violins with a jewel-shaped heart

Source: WIRED . Link below

One way to look at string theory is that everything is made of  vibrating strings/ music.

And now...what if  we found that a jewel was at the heart of it all?
  
"The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions."


See:

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER A JEWEL AT THE HEART OF QUANTUM PHYSICS

Zappa and Xenochrony: Strangetime synchronizations-- ξένοχρόνi

photo

From Wikipedia:

link

Xenochrony is a studio-based musical technique developed at an unknown date, but possibly as early as the early 1960s, by Frank Zappa, who used it on several albums. Xenochrony is executed by extracting a guitar solo or other musical part from its original context and placing it into a completely different song, in order to create an unexpected but pleasing effect. He said that this was the only way to achieve some rhythms.

..The word derives from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), strange or alien, and χρόνος (chronos), time.
Link
--------------------------------------------
Article:

 Temporality, Intentionality, and Authenticity in Frank Zappa’s Xenochronous Works
by Andre Mount;
Excerpt:

Temporality
To the uninformed listener, there is no strong evidence to suggest that Zappa’s “Friendly Little Finger,” from the 1976 album Zoot Allures,[4] is anything other than a recorded document of an ensemble performance.

The piece begins with a brief introduction featuring a repeated riff performed on guitar, marimba, and synthesizer. An extended improvisation with electric guitar, bass, and drums fills out the lengthy middle section before the track concludes with a quotation of the Protestant hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves,” arranged for a trio of brass instruments. Despite its apparent normalcy, however, “Friendly Little Finger” combines materials from four distinct sources spanning three years of Zappa’s career.
The primary recording—a guitar solo with a droning bass accompaniment—was recorded in the dressing room of the Hofstra University Playhouse as a warm-up before a performance on October 26, 1975. Several months later, Zappa added an unrelated drum track originally intended for use on a different song (“The Ocean is the Ultimate Solution”[5]) and a second bass part recorded at half speed. These three recordings, all appearing in the middle solo section, comprise the xenochronous core of the piece. To this, Zappa superimposed two additional recordings. The introduction comes from the same session as the added bass part, and the coda was recorded several years earlier, during a session for the song “Wonderful Wino.”
As Example 1 makes clear, the result of Zappa’s editing is a moderately dense network of temporally disjunct recordings. How is it that such seemingly disparate recordings happened to come together in this way? What inspired Zappa to take such an approach to manipulating recorded sound? Of course, examples of overdubbing in American popular music can be found at least as far back as the 1940s—recall Sidney Bechet’s One Man Band recordings in which each instrument was performed separately by Bechet himself. But while such tricks had become old hat by the mid 1970s, xenochrony stands out for it also has obvious ties to the twentieth-century art-music avant-garde.
Despite his continuing reputation as a popular musician, Zappa was remarkably well read in the theoretical discourse surrounding avant-garde art music, particularly with regards to musique concrète and tape music. He expressed an ongoing interest in John Cage’s chance operations, for example, trying them out for himself by physically cutting recorded tapes and rearranging the pieces at random for the 1968 album Lumpy Gravy.[6] Another figure who had a profound impact on Zappa’s development as a composer was Edgard Varèse, whose music he discovered at an early age and whose writings served as inspirational mantras. Given this fascination with the avant-garde, xenochrony may be best understood as a conscious attempt by Zappa to model himself on these influential figures. His own approach to music and composition would therefore require an analogous theoretical foundation.
Xenochrony is closely tied to Zappa’s conception of temporality. Zappa often described time as a simultaneity, with all events occurring at once instead of chronologically. Toward the end of his life, in an oft-quoted conversation with cartoonist Matt Groening, Zappa explained that the idea was rooted in physics:

I think of time as a spherical constant, which means that everything is happening all the time. […] They [human beings] take a linear approach to it, slice it in segments, and then hop from segment to segment to segment until they die, and to me that is a pretty inefficient way of preparing a mechanical ground base for physics. That’s one of the reasons why I think physics doesn’t work. When you have contradictory things in physics, one of the reasons they became contradictory is because the formulas are tied to a concept of time that isn’t the proper model.[7]

 continued here


----------------------------------------------- Interview:

Bob Marshall: In your work with "xenochrony", are you satirizing editing, the way you put things together, besides the technical innovation of doing it? 

Frank Zappa: "Xenochrony" means strange synchronizations. Am I satirizing editing? I don't know whether the technical process of editing is enough of a commonly understood phenomenon that you could satirize it. You can't made a joke about something that people don't know exists. So, I would say that's not part of it. 

Bob Marshall: How would you relate "xenochrony" to the time/rate thing we discussed earlier? 

Frank Zappa: Well, a classic "xenochrony" piece would be "Rubber Shirt", which is a song on the SHEIK YERBOUTI album. It takes a drum set part that was added to a song at one tempo. The drummer was instructed to play along with this one particular thing in a certain time signature, eleven-four, and that drum set part was extracted like a little piece of DNA from that master tape and put over here into this little cubicle. And then the bass part, which was designed to play along with another song at another speed, another rate in another time signature, four-four, that was removed from that master tape and put over here, and then the two were sandwiched together. And so the musical result is the result of two musicians, who were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two different rates in two different moods for two different purposes, when blended together, yielding a third result which is musical and synchronizes in a strange way. That's xenochrony. And I've done that on a number of tracks. 

Bob Marshall: What is the idea behind that? Or is it just an interesting sound? 

Frank Zappa: What is the idea behind it? Suppose you were a composer and you had the idea that you wanted to have a drum set playing expressively and intuitively, eleven-four, at a certain tempo while an electric bass player is doing exactly the same thing in another tempo in another time signature, and you want them to do this live on stage and get a good performance. You won't get it. You can't. You can ask for it, but it won't happen. There's only one way to hear that, and that's to do what I did. I put two pieces of tape together. 

Gerald Fialka: Do you realize it by chance though? Or do you say "I'm going to try this"? 

Frank Zappa: That's what I do every day. I'm going to try this, and the stuff that works you keep and the stuff that doesn't you throw it away. I thought that one worked. That's why it's on the record  Link

--
Video

figural Christology: reading backwards within the flowing stream of time

 Scot McKnight:

Believing to Understand

Richard Hays on figural Christology.

by Scot McKnight

What disturbs the professor is that so many read their New Testaments with nary a glance at the Scripture reference notes in the central column of many Bibles or printed in the footnotes in others. What disturbs the reader is what one finds when one pursues those cross-reference suggestions.

We need go no further than Matthew's first chapter. The original woman in mind in the famous "the virgin will conceive" was a "young woman" already married to Isaiah and pregnant and soon to bear a child. But the Greek translation, the Septuagint, turned the Hebrew almah into parthenos, which meant "virgin." Matthew, knowing Jesus was born of a virgin, chose the latter on which to hang this profound interpretation of the conception and birth of Jesus. In chapter 2, the holy couple, after having spent time in safety in Egypt, return—and Matthew finds a golden egg in a text that had nothing to do with the Messiah. Matthew brings rugged realities and scriptural patterns together: If Jesus is the Son of God, if he spent time in Egypt, if YHWH called Israel his Son and out of Egypt summoned them to the Land of Israel, then Jesus somehow needs to be seen fulfilling that text too. It's all in Matthew 2:1-15. Or take John 5:46, which tells us in the words of Jesus "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me." If there is so much Jesus in Moses, why did so few recognize him when he came? Over and over we see this interpretive approach to the "Old Testament" when we pay close attention to the cross references in our Bible, at once opening a world of glorious discovery and faith and re-imagining history and at the same time provoking us into pondering what kind of readings these early Christian hermeneuts were offering their readers.

....The grip of historical method has historians by the neck, but not so the new "theological interpretation of the Bible" crowd, now on full and detailed display in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. For the historians, what the original author meant—only what he (or she) meant—is all that matters; for the theological interpreters, while authorial intent certainly matters, it is not all that matters. What matters perhaps more is what mattered to Jesus and the apostles, and what mattered to them is now mattering more and more to Christian readers of the Bible. The tight grip of the historians has been loosened. More and more we are learning to see the Bible as an inter- and intra-textual reality; only by embracing its central vision—Jesus as Messiah—can one read that Bible well.

Richard B. Hays, in the published version of his Hulsean Lectures in Cambridge, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, proposes that Jesus read the events of his life "backwards" and in so doing taught Christians how to read the Old Testament "forwards." As he puts it, "the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and—at the same time—the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and—at the same time—we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT."

Hays opens by appealing to the term "figural" to describe this backwards reading, and so we hear Erich Auerbach boiled down into New Testament hermeneutics:

There is consequently a significant difference between prediction andprefiguration. Figural reading need not presume that the OT authors—or the characters they narrate—were conscious of predicting or anticipating Christ. Rather, the discernment of a figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective rather than prospective. (Another way to put this point is that figural reading is a form of intertextual interpretation that focuses on an intertextuality ofreception rather than of production.)

That is, time and later perspective generate new readings:

Because the two poles of a figure are events within "the flowing stream" of time, the correspondence can be discerned only after the second event has occurred and imparted a new pattern of significance to the first. But once the pattern of correspondence has been grasped, the semantic force of the figure flows both ways, as the second event receives deeper significance from the first.

Hays, well known for his brilliant studies of how Paul read the Bible,[3] is concerned in this book with the Gospels, so we are treated to four separate, succinct introductory essays into how the Evangelists read the Bible backwards. The result is a masterpiece. Hays shows that the Evangelists had a "high" Christology, one that was shaped by the divine identity of Jesus... Matthew, Hays concludes, is not so indirect {as Mark}.  Indeed, he says Matthew "is producing an annotated study Bible, providing notes and references that will give the uninitiated reader enough information to perform the necessary interpretation." One quick reading of texts like Matthew 24:15, which updates Mark's more allusive reference in Mark 13:14, is enough to see Matthew's annotations in context. But there's far more to Matthew than this, as we indicated in the opening paragraph above. For Matthew, Jesus is Immanuel, God's presence among us—seen in worshiping Jesus (14:33) and in Jesus as present (18:20) as well as in his promise of continued presence (28:20). Matthew "believes and proclaims that Jesus is the embodied presence of God and that to worship him is to worship YHWH—not merely an agent or a facsimile or in intermediary"—and this takes a unique form: "the one who was crucified and raised from the dead is himself the embodiment of the God who rules over all creation and abides with his people forever."

...The historian and the apologist may cry out for a place at the table, but the hermeneutical loop eventually closes in and begs the reader to believe. For such a reader, believing that Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible suddenly makes (new) sense. Can any Bible reader not recognize what John does in 1:1 when he says all over again "In the beginning"? But now something has changed. Jesus has been inserted into the narrative, and the beginning has been christologically reframed: the Logos, Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah, the incarnate one, is the Creator and the Life who gives eternal life. Whether it is the Temple (John 2:13-22) or the feasts of Israel (John 10:22-30; 19:14), under John's guidance they are all about Jesus—and the reader who sees they are about Jesus can rightly understand what the Temple and the feasts were designed to do. What then is John's approach? "John understands Scripture as a huge web of signifiers generated by the pretemporal eternal Logos as intimations of his truth and glory."  LINK

app takes pic of your location..in the past

read all about it here

The sweet spot to avoid time travel in your space travel

"Time Travel Is Real. Here Are the People and Spacecraft Who Have Done It" BY SETH KADISH , Wired  Magazine:

To get ahead in life, spend some time on the International Space Station. Why? Well, according to the theory of relativity, astronauts on the ISS age more slowly due to the spacecraft’s high orbital speed. It’s called time dilation, and it means that when they return they’re a bit younger than they would have been—as if they’ve traveled into the future. (The effect is very small—it would take more than 100 years on the ISS to warp ahead by just one second.) But not all space travel will keep you young. Like speed, gravity also slows time, so your clock revs up as you get farther from a large mass like Earth. As a result, satellites in higher orbits age more quickly. Got your heart set on space travel but want to age at a normal, earthly pace? Good news! There’s a sweet spot, 3,174 kilometers above Earth’s surface, where the effects of increased speed and reduced gravity cancel each other out. You can hang out there as long as you like without fear of relativistic shenanigans.  link

church as a nonhectic, episodic event which fractures time

William Stringfellow:

..The Kingdom is, I believe, temporal as much as spatial...the event of the church constantly, repeatedly fractures time. This is to say, the church as an institution or nation is, first of all, an event of the moment, gathered here or there, but that does not predetermine whether or how the church will appear again. The church is episodic in history; the church lives in imminence so that the church has no permanent locale or organization which predicates its authenticity as the church. This may seem a hectic doctrine of the church to the Constantinian mentality. It is. But it is so because it suggests the necessity of breaking away from Constantinian indoctrination in order to affirm the poise of the church awaiting the second advent of Jesus Christ. .. William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience: The Politics of Romans 13 and Revelation 13 in Light of the Second Coming. (ht, Richard Beck)

"Literary Forms/Physics Formulas": chapter of 20 of "Art and Physics" by Shlain

other chapters here

the pope of physics: Francis on "Time is greater than space"

In a section  of his  "The Joy of the Gospel" (APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION
EVANGELII GAUDIUM) called
The common good and peace in society,

Rock star Pope Francis covers four "greater than"s:

• Time is greater than space 
• Unity prevails over conflict  
• Realities are more important than ideas  
• The whole is greater than the part 

It's the time/space item I want to repost here, though do read the whole section to get the flow.
Some helpful connections between the pope's comments and Russian filmaker's  

Tarkovsky's thoughts  here.

Francis:

Time is greater than space

222. A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.

223. This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time. One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.

224. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in today’s world who are really concerned about generating processes of people-building, as opposed to obtaining immediate results which yield easy, quick short-term political gains, but do not enhance human fullness. History will perhaps judge the latter with the criterion set forth by Romano Guardini: “The only measure for properly evaluating an age is to ask to what extent it fosters the development and attainment of a full and authentically meaningful human existence, in accordance with the peculiar character and the capacities of that age”.[182]

225. This criterion also applies to evangelization, which calls for attention to the bigger picture, openness to suitable processes and concern for the long run. The Lord himself, during his earthly life, often warned his disciples that there were things they could not yet understand and that they would have to await the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 16:12-13). The parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30) graphically illustrates an important aspect of evangelization: the enemy can intrude upon the kingdom and sow harm, but ultimately he is defeated by the goodness of the wheat.  link

3 Simple Ways to Time Travel (& 3 Complicated Ones)

see related "time travel" posts below

The original Watergate tapes..starring Scot Hug-hes and Dave Wain-scott, 1973

By popular demand..(well, at least Aunt Karen's)..

            after (literally) 40 years in the can..

                         finally transferred from the original  antique cassette tape...

• Warning: if you are not Scot or Dave, or  close kin  to  a Wainscott or Hughes, you should exit now. Too many inhouse (and outhouse, actually) jokes..
• Last chance to surf elsewhere, with much funnier audio...or video

-------
For the three of you still reading:

• At last!
• Not remastered!
• Not remixed!
• 
  
• Definitely not censored!

Raw, original, audio of

"The Watergate Tapes"
 by  the Revs. 

• Scot "You Know What"  Hug-hes

                    and

•  Dave  "Itchy Dunce"Wain-scott

• special appearances by Garold "Pud" and Frances "Pat Nixon"  Hughes!
•  Cameos by  St. Mark "It's funnier if you don't try to" Hughes and  "Modd" Todd Hughes!!
• surprise stealth appearance by Archibald Cox

Recorded in glorious full mono in the summer of 1973 in  beautiful downtown Selma, Iowa, this brilliant spoof/satire of the  (then current) Watergate affair, hearings and tapes was ...believe it or not..recorded fairly spontaneously, and deftly directed by the two young geniuses.

Share widely.  Bootlegs invited.  Your mileage may vary.

Bonus find: Photo below in which the starving artists take a break from the exhausting studio work:

First photo: L to R-Todd, Scot, Mark, Bruce (studio engineer), Second photo:  L to R-Mark, Dave, antique automobile

Unbelievably, the original studio (though now longer under family ownsership still stands.
 See photo at right.  Historical/hysterical marker needed.  If you look carefully, remnants of thrown hamburger still visible in middle window..

Liner notes/legal warning:

Note: the first few minutes  (6:18 to be exact, before the tapes proper) are some random recordings: the famous/infamous Grampa Hughes "Goodnight, that's all I got to say! .. Burp!", followed by the best burps ever by Mark, as well as some ..uh, bathroom sounds believed to be Todd Hughes.  The last few minutes after the tapes (starting at  21:23 mark)are a sequel a few years later, and include a previously unreleased  snippet of the chart-topping ditty "Boney's Fina."

If there is wild demand to release more vintage insanity from this ever (measured by at least two requests below in the comments section or in the facebook mirror  by deadline of  midnight CST 12/32/15 A.D.). we will raid the vaults for more..including outtakes and the long-rumored blooper reel and deleted scenes.


FINALLY>>>make it viral>> 





Ready? Click here to hear

(final disclaimer: NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART  or children/spouses of the actors)

--------------------------------
or paste this:

https://sites.google.com/site/davewainscott/watergate/watergate.wma?attredirects=0&d=1

"Sing it church!: F--- you! I can't deny You"

The boys in P.O.D.  (see "The Future of Church is P.O.D., not Jars of Clay")  were on  fire the other night here in Fresno.  So glad my son let me accompany him..

 There is nothing quite like a band of Christians (as opposed to a Christian band) worshipping their hearts out in secular spaces (see Worship in the Bar/Brothel)

Often at a U2 concert,  you wonder how many are raising their hands in worship, and how many are just rocking out.  One never knows what the percentage is,  But when one of  P.O.D.'s  opening bands yelled out for everyone to flip a double bird and yell "F--- you!!" at the top of their lungs, it was fairly easy to "take attendance": look around and see who was abstaining from the liturgy!(:

"And also with you" (:

(Ironically, the lead singer from that other  band actually acted quite pastoral throughout the night..amazing.  They even sand a song or two that was ready for church.  Hmm, maybe the F-you was spiritual warfare addressed to the devil.)     (:

So in the clip below, here's the congregation/crowd gladly singing and/or praying along to the singer/ a lover/... and/or Jesus:

                               "I can't deny You."

If John Wesley had time-travelled to the gig..Even though part of him  might think the band was "on crack,"
(click for the reference), I think he would smile as he "got it" as the holy and heathen both sang:

• "Preach faith till you have it--then, because you have it, you will preach faith."
• "The world is my parish"
• "I once though it disgusting and vile to preach outdoors in the fields, and I would never be caught dead doing it,  but now I know it's God's preferred method." -paraphrase,see "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Preaching"

Related:

i may stay late at the bar tonight, honey...i have to preach tomorrow

N.T. Wright opens up for U2: 3 psalms

Okay, we all know N.T. Wright is the rock star of Bible scholars.

Sometimes even literally, see this:

But he also opens up windows for us to "really read" rock stars.

I was thrilled NT mentioned (page  25)  Bruce Cockburn  (and Dylan) in his new book on the Psalms.
Of course those two are only one degree of separation from U2.
I don't know if Wright has wrestled with U2 (Vice versa is a good bet).

But this post is really called "N.T. Wright opens up  U2."

At least three times when reading "The Case for the Psalms," I said "Hey, that's a U2 interttext!"
 And I'm not even  talking the obvious examples like "40" and "Wake Up Dead Man,"

Here are the three (o far)

1)

The Psalms thus transform what I have called our 'worldview.'  I use this term in a very specifi8c way...A 'worldview' in this sense is like a pair of spectacles, it is what you look through, not what you look at..Worldviews, in this sense, are a swirling combination of stories, symbols, habitual praxis, and assumed answers to key questions (Who are we? What's the solution?  What time is it?)   -page 8-9, emphasis mine

That last question is of course familiar to anyione conversant with U2's 36O Tour.
It was full of questions.  The "questions" intro to "Blinding Lights " and later to "Zooropa" was brilliant.  But the whole "What time is it in the world?" line,  which was used in various spots, is in ones sense the leitmotif..even worldviewmotif..of the tour.

Here;s one example from the intro to "Magnificent," note also the question is often coupled with "And where are we going?":

Psalms center us, and call us back to worldview that is not from this world.  Asking questions about navigating time and timing lead to answers being found in the questions.  It's a timeline and time machine on the horizon.

In the book, Wright baptizes us into the worldview (and I might coin the phrase "timeview") of the Psalms (and thus also of Jesus and Paul, who quoted about almost  many Psalms as U2 do).  From there, he says, we get oriented to what time it is...in the world, and in us.  "We are given those psalms, I believe, so that we can pray them ourselves out of our own impatience. God in his wisdom knows that we shal want and need to express the pain of being caught in the crack of time."  (p. 74)

"How long?" indeed.

Related : U2: "thank You for the unanswered question"



2)Wright, in  a parenthetical (literally!  Some of his most profound observations can be found in parentheses and footnotes) discussion of Psalm 137's context of exile:

We shouldn't miss the extra point here.  It may be impossible to "sing YHWH's song" in this foreign land, but this particular pslamist turns this impossibility into yet another of "YHWH's songs,"  thus making a psalm out of the fact that one can't sing psalms here."  (p. 43)

That insightful obsvervation about pslamic subversion connected me to so many places in U2's canon.  In a  sense, their mission is not only to mention/pray/sing the unmentionable/unprayable/unsingable (Bono often jokes about his "Tourette's syndrome").  But singing/psalming from within that place ("right in the middle of a contradiction," Bono often says, takes me to "Gloria"

"I try to sing this song..but only in You I'm complete"


3)
 I will never/can never/must never forget.listening to U2's "With a Shout" (so commonly known as "Jerusalem " that even The Edge seems to think that's the song's name),

 a song about Jerusalem..

                  ....in Jerusalem.





To the side of a hill
Where we were still
We were filled
With a Love

We're gonna be there again
Jerusalem!
We're gonna be there again
Jerusalem!




(See"with a shout" by the worship band formerly known as The Hype)

Wright:

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem" (Psalm 122:6-7 ).
I cannot read or sing this psalm without multilayered memories of many great services in Oxford, Litchfield, Westminster, Durham and many other places.

But the psalm sounded quite different when I heard it in Jerusalem.

..I have sung the psalm as a pilgrim, heading up the hill from Jericho ina bus rather than doing the journey oin foot as Jesus dd, but still with that same sense of excitement as you crest that final hill and there at last is the city that another psalm calls 'the joy of all the earth.  (p. 183)

I am always in Jerusalem; praying from Jerusalem.
Or at least righ around the crest of that final hill.

Suffice to say I have added this new Wright book to my stack of books on the Psalms that Bono has read...or should.

simultaneous perception and epistemology/synsethesia/simulacra of the city

Tony Hiss coined the phrase simultaneous perception in his  presceient 1990 book The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside.

The introduction and first chapter are invaluable (read here..just a few pages missing)  in discerning a "full-sensed" epistemology of the city.
I am making connections to synesthesia and simulacra (well, an "even worse than the real thing"  anti-simulacra: “A damaged experience is not only numbing; over time we can begin to mistake it for the original.”)


For example:

 It alters what I know about my surroundings and about whatever is going on around me, and at the same time modifies my sense of what all these things mean to me. The change - one that is reasonably well known to all of us, or is at least lodged somewhere in our memories-lets me gently refocus my attention and allows a more general awareness of a great many different things at once: sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of touch and balance, as well as thoughts and feelings." (3)

---------------------------------------------

The Experience of Place  (promo blurb):

Hiss uses the experience of place to help us understand how profoundly we are affected by the places around us. By bringing together the insights of planners, ecologists, psychologists, and environmentalists, he explores how our experiences in public places can restore our connection to our senses. Hiss uncovers why some places – the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or the corner of a skyscraper – affect us so mysteriously and so forcefully. In doing so, he demonstrates how our society can continue to grow without destroying the places that have nourished it for generations – how we can design changes that, rather than harming us, will enhance our future lives.

Excerpts

“A damaged experience is not only numbing; over time we can begin to mistake it for the original.”

“Conscious noticing of what we’re experiencing, once we get back the hang of it, can be a common denominator, a language of connectedness between social, environmental, and economic concerns. Using the things we know or sense about places but seldom put into words, we can bring all our minds to bear on the problems of how our communities, regions, and landscapes should change.”

“Until recently, when people spoke about a vivid experience of a place, it would usually be a wonderful memory, a magic moment at one of the sweet spots of the world – an orange sunset over a white sand beach; or hearing the soft hooting of an owl while standing in a moonlit meadow; or standing up for one minute during the seventh-inning stretch of a sold-out playoff game at Fenway Park in Boston; or walking up Fifth Avenue in New York at Christmastime, dodging past roast-chestnut and hot-pretzel vendors, and catching a glimpse of the two stone lions in front of the Public Library, with fresh snow on their gray manes and big wreaths around their necks.”

“These days people often tell me that some of their most unforgettable experiences of places are disturbingly painful and have to do with unanticipated loss. Sometimes there’s less to see or hear or do in a place: the curving road in front of an old suburban house, for instance, gets straightened and widened, and suddenly a favorite grove of oaks or pines that the winds whistled through is chopped down and paved over. In the center of a big city, people who have been used to window-shopping from the bus on the way home from work find that they can’t look out the bus windows at night anymore because these now have a dark-green or bronze tint – and then, squinting tight, they realize there are no longer any store windows to see, because they have all been covered over by steel grates.”

“Today, often without even realizing it, four out of five Americans have moved into a new kind of home – metropolitan areas. And it looks more and more likely that, twenty years from now, those numbers will be closer to nine out of ten. America has had cities and suburbs for more than a hundred years. What’s new about today’s metropolitan areas is that, whether we wish it so or not, within each new metropolitan area the economies, the social problems, the environments – the destinies – of all cities and suburbs are tightly linked. They need each other to prosper, and by themselves they can’t solve either the problems we already know about or those that the 21st century will inevitably dump in our laps.”  Link

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Later book:
"How We Travel"

Tony Hiss, "Deep Travel":
In Motion: The Experience of Travel:

RSA Animate videos

Complete collection and info here
(they also have  a ssries like the TED talks here)

Zimbardo on The Secret Powers of Time:

Pinker on Language as a Window into Human Nature:

Do Arely on The Truth of Dishonesty:

Roman Krznari on The Power of Outrospection

Žižek on  Chartable Giving,  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

SK: 'to be known by God in time makes life so strenuous"

Søren Kierkegaard was examined for his theological degree on  July 3, 1840 at the University of Copenhagen. His thesis was titled "On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates." How did he feel as he went into the exams? An early writing, The Fork, gives a clue: "...it also seems to me that to be known by God in time makes life so strenuous. Wherever he is, there every half hour is of tremendous importance. But to live in that manner is not endurable for sixty years; it is scarcely possible to endure even for three years the severe study required for the professional examinations which is however not nearly so strenuous as such a half hour."  LINK

apocalpyse and subversion of language

Nice post from Orwellwasright below and I love the Hegel quote.

Background frst:

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 apocalypse
has 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

See also Ellul: every moment of life= apocalyptic


Orwellwasright:

Language is constantly subverted. From the slang of the inner city where bad is good and a dirty tune is sick (that’s a good thing, apparently), to the manipulative propaganda rhetoric of “humanitarian bombings” and “just wars”  of the rich and powerful, words are constantly subjected to Orwellian distortions ..
...While the manipulation of words in political discourse is par for the course, few words have had their true meaning so effectively subverted than the word “Apocalypse”.

When most people hear the word “Apocalypse” they think of carnage and destruction ravaging the planet – Hell, unleashed on earth. But the Greeks – who created the word – had something different to say. To them, the apocalypse was understood to be a moment of “uncovering”; a revelation of knowledge previously hidden.....
Whether you believe the End Time or Christ’s second coming is upon us, or mankind is about to be transformed by a consciousness shift brought about by planetary changes triggered by a galactic alignment, or that all of the above is sheer nonsense borne of superstitious minds, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that world events are building to a head. A wider conflagration in the Middle East would certainly lead the religious extremists who take the fire and brimstone interpretation of the word apocalypse to feel vindicated.
On the other hand, should a mass movement built upon the foundation of revelations of previously hidden truths successfully overcome the depredations of the ruling elite, perhaps then the true meaning of the word “apocalypse” intended by the Greeks will be restored to the current lexicon.
To the philosopher Hegel, “world history is thus the unfolding of Spirit in time, as nature is the unfolding of the Idea in space.” As we watch history unfold before our eyes, by our actions we help to define it – the choice between destruction or illumination ultimately lies with us  link

Jeremy Begbie on music, theology and time/Jesus as worship leader

See the book

Theology, Music and Time - Jeremy S. Begbie

 and a review of the book here
also:

Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts