Mushin-Sho

What a strange and arbitrary moment to celebrate; the passing of an X number of days, hours, weeks, months all of which are changed to fit our own convenience—think daylight savings.

Am I questioning this because I’m chillin with my parents on New Year’s Eve? Perhaps…umm…..anyway…

What interests me most is the spectacular energy that goes into planning and celebrating the moment, no matter how arbitrary it may seem. The feeling I have at the moment is similar to the one I get any standard “party” night; weekends, special holidays and such. There is a strange sense in the air that things are moving, happening, energy being expended and new energy generated. Is this just a left over sense from my loser high school days? Does anyone else get this sense?

The paradox, yes there always is—leaving Ground metaphysics means finding ultimate Ground (and so on): The energy is infectious, the desire to get myself out and my butt shaking is undeniable but the moment of arrival is also the moment when that desire is destroyed; not fulfilled, destroyed. There has to be a theory term for this? Psychoanlysists please?

I cancelled a trip to New Years trip to Chicago to avoid the all too often experienced moment described above.

Happy Arbitrary New Year All!

“What is life if you don’t have fun? What is a “What” if you ain’t gotta gun? –Q-tip

From Banjo

I ain’t a big headed nigger, but a white man has got to respect me, for when I address myself to him the vibration of brain magic that I turn loose on him is like an electric shock on the spring of his cranium.

“It was nothing,” said Ginger, “but the eternal visible of imagination.”

I’ve spent the afternoon working on various texts during the afternoon with my study partner Kim. The evening, however, has been spent binging on hockey games. Thus far, I’ve seen three games, including a wings game and another featuring Sidney Crosby, the next Gretzky according to many pundits. He made a play from his knees which was impressive and insightful (saw something most don’t) made all the more so considering he’s only 18.

More interesting is the Winter Olympic team announcements; the NHL will be sending players to 12 national teams. This “white washed” sport is one of the most nationally diverse sports readily available on Sportscenter.

Why bring this up: because my recent viewing of Crash, an excellent film in most respects, reminded me that the popular perception of hockey still sees it as a “white” sport. The film attempts to complicate stereotypes, of villains, of the ‘good guys’, of racial and ethnic tensions. One black character loves hockey, wanted to be a goalie and even (to my disapproving ear) likes country music—note the uncool conflation of country music and hockey.

I find this troubling not because people see the sport as “white” but rather because the terms white and black are used to understand a much more complex relationship. This is obviously not a new observation but one that was foregrounded for me in hockey. As much as black or African American suppresses an entire continent to one surface, white does the same.

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.

At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead.

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

You must look at this article; forget the article, look at the photos and their captions. One example

“I was at home with my sister. She asked me to buy some ice cream. So I thought: ‘Good idea. I’ll get one for you and one for me.’ I remember walking toward the market. Then, an explosion. I woke up at the hospital. Now I am burnt. My ankle is broken. My body is filled with shrapnel.”

Some photos from the Tsunami coverage. Click on the photo for the rest.

All photos are from NyTimes.com; European Pressphoto Agency, Reuters, Associated Press.

I may add more as I find them but for the moment these will have to do. The beautiful from the deadly

After destruction we may be inspired to create but what comes after, unless of course, there is a definite paradigm shift. Apparently not here.

At first, the tsunami seemed to dangle the hope of reconciliation. It struck both government-held land and territory controlled by the Tamil rebels, and it brought the two sides together to heal and divide aid. Today, squabbles over aid combined with the legacy of recrimination have so worsened the conflict that Sri Lanka seems closer to war now than it has at any time since the peace process began nearly four years ago. Clashes between government troops and suspected Tamil separatist rebels have become routine.

From Nytimes, “Tsunami’s Legacy: Extraordinary Giving and Unending Strife:” By Somini Sengupta and Seth Mydans

Today is the Tsunami’s one year anniversary, the natural disaster that took 181,000 lives. The number is too staggering for any words to do justice but more disturbing is my own reaction, or rather non reaction, to the whole event. Aside from a pitiful $50 contribution to UNICEF, looking through some images of the damage, I was relatively, pitifully, disturbingly, unmoved by the moment.

Last year, a friend came up to me and said “I know you must be really distraught; my heart goes out to you and your family.” I thanked her politely, smiling and feeling incredibly guilty for not feeling those emotions. There is some part of me that desires to theorize this absence as the vacuum left by a simulacral culture where desire and devastation are little more than moments passed quietly away in the den of an imagined satisfaction. Although the questions I am left with may be banal they are ones I will venture regardless.

The number dead is so staggering that they become flat, a statistic without affect, or at least they did for me. Without doubt the geographical distance and closeted U.S media has an impact but I want to localize the onus for a moment. How do we refill the emotional void once it has been discovered? Is this something that is even desirable? Do we/ Should we want to be emotionally disturbed, shed tears for lost lives on a continent we’ve never seen? Or, like me, once grew up in, loved and in many ways, have become alienated from?

There is also a disturbing, but wholly natural, impulse for creation/ composition that comes out of disaster and destruction.

From “The Cyberpunk Educator:” a filmic, mix media, essay. Search for it on bittorrent sites, it’s definitely worth downloading.

“The word our government uses, “Homeland” is a derivation of “Motherland,” the placement of the classical feminine pastoral image within borders.”

“For the Motherland”

This book was timely in my own experiences because much like the unnamed narrator, I too have been disillusioned by things that were grandly, beautifully presented. Martial Arts was a structured scientific discipline that was taught by he, and only he, who saw further than the rest, had an intuitive connection with truth and was humbly obeying its objectives. Like the unnamed, invisible, narrator, I too was manipulated, devastated to discover the larger objective, the transparency of one who placed himself nakedly open in the shade of my own rationalization, where all words and behaviors must be, infallibly, directed by Truth.

Moreover, like the narrator theorizing his grandfather’s enigmatic last words, I have come to understand Martial Arts as a set of principles that has no owner, that like all information/ theory/ constructs can be manipulated to meet certain demands be they holy or vile. “We were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence.” The paradox of my thought, perhaps even of approaching the existential through Ground metaphysics, is expressed quite lucidly in Ellison:

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many– This is not prophecy , but description.

I just finished Invisible Man a moment ago and realized that I have a ton of paragraphs and phrases I would love to share. Here are three that struck me in this last stretch of reading:

I looked…..and recognized the absurdity of the whole night nad of the simple yet confoundingly compex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Beldsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others…

Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It’d really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

Meet my new pet (stuffed) Tiger. Urmu (in Japanese Urumu): the ‘U’ rhymes with Moo

It may strike some as strange that I should now have a stuffed animal but I fell in love when I saw him. Besides, what better companion when you want to eat your in progrees, procrastinated, “God, please write this thing for me” Master’s Thesis.

If this isn’t proof that Grad school changes you…although I thought I heard or read somewhere that we are against infantalization…or something…

Apparently one of the hottest Clubs in Miami. This shot was from a preivous trip. I just like it.

I realize that this is taken out of its narrative context but found it a meaningful moment nonetheless.

It was as though by dressing and walking in a certain way I had enlisted in a fraternity in which I was recognized at a glance–not by features, but by clothes, by uniform, by gait.

Aarthi and I had dinner with her recently graduated friend at Bal Harbour in Miami. The shopping mall is a common hangout for celebrities like J-Lo; not surprising considering the multi-million dollar ocean view condos directly adjacent, not to mention the even more expensive yachts docked close by.

We wandered into the ridiculous boutiques, “to play rich” as it were, and were always closely watched by store security/ personal. I don’t want to be too accusing of this simply because I don’t think these stores get that much traffic (you will see why). Entering Roberto Cavali’s store, Aarthi went with her friends into the women’s section while I browsed the men’s. I found a nice looking sweatshirt that could easily pass for a sweater and thought I saw $155 on the price tag.

“Oh, that’s not too bad”

Aarthi came over, approved my taste and gagged when she saw the price tag.

“This thing is worth more than gold,” she said.
“Huh? It’s not that bad”

She pointed to the price tag again: $2,600

note: story has been slightly altered for dramatic purposes *_

I had a vague repulsion to the movie, which has the melodramatics of “Lord of the Rings” and borrows heavily from Biblical language and story line. Let me cite one, probably strongest, parallel and introduce a bit of Zizek’s commentary into it.

“The Lion:” The beautifully animated Lion is named Arsalan who takes on himself the task of guiding and preparing the humans who have entered Narnia. The humans, four variously aged children called “the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve,” are prophesied as the saviors of Narnia who will destroy the White Witch and return Narnia to it’s Edenic glory.

So, through a variety of (poorly developed) character actions, a traitor is discovered and his life endangered. Arsalan makes a deal with the Witch to give his own life instead of the traitor’s; the Lion is beaten, bound, shaved and finally executed on a sacrificial stone slab. He, of course, comes alive again telling those who are mourning that ‘if a true one is sacrificed in a traitor’s stead, then death itself will bend,’ or the Biblical like.

Can we say Jesus and Judas?

Zizek on Judas: Although the latter is commonly regarded as a traitor, the one who lead to to Jesus’ crucifixion, Zizek regards Judas as the most Christian precisely because of his actions. huh? Zizek argues that Judas’ actions allowed Jesus to “die for the sins of man” and also to perform the miracle of resurrection. One could speculate that Judas knew that his Master could not really die and obeyed an intuition to tell the Romans of his whereabouts so that Jesus could become all that he was. In this light, Judas becomes a heroic figure vilified for the very actions that allowed the full “revelation” to happen.

From Invisible Man:

Still it was nothing new, white folk seemed always to expect you to know those things they’d done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing. The thing to do was to be prepared—as my grandfather had been when it was demanded that he quote the entire United States Constitution as a test of his fitness to vote. He had confounded them all by passing the test, although they still refuse him the ballot…Anyway, these were different.”

As a “Resident Alien,” albeit a ‘permanent’ one, I have no right to vote. I was supposed to become a citizen with the rest of my family but there were bureaucratic mix ups and my paper work was lost. Now, I face a choice.

Can/ Should I opt for dual citizenship with India and the U.S? Remain an Indian citizen only? Become a U.S citizen only?

Do I even believe in the voting process as enacted here?

More on this later.

Which witch is a real witch?; which witch is wishing she were a witch, which by the way, do very well.

Read it until “witch/which” has no meaning but is just a funny sound:

I think my blog is quickly deteriorating. I’ll post on death and human suffering next time to add that touch of oomf.

I asked my brother his opinion of the program and he replied thus:

Also, yes I do have Aperture installed since the day it was released. I haven’t played with it too much because my new photo ventures have been pretty limited recently, and my “to do” library is just too big to try to import and organize all at once. This is one of the few apps that make my computer seem slow though… and like I said when I first heard about it, I’m sure it’s great with a quad processor G5 with 16GB of RAM, 1000GB of HD, a 512MB $1500 video card driving two 30” cinema displays (est. cost directly from the Apple store… $24K). That is basically the hardware you see in the photos and movies about Aperture on the Apple site.

Megalomania has been subverted by bleeding bank accounts; maybe I can sell pictures of myself or something…

I will write more about this when I have a better sense of the moment’s weight.

Stanley Williams, founder of the Crips – rival gang to the Bloods – was executed about forty minutes ago. He applied to the California Governor’s office for clemency to which he recieved the response available here. If, for whatever reason, the link does not lead you to the pdf statement, go to NYtimes online and it should be available there.

Since I do not have a full understanding of the situation, of the particular legal matters at play, I hesitate to take any solid position on the matter. However, I did find this brief footnote interesting:

5) Williams’ perennial nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel Prize in Literature from 2001-2005 and the receipt of the President’s Call to Service Award in 2005 do not have persuasive weight in this clemency request.

More thoughts on this with possible connections to Invisible Man, Foucault, and even my 1020 class will follow soon.

I couldn’t sleep and decided to web browse rather than, say, read a text that would actually help me finish my projects. So, after staring at my own blog for a few minutes I browsed over to Apple’s site and found their new program, Aperture. Since my brother is an avid photographer I looked through their Flash presentation of the program and found this:

For the uninitiated, those are two 30-inch HD cinema displays being used simultaneously for the same project. One user–two gorgeous monitors = very jealous me.

Imagine, two huge screens on which to view my blog and all its pages…simultaneously!!

Anyone care to fire off on the actual pictures displayed on the screens?

I think my blog has official rights to my brain, or at least a majority stake holding in the tech/ online sector. I gaze approvingly on my blog all the time thinking how much I like it, how pretty it is and how people are idiots because there aren’t enough comments saying these kinds of things, thus leaving me to say them making me look like a narcissistic bastard, which of course, I am.

Of course, if I had as many visitors as Hilary I would probably feel even more pressure to ‘publish’ quality material even more often.

I have nothing of real interest to say today, so instead I offer you Kim Lacey’s hilarious post and a pretty picture.

“Wow. Look honey, what do you think it means?”
“That he’s into hallucinogens”

sit ubu sit

I’ve just awoken, far too early, from a night of binging on “Hockey Night in Canada.” This was the second hockey night for me because I also watched the Wings game on Friday. I think I need therapy…for finding a link between my favorite players/ plays and Academia.

Does anyone remember The Anamaniacs? The episode when they went to “Anvilania” and its national anthem? That’s how I imagine saying Academia. For those who don’t remember, shame on you for not spending quality time rotting your brain you paean, undemocratic, unfreedomloving….I digress..

In the games that I watched, the great plays were those which did the extraordinary in two senses; 1) the player was able to see an opening, an angle, another player, a position to be in, that no one else on the ice did at that moment. 2) the player was able to wait, to pause for that one additional superhuman moment, to make the pass or take the shot, throwing everyone off ; if it works the player is brilliant, if not, they were being too ambitious/ “trying to make the pretty play” and such. Do you see the links with Academia yet?

This is what I see;

There have been/ are scholars who have shown us new positions that we have not been able to see. I am thinking of recent scholarship on Black Face Minstrelsy, not to mention some of my own favorites, Foucault, Appadurai amongst many others. These are the superstars. I’m not so sure I can put myself in that category…yet.

Then, we have those scholars who for extraordinary moments are able to perceive the “one extra turn,” Gerald MacLean’s term for thinking through one step deeper, one more spin of the abstraction wheel. This, I think we can all achieve and are all attempting to do so. This latter kind of brilliance, if repeated often will make you a star scholar.

I should be sleeping right now, that’s why this post stinks and is not able to make the further turns that are its subject.

boooo….get off the ice you #$&*@*$&

From Invisible Man:

The vet frowned: “It is an issue which I can confront only by evading it. An utterly stupid proposition, and these hands so lovingly trained to master a scalpel yearn to caress a trigger. I returned to save life and I was refused,” he said. “Ten men in masks drove me out from the city at midnight and beat me with whips for saving a human life. And I was forced to the utmost degradation because I possesed skilled hands and the belief that my knowledge could bring me dignity–not wealth, only dignity–and other men health!”

......”Hurry, the man is as insane as the rest,” Mr. Norton said.

A conversation has begun regarding the place of interruptions in the composing process. Here are Ralph Ellison’s thoughts on the matter from his introduction to Invisible Man:

“...I was still inclined to close my ears and get on with my interrupted novel, but like many writers atoss in what Conrad described as the “destructive element,” I had floundered into a state of hyperreceptivity; a desperate condition which a fiction writer finds it difficult to ignore even the most nebulous idea-emotion that might arise in the process of creation. For he soon learns that such amorphous projections might well be expected gifts from his daydreaming muse that might, when properly perceived, provide exactly the materials needed to keep afloat in the turbulent tides of composition.”