My Quiet Life

I was operating under the assumption that I had missed a few days, since my day # didn't match up with what actual day of the year it was, but I rechecked and I just screwed up my numbering, and I'm still right on track! Picturedump:

Hope you didn't throw away your wooden cutting boards just yet. They may be just fine after all.

Watched Midnight Cowboy for the first time last night. What an awesome, fucking depressing movie. Great review, huh?

In a conversation with my friend Paul last night, we were talking about Salman Rushdie and wandered on over to Chris Hitchens. I talked about my respect for both as atheists and their respective different attitudes and revulsions towards religion. I pasted this clip of Hitchens talking about religion. It's admittedly not Hitchens at his best, but I think it's still a hilariously entertaining take on religion. Anyhow, we talked a bit about radical Islam and fundamentalist Christianity, and he half-jokingly said that we should just let the Buddhists run everything.

I encounter this sentiment a lot -- that while most organized religion has at some point been corrupted towards murderous applications, Buddhism has somehow historically been immune to this. Perhaps because of some intrinsic superiority. Now, I'm not looking to get into a religious debate about the relative merits of Buddhism versus other religions -- it's pretty clear that it's at least less whack than others. But the idea that it is or has been immune to dangerous applications is patentedly false. Does no one remember, like, World War II? You know, the war where Zen Buddhism was the backbone of an entire country bent on a fanatical suicide march of world domination and colonialism? Remember that? Okay, so at the time Shinto and Bushido had as much to do with it as Buddhism, but Buddhism and Zen played its part, and until recently the Buddhist temples' complicity and support of the war has gone unnoticed. But it's slowly being unearthed:

"Zen was a large part of the spiritual training not only of the Japanese military but eventually of the whole Japanese people," he said in an interview. "It would have led them to commit national suicide if there had been an American invasion."

...

Both of Mr. Victoria's books peel back layers of the career of D. T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950's and remains the best-known Japanese advocate of Zen in the West. In 1938, however, Mr. Suzuki used his prestige as a scholar in Japan to assert that Zen's "ascetic tendency" teaches the Japanese soldier "that to go straight forward and crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him."

"What Brian Victoria has written is mostly right," said Jiun Kubota, the third patriarch of Sanbo-kyodan, a small Zen group outside Tokyo that has also issued an apology. "I dare say that Zen was used as the spiritual backbone of the military army and navies during the war."

...

Traditionally, Zen stresses an inward search for understanding and mental discipline. But Mr. Victoria said that imperial military trainers developed the self-denying egolessness Zen prizes into "a form of fascist mind-control." He said Suzuki and others helped by "romanticizing" the tie between Zen and the warrior ethos of the samurai. Worse, he charges, they stressed a connection between Buddhist compassion and the acceptance of death in a way that justified collective martyrdom and killing one's enemies.

"In Islam, as in the holy wars of Christianity, there is a promise of eternal life," Mr. Victoria said in an interview. "In Zen, there was the promise that there was no difference between life and death, so you really haven't lost anything."

Got back from seeing Salman Rushdie a while ago.. He's a fairly engaging speaker.. the topic was loose enough ("the Role of a Writer") that it was more or less like sitting down to coffee with him and shooting the shit. He was at his worst when he actually stayed on topic. Because, really, the role of a writer is to write, and that's basically all he said, just in more words. Expose truth via untruths, etc etc. Whatever. Newsflash!! I guess it was ostensibly a talk oriented towards college kids, so maybe this was all news to them. His best was when he was digressing onto whatever tangents his brain was obviously leading him. Stories about him at award shows with Saul Bellow and such. Pretty entertaining. I think of the 4 or 5 questions he was asked, he actually answered maybe ... 1 of them, and then only as a token gesture. Questions are merely an opportunity to digress.. I do wish the topic had perhaps been a bit more focused, just because it's his more geopolitical commentary that really gets me off.

My experience with Rushdie is mostly via his editorial commentary, and a favorite exchange of mine with George Galloway. We should have a face-off between Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens where they take turns making a complete ass of George Galloway.. Anyways, I should get around to reading some of Rushdie's actual novels. I've been on a fiction-reading kick, lately.. Diving into Love in the time of Cholera again right now.. Enjoying it a lot more this time around.

Salman Rushdie is speaking at Sarratt today at 6PM, and it's sold out. Awesome. Anything else good going on that I can completely miss or not learn about till it's too late?

UPDATE: Woo, I'm going. The blog mafia comes through again.

Apparently Colin Hay played at the Wildhorse last night, and I had no idea. He was literally next door to my office.

I suck.

So, I've had a chance to review the Two Most Anticipated HipHop Albums of the Year (tm). Speaking, of course, of the great album-sales battle between Kanye West and 50 Cent that is constantly in the news despite the fact that as far as I can tell nobody really cares.

Well, anyways, a couple of weeks ago I finally got both albums. The verdict: 50 Cent? Worthless. Kanye's new album is boring, but not terrible. You pop it in, and Champion and Stronger open the album as decent standout tracks. It kinda takes a dive after that -- a good time to settle into a nap. Wake up to the pleasantly ethereal strings on Flashing Lights, and groove to the strings. Nice track. More napping, and then it's over. "So, that was quick,", you think, and you play it again. You play it a few times. You think that you sorta like it, but you aren't sure you can put your finger on why. Your assessment may differ from mine, but basically: the songs I like, I like because of the samples. And they aren't diced up and re-served, really, as far as I can tell.. just served up wholesale as a background for Kanye's lilting pseudo-singing/rhyming. It's not bad, but it's just not ... great.

And then there's the whole "battle" with 50 Cent. What is this? 1995? My brother said he thought Kanye was better off with his jaw wired shut. I won't go that far (though Through the Wire is dope), but you do have to wonder about the producer's rapper that we came to love before he decided he was the king. I think College Dropout is sheer genius (I might be in the minority on that one), so I am not willing to write off Kanye West or anything.. I think of this as more of a sophomore slump. But this album, frankly, I can take or leave.

So. while these two goliaths battled it out, I was waiting for something else. David (if you will forgive a ridiculous metaphor) coming to knock them both out. That album, of course, was Talib Kweli's new one, Ear Drum. This spring... and summer .. and fall, I had/have been borrowing my parents' Miata a lot (thanks mom&dad! I'll bring it back ... some day!). One thing about their Miata is that it doesn't play burned CDs at all. So I've had to listen to real CDs -- like, CDs that I actually bought. In a store. Probably at Tower. (Teehee, remember them?) Anyways, it's been a bit of a time-trip in the car, listening to music, since the last time I actually did that was probably roughly the year 2000. Which is why I have rediscovered Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek's Train of Thought, which I listened to compulsively over and over for about two months. I think a lot of people took the Mos Def train after Black Star and sorta forgot about Talib. But this album, damn. "Too Late" might actually be the perfect song. Anyways, that's a different album. But, long story short -- I had been eagerly anticipating Talib's new one.

And so, it arrived. And it is good. So good. I am no good at full recaps, but, best tracks: "Hostile Gospel", "Say Something", "In the Mood", "Hell", "Hot Thing", "Listen". I think "Country Cousins" is cute, and a nice sentiment, though I find the song itself sorta grating. Dirty south is best left to the dirty south, I think. I also think it's funny that he gives a shoutout to Outkast in a song called "Country Cousins" (see Outkast, "West Savannah" re: Southern, Country for their opinions on this). Anyways, it's a damn good album, and I can't stop listening to it. Someone help me.

I'm still in a work coma this week, but wanted to pop my head above water to say congrats to Karl Dean for his victory.. I am glad that my cynical prediction that Clement would take the election was proven wrong.. Now that my (second) choice for mayor has been elected, I can soon get started on criticizing him endlessly for his every move, in fine armchair political-wonk blogger tradition.

Through a chance confluence of events, it happened that I had a few Nazi-related history lessons this weekend..

I read This Way for Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen over the weekend, by the pool and on the plane. It's a collection of Tadeusz Borowski's stories from his experiences in Auschwitz. I first became interested in Borowski via the portrait of him in Milosz's Captive Mind. Borowski was a holocaust survivor and poet, who later joined ranks with the communists in Poland, only to commit suicide at the age of 28. Although the motivation for someone's suicide can never be known for sure, there's little doubt in my mind that his disillusionment with the Communist regime played a large part. Shortly before his suicide, a close friend was locked up and tortured by the Communists.. After surviving the horrors of the Nazis, his one hope for a "new and better order" (as Milosz put it) ended up a mirage.

Anyways, his melancholy spirit is evident in his stories from Auschwitz.. A sortof detached, sad commentary on the brutal reality of an environment where humanity has basically lost all meaning. Milosz called Borowski "The Disappointed Lover", and in reading these tales, you start to understand the depth of that statement. He also had a keen eye for the surreal.. Here's a bit from a story describing a soccer match they had orchestrated on a newly constructed soccer field:

The procession moved along slowly, growing in size as more and more people poured from the freight cars. And then it stopped. The people sat down on the grass and gazed in our direction. I returned with the ball and kicked it back inside the field. It traveled from one foot to another and, in a wide arc, returned to the goal. I kicked it towards a corner. Again it rolled out into the grass. Once more I ran to retrieve it. But as I reached down, I stopped in amazement - the ramp was empty. Out of the whole colorful summer procession, not one person remained. The train too was gone ...

Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.

This sort of thing makes for good airplane reading, because it's really hard to complain about being cramped on a plane while you're reading about millions being herded naked onto cattlecars to their deaths. Not the most uplifting book, though, no. I'd offer to let you borrow it (I think I even promised it to Aaron), but alas, I left it on the plane home from Wisconsin, so some flight attendant or passenger gets a crack at it.

Last night, then, I checked my mail and saw I had gotten Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage in from Netflix. I had read a bit about White Rose and the Scholls a bit in the past, and so I thought I'd check out this movie. It was pretty good -- a straightforward account of what happened. The performances were all excellent. What I enjoyed even more than the movie, though, were interviews with the original witnesses and friends in the special features. There's also a clip of Roland Freisler that is nothing short of amazing. Freisler was the eccentric (to say the least) judge who ordered the execution of Christopher Probst, Sophie and Hans Scholl. I thought in the movie that the actor playing Freisler laid on the "crazy nazi" a little bit too thick. Wow, was I ever wrong -- if anything he underplayed it. The same clip -- from some trial where Freisler preside -- is on youtube, check it out.

One thing I find interesting is the extent to which Sophie Scholl is heralded as the prime actor and hero -- both historically and in fictional portrayals, whereas Hans is relegated to the background, comparatively. Given the story of how things played out, and their respective involvement with White Rose, I can't quite figure it out.. I suppose it could be as simple as the fact that she was a girl, and a relatively pretty one, making it even more exceptional or surprising that she'd be this ballsy underground revolutionary. And so we have sortof this projection of romanticism in it because of that -- some sort of Joan of Arc syndrome. I don't know. She was clearly a remarkable woman, arguably more interesting in several aspects, perhaps, than her cohorts. But I find myself wondering if the focus on her alone diminishes the contributions of Probst, her brother Hans, and others who were involved in White Rose. Anyway, if you're not familiar with the story, check out the movie, it's interesting.

I need something a little more uplifting, now, though, sheesh.