It's been a while since AYT posted due to a busy week which included a visit from AYT's parents, a class on the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, and a Nationals game this evening. However, this weekend should find some time to complete AYT's thoughts about what can be learned from Dada, the early 20th century artistic movement, by those exasperated with the current 'war' in Iraq or with the related culture of fear.[1]
AYT also dabbled a bit in music this week. Purchased the Band of Horses CD...and purchased my first guitar, an Epiphone PR-5E:
Any suggestions on what song I should learn first? Keep it simple.
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[1] Of course, we could ask, "If a war isn't just, what is it?," which asks whether an unjust war might better be described otherwise (i.e. murder, slaughter, aggression, etc.).
Free Single of the Week
Poke - Frightened Rabbit
Album: Original version appears on The Midnight Organ Fight
Download Here
AYT seeks to bring you, not simply music, poetry and mirth, but theological biography and biographical theology.
-DRM-
3.31.2006
life | A Quick Update...
3.24.2006
article | "Expectations for Our Teachers Are Misplaced"
By Arthur Levine
"This is an age of finger-pointing. As profound demographic, economic, global, and technological changes rack the country, all of our social institutions — created to serve a disappearing world — perform less well than they once did. As they try to adjust to a society in motion, they appear to be broken and unable to fix themselves. Thus we say the government is broken. The American family is broken. So it is with the education school."Together we will need to think about and allow education to evolve. It is a collective responsibility, since we do not live alone.
Read entire article...
3.21.2006
life | Art
With his typical frenetic energy, AYT has crossed the country in search of images that will burn into his retinas, images to be received in wide-eyed wonder and may provide fuel for his blistering social critique.
Part One | Delving into the recent happenings in the artistic life of America's Young Theologian...
Houston
AYT visits The Menil Collection.
"...the collection consists of nearly 15,000 works dating from the Paleolithic era to the present day. Although historically vast, it uniquely resists the conventional museum model of the encyclopedia. Instead, within the four areas that largely define the collection—Antiquity, Byzantine and Medieval, Tribal, and Twentieth-Century Art (with a concentration in Surrealism)—one finds a selective approach to acquisition that yields depth with regard to particular areas and artists."One room details the kind of objects that the Surrealists collected:
AYT notes on the back of a DC Metro card: Ethnic, religious, and strange artifacts, crucifix, mounted butterflies, pocket knife, pocket watches, faded button reading "peace now," marbles, miniature boxes, seashells, sand dollars, decorated eggs, feathers, phrenology, dice.
Later, AYT visits the Rothko Chapel and Byzantine Fresco Chapel.
"The Rothko Chapel, founded by the de Menils, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate, nondenominational sanctuary. The chapel was designed by Howard Barnstone based on an earlier design by Philip Johnson and houses fourteen Mark Rothko paintings. Finally, designed by Francois de Menil and opened in February 1997, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel is a repository for the only two thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes in the entire western hemisphere."After seeing these two chapels and visiting the Chapel of St. Basil on the campus of University of St. Thomas (Houston), AYT is profoundly moved and profoundly saddened. These are beautiful, hopeful spaces insofar as they exemplify the resources we may draw upon for making beautiful churches. The aesthetic matters but these days is too often ignored in the spirit of functionality.
Before leaving Houston, AYT has one more important stop, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The event attended is for the closing of a special exhibit celebrating the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in NYC, and then as an important and successful avant-garde artist in the international art scene of the 1980s.
Here, Basquiat's "Per Capita" shows a black boxer carrying a (Olympic?) torch wearing Everlast shorts while phrases like 'Per Capita' and 'E Pluribus' haunt the painting and economic disparity is displayed by the numbers at left.The event is DJed by none other than hip-hop artist and DJ legend Grand Master Flash, one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing, cutting, and mixing:
To be continued in part two where AYT returns to the nation's capital and reflects on the absurdity of war with a much needed reminder from Dada, that artistic "protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society." [1]
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[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Dada," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dada&oldid=44541020 (accessed March 21, 2006).
3.12.2006
article | BHL vs. Fukuyama
Since I previously noted that I'd like to read Bernard-Henri Lévy's newest book American Vertigo on the beach this summer and otherwise have enjoyed the work of Francis Fukuyama, I thought I'd link to this curious interchange between the two:
The best piece explaining the ethos of Las Vegas (and the American West more generally,) is a short essay by Joan Didion entitled "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles." In it, she explains that Howard Hughes founded modern Las Vegas in 1967 because he, a reclusive insomniac, couldn't find a place to buy a cheeseburger in L.A. at three o'clock in the morning—so he created a whole city to cater to that need. It had nothing to do with sin or sex, but rather the perpetual American desire to reinvent oneself in a place where conventional expectations don't apply. [1]Read the entire article...
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[1] From "It Doesn't Stay in Vegas" published in The American Interest, where Bernard-Henri Lévy dukes it out with Francis Fukuyama over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, religion, the future of American muscular internationalism, and the role of intellectuals in a free society.
Read entire article...
3.11.2006
health | Hard Times for Soft Drinks
by Michael Blanding
"Last month, the FDA quietly revealed that some soft drinks were found to contain the human carcinogen benzene in levels up to 10-20 parts per billion (ppb) -- four times the acceptable limit found in drinking water. Benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia and other forms of cancer, forms in certain beverages under certain conditions, such as exposure to heat and light.
The agency immediately downplayed the risk, saying that such small amounts did not pose a significant danger to health. "Levels like that with benzene, our only concern would be lifetime consumption," says George Pauli, associate director of science and policy in the office of food additive safety.
While scientists and doctors disagree on how hazardous benzene is to human health, the Environmental Protection Agency requires public notification and alternative water supply for drinking water contaminated with levels of 5 ppb. Even "relatively short periods" of exposure at that level can "potentially cause … temporary nervous system disorders, immune system depression [and] anemia," according to the agency. A lifetime of exposure, says the EPA, can cause "chromosome aberrations [and] cancer."
The FDA has not set an acceptable level of benzene for beverages, arguing that the public consumes soft drinks and other beverages in far lower amounts than they do drinking water -- a contention that any parent of a teenager might find laughable. Younger children may have already had a lifetime of benzene consumption."
Read entire article...
3.03.2006
life | People worth celebrating...
AYT has been in Houston, DC, NYC, and Hartford in the last three weeks and is therefore catching his breath. This weekend Captain Inertia breezes into Babylon (D.C.) for the Belle & Sebastian concert, so stay tuned.
So, with no time for a tale (at least for now), Happy Birthday to these two:
(l to r: Lucile "The Deal" Wood and AYT)
(l to r: Matthew "The Heart of Hartford" Bennett and AYT)
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