sunday morning reflections

sunday morning finds me leisurely looking through pinterest, facebook, my flipboard blog feed and the new york times on my li'l iPad. husband always gets up and makes tea and delivers a cup, milky and sweetened with honey, so i don't have to leave the warmth of the quilts. the cats curl up next to me, purring and jockeying for position and it's pretty much my favorite hour or so of the week.

if i view the world through the lens of my various feeds, i have learned that vladimir putin has some canny editorial writers, we can no longer use the words lame, crazy or insane, disney has been infiltrated by the illuminati, the reason that time magazine didn't put putin on the cover in the US this week (he was on the cover everywhere else) was because the media is controlled by 6 corporations, sweden is awesome, there are a lot of injured, homeless animals in need of homes, iowa beat iowa state (i surmised this more from the silence of certain iowa state folks in my feed), people think it's homemade if you combine 4-5 premade ingredients (cake mixes, oreos, cool whip, jello and tortilla chips), eating the resulting sweet dessert will likely bring you closer to jesus, there is major flooding in colorado, berlin is where all the cool stuff takes place, triangles are the new circle, autumn is upon us, the latest trend in photographing food is to place it against a dark background, which serves to make it more moody and poetic and according to my myers-briggs profile (ENTP), i am sirius black from harry potter. 

i do wonder what effect this melange of input has on me? does it connect new synapses in my brain or reinforce the old ones? are my horizons expanded or narrowed? do i end up feeling helpless about my ability to do anything about the state of the world? do I even have the first clue about what state the world is in? does it take away my desire to argue against the madness before i even begin? am I even allowed to call it madness (that illuminati thing is pretty out there)? is it all a load of bullshit?

i listened to a pretentious panel of "experts" yesterday on P1 (our NPR equivalent, only even better) debate the ability of individuals to live more sustainably in practice. they justified their purchases of non-organic food, designer bags, frequent airplane travels, long showers and wasting of energy with homes filled with electronics they never turn off and ended up concluding that we as individuals cannot do anything about living more sustainably. we might as well load our grocery cart with cheap chicken and sit in front of our enormous flat screen televisions, clad in prada, planning our next holiday in bali. they decided that we should wait for governments to wake up and regulate us, since we were too lazy to take steps ourselves.

and while that's a pretty dire and cynical conclusion, and it rather pissed me off when i heard it (as i was driving instead of biking, no less) upon reflection, i don't think it's that illogical in light of the input we feed in to our brains. a lot of what we read and expose ourselves to points to individuals not being able to make one iota of difference (after all, the illuminati and those 6 corporations are controlling everything). and i'd like to say that it's lame and crazy of us, but apparently that avenue is now closed as well.

also in my various feeds, i came across a guardian piece by jonathan franzen about our frustrating way of conducting ourselves in the modern world. he harkens back to an austrian intellectual, karl kraus, who was  blogging in a journal called the torch, before blogging was invented. maybe we need to do as kraus did, and spend a lot of time reading stuff we hate, so as to be able to hate it with authority. i'll admit i'm not good at that, as i blogged the other day, i've been turning off those who post the most objectionable stuff on my facebook feed, because i don't want their vitriol polluting my mind or messing up the steady stream of photos of kittens and lego minifigures. 

i think i've said it before, but we have to start fighting back. we've been slacktivists long enough. it's time to start arguing against the madness. because not doing so clearly isn't working.

notes from the outer edge of the galaxy

real beauty

i have a bad habit of drinking too many caffeinated beverages during the day and into the evening. if i keep the coffee confined to before about 4 p.m. and only drink one cup of tea in the evening, i can sleep. but often, i do not abide by my own rules and so i'm up late. and i actually like it that way, what can i say? last night was oscar night, so it meant i could stay awake for a bit of the red carpet (the show didn't start til 3 a.m. here, and it wasn't THAT bad).

there was a time in my life when i'd always seen all of the films nominated for best picture. i could recognize the stars on the red carpet and i had opinions about who should win (i was almost never right about who actually did win). i'm no longer that person. i had heard of black swan but not seen it. and hadn't even heard of many of the other films, let alone the actors and actresses involved. (slight digression here: why is the word actress still ok but we can't use seamstress?)

so i watched the red carpet coverage on TV2 film (they apparently had a live feed from what i think was ABC - i was a little sad not to see joan rivers' catty assessment, but those rights apparently weren't bought in denmark). since i knew so little, it was a bit like watching from another planet. or at the very least like being from another planet.

and from that perspective, it's a strange spectacle. rail thin women with tightly stretched faces and plumped up lips in beautiful but ultimately unwearable-looking uncomfortable dresses walking down a red bit of cloth, cameras snapping away. stopped here and there by mannequin-like presenters who ask vapid, empty questions about how they're feeing and how their peers might be feeling. aside from being somewhat pleasing to the eye (that red archival valentino anne hathaway wore was stunning), it all seemed like much ado about nothing. peacocks on parade, empty of meaning and genuineness and well, reality.

i do realize it's not meant to be real and it is on another level entirely, somewhere up in the clouds, where mere mortals never tread. but the whole spectacle of it is odd - especially the "reporters" there on the scene, grabbing the stars for a quick but formulaic chat - try to make "news" out of something that is, as yet, in its pre-ceremony state, not news. pretending to care about feelings, but mostly caring about who designed the dress and jewelry and in many instances, clearly more about the "reporter" getting to pose for the cameras with someone they'd otherwise never even get close to.

what is with the obsession reporters have with feelings? "how do you feel? "how do the best actress nominees feel?" "how does your dog feel?" "is your dog wearing versace?" "what were you thinking getting an orange dress?" "don't you have a stylist?" "does your stylist hate you?" ok, granted, those last few questions were the ones i asked in my head.

i blame CNN for this. or rather the whole concept of 24 hour news. it gives us this odd pantomime that we must be subjected to before the news actually happens. the build up, the feelings, the empty interviews - because you can't have content when nothing has actually happened yet. but you still have to fill air time. and apparently they take "air" seriously and fill it with a whole lot of hot air.

it all leaves me feeling quite fortunate to be residing on a remote planet these days.

mixed feelings about wikileaks

this cartoon, by danish cartoonist jens hage, appeared in berlinske tidende last wednesday.
it says (from left to right) "threatens national security"
"it costs lives"
"a bomb under the international cooperation"

like many of us, i've been thinking about wikileaks of late. my initial feeling is that the release of all of these internal government documents about the wars in iraq and afghanistan brings a new level of democracy about these things that our tax money pays for. a level of democracy we weren't getting from our own governments. we are, after all, footing the bill for these things, so shouldn't we know the truth?

then, the latest wave of diplomatic documents were released. and these begin to feel a bit more like it would feel if you and the homecoming queen were very good friends and you came into possession of her diary. and you read it and you found out what she really thinks about you. and it isn't pretty.

not being a diplomat, i have a little bit of a smug, people-at-that-level-should-know-better attitude about the whole thing and i don't feel that sorry for them. but what if everyone's private conversations between peers or good friends and colleagues were suddenly public information? i've said loads of things i wouldn't want to be quoted for, especially not in public. and saying those things is a safety valve of sorts...letting off steam, releasing the pressure, so that you can go about your normal life and do your job and remain on an even keel. but there is a need for making wild sweeping statements or a need to laugh about things that are serious - like referring to putin and medvedev as batman and robin. we do it all the time. i have a bad habit of giving people nicknames - usually ones that i'd never call them to their face. and i'd be pretty embarrassed if those things were revealed because someone was secretly documenting them.

so i guess it leaves me with mixed feelings about wikileaks. interestingly, as much of a netizen as i am, i haven't actually gone to the site to read any of it myself. i'm still getting it through the filter of my daily newspaper, CNN, BBC World and online sources like the new york times and the guardian. and i have to ask, how democratic is that?

where is dostoevsky when you need him?

this morning, while i was getting ready, i flipped on CNN. it's what i do when i'm in a hotel. this morning, it was all chilean mine rescue, all the time. i watched the third guy coming up out of the hole and being released from his little cage, which is dubbed the fenix, i guess to signify rebirth. and it was a birth of sorts, as he came up the long canal into the light of the world again, to the waiting arms of his wife. and it was a touching moment.

but the endless analysis and gushing and hype by the newscasters was simply too much. they showed a psychological "expert," who, sounding no more authoritative than a random person on the street, exclaimed in completely general terms, about how psychologically difficult it would be for them. the CNN reporter simply exclaimed along with her, not asking any deeper questions to elicit a more meaty expert response. but perhaps she knew she didn't have an expert on her hands at all. what i fear is that she didn't know that. she simply thought it was her role to play sentimental drama queen together with this woman on camera, as they breathlessly watched footage of the first three miners hugging their families. it's a pity, as i think the psychological aspects of this experience on the miners must be fascinating.

the job behind this rescue is a big one and it is an amazing story. i was a little surprised that the strongest were brought up first. i'd have thought they'd bring up the ones most in need of medical attention, but maybe it made for better television that the first men stepped out, smiling and looking surprisingly robust in their trendy sunglasses (for eye protection since they'd been away from the light for 2 long months and undoubtedly donated by oakley or ray ban or some such company).

i wonder if, thanks to the instant transmission of information and the way that news is covered completely while it's happening, rather than waiting for it to happen, we have lost our ability to know what the story actually is. if we're developing the story on the fly, as it's happening, there's nothing reflective it and no opportunity to draw deeper meaning, or get at the essence of the story.

dostoevsky developed the brothers karamazov on the fly. he published it under great duress and financial pressure, as well as time pressure, in weekly installments, plotting it as he frantically wrote. but sadly, it seems that there are few dostoevskys out there today, and so we watch stories unfold on television...