I love you

As of late particular friends have been pestering me about this, that never say "I love you." This is not entirely true. I end most every e-mail and Skype call with the sister or parents or grandparents with that. I just do not say it to aforementioned friends.

Now, assume that I am mature enough to not squinch my face up and stick my tongue out when love is mentioned and can differentiate between romantic, friendly and every other form of love that English has compressed into a single, unwieldy, awkward word. This knocks down one obvious out and explanation for my actions, and as I do care very much for my friends, this has undoubtedly contributed to friends' accusations that I am either emotionally stunted or very distant from such feelings. Here is the deal.

I posted on the subject of love years back and still believe in what I wrote, that love is sacrifice of the highest order, and before I give any verbal indication that such an incredible relationship exists, I want to know that it is true and want to be precise. My actions towards my friends thus far, which consist of little more than hanging out and doing stuff together and whatnot, have, in my understanding, indicated nothing more than modest sacrifice, nothing greater than friendship. To say, "I love you" only to later find myself unwilling to make the appropriate sacrifice when it comes down to brass tacks is harsh and even cruel.

There is a way out of this. "I love you" is not a statement describing an already existing and demonstrated relationship but a promise. While we may not have been put up against the wall and forced to prove who it is we ultimately care about and will sacrifice ourselves for, to say "I love you" is a promise that we will decide for the other. But this bothers me. As I often so often heard and read, love is not a game. Quite the opposite, everything I thing have heard and read suggests that love is a big deal, too big a deal, mayhaps, to be promised to any extent.

A problem emerges. What are we left with then? We are not all the protagonists of romantic comedies and, when there is no other option to get in touch with our one and only, cannot demonstrate the depths of our love by stealing an airplane, thus getting over our fear of authority and heights, parachuting into Yankees stadium, thereby disrupting the World Series, and then standing up to whichever steroid-enhanced and rage-filled player comes to physically protest our action with a bat in hand. In fact, it is very likely that the brass tacks and hard decisions will never come. Our lives will progress from birth to death and the circumstances never demand anything so great of us. That may even be preferable because, really, even if the right sacrifice is made, something still had to be sacrificed and it is probably better that no one had to sacrifice anything at all in the first place. If that is the case, all that we have are the small things, preparing a special meal at the end of a strenuous day, simply talking, really listening, to demonstrate our love.

Maybe then love and the indicator that is "I love you" are habits in line with Aristotle's virtues. We practice the little, daily sacrifices because that is all we can do until they become so a part of our being that to do otherwise, even when the situation is much more drastic than stopping on the way back from work to pick up a special book the other has been looking forward to, is near inconceivable. Then a loving relationship is the one where not doing the selfish thing requires conscious thought and action because they have become so unnatural.

Now I must ponder whether my relationships are as such.

Off-balance

Know what this blog has been lacking in for the past few months? Pictures by me. Know why? Because Mr. Hard Disk who lived in my computer decided to make friends with Ms. Defect, never considering his responsibilities to protect the pictures Dame Hard Drive carried. Their loss presented a critical blow to the posting of my pictures to Spice of Life, that is until I remembered I had posted all my decent shots to Facebook and could just pull them from there to post here. Hurray for that.

I am fond of this picture, less for the aesthetic properties, which I have attempted to draw out in most of my other pictures, than the message I was trying, and feel I succeeded, to communicate. The young skateboarder is a little out-of-focus and his position and the angle may not be the most dynamic, but perfecting these was not so interesting to me as the theme of this picture. What attracted me to him, his friend and his father as subjects were just how ridiculously out-of-place they looked at this skatepark, these suburbanites spending an afternoon at a park where chain-smokers next to their beater cars at the opposite end appear to be dealing drugs.

Obviously, the kid is not the most comfortable on his skateboard. A far sight better than his off-camera friend, the subject is still struggling to maintain his balance in simple forward motion, no tricks yet. His father, also off-camera but included in another picture I plan on posting, is sitting next to his shiny white convertible Beetle. Never thought of the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd as one interested in graffiti either. The chance of getting paint all over your too-expensive T-shirt cannot be appealing. For me, his off-balance stance is simply the physical representation how disconcerting this all must be.

Considering the 3. Kammerkonzert des Bayerischen Staatsorchester

Studying in Munich, as I wrote earlier, was an opportunity to be "shook up" and break out of nasty old habits, like those which kept me back from trying those high culture things, i.e. visiting art museums and attending orchestral performances. Back in the States, I was holding back from them, waiting to take a class or read a book or something which would prepare me to more fully appreciate them when I finally got around to it all. Screw that in Munich. The city has two freaking opera houses, three orchestras, four world-class art museums and a not inconsiderable number of galleries and live music venues. My next chance at these was not going to come for years, and I was not going to waste an opportunity like that. Thus I ended up at one of the Bavarian State Orchestra's chamber concerts.

Interestingly enough, the Mozart piece which opened the evening, Quintet for piano and winds K. 452, was my least favorite. It was pretty, yes, but there was no excitement, no spirit to it. Movie reviewers attack superior actors by saying they "phoned in their performance." That is what this quintet felt like, Mozart phoned it in. The next two, Franz Danzi's Wind Quintet Op. 56, No. 2 in G-minor and Paul Taffanel's Wind Quintet, were easily my favorites. Danzi's brought to mind a stroll through the fields and Taffanel's hinted of a love story. The final piece, Sextet in Adaptation for Piano and Wind Quintet (sorry but the Internet fails me on this one) by Bohuslav Martinu was a strange one to me, employing on an off-putting dissonance, all the harsher in comparison to the more unified sets which preceded it.

And those are my thoughts on the performance. For a concert that clocked over two hours, that is not a tremendous amount of writing, especially what I have pulled off much more for shorter movies with much less acclaim surrounding them, but this is what it is: a beginning. At some point, if I want to make progress, I really ought to read some music theory and the like, but for now, I am content to reflect on that music I hear, to search out new stuff and try to understand it in my own situation.

Where this gets interesting is the minor controversy, which erupted yesterday and revolves on a review my friend Aaron Brown recently posted to his blog Fifty-Two Tuesdays. In brief, for those who do not care to click the link and come to their own conclusions first, Aaron reviewed the Get Set Go album Sunshine, Joy & Happiness: A Tragic Tale of Death, Despair, and Other Silly Nonsense. About a week later, Eric Summer, the band's viola player, gave a scathing point-by-point response, boiling tar scathing. Summer's rage can be divided into two camps: rants against against grammatical errors, which really smack of hypocrisy when Summer is confronted with a spelling mistake of his own and sarcastically replies that his own credibility is now shot, and raves that Aaron lacks the musical understanding to comprehend the complexity of Get Set Go's music.

"What qualifies one to be a reviewer?" is the question that finally arises from all this. For better or worse, I just reviewed a concert which I bloody well know that I lack the education to properly do, but is a degree in music necessary before one can offer a respone? I have heard some question the role of the movie critic because their experiences and very profession cause them to approach movies completely differently than most Americans and thus leave the theater with wildly different opinions. On this point, maybe what we need, and the Internet is certainly the avenue for more than enough of this already, is a greater opportunity for the non-professional critic to offer their response to art, one that can actually claim to speak for the layman. I would also like to offer one other suggestion. Only one other because this is a topic worthy of its own post. While I am not yet sure whether the ideal of a review or criticism should be to confront the art on its own terms, it should not be out of the question for a review to be approached on its own terms, as well. I was not looking to do anymore than share my simple response to it and give myself a foundation to begin a greater exploration of music. Would it be right for Mozart or Martinu to come back from the dead and bash me for my one-sentence declarations on their works?

Kudos, though, to Aaron for getting someone to pay attention and responding with a measure of tact. And fie on Summer for responding so childishly. Actually, a child would probably respond better. More like an emo teenager, one who whines that no one understands him.

Considering "Into the Wild"

One of the (admittedly weaker) reasons I believe in God is this unshakable sense that someone has been and is still screwing with me. All these coincidences keep popping up in my life, and I cannot help feeling that were I a little bit smarter, I could put it all together. There has to be a reason my Zen-Mediation instructor went off on mysticism for the first time last semester literally the day before I was to give a presentation on Sufism, the mystic branch of Islam. A push towards something or pull away? I do not know. Like I said, not smart enough. But, once I figure that and all the others out... I do not know that either. Maybe I will have won at life and will receive a free pass into heaven or something similarly cool.

Into the Wild, based upon the true Jack Krakauer account of the final two years of Chris McCandless' life, is just the latest in those coincidences. Let us begin with the clearest. The doomed protagonist and I share a first name. His estimated date of death (because he died alone) is August 18, the same as my birthday. But let us be honest as well. These similarities are shallow, nothing more than attention grabbers. To remain focused on them would be no different than those kooks searching for something behind the fact that both John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald are both referred to by all three of their names. What really matters and draws Chris McCandless and myself together across the years is the words that spill from his lips and into his journal. "I read somewhere how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. " "I want to be all the way out there. On my own. No map. No watch. No ax. Just out there. Big mountains, rivers, sky. Game. Just be out there in it." I wish I could come near that passion and eloquence.

I wish I could actually do it too, make a clean break with society to live alone and deliberately in the wilderness, but that is where Chris McCandless and I ultimately differ. He went out and did it. He stopped playing along with the rules which underly modern American life, which most of us never question, even if we happen to recognize their existence. Rather than go on to graduate school or pursue a career, he donated his entire savings to Oxfam and took off on a two-year journey in the early '90's, one that took him from South Dakota to Mexico and culminated in four months in the Alaskan wilderness where he eventually starved to death. McCandless was an idealist, unwilling to compromise the rightness of his journey to the real. Even better, he actually did what he believed in.

What does this all mean? If I grant that coincidence can be more than a number of random variables coming together at the opportune moment, and I do, with what did I leave this film? A chance to see the path less taken. If I have not made this clear enough yet, I apologize. I respect McCandless the man and his actions immensely. Maybe I could have been proud of myself if I were to do what he did, but after seeing this, I am not so sure. For sure, what he did took courage. Not just anyone takes on the Alaskan wilderness with 30 pounds of equipment and 10 pounds of rice with no safety net, but it takes a massive level of selfishness too. Some allusions are made to his distaste for apartheid, not particularly unique or difficult since I cannot remember the sales of "Maintain Apartheid Forever" stickers being particularly high, but instead of catching the next flight to South Africa or Washington, D.C., he chose to live for himself. Forget others. All that mattered in the end for McCandless was that he lived the life he wanted to.

Furthermore, McCandless ran not only from middle-class family and the consumerist life which awaited him after graduation but poverty and human misery, too. A year into his journey, McCandless checks in for a night at a Las Vegas shelter but picks right up and leaves that very evening after wandering the streets, unable to bear what he sees, and pushes harder still to make Alaska. That he had incredible passion and ambition cannot be disputed. What is disappointing is that he turned it all toward himself. He could have been great but died young and without reason. If you do not want to deal with possibilities of what may have been, realize that he hurt his family. Not on the best of terms with his parents, McCandless never told them of his plans or once contacts them. More unforgivable though, he never tells his sister either, one whom he supposedly loved dearly. They knew nothing of his fate, whether to hold onto a hope of his survival or until a call came in mid-September to inform them his body had been found. McCandless is someone to respect but not to emulate. I do not want to be him.

Make no doubt, this is an excellent movie, and were it released in any other year, it would have received more awards attention than it ended up with. Its only two Academy Award nominations went to Hal Holbrook as Best Supporting Actor and Best Editing. Both well deserved, but strong cases could be made for Emile Hirsch in the lead role, who has been a pleasure to watch since The Girl Next Door; Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam on the soundtrack; Sean Penn as the director; and even Best Picture. The movie is deftly made, and there are no weak links, except for those who demand constant action and find the original Die Hard a little slow with too low of a body count. Obviously, the movie centers on McCandless, but the ensemble of people he meets on his travels, both whose lives are touched by him and who shape him, is given due care. No matter their screen time, genuine depth is given to each of them. No stock characters here, and the landscape cinematography is simply brilliant. It is worth a little look-see, and you can come to your own conclusions towards Chris McCandless, a wake-up call to one's own squandered existence or a warning or something else entirely.

Studying abroad

Tomorrow marks my third full week back in the United States after five months abroad in Munich. Thankfully, the transition back has gone remarkably well. Jet lag was not an issue, and neither was homework, a bit of a surprise since I returned a week after classes at Gonzaga had already started. Of course, catching up and getting settled back into life in America has kept me busy and reconnecting with friends even more so. The result of this is that I have spent little time reflecting back on my months in Europe, and this bothers me. Five months in a foreign land, surrounded by a largely alien language, different culture and apart from most everything I was familiar with? Kind of a big deal, I think. Now is the time to start taking that on, a time to begin considering what those months meant to me, how they changed me.

But first things first. Why did I go? Looking back now, it seems kind of inevitable and as though I never made the conscious decision to trade Gonzaga for Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität for a semester. It begins with my choice to take German as my foreign language requirement at Gonzaga. When my application asked what languages I was interested in, I checked German even though I had studied French for four years in high school. My grandparents emigrated in the '60's, and I thought it might be nice to be able to speak with them in their native tongue and those relatives (e.g. all of them) who stayed behind. From that point on, there was no detour on my path to Munich. By the beginning of my sophomore year, it was already time to start considering whether I wanted to study abroad. Why not? A goodly number of my friends were taking advantage of the chance, and I thought it might be fun. There was never any doubt in my mind that a German-speaking country would be my destination since to wimp out on Oxford or something would be an affront to my two years of study, and once the Munich program was suggested by my German instructor, I never looked at another program. Like I wrote earlier, there was no deliberate thought on the subject at any point. The pieces all just fell into line. Perhaps this should worry me, such a light approach to a major matter, but I have come around to agreeing with Mary Schmich. "Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's." The amount I do not expect and cannot prepare for will always trump that which I can. No use worrying about it too much.

What was I looking for in this experience? Still not quite sure on that one. To get better at German for sure, but the language does not play any specific role in my future plans, as fluid as they are now. To see Europe and its great cities, too, but no plans were made before my departure at the end of August, everything arranged across the ocean. Certainly not to advance on my path to a Journalism major. Did not even take a media studies class over there. Mostly, I think, I was looking to get shook up. I was comfortable at Gonzaga, and it was time to see what happened when I threw myself into a situation I was not quite prepared for (God knows two years of college German is not enough to get by), break myself off from the familiar and watch the consequences. Cheated on that one a bit. A friend from Gonzaga participated in the same program, and we hung out a good deal, even more after the Internet in my room went down.

This is a big subject, and this is only a small part of the experience. I will, undoubtedly, write still more on it. For now, though, the only way I am going to get through it all is piece by piece.

And here is the first of those pieces. To be blunt, my academic education in Munich was not of the highest caliber. Ultimately, I learned German. All of my classes, barring the independent study of Locke's "A Letter Concerning Toleration," were held in German, and the academics were not that rigorous, except my term papers. Two classes were devoted solely to the language. Anything I learned from History of Germany Since 1945 came from reading the texts because the first half of the three-hour classes were student presentations on the assigned readings and the second half was the instructor waiting for us to ask questions on them. Weltreligionen im Religionunterricht was fun, but what was taught about the major world religions I generally already knew from earlier readings. Theorie und Praxis der Zen-Meditation was quite literally an hour of meditation preceded by the reading of a koan and a little yoga.

It is a good thing then that there is more to education than what you learn from books and lectures. I planned my own trips in their entirety and (far more difficult and resulting in failure far more often) planned for the arrival of friends. I learned a little of art simply by visiting as many galleries and museums as I could stomach and got better at meeting new people and accepting hospitality. These are all good things for sure, life lessons after a style, but they dwarf in comparison to the big one.

From the onset, I knew I would only spend a single semester in Germany, and I lived every day with that awareness. I was living in Munich on borrowed time, and I knew it. If an opportunity presented itself, I took it because these chances were not going to crop up again. For as much as I despise Harris' The End of Faith, he does make one decent metaphor. We are all living with an incurable disease that will knock us dead and off this mortal coil, and we do not know when. That is life. I just faced that on a smaller scale in Europe but was graced with the knowledge of when it would all end. Now I want to live my life that way. To go out and do something worth remembering and not pass up an opportunity for something new. Quit using homework as an excuse not to spend time with friends and stop spending hours asking "So, what do you want to do?" instead of doing something.

For that alone, I am euphoric I spent that time across the ocean. Really, it is not any sort of great revelation. Good grief, Tim McGraw sang "Live Like You Were Dying." To actually experience it, though, is something else.

McGlobalization

The latest issue of Charter, Gonzaga's journal of scholarship and opinion, one which I hope to serve as editor for next year, has been posted online. My essay considers the best way to discover a culture through the mostly standardized cuisine of McDonald's, and there are plenty of other essays worth your time. Particular favorites of mine include those by Mallory Ferland, Ann Foreyt and Rebecca Schwartz.

Considering "Mulholland Dr."

I once heard that James Joyce wrote with the intention that, in order for one to understand his works, the reader would have to devote their lives to them. If you think you understand it on the first go around, you are wrong. Mulholland Dr.? Not so different except, assuming you come to it blind and blissfully unaware, you will very quickly realize that you have no idea what is going on. Probably still true after the fourth viewing though you might finally be able to establish a chronology and distinguish between dream/nightmare/fantasy/psychotic episode and reality at that point, though everything else will continue to evade you, all of which makes for a rather interesting contrast to Babel which I had watched the night before. Against the example of Crash, I lauded Babel for not putting it all on the surface, forcing the audience to strain itself a little. To say that Mulholland Dr. strains the audience is like saying a five-minute time-out in the corner is the same as an hour of waterboarding. The initial viewing is punishing in the extreme. There is something that resembles a plot as an aspiring Canadian actress, freshly arrived in Los Angeles, tries to help a wandering amnesiac understand why she has mad stacks of money and a blue box in her purse, but that is frequently interrupted for scenes of completely unrelated characters doing completely unrelated things. A man discovering the monster of his nightmares behind a dumpster, a director strong-armed into casting a specific actress, a hitman bumbling the job and lesbian sex all just kind of happen. Then, with only a half hour separating you from the end, you have to throw all of what you just saw out the window because in a single moment, all those basic elements like plot and character relationships and identities, which you thought you were getting a grip on, are radically altered or straight-up traded for something new. If I had popcorn, I would have started throwing it at the screen and then proceeded to pick it all up and give it another toss because that would have been more worth my time than continuing to stare.

The problem, though, is Mulholland Dr. is an exquisitely crafted film. A compiled score of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes and user of rating of 8.0 on IMDB do little to suggest otherwise, and everything is so precise and absurd that there had to be something behind it all. All of my frustrations were only compounded by the constant feeling that I was so close to understanding it, just a few points too stupid. Other people have had this same feeling but have taken the next logical step in trying to make sense of the whole thing. Sites like Lost on Mulholland Dr. are a testament to this, and I am prone to agree with their deep, involved analyses, some undoubtedly taking more time and effort than a few term papers of mine.

Ultimately, one's response to Mulholland Dr. is dependent upon the attitude coming into it. For a lazy Friday evening with the friends, there is nothing worse. For those willing to fully immerse themselves in it and spend their life trying to understand it, maybe it will catch, but I question that decision. After all the hours of watching, reading and thought,what does Mulholland Dr. offer? It contains no great commentary on life, the universe and everything or the state of modern society. It is no myth the audience can set its life in relation to and there are no heroes one can aspire to be.

Ultimately, it is a psychological profile of Naomi Watts (whose ability to so completely disappear within the three characters she plays cannot be celebrated enough). At the end of it all, we have nothing more than an intimate understanding of a construct of the director's imagination. No matter how subtle and well-developed, she is nothing compared to the infinite depths of the person we pass on the street or sit next to in class. Does Mulholland Dr. allow us to better relate to them in the least? Maybe if they put the same amount of time into it as well, but for the most part, I doubt it.

But that is a terribly functionalist approach to it all and calls into the question the validity of all art, not a position I am eager to adopt.

Considering "Babel"

I had wanted to see this movie a long time before I came across it while flipping through a friend's DVD collection. Not really sure where that desire came from. Its compiled rating on Rotten Tomatoes is not so great, though it did receive nominations for a variety of awards including the Oscar for Best Picture (lost to The Departed) and even won a few of them. More than anything else, I think it was its association with the explosion in Mexican films that occurred that year. Having only seen Children of Men myself (still need to get my hands on Pan's Labyrinth) that movie alone is enough to make me see anything remotely related to it.

As a result, I was not really sure what I was coming in to except for mild memories of reviews comparing it to the previous year's Best Picture Crash through their wide-spanning ensemble casts and fractured storytelling. Let me make this clear now. Babel is better than Crash. That's no knock against the latter, a movie which I very much enjoy and appreciate, but for the most part, everything it has it puts out there. There is not much to sift through because the majority lies on the surface. Babel requires digging and reflection, and its raw emotional intensity matches that of Crash with little difficulty.

Babel hits the fundamentals beautiful. Acting across the board is excellent, the no-names, even through sign and foreign languages, matching perfectly against the headlining Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The music, simple but evocative and so very appropriate, is largely kept in reserve and only employed to the greatest effect, especially during the club scene. The cinematography, beautiful. The frequently employed jump cuts, powerful. On these basic, foundational elements there is nothing to fault Babel on.

But, to be a truly great movie, one that attains the level of masterpiece, it needs a similarly striking theme, and it is here that Babel takes a brilliant turn. For a movie that literally spans continents and arrives at a time when globalization has transformed and raised the stakes on every political issue, it remains intensely personal, not concerned with governments and society but the individual people doing the best they can in their little, daily lives. The narrative thread, effectively relating how a Japanese hunter's gift leads to the deportation of an illegal immigrant, is there only as an excuse to tell the nearly simultaneous stories of a Moroccan family, a troubled American couple touring in Morocco, a deaf Japanese girl looking for sex and a Mexican nanny forced to bring her young charges to her son's wedding. And what do we find in these distantly related stories? That all these people all are forced to put up with the same trash. They misunderstand each other. They bumble into one another in their search for intimacy and connection. Things get out of control, and people lie and make mistakes. But we all share in the same hope too. At the end, someone puts their arms around you. They show they love you. It does nothing to make the situation any better, but then, at least you know you can get through it.

The message of Babel, in spite of everything it seems to suggest in its scope, is really no greater than "You are not alone in your suffering," whether in the midst of the worst of it or when help finally arrives, sought or not. Just watch the movie. It gets intense at times and will make you uncomfortable, but it is very much worth it.

Neo-Atheism

If you want to be a jerk about it but gain a pretty good understanding of what neo-atheism is (so named and anecdotally described in this article by Wired Magazine, the same which introduced me to the movement), replace ‘neo’ with ‘fundamentalist.’ No different than Islam or Christianity, atheism has accrued fundamentalists of its own, and considering their rather antagonistic viewpoints, I have always found it amusing just how much of the language and techniques the neo-atheists have appropriated from their religious fundamental brethren. You get the same talk of the imminence of the end times, couched in language of nuclear holocaust rather than Revelation, and the same belief that their position is not only right, which is really not so uncommon even among the moderate, but that it is the only position worth having. Everyone not a part of your camp must either be persuaded from their path or is a potential threat. There has to be a video on YouTube somewhere of someone pointing this parallel out to Dawkins or Hitchens, and I have to see their response

This post is not intended as a refutation of neo-atheism. While I do believe that its most vocal proponents have gone off the deep end in their extreme rejection of everything religious and the possibility of any good coming from it, I understand why people choose atheism. I also know why I do not. Someday I may post on my thoughts on the subject, but that day is not today.

Rather, I prefer now to write on something which occurred to me since completing an essay comparing John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith. As one may guess from the titles, Locke and Harris have differing views on the subject of tolerance, Locke believing that so long as religious practices do not intrude upon the civil interests or otherwise muscle in on the state’s territory it must be afforded tolerance. At the other end of the spectrum, Harris insists that religion, as the prime source of pain and suffering in this world and throughout history, must be eliminated.

The thing is, their underlying, fundamental goal is not so different. Both are members of the Enlightenment tradition and anticipating truth and a communal utopia through argument. Locke has faith that “truth certainly would do well enough, if were once left to shift for herself,” and Harris believes that civil society is “a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence,” and where the expectation is that only the truth is able to survive the ensuing rigorous debate.

What is with that? That was the question my professor posed to me after we went through an early draft. My answer after a great deal of thought (not in that same meeting but a month or so afterwards)? Harris is trying to resuscitate the Enlightenment project of achieving a universal Utopia through argument and discussion since postmodernism came through and did a hatchet job on the veryidea of there even being a firm ground from which we can judge the rightness or wrongness of different ideas. First, he asserts materialism and the related ability to objectively quantify and measure everything as this common ground. Second, he tries his hardest to tear down religion, something which I find largely dependent upon one’s subjective experience of the spiritual, because anything relying upon the individual experience is a friend of postmodernism.

I like to think of Harris’ philosophy in this context as the Enlightenment project with teeth. And guns. Lots of guns. The gloves of Harris’ Enlightenment have come off. It cannot wait for everyone to realize that something is true or false. It needs to make that decision for them.

It is a pity. I like to think that people can still be trusted to come to the appropriate conclusions on the big issues by themselves.

Considering "Tanguera"

Night before my pan-European Christmas vacation began, I caught Tanguera, a modern musical that manages not to be based on a book written by Hugo, Eliot or Maguire; second-class movie; or some band looking to provide the next Mamma Mia!, on opening night at the Deutsches Theater. Ever since deciding that a Dance Minor would be fun and subsequently discovering that I could not actually complete it, I have been getting more into social dance, especially Argentine Tango for its music and moves that do not require planning five steps ahead. Thus, when the advertisements were screaming “Das tango Musikal direkt aus Buenos Aires,” my attention was rather effectively caught.

Certainly no intellectual heavyweight questioning the postmodern condition or anything of that sort, it was a story of love at first sight, love thwarted, love fought for and love immortalized. In short, it was fun and effectively so. I never fidgeted and was quite amazed to realize when I left that the running time pushed two hours and catching the familiar sounds of “Pena multa” in such a production was a pleasure.

The story. Dock Worker falls in love with Girl as she comes off the boat. Her returned affections, accompanied by a spotlight and the freezing of all other players on stage, are clear. Unfortunately, Local Brothel Owner, identified by his wearing of a hat, is also intrigued by Girl and takes her away. Dock Worker, disliked by Brothel Owner, is disturbed by this, and his increasingly violent attempts to regain Girl propel the rest of the story on through the building action to the climax.

And all of this, excluding the briefest of Spanish prologues and epilogues, is performed entirely without words, only dance, specifically, the titular Tango. When love is in the air, they tango. When they wash their laundry, they tango. When they fight, they actually tango. When Girl is attempting to decide between the true love of Dock Worker or moderately glamorous though mostly seedy life offered by Brothel Owner, they make their respective arguments through a threesome tango, one of the best moments in the entire musical.

One gripe. Part of the fun of musicals I have always understood, if my friends and their immense appreciation for Wicked and Rent is any indication, is the ability to participate, mostly through the singing. As already mentioned, the lack of vocals in this musical (does is still count as such then?) is not so possible with Tanguera. I guess I can just play some of the classics constantly on my laptop or tango my way to class. Unfortunately as my companion for the evening, who ought to know considering his month-long stay in Buenos Aires to practice the only dance I have referenced in this entire post, noted, none of the moves in Tanguera are practically possible. Of course they were choreographed and practiced until the actors were twitching the moves out in their sleep. It is just kind of disappointing when I cannot take anything from it.

Dachau

This post has been a stumbling block for me. In the same way that I had to visit the longest-running Nazi concentration camp once I learned it was only twenty minutes from Munich, I have had to write about it. Obviously, that has been difficult. I went to Dachau over a month ago, and this post only arrives now. There is a lot about the experience I do not know how to put into words, much less have any explanation as to why. What exactly was this compulsion to visit Dachau, for example? If I figure the answer to that one out, I will let you all know. It is intimidating, too. I have read that the Holocaust is the historical event for every generation since. Everything comes back to it. To write about a visit to a concentration camp is to try and capture the essence of the Holocaust, and I am hardly up to that task. But now I just need to push through and get something down.

First and lasting impression? It was big, and it was empty. Granted, my hometown is small, but it would be no trouble at all to gather all its citizens into the central grounds. Movies like Schindler’s List and La Vita è Bella are so personal that you lose any sense of the scale of the Holocaust. Yeah, the families portrayed suffered everything, but you could fit a lot of those families in Dachau and it was hardly the largest of the very many camps. What remains is not even the entirety of the camp. A generous portion of it, including the ovens, is now streets or residential.

There were several memorials in the camp. At the far end, past the lines marking the rows of demolished prisoner housing, were three religious memorials. You want irony? The Catholic memorial was finished first, pushed through by a bishop who survived and dedicated a good decade before the Protestant one, which still came a few months before the Jewish memorial was finished and dedicated. At the other end, closer to the museum was some art: rough iron bodies at harsh right angles and triangles surrounding a chain. A short distance from there was a simple stone memorial with the words “Never again” repeated in three languages.

Reflecting on his own visit, my friend Emmett wrote that no memorials were necessary, the dry buildings were enough. I disagree. In a very literal sense, the buildings were memorials themselves. They had to be reconstructed because they were so shoddily built, but they were not enough. I guess I expected something a bit more sinister. If not the overt evil of skulls on pikes outside Minas Morgul than at least the sterile, technological dread of the Death Star, but Dachau was nothing worthy of note itself. There was no aura of dread around the ground, and even if the ovens remained, I doubt they would have warranted a second look. Without the walls cutting the camp off from the surrounding town, the officers’ and prisoners’ quarters would fit right in with the neighborhood homes which would inevitably grow up around them.

That is where I find the great horror of the Holocaust, I guess. It was not the loss of life, as high as it was. Were life so sacred, war itself would have been ended long ago, and there would be no arguments about capital punishment because it would not exist. No, I believe our inability to escape the Holocaust is how pedestrian it was. There was no frenzy or insane rage. The extermination lasted far too long for that to be an honest reason. It was a job that the Nazis convinced themselves needed doing, and they went about it without any special interest or passion.

I think I needed to visit Dachau to realize this. Yes, there are the books to read and films to watch, and they are necessary because the extent of it all is not contained in this single camp. Still, to actually see it is something else. The Holocaust and very notion of genocide borders on the unreal for this middle-class kid from small town Minnesota. I can imagine all the students at my university dead from gas and then cremated and then multiply that number by 1,500, but to actually believe it happened is near impossible. That is what the visit was for.

Here is Emmett’s post.

Considering the Rodrigo Y Gabriela concert

I did not come into my five months in Munich expecting much or even with plans. The general idea was to take advantage of those this unique stay in Europe and try as many new things as possible. Thus, I finally ended up attending my first proper concerts: Bloc Party, of which I have already written, and Rodrigo Y Gabriela. As an aside, I find it rather funny that my first concerts are attended in Germany but neither are German groups. Bloc Party hails from London, and Rodrigo Y Gabriela came out of Mexico by way of Ireland. Good grief, except for a “Wie geht es euch?” from Matt Tong of Bloc Party, the bands did not even try to speak German. Hooray for globalization and all that jazz, I suppose.

Anyway, Rodrigo Y Gabriela. My second concert. Rodrigo and Gabriela are an acoustic guitar playing duo. They met as members of Terra Acida, a thrash metal band in Mexico, and were discovered while busking in Ireland by Damien Rice. The world owes Mr. Rice a hearty clap on the back for that. They are amazing in every musical sense. Their talent and skill are undeniable, and their music is soulful and infectious. This is not music that just plays in the background. It captures your attention like that bombshell you pass on the street and causes you to nearly stumble over yourself when you turn to get that second look and confirm that God loved the world enough to create her. If you hear Rodrigo Y Gabriela, even in passing, you are not human if you do not find yourself tapping your foot or giving in to the rhythm in the least. Even more, their sound is unique. It is not flamenco, it is not rock, and it is definitely not the same three chords by some talentless fool with a pretty face. It is entirely their own. Rodrigo does the melody, and Gabriela takes care of harmony and rhythm. Yes, percussion, and as great as their sound is, it hits the mind-blowing level when you actually see what they have to do with their hands to create this sound. Kind of like that Yngwie Malmsteen guy, you lose the experience without the visual. You want an idea? Check out these live clips of Tamacun and Diablo Rojo and Stairway to Heaven on YouTube.

I love those clips. I appreciated the skill of Rodrigo and Gabriela still more after seeing them live. It is unfortunate that the clips only give the barest sense of the concert. Of course the atmosphere is charged, completely different from a solo listen in your room, but your impression of their skill only pulls a gold medal jump when they keep the insanity up for a solid two hours and their encore shreds even more than their opening set.

The music and performance alone made the 16 Euro ticket, 45-minute delay and last-minute change of venue more than worth it. The kicker, though, lay in their answer to a complaint I had raised earlier that day. There is too much irony in the world. All we participants in this postmodern Western world have is a feigned appreciation for anything because to actually care about something is to leave ourselves open to derision. I could and likely will write a post on this sometime, dropping the level of direness, but let us let it stand at that. For now. To return to the point, Rodrigo Y Gabriela’s concert was delightfully free of it all. Rodrigo took multiple bathroom breaks between songs and ran the frets with a bottle of Beck’s in one hand for one song. Gabriela’s related the story behind their song “FUIO,” or some such acronym. It was honest and devoid of any pretension. Come on, they were taking song requests within fifteen minutes. Best of all, perhaps, was when Gabriela started head banging and flashing the devil horns. She is the first person I have ever seen do that non-ironically, and it was wonderful.

I have only a single complaint, having forgiven the previously mentioned delay. The dual punches of Bloc Party and Rodrigo Y Gabriela, excellent live performers who are still fresh and exciting, as my first concerts has spoiled me. All future concerts are doomed to fall short of the great googly balls of perfect that these were.

Should you desire a second opinion on this concert, especially from someone who can write intelligently on the technical skill of the duo with the appropriate vocabulary, check out this post by my friend Emmett, who delayed his trip to Munich a week in order to catch the concert. Also, I introduced him to their music. I take his appreciation for their sound as a sign of great taste in music on my part.

Running in winter

It has been a while since I last waxed romantic on something. Let us give it another shot.

Winter is bearing down on Munich. Needless to write, this has messed with my running as of late, but not for the reasons you might immediately assume. Yes, temperatures snuck below and dawdled just on the other side of freezing last week, and two weekends back there was even some snowfall that did not immediately melt. However, these have nothing to do with my fewer running outings. Rather, it is the shorter days. It gets quite tricky to find a free hour before the sun sets at 4:30 on those days I have classes. In all truth, the steadily worsening conditions have actually been an incentive to run, alongside my simple need to move. At least I had to walk downtown or between buildings at Gonzaga. Here, I just take the U-Bahn.

But I stray from my original purpose in writing about the ecstasy of running at the same time water molecules are settling into a place in which they feel firm. Certainly there are quantitative benefits (among them, less sweat and the freezing of mud that would otherwise spray across your back), but it is the qualitative that most interests me here. In a very real sense, the world goes still in the winter. Get away from the city and a good mile or two from any roads, and you will understand. The cacophony of the other seasons has gone. There are no leaves to rustle in the wind because they all have fallen. The playing of scrambling squirrels is curtailed by the cold, and those singing birds have long made their way south. In a figurative and oftentimes literal sense, the world has frozen in a moment of complete calm. There is nothing to draw your attention, and the senses strain to pick up the least of anything. Walking through it can be overwhelming, but running is different. With no distractions in the environment, all of your attention is drawn inward. I do not mean this in the sense of some emo teenage poet who bemoans the abyss that is their soul but of a complete awareness of every process going on in the body at that instant. Every step you take, every swing of the arms, every burning breath that you gulp down, you feel them and know that they just happened. All of those cerbellic processes that one never pays attention to otherwise dominate your mind. I have tried Zen meditation. Beginners are told to focus on their breathing. It is amazingly difficult, your mind and thoughts run madly off in all directions and constantly needing to be brought to heel once you actually remember that they are not concerned with breathing. Running in the cold does not suffer this problem. Naturally, all of your thoughts are brought into focus. I do not assume to suggest that running inspires the feeling of transcendence that Zen seeks, but there is a new appreciation for the wonder of the human body when you become aware of all that is normally hidden. It is a beautiful feeling.

To think, I used to ridicule my dad and sister for regularly participating in the Freeze Yer Gizzard Blizzard Run.

In consideration of concerts, both alternative and classical

Generally, I think it is a good idea to try and cultivate some taste in those things that culture has given value beyond that of mere survival. Please understand that I do not advocate turning one's nose up at any dish which someone with less training than four years at a French culinary school or constantly complaining that no one will ever again reach the level of Orson Welles or Akira Kurosawa, but I think it is worthwhile to be able to appreciate true talent or an original idea, even if lacks any personal appeal to you. In some things, mostly film and novels, I like to think that I have succeeded in this and at least have a modicum of taste. In other things, most notably music, I really have no experience at all, though visual art in all its forms, opera, dance, theater, food and other things that do not admittedly come to mind would make this list as well, but they do not matter so much to this post. At this point, the less said about them, the better. Sure, I played French Horn for five years and sing in church from the pews, so I can read music. But that's it. I have almost 275 hours of music on my computer, amounting to almost 4000 tracks, and all I can really say is whether I like the song or not. The music thing is especially depressing though because since high school I have always had friends deeply interested and involved in music who can speak very intelligently on the subject and whose opinions I tend to respect on such matters.

Anyway, what inspires this post is my recent attendance of my first two proper concerts, the two taking place on wildly different ends of the spectrum. Last Sunday was Bloc Party in Mannheim. Yesterday was a string chamber orchestra performing pieces by Tigran Mansurian, who was also in attendance for this performance. You want a sense of Bloc Party, their biggest hit is probably "Helicopter" but I suggest "The Prayer" still more, at least until they release a video for "Waiting for the 7.18." Unfortunately, tracking down Mansurian's work is a bit more difficult. You will simply have to imagine a bunch of string instruments, sans harps, playing.

For my only previous live music experiences being a Sherri Austin concert at my county fair and some band and choir concerts (though the ones at Gonzaga pleased me very much), these were great introductions to what lies beyond listening to albums on your computer or using YouTube as a highly inefficient, but free!, jukebox, the sort of introductions that do make me want to see and hear still more.

The Bloc Party concert was fun. It was cool. Really, I do not know what other words to apply to it, and, needless to write, a live concert was a completely different beast from listening to their two albums on my computer. There was crowd surfing, a new edge to even their softer songs like "So Here We Are," and a girl was pulled on stage to demonstrate how Kele Okereke wanted to see the audience moving. I got to be astounded by people paying €25 for T-shirts and jump around and pump my arm when Bloc Party came out. Foals, the opening act, did their job well. Their music was raw and pounding, but they bore no comparison or distraction to Bloc Party at all. They lacked the presence. When playing, they looked as though they were seizing on their instruments and always had trouble looking at the audience. Which just made the build-up to the reason for coming to the concert all the better. You knew there was still more. When the lights came on through the fog, which had been pumping for the last five minutes of the break, to shine through on the Bloc Party backdrop, that was amazing and hearing Okereke drag out "I am trying to be heroic" for "Song for Clay [Disappear Here]" was the release. Before they even reached song was ended, I was jumping just to see over those bobbing heads before me. Having spoken with friends who have attended concerts by bands established for decades and whose songs can truly be called radio staples, this merits mention. Bloc Party released its first album in 2005, and its second only earlier this year. There is no obscure library to dig through (I only failed to recognize one song) and no major hits that were the only reason for the audience to come.

But, with regard to the complaint that began this post, it was the Mansurian concert last night that bothered me more. Before the concert proper began, he gave an interview. Of course, his answers were filtered through his native tongue, Armenian I assume, to German and then on through to my English understanding, but I am fairly certain he was talking about the color of his music, apricot with the Armenian flag. Really, that means nothing to me. When he spoke of the emotional forces and how "Testament" was composed just days following his wife's death, I could relate with that in his songs, but what does he mean by color? What color is "Eroica" or "Flux?" Still, I enjoyed the concert. The pieces were beautiful and watching the soloist violinist and cellist play was something special, but it is still frustrating. I feel as though there is so much I am missing from this music because I lack the experience and background.

A bend in the road on Beacon Hill

Absolutely one of my favorite pictures in my very limited portfolio. Admittedly, this scan does not adequately capture the tones of the original and I probably ought to give printing it another shot to give the sky a little more depth through burning, but this landscape has the presence, the ability to make me stop flipping through my collection and give it a few moments more off attention, that I have otherwise found lacking in previous pictures. I feel this is because the picture helps you along. You do not have to figure it out on your own. It invites you in through a strong central line that moves through the picture, starting in the lower center with the shadow from the ridge and traveling up the road until it merges with the bottom of the tree line on the horizon. The texture, too, of the gravel road fascinates me. It is just so rich that even the smallest stones cast shadows and gain depth. Even better, the grass along the right side provides the contrast to appreciate the gravel even more.

Kind of a happy accident, this picture. I took this shot shot in a kind of desperation. After an early surge of photographic inspiration upon my arrival at Beacon Hill, nothing could capture my attention. It had probably been a good twenty minutes since my last picture, and I really wanted to finish off the roll and starting biking back to my house before the sun set. There was a brief thought like Lines are an important element in photos, and this turning road has lines, and I shot it. Seriously, despite this minimal amount of though, it is my favorite from that entire excursion. Also, the two hours I spent on the hill were the last ones to see sunlight, which provides the critical shadows here, for well on a week.

Living

In my excited descriptions of my first opera experience and other recent posts, I have revealed that I am currently studying in Munich. For this post to be properly understood, more context, specifically of a temporal nature, is necessary. I arrived in Germany at the end of August, a little more than two weeks before my study-abroad program started, so my grandparents and I could visit those relatives who did not immigrate to North America (i.e. all of them). I return to the United States at the end of January in order to enroll in the spring semester at my university. Roughly, that amounts to five months abroad. Keep that in mind. Not necessary to keep in mind but fun to share, being in Germany this long requires a residency permit, and I like to think it brings some flair to my passport, certainly more than those barely visible Frankfurt/Main stamps.

It has been an exhilarating time. My hometown had a population around 1,400, and though I still maintain that Spokane is a good-sized city, it really does not compare to Munich on most fronts. Merely having a choice between movie theaters is kind of a big deal for me. Not only having a choice in that regard but also in museums, galleries, theaters, opera houses and more still is a bit much, but I have enjoyed them at every chance. The idea has been a different museum and church every Sunday and at least one live performance every week.

What is more exciting still is that though I would be quite content to solely remain in Munich for my entire European stay, that is simply impossible when all these other cities of renown and all their culture are only a short flight or train ride away and the chances of an opportunity like this ever appearing again are so slight, there is simply too much. I have been to Dresden, Salzburg and Cork. Paris, London and Istanbul are all on the schedule, and should the finances still look solid after making all arrangements for travel over the Christmas vacation, hopefully Prague or Lausanne, Switzerland can be added to that list as well.

When I bother to step back and give this a little thought, I find myself a little surprised at myself, especially in consideration of how quickly I found my habits and schedule back in Spokane and refused to break with them. In the United States, it would not be uncommon for me to decline any number of offers to shake it up a little, opting for an afternoon of reading over a canoe trip with my dad or preferring to do homework instead most any other idea that might get kicked around by my friends at Gonzaga, but that has shifted now. The question is no longer whether something might fit my schedule, but how I am going to deal with my regular schedule to make this special occasion or trip possible. More bluntly and aphoristically, to just bloody do it and work out the details later. Sure, I may have to stay up a little later to finish the assigned reading or whatever, but it is not worth missing a whole freaking city over.

Really, this is no great revelation. The imperative to "live everyday as if it were your last, without regrets of missed opportunities" has finally been grasped during since my arrival in Munich, but it has taken on a great immediacy here too. I still do not know when I will die, but I do know when I will leave Europe. For the remaining two and a half months, I intend to not regret a single missed opportunity. And this is what has been so electrifying about my time here and has been a greater lesson still than the history of Germany since 1945 or all my language work. More than anything else, it is this concept that I want to take back with me and keep with me for the rest of my life.

But how? Admittedly, this is a unique time, one might not strain themselves to call it a frivolous one in spite of the classes I am taking. Those admittedly minor responsibilities I have gathered back at Gonzaga will kick in again when I return. Eventually more serious responsibilities, like family, will be mine. Through substantial gifts, especially from my grandparents, money has not been such an obstruction to my pursuits either. I will need a job someday and support myself too. It is not so easy to mold these around every passing opportunity.

For now, I think, the simple awareness of the need to take advantage when the situation presents itself is enough. Too long have I lived without it, at least in any practiced sense. The rest will be dealt with as it arises.

Considering "Le Corsaire"

The plan to become appropriately cultured that I may someday, without trepidation, move among the types of people that attract trophy spouses is proceeding admirably well, even if timely considerations of them have been slow in coming (I sit down to write this nearly one and a half weeks after taking in the performance). To follow up my first and second operas, I finally made my first ballet. It has been a long time in coming. Never gave a thought to ballet before last fall when a bought of thinking along the lines of "Wouldn't that be cool?" prompted me to try for a Dance minor and take a class in ballet without ever before seeing a performance, much less go to a high school dance, whatever those might count for. Coming on a year since being not good enough to advance to the second ballet class, I finally took in my first professional performance.

To put it all out there, without any rising action to the climax, I enjoyed it. Despite some dragging when the girls give the sultan an extended show in the second act, it was big and flashy and wonderfully fun. The sheer athleticism of the ballerinas and danseurs was something else. The speed, the delicacy, the precision, the pirouettes. Gah. Not very much what I expected either. Okay, there was much prancing about en pointe and lifts and so on, the sorts of things anyone with the slightest of idea of ballet would reasonably expect, but I did not, however, expect pirates, slave girls and sword fights. But this works, especially after the operas. Following the plot through the emotion of the voice alone can be a tricky ordeal. Following it through body language is considerably easier, especially when it amounts to: girl who has taken the heart of the pirate captain is sold to the sultan. Girl is kidnapped by the pirate captain in return. Treachery leads to the girl's return to the sultan. Pirate captain stages a daring rescue. The good are rewarded and the wicked punished.

Besides the great milestone of being my first ballet, attendance of Le Corsaire was also notable for being my first time in the Staatsoper. The two operas previous were both presented in the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, which, by no means a poor place, really does come off looking like a community theater against the magnificence of the Staatsoper. Compare their locations. Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz is found on a round-about where several community grocery stores can be found. Staatsoper runs along Maximilian Straße where stores like Dolce & Gabanna and Louis Vuitton, the sorts of places with dedicated doormen to open the doors to customers and keep riff-raff like me out, are located. The Oper had multiple chandeliers, men to press the button of your floor in the elevator and audience members who, I am fairly certain, had their clotes personally tailored. Despite tucking my own shirt in, I somehow managed to still feel out of place. Maybe ironing it would have helped.

It goes without saying that I want to see another. There is some apprehension though. How much is left? There are only so many moves and so many combinations. Just how long can I expect to enjoy ballets until all there is left to look forward to is the particular carriage of the dancers and their ability to land with poise? My hope? Enough to keep me excited until I leave Munich and still wishing for more. Hear that the Russian National Ballet will be coming through.

Considering "Die Hochzeit des Figaro"

There is absolutely no reason I should have screwed this up again. After all, I thought I had learned my lesson at Carmen the week before, but no, once more I went ahead and attended an opera without first reading the plot. And, for an opera with a plot of Shakespearean complexity, this was a bit to the detriment of my enjoyment of The Marriage of Figaro. In comparison, even if I had not read the plot of Carmen during the intermission, I could have made my way through the fairly simple plot of love, jealousy, revenge. With The Marriage of Figaro, that was not possible. Multiple, intricate relationships and hidden agendas were the norm, and by the time they got to the disguises and mistaken identities in the final act, I was done. Again, the opera had been translated into German, so there were sections I understood, which is better than if it had remained in Italian, but totally missed the meaning of. For example, it turned out the woman in black was Figaro's mother and the man with glasses was his father (Really hard to miss when "Die Mutter? Die Mutter." is repeated several times and accompanied by pointing). No problem following that. She originally intended to marry him because he defaulted on a loan? Did not figure that out until I read the Wikipedia entry the next day. Or, take when the Countess lied to cover for the escape of the effeminate one. Could have figured that out simply through the pantomime, but I would have rather liked to know why he had to escape through the window in the first place (he was supposed to be in the military).

Not that reading the plot late was as useful as it could have been. Now I understood why the various notes and letters being passed around were so important and needed to be kept hidden, but this was, as evidenced by the above picture, a modernized production of the opera. When Figaro was not prancing in a suit, he went about in bib overalls, the Count sported jeans and a sport jacket throughout, and Susanne played her French maid outfit to the extreme. Despite my lack of experience in such operatic matters, I am fairly certain in my assumption that this is not what Mozart and Rossini originally intended. This would not be such a problem, as I normally would assume that only the costumes were updated, were it not for a woman actually playing the role of a male character. Were some of the lines changed for that role to play some new joke? I have no idea. And what was the deal with taking the Count around in a wheelbarrow? Could not afford a proper carriage and found it more stylish than a rickshaw? Merely a clever pun? So many questions remain.

Still, I do offer the cast, especially Figaro and the Countess, the greatest props for playing so big and keeping it amusing even when the words were lost on at least one particular audience member. I already mentioned it, but the revelation of Figaro's parentage, replete with the disappointment of his discovered father, the excitement of his new mother and the lawyer whose irritating jabber bridged the language barrier better than a Babelfish, was a particular high point.

Not as enjoyable as Carmen as The Marriage of Figaro relied less on emotion, good for someone who has difficulty with the language, and more on plot and lyrical cleverness, less good for me, but not enough to put me off opera. I will just have to be more careful and more prepared in going to the next one.

Kari Practicing the Triple Jump

I want to like this picture. Really, there is nothing that I necessarily dislike about the picture or could pointedly say needs improvement except that the sky needs a little burning. There are even a number of elements I like, the use of lines especially. Moving from the top down we have fairly regular layers starting with the forest against the sky, going to the top of the chain link fence and ending at the long jump lanes. Kari's traversal of them and the unity it introduces I like too. With further consideration of lines, she is also rather nicely placed between what the two jump lines but a little off balance towards the right, thus imparting a little energy and keeping stasis from setting in. I even like the focus in that her right leg is blurred by movement while the rest of her body is caught still.

Against all those things though, this photo still lacks presence. Were it on presentation, I do not think this picture would be strong enough to give me pause between the others competing for attention. This does not bother me so much. I am still very much an amateur and certainly do not expect to be pulling off anything amazing in the near future. What does get me is that I am not sure what I need to be looking to capture to raise the next one over this picture.

Spirituality

It used to bother me when people merely called themselves "spiritual" rather than admitting to an association with some particular sect of Christianity (and I say Christianity rather than organized religion because the passage of my life from northern Minnesota to a Jesuit university in eastern Washington has generally kept me in closest proximity to and contact with people of that religious background). It seemed like a more socially acceptable answer than agnosticism or struck me as an excuse for not regularly attending any organized service. In my more charitable moods, when I was not suspecting the other of implied dishonesty or laziness, spirituality felt like a cop-out, an intentional vagary to avoid insulting anyone. Spirituality, to me, was the refuge of those educated enough to be aware of other religions and not hold them in seething hatred for taking grape juice instead of wine or believing that it was a symbol of Jesus' presence at the service rather than the Blood itself. They were aware of the great diversity even within the Christian tradition alone and did not want to risk causing offense by suggesting in the smallest manner that their tradition was superior, especially differences seem so insignificant.

But I write this because my views have changed. This post is to mark the evolution in my thought, as well as describe it. The more I read, the more I learn, the more I speak with other people on such things, the more I believe that it is perfectly possible to be a truly spiritual person, one who does not believe that any particular tradition exactly captures their experience of that which lies beyond the material world. Questions of religion and spirituality are big deals and should not be decided upon carelessly. If what there is does not work for you, they should be abstained from. If you cannot accept that all dualities are illusions or that all is one, bloody well stay from Buddhism in all its incarnations.

Still, though my tolerance has increased, this seems like an awfully difficult position to maintain. Now spirituality comes across to me as the religion of the academic who has not resorted to agnosticism or atheism. It is the choice of one has read their Lewis, Smith, Tillich, Chesterton and the apologists for every other faith and can not come to a decision as to which one is theirs yet they remain ensconced in the ivory tower. It pains me to write this because I do rather like the rationalism of Descartes and attendant optimism, but reason, and as important as that is to faith, can only take one so far. The experiential needs to be their as well. After every holy writing is read and discussed, religion must be dived into headfirst, too. Religion does not exist merely in the catechism or vedas or whatever other holy writings but in the mitzahs and Hajj as well.

I wrote this only a short paragraph ago, but I must reiterate it. Absolutely, I believe, it is possible to be a good spiritual person (spiritualist?) after having moving outside of the academic faith to the practical and still not finding that connection, but I keep my reservations that spirituality may too often be taken as the easy way out for those too timid to experience what the great faiths of the world have to offer.