I don’t talk about music very much. I don’t have to imagine myself singing a song to enjoy it, so its not that personal for me. I love it, but I don’t seek my identity there. Lately, however, for one reason or another, I’ve been forced to endure a LOT of music that I hate.... and I have to ask why these bands even exist.

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The fundamental premise that Sophocles is expressing is simple:  there must be suffering.  Suffering is the tyrannical God which we have devised a thousand pastimes, a thousand lesser idols, and a thousand false Gods besides in our effort to escape.

“As in the past,
This law is immutable:
For mortals greatly to live is greatly to suffer.
Roving ( Read more... )

Religious conflict is always the most brutal, for it is here that the stakes are highest, where the power of meaning and truth becomes paramount.  One must, after all, defend the faith from all that would seek to destroy it, or prevent it from manifesting its values.

Of course, secular culture stupidifies this process significantly, as we can see ( Read more... )

I’ve recently been watching a lot of HBO’s prison soap-opera “Oz” on DVD.  I actually saw the first two seasons when they were originally aired, but stopped watching television altogether by the time the third season came out.  I could say a lot of things about this show.  It fascinates me.  The political motivations behind the choice of characters ( Read more... )

We do not know what is going on in the world.  We only know what is going on in the media.  It is easy, when one criticizes the media, to forget that it is all that one has access to.  This is a friendly reminder:  however well informed you think that you are, however careful you are about accepting information, however automatically you accept the ( Read more... )

“By the nineteenth century, “anthropology” became, to a large degree, a discursive practice whose systematic administrative function was to maintain belief in the existence of exotic and alien worlds without fusing the alien with our own world.  It became exactly, in this respect, terrestrial science fiction, dealing with terrestrial aliens, as ( Read more... )

I recently purchased the film Syriana, on what amounted to a whim.  It was cheap, and given my interest in the subject, I assumed that I would have some kind of strong feelings about it.  I should have known better when I saw that it was made by the same bozo that directed that dreary piece of arty garbage, Traffic, but blind to the inevitability ( Read more... )

There can be no question about it:  men have been liberated by the feminist movement.  Liberated from the responsibility of providing care, liberated from social obligation in the treatment of women, liberated from the need to protect, and most of all, liberated from the expectation of maturity that was measured by a man’s ability to meet these ( Read more... )

I have often stated that people use the lyrical images of music, as well as the public personae of the people who perform that music, as a means of defining their identities.  I have also stated that people use characters and concepts from the narratives of certain Hollywood movies, usually dramatic pictures, to accomplish the same task.  Why is it ( Read more... )

Cobra, a film which set a standard that would be followed by critically acclaimed pictures such as Schindler’s List, Amistad, Forrest Gump, and Like Water for Chocolate, represents some of the finest qualities of 80’s film making.  Sylvester Stallone’s touching screenplay tells the story of a hard-working police officer with a heart of gold and a ( Read more... )