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Life is going to do everything it can to keep you from laughing, and you must fight against that evil. Death says stop laughing. Crime, hate, abuse, sexism, racism, judgmental eyes, in-laws, Mondays, the IRS, abandonment; they all want you to stop laughing, but you mustn’t.You absolutely cannot cease finding things funny and having a laugh. Look at the Jews. For all of time the world has tried to keep the Jews down, but they wouldn’t quit. Exile? Holocaust? The Jews are survivors. And how did they survive? They got funny. You know Jesus told the best crucifixion jokes.
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Hello from Chicago.
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1. The photographs my mother took were almost always centered around experience and documentation.
2. The Orange Crush, our family van
3. Rick Hawks for Indiana Congress bumper sticker
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News organizations and media groups abandoned journalism and now bow at the alter of the banner ad and the hashtag. Watching the political debates on CNN or FoxNews is completely unbearable. “Tweet us your questions for the candidates!” “We’re a trending topic!”
George Washington is very disappointed. He did not give his life for hashtags.
“Documentaries are the new journalism,” Shannon says every few days. So now we happily pay $8 to Netflix and have access endless documentaries and some good journalism. An equally valuable resource, and almost always free, is iTunes U, the best part of iTunes. On iTunes U you can get an entire ivy league education (in terms of lectures) for absolutely free. This is astounding! A few weeks ago I watched a Duke University chapel service on YouTube while sitting at home in Seattle. The times we live in! Because everyone has been waiting for jet packs and hover cars we all seem to glaze over iTunes U and Netflix.
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About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that “religion is the opium of the people.” Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.
Kurt Vonnegut
A Man Without A Country
p. 12
2007 paperback
Random House
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A good artist is able to capture the soul of his or her subject. Sally Mann accomplishes this with every image, from photographing her children to the deceased to the land.
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!! Chris Abbas made this stunning film using NASA footage from the Cassini mission. I would happilly watch a feature-length film of such a thing… like we sent an artist to Saturn instead of a machine.
Shannon and I have recently been discussing the idea of humans believing that we are the center of the universe; that we are the only ones alive.
We are so, so small.
