Culture

Art for Earth’s Sake: Jackie Brookner’s Biosculptures

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“Fifteen years ago, I couldn’t convince people there was a water problem. Now things are different in a good way in that people are more aware that there is a problem, and in a bad way in that the problem is so much more dire.” — Jackie Brookner
Jackie Brookner is a revolutionary among revolutionaries. All environmental art is inherently revolutionary in that it challenges viewers directly to rethink the ways they interact with nature and to take ownership, for better or worse, of the ways they affect and alter the ecosystem. Brookner’s Biosculptures–living works of art whose porous surfaces are inhabited by carefully selected organisms whose job it is in nature to clean and filter the toxins out of aquatic ecosystems–raise the bar by presenting that challenge not only to viewers but to the environment itself.

Buddhism

How to Reclaim Christmas, Chanukah, and Other Holidays

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Red-and-white striped poles spring up in the vacant lot on my block every year, even before I’ve fully digested Thanksgiving dinner. Topped by floodlights, these oversized candy canes tower over the neighborhood, a blinding reminder that Christmas is coming. Next time I check, the tree sellers will have finished setting up shop there, erecting their bristling forest of dead pines under the dazzling lights. Paired with the blitz of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” ads that tend to flood my inbox and mailbox, this surreal invasion of my neighborhood always makes me feel like Christmas is breathing down my neck. How did the commemoration of a homeless baby’s birth turn into this garish and materialistic extravaganza?

Culture

Escapist Movies, Education, CA Bankruptcy, Copenhagen…

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To all American readers: I trust you had a fine Thanksgiving. Our son was home and we did the nuclear family thing and went to two fun movies that we all three enjoyed a bunch: “Pirate Radio,” about the radio station I used to listen to at high school in England, and “2012,” which you wouldn’t think would be fun as it involves the death of almost all life on earth, but it’s so fantastic and unrealistic while being brilliantly presented and curiously full of humanity (though unforgivably as much a male-run world as that of Pirate Radio without any historical excuse for it), that we just sat back and lived through the roller coaster ride. Back in reality, if I was blogging today, which I’m not, being about to go off with the family to do a token soup kitchen stint and then put the lad on his plane back to college in LA, I might have mentioned this beautifully written article about the poverty-stricken state of education in California, by a woman who teaches in a rich school and a poor school simultaneously, or this about the cost of pre-school ($12,000 to $20,000) in San Francisco or this about a school for dropouts that works, run by a convicted bank robber and a former methamphetamine user. The wider story to the recent student sit ins at Cal State schools protesting firings of low income workers and huge increases in student fees is that California, which once had the best financed education in the country now has almost the worst. It all goes back to a citizen revolt against property taxes, Prop 13, passed in 1978, and it’s taken this long for it to bankrupt the state and there are many more bills to pay arising from the high cost of inadequate educations for low income Californians.

Culture

Nothing Is Wasted: The Art of Aurora Robson

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“The forms in my work are derivative of nightmares I had when I was a child. My fodder is junk mail, litter, waste, and nightmares. My job is to transform these things into art.” — Aurora Robson
When something terrible happens, it might someday somehow be transformed into something less terrible — this is the personal belief to which I most stubbornly cling. This isn’t idealism.

Christianity

Thanks for the Storytellers

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I loved the comments at yesterday’s post “What are YOU grateful for?” On Sunday I was thinking about how many things I have to be grateful for, and wondering which I would choose to mention if I wrote a gratitude post every day until Thanksgiving. Tony Roeber’s “I am grateful just for being alive and breathing…” has it all in a sentence. Jason Hamza van Boom’s items are wonderfully eclectic and specific.

Culture

So you want to be a new atheist

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This week at The Immanent Frame, Professor Kathryn Lofton comments on the millennial masculinism of the new atheists:
If you want to be a New Atheist, you are worried a lot. You are worried about the Bible and the Koran, about Talibans and new Inquisitions, about Jerry Falwell and, even more insidiously, Mother Teresa. You’re worried about the candy-covered comforts of hegemony dressed as salvation and you’re worried about mystical communion alone on a countryside ramble. You are worried about belief and practice and leadership and laity. “From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity,” a New Yorker review of Hitchens explained, and “those who would apologize for any of its forms […] are helping to sustain the whole.”

Culture

Dispatches from the Front Line: The War on Drugs

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If the war on drugs needed a spokesperson, it could hardly do better than select Chico Marx in Duck Soup, saying “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Sadly for the drug war effort, increasing numbers of both people and governments are starting to believe their own eyes. And what they see is that the war has been futile and counterproductive, causing over half the incarcerations in the US, with no measurable decrease in the amount of drugs consumed. But the war fights back, shooting messengers who speak truth to power. It’s enough to make you reach for a ….

Christianity

Launching my blog posts: A Sufi Look at Genesis, with a Tribute to King James

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When a couple gets married, they traditionally have a wedding. When a child is born, people usually throw some kind of celebration. When a ship sets out on its maiden voyage, it is customary to break a champagne bottle against its bow. A position as a blogger is, of course, nothing compared to those things. What are the opinions of one pundit, compared to a marriage, a new human life, or the ocean-crossing journeys of a ship?