"The judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

This article led to a reasonable discussion (by fark standards) and the above quote was thrown in at some point in the commentary. It was amazingly prophetic. My own disappointment with the faith I grew up with (and which I still actively participate in) is that it has largely become the "irrelevent social club with no meaning for the twentieth century". That greatly saddens me because I do believe the majority of the tenets of faith that Adventism is based on, but I do not feel that connected to the people in "the church". The social club is one I am not interested in. About the time I started high school I really decided I did not want to go to Sabbath School or church simply to be entertained. I started going to an adult sabbath school class that was discussion based only and had many members that were faculty of the local college/professionals in the local community. This was a boon for my spiritual growth because these were intelligent people struggling to reconcile parts of their faith with the rest of the world around them. If it was not for that period of my life I know I would not be a member of the church today.

The things that were disappointing to me at the high school level, have only gotten worse in my opinion, and I am not in the least surprised by the conclusions that article comes to because I see it repeated over and over among my own friends. I still believe that there is real value in a community of faith, I just wonder sometimes where that community is for me. I will write more on this soon because some of the questions asked on the fark discussion board are driving me to attempt to give an answer and I am struggling myself with how to do them justice.

unknown ps

"butterphant" by CryingDutchman

"b_looker_b" by ReggieNoble2

"the_3_horsemen" by Hansen'sDisease


Goodnight everyone!

1348 by TelefunkenU47

flidght by ReggieNoble2

Entraguard by mypalmike

Marilyn Collage by McDorkESQ

Yesterday a link was posted to Fark for the Garfield minus Garfield archive, which I perused for a while and found to be really funny. Now, I am not a Garfield hater, as many seem to be, I enjoyed it as a youngster. It had its time, which has long since passed in my opinion, but I feel no need to assail those who still like the strip. It is completely innocuous. But removing Garfield from the comic reveals an entirely different dynamic for Jon and I enjoyed the diversion it presented at work.

I caught "There Will Be Blood" at the Cameo last night. I am appreciatively satisfied with the new ownership there. After the fear that they would be shutting down at the end of last year, the slew of excellent movies to start this year has been wonderful and that seems to be an ongoing trend with the lineup for the next month or so. Now, "There Will..." just picked up a couple Oscars this past weekend and it is clear why when you see the film. It is not often that a film over two and a half hours long zips by, but this is an intense film with several fantastic performances and a soundtrack that really heightened that on the edge feeling. I had a chance to meet Daniel Day Lewis at Sundance a few years ago when he was promoting "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" (another fine film). That of course made me scrutinize the films I had seen of him and to seek out others I had not yet seen. I have to say that his range is phenomenal, he rarely plays the same character again. His character in "There...", Daniel Plainview, is an greedy man driven and ultimately consumed by hatred, butting heads with a second greedy individual driven by a lust for power of a different kind. They both get what they want in a way, but at a terrible price. As a period piece it made me wonder at what motivated people were able to accomplish at the turn of the century and simultaneously thank God I did not live back then.

Beautiful Eternal Child.....

I was taking a break from practicing for a party (a little Salakavala, a dash of S>Range, some Hujaboy, and mix in some Vibrasphere or Pope of Gegga) I will be playing in SoCal on March 1st and sorting through some old image folders on a spare hard drive when I ran into my Kumiko kanji.

Ku - Beautiful
Mi - Eternal
Ko - Child

This was one of the earliest things I considered for a tattoo, before kanji tattoos became cliche. I still like the way it looks on the page, but have less incentive to permanently memorialize it or anything else on my body now.

Unrelated to that, I spent way too much money this afternoon to get a coffee table book for my mom. The book is "Eduard Spelterini - Photographs of a Pioneer Balloonist" and collects a number of the aerial pictures taken by the Swiss balloonist known in his day as "the King of the Air". It is available from Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess in Switzerland.

Since I was in a buying mood, I also preordered "Five Centimeters Per Second" the newest animated film by Makoto Shinkai coming out in the US just a couple days before my birthday. For those who do not know, Shinkai burst onto the anime scene in 2002 with "Voices of a Distant Star", a story of two friends, one on earth and the other on a one way space exploration trip "out there" to the edge of the universe, which he almost single handedly created (story, music, animation, etc., etc.) and earned him accolades as the new Miyazaki. He followed that up with "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" an equally haunting and beautiful story of separation/dreams/hope. While he has publicly downplayed the Miyazaki comparisons , Shinkai has a visual attention to detail, an ear for sound craft, and a gift for making you care about his characters that outclasses everyone else but. Everything I have heard about "Five Centimeters" indicates more of the same and that means another masterpiece. I highly recommend finding and watching any of his projects. If you do not like them, you may not be human.

Books and films.....

"In his aptly named new book, UNCERTAINTY, David Lindley introduces us to the giants who made this revolution - Heisenberg and Einstein, of course, but also Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Arnold Sommerfeld, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Hendrik Kramers, and Max Born. Lindley's approach more or less traces the chronological history of the events leading to quantum physics and Heisenberg's formal statements of the ultimate uncertainty of measurement at the atomic level. At the same time, he provides excellent insight into the scientific and philosophical turmoil that these conjectures raised and the difficulties of acceptance they encountered. So much of this science was counterintuitive, and worse still, so much of it directly contradicted two thousand years of human belief about universal absolutes and the ultimate nature of science itself. Lindley presents these ideas in an easily understandable, non-mathematical way accessible to virtually any interested reader. To his credit, the author also presents the principals in this story in a decidedly human way, complete with their certainties and doubts and individual peculiarities. Thus, for example, we see Niels Bohr as an almost comical figure, a man for whom "his determination not to say anything straightforward or concise" while striving to reconcile classical physics with the quantum world "seem[ed] almost a phobia.""

This Amazon review of a book recommended to me based on a couple others I have picked up in the last six months definitely tipped the scale on my interest and I'm looking forward to it arriving shortly. I also ordered "No Country For Old Men", which I had been thinking about since I watched the film last month, and since I enjoyed Ben Stein's presentation mentioned in my previous posting, I picked up his collected essays "How to Ruin Your Life". Reviews will come later.....

Netflix has been a wonderful service for me and one of the better birthday gifts I have ever gotten (thank you Richard). Knowing that I'll be leaving for my extended trip in 6+ months, it has been a little sad seeing my queue dwindling down from over 150 to about 75 now. Just enough to get through before I fly away. Tonight I have two Holocaust films: one from Czechoslovakia "Divided We Fall" and a second from Switzerland "The Boat is Full". This is the second time in about a week that I've had a theme night like this. I recently watched both "Once Were Warriors" and "Rabbit Proof Fence" back to back and luckily in that order. I say that because "Once..." was such a depressing film from New Zealand and "Rabbit Proof..." from Australia was a story of hope and success despite overwhelming odds. What made it even better was that I had not realized it was a true story till the end when they introduced the sisters. I knew it was based on the Stolen Generations, but not that it was itself factual. I had assumed it was a historical fiction. (The same thing happened to me on a film called "The Newton Boys" and it made me similarly regard the film in a higher degree than if it had just been a story. I should track that film down and see it again.)

Two artists I found intriguing enough to consider buying pieces from get the spotlight tonight. First Aaron Kraken (with two examples of his style that I like). This is actually quite similar to the work of a high school classmate of mine, with less sexual overtones. The pieces incorporate a number of mediums and I am curiously drawn to the eyeless faces of his figures, the phrases/messages interlaced through out the canvas, and the human/machine hybrid theme that seems to recur with regularity. I find it hard to say they are beautiful pieces, yet I have to admit I continue to come back and look again and again, so there is an attraction on some unconscious level for me.




The second artist is St.Even who works primarily in oil/Photoshop meshings to create "Visionary Portraiture for Visionary People". I think he prefers to be called Saint Even, although Steven works as well. His pieces I find devastatingly beautiful. "Spiritual Armour" is the piece below. I have a couple prints that I embarrassingly have not hung due to a lack of decent frames. I was actually negotiating with him a couple years ago to have a piece commissioned and have recently started thinking about it again. The only reason it did not happen before was my brother getting a divorce and me having to sink about $20k into his legal fees, which of course put a strain on my extraneous spending.

A funny thing happened on the way to......

I have been looking forward to this past weekend for a while now for a single reason: OTT at Sanctuary. And while the Koinonea folks put an amazing experience together in a wonderful location in Oakland, there were so many other things that just seemed to happen at the right moment (just what I needed to hear or see) that made this a stellar weekend.

I was in church Saturday morning and while most people undoubtedly feel a sermon is the last thing they want to deal with to start the weekend, I would rather have a two or three hour sermon and skip all the preliminary parts of the service, especially when the sermon was as good as it was this time. I have been going through some issues in my personal life and it was almost as if the sermon was addressed specifically to those issues. As well as I know our pastor, he has no way of knowing about my problems, but what he spoke about really helped and encouraged me.

After that I went to a lecture led by Dr. Doug Clark on "A Window on the New Testament: The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context". There was a second session in the afternoon and I learned a lot from both. Dr. Clark is a co director for the Madaba Plains archaeological projects in Jordan and they are recruiting for their dig at the main Umayri site this summer. I spoke with him after the second session because I will be in Jordan in the summer of 2009 and was able to find out who to speak with to get linked up for that. So the Jordan leg of my world trip will involve excavation at the secondary site at Jalul. This was a connection that had been proving difficult to make and I am grateful to have made it.

Then I took a brief nap before heading to the second Sanctuary of the day: The Sanctuary of the Arts. Alloy Trex were playing when I got there and I really liked what they were doing, especially one track with a NASA feed throughout. Then BetsyLa came on and I did a little exploring before the official ceremony at midnight. While doing so I ran into a girl I knew in high school. She just moved back up to San Anselmo with her boyfriend and had randomly found out about the party. She was connected with the Moontribe people in SoCal and this made a pretty good beginning for getting into the SF scene. It was nice to see her again and catch up a little. Outersect kept things moving after the group ceremony. OTT played a good mix of old and new tracks from the just released album and then opened up his dj set with Leftfield (always a big plus for me!) . I always loved the visual juxtapositions between the dual videos Leftfield "Africa Shox" and UNKLE "Rabbit In Your Headlights". Two of my favorite videos of all time. I had to take off at the end of his set around 5am, because I had to be at work at 9am, so I missed Sneaky Hippy. I also recorded the entire evening, but need to make sure the levels were good before sharing that with anyone.

While driving into SF from Oakland that morning, I had the radio on some random station and they were broadcasting a presentation Ben Stein just made to the Commonwealth Club on January 24th. I have long thought Mr. Stein was an intriguing and insightful person, someone worth giving a listen to and this was no exception. I tracked down the link for the full lecture today at work and will give it a proper listen soon. So, Sunday was productive and despite only three hours of sleep I was feeling fantastic by the time I finally made in back home at 9pm with the truck full of trash from the remodel job.