Chicago Shows

Anyone have any interest in going to see any of these shows?

Broken Bells - Sun - 12/05 - 7.30 - Vic Theatre

The Black Keys - Thurs - 12/30 & Fri - 12/31 - 7.00 - Aragon Ballroom

The Decemberists - Fri - 2/04 - 7.30 - Riviera Theatre

Josh Ritter - Thu - 2/17 - 7.30 - Vic Theatre

Pete Yorn, Ben Kweller - Wed - 2/23 - 7.30 - Riviera Theatre

Girl Talk - Fri - 3/04 - 7.00 - Congress Theatre

Andrew Bird is already sold out.

8-Bit History of Creation

SUPERNATURAL CREATOR 2 from Mareike on Vimeo.

Addendum: In which Hedges is proven to be an Old Testament Prophet

Around the time that Hedges was publishing his book on war, the United States was invading Iraq. In 2003, after the invasion was complete, Hedges was asked to give the commencement address at Rockford College. In his speech, he strongly opposed the war and argued that it could never be a success. The crowd, in a paroxysm of patriotic furor, tried to boo him off stage. His mike was cut, and eventually two men rushed the platform. Although he was neither stoned nor burnt at the stake, he was forced out of his job at the New York Times in the aftermath of the incident.

Here is the video of the speech, in four parts: One Two Three Four.

War is a force that gives us meaning

These days Chris Hedges is mostly writing about Gaza, but he cut his teeth in journalism as a war reporter in the bloody civil wars of Central America. In 2002 he published War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a book that seeks to explain humankind’s predilection toward warfare. I would highly recommend this talk in which he summarizes the contents of the book, but to spare you the hour-long lecture, I would like to relate a few things from his talk that I thought were particularly remarkable.

In the first place, Hedges asserts that in our society war is pornography. He is unapologetic about the way that television images of war are fascinating and thrilling. Television news, in the interest of decency, shows war from such a distance that does not disgust us with its horrors, but instead titillates us with its power. Indeed, the sexual metaphor is the most fitting, as Hedges argues that the observance of modern warfare is almost always beautiful and erotic and violent, an indulgence in the lust of the eyes.

This very fact makes antiwar art conflicted. Even as they are put to use to attack war, images of war’s destructive power are perversely appealing. The enticing beauty of warfare is the reason that movies about war are so compelling, even if they are thematically opposed to violence. Hence, in their portrayal of warfare, antiwar films and documentaries contain within them the powerful seed of their opposite. As Hedges says, “The prurient fascination with violent death always overpowers the message.”

War engages the part of us that is self-destructive and destructive of others, and as we experience it, we come to depend upon it for relief. Hedges tells stories of both war correspondents and of soldiers who became addicted to war as if it were a drug. These people were often so changed by their experiences of war that they were unable to return to normal society and senselessly returned to areas of conflict. It is horrific how we can be intensely aware that war eats away at our humanity, but we continue to flirt with its release from the tedium of normalcy. “War is necrophilia,” Hedges claims.

Ultimately, Hedges seems to think that there is a component of the human being that is unable to turn away from the consideration of death. In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad calls this same desire "the fascination of the abomination." Again and again, humans look back toward the nothingness from where we came. Like the wife of Lot, we are unable to peal our eyes away from the spectacle of destruction.

The Contemporary Terror is Anonymity: Dissenting voices

This is what we've been doing lately...

The Great Contemporary Terror is Anonymity

"But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated -- we could live farther and farther apart -- technologies of communication redressed -- we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined...But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon...The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.

"Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive -- though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone."

"This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves -- by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility."

The End of Solitude, by William Deresiewicz

Bucket List

Micah and I found out that it's possible to make t-shirts with spray paint. Hello, new activity of summer 2010.

Bork bork bork!

Swedish Chef

As it turns out, it was just a clever ad for cigarettes.

"According to Friendly, the journalist’s job is ‘to make the agony of decision-making so intense that you can only escape it by thinking.’ Given his view of the crucial role of the media within a functioning democracy, there was witness-bearing consistency in his decision to resign his position, in 1966, when network executives cancelled live broadcasts of testimony on the subject of Vietnam before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opting instead to air sitcom reruns.

Like Rod Serling, Friendly believed that television was an almost unimaginably powerful tool for positive social change, but it also had to potential to become nothing more than a hi-tech totem pole of mass hypnosis that could serve the ends of multinational corporations and the nation-states that serve them, with airtime handed over to whatever forces will pay the most to colonize brainspace.”

Dark, The Gospel According to America