battle of the fundies

Colbert asks Ayaan Hirsi Ali if fundamentalist Christians should battle fundamentalist Muslims.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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"What are the Ten Commandments, Congressman?"

Classic episode:
Colbert asks Congressman Westmoreland, who has just talked about what a great idea to post the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, "What are the Ten Commandments?" (4:25ff):

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The Reformation and the shape we're in

Just a few lines from a choice chapter (30) and pivotal tract for our times.
This explains a lot of TSWI.

"Mysticism had no role in the early Protestant Reformation: both Luther and Calvin depended wholeheartedly on the persuasiveness of their carefully composed inked syllogisms. All founders urged their followers to have 'faith,' but the underpinnings of Protestantism were actually written, torturously logical constructions that were oresented in long dense, imageless tones...

The Protestant Reformation was clearly not a return to the content of the New Testament; but I submit, a wrenching sociological shift wrought by a new information technology dependent on users being alphabet-literate. This in turn changed the collective perception of culture. The printing press made the Reformation's rigid an repressive self-discipline possible."
-The Alphabet Vs The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image | by Leonard Shlain

By the way, pray for Shlain, he is recovering from a brain tumor (news)

where Western theology has no answers

"There are areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions"
-Kwame Bediako

alpha inventions and random stimulation

The readout on the FEEDJIT widget on the right-hand bar of this blog is fascinating;
it basically shows where people have clicked from to find a certain post on this blog.
I just noticed a sudden surge from a site called AlphaInventions, so I clicked to check it out.

Here's a post about it, and a video (which of course reminds me of the word flashes of ZOOTV):



There IS a holy randomnity, huh, Mike (Roe)?

There IS no random/
all of life is parable/
we are all synesthetes.

Check out AlphaInventions live, it's so random, you might get a word from God.

Bono: "what i love about Jesus is..."

It was the aftermath of 9/11, so I think Bono would context his comements about Bin Laden a bit differently now. But if you have naver seeen Bono's sermon which introduced "Please," in Miami in 2001, it reminds one how shockingly upfront and direct the God-content was on this tour (after the equally spiritual content, but more ironic and indirect vibe of the nineties), how 9/11 transformed the songs (I saw them in November 2001, and who can forget the Super Bowl performance as midrash on Psalm 51:15),
...and it's not a bad sermon; just to hear Bono say "ineffable." (:

"You have a voice, you know all the styles, but no duende."

This who remember the David Kootnikoff post on U2 and Duende
"Music of this caliber and class feels as primal as shelter and food. U2 is keeping duende alive in their sound') will enjoy this article by Lorca.

It called to mind my previous post on cultural translation (and the messy messianic betrayal it entails), in that some words in some languages are so loaded and leaded with the zeitgeist and chutzpah (yes, I chose those words with a wink) of a culture, that they are impossible to translate intact. This can cause one to pull one's hair out, and become a raving lucanatic.
I often want to preface such vulnerable, ineffable (remember when Bono included this ineffable term in his "What I love about Jesus" sermon?) terms with "holy," as in "holy zeitgeist, batman!"
"Duende," of course, is among that number:

Whoever inhabits that bull's hide stretched between the Jucar, the Gaudelete, the Sil or the Pisuerga - no need to mention the streams joining those lion-coloured waves churned up by the Plata - has heard it said with a certain frequency: "Now that has real duende !" It was in this spirit that Manuel Torres, the great artist of the Andalusian people, once remarked to a singer: "You have a voice, you know all the styles, but you'll never bring it off because you have no duende."

In all Andalusia, from the rock of Jaen to the shell of Cádiz, people constantly speak of the duende and find it in everything that springs out of energetic instinct. That marvelous singer, "El Librijano," originator of the Debla, observed, "Whenever I am singing with duende, no one can come up to me"; and one day the old gypsy dancer, "La Malena," exclaimed while listening to Brailowski play a fragment of Bach: "Olé! That has duende !"- and remained bored by Gluck and Brahms and Darius Milhaud. And Manuel Torres, to my mind a man of exemplary blood culture, once uttered this splendid phrase while listening to Falla himself play his "Nocturno del Generalife": "Whatever has black sounds has duende." There is no greater truth.

These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: so said the celebrated Spaniard, thereby concurring with Goethe, who, in effect, defined the duende when he said, speaking of Paganini: "A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain."

The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, "The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet." That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style - of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act.

This "mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain," is, in sum, the earth-force, the same duende that fired the heart of Nietzsche, who sought it in its external forms on the Rialto Bridge, or in the music of Bizet, without ever finding it, or understanding that the duende he pursued had rebounded from the mystery-minded Greeks to the Dancers of Cádiz or the gored, Dionysian cry of Silverio's siguiriya.

So much for the duende; but I would not have you confuse the duende with the theological demon of doubt at whom Luther, on a Bacchic impulse, hurled an inkwell in Nuremberg, or with the Catholic devil, destructive, but short on intelligence, who disguised himself as a bitch to enter the convents..

Any man - any artist, as Nietzsche would say - climbs the stairway in the tower of his perfection at the cost of a struggle with a duende - not with an angel, as some have maintained, or with his muse. This fundamental distinction must be kept in mind if the root of a work of art is to be grasped....

-Lorca, continued

Vanalesntriguing definaion