Thanksgiving, the day after. Around 8AM and this Starbucks is getting busy. It seems absurd to me that you’d attempt to go out today, especially to do shopping. If you’ve viewed television lately, commercials that focus upon “the holidays,” a period of 3.5 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, are presented one after the other….
It is a Sunday morning. The first day of our week in some traditions is designated for mindful attention to divine reality, to put it plainly – for worship. The timing could not be better for a story, an ancient tale of exchange between humans (we clever dwarfs) and the “gods” who by comparison…
We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s…
References to the macabre are hyperbole it seems to me, in relation to our Halloween. American kids look forward to scoring a bagful of free candy treats while thinly disguised in the costume of choice. Halloween is by no means as comparably serious as the Dia de Muertos in Mexico that features offerings to…
We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is…
Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68…
Friday, the sky is overcast. Perhaps we shall see showers, remnants of Helene, the cat 4 hurricane that bisected the Florida panhandle. I must confess schadenfreunde, perverse pleasure at the dread of the climate-warming-denying Florida administration. Nature is dispassionate, reciprocating according to the effect of a consumption based, hydrocarbon ravenous culture which increases the…
Wednesday is the pivot point of this week. Waking this morning I felt disoriented. Before waking, the body just ‘knows’ time in a way that a clock cannot. I surfaced to wakefulness through a sticky, surreal, dreamy vision. Did I see it or did I feel it? Both… Almost 9AM now and I continue…
These lines are counter intuitive to the contemporary American scale of values. Democracy valorizes what is common, the equality of citizenship. I think this is a critical dimension, to be defended – at the level of political participation in our society. By universal agreement every citizen has a voice, in the form of a…
Car show yesterday. An adventure in memory. Big shows seem to trigger introspection. I think about the individuals in the prime of life, that solved mechanical conundrums, understanding more deeply the principles of physics, to design, to construct a more functional, and a more beautiful vehicle. I do not believe that beauty can be…
