Shortbus
A sweet movie. I give it a high recommendation, but only for people who don't mind the first scene (for people who got the X-rated version), which features masturbation and straight sex. After that, although it's still wild, it's less explicit and wonderfully comfortable.
I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch as well. Also highly recommended. The writer, the director, and the main character actor are one. I particularly enjoyed the reference to Greek myth in its song, "Origin of Love," and enjoyed its play by twisting things around to include some Norse, Indian, and Egyptian mythology. I think this is what makes me awestruck at how ancient stories still reverberate in a society as distinctly illiterate as this.
The recent TIME magazine, its issues notwithstanding, is covering a new phenomenon of Bible-literacy. As the Bible is the source of so many of our culture, there is no reason that there should not be a literacy course being taught to help students understand allusions and references that make a literary man. Moreover, one cannot be either secular or religious without understanding the progression that led to Enlightenment, Deism, and separation of God from the material world.
The Enlightenment who brought about the idea that God is a watchmaker that leaves the watch alone was radical in its belief, because prior to this, ancient Greeks and Romans have always believed that their gods Zeus/Jove, Apollo, and Athena were intimately involved in the lives of the worshippers. The Chrstian God carried this same idea, until the 17th century, perhaps with the introduction to Haudenosaunee, who had a system of governance with checks and balances not unlike what the early Americans had hoped to achieve, secularized God from one that was vengeful, omnipresent, and watching into one that made the world like a watch and left it alone.
Naturally, science still keep up a debate that has largely been settled into two camps on America: one that firmly believes in God's invisible hands guiding everything among the fervent Christians, and one in the academe that firmly believes in a post-Modernist world where relativism dominates and God is merely the success story of Western imperialism. Science continues to submit inquiries into the inner workings of the universe, to ask what exactly is a man. Science is not a subject that pleases either "sides." Some sociologists cannot accept that humankind is limited by biology or that a man and a woman are different. Religious Christians cannot accept a science that can do what God did.
If God took from Adam a rib to make Eve, science will soon be able to do the same, take from Adam some cells, get rid of the Y-chromosome, to make an Eve.
It would be wonderful to speak to a skateboarder who read literature and love science. I can imagine one or two who once was a mewling sixth grader, in love with and curious about the world, only to face the mind-deadening education and drop away.
I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch as well. Also highly recommended. The writer, the director, and the main character actor are one. I particularly enjoyed the reference to Greek myth in its song, "Origin of Love," and enjoyed its play by twisting things around to include some Norse, Indian, and Egyptian mythology. I think this is what makes me awestruck at how ancient stories still reverberate in a society as distinctly illiterate as this.
The recent TIME magazine, its issues notwithstanding, is covering a new phenomenon of Bible-literacy. As the Bible is the source of so many of our culture, there is no reason that there should not be a literacy course being taught to help students understand allusions and references that make a literary man. Moreover, one cannot be either secular or religious without understanding the progression that led to Enlightenment, Deism, and separation of God from the material world.
The Enlightenment who brought about the idea that God is a watchmaker that leaves the watch alone was radical in its belief, because prior to this, ancient Greeks and Romans have always believed that their gods Zeus/Jove, Apollo, and Athena were intimately involved in the lives of the worshippers. The Chrstian God carried this same idea, until the 17th century, perhaps with the introduction to Haudenosaunee, who had a system of governance with checks and balances not unlike what the early Americans had hoped to achieve, secularized God from one that was vengeful, omnipresent, and watching into one that made the world like a watch and left it alone.
Naturally, science still keep up a debate that has largely been settled into two camps on America: one that firmly believes in God's invisible hands guiding everything among the fervent Christians, and one in the academe that firmly believes in a post-Modernist world where relativism dominates and God is merely the success story of Western imperialism. Science continues to submit inquiries into the inner workings of the universe, to ask what exactly is a man. Science is not a subject that pleases either "sides." Some sociologists cannot accept that humankind is limited by biology or that a man and a woman are different. Religious Christians cannot accept a science that can do what God did.
If God took from Adam a rib to make Eve, science will soon be able to do the same, take from Adam some cells, get rid of the Y-chromosome, to make an Eve.
It would be wonderful to speak to a skateboarder who read literature and love science. I can imagine one or two who once was a mewling sixth grader, in love with and curious about the world, only to face the mind-deadening education and drop away.
posted by AJ at March 25, 2007
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