Below is the full list of the movies I watched for the first time in 2008. There were 127 total (roughly 1 new-to-me movie every 3 days):
61 were documentaries (48%)
35 were dramas (28%)
18 were action/thrillers (14% )
12 were comedies (9%)
First movie I saw:Juno Last movie I saw:Slumdog Millionaire
Worst movie:Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay Stupidest movie:Step Brothers
Oldest movie:The Mouse That Roared (1959) Longest movie:Gandhi (188 mins.) Longest title:Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
I tried to read a book/week again, which seems very reasonable, but fell short once again. I’m about halfway through a dozen other books, which I’ll probably just finish & count for ‘09. Under each category, they’re listed in the order I read them. Incidentally, the first book I read in 2008 was The Audacity of Hope by Mister Obama. [Read more →]
Here are 20 of my favorite songs released in 2008. As usual, I’ve agonized over this list and have changed it numerous times. Like always, I only picked one song per album (otherwise artists like Bon Iver & Robert Forster would just completely dominate this list) and they’re only loosely ranked by preference.
So for better or worse:
1. MGMT - “Time to Pretend” from Oracular Spectacular
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The first 60-ish seconds of this are irresistibly awesome.
2. Bon Iver - “For Emma” from For Emma, Forever Ago
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Possibly my favorite album of the year.
3. Langhorne Slim - “Rebel Side of Heaven” from Langhorne Slim
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This dude isn’t always consistently great, but I dig a lot of this album and this song in particular.
But I continue to find John D. Caputo one of the most interesting living philosophers. He’s written an interesting preface to the Chinese edition of his book What Would Jesus Deconstruct?Entitled “Why the Church Deserves Deconstruction,” it’s an interesting read even if you haven’t read the book and actually serves as a decent introduction to a couple major themes in Caputo’s thought.
Also, and this is completely & utterly unrelated, but I’ve been greatly amused by this awesome new song by Creed:
The semi-ironic soundtrack to this post is Brother Ali - “Mr. President (You’re the Man)”:
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One of the most interesting pre-election interviews I saw was of arch-conservative Bill Kristol with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show just a few days before the 4th. One of the striking things Kristol said was that “I don’t think [Obama] would be a very radical president. I think he’ll disappoint a lot of people on the left, because he’ll be a conventionally liberal president.” I’ve thought a lot about this quote, especially as Obama’s picked his staff and proven Kristol exactly right so far. But I’m unsure just how “radical” anybody on the left ever expected him to be (we had Nader, Klein, Chomsky, et al to keep our expectations low).
However, whenever I stumble upon the lunatic fringe of the far-right (say, WorldNetDaily or FreeRepublic for example) I’m sometimes surprised at how often they try to paint Barack Obama as the left’s “Messiah.” It’s unclear, of course, who actually believes this. In reality, Republicans are far more obsessed with Obama’s supposed messiahship than liberals are. There’s no doubt that a number of people have said nutty things, among them Louis Farrakhan and, to a lesser extent, Oprah Winfrey, but there’s not much evidence that most people see Obama as anything other than an inspiring figure. Obama’s election team have admitted that McCain’s “celebrity” ads over the summer had them most worried — but being a celebrity is far different than being a messiah. [Read more →]
The must-read article of the month is Michael Lewis’ “The End of Wall Street’s Boom.” It is a superb account of our economic crisis and how we got here, as seen through the eyes of a handful of people who predicted it. I thought about quoting snippets, but decided I’d end up quoting most of the piece: it’s really good. After reading this article I went and also read Lewis’ 1989 book Liar’s Poker, the story of his four successful years at Saloman Brothers up to and around the 1987 crash. Though 20 years old by now, it still felt fresh in light of today’s recession.
Lewis’ Portfolio article also serves an unintended purpose: sufficient refutation of the notion that stupid, greedy, lower-to-middle class homebuyers are primarily to blame for our present troubles. This, of course, has been a persistent theme during the last six months and represents standard class prejudice. America hates its poor. [Read more →]
Do you know this story? It’s that one about the conservative Christian school with a Calvinist bent where “you don’t have to be very liberal to be viewed as ‘left’.” A school where faculty have been split (even to the point of a vote), struggling significantly with “persistent faculty disunity” because “several years of faculty discussions had produced an evident impasse.”
The controversy erupts in the Spring & Summer amid concern over “the historic theological integrity of the institution,” and eventually morphs into “something a lot deeper than theology.” Eventually a popular tenured professor is fired (perhaps because of his theology, perhaps because of professional reasons)… giving rise to Facebook protests and write-ups in The Chronicle of Higher Education and local papers.
Sound familiar? No, it’s not that - ahem - school. I’m talking about Westminster Theological Seminary. Maybe their ordealcan be instructive for other schools (not that I know of any) in similar situations?
I am not all that far into this book yet, but Zizek has lived up to his reputation so far. I’ve been particularly intrigued by his claim that “the Communist project was… not radical enough.” By which he means that Marx tried to keep the teleology of capitalism — that is, “completely unbridled productivity” — while discarding the framework in which that “mad dance of [the] unconditional spiral of productivity” can only play out. This a priori commitment to the Unlimited finds parallel in what Wendell Berry calls “Faustian economics.” In pure capitalism, there can be no limits because its “eschatology of profit” (Ben Kleis’ words) forces a perpetual quest for More. The insatiable need for more profit fuels the never-ending drive for higher productivity, greater efficiency, and newer markets (”the more profit you make, the more you want”).
For background information, I’ve included the full Madman passage from The Gay Science. For me, it remains a piece of unimpeachable literary excellence. [Read more →]
This is an ad for Cedarville College in the The Baptist Bulletin, January 1969. The student pictured is my dad, a junior chemistry major at the time. Click for larger version.
A couple weeks ago I wrote a paper on Nietzsche’s Madman and his pronouncement of the death of God. While researching I came across this passage by Bernard Martin, which is certainly not what Nietzsche meant by “God is dead” but is interesting nonetheless.
It is necessary to kill God! … One can, in all good conscience, kill God, for the true God does not himself be killed. He is beyond all deicidal tendencies. And yet, it is necessary to kill one’s God!
It is necessary to kill the God that we have learned! God is not learned. And if I have learned something about God, I can be certain that this is not truly he. The instruction that I received about God in my childhood was perhaps necessary. But today the God learned in my childhood no longer has any meaning. I am no longer young, and I need another God, the true God! Thus I must kill the God learned, even if it means that I can no longer proceed!
It is necessary to kill the God that I devise! The God that I dream up is never God. The thoughts that I am able to come up with concerning him never begin to express his majesty. My understanding can be extremely cultivated, yet the God that I imagine is always inevitable other than what he truly is. So I must kill the God that I have imagined and conceived, or I will risk remaining in a sterile and permanent thought. This God that I have imagined must die.
It is necessary to kill the God of my faith! Throughout my life I have been devoted to God with all my soul. In spite of appearances, I am still devoted to him with all my soul. But what must die is the God of my faith. My faith cannot reach God, and my theology, no matter how orthodox, will never be able to be a durable and absolute theology. And if I claim it because one day I make it on my own, then I am condemned to no longer understand what it is about. God is not dependent on my faith. He is, that’s all. I must acquiesce in killing the God of my faith!
From If God Does Not Die (pg 19-20) as qtd. in “The Graveyard Theology” by Vernon C. Grounds in Is God “Dead”? (pg 32).Speaking of Nietzsche, I was at Barnes & Nobles and ran across Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books That Screwed Up the World. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil was in there, along with Marx, Darwin, Freud, etc. It’s basically fundamentalist anti-intellectualism masquerading as serious scholarship. I almost laughed out loud when Wiker said Nietzsche’s madness & then death was a result of his profound atheism and not, say, of syphilis-induced dementia.
This is the personal blog of Kevin Cole, which has been online since early 2002. It is also the homepage for the Society of Metaphysical Bums, an invite-only club to which you're now invited.
You can find me elsewhere online at: Digg, Last.fm, LibraryThing, Mojo (dopefish@deusty.com), and Twitter.
This is the personal blog of Kevin Cole, which has been online since early 2002. It is also the homepage for the Society of Metaphysical Bums, an invite-only club to which you're now invited.
