Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/149/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
I love reading emails from the GoddessScholars list serve. This group of women includes some of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to the divine feminine. The core members — out of several hundred women — are scholars, but the e-list contains artists, musicians, story-tellers, and ritualists as well. Reading their posts, I discover what’s new in the “Goddess Sphere.” I discover where the current controversies lie.
Someone told me they found Tikkun Daily confusing last week. People usually tell me it’s a beautiful site, so I wanted to know more from her. I took her on a quick tour of the page — the posts, how to follow one contributor by clicking on their byline so all their posts come up, the photos of contributors on the home page, the art gallery, and the links at top right to the magazine articles. I didn’t even get to the themes you can click on in the “tag cloud” in the right hand column (larger words mean more mentions of the word in the tags that we bloggers add to our posts) or other goodies. She said she thought it looked fine and it had probably been her ADD that had made it hard to focus long enough to get it.
All fifty states are buzzing with news about the $4.35 billion in federal education grants now available for school improvement initiatives. The Obama administration released the final rules for its Race to the Top competition Wednesday, outlining how states can prove themselves worthy of the grant money. States that experiment with charter schools, track student gains over time, use standardized tests to evaluate teachers, and overhaul struggling schools by dismissing teachers en masse are poised to rake in the most money. California and Wisconsin have already sought to become more competitive by changing their laws to allow teacher pay to be linked to student test scores. It’s great that our executive branch is finally funneling some money toward education — what a welcome change from the last administration!
Renate Stendhal has written a fascinating and moving article in Scene4 magazine this month about the Stumbling Stones — cobblestone memorials — that Germans have individually payed to have installed outside the homes from which people were taken by the Nazis. On a trip to Hamburg, looking for the house where she once lived, she found one of these stones. It read:
Here lived Olga Misch, born Heller. Year of birth 1880. Deported in 1942.
“I feel that it’s irresponsible to beat the drums of revolution if you’re only half-informed.” — Christopher Reiger
A small sample of the images of the natural world, or rather the destruction of the natural world, gracing the walls of art spaces today feel like warnings being shouted in hopes that disaster might yet be averted. But so many others appear to reflect cynicism and celebration of cruelty’s surprising beauty, merely revealing how aesthetically interesting it can be to explore the narrative of impending ecological destruction and the doomed existence of animal and plant life. It is a bother to me that I cannot usually decide which is which, or how to feel about either. The recent work of Christopher Reiger is an exception.
“The fun of the story for us,” say the Coen Brothers, in their gloss on A Serious Man, “was inventing new ways to torture Larry.” He’s the only nice person in the film, and if torturing nice people is your idea of a good time, this might be the film you’re searching for. Or if you have always wondered what self-hating Jews really look like, here’s a matched set of brothers to demonstrate. It’s a natural phase to go through as a child, that when your life is miserable, you take out your toys and torture them. But by the time you’re in your fifties, surely it’s time to move on.
This is a long post, occasioned by looking at the lack of progressive influence nationally, and by talks with social change leaders locally. Can we agree we need more social change leaders today? We may be the leaders we have been waiting for — it’s a good democratic idea and a challenge to each of us. But if I had no other evidence, just the number of times I have heard that phrase in the last few years tells me that we are all feeling the lack of leaders. Note: although we progressives may be somewhat OK with the word ‘leaders’ we may not feel so comfortable with the word ‘followers.’
I’m not sure how many people realize that we have a weekly art exhibit on Tikkun Daily. Our goal is to find and display art that in some way can lift our lives as we struggle to heal and repair ourselves and our world. That opens a huge field of possible artists and types of art. And naturally one person’s tonic is another’s “huh?” But the search itself is fun and energizing for us here, and we welcome your ideas and comments, which you can put on the exhibit pages on our art gallery (easily found on the navigation bar at the top of this page), or on the posts by Phil Barcio that accompany each exhibit.
“To me, art is a commitment to asking questions and proposing alternatives to the status quo. Art should be integrated into life. It is empowering to work with your hands, to understand how elements of your surroundings fit together, and to try to use resources more wisely. That opportunity should be more public than elite.” — Alison Wilder
The immediate response I feel to Alison Wilder’s work is one of play.
This is not a historical footnote. This is about next year. A friend of our family who is, I think, 22 is starting a new anarchist collective in Woodstock, NY, the town where he grew up. Chrisso Babcock just wrote us the email below. There is a new wave of young people drawn to basic human skills of growing one’s own food, building one’s own home, and creating face-to-face communities.