My friend Peretz is in traveling, exploring Afghanistan, he files updates on his blog - jalalagood and feeds his flickr stream.
2010
I went to see the True Grit yesterday, it’s not like the cathartic Serious Man or the genius character sculpting in the Miller Crossing. True Grit it’s a western, a polished version of a western. At this point in their careers the brothers can do anything they want and so they geeked-out to write a country song. It’s a derivative film (I am trying to make this word into a curse with some street cred).
I don’t like westerns, they show the caricature, one-dimensional characters spread across the vast west. Anytime a man runs into another human being they start shooting. That’s a western and I find it boring. Yes there is something american about it, in a negative way, the unrefined characters, the primal drives, the survivorship, the overused clichés. A Western is a popular tan-colored cocktail formula of whiskey, marksmanship, horses, blood and on occasion a pretty girl in a pretty costume. True Grit stays close to the prescribed concoction.
The usual Coen Brothers trump cards are sparse, the visual texture is mediocre, there is none of the innovative camera angles. The dialogue is often illegible, the actors pretend the southern accent and speak in a mouthful, they swallow every other word. The setting seems theatrical, the snow flakes are fake and the air air-conditioned. The film feels sterile, there is simply no love, except the love of the teenage girl to her dead father. True Grit is a nerdy derivative diversion for the brothers, hopefully they can come up with something truly meaningful next time around.
Speaking of Тени на тротуарах, Bobby Farrell was found dead in his hotel room in St. Petersburg during a tour. Long live the holy swirl! ►click to continue
If you want to understand how Communism evolved from the Rabbinic dictatorships and then post Holocaust Judaism from Communism, watch this video [in Russian] (if you notice a massive Freudian slip, you get a bonus): ►click to continue
Egon Schiele, Double Portrait of Heinrich Bensch and his Son Otto. 1913
It’s unlikely that Egon Schiele was aware of the work of his Viennese neighbor Dr. Freud. Yet you can see how the ideas where patently in the air then. This is a remarkable and gutsy painting because Heinrich Bensch was an early benefactor of Egon Schiele, he was the first to recognize Egon Schiele’ crazy vision.
I had a dream las night. I was at a country retreat. There were many people there including Bush the elder and his wife Barbara. It was a picnic-like setting – sun, grass, wooden tables, happy laughter, finger food. I was designing something on a long scroll. When I pushed the print button, the design came out in color, instead of black and white or perhaps sepia like the Egon Schiele here. It completely changed the picture, it was nothing as I imagined. My design was a very, very long scroll, almost like a Torah. I asked someone to help unfurl the print and I can see that he was careless with the work, tearing away parts of the scroll. I started screaming at the helper, he was destroying my work. But perhaps I was happy about the destruction because the color print, it was noting like my vision for the project. I was thinking all the time how to present. I felt no connection or ownership of the design… I remember the mad anxiety in the dream. Then it was my turn to show it to the President Bush. I suddenly realized that in the commotion or perhaps as a revenge for the screaming someone stole my scrolls, I had nothing to present. President Bush was very understanding.
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C´era tra noi un gioco d´azzardo
ma niente ormai nel lungo sguardo
spiega qualcosa,
forse soltano
certe parole sembrano pianto,
sono salate, sanno di mare
chissà, tra noi, si trattava d´amore
Ma non parlo di te, io parlo d´altro
il gioco era mio, lucido e scaltro
Io parlo di me, di me che ho goduto
di me che ho amato
e che ho perduto
E trovo niente da dire o da fare
Però tra noi si trattava d´amore
C´era tra noi un gioco d´azzardo,
gioco di vita, duro e bugiardo
Perchè volersi e desiderarsi
facendo finta di essere persi
Adesso è tardi e dico soltanto
che si trattava d´amore, e non sai quanto
- Paolo Conte.
For whatever reason my Chabad readers feel familiar enough to use the new chat widget here (bottom right). Inevitably the chats leave me peeved. More about that later but generally speaking I think the Alter Rebbe had a dream to collect all the dunces devoid of the intellectual fortitude or the emotional range into a neat package where they can reinforce each other’s primitive drives. I takes years of inner work to develop your own thinking, to peel the onion and you people, still swimming within the bowls of Chabad, are not on this earth to do the work. In fact the name of your movement is a wanted sign.
I have nothing but a disdain for your way of life. I deplore the cultural patterns, the formulas, especially outside of the religion. Case in point is the chat yesterday with the Crown Heights M. (that anonymity fetish reeks).
First is the typical introductory dance, it’s between the annoying and the unbearable. M. starts with “do you know this guy or that guy”. When I tell him I met them perhaps once, he doesn’t relent till he finds someone I “really know”. “That one has a birthday tomorrow” – no kidding… Mazal Tov!
Then M. proceeds telling me where he went for yeshiva, shlichus, work. I remember now that he had a guest post on mentalblog. But he never comments.
Then he tells me that he though I was in “programming”. I mean the guy is reading me for a decade and he though I was in “programming”? When I actually tell him about my profession, he again goes into “I know that one and the other one who did that” routine.
Finally after M. tells me that he visits this blog every day I suggest the subscription. He replies with the “philosophy” on how everything online is free, etc. And here is the key point of the post. A Chabadnik might speak about the art, the internet, poetry or politics but it always betrays the pattern forming the core identity, nothing is examined, made your own, understood deeply or personally, it’s the dance of the clichés expressed with the mock conviction. Less understood, the bigger the conviction.
The inner work is a hard labour, it requires thinking and the painful undoing. To the people still associated with Chabad, I have nothing to share with you. I don’t sell ready to eat meals or the frozen potatoes. You are not invited to my farbrengen. It ain’t free.
Quint Buchholz - Wolf und Mann
This is a twenty minute podcast (12/2009) of John Gray speaking about the ideas behind his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals:
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I want to thank the readers who donated generously to this blog yesterday (personal emails are forthcoming). If you didn’t have an opportunity, please contribute today here (I hope I fixed the PayPal). As a service to the “community” I would like to give back something tangible, something you can use for a change. This is the list of Chrome extensions I recommend:
- after the deadline – spell checker bought by Word Press (last year?). It works as a plugin on all browsers and also as a Word Press plugin. How can you not like a spell checker that pciks up every cliché?
- google shortcuts – I take credit for talking the developer Sören Rinne into porting this extension to Chrome from Firefox and contributing a little to the design and testing in the early releases.
- google share button – I like the minimalist approach.
- last pass - the game changing application, trash your forms and password managers, this takes the experience to the next level.
- neat bookmarks – the most beautiful and usable bookmarks manager ever written.
- RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) – the best way to stay in touch with this blog is still via RSS.
Quint Buchholz. Winter Tag
The great onion domes of course are no bloody “onions”, these are the breasts of mother Russia, with the beautifully erect nipples masquerading as a cross (k’yodua l’yodey hen). The fury of the mother nature and her tragic fate in Russia, she always gives an excuse to the fascists who claim to intervene. Don’t fear her, fear the father civilization and his false impotent prophets.
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In his second article on the subject Christopher Hitchens it taking the Jewish establishment to task for downplaying or even explaining this recorded comment from Henry Kissinger to Dick Nixon: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” The problem with the mock indignation about this statement is that this was exactly the policy of the Jewish establishment in America during the WWII, when they actually put Jews into the gas chambers. Just look up what another Henry, Morgenthau was advising the President Roosevelt. It took the renegades and the “trouble makers” to shame the Rabbis into too little, too late action against the European slaughter. And when it came to the Soviet jews it was up to the marginalized Meir Kahanes of the world.
And as far as Kissinger’s rant, every job requires ethical shortcuts, the bigger the job, the bigger the shortcuts. Anyway Jews know nothing about ethics, they are busy with the laws.
I was thinking today about the antisemitic postcards, comparing it to my own “interactions” with the Jewish communities. It suddenly crystallized into single idea. The following message is nonexistent in the Jewish culture: What’s Legal is not Always Ethical.
I can stop writing, the rest, as the say, is commentary. Imagine, this really happened to me, I am talking to a Chabad officer and to a top executive of a Jewish federation, telling them that dealing with the Dnepropetrovsk gangsters is unethical, even when the mafiosi seem to be playing for your team. Amazingly, despite the vastly different backgrounds, they both return a bewildered stare. I have a feeling I need and interpreter. The concept doesn’t even exits. After all no laws are visibly broken. One might think this is an aberration but I believe the roots go much deeper. Indeed ethics are always subordinate to the laws, if it’s legal it must be ethical.
I am not in a whitewash business but broadly Christianity was spun as a revision addressing this very bug in the code. Allegedly the early Christians elevated ethics above laws. Can you see how the different thinking about this fundamental divergence can create a far-reaching problem when the two culture collide? Was it legal to work on behalf of the Polish feudal land owners and enslave the Ukrainian peasants? But was it ethical? Don’t blame Bogdan Khmelnitsky then. Alas the ethics don’t register on the radar of the Jewish cultural conscience, not then and not now.
And there is always a smoldering smoke screen. A Satmar lady might spend her entire life schlepping soup to hospitals, yet inside her community there is a culture of power, money, coverup, theft, the abuse of the children and there is not even a framework that can express the moral indignation. The concept simply doesn’t exist. To appeal to morals inside the traditional Jewish community is like asking an Eskimo to describe a coconut.
I belive this is a structural problem with the thingy known as Judaism. One can give up on God, on can give up on the divine origin of the Torah but then comes the time when functioning within the jewish community requires a complete erasure of ethics as a value. Not everyone is prepared to give up on that, the price is your own humanity.
P.S. Many speak today that the run up to the economic collapse was paved by the deals that were seemingly legal but unethical. It leaves me wondering where this derivative thinking comes from.
The 1996 Atlantic article by James Howard Kunstler – Home From Nowhere:
“Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business. We hear this unhappiness expressed in phrases like “no sense of place” and “the loss of community.” We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we’re overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight — the fry pits, the big-box stores, the office units, the lube joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons, the jive plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of signs, the highway itself clogged with cars — as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable. And naturally, this experience can make us feel glum about the nature and future of our civilization.
When we drive around and look at all this cartoon architecture and other junk that we’ve smeared all over the landscape, we register it as ugliness. This ugliness is the surface expression of deeper problems — problems that relate to the issue of our national character. The highway strip is not just a sequence of eyesores. The pattern it represents is also economically catastrophic, an environmental calamity, socially devastating, and spiritually degrading.
***
The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of decent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit.”