Sunday, April 29, 2007
Tropical Fantasy Is Reality
I awoke before dawn to a riot of birdsong. They seemed to be urging me to go outside, to climb a mountain. Stepping out into the darkness, I found myself awash in a sea of wet, heavy air punctuated by fragrant flowering bushes and fig trees that their improbably massive silver boughs outward into the night sky. Oh, yeah. I’m in Hawaii.
I arrived yesterday afternoon, and immediately went back into my miserly tropical tourist mode (it must be that spending so much on airfare affects the fiscal centers in my brain – I’m not this cheap in New York), eschewing the taxis and tourist shuttles for the local bus, just as I am wont to do when arriving in Bangkok. I hiked up to my weekend housing on UH-Manoa campus from downtown Honolulu, and was amazed by my homing sense – I’m staying in the same building where my study abroad sangha lodged on our way home from Japan back in ’99, and I was able to find it without much hassle.
The flora here is as unbelievable as I remember – pretty much every tree or shrub has a beautiful blossom, a crazy seed pod, some killer broad leaves, wildly peeling bark, or some combination thereof. Birds of paradise outside of Burger King, and frangipani petals litter the sidewalks.
For those of you who don’t know, I got a good offer to spend two years pursuing a M.A. in Religion at the University of Hawaii – Manoa. For reasons to be elucidated elsewhere (one of my sixth graders used “elucidate” in her essay about global warming this week [incorrectly, but I appreciate her burgeoning lexicon]), I’ve felt a bit ambivalent about what is undeniably a fantastic opportunity. So I came out for a long weekend to make up my mind. After about eight waking hours on the island, I’m feeling pretty good about it. At this rate, I can’t imagine disliking the faculty (whom I meet tomorrow) to such an extent that I decide to stay in Brooklyn.
One of my reservations about coming here is that, after five years in New York, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of cultural events going on. On the bus ride into town, not only did we pass a $1 movie theater (currently showing 4-5 films that I’ve been wanting to see), but we became waylaid by traffic going into the SPAM Jam, of all things. Anyone who knew my middle school predilection for canned meat would be shocked to know that I did not attend this street festival in honor of Hormel’s tinned ham, but I was a bit weary, my pack was a bit heavy, and the crowd was a bit raucous. I know, I know. I’ll go next year.
Another misconception overturned: being spoiled by the mid-Atlantic beer renaissance, I was figuring that I’d have to basically brew my own to get good beer in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was wrong. A bar just off of campus has over a hundred taps, from all over the world, and mugs are three bucks or under. It’s also attached to a sushi bar (where I had ahi poke last night – a kind of Hawaiian teriyaki salad with big chunks of raw tuna – yum) and a decent pizzeria (& I’m a harsh critic when it comes to pizza).
Also, there is a ton of diversity here on campus, to the point where there’s a flyer up in the building in which I’m staying for students to “document” their languages before they disappear (I guess a lot of Pacific Islanders come here), and I overheard a conversation last night where a girl was saying how hard life was for people in her village. You don’t hear that in New York all the time. Plus, as evidence for the Asian population, an entire section of the open-air kitchen on each floor (yes, I said open-air kitchen -- the one on the 12th floor has killer views of Diamond Head and Manoa Valley) is dedicated to rice cookers. Finally, there is a type of gritty urban life here (despite the paradisiacal setting) which I was afraid I would miss – I saw neighborhoods downtown that had people chilling on the corner, with tags sprayed on the walls.
Yeah, I scared the crap out of a mongoose this morning. I haven’t met the faculty, or even been down to the beach yet, but I think I’m moving here.
[Side Note: I realize the title of this post won't mean anything to anyone, but it amuses me, so I guess I should write a footnote with the references. Tropical Fantasy is the name of the ghetto-ass soda / fruit drinks that my students insist on calling "juice" despite the fact that any self-respecting piece of fruit has never been near that bottle (a couple of whorish peices of produce were convinced to pose for the label). Fantasy Is Reality is a Parliament tune that I've never been that into, but it sure is catchy. I've quoted it twice in my last few blogs, which says something about its "stick-in-your-head"ness, but it really breaks up the flow of Motor Booty Affair. END TRANSMISSION.]
I arrived yesterday afternoon, and immediately went back into my miserly tropical tourist mode (it must be that spending so much on airfare affects the fiscal centers in my brain – I’m not this cheap in New York), eschewing the taxis and tourist shuttles for the local bus, just as I am wont to do when arriving in Bangkok. I hiked up to my weekend housing on UH-Manoa campus from downtown Honolulu, and was amazed by my homing sense – I’m staying in the same building where my study abroad sangha lodged on our way home from Japan back in ’99, and I was able to find it without much hassle.
The flora here is as unbelievable as I remember – pretty much every tree or shrub has a beautiful blossom, a crazy seed pod, some killer broad leaves, wildly peeling bark, or some combination thereof. Birds of paradise outside of Burger King, and frangipani petals litter the sidewalks.
For those of you who don’t know, I got a good offer to spend two years pursuing a M.A. in Religion at the University of Hawaii – Manoa. For reasons to be elucidated elsewhere (one of my sixth graders used “elucidate” in her essay about global warming this week [incorrectly, but I appreciate her burgeoning lexicon]), I’ve felt a bit ambivalent about what is undeniably a fantastic opportunity. So I came out for a long weekend to make up my mind. After about eight waking hours on the island, I’m feeling pretty good about it. At this rate, I can’t imagine disliking the faculty (whom I meet tomorrow) to such an extent that I decide to stay in Brooklyn.
One of my reservations about coming here is that, after five years in New York, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of cultural events going on. On the bus ride into town, not only did we pass a $1 movie theater (currently showing 4-5 films that I’ve been wanting to see), but we became waylaid by traffic going into the SPAM Jam, of all things. Anyone who knew my middle school predilection for canned meat would be shocked to know that I did not attend this street festival in honor of Hormel’s tinned ham, but I was a bit weary, my pack was a bit heavy, and the crowd was a bit raucous. I know, I know. I’ll go next year.
Another misconception overturned: being spoiled by the mid-Atlantic beer renaissance, I was figuring that I’d have to basically brew my own to get good beer in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was wrong. A bar just off of campus has over a hundred taps, from all over the world, and mugs are three bucks or under. It’s also attached to a sushi bar (where I had ahi poke last night – a kind of Hawaiian teriyaki salad with big chunks of raw tuna – yum) and a decent pizzeria (& I’m a harsh critic when it comes to pizza).
Also, there is a ton of diversity here on campus, to the point where there’s a flyer up in the building in which I’m staying for students to “document” their languages before they disappear (I guess a lot of Pacific Islanders come here), and I overheard a conversation last night where a girl was saying how hard life was for people in her village. You don’t hear that in New York all the time. Plus, as evidence for the Asian population, an entire section of the open-air kitchen on each floor (yes, I said open-air kitchen -- the one on the 12th floor has killer views of Diamond Head and Manoa Valley) is dedicated to rice cookers. Finally, there is a type of gritty urban life here (despite the paradisiacal setting) which I was afraid I would miss – I saw neighborhoods downtown that had people chilling on the corner, with tags sprayed on the walls.
Yeah, I scared the crap out of a mongoose this morning. I haven’t met the faculty, or even been down to the beach yet, but I think I’m moving here.
[Side Note: I realize the title of this post won't mean anything to anyone, but it amuses me, so I guess I should write a footnote with the references. Tropical Fantasy is the name of the ghetto-ass soda / fruit drinks that my students insist on calling "juice" despite the fact that any self-respecting piece of fruit has never been near that bottle (a couple of whorish peices of produce were convinced to pose for the label). Fantasy Is Reality is a Parliament tune that I've never been that into, but it sure is catchy. I've quoted it twice in my last few blogs, which says something about its "stick-in-your-head"ness, but it really breaks up the flow of Motor Booty Affair. END TRANSMISSION.]
(Paradise) Lost
The easiest way to describe what Manoa looks like is that it’s pretty much like where the Others live (on Lost), except they’ve been here for about a hundred years so they have cars and stuff. But of course that’s what it looks like, because they shoot Lost in Hawaii. Kind of a dumb analogy, I guess.
But I think my reservations about coming out here are nicely encapsulated in the tension experienced by the show’s characters. Even though pretty much every character on the show had something terrible going on in their home life, something to run away from, pretty much every character on the show wants to get the hell off of the island. But how many times while I’ve been watching the show have I thought to myself, why in the world would these people want to leave? Aside from the fact that most of them have nothing to go back to, they’re living on a beautiful tropical island eating fresh fish, fruit, and roast boar. They don’t have a real job, and they’re part of an interdependent community with a disproportionate number of hotties. What’s the problem?
Well, my problem is this. I don’t have anything to run away from. I’ve got a pretty sweet life in New York right now – I love my job, I’m close to my family, I’ve got great friends, and I live in a great neighborhood. The only real reason to move on is if I’m going towards something that I really care about. If that were simply getting another degree so I’d be closer to my doctorate, which means that I could enter the highly competitive market for a tenure track position at an institute of higher education, I’m not sure I’d do it right now. However, I’ve come to believe what I wrote in my application essay, which is that two years of studying a phenomenon in which I’m genuinely interested (new religions that do energy healing) is an end in itself. Plus I’m really into fresh papaya.
But I think my reservations about coming out here are nicely encapsulated in the tension experienced by the show’s characters. Even though pretty much every character on the show had something terrible going on in their home life, something to run away from, pretty much every character on the show wants to get the hell off of the island. But how many times while I’ve been watching the show have I thought to myself, why in the world would these people want to leave? Aside from the fact that most of them have nothing to go back to, they’re living on a beautiful tropical island eating fresh fish, fruit, and roast boar. They don’t have a real job, and they’re part of an interdependent community with a disproportionate number of hotties. What’s the problem?
Well, my problem is this. I don’t have anything to run away from. I’ve got a pretty sweet life in New York right now – I love my job, I’m close to my family, I’ve got great friends, and I live in a great neighborhood. The only real reason to move on is if I’m going towards something that I really care about. If that were simply getting another degree so I’d be closer to my doctorate, which means that I could enter the highly competitive market for a tenure track position at an institute of higher education, I’m not sure I’d do it right now. However, I’ve come to believe what I wrote in my application essay, which is that two years of studying a phenomenon in which I’m genuinely interested (new religions that do energy healing) is an end in itself. Plus I’m really into fresh papaya.
Rainbows and Crap
So, walking back from my morning hike I saw a rainbow rising up from downtown (which I think is pretty much a daily occurrence – UH’s team is called the Rainbows, and those arcs of the visible light spectrum grace the state license plate), and it reminded me of a recent post on my new friend Eve’s pretty awesome blog where she was asking who the hell sees indigo in the color spectrum. And it’s true – I looked real close at this rainbow – no indigo. I saw a shimmer of red, a lot of peach, which faded into orange, a real distinct yellow, a faint green, two distinct blues – sky & royal – and a shimmer of purple.
At the risk of repeating some of my comments on her post, I recently saw Neil deGrasse Tyson speak in the packed basement of Union Hall (Tyson, People’s Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive [but, as he said, "consider the field!"], recent author of Death By Black Hole, the most-appeared guest on "The Colbert Report", and one of the cooler supergeeks you’ll ever meet [the man carries a radiation detector, so it will beep if he gets too close to any gamma rays]), and he claimed that very few people actually see indigo and that Newton inserted indigo into the spectrum so there would be seven colors, which matches up with his mystical numerological voodoo (Newton considered his contributions to alchemy to be at least as important as his calculus or his laws of motion).
Could color vision be that subjective? Neurological research suggests that there are six visual tones (or really, three pairs of complements) which our neurons code – red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white. Aristotle wrote that there were three colors in the rainbow (red, yellow, blue), and this morning, after I decided I’d write about this subject I opened a 600+ page volume, while on the john, to a page in an essay Jung wrote on alchemy where he refers to the four colors of the rainbow (red, yellow, green, blue). In East Asia, green has long been considered a shade of blue, but light grey and dark grey have different names. It all shows that there is no consensus on how many colors are in a spectrum; it matters where you draw the lines.
Colin Wilson, in The Occult, claims that, unless our color vision has evolved in the two millennia since Aristotle, it may be that our senses are becoming more sensitive to subtle nuances. He paraphrases psychical researcher Fred Myers as to say that it’s possible we have many more such latent senses to which we have not tapped in – if intuition is analogous to the basic three-color vision; clairvoyance or prognostication may be the next stage in developing that sense.
While indigo may be very difficult to see, there’s another shade of blue that stands out in the spectrum – the sky blue I saw, commonly called cyan. Scientists who study color have reached a consensus that if there are seven groupings of wavelengths in the spectrum, it’s ROY G CBV, which isn’t as easy for schoolkids to remember, but that’s science for you. If we can reclassify Pluto as a Kuiper object, we can certainly shift around the colors of the rainbow. As long as there are seven.
Of course, if indigo ain’t in the spectrum, and cyan is, what about all of those New Age chakra books that say the sixth chakra (ajna, the third eye) is indigo? To be fair, I’ve often read that the fifth (the throat chakra, whose Sanskrit name escapes me now) is sky blue, so maybe the aura readers were just prey to Newtonian tomfoolery, tricked into seeing blue as this alleged “indigo”. You see what you expect.
[funny sidenote: the first song that came on my shuffle after writing this post was The Sea & Cake’s cover of Bowie’s “Sound & Vision”, with the lines “Blue, blue, electric blue… don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?”]
At the risk of repeating some of my comments on her post, I recently saw Neil deGrasse Tyson speak in the packed basement of Union Hall (Tyson, People’s Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive [but, as he said, "consider the field!"], recent author of Death By Black Hole, the most-appeared guest on "The Colbert Report", and one of the cooler supergeeks you’ll ever meet [the man carries a radiation detector, so it will beep if he gets too close to any gamma rays]), and he claimed that very few people actually see indigo and that Newton inserted indigo into the spectrum so there would be seven colors, which matches up with his mystical numerological voodoo (Newton considered his contributions to alchemy to be at least as important as his calculus or his laws of motion). Could color vision be that subjective? Neurological research suggests that there are six visual tones (or really, three pairs of complements) which our neurons code – red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white. Aristotle wrote that there were three colors in the rainbow (red, yellow, blue), and this morning, after I decided I’d write about this subject I opened a 600+ page volume, while on the john, to a page in an essay Jung wrote on alchemy where he refers to the four colors of the rainbow (red, yellow, green, blue). In East Asia, green has long been considered a shade of blue, but light grey and dark grey have different names. It all shows that there is no consensus on how many colors are in a spectrum; it matters where you draw the lines.
Colin Wilson, in The Occult, claims that, unless our color vision has evolved in the two millennia since Aristotle, it may be that our senses are becoming more sensitive to subtle nuances. He paraphrases psychical researcher Fred Myers as to say that it’s possible we have many more such latent senses to which we have not tapped in – if intuition is analogous to the basic three-color vision; clairvoyance or prognostication may be the next stage in developing that sense.
While indigo may be very difficult to see, there’s another shade of blue that stands out in the spectrum – the sky blue I saw, commonly called cyan. Scientists who study color have reached a consensus that if there are seven groupings of wavelengths in the spectrum, it’s ROY G CBV, which isn’t as easy for schoolkids to remember, but that’s science for you. If we can reclassify Pluto as a Kuiper object, we can certainly shift around the colors of the rainbow. As long as there are seven.
Of course, if indigo ain’t in the spectrum, and cyan is, what about all of those New Age chakra books that say the sixth chakra (ajna, the third eye) is indigo? To be fair, I’ve often read that the fifth (the throat chakra, whose Sanskrit name escapes me now) is sky blue, so maybe the aura readers were just prey to Newtonian tomfoolery, tricked into seeing blue as this alleged “indigo”. You see what you expect.
[funny sidenote: the first song that came on my shuffle after writing this post was The Sea & Cake’s cover of Bowie’s “Sound & Vision”, with the lines “Blue, blue, electric blue… don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?”]
Sunday, April 22, 2007
It's Fo' Real
I've been showing my classes An Inconvenient Truth this past week to teach about global warming (I know, I know, some of the kids find sections of it incredibly boring -- I'm basically skipping around, showing them the razzle-dazzle version, plus lots of graphs [data analysis is important, if not razzle-dazzle]), and I've been stressing the difference between changes in weather (very frequent, short-term) and changes in climate (gradual, long-term), but this is one of those weekends when you're feel like it's summer already, and then you realize that we've still got two more months of school and not all my classrooms have a/c, and the fear grows, and I'm glad I'm getting out of New York again before the city completes its annual transformation into a tropical megalopolis with fewer ladies selling sliced mango.
By the way, having watched Al Gore's images and statistics over and over again for a week, I realized that a major criticism of the film (presented in a front-page article in the Science Times) is actually a "straw man" argument -- critics say that sea level will not rise as quickly as he claimed -- instead of 20 feet by 2050, climate scientists are predicting 20 inches -- yet Gore set no date for the striking images of Florida, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Lower Manhattan disappearing beneath the onslaught of Poseidon's armies. He simply claimed that "this is what will happen if Greenland melts, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica melt", and while I haven't done the math, that is a good deal of water sliding off the continental shelf. I hope the seven preserved frogs in my closet at school are doing okay -- should they be refrigerated? I'm planning on dissecting them with my after school club this week, and it would be a major bummer if they were rotten...
But anyway, it's beautiful for now -- the warm temperatures and the trees' brilliant blossoms forced my hand yesterday, and I attended approximately three hours of my eight-hour Saturday class. While my irksomely ill-prepared professor struggled to make the sound work on the Scooby-Doo cartoon that he was trying to show us (I can't make this stuff up -- this is supposed to be a graduate-level earth science class), I walked out, pedalled furiously up Ocean Avenue, and missed the free entrance to the Botanic Gardens by ninety seconds. Oh well, it was beautiful anyway -- the magnolia blossoms and daffodils had begun to wither in the heat, but their magnificent tulips are opening, and the cherry trees in the Japanese garden are perfectly in bloom right now -- colonies of tiny pink blossoms hang from twisted black boughs like we are walking through a woodcut. Pefection in a garden, indeed. When I got back to class a couple of hours hence, nothing had happened, and I left again to get some ice cream shortly thereafter.Well, my alcoholic neighbor Leo (he of the stubby grey dreads and the glassy red eyes) has been cranking out the reggae pop all morning (he seems to have gotten a new CD, as I am well familiar with his normal song selection -- from Country Roads to Candle In The Wind), and he seems very excited about this song that just came on. He's yelling along with it like he's at Arlene's Grocery. And yes, he's dancing on the sidewalk. What a glorious day...
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Yeast Is Wicked!
Well, not exactly, but that's what Passover would have you believe. Well, not exactly. It's just that when slaves are on the run from their masters, they don't have the liberty to wait for fermentation to work its magic (bread rising, beer brewing). So for eight days a year, Jews live in a world without yeast, and I can tell you, it's a sad, sad world. Instead of bread, we get crackers. Instead of delicious beer, we get crappy wine (why is pesadik wine so bad?). Yeast -- come back!
So, for the first year ever, I attempted to keep kosher for Passover. But rather than eat matzah 24-7 like most Jews, I went balls-out and multiplied my self-denial ten-fold. For a week I ate nothing but fruit, vegetables, tofu, and brown rice (I'm not Sephardic, but I play one on TV). The only oil I'd allow myself was olive (that means no delicious potato chips, even while my mom was eating them in the car and offering them to me, foul temptress...). I did excellent, that is, until Arlene's Grocery Rock & Roll Karaoke last night.
I convinced myself that whiskey was kosher (I was at a hard-rock karaoke show and not drinking beer -- the red wine they had was terrible. Am I made of stone?) The whiskey told me to sign up to sing with this hard rock band. (If you need to book entertainment for a party in the NY area, I highly recommend looking into these guys.) I got up there and sang Roadhouse Blues by The Doors (which has an awesome scat section which I remember rocking out -- we're all awaiting the videotape, which I'll post as soon as I get it). So everything was great, the crowd was diggin' it, and just before I got to the line, "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer", the band's regular singer came up and handed me an open can of PBR. What was a newly-somewhat-observant Jew to do? I was caught between listening to the God of the Old Testament and being a rock god myself. Well the rest is history -- Nietzsche would be proud of me, and my ears are still ringing. Wicked, wicked yeast...
Monday, April 02, 2007
Hooray for Yeast!
Okay, one more for the day, just to brag, and this is it.
I make really freakin' good beer. I assume it's not that I'm such a super-genius (or are I?), but just that good beer is easy to make in small batches? If you don't like beer, feel free to skip down to the next post, but if you do...
Imperial Aspirations Stout: Pretty much followed the Mr. Beer directions -- this one was made with a couple of cans of syrup (the stout mix & brown malt), a bunch of dextrose, and finished it with a mix of hops (the recipe called for Willamette, but I didn't have a full ounce, so I put in some Fuggle & Saaz to boot to give it a little extra spice), and a heaping handful of espresso beans, coarsely ground. I felt a little guilty about getting the coffee flavor from beans instead of from malts, but I'm over it. Plus, it's probably lightly caffinated, so it's a good rally stout. Anyway, after six weeks of cold-conditioning, it's really rich and tasty -- nearly black, orange-brown head (crazy), tastes of hazlenut mocha (my favorite taste for stout), the bitter espresso nicely balances the sweet malts, and it's medium body and good carbonation that doesn't stop. I left my glass for almost an hour and it didn't go flat. The recipe said to cold-condition for at least three months, so I can't wait to see what happens next!
6 Gage IPA: Named after our buddy who used to work in a homebrew shop and gave us the recipe, this was the first time I made a beer using actual grains. There were a lot of different grains, including toasted barley malt and Crystal Wheat. Also some light dry malt extract. We used a ton of Cascade hops for boiling, and some Kent Golding hops for finishing. After the first fermentation, we added some more Cascade to dry hop. Last night we bottled this ale, and poured ourselves a couple of glasses, cask style. Damn it was good, even warm and (nearly) flat! Orange-red color, very aromatic of fruity hops (that's that Cascade -- it's very hard for me to determine exactly what fruit it smells like -- orange-peach?) An excellently balanced ale with sweet fruit complemented with bitter and spice. I'm so proud. I can't wait to see what it's like in another couple of weeks (one week at room temp, one week cold-conditioning).
I can't believe I've become such a big beer-geek, but I think I'm prouder of this than for having organized and supervised frog and rat dissections by my 6th grade students last week (which is what I was going to post about until I tried these beers last night -- I'll post some gory pics of viscera later in the week...). Fermentation is amazing -- I'd love to try to make some sour beer, where you ferment your ingredients before you make your wort! Crazy.
I make really freakin' good beer. I assume it's not that I'm such a super-genius (or are I?), but just that good beer is easy to make in small batches? If you don't like beer, feel free to skip down to the next post, but if you do...
Imperial Aspirations Stout: Pretty much followed the Mr. Beer directions -- this one was made with a couple of cans of syrup (the stout mix & brown malt), a bunch of dextrose, and finished it with a mix of hops (the recipe called for Willamette, but I didn't have a full ounce, so I put in some Fuggle & Saaz to boot to give it a little extra spice), and a heaping handful of espresso beans, coarsely ground. I felt a little guilty about getting the coffee flavor from beans instead of from malts, but I'm over it. Plus, it's probably lightly caffinated, so it's a good rally stout. Anyway, after six weeks of cold-conditioning, it's really rich and tasty -- nearly black, orange-brown head (crazy), tastes of hazlenut mocha (my favorite taste for stout), the bitter espresso nicely balances the sweet malts, and it's medium body and good carbonation that doesn't stop. I left my glass for almost an hour and it didn't go flat. The recipe said to cold-condition for at least three months, so I can't wait to see what happens next!
6 Gage IPA: Named after our buddy who used to work in a homebrew shop and gave us the recipe, this was the first time I made a beer using actual grains. There were a lot of different grains, including toasted barley malt and Crystal Wheat. Also some light dry malt extract. We used a ton of Cascade hops for boiling, and some Kent Golding hops for finishing. After the first fermentation, we added some more Cascade to dry hop. Last night we bottled this ale, and poured ourselves a couple of glasses, cask style. Damn it was good, even warm and (nearly) flat! Orange-red color, very aromatic of fruity hops (that's that Cascade -- it's very hard for me to determine exactly what fruit it smells like -- orange-peach?) An excellently balanced ale with sweet fruit complemented with bitter and spice. I'm so proud. I can't wait to see what it's like in another couple of weeks (one week at room temp, one week cold-conditioning).
I can't believe I've become such a big beer-geek, but I think I'm prouder of this than for having organized and supervised frog and rat dissections by my 6th grade students last week (which is what I was going to post about until I tried these beers last night -- I'll post some gory pics of viscera later in the week...). Fermentation is amazing -- I'd love to try to make some sour beer, where you ferment your ingredients before you make your wort! Crazy.
Spirals And Stuff
So, that last one was a little heavy. Here's something (a little) lighter. Wait, first go look at these beautiful bacterial fractals (as pictured to the right). I'll wait.
Wasn't that cool? Anyway, I awoke early in the predawn a couple of mornings ago from a very cool dream in which my father taught me how to create ephemeral sculptures of magical ash that would take solid form for a few glowing seconds before they crumpled to the floor and vanished. The exhileration of completing my first attempt, a three-dimensional spiral which looped and whorled and filled the room, was enough to wake me from my slumber and fill me with awe.
Wide awake in a witching hour, I opened my computer to continue an tutorial on General Semantics (much more interesting than it sounds -- check it out when you get ten minutes free), and when I clicked to advance to the next screen, I was a bit surprised to see a big spiral (this was probably about 90 seconds after I'd woken up from the dream). I looked away from the computer, and right there was a single hair, curled up in perfect spiral. Pretty cool, huh?
Synchronicity or apophenia? You decide. But on the apophenic tip, check out Wikipedia's awesome list of religious pareidolia (e.g. the "grilled cheese Jesus"). By clicking on the footnotes, you can go to the primary source and see the "pizza pan Virgin" or Jesus in a dog's tuchus. It's all pretty amazing, for both the accuracy and the inanity of some of the apparations. I think that this dental x-ray one is pretty weird, myself.Faithless Liberation
"His disciples asked him and said,
Jesus said, 'Do not lie or do what you dislike, since all things are clear before heaven."
"What Grein sought did not and could not exist: he wanted the fear of heaven without dogma; religion without revelation; discipline without proscriptions."
It's been over a month since I've written, but I was recently inspired by somebody else's cool blog that not every post has to be an epic piece. In that spirit, I'll try to spin off a few shorter ones to encapsulate the divided existence I've been leading of late.
First of all, I've been doing a lot of reading on New Age spirituality, which is a subject I have been considering as a subject of research for graduate school. I was originally drawn to the field because it was "fringe"; the New Age appeals to my taste for cognitive dissonance in its rejection of the material world through thousand dollar seminars, its followers' combination of rational and magical thinking, and their application of archaic belief to a postmodern world. And, as perhaps good research should, it has made me begin to question my own beliefs.
The Reform synagogue in which I was brought up valued questioning over most nearly everything. To follow the commandments "just because" seems an empty affair in our age of scientistism. I remember being taught to be critical of even the pillars of our Law -- the two tablets with their proclamations of religious and secular code -- and being taught that it was revealed to Moses because of his doubts and the transgressions of the Israelites. The lesson I came away with was that the pared-down faith that results from the trials of questioning is more authentic, more resilient, more personal than that of dogma and orthodoxy.
Studying existentialism at college, I was impressed by Kierkegaard's idealisation of Abraham, afraid and trembling on Moriah, as a 'knight of faith'. I sympathised with Schopenhauer's suffering from insatiable desire, and his will to escape through art. But more than any other author I read at Hamilton, I was taken by Nietzsche: by his confidence, his daring, his artistry; by his assertion that we are the gods, and to continue to project our best characteristics onto fictional external entities is to cheat ourselves of our finest riches. And would you just look at that 'stache? I sensed in his writings that which I admired in Emerson -- the call to write our own Bibles, the claim that "nothing can bring you peace but yourself."
And the words of Nietzsche and Emerson continue to inspire and resonate with me, but their deification of self, which, via cultural refraction has led to the self-spirituality of the New Age, now strikes me as dangerously narcissisitic. (Here's a link to a quality interesting article on the tension between religion and spirituality that lauds self-spirituality's history for inspiring social justice, but is critical of its contemporary self-absorption.) Yet it is taught within Buddhism that compassion should only be practiced once one has acquired the wisdom and discrimination necessary to apply it effectively.
But the question I have on the eve of Pesach, the Jewish holiday when we commemmorate the Israelites' liberation from bondage by "our God and the God of Moses" by ritually tasting salt water and bitter herbs to relive the tears and bitterness of slavery followed by feasting and reclining to celebrate our freedom, is how to balance spiritual seeking with cultural tradition? I love this holiday for so many reasons -- it teaches about compassion, the food is great, we sing "Dayenu" -- yet I have issue with believing that the spirits I believe are praiseworthy are "one" with He who slew the Egyptians' firstborn. The very meaning of "Pass-over" is tied into the Angel of Death buying our freedom with mass infanticide. Troubling.
And as I eat my Hillel sandwich tonight, the delight I take in our freedoms here-and-now, the sweetness of the charoset will be tempered by the bitterness of the horseradish. It makes me cry involuntarily, tears that fall for not only for the oppressed, whom the Haggadah mentions, but for the innocents who will die for the liberation of the oppressed, whom it does not. So does doubt strengthen faith? If not, I think it makes one more authentic and thoughtful. But then again, if you've got the faith of Abraham, you get to make bad-ass graphics like this one with the Lion of Judah, and never think twice about it. So I guess it's a trade-off. Oh well, I guess this wasn't exactly a shorter piece. Sorry. Pesach Shameach!
'Do you want us to fast?
How shall we pray?
Shall we give to charity?
What food may we eat?'
Jesus said, 'Do not lie or do what you dislike, since all things are clear before heaven."
- The Gospel of Thomas
"What Grein sought did not and could not exist: he wanted the fear of heaven without dogma; religion without revelation; discipline without proscriptions."
- Shadows on the Hudson, Isaac Bashevus Singer
It's been over a month since I've written, but I was recently inspired by somebody else's cool blog that not every post has to be an epic piece. In that spirit, I'll try to spin off a few shorter ones to encapsulate the divided existence I've been leading of late.
First of all, I've been doing a lot of reading on New Age spirituality, which is a subject I have been considering as a subject of research for graduate school. I was originally drawn to the field because it was "fringe"; the New Age appeals to my taste for cognitive dissonance in its rejection of the material world through thousand dollar seminars, its followers' combination of rational and magical thinking, and their application of archaic belief to a postmodern world. And, as perhaps good research should, it has made me begin to question my own beliefs.
The Reform synagogue in which I was brought up valued questioning over most nearly everything. To follow the commandments "just because" seems an empty affair in our age of scientistism. I remember being taught to be critical of even the pillars of our Law -- the two tablets with their proclamations of religious and secular code -- and being taught that it was revealed to Moses because of his doubts and the transgressions of the Israelites. The lesson I came away with was that the pared-down faith that results from the trials of questioning is more authentic, more resilient, more personal than that of dogma and orthodoxy.
Studying existentialism at college, I was impressed by Kierkegaard's idealisation of Abraham, afraid and trembling on Moriah, as a 'knight of faith'. I sympathised with Schopenhauer's suffering from insatiable desire, and his will to escape through art. But more than any other author I read at Hamilton, I was taken by Nietzsche: by his confidence, his daring, his artistry; by his assertion that we are the gods, and to continue to project our best characteristics onto fictional external entities is to cheat ourselves of our finest riches. And would you just look at that 'stache? I sensed in his writings that which I admired in Emerson -- the call to write our own Bibles, the claim that "nothing can bring you peace but yourself."And the words of Nietzsche and Emerson continue to inspire and resonate with me, but their deification of self, which, via cultural refraction has led to the self-spirituality of the New Age, now strikes me as dangerously narcissisitic. (Here's a link to a quality interesting article on the tension between religion and spirituality that lauds self-spirituality's history for inspiring social justice, but is critical of its contemporary self-absorption.) Yet it is taught within Buddhism that compassion should only be practiced once one has acquired the wisdom and discrimination necessary to apply it effectively.
But the question I have on the eve of Pesach, the Jewish holiday when we commemmorate the Israelites' liberation from bondage by "our God and the God of Moses" by ritually tasting salt water and bitter herbs to relive the tears and bitterness of slavery followed by feasting and reclining to celebrate our freedom, is how to balance spiritual seeking with cultural tradition? I love this holiday for so many reasons -- it teaches about compassion, the food is great, we sing "Dayenu" -- yet I have issue with believing that the spirits I believe are praiseworthy are "one" with He who slew the Egyptians' firstborn. The very meaning of "Pass-over" is tied into the Angel of Death buying our freedom with mass infanticide. Troubling.
And as I eat my Hillel sandwich tonight, the delight I take in our freedoms here-and-now, the sweetness of the charoset will be tempered by the bitterness of the horseradish. It makes me cry involuntarily, tears that fall for not only for the oppressed, whom the Haggadah mentions, but for the innocents who will die for the liberation of the oppressed, whom it does not. So does doubt strengthen faith? If not, I think it makes one more authentic and thoughtful. But then again, if you've got the faith of Abraham, you get to make bad-ass graphics like this one with the Lion of Judah, and never think twice about it. So I guess it's a trade-off. Oh well, I guess this wasn't exactly a shorter piece. Sorry. Pesach Shameach!
