PeaceBang

The Cat That Got Away

omar-violin
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

This is Omar, a cat I met and kind of tamed in the summer of 1999 while house sitting for friends in PA. He was a biter and a scratcher who infuriated the other two legitimate feline members of the household by just sort of strolling into the house through their cat door whenever he felt like it. I thought he was smashing. He now lives in Massachusetts and has apparently taken up the violin. What a looker.

One evening I was watching a movie in the glassed-in, air-conditioned living room when I saw Omar racing across the lawn, hell bent for leather and practically foaming at the mouth. I thought, “What in the world is he running from?” and turned to survey the yard. When I spotted an unbelievably huge buck with his doe and fawn standing at the edge of the lawn, I just about fell off my chair. Those were some big antlers there, feller.

I teased Omar about it for days. “Hey Omar, can I borrow a few BUCKS?” and like that. Don’t think he didn’t understand me.

Love to you, my handsome bad boy Omar, and to your human for sending me this recent photo.

Margaret Cho’s Husband

small world after all

Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Activist & comedian Margaret Cho married artist Al Ridenour in June of 2003. Interesting guy. I love what he and his cohorts from the LA Cacapophony Society did at the Burning Man festival in 1999, creating a replica of the Disney “It’s a Small World After All” ride and then burning it to smithereens. Of course as it burned, that g*&Damnned song continued to play… and play… (although they say it was enhanced by sirens and other appropriate sound-scaping). This was an anarchists’ statement against Disney’s shiny-happy depiction of globalism, and the ethnic and racial stereotypes of the animatronic figures… you probably really want to read the whole pictorial report at http://la.cacophony.org/CS_smallafterall.html

House of Sand and Fog

Ms. Aghdashloo
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I am still breathing way down in my soul 12 hours after seeing “House of Sand and Fog” on DVD. Based on the book by Andre Dubus III and directed by Vadim Perelman, it is the best Greek tragedy I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m terribly devoted to the tragic form. Jennifer Connelly plays a sniveling, alcoholic beauty who screws up her life by failing to read her mail and thus losing her house(take note, ya’ll.. you can NOT blow off your mail!), and gets kind of rescued (in a really psycho-needy way) by a sexy deputy sheriff with an overdeveloped sense of he-man protectiveness (tho’ not for his own wife and children, the bastid).

You want to see this film for two reasons, though, and their names are Ben Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo. They are Lord and Lady Tragedy, they are exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely rendered according to gender stereotypes that are so true they make you weep, and played with honesty and love that will make you feel as though they have scooped your heart out through your mouth and dropped it onto the floor.

I asked a Persian friend if the details of Iranian immigrant culture were fairly depicted, and she thought so. I was glad. I didn’t see this story as a metaphor of Middle-East-Meets-West,though, as some critics have written. I saw it as a tragedy, pure and simple, where the gods look down and throw human beings together according to their whimsy and our inestimable loss and suffering. The tide comes in, the fog rolls out, someone tries to die and gets saved by someone else’s goodness, someone else dies and doesn’t get saved by anyone’s goodness. And so it goes. You will never forget the deep pools of Shohreh Aghdashloo’s eyes, which seem to reflect every proud mama and faithful wife’s suffering from the beginning of time.
If you rent the DVD, make sure to leave time for the commentary track, because if you care about acting at all you will want to hear Sir Ben Kingsley’s take on his magnificent performance.

Oy Vey, Not Again

A guy named Perry Marshall wants to get you to take his on-line course called “The Seven Great Lies Of Organized Religion.

These are the burning questions Marshall will address in his course:

(1) Some religious leaders seem to tell us that we’re not smart enough or good enough to discover God on our own. Who says?

(2) If God is good and perfect, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?

(3) How can anyone rely on the Bible for answers, if it’s just a loose translation of ancient myths anyway?

(4) How can we trust a religion that has advocated slavery and the subjugation of women throughout history?



Marshall, in all apparent sincerity, writes:

“These are serious questions-hot potatoes that nobody wants to touch.”

Um, hon? Mr. Marshall? A brief glance through, like thousands of articles and sermons from the past 150 years or so from probably about sixteen or seventeen dozen religious traditions would indicate that your questions are at the absolutely forefront of religious thought in America. Every single one of those hot potatoes done been PASSED. And passed. And passed.

Again, as in my “spiritual but not religious” entry of a week or so ago: Who are these people? What kind of bubble do they live in that they somehow don’t know that an enormous portion of the “organized religious” population concerns itself with these questions? So, just off the top of my pointy head… a reading list for our Mr. Perry Marshall:

Ralph Waldo Emerson or Immanuel Swedenborg, Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox (on the direct, unmediated experience of God); William Ellery Channing or Marcus Borg or John Shelby Spong or John Dominic Crossan (on how to read the Bible reverently and critically); Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza or Elizabeth Johnson or Rosemary Radford Ruether or Carol Christ or Sarah Coakley or Julian of Norwich (on the question of being a feminist and a Christian or a Jew); Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman, Walter Wink (on why we can “trust” Christian tradition despite the Bible’s teachings on slavery);

Gottfried Leibniz, C.S. Lewis, Harold Kushner, Elie Wiesel, Gersonides (on theodicy, the question of suffering, evil and God).

I apologize to Mr. Marshall and to anyone else on the planet who has been participating in a religious community on any level and who has been left with the impression that religious people do not care about things like evil, suffering, misogyny, oppression, access to the Divine, and the myriad other problems inherited from ancient faith traditions.

Down At The Socinian

The Socinian is a neat new blog by our friend Fausto. I checked it out today and laughed like hell (pardon me, HECK) to see a little shout-out to Yours Truly on one of his recent posts:

http://socinian.blogspot.com/2005/01/accidental-collision-with-peacebang.html

In the same post, Fausto quotes at length a letter from Benjamin Franklin to Unitarian minister Ezra Stiles in 1790:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals, and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England some doubts as to his divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed…



Isn’t that wise and tolerant and lovely? If only post-Christians today had the same maturity and respect.

Letters From Siberia

My friend, the poet Sophie Wadsworth, has published her first book!
This description appeared recently in a Harvard Gazette article by Beth Potier:

“When Roxanna Lord Pray - Roxy to all who knew her - left Maine as a newlywed to join her husband’s family in Siberia in 1894, she sent home letters. Thousands of letters, written throughout her 36 years in Vladivostok, rich with details of her life, images of East Siberia, and the mood of the time in which she lived.”

Sophie is Roxy’s great-granddaughter, who took those letters and wrote a gorgeous book of poems about them, including this one:

I picture Siberia, three weeks away:
deep snowy trees sleep along the horizon.
Another heave, I slide into a blue

hallucination … a swirling alphabet of snow …
Cossacks shouting, whipping the hull
to outrace a squall … I lurch locked inside
a giant trunk marked Roxanna Lord

– from “Passage to Vladivostok, 1894,” Sophie Wadsworth

***
Don’t you just want to buy this book? You can! Send $11.50 to Sophie at 22 Old Mill Road, Harvard, MA 01451. I bet she’ll even sign the copy for you.