Well, since you ask, a friend of mine is keen to promote Fair Trade clothes & shoes in New Zealand. So I thought I’d help out by putting her banner on my site.
The shoes are cool. And if you’d like to put the same banner on your site, you can do so using the following HTML code:
Or if you would prefer just to link to the website, use this code: http://www.autonomieproject.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=SFNT&Store_Code=AP&Affiliate=sehz4justice
Radiant City Set to the unique guitar soundtrack by Joey Santiago of The Pixies, the reality of planned suburbia on the fringes of the USA’s cities is terrifying. I could feel the cellphone waves in my teeth. Do they really call shopping malls “Power Centers” over there?
This was one of those films where you come away indignant at the West’s greed and opulence but at the same time with some pity those trapped in soccer-work-ballet-shopping cycles. Your wife wants a new home. In the suburbs. With a new kitchen. And she really wants it. And why don’t you want it? And don’t you love her? And the children? Don’t you want the best for the children? How can you be so selfish!
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Terrific full-length version of an interview David Foster Wallace did in the USA with (I think) a German TV program in 2003. It is 84 minutes long but I really recommend watching this right the way through. I think this guy was on to it on a number of levels.
“What has been surprising in the post-Cold War period are those beautiful and deeply moving words pronounced with veneration in places like Prague and Warsaw, words which pertain to the old repertory of the rights of man and the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because maybe underneath there is an abyss. After all, those ideas had their foundation in religion, and I am not over-optimistic about the survival of religion in a scientific-technological civilisation. Notions that seemed buried forever have suddenly been resurrected. But how long can they stay afloat if the bottom is taken out?”
Source: Towards a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts, Michael J. Perry, p. 28
I am currently reading David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again‘, a gift from a friend. It is so good, and so sad he is no longer alive. Reading his work I am struck by the same feeling I got reading about John Lennon’s life. A rare talent gone too soon.
This link will not be for everyone, David Foster Wallace writing about tennis is a select audience. But I do recommend it:
At different times in my life I have done jobs that have been hard to do. Thinking back now the hardest thing was having to do something I hated & being told that it wasn’t that bad and I would get used to it.
In retrospect those experiences were valuable. You learn a lot from that stuff. And I do think sometimes things are hard for a reason. But I remember then thinking that it would drive me mad if the rest of my life was going to be like that. It seemed to me then that work, what we do with our days work, would need to be meaningful. It would have to matter otherwise I would struggle with it.
I have my suspicions where that idea originates. It is interesting to me that from pretty young I was interested in what people did for a job, what they did with their lives & I hoped that I would do something fulfilling.
For me, the hardest times at the worst jobs are touchstones of sorts. When I see people losing it in the supermarket car park after work on Friday I wonder if their jobs are like those I suffered through. But they’ve been doing it for years & years. How much is it reasonable for a person to go through?
It seems to me that things shouldn’t have to be like that. That kind of awfulness is not fated or destined. It is like when they say on TV “…and the markets bounced back today after consumers embraced the long weekend”. That’s not consumers, that’s me, that’s you, that’s us! And when we buy stuff we make decisions, choices.
Recently I read something about how we can agonise & preach and be very vocal about the merits of a certain type of cellphone or mp3 player but we go strangely silent on the bigger topics. Well, that makes sense, how do you talk about those topics in everyday conversation? But I wish we would. Somehow I think if we were better connected to people around us, and talked to them, we would find it harder to shaft the people we don’t know or haven’t met.
I have been a rapacious user of Ted.com, AtGoogleTalks & This American Life for a while now & I’ve wanted to share some of the talks I’ve enjoyed the most. Unfortunately the feed for This American Life only makes the download available until the new one is ready – which is every week, so I can’t link to any of those. But I will embed my favourites from the other two sites below. These come highly recommended & are in no particular order.
TED.COM Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes
“Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.”
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
“Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one.”
James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia (contains strong language)
“In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.”
ATGOOGLETALKS Authors@Google: Michael Krasny
“KQED Radio’s Michael Krasny is one of the country’s leading interviewers of literary luminaries, a maestro for educated listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. In Off Mike, Krasny talks of his strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Bellow and Philip Roth, and then discovering his real talent as a communicator—a deft ability to draw others out as an interlocutor. In a mix of memoir and reportage, Krasny takes readers inside his world—his coming of age during the heady times of the 1960s with their blend of the civil rights movement and political activism, to the vivid description of his journey from a student of literature to a struggling novelist to an educator and—somewhat accidentally—a radio host.”
Authors@Google: Lawrence Wright
“Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, brings exhaustive research and delightful prose to one of the best books yet on the history of terrorism, The Looming Tower. He begins with the observation that, despite an impressive record of terror and assassination, post–WWII, Islamic militants failed to establish theocracies in any Arab country. Many helped Afghanistan resist the Russian invasion of 1979 before their unemployed warriors stepped up efforts at home. Al-Qaeda, formed in Afghanistan in 1988 and led by Osama bin Laden, pursued a different agenda, blaming America for Islam’s problems. Less wealthy than believed, bin Laden’s talents lay in organization and PR, Wright asserts.”
@Google: Benjamin Maron
“Ben Maron lives a dual life as computer scientist and fashion designer. Since graduating from MIT in 2004, Ben has worked on a number of developments at the forefront of high-performance computation, most recently at IBM where he is a lead architect on the Cyclops (Blue Gene/C) supercomputer team. On the design side, Ben is completing his final year on the BA Fashion Design course at London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins, and has worked for notable designers such as Donna Karan and Jonathan Saunders. His goal is to fuse the two disparate fields by creating thought-provoking, technically charged garments, which highlight the striking similarities between the artistry of a complex circuit and of a fabric’s interaction with the human form.”
BONUS I Met The Walrus
“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.”
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