Peter Kang in Brief

Pretty Cool Infographic on the First 100 Days

How FDR-esque will Obama be in his first 100 days?

Why I generally stay away from buying things.

From Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety.

Sunday Morning in Red Hook

Kitty and I rode our bikes to Red Hook this morning for some brunch at Hope & Anchor (pictured). Our cheeks were rosy red from the cold weather.
 
After a satisfying meal of eggs and hash (and excellent coffee), we rode over to IKEA and picked up some stuff for the kitchen. I also got some cups and cookware for the office. I had to ride one-handed all the way back home in order to carry everything. To bike around this late in the year is awesome. I also love productive Sunday mornings.

Yummy at Gyu-Kaku

Some Kobe beef filet mignon and lobster tail ready for the BBQ.

Walking under big cranes

Always a bit scary, but they're fun to look at, especially when people are at the top working. Modern day dinosaurs. (on 36th and 5th Ave)

DIY Poncho

Today was the second time I attempted a garbage bag poncho for Chocolate. I think it turned out much better. I used a Glad ForceFlex, cut a small hole up top for his head, and secured it with the doggie harness and an orange headband. The first pic is from my first try, which was okay, but he kept shaking he bag off his back. It kept him pretty dry although his face and ears got soaked.

   

Click here to download:

DIY_Poncho.zip (274 KB)

Salacious Cut-outs or Art?

On my way out of the office late last night, I spotted a binder with a missing cover that had a bunch of cut-out photos, both color and black & white, pasted on its pages. Upon closer examination, I realized that these were cut-outs of naked women posing nude or in very revealing lingerie. Like any sensible dude, I stood there and went through all the pages, carefully trying to make sense of this odd collection. There must have been at least fifty pages of cut-outs from porno mags of varying lewdness (or sophistication, if you'd like to put it that way), and looking at the hairstyles of the women, it seemed like these photos were from at least ten years ago if not longer. The first few pages were exclusively of Asian women, leading me to wonder if this was a particular fetish collection, but it began to diversify in later pages.

As I reviewed these pages (with my gloves on - just to be safe), I wondered how much work it took to create this binder and if these pages were created all at once or over a long period of time. There was a part of me that wanted to call it an art piece and take it home, but I realized it would probably be neglected after its initial day of being interesting and took pics of a few pages instead. I also thought about how fast and easy it is to access porn these days online and how maybe these kinds of pieces - as distasteful they may be for some - may become relics of a time when porn was regularly enjoyed in print form.

Note: I put a black image for the first pic since the rest of the pics are probably NSFW.

       

Click here to download:

Salacious_Cut-outs_or_Art.zip (489 KB)

Marilynne Robinson

Christianity has always held my interest. I grew up a preacher's kid, always enjoyed talking about religion with my leftist/Marxist Christian parents, and loved scrutinizing the right-wing, bigoted sermons of my youth pastor, a former gang-banger turned tongues-speaking faithful. By the time I got to college, I was as anti-Christian as I could be and a fierce atheist. My final exam in Contemporary Civilization, a thorough 20+ pages of handwritten Christian-bashing, earned me an A. Today, I'm a bit more tempered in my approach and a lot more careful in thinking about the people I consider Christians. It is a diverse designation with a whole range of beliefs, principles, and cultures. While some Christians, notably Evangelicals and other socially conservative types, may irritate me with their agendas, it would be unfair to accuse the whole lot of being that way.

Reading the Paris Review interview of author Marilynne Robinson was a breath of fresh air. In the intro, it is simply stated: "Robinson is a Christian whose faith is not easily reduced to generalities." And I've excerpted some parts (perhaps too much, but all her answers are good!) of the interview below to show what I mean. I have a feeling most Christians I know are not like this, but it's nice knowing how flexible Christianity can be to encompass someone like her.

ROBINSON
Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I've found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It's only very recently that you couldn't see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

INTERVIEWER
Is this frame of religion something we've lost?

ROBINSON
There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We're cultural creatures and meaning doesn't simply generate itself out of thin air; it's sustained by a cultural framework. It's like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.

INTERVIEWER
How does science fit into this framework?

ROBINSON
I read as much as I can of contemporary cosmology because reality itself is profoundly mysterious. Quantum theory and classical physics, for instance, are both lovely within their own limits and yet at present they cannot be reconciled with each other. If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.

INTERVIEWER
Are religion and science simply two systems that don't merge?

ROBINSON
The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I'm talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can't quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

INTERVIEWER
You've written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?

ROBINSON
No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It's a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it's always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don't talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.

The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

INTERVIEWER
But doesn't science address an objective notion of reality while religion addresses how we conceive of ourselves?

ROBINSON
As an achievement, science is itself a spectacular argument for the singularity of human beings among all things that exist. It has a prestige that comes with unambiguous changes in people's experience—space travel, immunizations. It has an authority that's based on its demonstrable power. But in discussions of human beings it tends to compare downwards: we're intelligent because hyenas are intelligent and we just took a few more leaps.

The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don't behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people. The Bible reiterates this endlessly.

INTERVIEWER
Did you ever have a religious awakening?

ROBINSON
No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don't simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.

INTERVIEWER
How would one learn to see ordinary things this way?

ROBINSON
It's not an acquired skill. It's a skill that we're born with that we lose. We learn not to do it.

INTERVIEWER
You've said that reading a footnote in Jonathan Edwards's "The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended" changed your consciousness. What was the footnote?

ROBINSON
It's not an attractive title for an essay, but in it he talks about the arbitrariness of "being" itself. He uses the metaphor of the reflected light of the moon, which we see as continuous light. Yet it is not intrinsic; it is continuously renewed as light. No physicist can tell you why things persist as they are, why one moment follows another. The reality we inhabit and treat like an old shoe is amazingly arbitrary.

INTERVIEWER
Does that arbitrariness include the supernatural?

ROBINSON
I'm not terribly persuaded by the word supernatural. I don't like the idea of the world as an encapsulated reality with intrusions made upon it selectively. The reality that we experience is part of the whole fabric of reality. To pretend that the universe is somewhere else doing something is really not true. We're right in the middle of it. Utterly dependent on it, utterly defined by it. If you read somebody like Wallace Stevens, he's basically saying the same thing.

INTERVIEWER
Do you believe in an afterlife?

ROBINSON
I assume immortality, but religion doesn't teach me to assume immortality. I assume immortality and this reinforces religion. But there's a qualitative difference between actually confronting death and thinking about death in the abstract. By the grace of God, it has been an abstract concept to me up to this point.

INTERVIEWER
It doesn't keep you up at night?

ROBINSON
No, I have benevolent insomnia. I wake up, and my mind is preternaturally clear. The world is quiet. I can read or write. It seems like stolen time. It seems like I have a twenty-eight-hour day. When I do think about death, the idea that life will be going on without me makes me melancholy. There's so much to miss: history and architecture! But it won't miss me.

INTERVIEWER
Is religion a way to feel comforted in the face of death?

ROBINSON
Faith always sounds like an act of will. Frankly, I don't know what faith in God means. For me, the experience is much more a sense of God. Nothing could be more miraculous than the fact that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and are moved by what is beautiful.

INTERVIEWER
Someone once said that there has to be a problem with Christianity because four hundred denominations later they still can't get it right.

ROBINSON
People in the churches worry about that, but would we be richer for the loss of Catholicism? Would we be richer for the loss of the Quakers? Isn't it true that every one of these traditions expresses Christianity in a way that the other traditions could not? It's prismatic.

Religion, however, has presented itself in some extremely unattractive forms. It has recruited people into excitements that don't look attractive to their neighbors. People seem to be profoundly disposed toward religion, yet they're not terribly good at it.

INTERVIEWER
Do you ever censor yourself in order to try to live up to a religious standard?

ROBINSON
It's not so much that I censor myself—I have to prod myself more often than not. I just get engulfed in whatever I'm thinking about, and I tend to forget that other people exist. I just don't do right by people in every circumstance. It's not that my religion inhibits me, it's that my religion is not always sufficient to overcome certain failings of mine, which tend toward solipsism.

Norman Rockwell

I remember going to a Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum about 4-5 years ago. There's a certain innocence and charm to his depiction of Middle America. You also have to give him credit for inspiring pieces like The Four Freedoms, which solidified the message of FDR's Four Freedoms speech in the American imagination.









What always troubled me about Norman Rockwell was that his artwork of peaceful and happy America had a marginalizing effect. It's what you hope is not true of most white Americans - that their vision of an ideal America is a safe and pleasant America in which everyone else is white and smiling.



And then I came across this - The Problem We All Live With (1964)



And I thought to myself - gee, wouldn't it have been great if Rockwell was still around to capture the events of Nov. 4 and also do for Barack what he did for JFK?

Speed the Plow

Watched a Broadway play tonight - a revival of David Mamet's Speed the Plow, which first came out in 1988. This time, the lead was Jeremy Piven, best known as Ari Gold from Entourage. And in the female lead role was none other than Peggy Olson -er- Elizabeth Moss of Mad Men fame. It's about two Hollywood producers looking to make big bucks with an action movie when a temp secretary comes between them and pushes her own agenda. Short review: second act sucked big-time. The lines they had for Elizabeth Moss was terrible - felt bad for her role - and the play has a forceful air as it ends with a whimper.

The last three plays I've watched - this one, Thurgood starring Laurence Fishbourne, and Beckett's Endgame have all been pretty disappointing. I wonder if it is because I am an ill-informed and impatient theater audience member or if these plays actually do a terrible job of connecting. Not sure. And not sure if I want to fork over more dollars to sit through these painful productions (well, Thurgood was at least entertaining in a sentimental way). Perhaps I should check out $20 off-Broadway shows with quirky stories and enthusiastic performances.