one of rock's most underrated Pretty Complex Dudes – as horny as Lil Wayne, as troubled as Thom Yorke, able to growl "war is the most vulgar madness" like the American Sting he's always sort of been. He's got a beige-Baja-shirt rep and a black-turtleneck soul. -linkGreat point, since as Mr and Mrs David Dark have masterfully noted Yorke (and his Radiohead) are absolutely apoclayptic and "very resurrection." (Back to Zappa, Rolling Stone, in the link above, Joe’s Garage is Zappa’s Apocalypse Now.)
We apparently have the word “apocalypse“ all wrong. In its root meaning, it’s not about destruction or fortune telling; It’s about revealing; It’s what James Joyce calls an epiphany-the moment you realize your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obssesive vanity…The real world, within which you’ve lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It’s starting to come to you. You aren’t who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypsehas occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer…Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope. The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. Is it any surprise that we often won’t know it when we see it?
-David Dark, “Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons”, p.10
in times of axial/historical shift
inced that studying earlier eras of cultural shift/liminal transition helps us get a better handle on "this weird moment in
2)Click the read the "Judas at the Jockey Club" chapter, pp 89-14 here.
Does Katie Couric’s Move to Yahoo Signal the End of Old Media Dominance?
When, years from now, historians try to piece together the exact moment that the balance of cultural power shifted from old media to new, when the old lions guarding the gatehouse were flattened by the democratizing power of the Internet and social media, the events of the last few months, or even the last couple of days, may provide a clue.
On Friday, news broke that Katie Couric, one of the most recognizable stars of television, was leaving ABC for Yahoo News. During any other month, that news alone would have signaled a new world order, an upheaval in the pecking order. But in November 2013, Couric was just the latest high-profile media talent to leave what was once considered a lifetime post for a job at a website that in the public mind’s at least last saw its heyday back when Friendster and Meetups and “the netroots” ruled the digital link
The Steeple and the Gargoyle: Celebrating The Simpsons
by David Dark
Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human beings who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals.
Every Christmas (or thereabouts), William F. Buckley sees fit to fill his Firing Line slot on public television with a re-airing of an outrageously strange conversation with Malcolm Muggeridge. Buckley customarily introduces the segment by observing that this is, by far, his favorite episode of Firing Line, and what’s remarkable is the utterly undignified and awkward aspect of the interview that follows.
It’s not an argument, exactly. Both men seem to be deriving a great amount of pleasure from one another’s company. But the stakes strike the viewer as, somehow, alarmingly high as Muggeridge, covering his smile, gazes at Buckley with his Obi-Wan Kenobi-eyes and Buckley shoots back furtive glances of disbelief at what’s being proposed.
Muggeridge, you see, contends that everything, under Heaven, is laughable, and he does mean everything. Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mother Theresa, whatever we can propose for the status of dignified and noble and true. Buckley, as we might guess, is scandalized. How can this be?
Muggeridge: “Let’s think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting, as it were, its own inadequacy—attempting something utterly impossible—to climb up to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behavior of men on earth, and these two things, both built into this building to the glory of God.”
But what is he laughing at? Evil? Pomposity? “He’s laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap—disparity —between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so till the end of time you see.”
Till the end of time. This is where Buckley (like a great many of us) can hardly help but hesitate. But the alternative, a worldview that allows for some finalized perfectibility of human nature in the Here and Now (the steeple without the gargoyle, Babel, what-have-you), is hopelessly off as well, and we all know it. What Muggeridge so profoundly understood and what Buckley had such trouble seeing (to the former’s respectful amusement) is that the state of affairs we’ve found ourselves in is really quite wonderful. No one, as it turns out, has managed to plateau. No one has successfully dotted every “i” and crossed every “t.”
And there’s a glory in this imperfection. Mother Theresa knows she’s simply doing what she can, and this, according to Muggeridge, is precisely what makes her such a beautiful person. The word is modesty. The fact that Muggeridge is no longer with us (the date of his departure is transmitted across the screen half-way through the interview) somehow serves to heighten the comedy as mortality gets a word in at his “expense.” Television has never looked so good.
And yet, it does occasionally come close. I’m referring to the closest thing I’ve personally found on the airwaves to a Muggeridgean tragicomedy: The Simpsons. It is a work of art. It’s also a cartoon. I won’t stoop to pretend you’ve never heard of it. What it offers is very likely the most pro-family, God-preoccupied, home-based program on television. Statistically speaking, there is more prayer on The Simpsons than on any sitcom in broadcast history. After all hell has broken loose over the Simpson family’s Thanksgiving dinner, Homer offers thanks for the food while interjecting, “Lord, are we the most screwed up family in the whole universe or what?” Later, when the runaway Bart has returned home and a haphazard order has been restored, they convene again for a late-night meal and Homer ends the show praying, “Thank you, Lord, for another crack at togetherness.”
The Simpsons’ creator, Matt Groening, puts it this way: “We try to put real human emotion into it. Most other cartoons, except the Disney Films, don’t seem to do that. They are just about surface emotion. The show has a rubber-band reality. We stretch it way out into the far reaches of human folly, and it snaps back to relative sanity.”
As a kind of celebration, The Simpsons fulfills, in part, the role that Carnival played in medieval culture. Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin gives this description: “Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people... It is directed at all and everyone...The entire world is seen in its droll aspect...It is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival....It is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed.”
The purpose of Carnival is to overcome or provide momentary relief from the death-dealing seriousness of the status quo, the official. On The Simpsons, all societal personalities are pushed together into a normalizing proximity in which the prerogatives of power and class and celebrity are dropped. George Bush moves into a house across the street, Sting assists in getting Bart out of a well, and Michael Jackson appears as a huge, white mental patient with a shaved head. Everyone comes to know everybody, and any appeal to aloofness or superiority from any quarter is subject to the heaviest lampoon and ridicule. The playing field is leveled, and the forum is open. The Simpsons is customarily subjected to a false evaluation for a variety of reasons, but its status as a kind of stumbling block is not, primarily, as an enemy of family values but, rather, as its advocate. The necessary, much-needed, life-giving gargoyle, if you will. It refuses to take seriously our proudest efforts, the various instances of self-centeredness and idiocy which fall so hopelessly short. That our presumed goodness is so devastatingly shabby is not a cause for outrage, but is, rather, a major part of what we profess (for those who do) when we claim Christianity. An acknowledgment of the ongoing persistence of our frailties is, after all, the central groundwork for what is called comedy. And we need comedy like we need the gargoyle. We need a sense of humor. Without it, we lose the ability to criticize ourselves.
Seriousness, after all, can be an excruciatingly inhumane task-master. Its vision is very often too small. It doesn’t want to know, for instance, that the person disagreeing with us or whose very existence offends has, as it turns out, a really nice smile. It certainly doesn’t want to hear that a Samaritan would do a thing like that. No time for it.
We’ve got to keep an eye on seriousness. It can make us treat people very unkindly. As Walker Percy says of sentimentality, it leads to the gas chamber. Seriously. On The Simpsons, everybody’s soft and funny-looking. No exceptions. Everybody’s invited.
Everybody fits, because nobody does. They’re all weird and getting weirder. Moe, the bartender, is just about consigned to a stereotype when, suddenly, we see him reading stories to children in an orphanage, a weekly activity he goes to great lengths to conceal. The writers of the program are kind enough to violate our prejudices at every available opportunity. And occasionally, through one child punching another on the arm or Marge gently stroking the back of Homer’s hand, we get to hear the strange, delightful sound of this silly-putty flesh-on-flesh. They’re ridiculous. They can’t seem to get away from each other. And the kindness and compassion that works its way between them is always funny but never ridiculed. They’re alive like us.
Is this making sense? It’s certainly okay to wince or to be a little bit bothered. But we probably ought to be careful about deciding we’re feeling offended. It can get old after awhile. We become offended in all the ways God isn’t. And the seat of offendedness (like the seat of judgement) can be a real tricky spot to occupy. Before we know it, it can become a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. It becomes all we’re known for. And when we’re all caught up in all the things we’re against, we forget the beauty of the things we’re supposed to be for. We forget what the kingdom of Heaven looks like and all the wonderfully odd characters taking up residence there.
I’ll end with another Christmas story. I was sitting in a corner at a Yuletide gathering when one of our hosts decided it was time to sing Christmas carols. Why she picked my own personal corner as the place to commence with this activity I neither know nor understand, but I was stuck.
So I sang. Me and three women and another fellow who’d suffered a similar fate. Softly at first, and with face reddened, I tried to do my part without sticking out too much and wishing all the time that enough people would join up and I could excuse myself. But no joy.
Eventually, another guy entered the throng and this one saw fit to sing real, real loud. He’d been drinking, but he knew how to harmonize, and he knew he knew, and he knew it was funny. So we all started going for it. Entirely too loudly. And we belted it out as the false reverence gave way to parody. This was a delight.
We ran out of carols, but we wanted to keep on going, so we reran the ones we’d started with. We were still going pretty loud, but we’d worn ourselves out somewhat, and although it was still funny, it didn’t have to be. The words were beginning to take on meaning (for me anyway) that hadn’t been too accessible before. And what I can only describe as reverie seemed to settle on the whole lot of us. We’d started with a kind of purported earnestness shot past seriousness into burlesque, and now we’d broken out of orbit. We’d made our way into authenticity. Maybe. In any case, I think all of life should be lived that way. I want to shoot past seriousness more often. As often as possible, actually. Keep an eye on the gargoyle. Just do it. Thank you for your time and attention. link
You probably never even knew it existed.
I don't know that anyone who's read Everyday Apocalypse loved it enough to scour the footnotes...
Believing Radiohead
"The distinction between politics and religion was not discovered but invented" -William Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist
"Who Put These Fingerprints
On My Imagination?"
Engaging the Matrix
Adapted from Everyday Apocalypse
by
"Propaganda makes up our mind for us, but in such a way that it leaves us the sense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And in the last analysis, propaganda achieves this effect because we want it to. This is one of the few real pleasures left to modern man: this illusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact, someone else is doing his thinking for him."
--Thomas Merton
With the latest New York Times in one hand and a Bible (NRSV) in the other, we try to explain ourselves to ourselves. What compels me? How did these clichés manage to hijack my consciousness? What does it profit a person to gain all the homeland security in the world and forfeit his soul? What is the Matrix? Or, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello's "Green Shirt": "Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?" What man, mind, or monster did (is doing) this. When and how did our thoughts get to feeling like they're not entirely our own? And when did we agree to it? Who benefits from our sedation? Who colonized my brain space? How hard it is to prefer the pounding headache of looking hard at the world over the blissful, happy-ending incomprehensibility of Technicolor and the easy answer, simple explanation, sound-bite culture of Fox News Network.
As a high school English teacher in America, ever in desperate need of a difficult-to-contest analogy, I've found a very present help in the metaphorical value, maximum applicability, and effective citation afforded by The Matrix. While very few propositions go unchallenged in a good classroom discussion, the intense relevance of this film to the experience of your average American teenager is something of a no-brainer. My students often accuse me of madness, but they find nothing particularly controversial in my observation that The Matrix powerfully names and describes the forms of captivity into which we're born and within which we live and move and, by all appearances, have our being. They know that worlds have been constructed around them, physically and psychologically, as protection against many a perceived threat, and they understand that it is an effort oftentimes well-intentioned and always in progress. They also understand that they are a target market whose buying power sustains the economy and that enormous amounts of money, mind-power, and resources are expended anticipating and manipulating their desires.
They live with the notion that their speech and their way of looking at the worldare often the creation of television and market research. They are painfully familiar with the Trumanesque epiphany in which the words "I love you, man," whether spoken or heard, are part-joke, part-sincere, and part-conspiracy. They know what it means to be unsure as to whether your own laughter is genuine. When Lawrence Fishburne's Morpheus describes the Matrix as "a neural-interactive simulation," they don't have to stretch their imaginations to know what he's talking about. They know. It's obvious.
Although most of my students don't know what a metanarrative is, they have a pretty good idea after I suggest that The Matrix might be the most convincing metanarrative on offer in this present age of popular culture. They take personally the apocalyptic significance of films whose protagonists discover themselves in carefully scripted, immersive environments which create the illusion of freedom while using inhabitants to fuel their own death-dealing machinery. They know the joke's on them when a voice says, "Because we value you, our viewers/customers/clients...." And the bright colors, earnest-sounding voices, and lively music only serve to remind that someone (or something) is trying to create demand and move product. They don't like it particularly, but they don't see much in the way of available alternatives. As the popularity of the film suggests, any articulation of a spirit of resistance will have people lining up. As Dostoevsky observed, no one wants to want according to a little table, and the sense that they've been playing roles in a vast formula of market research, while occasionally consoling themselves with a packaged rebellion, isn't a realization anyone can sustain for long without becoming depressed. But there is something powerfully invigorating about imagining, especially in the company of young people, what it might mean to take the red pill of reality on a regular basis or to weather the storm to the limits of one's bubble and to break on through to the other side.he Matrix has you.
What language shall we borrow to describe the length and breadth of our captivity? We can speak of the hegemony of multinational corporations over the human heart and mind, the preponderance of the Borg, or any of the many worlds of Philip K. Dick who never tired of employing fresh, outlandish articulations of how we go about lying to ourselves. But for sheer vastness and a monstrously effective borrowing from any number of available sources, little or nothing compares to The Matrix. Plato's allegory of the cave, for instance, certainly conveys the notion that we often warm ourselves by the fire of a cold delusion. But in The Matrix, we're conceived for the purpose of being plugged in. We're fuel for the prodigious machinery. The commodification knows no end. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Keanu Reeves' Neo is the daysleeper protagonist who, like many young (and increasingly not-so-young) people of the western world, has been raised on digital technology. By day, he sits in front of a computer screen in an office cubicle. By night, he's his own man, hacking legendarily into the early morning hours until he collapses at the computer beside his bed. The search is on, and it knows no satisfaction. It is unceasing. And while Neo wouldn't be able to tell you exactly what he's searching for, he has recently nailed it down to a specific, haunting question: "What is the Matrix?"
Something's in the air. Something's happening, and Neo possesses at least the beginnings of wisdom insofar as he knows that he doesn't know what it (the something) is. Everybody's looking for answers, we might say, but in Neo's world, it's perhaps better to admit that we don't even know the proper questions. Most of us are too busy grabbing and accumulating to even pause long enough to wonder or dream harder. We need a wake-up call, probably on a daily basis. Premeditated, protective stupidity or the non-conforming, ongoingly difficult path of being awake and alive. Choose.
"The Matrix has you." This message makes it through Neo by way of his computer. Its meaning will occupy the rest of the film alongside the apocalyptic discovery of what it can and must mean to wake up. When I first saw the film (on an Easter Sunday, appropriately enough), I couldn't help but think that our current, oft-discombobulated generation of Western culture was being given a sampling of language adequate to both its despair and its hope. When Neo is first introduced to Trinity, her words are tailor-made for the lone sojourner constantly found looking for answers (or less-than-edifying images) by way of the computer keyboard:Please. Just listen. I know why you're here, Neo. I know what you've been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone and why, night after night, you sit at the computer; you're looking for him...The answer is out there, Neo. It's looking for you and it will find you, if you want it to.
From here, it's back to the white-collar routine where he'll wait for something, anything, to happen. The Matrix does have him, for the time being, but he's about to be shaken by what is doubtless the fantastic daydream of many an employee in the workaday world of data entry. As he sits in his cubicle, he receives a call from the legendary hacker, Morpheus, who alerts him to the presence of "agents" who've come to take him away. For one glorious moment, Neo's office space is transformed into a playing field of real danger and cosmic significance. The interrogation that follows his capture is too fantastic, in Neo's view, to be accorded the name of reality. But as he will discover, his understanding of reality has been, to say the least, adulterated.
Copyright ©2003 by David Dark. Adapted from Everyday Apocalypse, published by Brazos Press
Chiasm and Inclusio
And this from a better Bible teacher than me, who once got stuck on Band Aid:
| Eccl. 11:3 | A | Clouds and Rain | |||||
| Eccl. 11:7 | B | Light and Sun | |||||
| Eccl. 11:8a | C | Consider the days of darkness | |||||
| Eccl. 11:8b | D | All that comes is breath | |||||
| Eccl. 11:9a | E | Enjoy your Youth | |||||
| Eccl. 11:9b | F | But know ... God will bring you to judgment | |||||
| Eccl. 11:10a | E' | Enjoy your Youth | |||||
| Eccl. 11:10b | D' | All of youth is breath | |||||
| Eccl. 12:1 | C' | Consider God before the days of darkness | |||||
| Eccl. 12:2a | B' | Sun and Light | |||||
| Eccl. 12:2b | A' | Clouds and Rain | |||||
Peter Ellis, following the doctoral dissertation of John Gerhard, S.J., has presented the structure of John's gospel...as completely determined by the laws of chiastic parallelism
-"The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center" p. 30,
...emphasis mine
a female solo dark electro project from Detroit created by Emileigh Rohn..for fans of: Bjork, The Prodigy, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Project Pitchfork, Skinny Puppy, Tom Waits, Public Enemy ..
Why the name?
I wanted to choose a name that represented my personal experiences, which at the time highly involved current studies in human neuropsychology. The optic chiasm, a structure in the brain credited with the ability for continuous and peripheral vision, seemed a worthy name on several levels, especially since the name "chiasm" is also a literary and biblical term that dates back for centuries, representing both a point of crossing over, a greek symbol of X, or chi, as well as a need in my own life to move past the boundaries I had previously set for myself and progress forward in a new path.
(link)
Seth: You have such vivid Christian imagery in many of your songs,
and much of it is contrasted with the selfishness of the "modern"
individual. I was wondering what's your take on the state of
Christianity today?
Leonard Cohen: Dear Seth, I don't really have a 'take on the state
of Christianity.' But when I read your question, this answer came to
mind: As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ
comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.
"...Letterman remarked that what his team delivers is essentially “circus time,” with things being lit on fire, dropped in water, and thrown off of buildings. Letterman isn’t happy with this state of affairs. It isn’t as if trying to make conversation with the last person to get voted off the island is Letterman’s preferred vocation, but an exhibition of literal nonsense appears to be what’s required. He stressed that he could never really know for sure, but playing in the big leagues in the unending competitiveness of prime time seems to allow for no pause in circus time. He wants, after all, to stay on the air.
With heartbreaking candor, he expressed a preference for the kind of television associated with Tom Snyder and Rose himself, the exhilaratingly legitimate moment of people talking to each other and other people tuning in from far away.
But could he risk it and keep up with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show? Would he remain, as the saying goes, commercially viable? Not necessarily. He has to play it safe. Back to throwing stuff off of buildings—back to whatever it takes.
Before the cameras, David Letterman can’t talk to the kind of people he wants to talk to. He can’t quite facilitate the stories he’d like. His show can’t show what he wants it to show. He can’t do what he wants to do without losing access. Access to what? Power? Influence? Like everyone else, he has to guess at what the biggest chunk of viewers want and then deliver it. And what haunts him is the feeling that the guess might be wrong. Maybe the..
_David Dark, continued here
