"Astoundingly Disturbing": Obama Administration Claims Power to Wage Endless War Across the Globe
Democracy Now
A Pentagon official predicted Thursday the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates could last up to 20 more years. The comment came during a Senate hearing revisiting the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, enacted by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. At the hearing, Pentagon officials claimed the AUMF gives the president power to wage endless war anywhere in the world, including in Syria, Yemen and the Congo. "This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here," said Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine. "You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today." We play excerpts of Thursday’s Senate hearing and our recent interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new bestseller, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield."
To Watch the Episode
Friday, May 17, 2013
Mark K. Smith: Dialogue and Conversation for Learning, Education and Change
Dialogue and conversation for learning, education and change
by Mark K. Smith
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education
Conversation and dialogue are not simply the means that educators and animators use, but are also what educators and animators should seek to cultivate in local life. They may be approached as relationships to enter rather than simply as methods. We focus on the thinking of four people in particular:
Paulo Freire – with whom the notion of dialogue has been linked as an educational form;
Hans-Georg Gadamer – the philosopher who uses the metaphor of conversation to think about how we may come to understand the subject matter at issue; and
Jürgen Habermas – the social theorist who argues for the need for ‘ideal speech situations’ in fostering both understanding and a humane collective life.’[A] humane collective life’, he said (1985: 82), ‘depends on vulnerable forms of innovation-bearing, reciprocal and unforcedly egalitarian everyday communication’.
David Bohm – the eminent physicist and friend of Krishnamurti, whose example and practical proposals for dialogue have met a response from a number of different areas – but particularly those, like Peter Senge, who are concerned with organizational development.
Martin Buber has also made a significant contribution to the appreciation of encounter and dialogue in education. Gadamer – horizons of understanding
I want to begin by approaching conversation as a way of coming to an understanding (sometimes called a dialogic structure of understanding). This particular way of approaching matters is linked to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. He describes conversation thus:
[It] is a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is a characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on a subject. (Gadamer 1979: 347)
In conversation, knowledge is not a fixed thing or commodity to be grasped. It is not something ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. Rather, it is an aspect of a process. It arises out of interaction. The metaphor that Gadamer uses is that of the horizon. He argues that we each bring prejudices (or pre-judgments) to encounters. We have, what he calls, our own ‘horizon of understanding’. This is ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be see from a particular vantage point’ (ibid: 143). With these pre-judgments and understandings we involve ourselves in what is being said. In conversation we try to understand a horizon that is not our own in relation to our own. We have to put our own prejudices (pre-judgments) and understandings to the test. ‘Only by seeking to learn from the ‘other’, only by fully grasping its claims upon one can it be critically encountered’ (Bernstein 1991: 4). We have to open ourselves to the full power of what the ‘other’ is saying. ‘Such an opening does not entail agreement but rather the to-and-fro play of dialogue’ (op cit). We seek to discover other peoples’ standpoint and horizon. By so doing their ideas become intelligible, without our necessarily having to agree with them (Gadamer 1979: 270), we can come to terms with the other (Crowell 1990: 358).
The concern is not to ‘win the argument’, but to advance understanding and human well being. Agreement cannot be imposed, but rests on common conviction (Habermas 1984: 285-287). In this, the understanding we bring from the past is tested in encounters with the present and forms what we take into the future (Louden 1991: 106). We experience a ‘fusion of horizons’.
The horizon of the present is being continually formed, in that we have continually to test all our prejudices. An important part of that testings is the encounter with the past and the understanding of the tradition from which we come… In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going on, for there old and new continually grow together to make something of living value, without either being explicitly distinguished from the other. (Gadamer 1979: 273)
Whether ‘fusion’ is quite the right word is a matter of debate. It does not quite fit the ‘ruptures that dis-turb our attempts to reconcile different ethical-political horizons’ (Bernstein 1991: 10). However, what we do know is that in that ‘moment’ our own horizon is enriched and we gain knowledge of ourselves. Emotions and virtues
For there to be dialogue in the dictionary or etymologically sense we look to dia meaning two or between or across and logos speech or ‘what is talked about’. Dialogue is , thus, speech across, between or through two people. It entails a particular kind of relationship and interaction. In this sense it is not so much a specific communicative form of question and answer, ‘but at heart a kind of social relation that engages its participants’ (Burbules 1993: 19). It entails certain virtues and emotions. Burbules lists some of these:
concern: In being with our partners in conversation, to engage them with us, there is more going on than talk about the overt topic. There is a social bond that entails interest in, and a commitment to the other.
trust: We have to take what others are saying on faith – and there can be some risk in this.
respect: While there may be large differences between partners in conversation, the process can go on if there is mutual regard. This involves the idea that everyone is equal in some basic way and entails a commitment to being fair-minded, opposing degradation and rejecting exploitation.
appreciation: Linked to respect, this entails valuing the unique qualities that others bring. affection. Conversation involves a feeling with, and for, our partners.
hope: While not being purely emotional, hope is central. We engage in conversation in the belief that it holds possibility. Often it is not clear what we will gain or learn, but faith in the inherent value of education carries us forward.
So it is, Martin Buber believed, that real educators teach most successfully when they are not consciously trying to teach at all, but when they act spontaneously out of their own life. ‘Then he can gain the pupil’s confidence; he can convince the adolescent that there is human truth, that existence has a meaning. And when the pupil’s confidence has been won, ‘his resistance against being educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the educator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns to ask….’ (Hodes 1972: 137).
To Read the Rest and Access More Resources
by Mark K. Smith
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education
Conversation and dialogue are not simply the means that educators and animators use, but are also what educators and animators should seek to cultivate in local life. They may be approached as relationships to enter rather than simply as methods. We focus on the thinking of four people in particular:
Paulo Freire – with whom the notion of dialogue has been linked as an educational form;
Hans-Georg Gadamer – the philosopher who uses the metaphor of conversation to think about how we may come to understand the subject matter at issue; and
Jürgen Habermas – the social theorist who argues for the need for ‘ideal speech situations’ in fostering both understanding and a humane collective life.’[A] humane collective life’, he said (1985: 82), ‘depends on vulnerable forms of innovation-bearing, reciprocal and unforcedly egalitarian everyday communication’.
David Bohm – the eminent physicist and friend of Krishnamurti, whose example and practical proposals for dialogue have met a response from a number of different areas – but particularly those, like Peter Senge, who are concerned with organizational development.
Martin Buber has also made a significant contribution to the appreciation of encounter and dialogue in education. Gadamer – horizons of understanding
I want to begin by approaching conversation as a way of coming to an understanding (sometimes called a dialogic structure of understanding). This particular way of approaching matters is linked to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. He describes conversation thus:
[It] is a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is a characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on a subject. (Gadamer 1979: 347)
In conversation, knowledge is not a fixed thing or commodity to be grasped. It is not something ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. Rather, it is an aspect of a process. It arises out of interaction. The metaphor that Gadamer uses is that of the horizon. He argues that we each bring prejudices (or pre-judgments) to encounters. We have, what he calls, our own ‘horizon of understanding’. This is ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be see from a particular vantage point’ (ibid: 143). With these pre-judgments and understandings we involve ourselves in what is being said. In conversation we try to understand a horizon that is not our own in relation to our own. We have to put our own prejudices (pre-judgments) and understandings to the test. ‘Only by seeking to learn from the ‘other’, only by fully grasping its claims upon one can it be critically encountered’ (Bernstein 1991: 4). We have to open ourselves to the full power of what the ‘other’ is saying. ‘Such an opening does not entail agreement but rather the to-and-fro play of dialogue’ (op cit). We seek to discover other peoples’ standpoint and horizon. By so doing their ideas become intelligible, without our necessarily having to agree with them (Gadamer 1979: 270), we can come to terms with the other (Crowell 1990: 358).
The concern is not to ‘win the argument’, but to advance understanding and human well being. Agreement cannot be imposed, but rests on common conviction (Habermas 1984: 285-287). In this, the understanding we bring from the past is tested in encounters with the present and forms what we take into the future (Louden 1991: 106). We experience a ‘fusion of horizons’.
The horizon of the present is being continually formed, in that we have continually to test all our prejudices. An important part of that testings is the encounter with the past and the understanding of the tradition from which we come… In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going on, for there old and new continually grow together to make something of living value, without either being explicitly distinguished from the other. (Gadamer 1979: 273)
Whether ‘fusion’ is quite the right word is a matter of debate. It does not quite fit the ‘ruptures that dis-turb our attempts to reconcile different ethical-political horizons’ (Bernstein 1991: 10). However, what we do know is that in that ‘moment’ our own horizon is enriched and we gain knowledge of ourselves. Emotions and virtues
For there to be dialogue in the dictionary or etymologically sense we look to dia meaning two or between or across and logos speech or ‘what is talked about’. Dialogue is , thus, speech across, between or through two people. It entails a particular kind of relationship and interaction. In this sense it is not so much a specific communicative form of question and answer, ‘but at heart a kind of social relation that engages its participants’ (Burbules 1993: 19). It entails certain virtues and emotions. Burbules lists some of these:
concern: In being with our partners in conversation, to engage them with us, there is more going on than talk about the overt topic. There is a social bond that entails interest in, and a commitment to the other.
trust: We have to take what others are saying on faith – and there can be some risk in this.
respect: While there may be large differences between partners in conversation, the process can go on if there is mutual regard. This involves the idea that everyone is equal in some basic way and entails a commitment to being fair-minded, opposing degradation and rejecting exploitation.
appreciation: Linked to respect, this entails valuing the unique qualities that others bring. affection. Conversation involves a feeling with, and for, our partners.
hope: While not being purely emotional, hope is central. We engage in conversation in the belief that it holds possibility. Often it is not clear what we will gain or learn, but faith in the inherent value of education carries us forward.
So it is, Martin Buber believed, that real educators teach most successfully when they are not consciously trying to teach at all, but when they act spontaneously out of their own life. ‘Then he can gain the pupil’s confidence; he can convince the adolescent that there is human truth, that existence has a meaning. And when the pupil’s confidence has been won, ‘his resistance against being educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the educator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns to ask….’ (Hodes 1972: 137).
To Read the Rest and Access More Resources
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Danny O'Brien -- We Beat Them to Lima: Opening a New Front Against Secret IP Treaties
We Beat Them to Lima: Opening a New Front Against Secret IP Treaties
by Danny O'Brien
Electronic Frontier Foundation
An expanded edition of EFFector, EFF's almost-weekly newsletter.
I’m Danny O’Brien, EFF’s new International Director. Five years ago, I worked on the EFF team that identified the threat of ACTA, a secret global intellectual property treaty we discovered was being used to smuggle Internet control provisions into the laws of over thirty countries. Together with an amazing worldwide coalition of activists from Europe to South Korea, we beat back that threat.
I’m writing to you today to explain what's happening with the new ACTA: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). TPP has been around since the Bush administration, but recently the pace has picked up, with governments saying they want to get the agreement signed and done by the end of this year.
Global activism can stop TPP, but preventing the endless merry-go-round of new IP treaties means tackling the problem at its roots. I'd like to describe what we're doing on both those fronts, and how you can help. But first, I'd like you to meet this gentleman:
Meet Michael Froman: The Most Important Man in Global Copyright
This is Michael Froman, and barring a scandal, he's about to be the new United States Trade Representative (USTR). The U.S. Trade Representative negotiates international trade agreements on behalf of the United States. Congress has one opportunity to ask him questions at his nomination hearing.
They should take full advantage of it. Right now, the only reason the public knows anything about what the USTR is doing on IP is that whistleblowers participating in the treaty process have leaked what they can. (Congressman Darrell Issa re-published the leaks on his own office site, over the USTR's objections).
Those documents show that the American proposals for the Trans-Pacific Partnership would export the worst of modern U.S. copyright law, and thwart other countries' ability to create laws that best meet their domestic needs:
The proposed rules could prevent individuals from circumventing DRM—the technical barriers put in place to make copying, accessing, and sharing copyrighted content more difficult. This would hinder technical fixes necessary to make content accessible for the blind or to unlock your phone.
It contains provisions that would, by default, regulate "temporary" reproductions of copyrighted files, thereby restricting all kinds of intrinsic functions of your computer.
It increases copyright terms well beyond international standards, adding some 20 years to copyright terms worldwide, potentially robbing the public domain of decades of cultural works.
In many countries, an allegation of infringement is not enough to get material taken offline. TPP’s proposals, by contrast, put in place a system (similar to the one we have in the U.S.) that encourages ISPs to take down content based on nothing but a notice. We’ve seen how that can be abused here—do we really want to export it wholesale?
Treaties like this also help to fossilize existing U.S. law and force other countries to sign up for American missteps. Momentum in D.C. for rolling back copyright terms and DRM law is growing, but opponents of those changes have argued that lawmakers can't undo their own mistakes—because, they say, we've already signed onto IP trade agreements that we supposedly can't undo.
To Read the Rest of the Statement, Access More Resources, and Learn How You Can Help
by Danny O'Brien
Electronic Frontier Foundation
An expanded edition of EFFector, EFF's almost-weekly newsletter.
I’m Danny O’Brien, EFF’s new International Director. Five years ago, I worked on the EFF team that identified the threat of ACTA, a secret global intellectual property treaty we discovered was being used to smuggle Internet control provisions into the laws of over thirty countries. Together with an amazing worldwide coalition of activists from Europe to South Korea, we beat back that threat.
I’m writing to you today to explain what's happening with the new ACTA: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). TPP has been around since the Bush administration, but recently the pace has picked up, with governments saying they want to get the agreement signed and done by the end of this year.
Global activism can stop TPP, but preventing the endless merry-go-round of new IP treaties means tackling the problem at its roots. I'd like to describe what we're doing on both those fronts, and how you can help. But first, I'd like you to meet this gentleman:
Meet Michael Froman: The Most Important Man in Global Copyright
This is Michael Froman, and barring a scandal, he's about to be the new United States Trade Representative (USTR). The U.S. Trade Representative negotiates international trade agreements on behalf of the United States. Congress has one opportunity to ask him questions at his nomination hearing.
They should take full advantage of it. Right now, the only reason the public knows anything about what the USTR is doing on IP is that whistleblowers participating in the treaty process have leaked what they can. (Congressman Darrell Issa re-published the leaks on his own office site, over the USTR's objections).
Those documents show that the American proposals for the Trans-Pacific Partnership would export the worst of modern U.S. copyright law, and thwart other countries' ability to create laws that best meet their domestic needs:
The proposed rules could prevent individuals from circumventing DRM—the technical barriers put in place to make copying, accessing, and sharing copyrighted content more difficult. This would hinder technical fixes necessary to make content accessible for the blind or to unlock your phone.
It contains provisions that would, by default, regulate "temporary" reproductions of copyrighted files, thereby restricting all kinds of intrinsic functions of your computer.
It increases copyright terms well beyond international standards, adding some 20 years to copyright terms worldwide, potentially robbing the public domain of decades of cultural works.
In many countries, an allegation of infringement is not enough to get material taken offline. TPP’s proposals, by contrast, put in place a system (similar to the one we have in the U.S.) that encourages ISPs to take down content based on nothing but a notice. We’ve seen how that can be abused here—do we really want to export it wholesale?
Treaties like this also help to fossilize existing U.S. law and force other countries to sign up for American missteps. Momentum in D.C. for rolling back copyright terms and DRM law is growing, but opponents of those changes have argued that lawmakers can't undo their own mistakes—because, they say, we've already signed onto IP trade agreements that we supposedly can't undo.
To Read the Rest of the Statement, Access More Resources, and Learn How You Can Help
Monday, May 13, 2013
John Engle -- August and Everything After: A Half-Century of Surfing in Cinema
August and Everything After: A Half-Century of Surfing in Cinema
by John Engle
Bright Lights Film Journal
...
The tensions of these real and screen lives have in large part remained those of the film genre Gidget engendered. In the half-century since, from the Beach Party franchise and its early '60s spin-offs, through Big Wednesday, Point Break, Blue Crush, and many others, and on to Chasing Mavericks in 2012, filmmakers have gone to the sand a couple dozen times to produce narratives either focused expressively on surfing as sport or obsessive life choice, or at least as significant background informing and directing the film's meaning. The result has been movies that are often more incisively pertinent in their treatment of growing up, family tensions, a world of dizzying social change, race and class, and the seductive lure of commerce and appearance than their wicked barrels, great tans, and dudespeak might presage. With an eye to the meanings behind their attractive surfaces, I'll be looking at a handful of these, at least one from each decade, for the most part relatively high-profile examples of a film type that, if rarely the source of smash hits, has generally met with commercial success. Hardening firmly in place by the 1970s, a highly restrictive formula thereafter rules the near totality of these films: given their interest in young people on the cusp of adult life, it's not without a certain logic that they return repeatedly to such story elements as the wise mentor, the temptation to sell out, the preparation sequence, and the concluding challenge or competition. The remarks to follow will examine the genre's creation in the beach-craze '60s, then turn to its elaboration in what one might consider the main line of "classic" surf films, with their reliably formulaic focus on childhood's end; the conclusion will explore how, while remaining generally faithful to established patterns, certain films have brought within their widened purview broader social and political issues. With the exception of Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer (1966) — a documentary but vaguely story-centered and, in any case, so iconic as to be compulsory — all of the films under discussion are pure narratives. As such, they should be distinguished from the grainy collections of hot rides Greg Noll brought to stoked kids in countless multipurpose halls and their often lyrical or thrilling cinematic descendants. Whether big deals like Riding Giants and Step into Liquid, or smaller, edgier efforts like BS!, these documentaries are absolutely central to the surfing subculture and merit separate study, with their specialist target audience, their shared values, and visual assumptions.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the first treatments of waveriding were documentary in nature and aimed at the widest possible audience. Like les Pathé-Frères, who put together 100 minutes on Le Surfing: Sport national des iles Hawaii in 1911, filmmakers in the first half of the century responded periodically to a curious public's hunger for images of exotic locales and practices that, even in the era of grand liners and early aviation, remained largely inaccessible. By the thirties, in any case, the word on surfing was getting out, if Hawaiian Holiday, the first cinematic narrative treatment of the sport, is any indication. In this 1937 Mickey Mouse featurette, Goofy recklessly challenges waves that, with the typical extraordinary range of Disney's animation teams, manage at once to be dumb funny, anthropomorphically nasty, and possessed of a frothy, sculpted loveliness drawn straight from Hokusai. While the cartoon is (somewhat speciously) considered the source of the term goofy-footed for surfers who, like its hero, lead with their right foot, its variation on the timeless theme of the arrogant individual chastised by a recalcitrant natural world in fact says little more about surfing than that it was just edging into the public consciousness. It would take the '50s and early '60s and the sport's headlong drop into popular culture before filmmakers would begin to recognize and exploit its rich visual and thematic possibilities.
And what visuals, for there is something basically unbelievable about human beings standing up on a tumbling wave, not to mention carving sleek sweeps and tight reverses back up its face. Cinematically, what's not to like about good-looking kids in a dream locale practicing a potentially dangerous sport that, even straight-on from a fixed shore location in black and white, films like a million bucks? Considered a moment, however, the scene is much more than its very pretty pictures, in large part because of the richly conflicting signals it emits. As sport, identity definer, and style locus, the surfing we have come to know these last decades is a space of, variously, big-money competition, reverent communication with the natural world, heavy partying, one-to-one confrontation with appalling physical force, proprietary localism of the ugliest sort, New Age self-discovery. It is a counterculture and a culture, a way to rebel and a way to grow up, and some live an entire adult life, work and all, still somehow rhythmed by the daily wave report. Surfing is the Beach Boys sweet in their striped Kingston Trio short-sleeve button-downs, and it's Dora dive-bombing kooks and bouncing checks. It's the garden and the salesmen who slither into it. Let's go surfin' now, everybody's learnin' how, we are joyfully urged, but to paddle out as the new guy is in fact to try entering the most closed of societies. Surfing can seem like an ocean of style, posing, and attitude, but out in the impact zone and beyond, the superficial abruptly washes off. To choose a short board or long, three fins or one, can be no less than to define different selves and value systems.
The very physical space offers an equally rich palette of thematic opportunity. From knee-high kids' stuff to Fukushima, pure fluid energy rears in defiance at sudden, solid resistance. The arriving swell is pattern and endless variety, or as Laird Hamilton says of the big ones in The Wave, "it's never the same mountain" (72). Proceeding in stately sequence, breakers seem all ruler-edged order, but of course they are also sites of chaos and fear. There the simple can become "in practice immediately complex," writes Woolf in To the Lighthouse, "as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests." Wild swings of perspective rule the sand as well, for what place is more one for sun-drenched, thought-free lotus-eating than the beach. Yet on that thin strip of dry land the tragic drama of our collective addiction to fossil fuels will play out first. And even carefree Waikiki lies hard by an ocean's unfathomable mass with its troubling, timeless reach of myth and suggestion. It is on the shore after all that Wordsworth rejects that world that is too much with us, yearning seaward to affirm the deeper truths of Proteus and Triton. The beach is just the beach, and it is much more than that. The greatest of the wavewriters, Daniel Duane, recognizes the way the surf scene can encode paradox, locate that sweet spot where the deeply complex and the unreflective simple both somehow find their footing.
...
To Read the Entire Essay
by John Engle
Bright Lights Film Journal
...
The tensions of these real and screen lives have in large part remained those of the film genre Gidget engendered. In the half-century since, from the Beach Party franchise and its early '60s spin-offs, through Big Wednesday, Point Break, Blue Crush, and many others, and on to Chasing Mavericks in 2012, filmmakers have gone to the sand a couple dozen times to produce narratives either focused expressively on surfing as sport or obsessive life choice, or at least as significant background informing and directing the film's meaning. The result has been movies that are often more incisively pertinent in their treatment of growing up, family tensions, a world of dizzying social change, race and class, and the seductive lure of commerce and appearance than their wicked barrels, great tans, and dudespeak might presage. With an eye to the meanings behind their attractive surfaces, I'll be looking at a handful of these, at least one from each decade, for the most part relatively high-profile examples of a film type that, if rarely the source of smash hits, has generally met with commercial success. Hardening firmly in place by the 1970s, a highly restrictive formula thereafter rules the near totality of these films: given their interest in young people on the cusp of adult life, it's not without a certain logic that they return repeatedly to such story elements as the wise mentor, the temptation to sell out, the preparation sequence, and the concluding challenge or competition. The remarks to follow will examine the genre's creation in the beach-craze '60s, then turn to its elaboration in what one might consider the main line of "classic" surf films, with their reliably formulaic focus on childhood's end; the conclusion will explore how, while remaining generally faithful to established patterns, certain films have brought within their widened purview broader social and political issues. With the exception of Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer (1966) — a documentary but vaguely story-centered and, in any case, so iconic as to be compulsory — all of the films under discussion are pure narratives. As such, they should be distinguished from the grainy collections of hot rides Greg Noll brought to stoked kids in countless multipurpose halls and their often lyrical or thrilling cinematic descendants. Whether big deals like Riding Giants and Step into Liquid, or smaller, edgier efforts like BS!, these documentaries are absolutely central to the surfing subculture and merit separate study, with their specialist target audience, their shared values, and visual assumptions.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the first treatments of waveriding were documentary in nature and aimed at the widest possible audience. Like les Pathé-Frères, who put together 100 minutes on Le Surfing: Sport national des iles Hawaii in 1911, filmmakers in the first half of the century responded periodically to a curious public's hunger for images of exotic locales and practices that, even in the era of grand liners and early aviation, remained largely inaccessible. By the thirties, in any case, the word on surfing was getting out, if Hawaiian Holiday, the first cinematic narrative treatment of the sport, is any indication. In this 1937 Mickey Mouse featurette, Goofy recklessly challenges waves that, with the typical extraordinary range of Disney's animation teams, manage at once to be dumb funny, anthropomorphically nasty, and possessed of a frothy, sculpted loveliness drawn straight from Hokusai. While the cartoon is (somewhat speciously) considered the source of the term goofy-footed for surfers who, like its hero, lead with their right foot, its variation on the timeless theme of the arrogant individual chastised by a recalcitrant natural world in fact says little more about surfing than that it was just edging into the public consciousness. It would take the '50s and early '60s and the sport's headlong drop into popular culture before filmmakers would begin to recognize and exploit its rich visual and thematic possibilities.
And what visuals, for there is something basically unbelievable about human beings standing up on a tumbling wave, not to mention carving sleek sweeps and tight reverses back up its face. Cinematically, what's not to like about good-looking kids in a dream locale practicing a potentially dangerous sport that, even straight-on from a fixed shore location in black and white, films like a million bucks? Considered a moment, however, the scene is much more than its very pretty pictures, in large part because of the richly conflicting signals it emits. As sport, identity definer, and style locus, the surfing we have come to know these last decades is a space of, variously, big-money competition, reverent communication with the natural world, heavy partying, one-to-one confrontation with appalling physical force, proprietary localism of the ugliest sort, New Age self-discovery. It is a counterculture and a culture, a way to rebel and a way to grow up, and some live an entire adult life, work and all, still somehow rhythmed by the daily wave report. Surfing is the Beach Boys sweet in their striped Kingston Trio short-sleeve button-downs, and it's Dora dive-bombing kooks and bouncing checks. It's the garden and the salesmen who slither into it. Let's go surfin' now, everybody's learnin' how, we are joyfully urged, but to paddle out as the new guy is in fact to try entering the most closed of societies. Surfing can seem like an ocean of style, posing, and attitude, but out in the impact zone and beyond, the superficial abruptly washes off. To choose a short board or long, three fins or one, can be no less than to define different selves and value systems.
The very physical space offers an equally rich palette of thematic opportunity. From knee-high kids' stuff to Fukushima, pure fluid energy rears in defiance at sudden, solid resistance. The arriving swell is pattern and endless variety, or as Laird Hamilton says of the big ones in The Wave, "it's never the same mountain" (72). Proceeding in stately sequence, breakers seem all ruler-edged order, but of course they are also sites of chaos and fear. There the simple can become "in practice immediately complex," writes Woolf in To the Lighthouse, "as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests." Wild swings of perspective rule the sand as well, for what place is more one for sun-drenched, thought-free lotus-eating than the beach. Yet on that thin strip of dry land the tragic drama of our collective addiction to fossil fuels will play out first. And even carefree Waikiki lies hard by an ocean's unfathomable mass with its troubling, timeless reach of myth and suggestion. It is on the shore after all that Wordsworth rejects that world that is too much with us, yearning seaward to affirm the deeper truths of Proteus and Triton. The beach is just the beach, and it is much more than that. The greatest of the wavewriters, Daniel Duane, recognizes the way the surf scene can encode paradox, locate that sweet spot where the deeply complex and the unreflective simple both somehow find their footing.
...
To Read the Entire Essay
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Three Time Covers From the Last Five Years
Check out Angus Johnston's post on three Time covers from the last five years. Is there a purpose in "convincing" a quickly politicizing and discontented generation they are actually "just" vapid and selfish.
More resources:
Matt Bors: Millennials Aren't Lazy
More resources:
Matt Bors: Millennials Aren't Lazy
Resources for Summer ENG 102
PhD Comics: It's in the Syllabus
The Political Compass Test
The Central Park Five
Matt Bors: Millennials Aren't Lazy; Angus Johnston: The Incredibly Rapid Decline and Fall of American Youth
Adam Mordecai: 9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact
Ruben Fischer-Baum -- Infographic: Is Your State's Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably)
Mark K. Smith: Dialogue and conversation for learning, education and change
"'Astoundingly Disturbing': Obama Administration Claims Power to Wage Endless War Across the Globe."
The Political Compass Test
The Central Park Five
Matt Bors: Millennials Aren't Lazy; Angus Johnston: The Incredibly Rapid Decline and Fall of American Youth
Adam Mordecai: 9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact
Ruben Fischer-Baum -- Infographic: Is Your State's Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably)
Mark K. Smith: Dialogue and conversation for learning, education and change
"'Astoundingly Disturbing': Obama Administration Claims Power to Wage Endless War Across the Globe."
Thursday, May 09, 2013
CunninLynguists: A Piece of Strange
[MB: starting on the International Film Studies composition books]
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Naam: Naam
[MB: finally finished grading the final essays from my three writing courses! This helped me get through the last of them]
David Graeber and Criag Calhoun: The Democracy Project
The Democracy Project
Speakers: David Graeber and Craig Calhoun
The London School of Economics and Political Science
From the earliest meetings for Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber felt that something was different from previous demonstrations. What was it about this particular movement that worked this time? And what can we now do to make our world more democratic again? Graeber presents a vital new exploration of anti-capitalist dissent, looking at the actions of the 99% and revealing the alternative political and economic possibilities of our future.
David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, who has been involved with the Occupy movement most actively at Wall Street. He is widely credited with coining the phrase "We are the 99%" and is the author of the widely praised Debt: The First 5000 Years. His new book The Democracy Project is published by Allen Lane.
Craig Calhoun is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. He took up his post as LSE Director on 1 September 2012, having left the United States where he was University Professor at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council. He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
To Listen to the Conversation
Speakers: David Graeber and Craig Calhoun
The London School of Economics and Political Science
From the earliest meetings for Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber felt that something was different from previous demonstrations. What was it about this particular movement that worked this time? And what can we now do to make our world more democratic again? Graeber presents a vital new exploration of anti-capitalist dissent, looking at the actions of the 99% and revealing the alternative political and economic possibilities of our future.
David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, who has been involved with the Occupy movement most actively at Wall Street. He is widely credited with coining the phrase "We are the 99%" and is the author of the widely praised Debt: The First 5000 Years. His new book The Democracy Project is published by Allen Lane.
Craig Calhoun is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. He took up his post as LSE Director on 1 September 2012, having left the United States where he was University Professor at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council. He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
To Listen to the Conversation
Melissa A. Fabello: Five Locker Room Myths About Penises Debunked
Five Locker Room Myths About Penises Debunked
by Melissa A. Fabello
Everyday Feminism
As the sixth graders noisily filed out of the library, I uncrumpled the index card and smoothed it over against my thigh.
The boy who had dropped it into the anonymous question box in my sex education class told me that he felt very strongly about it and wanted me to read it right away – anonymity be damned.
I passed the card over to my co-facilitator, a smile forming across my lips. “This one is endearing,” I said.
The card read: Why do boys’ penises grow when they see a cute girl?
What a vitally important question to know the answer to! It’s so imperative for us to understand our own bodies and why they react the way that they do.
Reading the question, I remembered – suddenly, joltingly – how confusing it is when your body does things that you don’t understand and can’t ask about.
Whispers from the mainstream media, pornography, friends, and locker room walls sell lies, telling us what we want to hear, convincing us of untruths.
It’s like a game of Telephone, but what’s at stake is our understanding of ourselves and our relationships.
And that’s a dangerous game.
So here’s the truth – about penises.
To Read the Rest
by Melissa A. Fabello
Everyday Feminism
As the sixth graders noisily filed out of the library, I uncrumpled the index card and smoothed it over against my thigh.
The boy who had dropped it into the anonymous question box in my sex education class told me that he felt very strongly about it and wanted me to read it right away – anonymity be damned.
I passed the card over to my co-facilitator, a smile forming across my lips. “This one is endearing,” I said.
The card read: Why do boys’ penises grow when they see a cute girl?
What a vitally important question to know the answer to! It’s so imperative for us to understand our own bodies and why they react the way that they do.
Reading the question, I remembered – suddenly, joltingly – how confusing it is when your body does things that you don’t understand and can’t ask about.
Whispers from the mainstream media, pornography, friends, and locker room walls sell lies, telling us what we want to hear, convincing us of untruths.
It’s like a game of Telephone, but what’s at stake is our understanding of ourselves and our relationships.
And that’s a dangerous game.
So here’s the truth – about penises.
To Read the Rest
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Response to HUM 221 Finals and Course
My comment on FB before heading to the final: "Heading to my Peace & Conflict Studies course to give a final that is not a test, but instead is a consensus decision-making/direct democracy style discussion of possible political tactics and solutions -- solidarity!"
My thoughts afterward:
My students just radicalized my understanding of teaching and education -- I was dreading that Summer I courses were starting Monday, now I am excited to start off my classes immediately doing this style of learning/discussion......
HUM 221 students, please take the time to leave some comments about the course content, the workbook, ideas/theories discussed, and/or the final. If you leave comments for any of the guest speakers, I will share it with them. Please feel free to do this anonymous or to leave your name.
Solidarity, Michael Benton
My thoughts afterward:
My students just radicalized my understanding of teaching and education -- I was dreading that Summer I courses were starting Monday, now I am excited to start off my classes immediately doing this style of learning/discussion......
HUM 221 students, please take the time to leave some comments about the course content, the workbook, ideas/theories discussed, and/or the final. If you leave comments for any of the guest speakers, I will share it with them. Please feel free to do this anonymous or to leave your name.
Solidarity, Michael Benton
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