Picture of the Day: Succinctly Summating Why I Shall Forever Prefer la Cuccina Italiana to la Cuisine Française..

As I've said somewhere once before, paté is for cats, and the Italians know it.

---

 

Posted with Blogsy

Diva Girl, Maximon's House, Panajachel Guatemala, July 1st 2012

 

 

 

 

---

Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Posted with Blogsy

Song of the Day: Jaded Lover, Chuck Pyle..

This one's of course for Annie Paradis.. As it shall always be for me.

 

Lyrics (variation off the version above, this being the way I sing it):

Now, it won't be but a week or two,
You'll be wantin' someone new lovin' you.
It's somethin' you've done a hundred times before.
Can't see you I been spreadin' myself thin too (in two)?
It's a lonely phase we've been goin' through..
Don't get up, I'll find my own way to the door.

Ah, I can see you are an angel whose wings just won't unfold,
Tune up your harp, polish your old halo..
'Cause the only kind of man that you've ever wanted,
Is the one that you knew you'd never hold very long,.
Now you're sittin' there cryin' like I'm the first one to go.

You may have thirty lovers behind you,
An' I may feel you but sure can't find you..
Seems you'd have found your own self by now.
But some nights those old lovers' tears come back,
Faces in your dreams, fingers in your back..
Echoes of the memories for cryin' out loud.

Ah, I see you are an angel whose wings just won't unfold,
Tune up your harp, polish your old halo..
'Cause the only kind of man that you've ever wanted,
Is the one that you knew you'd never hold very long,.
Now you're sittin' there cryin' like I'm the first one to go.

Ah, what a beautiful sight you are in your sleep,
I'll be leaving 'cause believing gets me in too deep.
That's easy enough for a man to say..
But we'd never agree if we talked all night..
Things get so heavy, I'm traveling light..

Goodbye my jaded lover, my undercover queen for a day.

Ah, I can see you are an angel whose wings just won't unfold,
Tune up your harp, polish your old halo..
'Cause the only kind of man that you've ever wanted,
Is the one that you knew you'd never hold very long,.
Now you're sittin' there cryin' like I'm the first one to go..


Think about it darlin'..


---

Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala




 

Bruised Orange: O.J. Squeezed from the American Dream..

If I Have Anymore Faith in this Fu'k'd Up Country, It's Due to the Likes of John Prine..




Them Lyrics:

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley,
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley,
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
Just to shovel some snow.

I heard sirens on the train track, howl naked gettin' nuder,
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter,
Just from walking with his back turned
To the train that was coming so slow..

You can gaze out the window get mad, gettin' madder,
Throw your hands in the air, sayin' "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know..

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter..
You become your own prisoner, as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own chain of sorrow..

I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there..
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
And my head shouted down to my heart, "you'd better look out below!"
Hey, it ain't such a long drop don't stammer don't stutter,
From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter,
You'll carry those bruises to remind you wherever you go.

You can gaze out the window get mad, gettin' madder,
Throw your hands in the air, sayin' "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know..

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley,
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley,
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
Just to shovel some snow.

I heard sirens on the train track, howl naked gettin' nuder,
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter,
Just from walking with his back turned
To the train that was coming so slow..

You can gaze out the window get mad, gettin' madder,
Throw your hands in the air, sayin' "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know..

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter..
You become your own prisoner, as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own chain of sorrow..



---

Next Year I'm Praying a Novena to Win..

"The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.."  Octavio Paz, Mexican Nobel Laureate in Literature 


The week before last I was walking through one of the many exquisite plazas in Oaxaca, and passing a lottery ticket booth I noticed that they were selling tickets for what apparently was a special 25 million peso (1,800,000 dollar) drawing  that was held yesterday on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the ticket (as shown on the poster above) being emblazoned with the image of her icon.  


I was extremely amused, and immediately reminded of the quote above.  I thought of buying one, and trying my luck, but didn't.  Fifty pesos (three and a half bucks) ) is a bit too steep (that's the price of two beers or an ensalada mixta here) and while I was fascinated and sorely tempted to collect a ticket for a souvenir, the impulse struck me as mildly sacrilegious..


I am still far more sanctimonious and puritanical than Mexico, you see.. 


Being here I'm starting to lighten up.  


I'm hereby resolved: Next year I'm going to play.  Cross your fingers for me..


--- 

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent Made Glorious Summer..

We, determined to prove villainous and hate the idle pleasures of these days, plots have laid, inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, set in deadly hate one against the other: subtle, false and treacherous.


All I can say is to repeat what I've already said: we deserve what we are going to get.




---

Adtendite a Falsis Prophetis.. Or Whatever.

I spent the better part of yesterday evening driving, and on the way north listened to NPR, CNBC and CBC. All three of which carried multiple stories about this,




Relating it all with successively varying degrees of "enraptured" snarkiness. They each loved themselves this story bunches, and every successive show covered it. Rachel Maddow shook herself a cocktail on the air, one with Chartreuse and high end gin in it.. Sounded super yummy.

Dude's got the Rapture down to the hour anyway, it seems. Like that arch biblical chronology and genealogy cruncher Bishop Usher, he's done himself some prophetic calculation.

Heads up. The Lord's coming in glory at 6 p.m. today.

Greenwich Mean Time? Eastern Standard? Dunno. Probably West Coast.. He's from California, just like his friend Jack Chick who drew this, a neat graphic summary of what he prophesies will happen this evening (check your local listings) to the saved:

Could be Mountain time.. Maybe he's gone into the Rocky Mountains, dude's likely out there in Colorado Springs in one of those multi- million buck evangelical retreats they have nestled out by NORAD high command there.

This time zone issue actually matters quite a bit to me, since I plan on making my last confession before they all get taken up if I have the time this Saturday afternoon, just to be sure I face the Tribulation in good conscience.. Rough times demand a clean conscience. That's the best a corrupt papist like me can apparently hope for, I guess. If it's California time I'll be able to assist at mass and even I hope get supper in before all the hullabaloo..


Or maybe I'll just get well and snookered and jam with JDawg all afternoon instead. There'll be last chance mass on Sunday evening even in the midst of the Tribulation, I bet.

Yeah. He wants to do this:




A little raw heart salve to caulk the cracks, you know?


Take our minds off all them tiresome pharisaical tools shooting their gobs off. It gives me heartache and makes me wonder if I'm insane and being mocked by my fellow inmates when "bible believing christians (sic)" start yelping this sort of utter exegetical idiocy.


I generally refrain from baldly citing chapter and verse in my normal discourse, because it lacks subtlety and is so gauche and all, but I've been provoked beyond reason.


Just one verse:

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).


Now I'm off to lobotomize myself with a spoon. I intend to enjoy myself the Apocalypse. Cheers.



---

One Last Observational Post This Afternoon..

With no further comment, apart from I was just thinking how both Ellen and Great Big Sea are from the Atlantic Provinces, just like me (or I so wish, I'm starting a movement for Maine and Vermont to secede and join Canada today.. ) and that Didier (my pipe smoking buddy in this here video) is from Belgium, just like Magritte.




See how patterns persist on the mind's eye. There is meaning inherent in things. I mean it.



---

By the Way..

Human desire is consummated and both at once parodied in itself.


Sin and love are both sublime sacred jokes.


Just an odd notation.



Blessed Pascha.



---

The Divine Comedy: the Gospel as Parody

Today is Palm Sunday. This is one of those blessed and relatively rare years in which the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) calendars are in harmony. We celebrate Holy Week and Pascha together this year. As the Universal Church always should.

During Lent I've been going almost daily to mass, and reading the psalter.


One of the things that keeps on striking me lately, is how funny the Bible is.

He rides in on an ass. He's making fun of us, of our pretensions.


When the French took Damascus from the Turks in 1920, the commanding General Henri Gouraud rode his charger into the tomb of Saladin in the great Ummayad Mosque, dismounted and planted his boot on the "Sword of Religion's" (that's what Salah al-Din literally means in Arabic) grave and declared, "Réveilles-toi Saladin, nous sommes revenus. Ma présence ici consacre la victoire de la croix sur le croissant!"

Get up Saladin, we've returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent!

That's how we like to do it. Charge in on a warhorse, all glory, then crush the enemy's head and spit on his grave. Then consecrate it all in pride and vanity.


We like to put boots up asses, see. That's definitely the American way.

(I love how this video of Toby Keith's immortal poetical expression of that sentiment begins with the image of a puppy wrapped in a flag.. Irony is dead.)


But God rides in barefoot, on an ass. And then goes to the religious and political authorities and allows them to slaughter him. He takes the boot upon himself.


The Gospel - in fact the entire bible - is rife with such inversions as God coming in glory on a donkey.


He's always making the most unexpected entrances, and turning our expectations upside down.


He shows up as a baby, is worshiped by donkeys and gets put in a box for feeding grain to asses (called in English a manger, from the French "to eat.." Taste and see..)

(there's great iconography of the animals in the stable worshiping him..)

Then he goes up on a hillside by the sea of Galilee, and preaches the "Sermon on the Mount," which is where he parodies Moses, and reveals himself to be God. See the sidebar, I've posted the Beatitudes he taught there. These are the Christian answer to the Ten Commandments.


I think they're really funny. Blessed are the poor? Says who?

Jesus, that's who.


And he sat down to teach them. He did not stand in the presence of the Lord as a rabbi does proclaiming scripture in the synagogue, or Moses did coming off the mountain with the written word. He went up and sat.


I've been to the "Mount," it's actually a great grassy hillside right next to Lake Tiberius (also called the Sea of Galilee, but it's not much of a sea at all, actually).. When I stood on it, I laughed. Not at all like majestic solemn old Mount Sinai.

Not exactly what I'd expected. Very gentle. A good joke.


He calmed that sea one night when his disciples were stuck out fishing in the middle of a storm. They were terrified by the storm, then terrified that he'd calmed it. He walks out onto the lake, and calls to them to come to him. Peter (our dearly loved pope) hops out, takes a few steps and sinks.


That my friends, about sums it all up. Very funny.


Stick your finger in me, Thomas. It is finished.


In the Name of the Rose, one of my favorite books, Emberto Eco tells this beautiful story about a Franciscan monk and a novice (played in the uneven late 80's movie version by Sean Connery and Christian Slater) who come to monastery where there's been foul play. The plot revolves around an newly discovered manuscript of Aristotle's ("The Philosopher," as Thomas Aquinas dubs him in the Summa) on laughter. The bad guys are bent on keeping this text from ever seeing the light, because the concept of laughter is so subversive to authority. They eventually kill almost everyone and burn the monastery down along with the book, because they can't handle a joke.

One of the characters (I think it's the arch-badguy, the abbot) makes the observation that in the Gospel Christ never laughs. He cries at the tomb of Lazarus..

(another funny story: "Lord, you're late! He's dead. You were supposed to come when we called you!" Open the tomb. "But he'll be stinky!" You still don't get it. Roll the stone away. They do it. Lazarus comes out dressed like a mummy.
That one had me silently belly laughing to in my pew when it was read at mass a couple weeks ago..)

He gets angry and whips the money changers like curs.

Lots of divine emotion gets expressed.


But no laughter.


Why? Because he's a straight comedian.


"I give them the sign of Jonas," he said.


And this is the thing: the Book of Jonah (like the Book of Job) is a comedy.

Go tell the people to repent, Jonah. "No. Stop bugging me." Jonah runs away, gets on a boat to Finisterra (the name of the end of land where Spain tapers out into the void just beyond Santiago de Compostelle), thinking he can hide from God. There's a storm, like that one on the Sea of Galilee. The sailors are terrified, so when Jonah confesses that God's out to get him, they throw him overboard and so calm the waves. Christ parodies this when he walks out onto the sea himself. Jonah is swallowed by Leviathan. He rests in the gut of a fish (the tomb of the sea) for three days..

(This is an inversion of when the fish leaps out of the Euphrates and Tobias grabs and eats it, then burns its liver to scare away Asmodeus from his beloved.. Or when Christ eats his last meal of grilled fish before he rises into heaven.. See how the symbols and the things signified, how all the referents proliferate? That's what a good comedy is all about..)

He gets spit up onto the beach, resurrected. He then grudgingly decides to obey God, and goes to preach repentance to the people of the great city (Ninevah, or Mosul- the capital of of what is now Southern or Kurdish Iraq, the northern twin of Baghdad, which is on the rivers of Babylon) whom he thinks are disgusting people not worthy of being pardoned. "I don't want to go preach forgiveness to those bastards. I want them to burn like Sodom and Gommorah did.." But he does it now anyway, because he didn't much enjoy being stuck in that fish. He preaches, and they all convert and put on sackcloth and ashes. A great revival. Billy Grahm's wet dream. The End.


It's out of control. And when the meaning dawns on you, you should laugh.


That's why fools who can't take a joke either think that the whole thing is contrived and "just a myth" or else run around saying that it's all "literally" true.

I hate the word literal. It's a nearly useless word that is its own deconstruction.


Our problem is that we need to control everything. We need to pretend we understand. We need to be right. Most of us are running around imposing our narratives on things, telling other people that they're wrong. Faith is parodied as a means of social control, of controlling our own insecurities.

Our tendency is to attempt to turn it all into a recipe for anathematizing and controlling other people..

("The Bible vs. Science," "Creation Science," nursing unhealthy obsessions with Darwin.. The Nazis, the eugenicists, militant atheists and the folks down at the Four Square Bible Church have got it all figured out, see.)

A means of categorizing and reducing or even annihilating the heretical other in all his scandal.


Grinding boots up Muslim asses, for example. Planting boots on their graves.


The irony of militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris writing book length screeds condemning the many horrific things people have done while proclaiming religious motives and justification, but then themselves advocating massive violence and terror against Muslims is a classical example of this..

An example so idiotic and shameless that it traumatizes my mind.


"The Inquisition means the Catholic Church is evil!"

This, immediately followed by "Muslims are evil, and I support the U.S. government's enhanced interrogation and rendition of terrorists, and Israeli and U.S. coalition violence against them!"


Like I say, no sense of irony. Very stupid.


They cannot see that they are doing much what the Nazis did to the Jews, or what the inquisitors in the violent aftermath of the wars that expelled the Muslims and Jews from Spain, did.

It's not that different. It's coming from the same place: rectitude, ideology as tribalism, annihilation of dissent.

Assassination, terror, and violence as censorship.

The other and his ideas are so threatening we must crush him politically or else kill him. Islam (or Judaism, or Catholicism, or jahaliyah - that's a favorite term among Salafist Muslims, it means pagan ignorance and decadence, all that is not Islam, or whatever) is so dangerous, we must eradicate it.

Shut up. You're wrong. If you don't shut up and do what I tell you, and believe what I tell you to believe, we will kill you.


My earlier posts about the "Left Behind" novels and the Grand Inquisitor are all meant to be driving at this same thesis.


When I put all these things up, I mean it to be read in full context. A context that is to me one of irony, parody and amusement.


Because death and evil are either a joke, or nothing's funny.


For what God does is almost always unexpected, you can't prepare your mind or body for the revelation. You can store up a year's worth of food in your basement, buy guns and ammo, vote Republican and try to keep America pure from whatever you think is evil and threatening, but in the end none of that will matter.

You can prepare your heart and soul, though.

One last joke:

Did you hear the one about that guy that stood up in a Podunk hick town synagogue a couple thousand years ago, pointed at the book of Isaiah and said “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing..”


Cymbal clash. Bada-bump.


Jews. They're pretty damn funny bunch. Always going for the best punchlines.


Blessed Holy Week, everyone. Let's keep one another in our prayers.



---

The American Cargo Cult: The Preordained March of the Elect Nation & Prosperity Gospel

No worries. John Frum shall return, with yet more cargo.




"Cargo cult" is an anthropologists' coinage of the early 1950s, describing South Pacific religious beliefs that place extraordinary faith in mysteriously arriving commodities. The mid-century anthropologists who first documented cargo cults date their beginnings prior to WWII, meaning that by the early 1900s these cults were touting a doctrine that bizarrely foresaw events of the 1940s. Scholarship agrees that the chronology is correct—cargo predictions predated the arrival of the American military—but it offers no logical explanation for the coincidental timing. What is clear is that when the military arrived, cargo cult predictions were literally realized. This made fertile ground for wildly successful sects; it also thrust America into the heart of cult dogma. Postwar religious practices were largely based on the activities of the US military. Cultists built loading docks according to the logic that cargo would arrive when docks were built, just as it apparently had during the American occupation. Believers routinely had visions of "Jake Navy," the corporate logo from an American brand of cigarettes; captains and lieutenants were appointed and exercised together daily. Village layouts were reorganized and genders segregated; airstrips, roads, and barrack-like housing were constructed; observances ranging from English lessons to self-imposed sexual continence were instituted—all intended to bring about the return of American wealth by simulating the conditions of an American military base.

The best known of the archipelago cults was the John Frum movement, centered on an island called Tanna (from which the Americans culled laborers for Efate). This faction followed a prophet named John Frum, who may or may not have been an actual person; a series of men seem to have assumed his guise as leader. Dressed in a red jacket with brass buttons, a tall black hat, and veil, Frum urged a return to kastom, the traditional ways of the Tannese. He advocated communal living and kava drinking, and rejected the well-established authority of the English Presbyterian missionaries. For a time in the late 1940s, a man named Isaac served as Frum's mouthpiece, prophesying with a magic bag of stones; at other times, Frum took on characteristics of the Biblical Noah. On Espírito Santo, the corollary to Tanna's Frummists were the Santo Naked Cult, which arose in the early 1920s under the command of a man named Runovoro. The early phase of the Naked movement culminated in the murder of a British planter in 1923; six cult leaders were executed. Runovoro wrote in a secret language, predicted that savior ancestors "would arrive after a Deluge in a great white ship loaded with Cargo," and prophesied the end of white Europeans on the island. Cultists on Vanuatu began to talk of a "King of America" named Rusefel (Roosevelt) who was alternately John Frum's father, brother, or Frum himself. In 1941, John Frum claimed that "he would send his son to America to bring back the King"; months later, American fleets began arriving en masse on Vanuatu.

Evolving as creative hybrids of anti-colonial sentiment, American xenophilia, reclaimed tribal traditions, and traces of Presbyterianism, the cults rapidly gained a popularity that predictably concerned the Condominium. By their order, American generals publicly declared that they were not gods incarnate. Religious connections persisted, however, and the Condominium responded with forcible suppression; in 1943, two men were executed for impersonating John Frum. (In the following fifteen years, 140 more men were arrested for their religious activity.) Part of the government's concern arose from the fact that the American presence was destabilizing colonial hierarchies of race. The ni-Vanuatu were both terrified and entranced by African-American troops stationed on the islands and the appearance, at least, of racial equality. A pre-war cult goal—the expulsion of all Caucasians—was revised, and the colors black and white gained symbolic importance. The sons of John Frum, expected soon, were suddenly described as half white and half black; Frum commanded that all clothing and decoration on the island be white or black, instead of the traditional red and yellow. This particular understanding of color as a marker of Americanness was no doubt strengthened by the dozens of black and white road signs, "exactly like the familiar US highway markers of the homeland, but neatly labeled 'Efate, U.S. No. 1.," that homesick American boys had erected around the island.

In the same vein, all kinds of material objects and symbols of the American presence—from red wood crosses modeled on the Red Cross to marine hats—were adopted as religious paraphernalia, invested with meaning that seemed strangely independent of, yet intimately connected to, their original purposes. At sunup and sundown, cult members raised and lowered an American flag, salvaged from a military dump, and assigned a color guard to watch over it during the day. Lamont Lindstrom observed that:

US military uniforms and insignia ... are prized possessions. A few men were lucky enough to secretly retain the numbered dog tags issued to them during tours of labor for the US military. Others still recall the songs they learned from American servicemen and are pleased to sing creditable rendering of "God Bless America" and "The Marine's Hymn." ... Every 15 February, a military drill team marches with bamboo rifles and the logo USA painted in red across the marcher's chests and backs. The team is commanded by a sergeant, "with stripes," who calls out still recognizable commands (which are, however, unintelligible to the Tannese) such as "to the right!"

To the Western observer, cult doctrine and practice appears shockingly Amero-centric. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that America was not a static object of cult worship. "America," and all things American, were put to use as vehicles for challenging colonial authority. Emulating military procedures, adopting military lingo, and folding America into local religious history had the psychological effect of aligning the disenfranchised ni-Vanuatu with the all-powerful Americans; performance of American military ritual invoked power by mimicking the powerful.

The departure of troops reified faith in American salvation insofar as it meshed well with the doctrine of Christ's second coming as taught by the missionaries. Cultists immediately began to prepare for the Americans' return. Frum believers cleared a plateau on northern Tanna for an airstrip that would receive John Frum's American sons, just like the airstrip that had been built a year earlier on Efate. The airstrip was also expected to receive American goods, and Frum said that people who did not help to build would be bombed by planes. About the same time, members of the Naked cult built a dock on Santo in anticipation of American cargo, and cleared roads to transport it to the villages.

Not only did cultists prepare for the arrival of new cargo, however; they also began to actively demolish what they had. Ni-Vanuatu started collectively dumping their British currency in the water, and raids on colonially owned trade stores were organized to gather extra currency to throw away. Not only money was destroyed, but livestock and indigenous crafts. Since so many cult practices mimicked American behavior, one wonders if the dumping wasn't also a reenactment of witnessed events, such as the strange "construction" of Million Dollar Point. The spectacular dump has never been explicitly linked to cult activity, but the connection seems plausible; the ni-Vanuatu regarded the American military's conspicuous excess as a direct function of their power. Again, in the absence of oral histories from Vanuatu itself, other regional testimony may be instructive. An Enewetak chief of the Marshall Islands noted that the gifts the islanders gave to American GIs were later seen on the beach, discarded, and he explained why: "All kinds [of things], they throw out, for they add nothing. Such is their strength, they do not need them." Quite likely, the ni-Vanuatu aimed to evoke this godlike strength by casting their things away. So outside the perimeters of recognizable human activity, the military's expenditure was deemed the behavior of divinities: large-scale destruction of usable goods and a cavalier attitude toward disposability were inscribed in cargo cult religious practice. Million Dollar Point thus unfolds as a prescient symbol functioning in two directions: showcasing American capitalism's disposal imperative, it also speaks to the immaterial dimensions of material caught in cross-cultural exchange. One country's waste betokens another's independence.



---