Posted 1/25/2003 11:54:12 PM
I took myself out tonight. I went to see John Cusack's new film, "Max" (the young Hitler movie), at the Magnolia. The camera work was intricate and very pleasing. For domestic and workplace aesthetics Max's home and office were amazing.

The Starbuck's down the street from the Magnolia, just past the Vespa shop on the other side of the street down from Nikita, is very cool. All of the Starbuck's that I have been in have always been tiny. This one, despite being situated in the urban cramp of the West Village, was humongous. It was like a university coffee shop. Pillows and common tables, odd arrangements of chairs and unthemed couches filled a space five times the size of the ordinary Starbucks.

After an espresso, a Tanqueray and tonic and Max I drove over to Cafe Brazil for a BLT and to plow through Jean Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication" (what a book!). My stomach full and my head filled with the seduction of the play of surfaces I stopped by Borders and read a new essay on tolerant Qur'anic exegesis by the UCLA Fellow of Islamic Law Khaled Abou El Fadl, some later Heidegger (more on this later...) and some interviews with Levinas in "Is it right to be."

In my old yellow antique chair checking my email and writing this summary is where I can be found at this moment. It was a good night.

Posted 1/25/2003 01:24:18 PM
NATIONAL POST: Sept. 11 took giant out of its shell
via coop

Posted 1/25/2003 10:35:30 AM
Brian Eno: A European View - Jan. 20, 2003

...America was an act of faith — the faith that "otherness" was not threatening but nourishing, the faith that there could be a country big enough in spirit to welcome and nurture all the diversity the world could throw at it. But since Sept. 11, that vision has been eclipsed by a suspicious, introverted America, a country-sized version of that peculiarly American form of ghetto: the gated community. A gated community is defensive. Designed to keep the "others" out, it dissolves the rich web of society into a random clustering of disconnected individuals. It turns paranoia and isolation into a lifestyle.

Surely this isn't the America that anyone dreamed of; it's a last resort, nobody's choice...

President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was "the single surviving model of human progress." Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance...

Too often, the U.S. presents the "American way" as the only way, insisting on its kind of free-market Darwinism as the only acceptable "model of human progress." But isn't civilization what happens when people stop behaving as if they're trapped in a ruthless Darwinian struggle and start thinking about communities and shared futures? America as a gated community won't work...

Perhaps it's asking a lot to expect America to act differently from all the other empires in history, but wasn't that the original idea?

Posted 1/25/2003 10:25:22 AM
let's nuke the bridge we torched 2000 times before.

Posted 1/25/2003 09:39:48 AM
current mp3:Hyper-Insomnia-Para-Chondroid

Posted 1/25/2003 09:38:06 AM
i saw my first Segway on the MS campus yesterday. cool, but underwhelming. if it were $500 it would be awesome. for $5000 i expect more.

Posted 1/24/2003 11:13:09 PM

So I got a copy of another extremist "manifesto" today...

Posted 1/24/2003 10:53:21 PM

State of the Union... Not Good

Posted 1/24/2003 10:35:38 PM

Turkish chief sees U.S. hypocrisy

Erdogan, chairman of the governing Justice and Development Party, (of Turkey) said eliminating nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq was a worthy goal.

“This sounds good,” he said in his first appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “But let’s not kid ourselves.

“No one is interested in eliminating their own weapons of mass destruction. They’re interested in strengthening their own weapons of mass destruction.”

what Erdogan has said needs to be repeated over and over and over and over again.

weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are a problem that will not be solved. our best hope is cooperating on an end to new development and the nation-state-to-nation-state WMD brinkmanship at the heart of cold-war political models.

the UN should not be broken up by a class system of WMD early adopters ruling over all others. this encourages proliferation. in this scenario developing WMD becomes a rung on the ladder to being perceived a strong, independent state worthy of the Davos elite, the G8 and the Security Council. this has to change. (this is another post, but how did creating huge conventional forces, WMD and going into space become the criteria for being a big international pisser? these archetypically hyper-male “my dick is bigger than yours” postures are carried out at the expense of international human need that gets a pittance thrown at it as the huge percentage of national budgets go to militarization, questionable space travel {btw, when was the last time there was something significant done in space? is NASA just spending their coin so that it is not taken from them? symbolic shuttle missions are not enough… anyway back to my other parenthesis} and bullshit domestic pork spending. i feel more and more like one of those third party candidates whining to an empty room.)

we need new treaties and new, radical experiments in weapons control. the current weapons need to be brought under an international armistice of sorts where they are held jointly by all nations of the world as a step in the processes of a dismantling of not merely the current devastating capabilities in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, but the will to build new generations of these weapons and the patronage of the weapons industry.

this joint management would demand carefully structured and nurtured checks and balances by the best and brightest our world has to offer. the pace of adoption, methods of management, ultimate disposal calendar, mutual use scenarios, etc. would all have to be spelled out with precision in a polyvalent international voice that eschew the monopolist tendencies of the current UN Security Council cartel. this task would have to be intentionally a multi-generational trust that is handed from parents to children among all peoples of the planet.

new ways of thinking and brash, unconventional, risky ways of living that thinking out are required if we are to begin the multi-generational task of obsolescing the politics of destructive détente and the disparate weapons R&D memes that round the globe, building and further entrenching their claws with each generation.

this process would have to begin with the long walks, heated discussions and shared family meals that spur the creation of something whose basis is in the human empathy and sympathy that we share.

we have to begin with trust. if trust is not an outcome on the top of the list of every branch of government the wars we have known will seem a trifle next to the random horrors that await.

Posted 1/24/2003 10:15:58 PM

not that i don't like consulting for M$. 
they are as good as any company. 
better in some ways, actually. 
nevertheless, focusing 
the majority of 
my time 
awake 
around this 
body of information 
that slips into obsolescence 
in mere months bores me.

oh, and shut the hell up. 
i know, 
"wah wah wah, life is so hard for dan." 
do you think i don't know that? 
i'm in the right quadrant, baby. 
i can't help myself. 

Posted 1/24/2003 10:00:31 PM

perhaps, i need to sell my soul and go into sales.
or the ministry. both require you to play golf.
fuck that. i'm a hockey player...

Posted 1/24/2003 07:14:51 AM

it's too cold outside.
homelessness must wait.
another end in sight?

Posted 1/24/2003 07:14:42 AM

The affairs of the world
are now dependent upon
the highest information of
which man is capable. The
word information means pattern,
not raw data.

-Marshall McLuhan, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout

Posted 1/24/2003 06:54:04 AM

the man is pleased.
i am not.
contented homelessness a solution?

Posted 1/23/2003 07:00:44 AM

The Register: Hilary Rosen quits RIAA

Hilary Rosen is out, but... When Stalinism has proved so effective, there's no need to alter course.

Posted 1/23/2003 06:12:25 AM

i need a technology that will allow me to send a data stream to myself from a dream. last night i had this amazing dialogue that i tried to capture on paper in my dream. you know, writing it down helps you remember it. well, upon waking i could only remember the first point. lucid dreaming is not enough. i want lucid dreaming with a hardwire to real life. it would be cool to send yourself email from your dreams. anyway, off to please the man. peace.

Posted 1/22/2003 06:11:00 PM

Speaking Out About War

Brad Arnold (3 Doors Down)
"People just need to realize that the U.S. is the daddy of the world and all the time daddy can't be the good guy." ...uh, yeah.

Tom Morello (Audioslave)
"This military adventurism could potentially have a horrific boomerang effect and whip up a cycle of violence that no one can see the end to. If Bush's real goal is to make the world a safer place, the real way to fight terrorism is to deal with the underlying issues of conflict and inequality in the Middle East and around the world, and not carpet bombing any country that doesn't do our bidding."

Posted 1/22/2003 11:32:43 AM

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

How long? Not long, 'cause
         what you reap is what you sow.






rage 
against 
the 
machine                            -"wake up"

Posted 1/22/2003 11:08:41 AM

Coop quotes a Lessig speech from the 2002 O'Reilly Open Source Conference... biting:

Now, I've spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And we've not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. [But] nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste his time in Washington?

But if you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can't Fight For Your Freedom . . . You Don't Deserve It.

But you've done nothing.

More coverage here.

Cooper's analysis is good. I concur with the emphasis on action. I would say though that blogging, done well, is action. Blogging is now a large part of the global meme eco-system that helps to create the matrix out of which action emerges. Presupposition, in some sense, determines actions. In this way blogging is powerful. But to blog without the life to make it a contribution worthy of the eco-system is masturbation. No one is getting off but you.

Live. Blog. Change the world.

Posted 1/22/2003 10:44:46 AM

My electronica-trance-blahblah musician compatriot, Relaps, took me out to Tex-Mex Monday. Diet Coke was $1 a glass with no gratis refills. That aside, the tortilla soup, fajitas and rice were tasty. After bidding adieu to our Columbian waitress we checked out Spike Lee's 25th Hour. It was not Edward Norton's best film--though, it may have been Spike Lee's best to date. The use of post-9/11 NY was done as tastefully as a context of tragic media spectacle could be. The f-you monologue was good, but somewhat forced. The ending toyed with the cliché, but satisfied. This could definitely send Spike further into the mainstream.

Posted 1/22/2003 10:34:48 AM

When are we going to move our faith beyond theological social clubs?

Posted 1/22/2003 09:51:31 AM

Easter 2004

"This has been germinating inside me for 10 years... I have a deep need to tell this story. It's part of your upbringing, but it can seem so distant."
-Mel Gibson

Gibson's pre-Vatican 2.0 leanings, his desire for a film in dead languages without subtitles and his odd association with the likes of Bill O'Reilly should make this interesting...

I want to see, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

**edit** 1/22/2003 5:09:09 PM

i love sotto's remarks on this project today. in part:

"...Imagine how changed American Bible Belt culture would be if their view of Jesus was someone who looked more like Yassir Arafat rather than a young Kenny Rogers. Would it even exist as it does today?"

Posted 1/21/2003 10:04:43 PM

Verizon told to reveal Internet song-swapper

Posted 1/21/2003 09:21:24 PM

Oh yes, some interesting responses to Beavis’s canon post. There seems to be a polarized disparity in the responses. The self-flagellating religious are in the matrix unable to get their mind around the possibility that what they have known is ever more nuanced than they could have imagined. Those marginally in the gathering and squarely outside of it have little interest in the matter in the first place, but seem to understand what is being said. It seems that when one is shackled with a well-defined-something-to-lose it is easier to allow the world to be pulled over one's eyes. When you've already lost it there is no such luxury.

{more related ruminations}
Interestingly, a Hebrew cannon was not established until the Council of Jamnia ca.90 and 118 CE. The Hebrew canon of scripture was created in an effort to deal with the decimation of the focal point of the faithful up to that point: the Temple. Yesh'uah followers did the same thing in moving their traditions from oral and collected-oral form into narrative Gospels and Acts; the most ancient of which we no longer possess. We no longer possess them because of the deep rift between the nascent Rabbinic Judaism and Catholic/Orthodox Christianity after the Roman-Jewish wars that eventually brought a vast chasm between what should have been sister communities. This chasm was made, seemingly, unbridgeable with the Roman councils that solidified a faith that could never be held authentically with Jewish sensibilities.

Posted 1/21/2003 04:34:55 PM

If you are looking to warchalk your WiFi network and can't figure out what the symbol should be try Logical Realism's Warchalk Generator.

I have always thought that the open network symbol )( would be cool as a tatoo or as a community symbol of some sort. Maybe next to my favorite Jungian quote.

Posted 1/21/2003 03:13:45 PM

Fighting Terrorism With Democracy

How can democratic institutions be strengthened so as to survive in a time when governments can no longer guarantee what President Bush calls homeland security?

That problem is genuinely new. Civilization is now threatened not just by rogue states like Hitler's Germany or Milosevic's Serbia but by people who are not exactly enemy combatants and not exactly criminals....

We call this new sort of person a terrorist for lack of any better term, but we do not really have any pigeonholes in which he fits, nor any sense of what institutions and practices will be required to cope with him. Neither armies nor police will do. It turns out that it only takes a few tens of millions of dollars, and a few people prepared to commit suicide, to create an organization able to bring despair to the heart of the West. Such an organization does not need to control a national government or even be allied with one. The catastrophes that rich monomaniacs like bin Laden are now able to cause are more like earthquakes than like attempts by nations at territorial aggrandizement or attempts by criminals to get rich. We are as baffled about how to forestall the next act of mega-terrorism as about how to forestall the next hurricane.

If we cannot forestall such attacks, we may nonetheless be able to survive them. We may have the strength to keep our democratic institutions intact even after realizing that our cities may never again be invulnerable. We may be able to keep the moral gains--the increases in political freedom and in social justice--made by the West in the past two centuries even if 9/11 is repeated year after year.

Posted 1/21/2003 03:05:08 PM

Organizations empowered with massive patronage of time and money want nothing to do with genuine public debate. Those with power want to wield it not discuss how to.

The Church has been lavished with just such patronage making debate over moral scandal, doctrinal idiocy, spiritual malpractice, administrative hubris, historical faux pas and the like not only improbable, but possibly impossible as it would endanger the conviction that such an organization wishes to encourage--that somehow it is or possesses an incarnate divine authority.

Whether infallible in book or man this don't-ask-questions-accept-the-authority-of-the-Church posture worked well while the majority of people in its gravitational field were under the control of a carefully groomed spiritual and economic class system that ensured literacy, wealth and power to the few. When access to these "upper class" ways became generalized across a larger population the overbearing self-aggrandizement of entrenched institutional ways began to be seen for what they were: an exclusive club of power brokers dominating and profiting from those who came to them for spiritual solace in organizations presumptuous enough to declare themselves the embodied mediation of the way of Jesus.

Acting as if the way of Jesus is a trust fund of sorts these, the “heirs” of this way, set themselves as the gatekeepers and toll takers for a kingdom that was never theirs in the first place; never even that of Jesus. The Kingdom is God’s and is never co-opted intact.

Posted 1/21/2003 02:46:30 PM

Posted 1/21/2003 12:12:30 PM

Sola Scriptura: rationalist idealism run amuck.

All spiritual communities around the way of Yesh'uah had different combinations of books (and no books!!) until 398AD/CE when an official New Testament was canonized.

{butthead: "Uhuhuhuh, yeah, he said, 'cannon.'"}

Posted 1/21/2003 11:46:58 AM

Pagitt is rough-blogging from a theological conversation with Hauerwas that I was planning to go to this week (the evil empire got in my way). He has brought up some of the central critiques that I too have of Stanley's body of work. There are no reports of the belligerent swearing that has been known to come from the mouth of this American theologian. Or maybe Doug is editing for his audience.

Posted 1/21/2003 11:17:07 AM

Posted 1/21/2003 11:06:43 AM

Viva La France!

Posted 1/21/2003 08:11:40 AM

Phuture: Serving the Second Reformation via John

It seems that we have fallen for the greatest of sucker punches. Give people ways to express their rebellion that change nothing, that keep oppressive systems in place, and nothing will change.

Posted 1/20/2003 11:01:58 PM

AKMA has seed funding for the Disseminary

Posted 1/20/2003 09:44:50 PM

get behind this: Open Spectrum

Posted 1/20/2003 09:23:20 PM

Posted 1/19/2003 10:46:04 PM

US offers immunity to Saddam -- who is in a position to offer such immunity? what does said immunity entail? how can the USoA pronounce blanket immunity when they have no global prosecutorial jurisdiction? what if the Hague decides to prosecute him? or the people of Iraq? i like this idea, but have questions about the authority such an offer presumes.

Posted 1/19/2003 10:32:13 AM

Art Collective: Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together

...Some collectives blend art and lifestyle in more personal ways. The 13 members of Flux Factory, which recently showed at the Queens Museum, live together in a loft in Long Island City, in Queens. The members of Instant Coffee in Toronto use much of their collective energy to organize large-scale artistic and social events that bring artists, writers and musicians together in combinations rarely encountered elsewhere.

Instant Coffee functions on a principle of service-work — generosity as an art medium — an ethic that is also an aesthetic....

Posted 1/19/2003 10:08:19 AM

the Slacktivist has a modest proposal to solve the world dictatorship problem.
it is a city of refuge of sorts.

Survivor 29: Dictators in Paradise