Full disclosure up front – I am a Mets fan. This fact should not discount the validity of my post, but rather strengthen it.
The imminent demise of Yankee Stadium is more than just a tragedy for the Yankees, more than a tragedy for baseball, more than a tragedy for New York City. It is an American tragedy and together we should be up in arms that this icon of American History is to be destroyed on our watch.
As Americans, why do we continue to allow the wrecking balls to diminish our shared soul? Is it simply a sacrifice to the true American God – the Almighty Dollar?
One of the stated reasons for the new stadium, as with all new stadium constructions, is for the expansion of luxury boxes. The irony is that these boxes will be filled with the same Fat Cats that will shell outlandish sums of money to snap up trinkets of nostalgia from the corpse of Yankee Stadium. ‘Look at me,’ they will be saying in effect, ‘I killed the American Soul and here is the evidence to prove it.’
As stated above, I am a Mets fan. Yet anytime I have entertained a visitor to New York, especially ones from abroad, I would not take them to the Statue of Liberty (or Shea). I would take them to Yankee Stadium. Everyone reading this post knows why. It is America. It is part of our DNA. It is living history that has borne first-hand witness to America becoming America in the 20th Century. It represents winning at all costs. It represents a de facto Town Hall where people of every background, age, gender and economic circumstance could find common ground for several hours.
In the litany of events and trends that demonstrate that we are losing our way as Americans, surely the end of Yankee Stadium must be included.
Why there isn’t more hue and cry from the Yankee faithful, I can’t guess. Yankee Stadium is practically the 10th player in the lineup. I would understand the new stadium if it was crumbling and posed a danger to its inhabitants. To date, the only real danger it presents is to the record of visiting teams.
Why give that up? To generate more revenue to pay the likes of A-Rod? If the rich history of the Yankees has shown us anything is that the greatest performances have come those that are there for the aura and Yankee Stadium is the repository of that aura.
As a supporter of the rival team in town, there is part of me happy to see the Yankees surrendering their powerful 10th player and leveling the proverbial and literal playing field. Yet at a more important level – being an American – I am deeply saddened that my generation is allowing this sacrilege to come to pass.
As an American and a dreamer, I wish at this late stage some entity would ‘step up to the plate’ and find a way to save Yankee Stadium. As preposterous and physically impossible as it sounds, perhaps as much of the stadium as feasibly possible should be transplanted elsewhere. They moved London Bridge to the middle of the Arizona desert, why not Yankee Stadium (somewhere agreeable, i.e. not anywhere near Boston). I realize it wouldn’t be the same as it was rooted in the Bronx, but it would better than scattered all over eBay. It could become the permanent home of the All-Star game, college baseball World Series, old-timer events. I know that with the new stadium the House that Ruth built must go. I know that it is easier and more profitable to sell it bit by bit. However, this is a complete piece of American History we will never get back.
Ever.
We need to remind the world, and more importantly to ourselves that we are a nation of Dreamers and Doers. Not a nation of demolishers.
Save Yankee Stadium.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Does it Matter?
At thirty-seven and one-half years of age, I am now squarely in the chronological terrain of the 'mid-life crisis'. For those most afflicted by this syndrome, they quit their jobs, leave their spouse and/or have a tendency to jump out of perfectly good airplanes in an attempt to feel alive.
I have none of those desires. I simply want to know 'does it matter?' If one reflects on my life and what I've done, you could either conclude that I have done a great deal or I have done zilch. It's all a function of your perspective and an application of comparison to the lives of others.
I recently returned from China and I'm left perplexed wondering about the example of Mao Zedong, with respect to the idea of 'does it matter?' Here is an individual that changed the course of history for not only billions of Chinese but for the world as a whole. (Paradoxically, he is also an individual who managed to convince a population of hundreds of millions to stop being individuals.) Yet as of 2008, a mere twenty-odd years since his death his vision for China and communism is becoming obselete at broadband speeds.
Does it matter?
Does anything I do actually matter? If I had cured cancer, written the Great American Novel or founded an innovative company that changed the world and employed thousands would it actually matter? I, like Mao, will be dead one day and humanity will ultimately implode on itself and the universe will continue with barely a blink of notice.
So what does anything matter?
To me, at this reflective point in my life, the only thing that matters is to understand completely who I am. And somehow that does matter.
Last year, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days at St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mt. Sinai. It was here that Moses asked God for his identity and God replied 'I am that I am' or 'I shall-be that I shall-be'. I found my interpretation of this enduring philosophical puzzle by following the example of the Little Prince and repeating it aloud to myself.
'I am that I am'
What I have discovered is what matters is me. If we take the common premise that man was created in the image of God and 'he is that he is', then it follows that the understanding of the Divine and the understanding of our purpose is simply the complete understanding of Self.
And that is the only thing that matters.
I have none of those desires. I simply want to know 'does it matter?' If one reflects on my life and what I've done, you could either conclude that I have done a great deal or I have done zilch. It's all a function of your perspective and an application of comparison to the lives of others.
I recently returned from China and I'm left perplexed wondering about the example of Mao Zedong, with respect to the idea of 'does it matter?' Here is an individual that changed the course of history for not only billions of Chinese but for the world as a whole. (Paradoxically, he is also an individual who managed to convince a population of hundreds of millions to stop being individuals.) Yet as of 2008, a mere twenty-odd years since his death his vision for China and communism is becoming obselete at broadband speeds.
Does it matter?
Does anything I do actually matter? If I had cured cancer, written the Great American Novel or founded an innovative company that changed the world and employed thousands would it actually matter? I, like Mao, will be dead one day and humanity will ultimately implode on itself and the universe will continue with barely a blink of notice.
So what does anything matter?
To me, at this reflective point in my life, the only thing that matters is to understand completely who I am. And somehow that does matter.
Last year, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days at St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mt. Sinai. It was here that Moses asked God for his identity and God replied 'I am that I am' or 'I shall-be that I shall-be'. I found my interpretation of this enduring philosophical puzzle by following the example of the Little Prince and repeating it aloud to myself.
'I am that I am'
What I have discovered is what matters is me. If we take the common premise that man was created in the image of God and 'he is that he is', then it follows that the understanding of the Divine and the understanding of our purpose is simply the complete understanding of Self.
And that is the only thing that matters.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
A Letter to Bill Simmons
Bill-
It has happened again. I am an American citizen that continues to fall for soccer when the big tournaments reach our shores. Does this make me a bed-wetting socialist?
I jest … I hope.
I know much valuable American ink has been spilled on the subject of soccer and why it has been so difficult to ‘sell’ here in the former Colonies. (Any enterprise that wants to be taken seriously in the United States must be successfully converted into a commodity around which a profitable commercial transaction can take place… dammit, Bill…see what I feared … I’m actually sounding like a socialist now.)
I’m certain better writers than me have made the following point, but as I fall under the spell of the ‘Beautiful Game’ I needed to repeat it for myself and for you.
The primary reason that soccer continues to have difficulty gaining popularity among average Americans is that as a collective we have little capacity or appreciation for abstract thought. We are a material country, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. I simply mean that we need tangible things to count. At every level of education in this country, Math and Science are clearly more valued than Art and Philosophy. This manifests itself in the way we approach our sports. We measure and count every aspect of the games we enjoy. It goes beyond tracking in-sport numbers like ERA or yards-after-catch. Even a modest American sports fan becomes engrossed in extraneous data like yearly attendances, Nielsen ratings, player salaries and the like.
Soccer is a sport of nearly pure abstraction. The only thing to count in soccer are the goals… which are celebrated by the players and fans like the fall of a corrupt dictator that delighted in paving the driveways of his villas with the crushed skulls of their relatives and happen about as frequently.
The lifeblood of any sports popularity is the ability of common fans to argue incessantly in public about the merits & liabilities of players and teams. Without anything to count, however, the only weapon the soccer fan has at his disposal is one the red-blooded American Sports Male will avoid like gonorrhea: vocabulary. To argue a point in baseball, football, basketball or NASCAR, the American Sports Male will prepare his numerical evidence as if he had been subpoenaed to appear before a Senate Sub-Committee Hearing. The American Sports Male will present charts, graphs, and statistical trends dating back decades. But heaven help us if we showed up to a sports argument with a dictionary and thesaurus in tow. To use the old cliché, it would like bringing a rock to a knife fight. The American Sports Male even acknowledges his deficiency with a single word when faced with trying to explain an aberration that does not conform to the available data.
That word? May I present the all-purpose: ‘Intangible’
When trying to wrap his head around defining ‘intangibles’, the American Sports Male bobs and flails like a scuba diver that surfaced a mile away from the dive boat, missed his ride and is now being eyeballed by a passing Tiger shark. We have to make up words nonsense words like ‘gamer’or ‘scrapper’ to protect us from using any icky, polysyllabic synonyms for ‘passion’ or ‘desire’ that might make our audience pause and suspect that we go home and crochet in the bathtub when no one is looking.
That soccer is nothing but intangibles may explain why it is arguably more popular and accessible to American women. Our fairer sex is more inclined to abstract thought and as such she can admire the dastardly bend in a David Beckham free kick without having to scramble for measurable tangibles to relate to it. What does it matter how hard it was hit, the percentage of success from 30 meters out or the dollar-to-free kick ratio that he is compensated?
As a collective and as the greatest nation on earth we need to get over our fears of the Intangible and the Abstract because here is the twist: America needs soccer. At no point since the 1960’s has American society been this divided. From our gated communities to our ghettoes, from our luxury boxes to our bleachers, Americans everywhere are drifting further and further away from one another. Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, demonstrated the parallel decline in civic engagement in the U.S. and the decline of the American bowling league. We are slowly coming apart at the seams and part of that reason that is that the United States can find no common ground, field, pitch, diamond, court, rink or otherwise on which to stand together as a nation and cheer our democratic-capitalist-liberty-loving souls out.
Every country in the world experiences political divisions, social stratifications, injustice and just plain, old squabbles. Yet every country in the world, but the United States, has one common passion, one common tongue. That common ground is their national soccer squad. For the 90 minutes (plus injury time) differences are put aside, everyone from the Prime Minister to the plumber slides into their jerseys, their scarves, cover their faces in paint, link arms and sing in unison to their nations glory and hopeful victory on the pitch. The result is pure spectacle, pageantry and, for at least the duration of the match, national unity.
If I sound envious and under the spell of the Beautiful Game, it is because I am.
There is only one time in my life that I can recall such a feeling. I was nine-year old kid playing pee-wee hockey in Washington D.C. on February 22, 1980 when an earnest group of scrappers defeated the vaunted Soviet Union 4-3 on a hockey rink in Lake Placid. I stood that night in front of the TV watching the tape delay transfixed until the end, when the entire stadium began chanting - USA! USA! USA! I joined them and when Al asked me if I believed in miracles, I can assure you that I tearfully did and I still do to this day thanks to that moment.
I dare you to name a more powerful moment in American Sports History than that one. It was the power of an entire nation speaking with one cohesive voice. It is not only the most powerful sports memory I have, it is also among the most powerful memories I have as an American. Why have we been waiting thirty years for such another moment to arrive and will we have to wait another thirty?
It doesn’t seem likely that this will occur anytime soon. In case my fellow American sports fans haven’t noticed, not only are we not taking it to the world at their game – soccer – but also over the past few decades we have allowed them to take it to us at our own games. In the 2006 World Baseball Classic, the United States placed a ridiculous 8th… we did not even qualify for the semi-finals. Team USA basketball placed a little better than their baseball counterparts in the 2006 Worlds, yet they still finished third behind Spain and Greece!?
At this international level, the American sporting public is more than happy to issue ‘get-out-of-duty’ passes to our most talented players when they turn their lucratively-sponsored backs on representing their nation. Why play for little compensation or even worse risk injury and forfeit of their contracts and endorsements? Why, indeed? The only costs for these players and coaches in declining to play for their country are Abstract costs. Who needs National Pride and Honor when you can have your seventh shiny Hummer with fitted with flat screen panels in every headrest?
European players enjoy similar unworldly salaries and endorsements yet would set their heads on fire for the honor of wearing their national jersey. For a nation that purports to take pride in its patriotism, it is nothing short of lacking when it comes to supporting our country’s sporting endeavors at an international level and again I attribute that to an general unwillingness to think abstractly.
All is not lost though. I believe there has been a glimmer of hope for an increased awareness in the appreciation of the abstract and it comes from an unlikely source – the fallout surrounding scandals involving Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and the New England Patriots. There is, for the moment, a small window where the American public seems, however begrudgingly, to realize that absolute numbers can take a backseat to abstract concepts like Integrity and Fairness.
This is not as surprising to me as one might think reading the body of this letter. After all, I know every American Fan believes they share their sports DNA with greatest mythological scrapper of all time, Rocky Balboa. In the only movie that counts (the original), the climax leaves Rocky a loser in the Material column with the title, belt and glory going to Apollo Creed. Yet here our American hero emerges the Victor in the Ring of the Abstract, carrying home Love, Courage and Character.
Can America one day learn to love the ‘Beautiful Game?’
Yes. Because we believe in miracles.
USA! USA! USA!
It has happened again. I am an American citizen that continues to fall for soccer when the big tournaments reach our shores. Does this make me a bed-wetting socialist?
I jest … I hope.
I know much valuable American ink has been spilled on the subject of soccer and why it has been so difficult to ‘sell’ here in the former Colonies. (Any enterprise that wants to be taken seriously in the United States must be successfully converted into a commodity around which a profitable commercial transaction can take place… dammit, Bill…see what I feared … I’m actually sounding like a socialist now.)
I’m certain better writers than me have made the following point, but as I fall under the spell of the ‘Beautiful Game’ I needed to repeat it for myself and for you.
The primary reason that soccer continues to have difficulty gaining popularity among average Americans is that as a collective we have little capacity or appreciation for abstract thought. We are a material country, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. I simply mean that we need tangible things to count. At every level of education in this country, Math and Science are clearly more valued than Art and Philosophy. This manifests itself in the way we approach our sports. We measure and count every aspect of the games we enjoy. It goes beyond tracking in-sport numbers like ERA or yards-after-catch. Even a modest American sports fan becomes engrossed in extraneous data like yearly attendances, Nielsen ratings, player salaries and the like.
Soccer is a sport of nearly pure abstraction. The only thing to count in soccer are the goals… which are celebrated by the players and fans like the fall of a corrupt dictator that delighted in paving the driveways of his villas with the crushed skulls of their relatives and happen about as frequently.
The lifeblood of any sports popularity is the ability of common fans to argue incessantly in public about the merits & liabilities of players and teams. Without anything to count, however, the only weapon the soccer fan has at his disposal is one the red-blooded American Sports Male will avoid like gonorrhea: vocabulary. To argue a point in baseball, football, basketball or NASCAR, the American Sports Male will prepare his numerical evidence as if he had been subpoenaed to appear before a Senate Sub-Committee Hearing. The American Sports Male will present charts, graphs, and statistical trends dating back decades. But heaven help us if we showed up to a sports argument with a dictionary and thesaurus in tow. To use the old cliché, it would like bringing a rock to a knife fight. The American Sports Male even acknowledges his deficiency with a single word when faced with trying to explain an aberration that does not conform to the available data.
That word? May I present the all-purpose: ‘Intangible’
When trying to wrap his head around defining ‘intangibles’, the American Sports Male bobs and flails like a scuba diver that surfaced a mile away from the dive boat, missed his ride and is now being eyeballed by a passing Tiger shark. We have to make up words nonsense words like ‘gamer’or ‘scrapper’ to protect us from using any icky, polysyllabic synonyms for ‘passion’ or ‘desire’ that might make our audience pause and suspect that we go home and crochet in the bathtub when no one is looking.
That soccer is nothing but intangibles may explain why it is arguably more popular and accessible to American women. Our fairer sex is more inclined to abstract thought and as such she can admire the dastardly bend in a David Beckham free kick without having to scramble for measurable tangibles to relate to it. What does it matter how hard it was hit, the percentage of success from 30 meters out or the dollar-to-free kick ratio that he is compensated?
As a collective and as the greatest nation on earth we need to get over our fears of the Intangible and the Abstract because here is the twist: America needs soccer. At no point since the 1960’s has American society been this divided. From our gated communities to our ghettoes, from our luxury boxes to our bleachers, Americans everywhere are drifting further and further away from one another. Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, demonstrated the parallel decline in civic engagement in the U.S. and the decline of the American bowling league. We are slowly coming apart at the seams and part of that reason that is that the United States can find no common ground, field, pitch, diamond, court, rink or otherwise on which to stand together as a nation and cheer our democratic-capitalist-liberty-loving souls out.
Every country in the world experiences political divisions, social stratifications, injustice and just plain, old squabbles. Yet every country in the world, but the United States, has one common passion, one common tongue. That common ground is their national soccer squad. For the 90 minutes (plus injury time) differences are put aside, everyone from the Prime Minister to the plumber slides into their jerseys, their scarves, cover their faces in paint, link arms and sing in unison to their nations glory and hopeful victory on the pitch. The result is pure spectacle, pageantry and, for at least the duration of the match, national unity.
If I sound envious and under the spell of the Beautiful Game, it is because I am.
There is only one time in my life that I can recall such a feeling. I was nine-year old kid playing pee-wee hockey in Washington D.C. on February 22, 1980 when an earnest group of scrappers defeated the vaunted Soviet Union 4-3 on a hockey rink in Lake Placid. I stood that night in front of the TV watching the tape delay transfixed until the end, when the entire stadium began chanting - USA! USA! USA! I joined them and when Al asked me if I believed in miracles, I can assure you that I tearfully did and I still do to this day thanks to that moment.
I dare you to name a more powerful moment in American Sports History than that one. It was the power of an entire nation speaking with one cohesive voice. It is not only the most powerful sports memory I have, it is also among the most powerful memories I have as an American. Why have we been waiting thirty years for such another moment to arrive and will we have to wait another thirty?
It doesn’t seem likely that this will occur anytime soon. In case my fellow American sports fans haven’t noticed, not only are we not taking it to the world at their game – soccer – but also over the past few decades we have allowed them to take it to us at our own games. In the 2006 World Baseball Classic, the United States placed a ridiculous 8th… we did not even qualify for the semi-finals. Team USA basketball placed a little better than their baseball counterparts in the 2006 Worlds, yet they still finished third behind Spain and Greece!?
At this international level, the American sporting public is more than happy to issue ‘get-out-of-duty’ passes to our most talented players when they turn their lucratively-sponsored backs on representing their nation. Why play for little compensation or even worse risk injury and forfeit of their contracts and endorsements? Why, indeed? The only costs for these players and coaches in declining to play for their country are Abstract costs. Who needs National Pride and Honor when you can have your seventh shiny Hummer with fitted with flat screen panels in every headrest?
European players enjoy similar unworldly salaries and endorsements yet would set their heads on fire for the honor of wearing their national jersey. For a nation that purports to take pride in its patriotism, it is nothing short of lacking when it comes to supporting our country’s sporting endeavors at an international level and again I attribute that to an general unwillingness to think abstractly.
All is not lost though. I believe there has been a glimmer of hope for an increased awareness in the appreciation of the abstract and it comes from an unlikely source – the fallout surrounding scandals involving Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and the New England Patriots. There is, for the moment, a small window where the American public seems, however begrudgingly, to realize that absolute numbers can take a backseat to abstract concepts like Integrity and Fairness.
This is not as surprising to me as one might think reading the body of this letter. After all, I know every American Fan believes they share their sports DNA with greatest mythological scrapper of all time, Rocky Balboa. In the only movie that counts (the original), the climax leaves Rocky a loser in the Material column with the title, belt and glory going to Apollo Creed. Yet here our American hero emerges the Victor in the Ring of the Abstract, carrying home Love, Courage and Character.
Can America one day learn to love the ‘Beautiful Game?’
Yes. Because we believe in miracles.
USA! USA! USA!
Response to an 'Angry Woman'
(*Note: this letter was emailed in response to a chain letter working its way around the internet from an 'Angry Woman' that effectively condoned the methods & abuses being employed by our Government and military in the 'War on Terror'.)
I can no longer take this sort of nonsense.
Someone on this extended set of mailing lists thought that my worldview was in agreement with the hatred, ignorance & fear espoused in this forwarded “Angry Woman’ letter.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
I am a political centrist. I am a registered Independent that has voted Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian and will always vote for the person who I feel is the most intelligent candidate and the one most suitable for improving my life and the life of my community.
I grew up Republican and would still vote that way with more regularity if the party wasn’t populated by the sorts of numbskulls that author this kind of jingoistic crap. Being a Republican used to be about fiscal discipline, small government and basically demanding that our elected officials stay the hell out of the lives of ordinary Americans. The modern Republican wants to foist unwanted Christian dogma on us, thinks we must be crazy for not giving the Federal government unfettered access to our personal affairs and feels they should be allowed to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave for whatever crony-istic pork barrel project that suits them, particularly under the useful guise of ‘national security.’ Drunken spending used to be the sole domain of the Democratic Party. The idiot presently in office has demonstrated that wasting vast amounts of our tax dollars can indeed be a bi-partisan exercise.
For starters, the implied notion in this woman’s letter that all followers of Islam are violent individuals bent on terror and the destruction of America is simply ridiculous. This continues to be a very common misconception among too great a number of Americans.
We are at war with ideological extremism, not the religion and practice of Islam. Prior to September 11, 2001 the worst terrorist act committed on American soil was perpetrated by a white American of Christian heritage. Have we forgotten the 168 men, women and children murdered by Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols on April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City? Have we forgotten the responding law enforcement officials that subsequently committed suicide in the aftermath of this reprehensible event? I have not.
When it was revealed that the cowardly executors of that terror attack were Christian Americans, did the world, Christian & non-Christians alike, paint ALL white Christians as violent, hateful terrorists? No, because that logic would be ridiculous. We were obviously able to recognize that this was the organized work of several very twisted and sadistic individuals and these individuals did not represent the entirety of their race or religious background. (McVeigh was also a registered Republican, yet no rational person would suggest by extension all Republicans are terrorists.)
We are at war with the forces that created Osama bin Laden AND Timothy McVeigh.
In a rare moment of clarity right after 9/11, even the Moron-in-Chief himself recognized the difference between a radical wing and the vast majority of a practicing religion, in this case, Islam. In his address to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001 President Bush declared:
“The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam”
So why is it that the sadistic acts committed by a small percentage of Islamic militants should continue to condemn an entire religion and dozens of nations? Yes, Angry Woman I am sickened when a suicide bomber blows up a market in the Middle East. I am sickened the same way as when a disgruntled kid from the suburbs shoots up yet another American high school or college. These are both acts of terror. Both need to end. (No one has suggested yet we start waterboarding our teenagers to extract information about the next school attack, but if we continue to support to the idea of using it to ‘keep us safe’, how far off can that be?)
Humanity as a whole is at war with the extremist fringe and no one faith has a monopoly on terror. Yes, there are plenty of militant Muslims and they need to be dealt with, but likewise there are violent factions of every ideology from Hindi to Judaism, cults like Aum Shinrikyo and certainly Christians as well. Does the presence of violent fundamentalists in every religion mean that religion itself is the face of terror?
Obviously not. Again, this logic is insane.
What has me the most incensed, however, is the suggestion from our Angry Woman that we ought not to care when we allow the erosion of the fundamental principles of liberty and justice that as a nation we have spent the last 300 years creating. This ‘I don’t care’ attitude is nothing short of abhorrent. Our Angry Woman is all too willing to give away the very essence, the very heart of what makes America truly great, simply to gain some feeling of protection from or vengeance upon this Muslim minority.
As Americans, we invented Liberty. We are (or at least we were) the Gold Standard of Justice and Freedom in the eyes of the world. And we are prepared to give that up by permitting torture? By skipping due process? By waiving away our Constitutional rights to protection from search & seizure? By allowing our rights to free speech to be diminished and tarnished? By pretending that international law we ratified and helped create shouldn’t apply to us when we don’t feel it is convenient?
Are we really that frightened by a couple thousand desert-dwelling religious fanatics that we will turn our backs on the heritage given to us by the Founding Fathers and improved by three centuries of hard work?
Everyday we allow our most hallowed principles to be subverted as Angry Woman would have us do; we allow terror to destroy America. The destruction of America that our enemies seek is not simply the physical destruction of America and her people. They wish to destroy the very IDEA of America. And when we are reduced to not caring about the proper application of Justice that we ourselves created then they have succeeded in harming the IDEA and soul of America.
Buildings, roads, cities, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center – they are physical structures that can be destroyed and rebuilt. But the very ideas on which our buildings, cities and nation are founded – Liberty, Justice and Freedom – for everyone – must be protected and preserved at all costs. This will be much, much more difficult to rebuild should they be lost in the struggle.
This is what I care about, Angry Woman. I care that the United States continues to honor the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that all men are created equal that made us a nation in the first place. I care that in this war of ideology, that is, a war of IDEAs, that we continue to demonstrate the superior ideology and unwavering commitment to real justice and democracy. The moment we stoop to the level of thugs and terrorists, we ourselves become thugs and terrorists and not Americans.
Yes, I am aware that my wishing to take a principled course of action in the War on Terror I am making my own life less ‘safe’. But I would rather take the chance of being blown up by a car bomb on 34th Street and die a free man, rather than live in a nation that taps my phone, condones torture and attempts to suppress my opinion and dissent. That isn’t America. That is called China.
For too long, people like myself in the middle ground have stayed quiet and allowed this sort of ignorant blather to go unabated. It is that sort of passivity that allowed the German Nationalists to whip a nationalistic frenzy based on religious hatred and come to power virtually unopposed in 1930s Germany, As such, I can’t be quiet any longer and I can’t sit idly by and watch the heart and soul of America be ripped out, no matter how good the intentions are of the ‘patriots’ in question.
Vote for whom you will in November. Men and women have died and continue to die for your right to vote since the outset of the Revolutionary War and the most disrespectful thing we can do to dishonor their memory is to NOT vote. But I urge you to vote with genuine thought and consideration from your brain rather than the hatred in your heart.
Hatred, wrapped in an American flag, is still hatred. And hatred is un-American.
‘James Madison’
PS – Sorry Angry Woman, I will no longer be hitting the delete button when I disagree with someone and if you and anyone else on this list disagree with me feel free to hit ‘reply’.
I can no longer take this sort of nonsense.
Someone on this extended set of mailing lists thought that my worldview was in agreement with the hatred, ignorance & fear espoused in this forwarded “Angry Woman’ letter.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
I am a political centrist. I am a registered Independent that has voted Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian and will always vote for the person who I feel is the most intelligent candidate and the one most suitable for improving my life and the life of my community.
I grew up Republican and would still vote that way with more regularity if the party wasn’t populated by the sorts of numbskulls that author this kind of jingoistic crap. Being a Republican used to be about fiscal discipline, small government and basically demanding that our elected officials stay the hell out of the lives of ordinary Americans. The modern Republican wants to foist unwanted Christian dogma on us, thinks we must be crazy for not giving the Federal government unfettered access to our personal affairs and feels they should be allowed to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave for whatever crony-istic pork barrel project that suits them, particularly under the useful guise of ‘national security.’ Drunken spending used to be the sole domain of the Democratic Party. The idiot presently in office has demonstrated that wasting vast amounts of our tax dollars can indeed be a bi-partisan exercise.
For starters, the implied notion in this woman’s letter that all followers of Islam are violent individuals bent on terror and the destruction of America is simply ridiculous. This continues to be a very common misconception among too great a number of Americans.
We are at war with ideological extremism, not the religion and practice of Islam. Prior to September 11, 2001 the worst terrorist act committed on American soil was perpetrated by a white American of Christian heritage. Have we forgotten the 168 men, women and children murdered by Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols on April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City? Have we forgotten the responding law enforcement officials that subsequently committed suicide in the aftermath of this reprehensible event? I have not.
When it was revealed that the cowardly executors of that terror attack were Christian Americans, did the world, Christian & non-Christians alike, paint ALL white Christians as violent, hateful terrorists? No, because that logic would be ridiculous. We were obviously able to recognize that this was the organized work of several very twisted and sadistic individuals and these individuals did not represent the entirety of their race or religious background. (McVeigh was also a registered Republican, yet no rational person would suggest by extension all Republicans are terrorists.)
We are at war with the forces that created Osama bin Laden AND Timothy McVeigh.
In a rare moment of clarity right after 9/11, even the Moron-in-Chief himself recognized the difference between a radical wing and the vast majority of a practicing religion, in this case, Islam. In his address to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001 President Bush declared:
“The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam”
So why is it that the sadistic acts committed by a small percentage of Islamic militants should continue to condemn an entire religion and dozens of nations? Yes, Angry Woman I am sickened when a suicide bomber blows up a market in the Middle East. I am sickened the same way as when a disgruntled kid from the suburbs shoots up yet another American high school or college. These are both acts of terror. Both need to end. (No one has suggested yet we start waterboarding our teenagers to extract information about the next school attack, but if we continue to support to the idea of using it to ‘keep us safe’, how far off can that be?)
Humanity as a whole is at war with the extremist fringe and no one faith has a monopoly on terror. Yes, there are plenty of militant Muslims and they need to be dealt with, but likewise there are violent factions of every ideology from Hindi to Judaism, cults like Aum Shinrikyo and certainly Christians as well. Does the presence of violent fundamentalists in every religion mean that religion itself is the face of terror?
Obviously not. Again, this logic is insane.
What has me the most incensed, however, is the suggestion from our Angry Woman that we ought not to care when we allow the erosion of the fundamental principles of liberty and justice that as a nation we have spent the last 300 years creating. This ‘I don’t care’ attitude is nothing short of abhorrent. Our Angry Woman is all too willing to give away the very essence, the very heart of what makes America truly great, simply to gain some feeling of protection from or vengeance upon this Muslim minority.
As Americans, we invented Liberty. We are (or at least we were) the Gold Standard of Justice and Freedom in the eyes of the world. And we are prepared to give that up by permitting torture? By skipping due process? By waiving away our Constitutional rights to protection from search & seizure? By allowing our rights to free speech to be diminished and tarnished? By pretending that international law we ratified and helped create shouldn’t apply to us when we don’t feel it is convenient?
Are we really that frightened by a couple thousand desert-dwelling religious fanatics that we will turn our backs on the heritage given to us by the Founding Fathers and improved by three centuries of hard work?
Everyday we allow our most hallowed principles to be subverted as Angry Woman would have us do; we allow terror to destroy America. The destruction of America that our enemies seek is not simply the physical destruction of America and her people. They wish to destroy the very IDEA of America. And when we are reduced to not caring about the proper application of Justice that we ourselves created then they have succeeded in harming the IDEA and soul of America.
Buildings, roads, cities, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center – they are physical structures that can be destroyed and rebuilt. But the very ideas on which our buildings, cities and nation are founded – Liberty, Justice and Freedom – for everyone – must be protected and preserved at all costs. This will be much, much more difficult to rebuild should they be lost in the struggle.
This is what I care about, Angry Woman. I care that the United States continues to honor the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that all men are created equal that made us a nation in the first place. I care that in this war of ideology, that is, a war of IDEAs, that we continue to demonstrate the superior ideology and unwavering commitment to real justice and democracy. The moment we stoop to the level of thugs and terrorists, we ourselves become thugs and terrorists and not Americans.
Yes, I am aware that my wishing to take a principled course of action in the War on Terror I am making my own life less ‘safe’. But I would rather take the chance of being blown up by a car bomb on 34th Street and die a free man, rather than live in a nation that taps my phone, condones torture and attempts to suppress my opinion and dissent. That isn’t America. That is called China.
For too long, people like myself in the middle ground have stayed quiet and allowed this sort of ignorant blather to go unabated. It is that sort of passivity that allowed the German Nationalists to whip a nationalistic frenzy based on religious hatred and come to power virtually unopposed in 1930s Germany, As such, I can’t be quiet any longer and I can’t sit idly by and watch the heart and soul of America be ripped out, no matter how good the intentions are of the ‘patriots’ in question.
Vote for whom you will in November. Men and women have died and continue to die for your right to vote since the outset of the Revolutionary War and the most disrespectful thing we can do to dishonor their memory is to NOT vote. But I urge you to vote with genuine thought and consideration from your brain rather than the hatred in your heart.
Hatred, wrapped in an American flag, is still hatred. And hatred is un-American.
‘James Madison’
PS – Sorry Angry Woman, I will no longer be hitting the delete button when I disagree with someone and if you and anyone else on this list disagree with me feel free to hit ‘reply’.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Stories from strangers
I see from looking at the past few posts that photos are beginning to take over this blog. That is OK by me. I continue to be fascinated by the information that they store. In a previous posting, I discussed how my personal photos store metadata that unlock my memories. This evenings photos hail from complete strangers, yet they too store wonderful information. However, rather than accessing one's memory banks, photos such as these access the imagination. The journalistic instincts kick in with the hope of answering 'Who', 'What', 'Where', 'Why' and 'How'. Take for example this photo:
My first question in seeing this photograph is 'why is the gentleman on the left wearing purple pants?' Is it the only pair he owns? Are they his special crocodile-handling pants? Is he color blind? Did his daughter pick out the pair of pants? With regard to answering some of the journalistic questions, I have a bit of an advantage because I was told in advance that the photos came from Papua New Guinea and in seeing the rest of the series, I know that this was some sort of crocodile farm. That it the slides came from Papua New Guinea were also confirmed by this photograph:
Thanks to google, I learned tonight that Varirata National Park was the first designated national park in Papua New Guinea. The '76' stamped on the slide frame would also indicate that these photos were taken 3 years after Varirata opened in 1973. You will also note the aspect ratio of the photo. It is square. One would assume that meant it was scanned from a medium-format transparency. You would be incorrect. I have been fooling with photography for just over 21 years now. Only tonight did I learn that several camera makers had indeed made square-format 35mm cameras. The frame size is 24mm x 24mm. Now I am on a mission to find me one.....
My first question in seeing this photograph is 'why is the gentleman on the left wearing purple pants?' Is it the only pair he owns? Are they his special crocodile-handling pants? Is he color blind? Did his daughter pick out the pair of pants? With regard to answering some of the journalistic questions, I have a bit of an advantage because I was told in advance that the photos came from Papua New Guinea and in seeing the rest of the series, I know that this was some sort of crocodile farm. That it the slides came from Papua New Guinea were also confirmed by this photograph:
Thanks to google, I learned tonight that Varirata National Park was the first designated national park in Papua New Guinea. The '76' stamped on the slide frame would also indicate that these photos were taken 3 years after Varirata opened in 1973. You will also note the aspect ratio of the photo. It is square. One would assume that meant it was scanned from a medium-format transparency. You would be incorrect. I have been fooling with photography for just over 21 years now. Only tonight did I learn that several camera makers had indeed made square-format 35mm cameras. The frame size is 24mm x 24mm. Now I am on a mission to find me one.....
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Great Auto Race
On Monday night, I attended a lecture at the Explorer's Club with PG & IW called 'Bandits, Guns & Autos: The Great Race of 1908.' In an effort to prove the viability of the automobile to the general public, several international teams raced from Times Square in New York to Paris, by way of the Pacific. The race organizers, working on some faulty intel, decided to start the race on my birthday February 12th in order that the teams could transit from Alaska to Russia by way of the 'frozen' Bering Strait. Needless to say, this didn't happen and the few teams that did make it across the United States (driving countless miles over the railway lines) were shipped by freighter to Japan and then to Russia from there. All told, it took 169 days and the American team in a Thomas Flyer won the race. More details can be found here: www.TheGreatAutoRace.com
I enjoyed one of the quotes regarding the race from the London Daily Mail in 1908. "Is such a journey possible? Theoretically it is, but it must be borne in mind that the motor car, after woman, is the most fragile and capricious thing on earth."
I enjoyed one of the quotes regarding the race from the London Daily Mail in 1908. "Is such a journey possible? Theoretically it is, but it must be borne in mind that the motor car, after woman, is the most fragile and capricious thing on earth."
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
"Whatever is best for a human being lis outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, remain eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men." - Seneca
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Tongue of the Viking
In his book Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner included the following Bill Holm poem in the chapter on Iceland as a description of the Icelandic langauge:
In an air-conditioned room you cannot understand the
Grammar of this language,
The whirring machine drowns out the soft vowels,
But you can hear these vowels in the mountain wind
And in heavy seas breaking over the hull of a small boat.
Old ladies can wind their long hair in this language
And can hum, and knit, and make pancakes.
But you cannot have a cocktail party in this language
And say witty things standing up with a drink in your
hand.
You must sit down to speak this language,
It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.
For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of
your life is laid out before you
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
My photographs are my life. The famous adage is that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' For me it is more than that. When I return to a photograph from my life, it opens a portal to a series of stories, memories and feelings.
It is like the photo itself stores metadata. Frequently, the story revealed has nothing to do with the content of the photo. Take, for instance, the photograph below. It is a photograph of a posse of Aboriginal youth dangling on a temporary camel enclosure. Yet the memory it unveiled was watching videos with an Old English Sheepdog as a pillow. That is because when I looked at it the first time, I didn't see the camel in the shadows. I just saw the kids on the fence. Trying to recall where it was taken my brain produced the Aileron camdraft I attended with my mother and our friend, Ronnie Huriwai-Hawkes. Ronnie is delightful Maori woman who has been a family friend since 1981 and over the years has owned several Old English Sheepdogs. The two I remember best were Boo and Breeze. Ronnie was one of the first people we knew in Alice Springs that owned a VHS player. For a year or so, we had a Friday Night routine where our family would rent some movies, truck up to the North Side of town and watch movies with Ronnie, or 'babysit' Boo and Breeze while Ronnie went bowling. As an 11-year old, I found that the Old English Sheepdog made a pretty good cushion for video viewing. (I don't recall many of the movies we saw except for 'Harold and Maude' and the incredibly strange 'Quintet')
I wish I could remember more about the Aileron campdraft because it was such an outback experience. Aileron at that time was a small roadhouse on the Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Darwin over a thousand miles away. Along the 'highway' - I use this word loosely as the Stuart is a single lane in each direction but at least it is paved - there are roadhouses every few hundred miles. The Great Aussie Outback roadhouse served a variety of functions. In addition to being a place to fill up with petrol, beer and ice there would usually be an attached ramshackle pub and kitchen, perhaps a stationed police officer and usually a few rustic trailers or sheds in the back if you needed to sleep for a couple of hours. (Beer served a more important function on Northern Territory roads than a simple beverage. Distances were actually calculated by the number of beers likely to be consumed between two points. 'Ya're not far, mate, that's about six cans from here ...')
Not surprisingly, the outback roadhouses were pretty rough and ready affairs populated by the floatsam that washed up in these isolated areas, but most of the folks were passing through and very few actually lived at or near the roadhouses. Once a year, many of these remote outposts would put together some sort of get-together and for a couple of days the population would swell with visitors. The most famous of these are the Birdsville Races in one of the most remote corners of the country. Aileron staged a campdraft, which is a contest of horsemanship unique to Australia where jackeroos demonstrate their mustering abilities.
We must have presented quite a trio their in Aileron: a Yank woman from New York, her scrawny son and the always-laughing Maori woman - all camping in Ronnie's little station wagon. It is a shame I don't remember much - only small swatches of walking through the red dust kicked up by the horses and the cattle, climbing up some scaffolding for a higher look and I think trying to take a solar shower. I'm sure my mother took several rolls of photos and when I find them hopefully I can fill in some of the blanks.
It is like the photo itself stores metadata. Frequently, the story revealed has nothing to do with the content of the photo. Take, for instance, the photograph below. It is a photograph of a posse of Aboriginal youth dangling on a temporary camel enclosure. Yet the memory it unveiled was watching videos with an Old English Sheepdog as a pillow. That is because when I looked at it the first time, I didn't see the camel in the shadows. I just saw the kids on the fence. Trying to recall where it was taken my brain produced the Aileron camdraft I attended with my mother and our friend, Ronnie Huriwai-Hawkes. Ronnie is delightful Maori woman who has been a family friend since 1981 and over the years has owned several Old English Sheepdogs. The two I remember best were Boo and Breeze. Ronnie was one of the first people we knew in Alice Springs that owned a VHS player. For a year or so, we had a Friday Night routine where our family would rent some movies, truck up to the North Side of town and watch movies with Ronnie, or 'babysit' Boo and Breeze while Ronnie went bowling. As an 11-year old, I found that the Old English Sheepdog made a pretty good cushion for video viewing. (I don't recall many of the movies we saw except for 'Harold and Maude' and the incredibly strange 'Quintet')
I wish I could remember more about the Aileron campdraft because it was such an outback experience. Aileron at that time was a small roadhouse on the Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Darwin over a thousand miles away. Along the 'highway' - I use this word loosely as the Stuart is a single lane in each direction but at least it is paved - there are roadhouses every few hundred miles. The Great Aussie Outback roadhouse served a variety of functions. In addition to being a place to fill up with petrol, beer and ice there would usually be an attached ramshackle pub and kitchen, perhaps a stationed police officer and usually a few rustic trailers or sheds in the back if you needed to sleep for a couple of hours. (Beer served a more important function on Northern Territory roads than a simple beverage. Distances were actually calculated by the number of beers likely to be consumed between two points. 'Ya're not far, mate, that's about six cans from here ...')
Not surprisingly, the outback roadhouses were pretty rough and ready affairs populated by the floatsam that washed up in these isolated areas, but most of the folks were passing through and very few actually lived at or near the roadhouses. Once a year, many of these remote outposts would put together some sort of get-together and for a couple of days the population would swell with visitors. The most famous of these are the Birdsville Races in one of the most remote corners of the country. Aileron staged a campdraft, which is a contest of horsemanship unique to Australia where jackeroos demonstrate their mustering abilities.
We must have presented quite a trio their in Aileron: a Yank woman from New York, her scrawny son and the always-laughing Maori woman - all camping in Ronnie's little station wagon. It is a shame I don't remember much - only small swatches of walking through the red dust kicked up by the horses and the cattle, climbing up some scaffolding for a higher look and I think trying to take a solar shower. I'm sure my mother took several rolls of photos and when I find them hopefully I can fill in some of the blanks.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Buried Treasure
This photo was unearthed from the pre-demolition salvage operation Leigh and I made on the family barn. It was taken probably by my mother circa '82-'83. It could have been taken the same day as my own camel photo below, though the appearance of a camel in Alice Springs did not always mean the Camel Cup. Strange circumstances often create strange relationships. The discovery of gold and the construction of the Overland Telegraph in the unforgiving arid climate of Central Australia created the need for reliable desert transport. Camels came by their reputations as 'ships of the desert' honestly. Teams of camels were employed to transport supplies from the Southern regions of Australia to the interior and most of these trains were led by Muslim immigrants mostly from Pakistan though they were known collectively as 'Ghans'. To this day, their still resides a small Islamic population in Alice Springs and Australia now holds the worlds largest population of wild camels. So large, in fact, that Australia exports camels and camel meat back to the Middle East and Asia.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Love isn't a Hallmark Card
I was surfing back through some posts I made on a previous blog and I thought the following excerpt was worth a re-post:
I have a more serious observation this morning. As I made my way downtown yesterday, I saw a couple on the corner of W.10 & 6th Ave. They were a wholly unremarkable couple as far as a numerical readout would go. Perhaps a 0.5 tops. No matter. Despite the evidence of hard-living on both their parts - they looked late 50's, but were more likely mid 40's - these two were definitely in love with one another. There is no telling whether they had been in love for 40 years or 40 minutes or it had taken them 40 years to find these 40 minutes. Again, no matter. The love on their faces and in their body language as they clung to one another on the corner waiting for the cab to hurtle pass so they could cross the street was clearly evident. It struck me at that moment that while the vixometer is calculating for a particular aesthetic it is considering and acquiring all manifestations of true beauty.
It reminded me of one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in New York and it came from a most unlikely source. About seven years ago I was riding the N train in from Queens. Standing in front of me was as rough a featured man as you are likely to see in the public. In fact, given the extent of the prison ink on his arms I dare say he hadn't spent much of his life on the streets. His external appearance was brutal. He was missing teeth, his body was bent and beyond the ink, his flesh scarred from hard knocks, None of this mattered. He was cradling in his arms an infant. It was unclear whether the baby was his own child, a grandchild or otherwise. Again, it didn't really matter. What did matter was the connection between the two. It was obvious from this man's eyes that the child in his arms was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. He was oblivious to everything around him. The child was gurgling and giggling, swinging its arms and legs bubbling over from the attention the man was giving it. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but to me it seemed that the child must have represented his redemption. It was a blank slate to start over. The child didn't care what he looked like. The child didn't care about his past. It was a beautiful and inspirational thing to witness.
Love isn't a Hallmark card. It isn't rational. It doesn't make sense. And more often than not, it comes in humble wrapping.
I have a more serious observation this morning. As I made my way downtown yesterday, I saw a couple on the corner of W.10 & 6th Ave. They were a wholly unremarkable couple as far as a numerical readout would go. Perhaps a 0.5 tops. No matter. Despite the evidence of hard-living on both their parts - they looked late 50's, but were more likely mid 40's - these two were definitely in love with one another. There is no telling whether they had been in love for 40 years or 40 minutes or it had taken them 40 years to find these 40 minutes. Again, no matter. The love on their faces and in their body language as they clung to one another on the corner waiting for the cab to hurtle pass so they could cross the street was clearly evident. It struck me at that moment that while the vixometer is calculating for a particular aesthetic it is considering and acquiring all manifestations of true beauty.
It reminded me of one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in New York and it came from a most unlikely source. About seven years ago I was riding the N train in from Queens. Standing in front of me was as rough a featured man as you are likely to see in the public. In fact, given the extent of the prison ink on his arms I dare say he hadn't spent much of his life on the streets. His external appearance was brutal. He was missing teeth, his body was bent and beyond the ink, his flesh scarred from hard knocks, None of this mattered. He was cradling in his arms an infant. It was unclear whether the baby was his own child, a grandchild or otherwise. Again, it didn't really matter. What did matter was the connection between the two. It was obvious from this man's eyes that the child in his arms was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. He was oblivious to everything around him. The child was gurgling and giggling, swinging its arms and legs bubbling over from the attention the man was giving it. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but to me it seemed that the child must have represented his redemption. It was a blank slate to start over. The child didn't care what he looked like. The child didn't care about his past. It was a beautiful and inspirational thing to witness.
Love isn't a Hallmark card. It isn't rational. It doesn't make sense. And more often than not, it comes in humble wrapping.
Fun with scanners pt.2
I took this photograph probably in July, 1982 when I was 11 years old. It represents a photo taken with my first camera - an old Kodak Instamatic 126 job. On my sixth birthday, my mother gave me two options for a present. I could either have a 'speedometer' for my Schwinn bicycle or I could have a camera. I chose the speedometer. However, it was backordered and after several weeks of impatiently waiting for it to arrive, it did not - so I took the camera.
The event I am documenting here is the Alice Springs Camel Cup. It is still faithfully held every year in July and remains a testament to Australia's genius ability to combine outrageous entertainment, gambling and drinking all in the name of charity.
Begin Here
The search for inspiration is maddening. Second only to love in its elusiveness, finding and keeping inspiration is like trying to maintain your balance on a branch while some idiot is taking hacks at the tree trunk with an axe. If you are lucky, you can anticipate the whacks and stay aloft briefly, but most of the time you land on your ass and have to start looking for another tree.
My quick fix for finding inspiration is watching Dan Liss' timeless 'Begin Here' - from the comments I can tell that I am not the only person drawn back to watch it over and over for an inspirational fix. I've seen it no less than thirty times. I even printed out the text and left it behind in the 4th Century Cave of St. Anthony in Egypt.
New Years always scares me a bit. I had written a poem some time back in the infamous lost Moleskin called 'Terror of the Blank Page.' The traditional approach to New Years is somehow it provides us with a blank slate to start afresh, so it naturally taps into my fear of the a blank canvas. Over the years I have expounded in both word and in person, that the limitless number of options available to us in this wealthy, western 21st society actually is more paralyzing than it is freeing. Artists often echo this when they set forth on projects with substantial limitations.
Perhaps that is the answer to my own New Years quest. Perhaps instead of a list of resolutions, I should set myself a series of limitations....
My quick fix for finding inspiration is watching Dan Liss' timeless 'Begin Here' - from the comments I can tell that I am not the only person drawn back to watch it over and over for an inspirational fix. I've seen it no less than thirty times. I even printed out the text and left it behind in the 4th Century Cave of St. Anthony in Egypt.
New Years always scares me a bit. I had written a poem some time back in the infamous lost Moleskin called 'Terror of the Blank Page.' The traditional approach to New Years is somehow it provides us with a blank slate to start afresh, so it naturally taps into my fear of the a blank canvas. Over the years I have expounded in both word and in person, that the limitless number of options available to us in this wealthy, western 21st society actually is more paralyzing than it is freeing. Artists often echo this when they set forth on projects with substantial limitations.
Perhaps that is the answer to my own New Years quest. Perhaps instead of a list of resolutions, I should set myself a series of limitations....
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