward — those endless e-mail chains bring something decent to my mailbox.
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This relates to the American presidential race. I am, after 40 years, revisiting Rabelais, so my thoughts have turned recently to satire.

It seems that, with all of the religious demagoguery we are seeing in the presidential race, a few revisions of the gospels must be in order. These changes to the gospel might serve them well:

Replace "Blessed are you poor" (Lk 6:20b, Mt 5:3) with "Cursed are you poor. Quit bothering me. Thou art lazy."

Replace "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret" (Mt 6:6) with "Pray at all times in public, especially in schools and in all places in order to be seen by others."

Replace "Sell your possessions and give to charity" (Lk 12:33a) with "Keep all you have, unless you can get a good tax break. Then, toss a few crumbs."

Replace "Give to him who begs from you and do not refuse him who would borrow from you" (Mt. 5:42, Lk. 6:30) with "Tell those who beg from you to get a job. Tell those who would borrow from you to first raise their credit rating."

Replace "Blessed are you that hunger now" (Lk 4:21a, Mt. 5:6a) with "If thou art hungry, thou shalt urinate in a cup, pay for it, and if it is clean we might give you gruel and a biscuit." (Based on several state proposals to drug test welfare recipients.)

Replace "Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you" (Mt. 5:44, Lk 6:27) with "Hate those with different pigmentation or language or religion or hair color or whatever excuse you can find; then, try to kill them."

Replace "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her (Mk. 10:11, Lk 16:18, cf. Mt. 5:31) with "Marry thy high school math teacher and when she gets old, find a trophy, and when she gets old find another, then suddenly become a Catholic and lay off the Viagra, lest ye shall needest thou another trophy."

Replace "You are missing one thing: Go, sell whatever you have and give the proceeds to the poor..." (Mk10:21, Mt. 19:21, Lk. 18:22) with "Buy stocks."

Replace "How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God" (Mk 10:23, Mt. 19:23, Lk. 18:24) with "The kingdom of God is underneath the Fortune 500 sign."

Replace "Don't acquire possessions here on earth" with "More, More, More! Now, Now, Now! Warm up the credit card!"

Replace, "When someone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other as well" (Lk 6:29, Mt 5:39) with "Preemptive strikes are the way to go. Nuke 'em."

Replace "When someone takes your coat, don't prevent that person from taking your shirt along with it" (Lk 6:29, Mt. 5:40) with "Keep your Second Amendment arsenal armed and ready to go!"

Replace the six sentences of the Samaritan parable (Lk. 10:30-35) with four
words: "Corporations are people, too."

Replace "It is easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle's eye than for a wealthy person to get into God's domain" (Mk 10:25, Mt. 19:24, Lk 18:25) with "Medication, stapling the stomach, gastric by-pass are all keys to the rich entering the kingdom."

Replace "Since when do the healthy need a doctor? It's the sick who do" (Lk. 5:31, Mk 2:17, Mt. 9:12) with "Let the poor die if they can't afford health care. Blessed are the health insurance lobbyists, for they serve the wealthy."

Finally, the demagogues can replace the crucifix with an image of an electric chair.

Happines is a Cage

2012-02-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

Enjoy you faults,
Savour the beauty in your sadness,
Let your pain save you.

Burn freely.

Ego-guilt

2012-01-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

"Guilt is a device of the ego to make you feel like you're doing something about your 'failure' — that somehow you're atoning for what you've done with how bad you feel."
- my friend Manuela (or my best memory of what she said)

Suicide or Sell-Out? (Jesus' Dilemna)

2012-01-24T22:00:00.000-08:00

Last night, I watched this 'amateur' music documentary, and it's probably the best I've ever seen. Well, at the least, it's the best I've seen on what it's really like to be in a band, and the struggles that go along with it. This includes questions of 'selling out,' what it means to succeed or fail, and 'why you do it.'

[Watch it in youtube here]

Things got particularly interesting from 40:30 on, culminating at 48:11, when Randy Blythe from Lamb of God confesses that he was perfectly content to have no money when he was 25. But now that he's nearly 40, and has put 15 years into his band, it would sure be nice to have enough to have kids and maybe even own a house.

Because my brain takes weird left turns like this, a little while later I started wondering...

If Jesus would have lived past thirty, would he have sold out? Decided that money, or government, or religion weren't really that bad after all... made his peace with such satanic things... settled down with a wife and a mortgage, content that he deserved a secure life and a decent living in return for his teachings?

Brains are funny sometimes

2012-01-02T20:26:00.000-08:00

The thing I like about books is that I can put them back on the shelf when I don't want them anymore.

The thing I like about fiction is that it allows me to live vicariously through stories that are much more easy, meaningful, and satisfying than my own.

The thing I like about movies is that they let me stare at pretty girls who can't look back.

Best commentary on Attawapiskat I've yet heard

2012-01-02T17:25:00.000-08:00

Last month, the plight of people in Attawapiskat captured the attention of the Canadian media. Attawapiskat is a reserve/First Nation in northern Ontario, near Kenora. (The best background on the immediate crisis might be this article, by the MP for the area, which helped launch the media frenzy; this blog post by Pam Palmater gives excellent historical context).

This is a piece on Attawapiskat written by Bob Lovelace. Bob's an elder and former chief of Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and lecturer at Queen's University. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation he did on the history of the Ottawa Valley and its original people, the Algonquins.
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Seeing the Forest and the Trees

If you can cut through the racism, ignorance, and half-baked opinions of pundits, politicians and sound-bite media most folks will realize that Attawapiskat and many other First Nations have been laboring under the repression of Colonialism far to long. The antidote for poverty is self-determination and no one can give you that. You have to standup and take action yourself to make it happen. Colonialism does not give way on its own; it must be defeated through vigorous and enlightened opposition.

It is difficult in the face of human suffering to turn attention to the systemic and structural reasons that have led to this catastrophe but this is the very time when thoughtful analysis is needed. The homes are small and cold. The tedium of poverty bears down day-by-day and those who have stolen your children’s future call the daily bread on your table a “handout”. It is difficult to feel anything but shame through the numbing that is required to get-by every day. But there are reasons behind this suffering. There is a history. There is a structure to oppression, denial and indifference that houses this suffering and there is a system that perpetuates it.

...
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Read the rest of the post here, at Bob's Decolonization Blog.

I'm certainly no expert on the situation, and haven't even done a very good job of following the media coverage. But two thoughts occur to me:
1) Government representatives in damage-control may toss around impressive-sounding figures that they've sent to Attawapiskat, implying that the money must have been wasted through corrupt management. But per individual, on-reserve natives get 2/3rds of the spending for government services that other Canadians receive. (Hello! That's racist!) So the amount spent on a similarly-sized group of 'regular Canadians' would be even greater.

2) If there's no place for natives to live on-reserve, maybe they'll move away and assimilate properly into mainstream Canadian society. Wouldn't that be convenient?!

Is it too late for one last Christmas song?

2011-12-28T21:37:00.000-08:00

I remembered this song the day after Christmas.

Lyrics and sheet music for the original version of the song can be found here.
http://lds.org/churchmusic/detailmusicPlayer/index.html?searchlanguage=1&...
Dave skips the last 2 verses and writes his own final one.

The song has an interesting story and history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Heard_the_Bells_on_Christmas_Day
The original words are by Wordsworth, and the original and most common musical setting – which Dave uses – was by John Baptise Calkin.

Taken without permission from the Grapes of Rad podcast. So check them out as a thank you for the pretty music.
http://www.grapesofrad.com/
(Dear Grapes of Rad, let me know if you don't like this being out there).

Self-aware angst is the best kind

2011-11-29T20:20:00.000-08:00

What's the point of having an a planet-destroying piece of communication technology in my pocket, (a position from which, incidentally, it's probably making me infertile — not that I particularly mourn the loss, though brain cancer later in life will probably suck), if I can't talk to someone when I really need it?

How can I rant about how I'm sick of texting and phones and the goddamn internet, and how I just want to sit in the same room as someone I care about and be with them, if I can't get a hold of anyone via texting and phones and the goddamn internet in order to give said rant?

Best. Video. Ever.

2011-11-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

Best Dinosaur Comics mouseover text ever!

2011-11-24T15:08:00.000-08:00

"Let's count up the number of brain cells across every living thing worldwide dedicated to Facebook. Then let's slice them out, create a Facebook brain, and ignore what it says forever."

(It's from this comic).

Guests of the Sheik

2011-11-18T13:06:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea went 'behind the veil' when she and her anthropologist husband spent 2 years (1956-58) living in an Iraqi village. The real pay-off of the book she wrote about the experience comes — at least for me — on the last few pages:

"I suppose I was flattered, for I had apparently shown, by my restrained conduct in El Nahra, that all Western women were not, per se, wanton, but I had done this by generally observing Hamid's own customs towards women. How many years would it have taken, I wondered to convince Sheik Hamid that I was a respectable woman if I had not worn the abayah in El Nahra, if I had sat with the men in the mudhif, ridden horseback in blue jeans and wandered through the suq and village as I pleased?

"How many years would it take, I wondered, before the two worlds began to understand each other's attitudes towards women? For the West, too, had a blind spot in this area. I could tell my friends in America again and again that the veiling and seclusion of Eastern women did not mean necessarily that they were forced against their will to live lives of submission and near-serfdom. I could tell Haji again and again that the low-cut gowns and brandished freedom of Western women did not necessarily mean that these women were promiscuous and cared nothing for home and family. Neither would have understood, for each group, in its turn, was bound by custom and background to misinterpret appearance in its own way.

"... We [she and her husband] talked until very late that night. The dinner party had dramatized, a little more effectively than we might have wished, the difference between the sheik's world and ours. It had also made us realize that our presence in El Nahra had done little to resolve those differences. We admitted to each other that we had both somewhat irrational and idealistic notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had not basically changed anyone's attitude, except perhaps our own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have hoped for, and perhaps it was enough."
-p.312-13, 314 in Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village. Anchor: 1965/1989.

"What do you mean the store is closed?!"

2011-11-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

What's the point in living in a capitalist society if I can't have instant gratification when I have money to spend?!

"swear their love is real, they mean I like the way you make me feel"

2011-11-14T21:02:00.000-08:00

So is it possible to love someone for who they are, not what you want them to be for you?

2011-11-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

It's heartening to see people finally standing up against the unlimited greed and power of corporations. This is especially so since it seemed initially that, in the wake of the recent Credit Crunch and Bailout Bonanza, the public was just going to roll over — with only some minor grumbling — and take it in the ass again.

But what I find most exciting about the 'Occupy' movement is not the message. It is large groups of people figuring how to make decisions and live together — not just protest, let me assert that again, but live together — in genuinely democratic, consensual, and egalitarian ways. The challenge to activits and radicals, I think, is to prove it is possible to construct communities and ways of life that are actually of free of hierarchy, coercion, exploitation. Otherwise, how can our criticism that society and its institutions are riddled and dependent on these things be valid?

And there's the 'Occupy' folks doing it, right there in public. And having fun doing it too!

(Zombie walks, acrobatics, occupy. Who says you can't have it all? The Occupy Ottawa folks are sure doing something right — and enduring even as the weather keeps getting colder).

Be your own iPod!

2011-10-25T20:33:00.001-07:00

Let the song sing you...

Best political ad ever!

2011-10-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

In this video, Jedrzej Wijas, a politician who ran for Poland’s Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) party, told voters:
"End the useless talking / Enough of the stupid wars / Secular government / Dignified life / Freedom / Is my goal / Vote wisely."

He didn't win.

mother,

2011-10-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

what part of you have we not poisoned?
where does our noise not penetrate?

you sustain us

so why do we act as if that sustenance is something to be won and wrested from you,
with what amounts to little more than long-distance rape?

These things worry me

2011-09-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

Is calling yourself the follower of a man who smashed the money-changers' property consistent with condemning the actions of the Black Bloc?

What exactly is violence?

Isn't there something violent about a Nike shoe, McDonald's burger, or cop's car? What exactly is more violent, to do nothing about them, or to smash them?

Would-be followers take note

2011-08-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

The Jesus of the Gospels didn't seem to think poverty was a problem — wealth was. He didn't think the solution to economic inequality was the comfortable and well-to-do pulling the poor up to their level through charity or economic development.

The solution was for the rich to become poor.

Pretty much

2011-08-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

Taken from this episode of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cartoons, a wickedly funny webcartoon.

"This land is their land, this land is their land..."

2011-06-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

Algonquins of Barriere Lake vs Section 74 of the Indian Act from Barriere Lake Solidarity on Vimeo.

All Aboard!

2011-05-31T04:25:00.000-07:00

My ukelele version of a song by Pete Seeger. Lyrics and chords at the bottom. Disapointingly, it was much less dark on my camera and computer before I uploaded it to youtube.

The song's relevant to me right now because... (briefly), two days from now, in a act of civil disobedience, some protesters will attempt to present those attending an arms bazaar in my hometown with a copy of the Nuremberg Principles.

(In detail)
Wednesday June 2nd, there will be an arms bazaar called CANSEC showing off the latest in security and military technology at Landsdowne Park in my home Ottawa, (Ontario). Canada is one of the leading exporters of weapons in the world (ranked 7th by the US Congressional Research Service in 2007).

Some of this technology goes to Middle Eastern and African nations that are dictatorial and repressive, that are engaged in civil wars and wars of aggression, and that have even been accused of war crimes. I'm sure some of it has been quite helpful in suppressing/killing demonstrators in the recent movement that have swept the region.

(Not that I think Western nations – the US is the biggest buyer – are making much better use of these devices. Killing people is ugly, and getting rich selling devices for killing people is grotesque).

Landsdowne Park is publicly-owned by the City of Ottawa. Because of a protests and a public outcry against a previous arms fair in the '80s, arms trade shows were banned by the city in 1989. In 2009, (now former) Mayor Larry O'Brien reversed this decision, so that CANSEC could take place. O'Brien is the founder and still a board member of Calian Technologies, who derive much of their revenue from military and security sources. They are now a regular exhibitor at CANSEC.

Wednesday June 2nd at noon, a group of people will undertake a direct action against CANSEC, attempting to non-violently enter the grounds and distribute copies of the Nuremberg Principles to those attending, asking them to to sign a commitment to adhere to them.

These Principles came out of the Nuremberg Trials, where surviving members of the Nazi leadership and others who helped them (concentration camps doctors, industrialists who fuelled the war machine, etc.) were put on trial for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The trials/principles established in international law that individuals have a duty abstain from such crimes even if they were "only following orders" or they would have broken the laws of their country in order to abstain.

The argument is that
1) Some CANSEC exhibitors deal weapons to countries guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and are therefore complicit in these crimes.
2) Such crimes are more important than trespass, so it is worth "trespassing" (onto public-ally-owned land, ironically) in order to inform/remind those of their possible culpability, and in order to oppose their complicity.

I'll be there, singing a couple of songs. If you're in Ottawa, and this speaks to you, feel free to join us. There are other options other than civil disobedience too.
http://coat.ncf.ca/
http://www.nowar-paix.ca/snag/index.html

The words and chords go:

Chorus
Last train to Nuremberg! (2x)
Last train to Nuremberg! All on board!

Verse
Who held the rifle? Who gave the orders?
Who planned the campaign to lay waste the land?
Who made the bullet? Who paid the taxes?
Tell me, is that blood upon my hands?

Chords
Chorus: Dm Dmsus2 Dmsus4 Dm / Dm Am C Dm (Emsus4)
Verse: Dm – / Dm C Dm – / Dm – / Dm C Dm –
Dmsus2 = 2200. Dmsus4 = 2230. Emsus4 = 4410

Said the L'Arche Assistant to the Social Worker

2011-05-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes 'helping people' just seems like an excuse to control them — and feel good about yourself for doing it."

Post-Election Meditation

2011-05-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

As _______(e.g. activists, Christians, anarchists, Quakers, progressives, subversives, radicals, leftists, shit-disturbers, protesters, whatever... as people of good will),

Are we right to demand that our governments make justice and peace the basis of all their policies and actions if we have failed to build livable communities that are free from coercion and hierarchy? Can we demand that corporations end the exploitation basic to their economic life if we have personally failed to find ways to make a living that are sustainable, and free from any form of oppression? Why should they take us seriously, or believe that such things are possible in the "real world," and on a grand systemic level, if it has proved un-achievable on a small-scale, personal level?

(What about what Jesus said about considering other's sin to be like a speck, and our own like a plank – and our need to deal with our own, before addressing others? Or the parable about the servant who is faithless in the little things never being entrusted with the great ones?)

How exactly do we imagine our utopia of peace, justice, and sustainability would be achieved? By coercive laws backed up by force?

It's election time in Canada

2011-04-28T20:04:00.000-07:00

A myriad of missing relationships

2011-04-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

Last post I was musing about (among other things) how we seem to grow up alienated in our culture.

While still reflecting on this, I received a letter from a good friend, and I think he really hit the nail on the head with this point:

"I've been thinking that we demand so much of each other as humans, family, friends, lovers, etc. that we burn each other out and increase divorce, abuse, war, you name it. Why? Perhaps because we are trying to get out of one particular creature of one particular species all the myriad relationships we can only have when rooted in a diverse and natural setting with birds, hills, soil, rivers, trees, and other beings. In other words, we need the ironic state of being committed to a place — a 'natural' space — in order to really feel and appreciate diversity of being, and to not burn ourselves and our fellow humans out be demanding what they and we can't offer."

"It is enough," Part II

2011-03-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

There is a second and more personal thing that the statement "It is enough" meant to me. (Please see the last two posts for context if you're confused).

Experiencing Jenny's life and death changed how I felt about life, and about being alive.

Previously, my life was — perhaps— like that of many other shy suburban teenagers. Sure there were good moments, mostly when laughing or being silly with friends — moments of joy and even connection. But in order to get to those moments, it felt like I had to grind through much that was grey, kind of empty, and rather boring.

There was nothing particularly 'wrong' with my life, I was comfortably looked after, and my life was devoid of any real suffering. I was a child of priveledge, if not compared to many of my suburban peers, than to most of the people in the world. I had nothing to complain about.

Except a vague emptiness, a certain lack of meaning, and connection. There was no one to share what I was really thinking and feeling, deep down. I had no idea how to start such conversations, and maybe not even the knowledge that it was possible to have relationships and conversations where such sharing could take place.

In the context of all the suffering, injustice, and unmet needs present in the world, to speak of this lack seems obscene. But that doesn't make it unreal.

Maybe my lack just boiled down to being socially awkward and introverted. But I'm starting to think there is something more systemic about it. I also suspect that lack of emptiness, lack of meaning and connection goes deeper than just a 'lack of intimate friends' — even if that's how I tended to think of it at the time.

This train of thought reminds of something I saw in Geez magazine a few years ago. "Help end affluence — sponsor a comfortable Western kid!"

(The fine print is both funny and pointed, so I would encourage you to click on the image and read it).

Anyways, to end this political rant over and get back to the 'real' topic at hand, let me just say this. While walking out of of the cemetery after I had visited my friend's grave for the first time, I broke down and started crying — for the first time since hearing the news of her death a month earlier.

I truly appreciated those times I had had with her, and I was glad I had got a chance to know her. Those rather brief moments — and other moments, with others still alive — now "were enough" to make life seem worthwhile, to make wading through all that grey feel worth it.

Undoubtedly, this will sound cheesy to any outsider. But that realization unblocked a lot in me, and opened my life up to so much, both in that moment, and yet to come.

"It is enough"

2011-02-10T09:17:00.001-08:00

I'm going to tell a story or two about (or maybe better said, behind) the song I posted in my last entry. So if hearing such stories takes the mystery/goodness out of music for you, or if the song doesn't do much for you, feel free to move along.

Like the title of that entry said, it's an old song for a friend that died several years ago — though the similarly unexpected death of a friend's younger brother over Christmas has brought it back to mind in a powerful way. Anyways...

Jenny was a lifeguard, but the summer after graduating high school she drowned while swimming in a lake, because of a fit of her just-diagnosed epilepsy. She and I weren't the closest of friends, but we were in music class and "concert band" together, and our senses of humour clicked. Having fun and feeling happy while being at school was an unusual thing for me, nerdy introvert that I was. Not to get too sentimental or philosophic about it (though of course these are the thoughts you think after someone dies), but it seemed like she brought out a 'me' that was fun and funny — a 'me' that rarely saw the light of day. And I think she brought a lot of light and life to many people's lives.

One of the striking things at her funeral was the difference between how the "adults" and the "kids" in her life spoke about her. The adults seemed to have a hard time getting over the lost potential that her death represented, all the things she didn't do: she didn't get to go to university, to become a french teacher like she planned, to become a wife, a mother. Etc. Her peers, other the other hand were content to speak about what she'd done and been, and would continue to be in their hearts and memories.

Some of that, I'm sure, is that we ourselves hadn't had many of those 'adult' experiences yet. But as I thought and felt about it afterward, it seemed to run deeper than that. We didn't see her life in terms of lost potential, or things she didn't get a chance to do. Yes, it was monstrous, unimaginable, and so... so...unfair... that her life was cut short. Especially because she was so special, so well-loved, so full of light and life. But precisely because she was that way, it also was enough. To think otherwise would diminish all she gave. "It is enough" that we knew her for that all-too short time, because we had been given so much in that time.

At least, that's what I thought (and felt, much more importantly).

An old song for a friend who died

2011-01-08T20:15:00.001-08:00

i don't miss cuddling with you
i don't miss your kisses
philosphizing or emotionalizing
(we never did those things)

what i miss is goofing around
collapsing in fits of gigles
attacks of silliness
belonging when i'm with you

good-bye
good-bye, for now
good-bye — pirouette through light
good-bye, for now
good-bye: it is enough.

This is scary-good

2010-12-28T22:17:00.001-08:00

Hopefully it's not too late for one last Christmas song, a spine-tingling and subversive version of Silent Night. Be patient and wait for the new lyrics to show up.

It's not Christmas without Optimus Prime

2010-12-26T19:31:00.001-08:00

These are the sorts of thing me and my brother get up to on Christmas.

Am I an anarchist?

2010-12-20T21:00:00.001-08:00

Building on my characterization of anarchism involving 'a radical rejection of coercion,' last post I tried to show that capitalism functions coercively, in that it tends to be hierarchically-organized. (Not to mention the fact that the ideology of capitalism says that it is a good idea to subject people to the tyranny of efficiency, calculation, and market forces — that this will 'really' be best for them, and society, in the long run).

That said, feudalism and slave-economies are more coercive — and much worse — than capitalism. As that comparison should make clear, coercion comes in many gradations, from the blatant and horrifying, to the incredibly subtle. For another, perhaps overly blunt example, think of the difference between a woman who is forcibly tied up and raped, and one who gives in to a husband, boyfriend, or date because 'he's a man, and they have needs.'

The subtle shades that coercion comes in means that it's probably impossible to rid every interaction, relation, and decision of it. (But that doesn't mean this isn't an ideal worth striving for! In fact, I'm tempted to say the only ideals worth having are impossible ones.)

But anarchism is an impossible ideal, then.

On top of the fact that the word means different things to different people, that's one of the reasons I still hesitate to describe myself as an anarchist — there are so many ways coercion is embedded in many of the institutions, relations, decisions, cultures, and thought-processes that I participate in. Alongside and in spite my best efforts to disentangle myself from coercion, I often compromise, and make my peace with these things. I settle. And will I ever truly stop?

So anarchist? I don't know. But anarchy, anarchism, the never-ending rejection of that coercion, yeah, I believe in that.

Anarchism and Capitalism

2010-12-04T21:14:00.001-08:00

In the last post, I characterized anarchism as involving a radical rejection of coercion. More fully, "Anarchism, as I understand it, says that all our collective interactions, relations, and decision-making should be free of coercion. Or to state it positively, they should be co-operative and voluntary — and I believe by extension, personal and small-scale."

An ideal like this make capitalism... problematic. After all, capitalism — along with most other institutions in our society — is hierarchically-organized. People at the top dictate what people at the bottom do. Most fundamentally, workers sell themselves for 8 hours a day, doing what the owners and bosses want them to do. Not only is this coercive, it is also alienating. People are alienated from their work — they exercise no ownership over it, they are not invested in it, they put little into it because they get little out of it. Since they are alienated from that which they spend the biggest chunk of their lives, time, and energy on, they are alienated from themselves.

Everyone hates work, complains about it, and can't wait until the workday ends and the weekend comes... not because they are lazy, but because 'work' in our culture generally involves doing something you don't want to do, but that you nevertheless feel forced to do.

(And at the same time, strong cultural forces pressure us to be happy with our lot... unhappy people bog down the system... if you're not happy there must be something wrong with you... probably chemically... and we have drugs for that! ... but maybe you're just a failure. When it comes to depression or unhappiness, the collective is never at fault, only the individual. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the alienating society we live in).

Because we can do different kinds of alienating work, there is the illusion of choice and freedom. But it is difficult to avoid the basic equation of 'work = boring, dissatisfying, alienating.' Even people who are lucky enough to end up 'doing what they love' or at least 'doing something worthwhile' (e.g. musicians, social workers, teachers...?) often end up hating their jobs because the institutions involved are coercively-organized. They get forced to do what they love in a way that they would never choose. And there are so many 'extra' things that they have to do, things they don't want to do, that it feels like they never get to the things that they love, the things which attracted them to the profession in the first place.

All this said, exchange need not be coercive. If I make something, or grow it, and you make something, or maybe are willing to offer a service, and we want to trade with one another... then, that's fine! If a group of me and my friends get together, make something, and are willing to exchange it (and if we formalize this, this is called a co-op, a nice alternative to the corporation) then that's fine. If we want to use money to mediate our exchanges... well, that can be fine.

The thing with money is that it is a numerical technology. Like all technology, it might be designed to help us and make our lives easier, but it can easily take control. All too often money subjects humans to the tyranny of numbers and their logic. Instead of humans making choices, numbers do, a mathematic operation does. "What is the lowest number (i.e. what is cheapest)?" The answer to that question determines so many of our decisions.

But we don't have to be determined by the numbers. We can choose to consider more than just economics when we make decisions – we can consider things that can't be measured, things like the environment, social justice, and aesthetics. This is a human way to make choices: to consider multiple factors when making a decision, rather than just one, rather than just money. The problem is that our culture – unlike almost every other culture that has ever existed — tends to value the numbers above all else, and teaches and encourages us to be determined by them. We worship efficiency, economic growth, and the free market. The thing is, in order for the market to be free, we must enslave ourselves.

So while exchange isn't inherently coercive, it nonetheless tends to be coercively-organized in our society. Capitalism, which involves workers selling themselves for part of the day, amounts to what I'm tempted to call 'semi-voluntary and somewhat-limited slavery.' Worse systems could be imagined — feudalism, and race-based slavery please stand up! — but better ones could be too.

Anarchism 101

2010-11-15T20:20:00.001-08:00

Even more than with other words, there can be no definitive understanding of what 'anarchism' is. But what it means to me is a radical rejection of coercion, in all its forms.

This necessarily involves a rejection of violence, because violence is coercive. Masochism aside, physical pain is precisely 'that which we don't want to feel,' and violence causes pain. Violence takes away freedom of choice for those who suffer it, coercively overriding and ignoring their desires, starting with their desire not to suffer pain. Of course, the coercion of violence usually extends far beyond simply inflicting pain. The threat, example, or experience of the pain that violence causes generally exists in order to force people to do the will of the violent. Sometimes the violent settle for damaging and killing those in their way, so that they can they do as they please. In any case, violence says to its victim 'I know better than you, and I have a right to force you to do — or at least suffer — what I want.'

Also, 'a radical rejection of coercion' goes beyond just promoting a stateless society — though that's certainly part of it too. Promoting coercion-free politics would be a better way of putting it, as long as politics is understood as embracing much more than 'the words and actions of rulers and would-be rulers of the state' (be they democratically-elected or not). That might be what we usually mean by 'politics' in the modern West, but that's a bit silly because, for one thing, hunter-gatherers clearly have politics too. (And by the way, 'economy' does not just equal 'money' because hunter-gatherers and mostly-cash-free agrarian societies have economies too).

Really, 'politics' (anthropologically, and as I'm using it) just refers to 'collective decision-making' — in other words 'how groups of people decide to do stuff,' including most importantly, how they decide to live alongside one another.

Anarchism as I understand it, then, says that all our collective interactions, relations, and decision-making, should be free of coercion. Or to state it positively, they should be co-operative and voluntary, and I believe by extension, personal and small-scale.

Speaking of the media (G20 meditations continue)

2010-09-29T07:02:00.001-07:00

I found it interesting how the media suddenly had a new and scary name to call the violent protestors. No longer the 'anti-globalization' protesters of the Battle for Seattle or other WTO/G8/G20 protests, this time they were labelled 'anarchists.' And it was taken for granted that we knew what anarchism is, and that the images we saw — fire, smashed glass, violence — were what anarchists did.

Sigh. One more word that means a lot to me ruined in the popular mind.

More meditations from a sheep

2010-09-24T21:57:00.001-07:00

Of course, being a sheep is exactly what Jesus asked the people of first-century Palestine to be. "Turn the other cheek, do not resist an evildoer, do good to those who mistreat you." Etc.

But those were not moral platitudes delivered into a political void. Palestine (or Judea, as it was then known) was an occupied territory, brutally conquered and kept subject by an oppressive, violently exploitative, and very effective empire. The more you learn about Roman rule at the time, the harder it becomes to resist the idea that violent rebellion might just have been justified.

But Jesus asked them to do the opposite, to refuse to answer violence and injustice with more of the same. (In fact, more than that, he asked them to respond with love).

Why did he do this?

I think that, first of all (and for brevity's sake it will be the only point for today), he knew that violence was an ineffective form of resistance.

History proves this pretty definitively. Jewish zealots in Palestine did rebel violently and in large numbers on three separate occasions (4 BCE at the death of Herod the Great, 66-73 CE resulting in the destruction of the Temple, 132-135 CE leading to the expulsion of the surviving Jews from Jerusalem and Judea).

So they were slaughtered every time. With the weight of the state and a huge empire on their side, the Romans had all the power, resources, people, and weapons.

(Incidentally, John Dominic Crossan points out — in God and Empire, a book I highly recommend — that the centre of the Judean rebellions in 4 BCE was the city of Sepphoris, which is only 4 miles from Jesus' hometown of Nazareth. With Jesus' birth also generally dated around 4 BCE, he probably would have grown up hearing about the rebellion and resulting massacres.)

* * *

And of course, though the situation was much less dramatic and life-or-death, the same proved to be true of the Toronto G8/G20 protests.

Being violent played perfectly into the hands of the authorities. For many mesmerized by media images of shops smashed and cars burned, the violence of a few black bloc protesters justified the billion-dollar security operation that militarized Toronto's downtown — not to mention the brutalization of thousands of peaceful protesters.

Without the violence, there might have been a serious public discussion about why the government and its security forces felt a need to go so overboard. Instead, every broken window pane and every shot of masked protesters justified the expense, the paranoia, and the overbearing response of the security forces.

Or at least it did so in the minds of many — and far beyond those who you'd expect (e.g. conservative hawks). I've talked to a relative that marched in peace and anti-government demonstrations in the '60s who was mesmerized by television coverage of the protests, and subsequently felt the expense and actions of the security forces were entirely justified given 'what they were up against.'

(Nevermind that the security forces response was entirely disproportionate. Nevermind that the hooligans did relatively little damage — compared with, say, the costs businesses bore as a result of having the downtown militarized and effectively shut down. Nevermind that the media, through its fascination with the sensational and visually dramatic, magnified what were basically small and incidental moments.)

Meditations of a Sheep (G20 continued, still)

2010-08-19T14:54:00.001-07:00

It was a visceral and still-disturbing experience being kettled by riot police at a G20 protest last month (scroll down a few entries for that story).

(This video dos a good job of capturing the intensity, though I'm glad to say our experience wasn't as long-term, and that eventually most of us were allowed to leave.)

It's taken me a long time to be put a name to this feeling... but it felt, I imagine, a lot like being part of a flock of sheep, as it is hunted by a pack of wolves.

We were unarmed and nonviolent (and intimidated, perhaps?), and they could pick us off at will. All that we could do is crowd closer to one another, and as far as we could from them. (Not that that would do much good – they could have had any of us anytime they wanted).

* * *

And so, what about being violent in self-defence? In a lot of ways, especially in retrospect, it felt wrong that when they violently attacked some of us, we did nothing.

We were sheep.

And the girl who stood beside me, who was violently arrested for peacfully protesting? Why should she be non-violent next time? She refused to be violent, in fact was a vocal part of a protest denouncing earlier violence, and she got beaten and arrested by the police. Next time why not throw rocks at windows, or even at the police?

What are they going to do, arrest her? Beat her up?

* * *

This is why the G20 "security" forces inability to discriminate is so stupid, purely from a tactical perspective. They treated nonviolent protestors, passerbys, reporters, etc. like criminals – even denying them many of the rights criminals get. That's a sure-fire way to radicalize thousands of people, and destroy their trust in police and the system of governance.

You set such a great example. You don't discriminate when fighting for your cause, so why should we?

A monopoly on violence (G20 continued)

2010-08-03T22:04:00.001-07:00

One of the defining characteristics of the state is that it has a monopoly on violence, or at least legal violence. But in a democracy, that power is supposed to be subject to all sorts of legal limitations, (and ultimately, the will of the people). But in this case, police officers and decision-makers that are supposed to uphold, enact, and enforce the law used that power, that monopoly on violence, quite ruthlessly, with little regard for the law (see below).

How are we supposed to trust them, those of who were on the streets of Toronto for that week?

Saying that it was an exceptional situation doesn't cut it. The whole point of 'the law' is that it is impartial and always applies. Rights aren't something you can just take away when they're inconvenient or even when you feel threatened.

In theory, the law gives police adequate powers to defend the public, public officials, and public property – while balancing these powers with rights like freedom of speech, freedom from arbitary police power, the rights of suspects and the accused, etc. The whole point of common law is that that balance has emerged over time – it is the product of hundreds of years of legislation and court rulings. That means that if it needs changing or tweaking, you get a democratic mandate from the people and modify it!

You don't draft new provisions onto antiquated legislation, plan to publish it after it will be used, then claim that it was never passed. You don't use this new law on the ground as an excuse to arrest and search people miles away, rather than 5 metres, from the fence. You don't disapear the charges of the only person formally charged under the act because he's going to (understandably) challenge its very constitutionality!

For a few days the people with power, the people with guns and armour got to change the rules.

In Canada, we think we're better than everyone else. Better than the States, that's for sure, to say nothing of all those people overseas. We're nice. We like to think we're nice. We like to pretend everyone's middle-class. We have the rule of law, human rights; we're progressive and liberal, and our military is just for peacekeeping. (The latter is a totally out-of-date perception but we're still coasting on it). Our government might be a little incompetent and all politicians are blowhards at best and crooks at worst, but it basically means well. Most of all, it is legitimate – that's why we have such a free, comfortable society.

But for a few days in Toronto the threat of violence that underlies our government and society was exposed because a few hoodlums wanted to smash some windows so that they could feel like revolutionaries.

That threat is always there, we just don't see it most of the time.

(Click on the image for a larger version. The original is from Chris Harding's "We The Robots", a beautiful, and sadly defunct comic whose archives is well worth your time.)

Police state (G20 continued)

2010-07-26T21:02:00.001-07:00

Nearly a month has passed since the G20, and I'm still slowly processing it in blog form.

Of course I got off easy (see the two entries below for my relatively unremarkable G20 stories). But many weren't so lucky. People were arrested – sometimes violently – for having a screwdriver in their pocket, for walking home from work, for wearing a black t-shirt. A couple of 17-year old girls were arrested for blowing bubbles. (Can you imagine being their parents during the 12 hours that they were not allowed to phone?)

I don't use the term 'police state' lightly, but that was exactly what they turned downtown Toronto into for almost a week. It was an armed camp with fortifications. I can't explain how creepy it was to move through those normally bustling streets, near deserted, except for heavily armed, black-clad cops everywhere, far outnumbering the civilians.

And anyone within miles of the dowtown area could be subject to arbitrary arrests and searches without a warrant.

The right to be free from arbitrary policy power, arrests, and searches; the right to be presumed innocent; hell, the right to freedom of speech – those are rights that our ancestors fought revolutions and wars for. Good people died for them. They underly our claim to be a free society, to not be an evil totalitarian regime.

This isn't Iran or North Korea. The people who were arrested weren't killed or tortured. They didn't simply disapear for disagreeing with the government. And life in Canada is not normally like it was during the G20.

But what is so scary is how easily so many of the rights disappeared at the slightest stress, at the slightest threat. There were, at most, a few hundred 'Black Bloque' protestors. On their account, the police and the powers that be criminalized tens of thousands of peaceful protestors – not to mention ordinary Torontonians try to go about their business.

For what? For what did they revoke rights, arrest and brutalize peaceful protestors and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives?

Well, the 'Black Bloque' caused some property damage. As far as I can tell they never hurt anyone – never targetted or attacked a person. I am not condoning them or their tactics, but the same can't be said for the security forces, who terrorized and hurt, I think I can say without exagerration, thousands. (Almost a thousand people were arrested, and judging by my experience you didn't have to get arrested to feel intimidated and scared).

The ironic thing is that they did terrorized so many, they spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars on security, they carted in over 10 000 cops from across the country... and from all appearances and first-hand accounts I have had shared with me, they did basically nothing to stop the Black Bloque rampage.

I'm not one for conspirary theories (and I don't really believe the one I'm about to propose) but it almost makes you wonder if the police let the Black Bloque run rampant so that they could justify clamping down. So that they could justify the exorbitant security measures and obscene expense that came with it.

Another story about the G20

2010-07-20T15:07:00.001-07:00

So after almost getting forcefully arrested at the 'bike bloc' protest (see the post below), I had about an hour to kill on my way back through downtown to my workplace.

As I biked, I started thinking about how I had been to two protests and still hadn't even seen the infamous G20 fence. There had been a lot of coverage in the media about this fence (or more properly, fences) which, from the sounds of it, could survive a full military assault involving tanks and bombs. And imagine – a billion dollar security operation employing 14,000 cops so that the leaders are not only 'safe,' but guaranteed to not even see those trying to send them a message. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, not to see any of these decision-makers, not to see the place where they were meeting, but to at least see the fence they erected to separate themselves from everyone else?

So naturally I got stopped by a group of policeman heading down Yonge Street (one of the main drags in Toronto). Pretty soon they were going through my bag. They claimed they could search me without a warrant because I was on 'highway' (for those of you unfamiliar with the city, Yonge Street is no 'highway' under any normal usage of the term). The way they explained it, anyone on a road or sidewalk – or near one – could be subject to search without warrant – which contradicts just about every representation I've ever heard of civil liberties. When I brought up the now infamous 'five metres from the fence' Public Works bill amendment secretly passed by the Ontario cabinet (or maybe 'not passed,' depending on who you ask, now that they're backpeddling), they asked suspiciously why I knew so much about it. (I read about it on the front page of the Toronto Star).

Now, I had two empty dishsoap bottles in my backpack so that I could stop off at an environmental shop on the way home and refill them with detergent. Apparently, such things are suspicious and dangerous weapons! They had a really hard time understand the concept of refilling bottles so as not to waste plastic. One officer came over, swore at me and called me a liar while I was trying to explain it to two others. They confiscated them and a glass iced tea bottle I was using as a water bottle. (They said protesters had been filling bottles with urine and throwing them at police).

I offered to bike away from the fence, if they left me the bottles. They said no, but that they could write me a receipt for my bottles, and I could come collect them at the police station after the G20. (Ah, bureaucracy). They obviously didn't want to, but I said they were inconveniencing me, so I felt like I might as well return the favour.

Of course, then they got to the bike tools in the bottom of my bike bag. (After suffering a lot of break-downs in the space of a year, I started carrying them with me everywhere). I admit my heart sank a little – of course, soon they were speculating about whether I was planning to use them to cut my way through the fence. (How I would do this with a screwdriver, a few wrenches and a patch kit, I don't know).

At this point, one of the officers took pity on me (or got lazy?) and offered to let me keep the tools if I biked away in the opposite direction and didn't come back. And they would keep my bottles, and not give me a receipt.

So I did.

A story about the G20

2010-07-14T17:44:00.001-07:00

So... I went to the Toronto G20 protests a couple of weeks ago. I've never been a protest/activist kid, but I figured I am against pretty much everything the G20 stands for (i.e. unbridled capitalistic and technological development at the expense of humans and the environment). Most of all, I wanted to stand – albeit in a tiny and probably inconsequential way – against what "security" forces were doing to my adopted city. I wanted to say to say I was not afraid, despite the forces of paranoid violence being marshaled in the name of said "security."

(I probably should have been more afraid).

So I went to a march on Friday, and then a Critical Mass-inspired bike protest on Sunday, after the shit had gone down Saturday.

I liked the bike protest. Biking is fun, it was explicitly non-violent, and the participants seemed to be mostly locals. (I admit to having a hard time respecting protest tourists, and when travelling to other cities, people rarely bring along bikes along – they don't fit in duffel bags very well). The police had a much harder time blocking and boxing off a flexible, mobile group of cyclists than they did marchers.

(And they did that quite a bit. It is quasi-understandable that the police would block off streets leading down to the infamous fence, but they also seemed to delight in randomly blocking off legitimate peaceful protesters whenever possible, whichever direction they might be headed.)

Right as we were about to start, some guy got up and said 'there are no leaders of this protest, but if you want to do something violent, please go somewhere else.' Then we tried to get on the road, but the police blocked us off. There was a small gap at the back – not enough police to completely pin us in that far from the fence apparently – and we slowly trickled out, even as police continue to block, harass, and sometimes grab people trying to get onto the road with the rest of the group.

After a few hours, the ride ended at the temporary detention centre. (Strangely, a line of police had channeled us right toward it – though several people within the group had been advocating that as a final destination for some time). We dismounted and chanted various things in support of those inside. Conditions inside were pretty terrible from what I've heard, and people were routinely denied a phone call for over 12 hours – it was again, a tiny thing, but we hoped they might hear us and know that people in the outside world cared.

I ended up on the left edge of the crowd (picture a T intersection with the protesters at the centre, facing the detention centre and its fence). Suddenly a bus pulled up and a bunch of riot cops started getting out on the road to the left of me. They quickly formed up into a line about 15 feet away.

We formed our own line, holding our bikes in front of us. Because I was on the edge of the crowd, to my chagrin, I found myself one of those on the front line. We were chanting 'peaceful protest, peaceful protest' (probably the most common chant the whole ride long).

I couldn't really believe it, but after a couple of minutes of standing there, the riot police started advancing on us shouting 'move.' Those of us right up front nervously edged back a bit, but there really wasn't anywhere to go. (I later learned that lines of riot cops had descended from the two other directions of the intersection – they had us surrounded, with nowhere to go).

As they got close, one riot cop lunged and grabbed the girl beside me, immediately assisted by those beside him. They threw the girl behind the line, separated her from her bike, pinned her to the ground, tied her up with their plastic cuffs, and dragged her away.

That description doesn't really do justice to how brutal and violent they were to her. It seemed like they were hitting her, but I admit to being fairly distracted by the cops that were right there in front of me – about, I thought, to do the same to me.

They grabbed a couple of other people at the same time, and a couple of other people's bikes – I just saw what happened to this girl up close and personal, which is why I'm telling you about it. The line of cops actually stopped advancing as we began yelling 'shame, shame,' but I don't know if those two facts are causally connected.

We sat down. After a while, a cop with some sort of authority came and tried talking to us. He told us it was illegal to sit and stay in one place. Apparently, as long as we kept moving that was ok, but it was 'illegal' to protest by sitting in place. Now remember that they had us surrounded and blocked off – there was no place to go. Some people pointed this out, but nothing seemed to come of it. At one point a couple of 'protesters' walked out of the crowd and got a big handshake and friendly greeting from this head cop; they didn't rejoin those of us sitting down.

More time passed, and more riot cops with huge guns (for tear gas pellets, presumably) started climbing out of armoured vehicles. A lot of us started feeling like it might just be time to move on, and apparently they were now letting people out at the back of the T intersection. I actually had to go back to work in an hour or so – there was a person in wheelchair relying on me to help him eat and go to bed, which had made me a lot less ok with the idea of getting arrested all along.

So I biked away. That wasn't the end of my adventures that day, but that's enough for today's storytime.

Happy Birthday Canada

2010-07-01T13:10:00.001-07:00

O Canada, we are so ashamed of thee.

Well, specifically, of the goons that run 'thee.'

"Gentlemen's" Club?

2010-06-24T21:14:00.001-07:00

I think the word "Gentlemen" in this name is a little like the word "democratic" in a country's name. (If you have to put it in your name, you aren't).

These are the sorts of things I think about as I bike up and down Bloor Street (in Toronto) every day.

Is it possible to write non-cheesy nature poetry?

2010-06-18T20:56:00.001-07:00

Reflection

Tiny birds flit like moths across the surface, skimming over mirror-trees bouncing and bobbing in a breeze which ripples the quiet still of the lake...

hold myself open, don't run.
breathe like a tree.

Then walk back to camp, with brilliant columns of light that stab through the gloom of the canopy, oblivious to the friends singing your name - you missed the soccer game.

Today I move the last of my stuff out of parent's house

2010-06-12T20:03:00.001-07:00

Terrifying and pathetic

2010-05-29T14:04:00.001-07:00

It's worth watching until the end.

The commercialization of Garfield

2010-05-25T18:38:00.001-07:00

I have to admit, I enjoyed Garfield as a kid. You know, before I discovered the delightful genius of Calvin and Hobbes. This is a pretty creepy article in Slate about how Garfield was always a commercial and ad-orientated creation.

It's funny, because when I was a kid I just liked Calvin and Hobbes because they were fun and funny. Then in my late teens I went back and re-read all the books and fell in love all over again for so many other reasons. And I was surprised – but shouldn't have been, I'm sure – to read all the text in the 10th anniversary collection. You know, the parts that I'd skipped through when I was a kid. In it, Bill Watterson talked about the same issues that a lot of the bands I was into at the time would rant about: struggling with a syndicate (i.e. record labels) over issues of artistic freedom and creativity, the ways in which the form has become more and more standardized and commercialized. Etc.

Things are a lot more connected than I knew at the time.

These days I know that it's a lot more than just "art." It's everything... the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the things we do for fun. Our own choices about employment and how we (fail to?) make a living. Is our primary motivation going to be money? Efficiency? Looking good?

Of course, I say this as someone who nearly went on a tour where one of the main factors pushing me to do so – much as I struggled to admit it – was that I really needed money, and knew I could make a fair bit by being part of it. No self-righteous judement here.

Have you see the ads for the new Robin Hood?

2010-05-21T14:34:00.001-07:00

I think this one is going to be dark and gritty.

I mean, as opposed to that other one. You know, the other one with an aging actor trying to revive a flagging career.

Excuses, excuses

2010-05-18T21:21:00.001-07:00

So it's been a long time since I posted anything. I feel like I had pretty good reasons: a series of adventures involving little or no access to computers. Or just little time. Witness:

I ran off to JPUSA in Chicago for three weeks, to see old friends and get re-acquainted with the place.

Once there, I found out Seth Martin, a kindred spirit I met in Portland on the Blessing Tour was playing JPUSA's Easter celebration. He invited me to join the crew for the rest of the tour, so I did. We played messy folk music – sometimes pretty, sometimes screamy-and-stompalongish – in Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

A few highlights of the tour:
-Playing the front porch of the Possibility Alliance, a permaculture farm where the people live electricity-and-gasoline-free lives. They also send out teams of people dressed as superheroes on bikes to do free acts of service in neighbouring communities and states.
-Seeing The Great Confinement live at one of the house shows in Minneapolis. They have yet to even finish up an album, but they should become huge if there's any justice in the world.
-At our two 'standard' shows, refusing to use the proferred stage and amplification, but setting up in the middle of the 'audience,' playing acoustically and having them sing and stomp along, blurring the line between 'performer' and 'audience' just a bit.
-Giving out free seed packets for people to shake along with the music. (And then take home and plant, hopefully).
-Playing our last show in Philadelphia with the Psalters.

And immediately upon returning to Toronto, I biked out with my love to spend a week at an organic farm near Hamilton. The people there only ate locally – mostly stuff they grew themselves. The farmers there strove to (in their words) to 'put themselves out of business' by trying to convince all their urban CSA clients to grow their own food, showing them how to do it, providing seeds, etc. One of the longtime volunteers there lived year round (Canadian -20 degree Celsius winter included) in a teepee, and mostly wore beautiful clothing he had made out of the hides of deers he had hunted.

In the future, posts will not have such a diary/faceborg/'what I did this summer' kind of feel.

Sweet one for a sweet one

2010-03-25T13:53:00.001-07:00

My interpretation of "Such Great Heights." Originally by The Postal Service, though this version owes more to the Iron and Wine one.

Could you have more fun while playing music?

2010-03-04T07:58:00.001-08:00

In through the back door

2010-02-12T01:13:00.001-08:00

This is why musical semiotics is so, so, very fun. Such a brilliant idea to have decided to write an honours essay on it. Is it any wonder it's taken me an extra year?

Figure 5. Shepherd and Wicke's model of sonic signification.
(From Music and Cultural Theory. Mostly pages 152-82, but see especially their diagrams on 165 and 173 )

Why Anthropology?

2010-02-07T20:29:00.001-08:00

"The famous anthropological absorption with the (to us) exotic — Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French Legionnaires — is thus, esseentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us. Looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as so often been claimed, the arbitrariness of human behaviour (there is nothing especially arbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco) but the degree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed. Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (The more I manage to follow what the Moroccans are up to the, the more logical, and the more singular, they seem.) It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity."
-Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books) p.14.

This is why I sometimes tie myself into knots with words

2010-02-05T22:46:00.001-08:00

How can any expression be believable and authentic if it isn't qualified and self-doubting? (Somehow questioning itself, self-undermining...)

This rocks pretty damn hard

2010-02-02T13:15:00.001-08:00

Such a massively gorgeous drum and guitar sound. And sheer fun instead of the dreary seriousness of so much 'hard rock.'

If you want to watch it within the youtube site try:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu6wJveSWRU

Donald's story

2010-01-30T21:41:00.001-08:00

[See the last blog entry for background on this story.]

Donald was a pleasant-looking man, a visible minority in the context of an innercity Chicago shelter (i.e. he was white). He was almost violently inoffensive, in a world where so many are brash and prickly. He spoke little and kept to himself. He was part of the day program (something that involved doing some classes, volunteer work, and frankly, a lot hanging out and watching tv) without ever really being part of it. In fact, he was always there without really being there.

Donald wasn't well. The majority of the men sleeping overnight with us had some sort of problems with mental illness (and many of their addictions amounted to a sort of self-medication), but Donald stood out. It was obvious when you spoke to him. He was always very polite, but his words seemed to come from a distance and cost him some effort.

He didn't really seem able to relate at all to anyone else. He was completely by himself even while surrounded by people, and the complex social system of the shelter and the streets. There was something a little child-like about him, and people looked out for him – partly just by leaving him alone.

During my last few months at the shelter, Donald starting getting worse. He would talk to himself a lot, and smile and laugh. His personal hygiene slipped; his hair stuck up at odd angles.

(It's hard living in a shelter 24 hours a day for weeks and months on end; it is highly stressful being crammed in with so many people, and such a volatile group at that. I can't imagine anyone's mental health doing anything but deteriorating in such a place).

Finally Donald snapped. He went on a loud, profanity-filled rant where he claimed to be Jesus and that he owned the shelter, and threatened to cut everyone's throats. (Threatening people's lives pretty much automatically led to being temporarily banned from the shelter).

My friend and co-worker Scott had spent the most time with Donald, and he did what you are 'supposed' to do in situations like this. He called the police, and filled out a form requesting Donald be placed in 'protective custody' – this is for people that haven't commited a crime (so they can't be arrested), but that are sick enough that they have become a danger to themselves or others.

In theory, this would lead to Donald being mentally evaluated by a professional, which would hopefully lead to him getting some help, even if this involved getting commited.

In a way, this should have been a blessing in surprise. Living at the shelter was not good for Donald, and he needed far more help than we could give him. Now we had something more concrete than 'he's not all there when you talk to him' to tell mental health authorities.

(Yet as you do this, you feel guilty and worry that these mental health authorities won't do him any good, but you have to hope they will).

But the two cops that showed up didn't buy it. They refused to take him into protective custody, or do anything for that matter.

Meanwhile, Donald (understandably) felt hurt and betrayed because we had tried to do this to him. In his own mind he was perfectly fine, and I'm sure he managed to speak quite well and calmly to the police. He was angry with us and determined to leave. Yet all the shelters in town were perpetually full. We tried to track down some next of kin that could come look after him, but he seemed to have no one.

So he left. Would he even be able to survive, to look after himself? As far as I know, no one from the shelter ever saw him again. Scott was almost inconsolable.

Resolution

2010-01-18T21:54:00.001-08:00

Almost exactly six years ago, I started working at an overnight shelter for homeless men run by JPUSA, (Jesus People USA, a Christian commune in inner-city Chicago). In a lot of ways, it still feels like one of the most affecting and defining experiences of my life. And yet, if also feels like I have done nothing with it - even just in terms of talking about it, or even personally assimilating and processing it into my brain and heart. I wrote a long paper about my experience living at JPUSA, (partly, frankly, to record and deal with some of my experiences and memories), and have had a fair number of conversations with people about it, but nothing like that has taken place with the shelter.

It is easy to talk about living communally with five hundred people in an old hotel, apparently, but not about working at a homeless shelter.

I joke, but it's true. (And it's a special band of brothers, those of us that worked there. All of us walk with a limp, is the best way I can think of expressing it.)

The whole thing seems so far out of the frame reference of the rest of my life - and the lives of just about everyone I know - that it seems impossible to do them justice - and by 'them' I don't mean the disembodied abstraction that is a set of experiences, I mean Them, the men whose lives I witnessed and got to be a part of.

But I'm starting to forget. Names are slipping away, and the details of stories are getting fuzzy. The least I can do is bear witness to the pain and tragedy and beauty, more and bigger and blacker than anything I've ever tasted.

Until now I have mostly just bore witness in my head. But I can externalize and objectify, so that these memories of interpretations of experiences and of statements people make about their experiences become a little more concrete than fading electrical signals passed through the network of my brain. Yes, they can become electrical signals passed between networks of computers - and by undergoing this transmogrification they will be subjected to the violent inadequacy of language and communication. But maybe they'll light a spark in another neural net halfway around the world.

Maybe if I write one story a month (this is my resolution - I've never set goals for posting on this blog yet), each an attempt to remember one of the people I met, annd keep doing this until I can't remember anything more... well, maybe by then, I'll know what to do with those memories, how to be faithful, and live something out of them that means something.

(I left in September to go to university. The shelter closed a few months afterwards, a victim of local politics and NIMBY-ism. I don't know where any of the guys are these days, aside from one whom I know died shortly afterward).

It's not enough, but I'm going to start sharing their stories.

Cute

2010-01-03T18:26:00.001-08:00

This was drawn by a friend of a friend. (Click on the image above).
She has a website here, which I would invite you to visit.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T19:13:00.001-08:00

My attempt to capture what I improvised last night.
Obviously, it seemed more fun and funny at the time.

It seems even lamer in writing, but probably even lamer than that is missing the (bad) jokes because you can't make out the "lyrics," so I've transcribed them here just in case:

Happy new year, happy new year, happy new decade.
Happy new year, it's 2010, so where are the flying cars, and talking robots?
I thought this was going to be the future.
Happy new decade,
remember when we'd never heard of facebook, or texting or twitter?
I guess that's progress. (I like flying cars better)
At least we don't have a right-wing extremist
running the most powerful country in the world - now that's progress
(If only we could get rid of Harper - sounds like a good New Year's resolution).

Happy new decade
Remember when we remembered how bad the 80's were?
they couldn't be retro or cool
Happy new year
there are now kids in university
that were born after Aladdin came out
(That's kind of scary)

Hallelujah
We survived another year
without an environmental apocalypse
Let's try to keep that up!

Anyways, happy new year!

Inappropriate Christmas

2009-12-27T13:26:00.001-08:00

One of my and my brother's favourite Christmas traditions is arranging the creche scene (the figurines were handmade by my Grandma and given as a Christmas present long ago).

As you can see, we decided to depict the scene shortly after the shepherds arrived. As the biblical account states, Mary and Joseph didn't consumate their marriage until after Jesus was born (that's a long time to wait on top of the whole waiting 'til marriage thing ;) and here they have commandeered the shepherds as emergency babysittters.

Meanwhile, the wise men have entered the scene. Being quite far-sighted fellows, they're actually able to spot the angel and (at least initially) they pay more attention to it than that spitty poopy thing. (Meanwhile the sheep are all like 'get out of the way of my food!). One of wise men is partiuclarly prescient however, and spots the ghost of Christmas future looming over the whole scene — the giant spirit that will soon overshadow this whole 'babe in a manger' scene.

...

A little later in the night, the angel and the sheep started playing poker while drinking. The results can still be seen here. (Mary and Joseph took their time getting back to that stinky burping creature; the formerly prescient wise man starts wondering what they're up too — 'hey we have some important gifts to give here!)'.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T18:02:00.001-08:00

Here's the least merry of Christmas carols!
Hey... It's not my fault my favourite Christmas carol (I think the most beautiful one, with all due respect to Silent Night) just so happens to be in a minor key and have lyrics full of longing.

So that's my beautiful new ukulele. During the Blessing Tree tour, my old cheapie got broke trying to fix the intonation on it; an anonymous donor gave us money for this beautiful Kala tenor ukulele. $115 US, and I would definitely recommend it. (As 'kittenmildew' put it: "Get a uke! it will change your life for the better.")

The song is based on a medieval chant (Veni, Veni Emmanuel) that dates back as far as the 9th century. 19th century priest and hymn-writer John Mason Neale was the first to translate the text into English and use it as a carol.

There's six or seven verses (more if you count translation variants). I sing the following three (if you can't make out my mutter-y words):

O come, o come Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the son of God appears.

Rejoice, rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, of Israel.

O come thou day-spring, come and cheer
our spirits by thine advent here.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
and death's dark shadow's put to flight

O come, desire of nations bind
all people in one heart and mind.
Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease;
fill the world with heaven's peace

For those who care...
I tuned the ukelele down a half-step to try and bring the melody closer to my vocal range (I need all the help I can get and it probably still isn't enough). If you're interested in learning it, the chords are
Verse - Em Am G Em, G Am D Em, Am G D D7, Em Am D G
Refrain - D Bm Am D Em, G Am Em
(I got them out of internet guitar chord database and modified them a bit).

Photo Album

2009-12-09T21:38:00.001-08:00

We interrupt the boredrom of your regularly-scheduled-text-based musings for a (probably equally boring) spasm of Facebook-like photo posting. (Of course if you have yet to join FaceBorg you do this where you can).

So... this is a few of the places I've been to as we've gone down the West Coast on this tour. Some have been mentioned in the newsy e-mails I've sent out to friends and family.

Here are the wackos I've been touring with.

Here is some shots from the camp at Bowen Island (off the coast of Vancouver), where we held 'band camp' (pre-tour practice) and rolled and dragged logs through hills so they coud become firewood.

This is the ferry ride to Vancouver.

Crossing the mountains into eastern Washington looked like this.

This is right before we dropped into the Columbia River valley (i.e. heading back to the coast in Oregon).

We got visit ranch in (very) northern California, (just across the border from Oregon, near Yreka CA and Mount Shasta). If you went for a walk, you would see things like this.

As the walk continued, Ben got trapped in a Western movie.

We met a horse.

Alex and the horse went for a picnic.

I climbed a big rock and looked around.

Ashton got in touch with an other side... of Bob Dylan.

(Unwittingly, for she's never seen the album cover.)

Crystal (daughter of James Shepherd who co-owns the ranch) and I found some treasures.

All of these photos were taken by Alex. Except for this one, which was taken by a girl name Julie Furbush.

I'm not trying to break your heart

2009-12-07T16:05:00.001-08:00

"Awww. I thought you guys were coming to live here."
-Kid from a housing project in Santa Barbara

2009-12-01T15:07:00.001-08:00

Just stole this from my friend Rachelle's blog.

"We just find it easier to hate a rich man than to love a poor person with our actual resources and energy. Most people who rail against how the mega-corps are exploiting human life try to put a stick in the spokes of the mega-corps rather than trying to meet the urgent needs of the poor that made them willing to exploit themselves as cheap laborers. The "machine" may need to be dismantled, but it needs to be done with caution, because its moving parts are human lives."
-from The Apparent Project; "Haiti Wants Some Sweatshops"

Your songs aren't spiritual enough

2009-11-30T16:57:00.001-08:00

Oh, you wrote a new one? Well the theology is incorrect. (C'mon, don't corrupt this innocent song about Noah and the animals by actually quoting the bible).

Well, it couldn't all be good, I suppose. Now I have personal experience with some of the reasons why so many of my teenage heroes hated living within the world of Christian music.

There are so many of you!

2009-11-30T15:09:00.001-08:00

Dance 'til it hurts!

2009-11-22T13:34:00.001-08:00

Though this doesn't occur in a simplistic or one-to-one ways, musical structure really does reflect social structure — and vice versa. We participated in a concert at an "anti-profit" coffee/community house in Portland last week, and the way the radical/anarchist-y people did music there actually gave me some hope for that movement. At least, in that it confirmed their ability to create some sort of collective way of life that follows a genuinely different logic from our mass-market (post-?) industrialized society. Simply put, they did music a lot like the people on the old field recordings I love, from societies before they get electricity and industrialism. That is, with little separation between "performer" and "audience," people spontaneously jumping onto their instruments to accompany whatever's going on, dancing, and feeling free to join in stomping and clapping and singing and humming, not in perfect unison with the 'leader' but notes and rhythms they pull from the air and from their heads, voices overlapping and interlocking in a diverse unity free from uniformity.

Oh but my poor words and over-intellectualized thoughts fall down and gasp feebly, not able to catch even the barest twinkle of the magic that was the best musical experience of which I've ever been part.

Thanks to all the people at Muddy Waters Community House Nonprofit who will never read this. Thanks for everything, but especially for all the hugs.

New eyes

2009-11-22T00:22:00.001-08:00

I love how playing cardboard drums (and assorted paraphenalia) changes the way I see the world. These days I walk around wondering what things sound like if I hit them, and how they could be used musically. I value — treasure even — things like paper bags and egg cartons, which other people have too many of, and see as only fit for garbage or recycling.

Of course, destroying my "drums" during a performance and throwing the pieces into the crowd is pretty fun too ;)

The Blessing Tree

2009-11-18T11:05:00.001-08:00

We have a new myspace site.

Ego-Deflating

2009-11-14T18:35:00.001-08:00

There's nothing like recording to show you how badly you actually play your songs. It's just plain embarassing how long it can take to just get one full take where all three people don't make a mistake — nevermind play it the way truly great.

The great thing about playing live is that mistakes are always in the past, not haunting you forever. (Plus you can act like a goofball and people love it).

Adding some mulitmedia content

2009-11-13T10:18:00.001-08:00

Pretty sure my main job in this song is just to look ridiculous and a little awkward, but here's a taste of the sort of thing I do these days.

Blessing Tree - Psalm 107

The Beatitudes | MySpace Video

Ashton couldn't join us for the first couple of weeks, so I got to play the toy drum, which is pretty much the best thing ever.

Also, there's a couple of videos on youtube under 'The Blessing Tree' where you can watch me play inaudible bass (the little camera does great at picking up the cardboard drums, but doesn't handle the low-end portion of the sonic spectrum too well). Oh, and also one with an overlong flute solo. (One day when I'm a real boy there will be videos of me on youtube that I don't find embarassing).

Summing up your life in two lines is fun!

2009-11-03T08:45:00.001-08:00

Also a little disquieting.

[Somehow this post never made it out of my drafts folder, back when I wrote it about a month ago.]

A week from now I'll be playing the beatitudes out in BC. One of the performances will be at my friend Ben's home church, and they asked for little two line bios that they could print up in the bulletin.

I wrote out a few, just so I wouldn't get stuck on crafting the 'perfect one.' But then I couldn't decide, and just sent them all to Ben to pick the one he thought was best.

Apparently, I am incapable to describing my life seriously. (My life is a joke!) I present them here for other's amusement.

"Tim studies culture and music at Carleton University in Ottawa, and contemplates becoming a professional student. A few years back, he discovered that once you've learnt enough to play a few instruments poorly, it's not hard to just keep adding more."

"Tim reads too much for his own good, to the point where he has concluded that becoming a professional student might be the only positive contribution he can make to society. He once tried to escape from his pastor's kid upbringing by running away to a Christian commune. "

"Tim studies culture and music at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is still trying to figure out 'this Jesus guy.' " OR "He is still trying to figure out how to wrap his head and heart around Jesus."

"Tim studies culture and music at Carleton University in Ottawa, and plans on being a student forever. He listens to music and reads too much."

[He chose the last one. Not the funniest one, but probably the most 'appropriate' one.]

Inappropriate typos

2009-11-02T16:54:00.001-08:00

(Setting up shows via e-mail can be dangerous).

"We'd love to come perform on your penisula."
"It's wonderful to see all these ideas pooping up."

This is what you look like after rolling logs down the hills of BC

2009-11-02T10:12:00.001-08:00

Attractive, isn't it?

The most noticeable difference about the forests of BC (at least on Bowen Island, and as compared to Ontario) is that there are ferns everywhere. It's kind of like being in Jurassic Park.

Wearing two sweaters and a tuque to bed is adventuresome, but I have to admit I appreciate being back in the 'civilized' world, with central heating.

Riding the train across the country and spending a couple of weeks at a camp whose builings were (mostly) unheated, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the hunter-gatherers — and even European homesteaders — who once lived here. It's kind of amazing they even were able to survive. There is still so much empty space in our country; it's weird how as our population has grown, the countryside has emptied out.

Cd covers

2009-11-01T11:31:00.001-08:00

This is what the Beatitudes cd covers/packaging look like so far. I came up with the folding/cutting 'design' after spending way too much time on youtube looking at impossible cd cover origami. (You can't really see it from the picture, but the back opens up like an envelope). Yayy no plastic! (And only two small tabs of paper waste).

Credits: the lion is by my friend Janet (thanks again). The abstract fire is by Franny and Theo, two twin toddlers Katie (another friend) babysits. The rest are from these notebooks that get handed out at the church I semi-regularly attend, Ecclesiax.

I created a black and white template (of the liner notes, correctly positioned on a standard 8 by 11 sheet of paper), and then pretty pictures can be photocopied or drawn onto it. So we're hoping to continue to come up with new ones, as we come across more adapt-able art. (And a drawn cover is one thing we're always happy to trade a cd for).

Real life conversation, VI

2009-10-22T22:10:00.001-07:00

"I'm so fat, I can't even put on my shoes!"

(Not actually... he'd just eaten a really big meal).

"Canadian Spiritual Activist Summit"

2009-10-22T22:07:00.001-07:00

Being around a bunch of fresh-faced, optimistic, religiously-commited youth is... odd. Disquieting? A little wistful, perhaps.

Rockies through a train

2009-10-19T14:31:00.001-07:00

snow-wrinkled mountains
with black pines inched upon them

So...

2009-10-09T11:58:00.001-07:00

I'm running away to join the circus. Well, actually, I'm running away to BC to meet up with a couple of friends. We're then going to go on a bit of a musical tour, playing the previously-advertised Beatitudes, travelling down the West Coast from BC to California.

Crazy, eh?

So, I might not update this blog very much between now and Christmas. But who knows? If I do, I might even talk about how the 'tour' is going. Though to be honest, this blog has never really been about chronicling what I'm doing, so much as it is a semi-random window into the constant flow of thoughts that run through my head. And I kind of it that way.

If you want to read an ongoing blog about the tour from a completely different perspective than I would ever have, you can head over to my friend Alex's site. (Alex is a lovely person and he helped us record the Beatitudes. He also has his own music; we'll be travelling together and helping each other out, musically and otherwise).

Why men should be free to wear kilts and other kilt-like clothing.

2009-10-09T11:51:00.001-07:00

"We are an international band of men who enjoy the freedom, comfort, pleasure, and masculine appearance of kilts or other male unbifurcated (skirt-like) garments, and who reject the absurd notion that males must always be confined to trousers. We are men in kilts, Utilikilts, and other kilt-like clothing. Our purpose is to liberate men from the "tyranny of trousers" that has been imposed upon us by Western society. We encourage and promote the wearing, acceptance, and availability of kilts and other unbifurcated garments for men.

Unbifurcated garments - including kilts, robes, caftans, sarongs, tunics, and other skirt-like garments - are traditionally male clothing that have been worn by men throughout history. They are far more comfortable and suitable to the male anatomy than trousers, because they don't confine the legs or cramp the male genitals the way that trousers do."

So sayeth Kiltmen.com, and of course you can visit them to read more. Somewhere amidst the silliness, they... have a point.

Real life conversation V

2009-10-05T15:53:00.001-07:00

"The closer you get to a real girl, the less pretty she is. (That's how the fashion industry works)."
-A model

Best thing I ever said?

2009-09-26T08:37:00.001-07:00

I am proud to say this line rolled off my tongue a few years ago:
"Pink Floyd did drugs so you don't have to!"

After a nice conversation with Mike Ryan, I can now bear witness to the fact you can say:
"[Insert techno band here] did drugs so you don't have to!"

Also, in the words of his thesis supervisor, "There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good re-writing."

Something I can bear witness to via the agony that went into my 1-page 'Statement of Interest' for grad school applications. Well, I don't know if the final result is good. But it's better.

Real Life Conversation IV

2009-09-24T19:13:00.001-07:00

"They'll probably just say it's good writing, but I think it's kind of understood in the academy that good writing equals good bullshit."

[After spending hours and hours obsessing over one page of a scholarship application.]

I have no idea what this means but it's awesome

2009-09-23T19:26:00.001-07:00

" WHAT A GLASS SMASHER! LOve it.. gimme the tunes and i'l feed them to the racoons, and they'll be dancing in environmental freindly moonlights." (And the copy-paste picked up her photo without me even trying. Bonus.)
It came from here.
Whoever DOQTRESS is, I am a little too frightened to visit her myspace page.

Introduction to enchantment

2009-09-17T19:44:00.001-07:00

dream fragments like slivers of glass:
getting sucked into my mirrors,
fighting the consequences of capture,
it was like i was the rope holding her and she was untying me

does your hearbeat ever keep you up at night?
i stumble through old wounds
rubbed raw by my tongue, undone by my hope
please still my shaking, runing in tremolos of regret
silence my mind chatter, introduce me to myself
and untie my hobbled heart
leave me
washed fresh, with true-love tears.

haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before?

"sin like you mean it!"
sing like you've seen it
dream like you want it
fall like you can't.
(i am a weak vessel for love
but i promise to leave the candlelight of common sense behind
if you'll venture into the shadows with me
greeting solitude but passing it by
dismissing small fears and insecurities
persisting in these days of incredulity
struggling to live lives bound by love).

you know, Cupid dips his arrows in your eyes
and as i listen to the colours in your voice
the words i say no longer belong to me.
and it's easy to tell who's a friend:
you know your name is safe in their mouth.

Real-Life Quotations III

2009-09-17T18:59:00.001-07:00

"Blue is confident enough to be a dark colour — not like black, which feels like it has something to prove."

Word Games

2009-09-16T18:22:00.001-07:00

Here's one I just made up. Try to make the longest possible sentence by combining band names. No added words allowed, or at least as few as possible.

You're allowed to drop the prefix 'The' from a band name if that will help. Here's my best attempt so far, though I cheated and added the words 'yet' and 'could' to make it work.

"They might be giants at the gates," the obsessed Emperor decided, "but if — as I lay dying among thorns, earth against me, stars in flames — if evil farm children possessed deep purple throbbing gristle, then I could die happy, mayhem overcome.

If you care, here it is with punctuation so you can see the individual band names. I capitalized the beginning of each new band name, and put the added words in caps:

"They might be giants At the gates, " The obsessed Emperor Decided, "BUT If — As i lay dying Among thorns, Earth Against me, Stars In flames — If Evil farm children Possessed Deep purple Throbbing gristle I COULD Die happy, Mayhem Overcome."

You could of course do the same thing with song, album, movie, or book titles. Or thoroughbred horse names! Man, have you watched the Kentucky Derby anytime in the past decade? There are some weirdly named horses out there.

(Speaking of weird, yes, I am aware of what a strange person I am. (Fortunately, the chances of my genes being passed onto the next generation are slim. (Yes, unfortunately, I have yet to meet a lady that accepts compulsive music-dork word games (and I mean compulsive, this definitely stopped me from sleeping one night (not that that takes much)) as some sort of mating ritual. (Though if on the off-chance you happen to be reading this, (oh dream of mine) would you like to get married? (Good, well, then, consider your ability to parse these nested parentheses as something of a litmus test (i.e. please e-mail me if you can actually get through this paragraph without getting a headache.(And if it actually makes you smile, let's just skip the ceremony and elope, eh?))))))).

Hey if you can't amuse yourself... I don't actually know how to finish that sentence. I'm going to bed.

Real-Life Quotations II

2009-09-15T13:11:00.001-07:00

"I just kind of tried to hide, except I was just sitting there."

2009-09-03T20:48:00.001-07:00

It's about rape. The play that I excerpted in that last post. If you didn't get it. (Sometimes I wonder how obvious it is).

No and other ambiguous words

2009-09-02T17:07:00.001-07:00

Waiter: Would you like some coffee?
Woman: Yes, please.
Waiter: Just say when. (Starts to pour).
Woman: There. (He keeps pouring.) That's fine. (He still pours.) Stop! (She grabs the pot; there is coffee everywhere.) What are you doing? I said stop.
Waiter: Yes ma'am.
Woman: Well, why didn't you stop pouring?
Waiter: Oh, I wasn't sure you meant it.
Woman: Look, of course I meant it! I have coffee all over my lap! You nearly burned me!
Waiter: Forgive me, ma'am, but you certainly looked thirsty. I thought you wanted more.
Woman: But--
Waiter: And you must admit, you did let me start to pour.
Woman: Well, of course I did. I wanted some coffee.
Waiter: See there you go. A perfectly honest mistake.
_______________________________________
Excerpt from the play Until Someone Wakes Up, written by Carolyn Levy and a group of her students.

Oh, Existentialism!

2009-08-29T13:03:00.001-07:00

A Fragment from Robert Bretall's "Introduction" to A Kierkegaard Anthology.

"It is impossible to reach an absolute beginning, and there is no such thing as 'presuppositionless thought.' The man who pretends that his view of life is determined by sheer reason is both tiresome and unperceptive (Kirkegaard found him essentially comic): he fails to grasp the elementary fact that he is not a pure thinker, but an existing individual.
To one who has chosen Christ, says Kirkegaard, "the only possible objection would be: but you might possibly have been saved in another way. To that he cannot answer. It is as though one were to say to some one in love, yes, but you might have fallen in love with another girl: to which he would have to answer: there is no answer to that, for I only know that she is my love."

[Please pardon all the male pronouns; it was a different time. The quote's from p. xx-xxi, and I read it in the 1946 Princeton University Press edition.]

All or nothing

2009-08-24T19:24:00.001-07:00

In the youth group I grew up in, there was a lot of hand-wringing over that fact that so many teenagers grew up, went away to university, and 'lost their faith.'

Speaking as someone who's been through that, I'd like to point out that when we 'accepted Jesus into our hearts' as kids, we didn't just get Jesus. We were handed a whole huge set of cultural-ethical-religious-aesthetic-philosophic-doctrinal-'scientific' presuppositions. And each and every one was represented as somehow being 'God's Word,' and 'grounded in the inerrant Bible.' We were made to feel that you could not be a Christian without swallowing the whole thing. All the moral rules. All the theological/philosophic/'scientific'/etc. positions.

(Many of whom, frankly, are based on debatable interpretations of scripture. Look, almost every interpretation of scripture is debatable. It is just not possible to establish what 'God's word' says, definitively for all time).

The problem, then, is that if any part of that comes under attack — as it is almost bound to do in an environment like university — and we lose faith in that part, it's easy for it to become an 'all-or-nothing' thing. Because that's what we were taught! All or nothing.

So because some of us can no longer buy creationism, or innerrancy, or the idea that Christianity is 'the only way,' (etc.)... or because we don't see the harm in having safe sex with people we love, or gay marriage, or drinking or swearing, (etc.)... there are so many individual things that can go wrong, so many things we could reject... we walk away from the faith altogether, usually ignorant of the fact that there are other ways of being Christian, other ways of loving God.

That's sad. It's not sad that we walked away from a very narrow, particular interpretation of Christianity, grounded in the very specific moment in history, and very specific political and cultural movement. It's sad that we thought that was the only option where we could still call ourselves followers of Christ.

Strategic Ignorance (Being read by the Bible)

2009-08-14T20:34:00.001-07:00

I was talking to an earnest young lady the other day who informed me that her church only does what's in the Bible. I didn't have the heart to argue with her. But there was so much I could have said. Really? Do you meet in people's homes instead of owning a church building? Do you have only lay unpaid leaders? Is your communion a full meal? Does every member that comes to service contribute something (a song, a 'word,' a verse)? Because if you don't, you're failing to do what they did in the New Testament.

Last post I talked about the need to not just pick and choose in a facile way which parts of the Bible to believe in, and which to ignore. Super-important. Yet I think us Christians need to be honest and recognize that we all do this, to a degree. No one believes in and puts the whole Bible into practice, certainly not in any kind of literal way. We all ignore parts of it.

We don't build railings around the edge of all our roofs, or weave tassels into the corners of our clothing. Most of us guys cut our sideburns and trim our beards, and most of us gals have worn 'man's clothing' at some point. We don't stone adulterers. Nor make a widow with no children marry her brother-in-law. We mix different materials together in the clothing we wear. We're not really into the whole 'slaves obey your masters' thing anymore. We don't gouge our eyes out or cut our hand off if they 'cause us to sin.' We rarely greet each other with a kiss. Few of us prohibit women from speaking in church, or force them to wear a head-covering when they do.

When it comes to the Bible, there is always picking and choosing, emphasizing, and de-emphasizing. There is always interpretation involved in the way we read the Bible. The question then, is not whether we do this, but how. This is what Brian McClaren meant when he said that we shouldn't just read the Bible, we should let the Bible read us, I think.

The way we read the Bible reveals a lot about our hearts.
What passages or themes do we see as key? ('Key' both in the sense of important, and something we use to unlock the meaning of parts we see as less central or more mysterious). What parts do we ignore, not talk about much, de-emphasize? Which parts make us uncomfortable or nervous, make us wish they weren't there? Which do we have a hard time explaining or understanding? Which ones do we strive to apply? Which do we metaphorize, and which do we tend to treat literally? Which ones do we relativize by talking about the differences in cultural context? Which do we cling to, are we unable to let go of, and call people 'unchristian' for not following?

And what does that say about us?

On the continued worth and relevance of the Bible (for Christians)

2009-08-11T20:15:00.001-07:00

Further to the last post...

I do still think the Bible is important, and that a major part of Christian life should involve struggling with it deeply, not just picking and choosing in a facile way which parts to believe in, and which to reject. Religion shouldn't just be whatever we want it to be; we shouldn't make God in our image. If our beliefs are just 'all about me' what's the point? It's worth aligning oneself with a living tradition, and taking its ideas seriously — including some ideas that we might otherwise dismiss as crazy or just plain wrong without really thinking about it. (Assuming, that is, that some of the central ideas also really resonate with you — for me, that would be Christian ideas like 'love as the only law' and 'God becoming human in order to be with us'). I think doing so can be good for us in very deep ways. We're such a self-driven, radically individual culture (and then we wonder why we feel cut off, alienated, and lonely). We're so sure we're so much wiser than the people of the past — the idea that 'newer is better' is so ingrained in us. Engaging thoughtfully with a living tradition might just broaden us, and leave us a little less tightly bound to our culture and ego.

To step back for a second, one of the things that keeps with me obsessed with reading and learning in general is the fact that... no matter what I'm thinking or struggling with, there's people much smarter and better than me who have thought and struggled with it too... and written good books about it! Not to say that reading a book is a substitute for doing your own thinking and struggling, but it can help! It can help you in your own thinking and struggling. So in our struggles with idea of a living loving mysterious God — with the idea of ultimate Goodness as a personal being — and with the reality of living with and reflecting that God... there's worth in reading the writings of others who who have done the same. Especially those who were among the first to think and experience such things, and whose writings have even encouraged countless others who have come after them.

(The Bible's been beta-tested to death, my friends. This reminds me of the best explanation I've ever heard for why the four gospels are part of the canon, and not others that were also written in roughly the same period. Simply put, the early believers found that the Jesus they found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John corresponded best to the Jesus that had been preached to them and that they found at work in their own lives. The Jesus of the gospels was the Jesus who had changed them.)¹

You know, there's something powerful and unique about the origins. There's a life and energy to an original genre-launching artistic expression that is lost when that genre is established. Do something powerful and fresh and there's bound to be copyers. But you can never copy that originary power because part of made that origin powerful was that it was not a copy, that at the time, no one had done anything quite like it.

I think there's a difference between being a copyer... and being a follower, though. Real punks don't sound like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. But they might still deserve the name 'punk.'

Being true to an origin means grasping it creatively, or perhaps being grasped creatively by that origin.

The letter kills, but the spirit brings life, as the good book says. Words on a page are dead, even in that good book, and imperfect — at the least, imperfect simply by virtue of being a manifestation of human language. (Language can't perfectly describe, capture, or represent... anything, much less God!) But the spirit can bring those black marks on paper alive,² so they do actually become the Word of God for us. So they become truth, or maybe even Truth, for us, for a little while. (The evidence of Truth is always that it changes our lives...)

But it doesn't just have to be the good book. It can also be a movie, a song (by a secular band even!), a conversation with a friend, a tree. This might sound bizarre, but when I was a teen and a friend of mine died, the movie The Crow 'ministered' to me a lot more than my youth group did.

I think the problem is that when it comes to the Bible it becomes such a 'all or nothing' kind of thing for so many Christians. More about that next time.

^{1. There's also the fact that the four gospels tend to be some of the earliest narratives of the life of Jesus. But a notable exception like the Gospel According to Thomas is a good example of the principle I'm explaining. While in agreement with a fair bit from Mark and Luke, that gospel also shows things like Jesus teaching that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, a woman must become a man. (How? Uh...spiritually, of course. Whatever that means. Don't ask questions!) That's not the Jesus I feel at work in my life, and I think even Christians living in the context of patriarchal Roman/Jewish culture felt the same way.
2. I offer a longwinded explanation of why 'spirit' and 'alive' are synonymous , or to set the background even more thoroughly, here.}

Burn it down and start again

2009-08-11T17:25:00.001-07:00

Alright, it's taken me five years to figure this out. No wait -- seven? Ten? A lifetime? Anyways, I think I finally figured it out. (But it wasn't even me... I just stole ideas from others, really -- see the footnotes at the bottom of this entry).¹I think the Word of God is a person, not a book.² (As the book itself says). And to ascribe perfection to anything other than God is a form of idolatry.³ (Doctrine of innerrancy, I'm looking at you).

It seems to me that modern Christian theology of a conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist bent has elevated the Bible to the position of '4th member' of the Trinity, if that were possible . Their creed might as well be "I believe in the Father, Son, Holy Ghost... and Bible." (i.e. the Bible as the inerrant Word of God -- like I said, I think that position is already occupied by 2nd person of the Trinity).

More tomorrow.

1. If you display the following symptom -- an urge to insert footnotes into even your blog entries -- go see your doctor ASAP, because you have officially become infected with the spirit of academia. Generally fatal and incurable, this condition can at least be treated so as to reduce suffering. Whatever you do, do NOT keep typing.
2. I stole this idea from Karl Barth.
3. I stole this from some guy on youtube.

Badanistrax and the Zombies of the Four Winds

2009-08-11T08:20:00.001-07:00

As you have picked up, I kind of like to make fun of D&D, (though I probably have no right, considering the incredibly dorky things I'm involved in). I've certainly teased my brother over his D&D obsession for a long time. But allow me to toot his horn a little -- that obsession finally paid off! A D&D adventure he has written is being published on-line. At this point, the adventure is free to download, they're soliciting feedback, and the plan is for it to eventually be collected in a book. Also, an article he's written on "Places of Myth and Magic" will be published in... some D&D magazine... um, I'll get back to you when I get more details from him. Anyways, I'm very proud of my little brother, and if you're the D&D playing type, you should check out his adventure!

While I'm promoting Kitz family members, I should really point out that my dad has his own website. He's got a novel, a kid's book, and a new book on the Psalms that has just came out. He also has does Bible-based dramas that are a nice alternative to your usual Sunday-morning fare. And of course you can find out about all of this stuff on his website.

Oh, what the heck. While I'm at it, you can now listen to some music I've played on-line. My friend Ben set the Beatitudes to music, and I and some other friends played along. It's a bit of a rough recording, and I'm selfish enough (and enough of a perfectionist) to wish some of the instruments I played would have found a better balance in the mix, but... Trust me, the songs are very tasty treats for your ears, and I am happy that we recorded the music the way we did (i.e. in live takes, gathered around one microphone). And you can listen to an instrumental piece I wrote for guitar here.

Best pick-up line ever!

2009-08-03T21:48:00.001-07:00

"My mother and my psychologist both think I should ask you out."

Real-Life Quotations

2009-07-28T12:06:00.001-07:00

"I decided the rice was okay since there was only two bugs. They were really little bugs!"

xkcd rocks

2009-07-28T09:40:00.001-07:00

I Dare You! Christianity and Celibacy

2009-07-27T21:44:00.001-07:00

There's an interesting thread on Christianity and Sexuality going on at Empire Remixed. (Here, here, and here). Basically, they're saying "hey guys and gals — i.e. other Christians — let's talk about sexuality in an open-minded way." They're very articulate, poetic, and heartfelt in saying this, but yes, that is what it boils down to. This message might sound pretty obvious, but really given Christianity's fraught relationship with sexuality... it's both necessary and worth applauding. (Though it's not like they are the only ones saying this kind of stuff these days — I'm just saying the more, the better).

But I'm going to be a little more aggressive, and throw down the gauntlet to evangelicals. (A Christian tradition I was raised in and identified with for most of my life, so I probably have a little aggression to get out my system here. Probably none of them actually read this blog — really, no one actually reads this blog — so I might as well be talking to myself. But, hey, it's soothing for me to post these ranting rambling on the Interconnect, and we should all support the admirable project of maintaining my sanity).

Dear evangelicals: Where in the Bible does it say not to have sex before marriage? Where exactly is that commandment? And no, vague references to 'sexual immorality' do not count. (One has to define what im/morality is first!). And neither do proscriptions against adultery, because, as anyone with a dictionary knows, adultery refers to people that are married banging people that they aren't married to.

Look, it's definitely possible to make a sound Biblical argument(s) for pre-marriage celibacy. Normally, evangelicals constantly quote chapter and verse in support of what they are saying, but strangely when it comes to sex before marriage... they don't. They don't make this argument. I was hit with a lot of 'chastity propaganda' growing up, and I never heard a good exposition of the relevant passages, in the light of the over-arching themes of the Bible.

Two reasons, I think.
1) There is no verse that says 'don't have sex before marriage.' I've read every word in the Bible, and it's just not there folks. There's implications, there's principles that could be applied to this situation based on other instructions regarding sex, but the Bible never clearly and un-ambiguously states 'don't have sex before marriage.'

2) If you tried to explain to teens why Christians shouldn't have sex before marriage, and back it up with a solid biblical reasoning... They might realize that this is an argument and that it involves a fair amount of interpretation. They might realize that you could also argue the opposite. (Yes, it's also definitely possible to make a sound Biblical argument — I think — for relaxing the proscription against sex before marriage that the Victorian Age saddled us with. I'm not saying this is a better argument or interpretation — I really don't know — I'm just saying it's possible). In other words, they would be thinking. And everyone knows that if teens actually start thinking and making their own decisions about whether God wants them to be celebate... well, clearly, we will be swept by a cascade of teen sex, abortions, pregnancies, our nation will descend into apostasy, be overcome by terrorists, run by liberals, and fall into the gaping maw of the very pit of hell.

Ok, I'm being silly. (I know you don't actually believe that. Right?) Please hear the teasing tone in my voice as I'm writing this.

And please pardon my inflamatory (ha! that's a pun!) tendencies — I do respect the viewpoint and commitment of those who are pursuing a celibate lifestyle before marriage. Going against the grain of our societal system and its unhealthy obsession with sex, and ways of dealing with it, is admirable in itself. And that's a far from easy path. But please. Let's be open about this stuff. Let's talk. Let's think. Let's not reflexively consign each other to the nether regions of 'sin,' 'heresy,' and 'un-Christian behaviour.'

I'm just stating the obvious here.