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| Just posting a link for my own future reference...
A tiny taste of what cornerstone was like...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMbDCItFEO4
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| I, as of last night just finished reading Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.
I was going to ponder on it earlier, but I ended up getting involved in
a nice little get-together with some ex-college cohorts. Droogs, as it
were.
At any rate, I enjoyed the novel. I had long been a fan
of the film, (though I do not recommend it for everyone, or even most
people) but did not want to be the one to expose a young friend from
church to it. I figured it a possibility that all the body parts and
apparent gratuitousness would distract from the real beauty and anger
that was the film. So after recommending the novel, (myself being
curious about the alleged last chapter left off by Kubrick and the
previous American renditions of the story), I borrowed it myself and
barreled through it. If you liked the movie, find and read at least the
last chapter. I think you'll find the scenes of prison and the
classical conditioning to be longer and more informative as well.
Which
brings me to my reading of the story. I sometimes fear the
overprojection of myself onto a text. Perhaps my Judeo-Christian roots
lead me to highly hallow the almighty author and his supposed intent.
Or perhaps my guilt is an overreaction to a fad of relativism and we
can soon get right back to the dark ages and feeling good about
ourselves and our empirical domination of the world-at-large. Either
way, I'm just letting you know my predisposition.
The
protagonist of A.C.O. is an anti-social young criminal in some future
England. He gets himself arrested for murder, rape, theft, and
vandalism, finds himself in prison, and is offered a way out. He allows
himself to be subjected to two weeks of classical conditioning sessions
where he is given a drug that makes him feel horrible, strapped to a
chair with his eyes forced open, and forced to watch films about
violence, both on the individual and social level. As a result, he is
incapable of being violent, even in his own self-defense, as a wave of
nausea hits and incapacitates him at the thought of action. He is then
tormented by members of society, who have no grasp of the pain he has
endured in the course of his punishment, and is therefore unable to
hold his own, a perfect citizen without free will now entirely subject
to the desires of a society that doesn't like him very much. This being
a blog and not a formal book review, I don't have to spoil the end for
you. I rather like it in the book, whereas I was only marginally
satisfied with the movie. There you have it.
As to intent. I
think Burgess was a bit more interested in the government than I am. He
had a character in the form of a drunken old prison chaplain who would
talk about the difference between God wanting people to be good and
being able to choose to be good. I thought that was interesting, and we
could talk about it sometime. What riled me the most though was the
realization, thanks to Burgess' graphic description, of the
consequences of classical conditioning. I am bothered that Christian
institutions do demographic studies on areas solely with the intent of
emotionally manipulating people that have no connection with the
individuals participating. I hate seeing myself and everyone around me
willingly participating in the impulse/response game of modern
advertising.
Granted, some people actually do find out what
they want or like or maybe even love as a result of capitalist
marketing. Maybe some people actually find religious experience because
they saw someone of the same gender and ethnicity as them on a
billboard somewhere. It just bothers me that we are allowing ourselves
to preidictably act as the corporate machine (listen to me, I sound
like a conspiracy theorist) would love us to. Do humans really want
someone else to make their choices for them? Raging individualist that
I am, I admit a potential to have choices I'd like to see everyone
making. but even over that, I'd rather see a bunch of unpredictable
idiots running around than a sulking blob of world to be pushed and
yanked according to the whims of the educated and ambitious.
But again, maybe that's really what most people want. It makes me want to snuff it. | | |
| I'm double posting my most recent entries. I'm rather liking blogging on myspace more than here... It's sort of more convenient, like. But here come a few recent posts, doubled over.
I shan't go too long with this post, or say anything that hasn't been
said from a grand, academic perspective already... I just feel the need
to discuss my feelings regarding a recent event.
That being
said, recently someone quite close to me, one whose opinions I tend to
rather greatly respect, sent me an email regarding interesting claims
regarding the "end times" from both a fundamentalist Christian and
Muslim perspective.
Those of you who buy into the idea of
dispensation and/or a single, capital-A "Antichrist" arriving,
following one of the myriad "this will happen at this time"
interpretations of Revelation, Daniel, etc. would find the list quite
interesting, and I'd recommend Googling it if you care about such
things. Basically the iist attempted to explain interesting
coincidences in the prophecies of both Christian Armageddon and Muslim
Jihad. Again, reading into the claims of those on both sides of the
religious right extremity (those who bomb abortion clinics and those
who bomb airplanes), some (probably) Christian has attempted to
demonstrate the Qur'an's claims of the coming Jihad match perfectly (or
nearly so) the description of the coming Antichrist. My favorite
assertion is as follows:
Bible: The Antichrist is said to "change the times."
Islam: It is quite certain that if the Mahdi established Islam all over the earth, he would
discontinue the use of Saturday and Sunday as the weekend or days of rest but rather Friday,
the holy day of Islam. Also, he would most certainly eliminate the Gregorian calendar (A.D.),
and replace it with the Islamic calendar (A. H.) as is used in every Islamic country.
You
get the idea. Granted, many of parallels required considerably less
apparent contortion of the respective faiths' relative dogmata than the
afforementioned example. But please. When compiling such a list...
sticking to the easy ones rather than working so hard to be
comprehensive would have made the "speaks for itself" factor
considerably greater.
Which is the problem.
What was most
disturbing to me was that this came from a person who is not
particularly prone to speculation about eschatology, having in fact
railed against such attempts in the past by persons to uphold their
perspective regarding a few late Christian prophecies as a test of
fellowship, as some sort of symbol of an individual's perspective
regarding the entire Bible, Christianity et al, and so on...
Okay.
Why does such a list tantalize such a person? It does because of the
fear of Islam. Because some of us would like to enforce the spreading
of "freedom" around the world, and not merely protect our localized
lifestyles (I realize the two goals intertwine at certain points, but
think the pursuit of easy answers regarding the where and when of this
dilemma is a significant part of why so much of the world currently
hates America), and because fundamentalism in any culture other than
our own presents a massive threat to our worldview and a similar danger
to those outside its bubble (regardless of what bubble it is...
Stalinism, Christianity, Islam, Nazism), we turn to easy answers we
would otherwise be willing to challenge out of fear of the perceived
greater threat.
The interesting thing, (and I steal from Zizek
here), is the way we generate an "ideal" muslim that no existing person
actually is. In large parts of midwestern white america, such a word as
muslim conjures up the image of a man in a turban with a dynamite vest
climbing into a wheel well of a jet on an American tarmac. Even if such
a person were to exist the ideal model would quite quickly eradicate
itself in this particular instance. I realize I am writing from a
sheltered perspective, and this is part of what frustrates me. I am
distantly and vaguely aware of a form of violence and destruction that
holds little parallel to the American experience as a result of
Fundamentalist Islam. But, the closer we get to the elimination (which
is, thanks to the American government) of this particular brand of
ideology, the more dangerous it becomes in our own minds. Just as Zizek
notes the rather spectacular Nazi perspective of the Jew as some
superhuman incredible evil developed to greater and greater levels of
formadibility as they became ever more scarce, so the reality of the
not-evil/bent-on-jihad Muslim in America will be replaced by the
picture of the Fundamentalist Christian Antichrist in our process of
antagonization.
The inconvenience of the disparity between the
reality of each individual Islamic believer and the image we have
created in the pursuit of "freedom" causes us to rush to perspectives
previously regarded as ridiculous. Christianity is currently
perpetuating the concept of the militant Muslim. And will a group of
marginalized religious fanatics be interested in dialogue? In changing
America's perspective of them? Probably not. But the more of them we
kill, the more we must bend our concept of reality, and wrap ourselves
in a brittle shell of perceived cultural "truths." And establishing a
global military threat to the rest of the world, while reinforcing the
idea from within the culture that anyone who is not a national ally is
a sub-human barbarian or a force of evil hasn't seemed to work for any
of the other world-empires to date.
What this country needs is a good visigoth invasion.
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| I am indeed scheduled to play at Cornerstone this year.
Twice.
I'll be playing the gallery stage thursday night, first with Monk at 7:20, and then again with Leigh Nash at 10:00 pm. If you're hitting up the festival, give me a call and we can hook up. I would enjoy seeing some old faces immensely.
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| I might be playing at cornerstone. This creates a heightened sense of anticipation I have not experienced in the last few years. I find myself unable to provide details because of something like superstition. odd. | | |
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