jude folly

Recently I read this nonfiction piece by Frank Tempone called “Born Again”, featured in the literary magazine Upstreet. (Spoiler to the evangelical crowd: it’s got nothing to do with any come-to-Jesus moment.) I recommend this piece for depicting the harrowing pity a son might experience when first acknowledging his father’s vulnerability, especially that of an authoritarian patriarch; overall, an enjoyable and pathos-inducing story.

(pay no attention to the voice coming out of that box…)

By now you should have heard stories about ‘food rationing’ at the big box stores and the link to the global food crisis; while I would never want to diminish the staggering depth and scope of human hunger worldwide, I find the reportage about wholesale and retail rice supplies to err on the side of exaggeration–on a technicolor scale. 

If you’ve paid attention, you’ve heard the word “ration” and phrases like “not since World War II” bandied about, which evoke times of upheaval and uncertainty. There’s no denying how startling the increase in the price of rice  has been over the past year and that rice producing nations have limited exports to hold down the staple’s cost at home. Yet the hysteria journalists seem all too willing to stir up, I find quite tactless and annoying at best. As with oil, consumers should focus their ire on the forces at play in the distribution of rice and not so much on hype about dwindling supplies.

Very reluctantly I’ve added some content to the ‘about‘ page of this site. I anticipate it changing… some time. Funny that without content it received more hits than this blog.

I neglected to acknowledge Julia and Jimmy from Blue Mouse Monkey who got this site running. I recommend them to anyone wanting a web site designed and prepped for self-directed content management. 

Big news from the medical research community: a study presented by McNesse State University and Louisiana State University describes the antibiotic potential of proteins found in alligator blood. I get a kick how a news headline could provoke a visceral  response to the idea of ingesting alligator blood for medicinal purposes.

Given the geezer I am, I’m mentioning this ‘discovery’ as a come-lately experience this past Fri. 4 April. While listening to Indie 103.1FM my ears perked up when a Brooklyn-based trio called A Place to Bury Strangers mesermized me with a delightfully dark ditty, “Ocean”. I heard strains of Joy Division, The Cure and early ’90s shoe-gaze yearning layered into this ominous and thrilling tune. Give ‘em a listen.

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

   – Bono Hewson, “Pride”

I like how a narrative from the Bible can sometimes capture, or serve as an emblem for, contemporary times. Babel seemed a civilization unified by one vision and one language until their arrogance caught its people up in a sudden blast of wind that thwarted their goal.

This I mention as today I cast my words into what feels like an oceanic clatter of voices drawn together–not in service of one vision, but by an infinite variety of motivations and intentions. Though I hesitate to admit it, I think the most fundamental impulse that writing on a blog reveals is the one inside each person that says ‘look at me!’–the longing to be acknowledged, which has often played out in human history on an unfathomable scale. The Denver hip hop act Flobots recently released the tune “Handlebars”, which illustrates this in a timely fashion.

Anyway, I look forward to contributing subsequent comments on politics and culture, wielding my oblique and, perhaps sometimes troubling, point of view about the human condition (why we do or say what we do or say); where fear throttles the senses and imagination (didja hear the one about Sen. Obama, Rev. Wright and Minister Farrakhan, who walk into a bar...?).