April 27, 2006

A love song to boag world. Only follow this link if you are a webdesigner. Otherwise you won't piss yourself laughing and the point will be lost.

April 25, 2006

So I was looking up the french words for RSS feeds and found this podcast:

The French Ecole 'French For Beginners' Podcast

The french ecole? Guys, let's not get off on the wrong foot or anything eh?

Still check out the little grenouille with a guitar and a plaid suit I know every time I parlez on francais un peut that's what I like to pretend I look like.

Oh and speaking of frogs, I went for my now seasonal check-in with Marilyn the tiny wand-waving grief therapist and as I walked in the door she said, "Have I shown you my new present yet?"

I said no and she took me to her desk where this was sitting;

She pressed the frogs toe and it started playing a version of 50cents "Birthday" and Marilyn and the frog, God bless them both, started to dance.

Had I been feeling even remotely grief-stricken that would have taken care of it right off.

I wasn't too suprised actually, I know Marilyn likes to rap from way back.

As I left I pressed the toe again and Marilyn said; "Check out Froggy's bling."

April 23, 2006

Why We fight

I finally went to see a movie last night, it was just so rainy and movie-night-esque.

We started out at this German movie, called Sophie Scholl the Final Days. Which almost immediately revealed itself to be one of those horrible movies I tend to pick when left to my own devices in front of either a marquee or a video shelf.

As the shchmaltzy organ music reached it's cresendo and the young resistance fighters were being tossed into the back of a gestapo van we crept out of one theater and into the next where Why We fight was only into it's first 20 minutes or so.

Disclaimer : I am about to rant in a way that is going to appear blatantly incorrect to many people, and they have every right to say so in the comments but don't call me a self-hater or a Jew-hater. I love my Judaism and I nurture it daily. What I do have a serious problem with is some of the cultural capital built up around the holocaust, which is what my next paragraph is going to address. I am not talking about the legitimate need to preserve survivor stories or the collective memory of the tragedy of the holocaust. I am talking about the movie business, and what I see as the collective tendency towards varnishing the past instead of trying to illuminate our present.

It seems odd to me that there are still movies being made about the heroic actions taken by people during what was arguably one of the most horrrific events in recent history, when it seem obvious to me that we haven't learned a thing about how to prevent such a occurances in the present time, I mean "Never Again" as if.

Sorry I know that is super fucking incorrect but I am speaking as a Jew and as someone who just listened to an odious interview with the mayor of a small town in the West Bank defending his and his townspeople's right to shit all over the idea of Palistinian self-government.

As far as I can tell, based largely on the brilliant logic of Why We Fight, the only thing the Second World War, and the resultant cold war taught anyone, was that it's best to have standing army, and to fund that army madly, and to use imperialism as a means to buy that army whatever it needs to maintain its stature.

And then we watch and make sacharine movies about German school girls who die for their ideals. I mean, what's driving imperialism /global militarism is also ideals, ideals that result in further bloodshed so let's not wax poetic over that, let's really carefully examine why we still have to talk about past wars in order to add a gloss of respectability to the clearly unjust wars being fought in our present day using reprehensible technologies.

Granted there was this movie Why we Fight available next door to Sophie Scholl, but how often does a documentary about the real cost of war get made in comparison to historical fictions about any one of the last centuries wars.

Probably most movies made about war attempt to paint war as a tragic event, not one that ought be repeated, Just like the Sophie Scholl thing did. I guess what upsets me is it seems only possible to excoriate wars after they have happened. After it's too late and nothing can be done except create fictions out of real events.

I suspect it's because the condition of war is such an ingrained part of human culture it doesn't seem like a phenomonon that can be halted through human effort. Maybe it's as if war is irrevocable like torrential rain or a plague. So the only thing to do is to create meaning out of carnage once everything has settled down again, at least in that particular region.

It seems we like our wars to arrive as stories, not as human tragedies, stories that carry morals within them that justify the further condition of war. As my dear friend Ned explained to me, it seems like a tautaology. Fiction about war often carries a justification for the acceptance of the generalized condition of war itself, maybe not that particular war, but the moral order in which war must occur in order to generate the proper circumstance for a demonstration of might, as the single most effective response to evilness or wrong-doing.

During Why We Fight the talking head that most represented the mentality of continued defense funding said; (I am paraphrasing here). "It's not like there are three guys who hold the key to everything and if you got rid of them everything would suddenly be okay. This is just the way things are done now."

That's the part that scared me most. Because he's right. It isn't any single group of people and it can't change based on regimes, it's an entire moral system, and we don't really know how to stop it.

April 20, 2006

8 months left 'til class five.

Of course this couldn't come at a better time.

Anybody looking to unload a used Prius?