Blindness and Busey

So I've been watching the first season of "Entourage." Now, granted, the show is basically morally reprehensible, but it's really funny. One episode finds Vince and crew at Gary Busey's art show. In the banal kingdom of Hollywood, Busey might take the cake for the being the crackheaded black sheep. He, coincidentally, appears in the movie, Black Sheep. He's a friggin headcase.

I should preface by stating the art on display at this show looks like someone drank a glass blue and white Target bullseyes and peed all over a canvas and various sculptures. If I gave a three year old at Cheddar's some crayons, a kids' placemat, and a print of Guernica, the result would still be more coherent than this painting Busey is describing. The subsequent dialogue transcends all language that could be used adjectivally.

"This piece evokes all of the emotions from an emotionally discombobulated man. This [white circle] is emotional dislexia. This [other white circle] is emotional confusion. What is emotional confusion? It is running backwards, naked, in a cornfield at midnight." (Following silence)

There is only one word here: Wow. (Kyle, let it be recorded that I burned a WTF match.)
Absolute unintential comedic genius.

It's four o'clock and I'm going to get back to studying and save the blindness thing for later. I hope you are all sleeping soundly somewhere. I wish I was.
Nords

PETA

Balaam beat his own ass - that is, Balaam struck his donkey three times. Then the donkey, with, according to Numbers, divine help, began to talk back. This got me thinking in class today, that Balaam should be the new figurehead for PETA.

Then I thought, actually it should probably be the donkey. I mean, if a talking animal could represent the animal kingdom, we could do without all of these psychotic, overemotional activist middlemen. And I'm pretty sure if animals could talk, they'd tell these PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) people how ridiculous they all are. The sheep could tell people, "Hey, you don't have to boycott wool, because shearing wool DOESN'T INVOLVE KILLING OR EVEN HURTING ME. It's kind of like trimming your fingernails. You think I want an eight-inch full-body afro in the summer time anyway?"

Side note: The donkey's publicist informed me that Balaam and his ass have reconciled and continue to have a good, transportative relationship.

Another acronym: PETA - people eating tasty animals
That's what I'm talking about.

You want the last two minutes of your life back, I know. I'm sorry. It was funny in my mind. You have to admit though, people that would rather see an economy collapse than a sheep sheared are just ignoramuses.

Here's to being smarter than animals,
Carsone

shadows

I would like to begin today by juxtaposing two quotes:

"And so, gentlemen, you'll have lived your whole lives in great fear, and afterward they'll tell you: 'It wasn't a wolf, but just its shadow.'"
- Madmoiselle de La Mole, Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir

"If you see a shadow, something's there."
- The Arcade Fire

It's a bit of a no-brainer, that if you see a shadow, something's there. So yes, one has every right to be afraid of a shadow, if that shadow is the shape of something dangerous or threatening. If you see a wolf's shadow, then there's a wolf there. Unless, of course, there is just a wooden cut-out of a wolf, in which case the shadow wouldn't move for hours at a time, and that would be fairly obvious.

I'm not really certain why it occurred to me to use these two quotes as writing material, but for some reason they tickled my fancy. Maybe I just have a fixation with the whole light-darkness motif. Anyhow, we can learn a lot from shadows. Because they move and change, and give us a kind of litmus test for truth. You're probably thinking, What? It's true though. Shadows and emanations give us a conditionality.

The criteria for the truthfulness of a thing is constantly shifting and fluxing, just like shadows. As we live on, any true thing must remain true in all of the shifting, dancing shadows that pass over it. Not to get heavy here, but this is a quote made by Irving Greenberg after the Holocaust:
“No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.”

This is pretty heavy. But any statement or axiom or what-have-you must be as true in the shadow of a tombstone as it is in the shade of a tree. It has to be as true in the hovel as it is in a mansion. It has to be as true out of the mouth of a liar as it is from the very lips of Jesus Christ. It has to be as true in hell as it is in heaven.

It would be nice to believe that everything we believe and feel strongly is true. But it is for the good of everyone that we temper our claims and statements with the events and shadows of history and plain practicality.
Be credible people, that's all I'm saying here.

So as not to leave you with a somber fermata, another edition of things that do and do not rule:
Someone that rules: Will Campbell (if you don't who he is, look him up)
Someone who does not rule: Orson Scott Card (that guy sucks)

Salud,
Alexander de Nordville

Sympathy shmympathy

You know, sometimes the sympathetic bent of our generation seems simply silly. I know there's more to life than cold rationale and objectivity, but emotionalism is going to kill us all, just mark my words. We sympathize with anyone we see as any kind of a victim. And sooner than later this sympathy is going to engender its own victims, will we sympathize with them too? To borrow a phrase from M.J. Keenan, the "collective Judas" is rapidly diminishing. What the deuce does that mean? you ask. I mean that sooner or later, there will be no one left in the bank of people at whom we can point fingers. Now don't get me wrong, the blame game sucks, but we can't be afraid to lay blame where blame is due. There are culpable people.

It's all well and good to sympathize with the victim and hold the perpetrator of the crime guilty. But I see so much now of sympathizing with the criminal. We use psychological analysis and shift the blame to some entity that only exists in abstractville. We transfer the demons of responsibility into a swarm of pigs and drown them all. And that's the end of that.

Why do we do this? Why is sympathy some kind of generational zeitgeist? I think we feel that we can vindicate ourselves through it. And it's not just an attitude either. We send casseroles or babysit children, and this action is wonderful and loving and good. But we can't just stop there and not fight evil in the first place. We have to take action against things that leave victims behind. There's my weekly two cents. Take it for what it's worth. I know I ramble, sorry. I can only imagine how Faulkner felt. And none of my diatribes are meant to be exhaustive statements. Many of them are specific rather than general cases. But that doesn't mean they're not valid points.

Have a good weekend. It's Fall Break here! Yeah! Meaning...we don't have class on Friday? Nice break. How about they just mail me a check for two hours instead. I'm going to stop now. Bye.

Nords

Pat, you're a marked man

Pat, that comment about Ryan Adams was utter blasphemy. To prove your ignorance, see Plato's "On Ryan Adams," in which he lauds Adams for his seminal contribution to music and life as we know it. I hope a bird craps on your head today. Yes, there are some very catchy songs that are good to ride around to with your windows down, better in Missouri where you guys actually have cool weather.

This pic is of me with the painting I made reference to, "Requiem." I'm at the artist's house. On my right is Aleem, the painter, and on my left is Zarema, his wife, who is one to the best contemporary artists in Ukraine. (I couldn't afford one of her paintings - they were in the triple digits, and would have exhausted my travel budget. It was really awesome to get to talk to them about art and life and stuff. They are both Muslims, but use a lot of Christian themes in their art. They actually do a lot of art for the Christian church in Ukraine, which is an interesting conversation for another day.

BREAKING NEWS!

I new world record has been set for taking the most rock 'n roll lyrical cliches and almagamating them into one album. The Killers have successfully put the devil, Jesus, a hurricane, the Fourth of July, the highway, running, youth, quixotic European cities, and much more into their newest release. Quite an accomplishment fellas. I hope they can't sue me for this.

Me

Requiem

I have a bit of a healthy obsession with death.

I have a painting hanging on my wall. It is one of two real paintings I own - paintings on canvas, works actually painted by a real painter. And I only have the other one because it was a gift given to me by the artist for buying the other one. I bought it when I was in Ukraine while visiting the artist at his house. It means a lot to me, and there's even an inscription on the back that says, in Russian, "To Jordan, Aleem." But the story of acquiring it is not the point.

The painting is called "Requiem." Requiem either means a Mass for the repose of the souls of the dead or an act or token of remembrance. The painting is pretty simple. 7/8 of it is just blue - midnight, inky, blue as deep as the ocean and far as the night sky. The other eighth is an obscure depiction of a funeral procession. The leader is carrying a torch and pointing towards something hidden in the murky blue.

I don't like death. In fact, I hate it, which is probably why I'm kind of obsessed and fascinated by it. I'm only 23 years old, and I hope to someday be 80 years young. But I like that painting, because it gives me hope. Because death brings life back to us. Death reminds us that there is another life. And there is also this life. I used to have a very pessimistic view of life. Life is hard, and it's not fair, as my father told me many times growing up. Life is hard, and I could not forgive it for that. But I'm beginning to learn that that is not a reason to give up on it.

I dislike those people who tell the little kids to stop running and laughing in the sanctuary - which, is, exactly where people should be laughing and gamboling about. Those people who think that life is miserable, and because their lives are miserable, everyone else's should be too. If anyone ever tells me again that this life is some kind of purgatory that exists only to suffer so that I will be rewarded in the next life, I will tell him or her that he or she is full of shit. Really. I don't care if that person is a minister, a criminal, or a relative. I will tell that person that he or she is squandering the next life for the sake of this one - to hang on to this sick, prideful, nightmare.

When I look at my painting, I think of life. Because, although the mass trodding along in this funeral procession is walking to a grave, those people are also the only source of light in the picture. They are also a light walking into the darkness and illuminating it. The implied dead person in the painting has faded into the dark blue, but from that grave the light pushes onward. Death is only a kind of reference point. I will return to this and try to be more coherent, but it is exasperatingly difficult to pin down. But I hope you can feel me here - what I'm getting at. The dead person in the painting was once one of the torch-carriers. And who knows, could've been the spark that lit all of the torches that cast away the darkness. Darkness is not a thing, it is a no-thing. It is an absence, the absence of light. Darkness has no volition - it can do nothing to the light. But the light has ontological status, it can make the darkness go away, as the darkness can only exist if there is no light. Rambling now. Going to sleep.

Oh yeah, now I remember where I was going with this. My friend Greg Garrett just released a book that has made me think about some things, one of which is this: Death teaches us that "man does not live by bread alone." What? You ask. Yes, one can die without food. And one can die in a stocked pantry. Eating ALONE can kill a man. Man does not live by bread, ALONE. We need people. And the fact that the deceased in my painting had a bunch of people in requiem on his or her behalf, proves that he or she was not alone. (Greg's book is called "Crossing Myself." Don't think about the title, just go read it.)

Cheers,
Nords