In Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Wade Davis (he of The Serpent and the Rainbow fame) describes the tenuous ways in which death has been defined, historically and even into the present day. It’s a frightening account, filled with examples gleaned from the modern media, of folks who have been declared dead and consigned to the morgue or funeral home, only to suddenly recover and be not-so-dead anymore.
Take this example in China. A guy kidnaps a couple folks and is holding them hostage on a window ledge. Some enterprising cop hits him with two shots, point-blank, to the head, knocking him off the ledge and to the pavement 5 stories below. I mean, that’s some serious dead-making action! And yet…
The paper said his body was put in a coffin and taken to a funeral home, where it was to be refrigerated before being cremated.
But funeral home workers heard a groan on opening the coffin and were shocked to find the man still alive. They rushed him to hospital.
Makes you want to write a “living will” for after you die, doesn’t it? Something like “In the event of my death, give it a few weeks before you bury me alive, ok?”
I forgot I wanted to include this quote in my previous post on boxing, found on the ThinkExist quotation site:
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” –Mohammed Ali
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article by Gordon Marino on boxing and philosophy. Although a little too heavy on platitudes like learning “to get control of your emotions”, there’s a deeper thought at work, which is stated best in the introduction:
“Know thyself” was the Socratic dictum, but Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the movie Fight Club, asks, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” Although trainers of the bruising art wince at the notion that boxing equals fighting, there can be no doubt that boxing throws you up against yourself in revealing ways. Take a left hook to the body or a trip to the canvas, and you soon find out whether you are the kind of person who will ever get up.
Boxers like Mohammed Ali, Joe Louis, and Max Schmeling (Hitler’s hope for Aryan superiority, who paid for his rejection of Hitler’s ideology and his refusal to join the Nazi Party by being drafted and assigned suicide missions, and who gave ex-rival and then friend Joe Louis financial support throughout the ex-champ’s life, including paying for his funeral) have shown time and again the willingness to fight outside of the ring — albeit not with their fists. I’m not a boxing fan and don’t completely buy Marino’s dismissal of the violence inherent to the sport (Marino seems too willing to overlook the way its promoters portray big-money matches), but there’s a lot to admire in the kind of men (and more and more women) the sport has produced.
Anne Galloway: Purse Lip Square Jaw
Anne Galloway is (as far as I can make out, and among other things I’m sure) an ethnographer of architecture and the architectural — that is, she’s concerned with spaces and places, a concern I share and have written on a lot here, though far more amateurishly than Galloway. Her writing can be a little academic and dense at times, though giventhe complexity of the subject matter, I doubt that’s avoidable. Give it some effort, it pays off — as it does in the bit I excerpted below, from a post last month on “restricting mobility”:
As part of my research on tensions between mobility and stability, I’ve become particularly interested in ways we attempt to control the movement of people – especially given the well-established Western (and especially American) tradition of associating mobility with freedom.
…
Coming at the question from a different direction, I’ve been thinking about how photographs stabilise the movement (arguably the essence) of parkour and skateboarding. And even how old daguerreotypes were incapable of capturing movement.
But mostly I’ve been thinking about how settled people have historically reacted to nomads. For example, under the Israeli state the life of the Bedouin has changed dramatically, and the Irish government has long tried to fix the itinerant problem associated with Irish Traveller culture. Mongolian nomads are increasingly moving to the city, but urban infrastructure and policy – as well as nomadic cultural values – are not adapting well to this shift.
I cut a bit out — you’re sposed to follow the link and read it, silly — which deals with stuff like “no skateboarding” signs and dress codes, military baricades and riot control strategies, and so on. Galloway links together a whole spectrum of mobility-denials , from the private strategies we use to keep those crazy kids off our walls to the machinations of nations and their efforts to sedentarize people who have, often unwillingly and even unwittingly, become national subjects.
Purse Lip Square Jaw is one of those sites that makes you glad to live in the age when humanity decided to blog. It’s the kind of work that, a decade ago, you’d only be exposed to in hallway chats at universities and professional meetings, and once in a while in an academic journal (which while certainly good for what they are sposed to be good for, do little to convey the process of ideas developing and growing).
Some kinda weird problem with Pivot today…
Gamespy has a series of over two dozen articles detailing the history of Dungeons & Dragons, the game that, for many a geek, dweeb, and nerd (now better-known by titles like CTO or guru), was both the source and stigma of high school ostracism. The history told in the Gamespy series is pretty fascinating — a lot of stuff I remember as rumour and speculation is put into order in this surprisingly modern tale of market domination, poor business models, and interpersonal rivalries. In the end, though, D&D was always about a kind of social interaction (ironically given it’s reputation as a refuge for social rejects), which might give us just a small insight into why so many ex- or longterm D&D’ers, now fully embedded in the tech industry, are so interested in the social possibilities presented by new technologies.
It’s a scene familiar to many across the world. A small group of people sitting around a table littered with strangely shaped dice, thick books, and pieces of paper filled with arcane statistics. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons game, and while the rules may have changed a bit since it was first published, the social interactions between the players haven’t.
anil dash
Anil Dash is a VP at SixApart, the pleasant folk who brought us Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad hosted blogging service. His site deals mostly with technical stuff in a fairly engaging, often humourous, and sometimes just plain fun way. F’rinstance, when a couple search optimization organizations decided to hold a contest with prizes for whoever could get their site listed first on Google for the keywords “Nigritude Ultramarine”, Dash — though not a search optimization pro — jumped right in, and even won. The whole exercise was not just to show his contempt for the search optimization industry (though there does seem to be a little bit of that) but to show the potential of a strong network built through interpersonal contact — the opposite of the corporate mindset in which “thinking outside the box” means not radically reenvisioning a system but merely learning how to “game” it.
When not discussing the ins and outs of web services or the history of failed apps bundled with Office, Dash offers a more personal look into the life of a tech professional. This seems to be a theme among techie blogs — zigzagging back and forth between critiquing the latest XHTML standards or describing object-to-SOAP transformations or some equally obscure thing you had no idea even existed and then a moment later describing the all-too-human heartache of leaving a city one loves and the anticipation of moving into a new home. Maybe because blogging has become a way to not only broadcast but to build and maintain a network of like-minded people, bloggers like Dash feel comfortable detailing the whole spread of their life-spectrum, knowing that their regular readers know and understand boththe arcane and the everyday details. I’ve tended to avoid the personal on my own site, with a handful of exceptions — I mean, I hope I have a very personal and personable “voice”, but I’ve rarely delved into the details of my private life. Which is a bit odd, since the bloggers I like best tend to be the ones who leaven their political or technical commentary with the day-to-days — something for me to think on, I guess.
AKMA’s Random Thoughts
AKMA is, believe it or not, a postmodern priest! OK, I don’t know if he’s a priest or minister or what — the picture of him on his faculty bio shows him in a collar, and Jew that I am, I don’t know which clergy wear collars and which don’t, so to me, he’s a priest.
Anyway, a postmodernist, with what looks to be about a half-dozen books of postmodern biblical and theological analysis to his name (where does he find the time?!). Not a hell-fire and damnation kinda clergyman, though — AKMA writes with a sensitivity and compassion I bet you wish your clergy had. On the topic of the “emergent church”, for instance, he writes:
The emergent leaders I’ve met want no part of a rope-’em-in-for-Jesus membership head count game; they’ve stopped cold, asked the basic question of why people who love God and want to follow Jesus should do it in bunches, and are trying to see what answers make sense on the ground.
I’m not a part of that endeavor, and I’m probably misconstruing it in various ways, but as far as I understand it, I respect the impulse and the ways it’s being played out around us. Institutional spokespeople (like me) should mostly just quiet down and let the Spirit speak, aye or nay, through the ministries of hard-working, committed leaders such as these.
Given the way that many religious folk, clergy or no, respond to any sign of difference within or without their congregations, AKMA’s openness and willingness to exptend respect even to folks whose take on spiritualism he doesn’t personally agree with is truly a beautiful thing, and for that, I extend the same respect to the man himself.
Even if he is a Christian. :-)
action figures sold separately
I first encountered the action figures gang back in April of 2003 when elihu, one of the action figures I suppose, seconded my suggestion that “fleischering” be added to the national vocabulary to describe the act of not only talking around a question but not even pretending one is dealing with the same topic they were asked about. The site’s posting history is spotty (as is mine — no finger-pointing here) and their last post was in February — apparently they got so worked up about the whole gay marriage thing in San Francisco that they quite forgot about the whole blogging phenomenon for 6 months or so.
Actually, the site was a part of the movementbuilding.org family of websites, and it may just be that the group blog was forsaken in favor of the various other projects they take part in. Maybe I should link to some of the other parts of the site — but there’s no clear indication that action figures will not, as sometime in the future, again be sold separately…
Abstract Dynamics || nomadic, intense, not quite daily/
Abstract Dynamics covers pop culture and politics and pop politics and political culture with an especially deft ear. Topics range from Hip-Hop to Big Media to Old School political agitation. Even if the writing weren’t good and on target and kinda fun, even, you’d still like him (the name behind the email address is William Blaze, so I’m thinking “him” is appropriate) because of the great book plugs on the sidebar: Deleuze and Guattari, Luc Sante, Paul Auster, Neal Stephenson, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez — ain’t no fluffy “summer reading” crap! Plus, he Does the Right Thing by hosting other blogs he thinks are peachy-keen.
Lissen:
Ultimately though I suspect that corporate personhood is an effect of the corporate drive for power, not a cause. Is shifting the balance of power back towards another organization with repressive tendencies, the State, an answer to the problems posed by big business? In order for the answer to be “yes” the State must be ready to recode the corporate laws in a constructive manner. A dubious but not impossible prospect, and one that can be furthered greatly if the ideas on how to recode these entities are in existence. And this my friends is our job.
Good writing, good taste, good NYC style — I’m thinking he’s gotta be from Brooklyn.
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