misc | A Day In The Life Of...

Haven't been blogging much as I've been trying to make big strides on my dissertation. Today's task: Read Heidegger's 1962 lecture "On Time and Being," which opens with the lines:

"If we were to be shown right now tow pictures by Paul Klee, in the origianl, which he painted in the year of his death - the watercolor 'Saints from a Window,' and 'Death and Fire,' tempera on burlap - we should want to stand before them for a long while - and should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible."

Of course I had to track down the paintings (see above). I finally got around to watching Todd Haynes' most recent film I'm Not There.


As Roger Ebert writes:

"I'm Not There" is an attempt to consider the contradictions of Bob Dylan by building itself upon contradictions. Maybe that's the only way to do it. If you made a biopic with Dylan played by the same actor all the way through, it might become the portrait of a shape-shifting schizophrenic. Todd Haynes' approach is to create six or seven Dylans, depending on how you count, and use six actors to play them. This way, each Dylan is consistent on his own terms, and the life as a whole need not hold together.

My friend Sophie wrote this review. I love Dylan and thought it as interesting a film as it was unconventional. Dylan is 'not there' as any of the character names, each portray a different Dylan myth and have correspondingly different names, but Dylan is there in the soundtrack of this delightful work which gives some evidence that Haynes studied semiotics in college.

Lastly, Destroyer has a new album out. I'd recommend it. You can download the track "Foam Hands" here.

[America's Young Theologian][Theology][Bob Dylan][Music][Film]

politics | Iraq & McCain

Just a few thoughts:

I worry that the discussion about Iraq is as morally anemic as it was 5 years ago. Now, the war is unpopular in the US. I'm glad to have more voices against it, but not sure those voices are clear on why to be against it. Clearly, it has been a disaster. But the reason to be against the war is not that it went poorly or was mismanaged. A better reason would be because it was unjust. In the case of robbing the proverbial liquor store, one doesn't make a decision to be for or against the action by how well it went.

I also worry about how common war is in our history, and how much profit there is in the industrial-military complex, which makes war profitable (read: desirable). Like the child who grew up around abusive adults and failed to learn other ways of dealing with problems, I fear that the US imagination/identity is too formed by war.

Tom Engelhardt writes:

To put this in more human terms: Imagine that a child born on March 19, 2003, just as Baghdad was being shock-and-awed, will be of an age to enter first grade when the sixth anniversary of George Bush's war hits. He or she will have gone from babbling to talking, crawling to walking, and will by then possibly be beginning to read and write. Of course, an Iraqi child born on that day, who managed to live to see his or her sixth birthday, might be among the two million-plus Iraqis in exile in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East, or among the millions of internal refugees driven from their homes in recent years and not in school at all.

(Similarly, a child born on October 7, 2001, when the President first dispatched American bombers to strike Afghanistan, will be in second grade in March 2009; of course, seven-and-a-half years after being "liberated," an Afghan child, especially one now living in the southern part of that failed narco-state, is unlikely to be in school at all. As with Iraq, we could take some educated guesses about the situation in Afghanistan a year from now and they would be grim beyond words.)

For those children, the real inheritors of the Bush war era that is not yet faintly over, the Iraq War has essentially been the equivalent of an open-ended prison sentence with little hope of parole; for some Americans and many Iraqis, including children, it is a death sentence without hope of pardon.

Ultimately, this determination by war is what scares me about McCain with his constant talk about the military.

[America's Young Theologian][Iraq][Politics][McCain]