core::minimalist

2 Corinthians 1:3-7

2011-04-01T09:50:00.000-05:00

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort."

April is the month of every year with the highest number of suicides, so be nice to your neighbors. If you have an encouraging word to spare, say it.

Thank you.

-Dann

_DZ

Jehovah's Witnesses: Using Jesus Against the Watchtower

2011-03-03T22:09:00.006-06:00

As I was walking with my friend Mike today, somewhere in the Philips neighborhood near Franklin, we approached a car parked at the curb. An older (greying) woman in the passenger’s seat rolled down her window, got our attention, and waved a magazine at us. “Can I give this to you? This is for your health!” I recognized it from fifteen feet away - it was a copy of Awake!, a witnessing tract used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A longtime cult in the US and now growing in popularity around the world, at first glance the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their theology look strikingly similar to Protestant Christianity. Where the paths split is when the JWs refuse to recognize the divinity of Jesus. So, if you look at it that with that in mind, the two theologies are actually completely different.

The only thing most Christians know about the JWs is that they are a cult with dangerous doctrine (which is true, more on that later). But the JWs are also a very proselytizing religion, going door to door and whatnot, and so Christians find themselves encountering far more JWs than they are usually comfortable with. But they know that they shouldn’t engage them (danger!), so they might mumble a hasty frightened response like “Um, no, yeah, I’m a Christian, so, uh, please go away.” This is sadly one of the most damaging things that one can do, because JWs are taught that Christians are afraid of them because they (the JWs) have the truth. Identifying oneself as a Christian and showing intimidation only reinforces that teaching.

Graciously, God has blessed me with a great relationship with a man who has spent years working with JWs, working to get them out of their organization, the Watchtower. He’s taught me tons of useful tips for use in talking with JWs, and here, on a cold Thursday in Minneapolis, I got a chance to use them.

I’m not much one for arguing theology with strangers, but I am very much into fighting false hope. The opposite of hope isn’t despair (because despair drives you to seek hope), but false hope, because once you find any kind of hope, you tend to rest in it until it is no longer hopeful. In offering God without Jesus, this woman was offering false hope that will leave people in hell. This was suddenly about spiritual warfare, heaven and hell. What followed was basically a spiritual version of a ‘breach and clear’ sequence straight out of a Clancy novel, because I wanted to present the real hope that Jesus has to offer.

I walked up to the car and took the magazine, holding it in my thick winter glove. I looked at the cover and then at the woman. (Set!) Meanwhile she had handed Mike a copy of Watchtower magazine. (Clear!)

“Is this about Jesus?” I asked. (Bam! I blow down the door.)

“This is for your health!” she replied.

“Oh. Because it looks like it’s about Jesus!” ( I gratuitously kick over the coat rack.)

I clumsily turned a few pages until my gloved hands held open a page-long article. The word “Shepherd” was in the headline.

“Is this about Jesus?” I asked, motioning to the headline. (Now I’m in middle of the room, red targeting lasers criss-crossing the smoke.)

She smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes it is.”

“Great! Because I love Jesus.” (I slide belly-first over a table.)

That made her look concerned and cautious.

“You know, a lot of people wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, I do, because Jesus is awesome.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “It is pretty amazing what he did for us on the cross.”

“I know! How he lived a perfect life and died on the cross for our sins, so that we might be reconciled to God.” (Muzzle-flash galore.)

She was nodding, knowingly.

“Man, I’m so thankful for how he changed my life. I pray to him all the time now!” (Bombshell!)

At this point my excitement in talking had taken over my mental preparation and clearheadedness, and instead of following up and asking her about Jesus, other tips that I had received started surfacing in my head.

Take the literature and keep the interaction short.

This actually applies much more to door-to-door interactions than to on-the-street ones, because JWs who are witnessing have a certain quota to meet. If you want to start a relationship with them, the best thing to do is to take the literature (they like that), and schedule a follow-up meeting with that same JW (they sometimes just send elders for follow-ups). The scheduled follow-up allows them to move on to the next house (they like that, too).

So I thanked her for the tract and Mike and I continued on our walk. I was happy with how things went, but I regret to say that I left out one of the most important points of Rapid-Fire Jesus Promotion: Acknowledge that you are sure in your experiences with Him and that you haven’t been lied to.

JWs are taught that people who believe that Jesus is God have been deceived, and when you face them with excitement over what Christ has done and surety that your convictions are genuine, that might find its way through a hole in their defenses. I forgot to do this, and the result is that she might have just left the conversation thinking that I was a babbling crazy person. Nice and enthusiastic, but misguided.

Hopefully God will use the “praying to Jesus” comment that I got in to work in her heart. Since JWs don’t believe that Jesus is divine, they don’t pray to him; praying to Jesus for them is heretical, like telling a Christian to pray to Moses. We’re not going to do it. Jesus’ death and ministry, his divine atonement for sin, is THE axis around which Christianity revolves. It is the central work to which all the of Old Testament points towards, and to which the entire New Testament points back. Without a divine Jesus, Christianity is worthless and going to church becomes a really dumb hobby.

This, the majestic work of a fully-divine-yet-fully human Jesus, is the weapon which we wield against the dangerous doctrine of the JWs. But we have to know how to use it well in order to be effective. There is little use in entrusting a soldier with a powerful rifle if he doesn’t know how to use it correctly. There are people in church who have encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and Jesus, but either don’t believe that is true or are not able to talk about it well. The mission of the Christian should be this - to yearn to know and love and savor and treasure and worship Jesus in order to proclaim Him effectively to neighbors and nations. My interaction this morning was less then ideal, but I hope that God will use it nonetheless. In the meantime, it’s back to my Bible to worship and savor Jesus, and back to looking for ways in which I can share Him with the world.

Black Swan: A Lesson in Broken Feminism

2011-01-10T17:53:00.005-06:00

(Picture from MoviePosters.com)

ALERT: This movie features scenes that the main character hallucinates, which I reference; therefore, movie spoilers are present.

Time and time again Darren Aronofsky succeeds in producing films that I can’t watch twice. Try as I might, I just cannot rustle up the will to re-watch any of his movies. Pi bored me almost to tears, Hugh “wolverine forever” Jackman ruined The Fountain, and Requiem for a Dream, despite all of its brilliance, left me with such psychological scars that I cringe just passing it on the shelf at the movie store. Aronofsky’s latest film, Black Swan, continues the trend, though this time its ideological bias is what ultimately renders it best left as a one-time experience.

Which is too bad, because as a movie, it is really well done. I’m a sucker for films featuring mental illness and this one not only capture that angle well, but soared as high as I think Aronofsky’s vision for it would allow. The levels of psychology explored in the mind of the main character, Nina (Natalie Portman) are intriguing without being overblowingly psychotic. On the surface, the storyline is an obvious tragedy: a young woman goes insane while trying to prepare herself for (and ultimately achieving) the so-called “perfect” performance of her career. A technically gifted ballerina, she is given a role where she must embody two characters: the technically perfect and reserved White Swan, and the mysterious, dark, sensual, passionate Black Swan; a literal Jekyll and Hyde of the ballet world.

All this time, her understudy, a girl named Lily, is a “free spirit” who, while lacking technical discipline, embodies the black swan almost perfectly. Nina must then fight not only her own lack of confidence in forgetting all that she has trained for up until this moment (in order to capture the spirit of the black swan), but also the lingering feeling that she may soon be replaced. The key that allows her to finally harmonize that black/white dichotomy in her final performance is an endorphin high brought about by a self-inflicted stab wound to the abdomen - a true Phyrric victory if there ever was one.

Underneath this tragedy, however, feminist themes run strong. The movie draws out scenes that emphasize the degrees to which Nina must go to be perfect: grapefruit-and-egg-white diets (followed by bingeing), weight-watching, a mother who constantly fusses, daily stretching and exercises, early nights filled with restless sleep, and long make-up application sessions. She is a doll in a dollhouse, marched from room to room, from home to rehearsal to stage to back home. "This is not freedom," the film seems to scream, "This is not normal!" The message is conveyed primarily in the scenes in which Nina hallucinates: a hang-nail removal having drastic consequences, a toenail cracking to uselessness, webbed feet, legs bending at odd angles. Her body is falling apart right before her eyes despite all of her attempts at control. Again the message here is clear: This is not worth it and everything will probably not be ok.

(Picture from the official webpage of Black Swan)

If Nina’s control won’t get her to the top, then what will? The answer seeps into nearly every sceme - her sexuality. Black Swan is rife with nods to the third wave of feminism, the lie that full knowledge and experience of feminine sexuality is not only the swiss-army knife of the modern woman, but even that it is the key to ultimate self-realization. While the viewer is told that Nina has has some sexual experiences in the past, for the most part she comes off rather priggish, naive, and sexually self-repressed. Her creepy ballet troupe director believes that breaking that repression will ultimately allow her to embody the sensual black swan, and takes it upon himself to facilitate the transition. He forces himself on her twice, once with a kiss to find out if she is good for the part (she bites him, somehow proving that she is), and another time gropes her and calls it “seduction.” (“See how easy it was for me to seduce you? Now I need you to be able to do that on queue!,” is the “life lesson” there.) I was at once horrified and impressed with the brazen misuse of such a loaded feminine term.

Perhaps most controversial about the movie is that he assigns Nina the “homework” of going home and touching herself, as if “self-discovery” and orgasm apart from relationship is a integral component of well-rounded femininity. To turn some feminist lingo on itself for a moment, it almost seems that the goal is for Nina, as an “animus”, to be a sort of “celibate priest incarnating God as she plays the role of a creator” of the rest of her self. Yet as she writhes on her bed in private, on the screen she remains no more than an object of scopic consumption. There is no power there - only weakness. This preoccupation with her myopic sexual release culminates in a lesbian sex hallucination completely devoid of intimacy. Not only is the act itself over far to soon for any meaningful climax to have been achieved (contributing to the pornographic and therefore exploitive nature of the scene), but its ultimate result is that Nina, thanks to vendrous mental delusions, stole her sense of sexual liberation from her understudy (her fantastical partner) instead of searching it out on her own. But hey, whatever helps fulfill her dream role, right? Don’t let consistency get in the way.

Despite criticisms some leniency may be required - this is, after all, a story about mental illness brought upon by eating disorders and a high-stress lifestyle in a fragile girl. But wait, no. The options that those in authority give Nina as ways to achieve her ultimate goal are ludicrous. Barbie-doll physique? Manipulative authority figures? Selfish sexual empowerment? This kind of ideology is ultimately what makes Black Swan difficult, if not impossible, to watch twice. Even if Nina hadn’t been mentally ill, the pathways that lead to her success are ultimately vapid and devoid of any true character development. That doesn’t make for a rewarding viewing experience. I don’t want to be entertained by being lied to. It’s sad, because the movie was so well done, but this is yet another Aronofsky film that will become but a memory of my twenties.

_DZ

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" or, Yes, Kanye is Insane

2010-12-11T05:58:00.003-06:00

Since Kanye West’s latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy “dropped” a few weeks back, people can’t stop talking about it. Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media both gave it a perfect score, and the single “Runaway” has over two-and-a-half million views on YouTube. His 35-minute video that accompanies the album has (counting both clean and unedited versions) close to twelve million views. Ridiculous. I don’t even follow any hip-hop/rap releases, and not only did I hear about it, but I sat through the whole half-hour ordeal. Oh, and about eight of those views that the single got are from me. So why does the press and the internet like this release so much? Heck, why do I like it so much?

Of course, West is still a complete egotist - his music is still a reflection of that personality. Allmusic.com puts it well:

“In some ways, [this album is] the culmination of [his] first four albums, but it does not merely draw characteristics from each one of them. The 13 tracks, eight of which are between five and nine minutes in length, sometimes fuse them together simultaneously. Consequently, the sonic and emotional layers are often difficult to pry apart and enumerate.”

What was good about (I think, specifically) Graduation and 808s & Heartbreak, here coalesce to form a holistic view of West, a view only bolstered by his latest media shenanigans. Beautiful...Fantasy is just completely Kanye - these 13 tracks are what he is about, inside and out. It is raw and even embarrassing at times. When, on “Runaway,” he claims to have taken a picture of his genitalia and emailed it to a woman, you get the idea that, so long as the lyric is not a prophesy about a aging NFL quarterback, that it is something that Kanye has actually done. Sad, but that is who he is, so “runaway from me, baby. Runaway!,” he pleads. Pitchfork elaborates:

“[W]ithout his exploding self-worth-- itself a cyclical reaction to the self-doubt so much of his music explores-- there would be no Twisted Fantasy. "Every superhero needs his theme music," he says on "POWER", and though he's far from the virtuous paragons of comic book lore, he's no less complex. In his public life, he exhibits vulnerability and invincibility in equal measure, but he's just as apt at villainy-- especially here.”

Kanye knows that he is fallen and so has to prop himself up. He has to build something out of nothing. And see, I don’t think that that is lost on us. Yes, the tracks are well-crafted and the bass is thumping, but what appeals so much about the album is that Kanye is effectively starving himself to death on top of a pillar in the town square. It’s a spectacle, an aestheticization of his own destruction.

This idea, I have also argued, is why Lady Gaga is so attractive. Just as Gaga “left her head and her heart on the dancefloor,” so to is Kanye baring himself, multitude of flaws and all. And, let’s not forget, Gaga already acted out her own death in a music video. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kanye’s next move echoed those impulses.

It’s said that the best music is that which does not bore the listener, and the more I listen to wider varieties of music, the more I find this to be, in fact, completely true. There are lots of things that can make music interesting: new sounds, new rhythms, quirky lyrics, etc, but I would argue that most important is the ability to show your personality through your music. David Bowie can change with the times and yet still be himself. Vernon Reid can smoooothly transition from a twenty-something shredder in neon tights to the anchor of a free-form jazz/rock hybrid collaboration. Lady Gaga is a wacked-out plastic disco antibarbie. Each time it inevitably shows in their music, and this is what makes it interesting. Ultimately, Beautiful...Fantasy is a solid record because it is inseparable from Kanye himself, and this is precisely why we are attracted to it. We aren’t really listening to slick production and bi-polar lyrics; we’re listening to a functionally insane man make music. And functionally insane men are interesting to us.

_DZ

Guest Post: Maria Rainier on Cultural Arrogance

2010-12-03T13:49:00.005-06:00

This week's post comes from Maria Rainier who contacted me like, a month ago, and offered to write a post. I'm pleased with how it turned out, even though it was a long time coming. Like me, Maria has experience living in Japan, and her views on cultural cross-pollination and adjustment, while unique, certainly resonate to some degree with my experience. That being said, her opinions are entirely her own and I welcome the diversity she brings to core::minimalist. I hope you enjoy her article, and feel free to give her link a click once you have reached the end!

_DZ

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Around the World in a Little Over 80 Days and What I Learned About Cultural Arrogance

Until I arrived, America was my promised land. And then it all went to hell. People didn’t greet me with huge smiles when I entered convenience stores and they didn’t give me an exaggerated bow when I left (they also threw my change back at me instead of placing it in a little plastic tray and gently nudging it across the counter toward me). Nobody had any sense of personal space in concerts or bars. Nobody had any manners. My friends gave me funny looks when I gave themomiage, or gifts. Everyone told me to stop apologizing.

To a college-bound kid who grew up in Japan, America was a nightmare.

And then there were the questions. It’s not news to most kids who grow up abroad that when you go (or go back) to America, you get an interesting array of questions. Here are some—word for word—that I was asked:

Do you eat raw fish?

Do you live in teepees?

Is Japan that island off the coast of Africa or somewhere?

Do you guys have gnats? I hate gnats.

Is Hiroshima still in ruins?

I won’t go into the Hiroshima bit. I want to, but I won’t. Instead, I highly recommend a great book, Stephen Walker’s Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.

Cultural Superiority: the American Way

What I will go into, however, is how appalled I was that when I offered a couple of American friends Japanese chocolate candies—and anyone who’s ever had Japanese candy knows that it’s phenomenal—they took one look at the foreign writing on it and said, “I don’t eat furren food.”

This would not be the last time I’d hear something to the effect of, “Why doesn’t the world do things theAmerican way?”

For a few years, I went through an I-hate-American-and-I-can’t-wait-to-graduate phase for this very reason. I found the Americans around me to be self-righteous, self-important, and self-serving. If it wasn’t in English and if it didn’t praise the Lawd or Amurrica (as the two are synonymous to many Americans I know), it was trash.

Cultural Superiority: Not Just the American Way

In 2007, I studied abroad in Europe. My home-stay family lived in northern Italy, where locals spoke more German than Italian. I found that if I spoke Italian to the town baker or gelato man, I got dirty looks. These looks, however, were nothing in comparison to the derision on the faces of Romans to whom I accidentally spoke German. German was the “lesser” language, while Italian was the language of the oppressors.

Similarly, when I visited my family in Japan that same year, I found that if there was a Mandarin-speaking person in a Japanese town, the usually humble and open-minded Japanese turned up their noses and protected their purses. Koreans and southeastern Asians had the same effect on many Japanese I saw.

Not too long ago, a Chinese trawler bumped into a Japanese patrol boat around what the Japanese call the Ryukyu Islands, which they boldly deemed their territory and therefore held the Chinese captain and crew hostage for days before returning them to their country. The history between these countries can’t be discounted—before WWII, Japan defeated Russia, China, and Korea, and the Imperial Army’s conduct there was less than reputable. Post-WWII turf wars aside, China and Japan haven’t been buddy-buddy on anything: China keeps kidnapping Japanese citizens and putting lead in their toothpaste, and many Japanese refuse to admit to the Nanking atrocity. That many Japanese citizens hold deep grudges and prejudices against the Chinese and feel a sense of cultural superiority over them is no exaggeration.

This sounds oddly familiar. Since the colonists’ defeat of the English oh-so-very-long-ago, many Americans can’t stop poking fun at the Brits and Europeans (and the latter can only laugh at American antics). Meanwhile, North American treatment of Latin Americans is beyond abysmal. That racial epithets—most of which I didn’t even know existed before I came to America—can be so blithely dropped in everyday conversation is a point in itself.

The Kamikaze Incident

Bigotry is alive and well, not that it’s news. In September of this year, an American military base employee in Japan ran over an elderly Japanese man going home from his garden plot across the road. He died three hours later. He also happened to be the vice chairman of the anti-base housing coalition, which happened to be having a very important meeting that day with a prominent Japanese official to prevent the nearby military base’s planned expansion. Local Japanese often fall victim to military personnel’s drunken driving and prejudices, ear-splitting and low-flying jets, and the humiliation of living under the thumb of the country that dropped not one but two atomic bombs on them over sixty years ago.

On that base, whispers quickly abounded among American military and civilians: Did he do it on purpose?

What for, how, and why, I might ask?

You know, they used to be kamikaze. . . .

Oh, right. That hugely misunderstood band of brothers who were forced or brain-washed into dying for their lying government and Emperor because if they didn’t, their families would be punished and they’d be sent to a deadly war in the Southeast, anyway. That thing that no one in Japan talks about anymore because it’s ludicrous and horrifying even to them. That thing that’s been falsely linked by the ever-so-fair-and-balanced Fox News to the 9/11 terrorists when in fact the kamikaze never once targeted civilians in a non-combat situation. Oh, yeah. That thing.

But I Don’t Mean to be a Killjoy

Yeah, American prejudices and examples of cultural superiority annoy me more than anyone else’s, I think. That’s my own bigotry. Bigotry is alive and well. Again, it’s not news. You don’t have to look far for it, either. I found it around the world.

The good news in all this? That there are sane people around the world, too, whose kindness knows few, if any, culturally implemented bounds. It was an American who let me cut thirty people in the security line at the Kansai International Airport when I had five minutes before my plane took off. It was a Japanese man that let me charge my camera battery and warm my frosted hands in his sake store in Iwakuni. It was a My Lai massacre survivor who hugged me when I told her that my mother was a Hiroshima victim. It was in Grand Cayman that locals and Americans worked together to shelter and feed abused and stray animals on the island. These are the truths that let me sleep at night.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching various online programs and blogging about student life issues. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Guest Post : Angelita Williams on The Russian Experience

2010-10-08T16:42:00.003-05:00

This is my first unsolicited guest post, which is rather exciting. Even more exciting is that Angelita's article is coming from a part of the world that I have never been to nor know much about. (She also cites The Paradox of Choice, which is one of my favorite books and definitely recommended reading.) She was great to work with, and very gracious as I was super busy and often late in getting back to her. That being said, I'm glad how this turned out: I really enjoyed her essay and I hope you will, too. I am still very open to guest writers, and if you think you have a story and experience to share, please email me and we can get working on fleshing out your ideas to the fullest potential!

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The Russian Experience: How My Time Abroad Changed My Perspective

When I was an undergraduate student a few years ago, I decided to take a semester to study in Russia. I had been studying the Russian language for a few years, and so I figured I should put my knowledge to some good use. However, what I didn't bank on was how much it would change my perspective on several different things, not least of which was my relationship to consumer goods.

It would be trite to say that America is a consumerist society mired in the acquisition of material goods. And whenever anyone said something to that effect, I always thought it was more of a stereotype than anything. However, when I went to Russia, I realized that there was more truth to the stereotype than I had ever imagined.

One difference that I encountered was the fact that no one kept tabs on anything. The Russian students I hung out with were very serious about sharing. When I was in college in America, there was always talk of "I got you the other day, now you owe me X." Not only did this notion of debt not surface among my friends, but whenever I told a Russian friend, "Hey, I owe you a meal; thanks for helping me out with this or that," he or she was not only dismissive, but actually confused. "What do you mean?" they would say. "I did it because you're my friend; you don't owe me anything." This idea that everyone has a share in everything, that when it comes to things ownership is irrelevant, is even reflecting in the language. "My" is often omitted in phrases like "I lost my key," and when you say "I have an X", the literal translation is "I am next to an X".

Another distinction between Russian and American students that I noticed was a profound respect for both the arts and sciences. Where I studied in America, if someone was studying hard sciences, he or she knew or cared little about things like literature, art, etc., while if you were a humanities student you didn't dabble in mathematics or physics. In other words, knowledge in America is considered to be black and white. You're either interested in one side of it or another. Most of the Russian students I met, however, drew inspiration from various fields, even if they were focusing on one in school.

One of the most refreshing differences I encountered was the fact that there was far less choice in terms of brands and products. Trips to the grocery store were simplified ten-fold simply because I wasn't being inundated by millions of different varieties of the same exact product. Of course, there were a few varieties, but not nearly as many as I was accustomed to in America. When I returned home, I had become so used to the simplicity that I found it frustrating to even step into a superstore such as we have. This reminded me of a recent book I read called "The Paradox of Choice". It was not until I experienced the alternative in Russia, that I saw author Barry Schwartz's theory--that too much consumer choice actually can cause anxiety and inhibit our ability to choose--in action.

This is not to say, however, that Russia doesn't have its fair share of problems, or that its culture is perfect or even preferable to American culture. However, it was a truly eye-opening experience in that it made me see my own way of living in a different light. What's more, spending six months in Russia also did much to dismantle the popular image I had of Russians as cold, suspicious people. And I think it's precisely this destruction of stereotypes that makes living in a different place so valuable an experience. If you have the chance, I think everyone should spend time abroad, no matter where you go.

This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online college courses. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

_DZ

On Cultivation Of Musical Tastes Via Old-School Serendipity

2010-10-05T16:28:00.002-05:00

One thing my resolution of not buying music for a year has taught me is that music is more than a commodity. It is more than something to be bought, consumed, and collected. Huge digital music libraries, in this day and age, don’t say much about their owners. Yet we continue to define ourselves by what style or artists we listen to. I think this is misguided - personal musical taste, rather than the musical collection, should be the object of curation.

This is somewhat paradoxical, because the primary way we expand and refine our taste is through acquiring new music. We buy new albums, give them a few spins, and, if we like them, keep them. If we don’t like them, we still keep them because A) the album was an investment and we don’t want to suffer the loss of getting rid of it, or B) the music has been ripped on our computer, and it now pads our iTunes song count. The ultimate end result of both reasons is that we accumulate music we don’t necessarily want. I’m dealing with this right now - I have a couple albums I impulsively purchased from Amazon MP3 at the end of last year, and now I never listen to them. I don’t want to delete them because that would effectively mean I lost $10. What should I do?

I don’t have this problem when I buy used CDs. If I buy a CD and end up not liking it, I give it away to a friend who may like it. If I have no interesting interested friends, I just take it to Goodwill; somebody else may enjoy it, and the money goes to support a good cause. I’ve gotten rid of scores of CDs this way. It’s great. Music on physical media is easy for me to get rid of. But could it be easier? What would be the easiest, most cost effective, legal way to discover new music? Let’s look at where the current options are lacking.

The obvious answer is bittorrent, but that is illegal. Internet radio stations like Pandora or Last.fm, or sweet sites like YouTube Disco, are legal, but they’re not very mobile yet. (You know, for the 95% of the market that the iPhone hasn’t penetrated.) And if you do hear something you like on those services, you still have to go out and buy an album. Besides, the key word in play is discovering new music. There is, almost by definition, a huge serendipity quotient here. This is not music that Amazon, iTunes, or Last.fm recommends to you. This is not borrowing a friend’s CD to give it a listen. This is music you may/would never have sought out on your own. This is browsing the “recent arrival” racks at your local record store.

But browsing racks takes a lot of time. You have to stand there and flip for the better part of half an hour. Also, you don’t know if you’re going to get something good; what if the CD is scratched? There are other downsides: record-store CDs are not (relatively) cheap. Most discs are near the $7 mark - a lot to spend on a album you’re not sure you’ll like. And if you don’t like it, you again have to deal with how or if you’ll get rid of it - kind of mentally taxing for what is supposed to be serendipitous.

So it’s clear we need a music format that is:

*Mobile

*Home to a wide range of music

*Cheaper than $7

*Widely available

*Practically disposable, so that there is no separation anxiety if the album is crap

What am I talking about here?

I'm talking about the audio cassette tape, which neatly fits all of the required categories: You can stick them in a Walkman (which never skips!), you can find every type of music on them, you can buy them at any thrift store in the country for pennies, and because of that you feel no guilt about throwing them away should you not fancy whatever you bought. As the saying goes, it’s a win-win(-win).

Cassettes are so cheap that it is no problem to wolf them down, glean any nutritious value from their music, refine your musical tastes accordingly, and toss them. If you like the music, keep the cassette until it wears out, and then legally download it. That’s the great thing about digital music - you can get practically any music from any time period. You don’t have to waste time tracking down another copy of your favorite cassette.

I love cassettes. A few years back I was driving a borrowed Nissan that only had a cassette player. I went to the local Salvation Army and bought three tapes for like a dollar: David Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise, Nirvana’s Bleach, and Primus’ Pork Soda. Those tapes got really heavy rotation because they were all I listened to when I was driving. The Bowie album was awesome; the other two pretty much sucked. So I bought the Bowie record on CD and the others were lost when the car was totaled and towed.

Experiencing music this way was so easy yet so practical. Musical taste: Refined! Cost? Minimized!

A year later I had my own place and kept a tape player in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time in there and consequently was heavily exposed to the only two tapes I had at the time: Living Colour’s Vivid and Poison’s Look What The Cat Dragged In! Hard rock albums on cassette is a glorious thing. For a reason that I have yet to discern, I took the tape player to Goodwill when I moved. I still don’t know what on earth I was thinking. I recently was given some more cassettes (Public Enemy, Frank Zappa (!!), Smashing Pumpkins, Cream) and now I have no player to play them on. Sigh.

Some might raise the objection that I’m being sentimental. If I was being sentimental, I’d advocate records, which, oops, I already did like two years ago. Records are great for establishing a music collection, not for trying new music out. Try the cassette out, then, if you like it, buy the record. The cassette even mirrors the double-sidedness of a record! Seems perfectly acceptable to me!

Another objection might be in your minds: But cassette’s are only available for old music!

So? The object here is to refine musical taste cheaply. Was there no good music available on cassette? Or have you heard it all? Yes, cassettes are old. So is Hysteria, Aja, London Calling, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and like a bajillion other albums that weren’t released in the last twenty years. If you’re going to be that elitist, feel free to stick with the Popular Songs Right This Second list on the iTunes Store.

I really do believe that cassettes are the best way to develop a great taste in music - they are the cheapest, easiest way to expose yourself to any and every artist and style of music. It excludes new releases, but who cares? If I want new releases, I can go to Amazon, Ping, iLike, or one of the other dozens of services who want to define my musical taste for me. With cassette tapes, I’m being exposed to music history serendipitously. And much of the music that makes up music history is really, really good. Cassettes deliver that to me. But even if they don’t, that’s OK - in the same motion I can toss it into the trash and pop something else in the Walkman. (As soon as I get one!)

Dann writes from his home in Minnesota, which can be rearranged to spell "Aeon Mints," which, you gotta admit, is a pretty great name for a band.

_DZ

Guest Post: Daniel Gateley from DeeplyInexplicable.com!

2010-09-11T16:38:00.004-05:00

I haven't been able to get any decent writing done lately, so I thought I would take the opportunity to introduce you to my friend Daniel who writes a literature and entertainment review blog. We were classmates in Tokyo and have been friends since back in the day when Xangas were cool. He knows more about American literature than I ever will, and I'm honored that he agreed to write a guest post for me! I really like where's he's coming from in this article because I think we were in the same boat after high school. I also took a year off, but the only difference was that he was traveling in exotic Europe while I was living at home with my parents. His takes on life are witty and thoughtful and almost always infused with the wistful longings of a boy hopelessly in love with Emily Dickinson. I hope you enjoy!

----

The 20-Somethings

Lately, I've been hearing and reading a lot about 20-somethings. I'm 24, myself, and it's been extremely interesting to read some of the research being done on my age bracket. Most of the findings suggest that, as generations go, mine is taking much longer than usual to settle into normal, stable adult lives. I can identify with that.

When I graduated from high school, I postponed college for a year and backpacked through Europe instead. It was an incredible year - one that I wouldn't trade for anything - but looking back, I have a better idea of the reasoning that went into making that choice. Doubt played a big part in causing the prospect of impending adulthood to loom large in my thoughts. I remember how I felt the day after graduation: abandoned. In those days I was in the habit of turning my thoughts into poems; in one of them, I described (rather dramatically) being set adrift on an ocean, alone. On a sub-conscious level, graduation was a lot more like a death-sentence than an emancipation. Heading off to Europe was a way to push off the inevitable, spend an expectation-free year abroad, and hopefully, return better prepared. I didn't go alone either; two of my classmates joined me in a temporary escape from our formless future.

The New York Times recently ran an article on the 20-something phenomenon which had some pretty big numbers:

"One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation."

The numbers only confirm what I've been observing the last few years. More and more, my generation is undergoing a pretty unique state of being. Most of my friends, the people I hang out with, talk to on a regular basis, identify with - they don't have steady jobs that they can expect to keep for years to come, or want to, despite already being old enough to have careers. Almost all of them are unmarried, and a surprisingly large number don't even date. Few of them have finished school. They all live from paycheck to paycheck, barely getting by on what they make.

It's tragic that the small number of people I've known who have successfully taken on some of the "adult" responsibilities that elude the rest of us have become irretrievably distant and cut-off - my first room-mate from college is just one example. When he got engaged, about a year after we started living together, everything changed very quickly. Only a few months later, he was married, had a new car, had graduated and gotten a lucrative full-time job in another state. Less than a year after that, he was a father. We don't talk or see each other much anymore. When he isn't working, he's spending time with his brand-new family, and when he's not doing that, he's spending time with couples, or co-workers - people he has a lot more in common with than I do. I'm happy for him, but I kinda miss him. Also, when I think of him, I feel a little bit guilty. "Why don't I have a job, or a girlfriend, for that matter?" I ask myself. "How come I'm not responsible like that?"

Why is this happening, and how long will it last? What effect will it have? Nobody seems to have any answers. There is a psychologist who's making a case for "emerging adulthood" as a new and previously nonexistent developmental phase, but his position seems to be an unpopular one, or at least a problematic one for most psychologists. Financially, no one is sure what effect the postponing of marriage and entering the workforce will have in the long term.

Maybe the most significant epiphany we can have as a result of all this is that our parents can't explain, fully sympathize with, or do anything about the difficulties we have to deal with. The world is, quite simply, a changing place, and changing faster all the time. If anyone is going to sort out this new world, it's got to be us. It may not be fair to have to start from scratch, so to speak, but we can do it. We ARE adults, even if we don't have some of the same responsibilities that our parents did at our age.

Daniel Gateley keeps a blog at DeeplyInexplicable.com

_DZ

Everett Bogue and the New Minimalism

2010-08-16T21:45:00.005-05:00

A notable snobby bicycle blogger recently alerted me to the existence of celebrity minimalist blogger Everett Bogue and his blog Far Beyond The Stars. Everett is apparently a minimalist guru of sorts who quit his writing job in New York and moved to Oakland to take up a “location-independent” lifestyle with his girlfriend. He is the author of two best-selling e-books (a position that, like “employee of the month”, is a great way to be a winner and a loser at the same time) and proves eager to share about how he lives on the income of working only two hours a day. This ten-hour workweek is a bit more than Tim Ferriss’ four-hour workweek but Tim has a bit more stuff than Everett does, thus canceling out any perceived advantage. (Everett actually admits that no work can be 100% original these days, and is no doubt heavily influenced my Ferriss, Seth Godin, and other work-better-not-longer gurus.) Despite this two-hour workday, however, Mr Bogue has recently admitted that he needs a vacation and will go camping to get away from the electronic hive that makes his lifestyle feasible. It’s a tough life when you need to rearrange your schedule to fill two more hours of the day with recreation.

Snide remarks aside, after reading a few of Everett’s posts I realized he does have some things going for him. He is quite skilled in writing propaganda, motivating readers with such lines as

- “The idea is that we need to curb our consumerism in order to focus on the important. This is why I live with less, because I’ve decided to stop consuming and start living.”

- “You need to write down an unrealistic goal and start to live and breathe it every single day. This can be simple, or more complex. Make it crazy though! The sky is the limit, and trust me, people have been up there too.”

- “The time to start your own very small business is now, as there have never been more opportunities to reach out and find the tribe that will support your goals.”

Using words to stir emotions is a powerful skill; one I think should be taught in schools. In light of Lenin’s teaching that the line between education and propaganda is subjective and reflects educator’s confidence in the student’s ability to learn, Everett has no problem playing the role of shepherd to his flock of commenters, offering advice on everything from small business entrepreneurship to selecting social circles. He is an enthusiast of lists; indeed, his “e-book” is tantamount to a list of bullet points with short elaborative paragraphs. These lists are a handy way of organizing more information than a reader can handle on the first read, thus ensuring a sense of information overload that will cause the reader to keep the book close at virtual hand for quick reference should they find they don’t remember Point 34. Maybe they won’t even be looking for enlightening texts, as the book is also illustrated with “peaceful photographs from [Everett’s] travels.”

But let’s shluff this rather superficial criticism aside and actually analyze some of what Everett claims to be about - let’s see what walk he is walking.

He claims to be “location-independent”

This is really just a fancy way of saying that you have no roots. It may be hard for white-collar people to swallow, but being location-independent is actually a default human state rather than a progressive one- a state that ancient Mesopotamian people lived in for hundreds of years. The idea of people settling down together to foster the basics of a community - things like commercial trade, cultural growth, division of land, organized defense, etc - is actually a pretty civilized notion. Being “location-independent” just means you’re rejecting permanent community, and the English language has, in fact, several words for such people who have no home base: nomad, vagrant, drifter, fugitive, itinerant, and refugee come to mind. And living as a celebrity blogger certainly isn’t the only occupation that allows comfortable itinerancy - be a half-decent bartender or car salesman and you can get work anywhere.

He counts how many things he lives with

It used to be 100, then he cut it to 75, then 50, and now he’s up to 57. He originally intended to cut possessions down so that he could spend less time worrying about taking care of all the stuff he owned, but if he’s still doing regular inventory counts, chances are he’s still kind of worried about his stuff, albeit now out of different motives. I applaud his cuts - I think that living with less stuff is good - but I am wary about the quantification of the minimalist ethos. We humans love comparing ourselves to one another, and using numbers is a really easy way to do that. Is Everett with 57 things doing a “better job” than someone with 62? He lives in Oakland, with a mild climate. What about me in Minnesota, where I need at least two distinct seasons of clothing? Having to own winter boots, hats, mittens, snow pants, etc, just adds to my stuff count, putting me at a disadvantage. The numbers quickly become meaningless, so why bother with them at all?

He lives life with no direction

A direct quote from his blog:

“...I don’t really have a routine, I simply wake up every morning and do what I feel inspired to do from start to finish.”

This is worthless to anyone looking for concrete advice. Routinizing the mundane tasks of life allows you to turn your brain off and not worry about them, freeing it instead to focus on what you want to think about. If you want to work for only two hours a day, as he advocates, there must be some routine that you can follow in order to get anything done. Even something as basic as - wake up, breakfast, newspaper, read for 30 min, check email, work - can form a simple trellis around which you can weave your life. Spontaneity and daydreaming are important, but the entropy of the universe ensures that repetitive tasks are a part of daily life. We just have to organize those tasks so well that we don’t have to think about them. Everett abhors routine yet automates his blog as much as possible, so he at least gets the irony vote.

He wants to also be your financial guru

Everett is also the author of the e-book Minimalist Business, a (virtual) tome offering tips on how to get the most money out of your work time. Advice also includes how to quit your job successfully and follow your dreams, since, obviously, there is no way that your current job is part of your dream. Apparently downshifting your lifestyle, reducing expenses and eliminating possessions means earning less money as well. One wonders why you can’t keep making $40,000 a year and just buy less stuff. Sure you have extra money, but can’t you give that away to the homeless or to your church or some other charitable organization? Why can’t you use extra income to enable others rather than minimize your income and support only yourself?

You can check out the blog for yourself and make your own decisions but, to me, Mr. Bogue just sounds like another aspiring self-help writer. Everything is focused on you, the reader and consumer of his advice. You can follow your dreams. You can live the life that you always wanted to. You can be an outlier from society and make your life into a model for others. You can earn the respect of others by being semi-ascetic and respecting yourself first. Be centered and your life will fall into place around you! It really isn’t anything we haven’t heard before. Sure, try and live on less stuff. But don’t let how much stuff you live without define you anymore than how much stuff you live with. You’re not your job, or lack thereof. You’re not your 100 things, or 62, or 33. You’re not your location or state of permanence. You’re who God made you to be, doing what He wants you to do.

_DZ

Christian Memes and Double Rainbows

2010-07-29T19:16:00.002-05:00

Last week a friend sent me a text asking something to the extent of, “Can there ever be ‘Christian’ memes?” The question struck me as odd so I didn’t reply, but it has provided me with much to think about since then. Christian memes? Can such a thing be generated? What would that look like?

If you read a lot of my posts you may gather that I am a big fan of viral marketing and sleeper hit advertising campaigns. More than anything I guess I enjoy the revelation of people’s interests and thought patterns manifest in their reactions to successful attempts to part them with their money. Product (Red). Mountain Dew partnering with extreme sports. Red Bull Flugtag. Dominoes Pizza soliciting fan pictures of pizza to use in their promotional literature. Free shoes from Chrome Industries. Ideas that, once acted upon, generate intense interest and participation from people around the world.

Memes, at least in the colloquial, are kind of like this, but restricted to inside the realm of the Internet. When we here “meme” we think of things like the Numa Numa dance, archaic raps, poorly translated Japanese video games, songs that question the underlying mechanics of magnets, and philosophical velociraptors (philosoraptors). These memes spread like wildfire and, like any good ad campaign, generate a tremendous amount of user-generated content as denizens of the Interwebs try to jump on board and garner impressive amounts of view-counts, whether it be on a video, picture, or webpage, of their own material. Memes bring out the id superstar in us who wants to rule our sphere of influence. We like to show how creative we can be.

So what would a “Christian” memes look like? Photoshopped pictures of King David being a badass? Auto-tuned dcTalk songs? ~~“Hip” Christian slogan ideas~~ Bible verses in lolspeak? I can only think of retarded ideas. Christian memes based on these ideas would turn out like the rest of the so-called “Christian culture”, most of which is just regular culture watered-down and sterilized. So much of “Christian” culture seems to be about generating religious-themed merchandise that people can “feel good” about buying and, once they do, revel in proclaiming their “lifestyle” to the world. It’s a picture of Jesus screen-printed onto the twisted t-shirt of ethical consumerism. A little more to the point, what would be the goal of generating said “Christian” meme? To spread the Gospel? To publicize a church? To convey the importance of incorporating a rational way of addressing pain and suffering into your worldview? These things are much to important to be trivialized by a mere meme.

And therein lies my main objection to Christianizing the meme. Internet memes are only done for moar lulz; never for anything really important. They are here today gone tomorrow - the very digital embodiment of that which does not matter. Something that should truly slide. If anything, why don’t we Christians focus our energies in pointing out God in what society already finds meme-worthy, such as how cool (and, also, sweet) it is that God wants to display two rainbows at once. Sure the song has a bleeped curse word in it, but should that keep us from appreciating how bright and vivid that rainbow is? Show your friends and be like, “Hey, my God does that.” It’s certainly better than any t-shirt idea I have.

_DZ

Trash Messenger Bags FTW!

2010-07-22T09:20:00.000-05:00

One of the drawbacks of using a bicycle for everything is that I can only buy as much groceries as I can haul on a bike, which means that I have to re-stock at regular weekly intervals. That’s actually just a really pretentious way of saying that I go grocery shopping once a week. Today was one of those days, based on my observations of lack of food in my pantry/kitchen. I decided that I had about $50 to spend on groceries this trip, so the next step was deciding where to go shopping for food. The obvious answer that requires the least physical effort on my part is to go to Whole Foods, because fifty (whole) dollars worth of (whole) food can be hauled in this:

But the obvious answer is not always the economically viable answer, so I then thought “Aha! ALDI!” This option was short-lived, because hauling $50 worth of food from that store would require me to rent this:

I don't have a CDL, so I decided to choose the happy medium and go to Cub Foods, which is where I was going to go anyway before I considered other options. I usually take my grocery/utility bike with baskets on it when I go grocery shopping, but since I recently bought a Trash Messenger Bag I decided to do what everyone does with a messenger bag - fill it with stupid amounts of stuff. So I hopped on my normal bike with no baskets and went late-night grocery shopping at Cub.

Twenty minutes and fifty pounds of food later I was riding my bike home, experiencing what it would feel like for a dude with a 50lb beer gut to ride my saddle. After making a mental note to be considerate of others, I turned my attention to my vertebrae, who were all yelling at me at a volume I hadn’t heard since that one time in a high school wrestling meet when I got lifted up and dropped and pinned by a south-Asian Arnold Schwarzenegger. My back reminded me there is a reason why people buy cargo bikes in favor of large bags. Also, the print-out that came with my bag now made more sense:

I did make it home safely, however, and for your viewing pleasure (and Trash Bag promotion) decided to take a few pictures of just how much stuff you can fit in these top-quality bags. The craftsmanship is superb, the bag is really comfortable across your shoulder, and Andy, the CEO/President/sweatshop employee of Trash Bags, is a really great guy to work with. Feel free to check out the website while I go and reserve a massage and make sure that my fridge is well-stocked for the coming week.

_DZ

David Bowie - Everyone Says "Hi"

2010-07-13T13:00:00.002-05:00

There’s something to be said for being able to write a deeply heartfelt song about an emotion that you haven’t felt in years. It really is a gift to remember so clearly what it was like to be a certain age and feel the things that that person felt then. For a man, for instance, to remember what is felt like to be a boy full of unrequited love. It’s one of those things that can make a song truly great, and it’s what I like about David Bowie’s song “Everyone Says Hi”.

It's off of Bowie’s album Heathen (2002), meaning that Bowie was in his early fifties at the time of writing and had been married for ten years or so. Yet the song conveys what I take to be the sentiments of a heartbroken lad who has just realized that a girl he didn’t really know that well, but still was inexplicably in love with, has left him for a life of adventure. It starts out poignantly:

Said you'd took a big trip

They said you moved away

Happened oh so quietly,

They say

She’s gone and she never told him she was leaving! He had to find out from someone else! Judging by the later lyric (“Said you sailed a big ship/Said you sailed away/Didn't know the right thing to say”) I’m guessing that she sailed across the channel to France in search of a bigger world, leaving behind a boy from the neighborhood whom she didn’t think merited a proper good-bye.

Self-centered remorse is the first reaction for the boy, like it is for so many other teenagers who suffer imaginary heartbreak, expressed here through longing for a memento of some kind.

Should've took a picture

Something I could keep

Buy a little frame, something cheap

For you

Lest he get swept away in his own river of emotions, however, he quickly gets to the main refrain of his letter - “Everyone says ‘Hi’”. A admirable gesture of corporate well-wishing, perhaps, but really only a Trojan horse for expressing his own feelings of abandonment as his “concern” for her well-being continues through listing various fears and disgruntlements common to anyone adjusting to a new environment (“Hope the weather's good and it's not too hot/For you” “If the money is lousy/You can always come home” “If the food gets too eerie/You can always phone home” “Don't stay in a bad place/Where they don't care how you are”).

By the second chorus he is all out of excuses to proffer and instead appeals to her emotional attachment to loved ones she’s left behind. They say, “Hi”, he says.

And the girl next door

(Everyone says hi)

And the guy upstairs

(Everyone says hi)

And your mum and dad

(Everyone says hi)

And your big fat dog

(Everyone says hi)

But notice how he repeats that “Everyone says hi”. This is where Bowie’s expressive voice takes over the song and communicates the true intent behind a seemingly altruistic lyric. With every repetition of communal concern, behind Bowie’s rich tenor the timid teenage voice is screaming “I say hi! Me! I care! Look, I’m writing you a letter! I miss you! I want to be with you...”

But everyone says “hi”, because that’s who you really care about.

The amount of resigned angst in Bowie’s voice is almost palpable, and it’s this kind of performance that makes him, even past age 50, a remarkably accessible artist. The whole song, start to finish, communicates an emotion that resonates with fans 35 years younger in a generation that is realizing that no matter how digitally connected you are, physical separation and loss is still a painful, wrenching feeling.

Maybe she’ll come back. Maybe she won’t. Maybe they’ll live happily ever after. Maybe she’ll fall head over heels for a Frenchman and move to Sicily and live on the coast. Maybe he will rent out an airplane to fly over the Mediterranean trailing a banner, reminding her that

“Everyone says ‘Hi.’”

_DZ

Growing Up With My Face On a Prayer Card: A TCK Experience

2010-07-03T11:08:00.000-05:00

The other day my friend Daniel (it’s uncanny how many people I know with my some variant of my name) and I were talking about missionary kids and how we (he is one too) grew up with this pervasive feeling of ‘being known’. The feeling is, in part, a side effect of growing up in another culture where your entire neighborhood knows who that “little white kid” is, but I think has a lot more to do with all of the attention you get from people you don’t know.

As a missionary kid you get used to your family being treated like some sort of Christian rock star. Not rock star in the “Audio Adrenaline” sense, but rather in the “Superchristian” church hierarchy sense. Your face is depicted in its various iterations of maturity on numerous prayer cards which are distributed to anyone and everyone, churches rearrange their schedules to listen to Dad preach, and you receive birthday cards postmarked to an address you lived at four houses ago from Sunday School groups at churches you never remember attending. These cards were filled with birthday greetings scrawled in various shades of crayon and were brimming with eager questions about what missionary life was like.

Living in Japan, a highly developed first-world nation, did not exempt me from the ‘typical’ missionary questions. What is Japan like? Do you have TV? Do you speak Chinese? Have you ever eaten raw fish? Do you like Japan or America better? With all these kids clamoring to gain knowledge that you intrinsically possess, you start to feel a certain sense of power. I am super-special. People know who I am.

As I grew older I started to resent some of the attention - after all, it’s not like I chose to go and live in another country. Everyone I met had these ideas of missionaries that involved danger and sacrifice and hardship. I didn’t feel like my life reflected that at all. I had clean water, Western living standards, delicious food, a very good English education, and a faster Internet connection than most people living Stateside had. But none of that mattered. People in American churches still treated me differently.

As I experienced more of the world I started to realize just how different that “differently” was. I never thought it weird that a picture of my family was on a church bulletin board or a family’s refrigerator, or that Dad would send out prayer letters telling people in America how our family was doing, that we would sometimes open a letter and find an unsolicited check from a generous individual, or that people would come up to me and say “Hey, I’ve been praying for you since you were a baby.” But that stuff doesn’t happen to everybody; it’s a unique experience - one that I now treasure - but it also contributes to the aforementioned paranoia of feeling ‘known’.

It doesn’t matter where I go, there's a pervasive feeling that people know who I am, who my parents are, and where I are from. Maybe they even know my education history, friends I’ve had, or where I currently live. And all that means that I mentally prepare myself for awkward interactions with people I don’t know but who know me. People around the world have been vicariously following my life, and yet when we meet I have no idea who they are. It makes one-off interactions such as ordering pizza, making a reservation, talking to customer service, or asking for help locating an item in a grocery store irrationally daunting. It contributes to the insights behind this article I wrote about why I don’t like talking on the phone. I remember a time in high school when I had to find a somewhere to volunteer for class credit. Calling up a volunteer coordinator at a local rescue mission, something most people wouldn’t blink at, was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. And why? Because I was used to people whom I had never met knowing a lot about me.

People in Japan knew me as the blonde, white kid, and people in America knew me as the missionary kid from Japan. Not only did people know me, but they had been following my life for a long time. They had, through pictures and family updates, watched me grow up. Who’s to say that they weren’t going to continue that? I assumed they did, and that I was going to have to watch my back. It took me a few years to come to terms with this and try to compensate for my skewed perception of the world. Over time I realized that not every new person I meet knows everything about me, and that most people I meet just see me as a tall, skinny white boy. Cool. I can deal with that.

_DZ

"23" - Then and Now

2010-07-02T17:15:00.001-05:00

Have you ever listened to a song where the lyrics mentioned a specific age that seemed really far away and talks about the songwriters experience at that age? I just had one of those experiences.

In high school I listened to a mediocre electro-industrial band named God Lives Underwater, (I actually created that page, way back when) who I thought were one of the greatest things to happen to music. (Admittedly, they made some catchy stuff.) They sounded a bit like Depeche Mode meets Nine Inch Nails and I thought they were “gritty”, “advanced”, “unique” “underrated” and probably some other words that get thrown around by pretentious high school music fans. In reality all of their albums were about heroin addiction and produced on equipment that you could find in any aspiring twenty-something musician’s bedroom.

This didn’t stop me from developing a love for their song called “23”. The seventh track off their sophomore effort Empty, it's the one “slow” song (basically just a synthed-up loop for the verses and then an acoustic chorus) on an otherwise extremely sonically harsh album, which meant that I immediately labeled it “deep”, “emotional”, and “super good”. The lyrics go something like this:

I'm breathing the air
the air i always breathe
I don't have a lot
but i want someone to share it with me

I really only want a few things
they've all been taken away
what does the next life bring
I just want to feel o.k.

I'm searching forever
for someone or something
I want to be high
and i want someone to love me

I spent 23 years now
trying to get by
other people make it day to day
I still wonder why

I only really had a few things
they've all turned to tears
one tried to kill me
the other kept me

i'm still here

It’s so painful and hopelessly full of cynical optimism that I almost want to burn myself with cigarette butts in a way that the scars form a smiley face.

Listening to the song reminds me of not only how far my musical taste has improved, but of what kind of person I was before Jesus saved me. Obsession with the hopeless turned into a passion for God; depression was slowly replaced by joy. God Lives Underwater, a band I liked eight years ago, serves to remind me of what my life was compared to what it is. I was fifteen then. I am twenty-three now. I pray for joy, love, compassion, and wisdom in the years to come.

_DZ

Unbridling Your Speed

2010-07-01T11:41:00.000-05:00

I recently attended a spectacular wedding of two high school friends, which was a nice treat in the middle of an otherwise predictable summer of work and cycling. The nature of weddings (gifts, dressing up, being clean and fresh) and the ceremony being a good 17 miles away made it difficult to make the trip by bike, so I borrowed a car. Being able to use a car was really helpful and saved me a lot of time. However, it did remind me of why I love to bike as much as I do. I think about the car/bike debate a lot, and while driving I had a new insight into why I prefer cycling.

On a bike, you don’t have speed limits.

Not relevant ones, anyway. (Actually, one of my life goals is to be issued a ticket for speeding on a bicycle. I can probably achieve this if I find a hill where upon descent I can hit 30+mph and then zoom into a 15mph residential zone.) More to the point, you don’t have limits on your “engine”. You go as fast as your legs will take you. If you are tired, you pedal at tired speed. If not, you pedal at normal speed. Regardless, you are pedaling at maximum comfortable output. This sounds simple, but it’s actually really liberating to not have to worry about how fast you’re going. So liberating, in fact, that I was experiencing a sort of anxiety over driving a car on the highway. Having to worry about going too fast was actually a painful psychological experience. Add to the the lack of wind blowing past me and the isolation from surrounding traffic, and I was mildly claustrophobic as well.

Driving is turning into a genuinely distasteful experience. Maybe it’s time to look into a cargo bike?

_DZ

Commenting on the Marketability of the Zombie Apocalypse

2010-05-31T22:25:00.007-05:00

It's no secret among twenty-somethings that cultural adoration of zombies has been on the rise over the past few years. Ever since we started blasting them away in Resident Evil (we’re too young for the Thriller video - we had to YouTube it afterwards) we’ve been intrigued by the creatures - these living dead who walk with their arms outstretched in their search for braaaaaiiiins. I could list all of the appearances of zombies in popular media, but that would A) be tedious and B) probably be a repeat of what Wikipedia already does. To make a long list short, the zombie trend is fueled by video games like the aforementioned Resident Evil series, Left 4 Dead and the House of the Dead series, comedy films like Army of Darkness, Shawn of the Dead, and Zombieland, and books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or The Zombie Survival Guide.

Zombie are usually portrayed in the media as slow, indestructible beasts (save for their susceptibility to chainsaws), oozing gore and intent on killing for no reason other than to spread their numbers. They don’t really feed; they never hunger or thirst. They are the animated shells of the former living, and they are never the good guys in any form of narrative. So why the cultural obsession? Why the zombie walks and zombie pub crawls?

After all, zombies are ugly, horrid, grotesque creatures. Their image reeks of death and putrid decay. They have no qualities that real live humans would want. So why do we emulate them? It doesn’t even matter where we are in the world; zombies have appeal.

Take for example this photoset from a Russian zombie walk (warning: heavy fake gore, some brief nudity). This crawl was a flash mob (a group of people organized quickly for a specific event through the use of mobile devices) and as you can see got quite large. I don’t really know what they did while dressed as zombies, but I imagine they walked slowly everywhere, took a lot of pictures, and commented on each others’ costumes. I suppose I would liken it to a bunch of performance and make-up artists getting together and having a grand old time. As anyone can plainly see from the pictures, most of the costumes are pretty creative, and a few showcase some real talent.

The image that really struck me, however, was this one capturing the juxtaposition of the clean-cut advertising model with rejected and soulless zombie bride.

That right there is the heart of the appeal of the zombie movement: its un-marketability. Other outlaw-type figures can be manipulated to the advantage of commercial marketing. Ninjas? Check. Cyborgs? Check. Pirates? Double check. Vampires? Don’t even get me started. They can all be turned into heroic figures. But not zombies. Just looking at the photoset makes it obvious why. Some of those costumes are genuinely terrifying. That’s not fit for a billboard. Well, how about watering it down? That won’t work either, because the zombie image is so pervasive in media that people will take one look at a consumer-friendly zombie and say, “WEA~~~~~K”. We all know what a zombie should look like.

It’s unfortunate that this has to be the case, that our youth culture has to turn to the mutilated, the rejected, the soulless and the decrepit to find something that it can have all to itself; something that won’t be usurped by advertising machines and cultivated and curated to be sold back to us. The only imageries worth indulging in are the ones which are offensive to the general public, to the consumer. I wrote about this a while back, commenting on the happy-slap craze that invaded the UK for a brief time. The same thing is going on here, this time in a less violent form, but equally untouchable to an ad-man. Will this trend of planning social events around glorifying the ugly increase? Are we that sick of being marketed to? And what will be the long-term consequences of this social phenomenon to the human psyche?

_DZ

Solving Pantslessness and Inquiring Into Transportation-Specific Wardrobe Choices

2010-05-23T17:13:00.002-05:00

In the last month or so I have become the proud owner of two pair of wool pants. This is unusual for me, because I hate pants shopping like teenagers hate braces. I like to keep my pants-buying activities relegated to A) special occasions or B) in response to sudden unexpected bouts of pantslessness. But recently I bought two pairs of wool pants for completely different reasons.

My motivations behind buying wool pants, and my delight in discovering new bonus features that these pants provide, have lead me to think a lot about how transportation influences and molds our clothing choices and habits. Since pretty much every one in America drives a car, transportation-specific clothing choices - even those that coincide with car travel - often go unnoticed.

I bought wool pants for three reasons: they are warm, they shed water, and they keep you warm even when they are soaked with water. Basically I bought them for when I have to ride my bicycle in the rain. My wool pants are great for this, but they have other features of which I was unaware until I started wearing them regularly. First, they are incredibly comfortable when riding my bicycle. The fabric doesn’t rub or chafe the inside of my thigh when I pedal, nor does it bunch up in the crotch or flap into the chain. That is really nice. And secondly, since the fabric is a charcoal-grey color, even after a full day's work in a greasy bike shop, the pants don’t look dirty. They look just, well, like normal wool pants.

And how much did I pay for these features, you ask? Did I follow some minimalist principles and save money while maximizing value? Or, to put it in fancy-shcmancy terms, did I forgo acquiring a liability in favor of enhancing my life with an asset? Yes, yes I did. The two pair of pants cost me less than $5 each. Wool pants are easy to buy used because, even though my local Goodwill arranges their pants by number of belt loops, because they have a different texture. I can walk down the store aisle at a normal pace, feel all the pants as I go by, and know without visual confirmation when I find what I am looking for.

There are some aisles of Goodwill clothing that I can skip all together. Fancy jackets, for example, or sweaters or polo shirts. My wardrobe is noticeably ebbing towards more cycling-specific clothing, just as some of the clothing that the general public now wears is actually car-specific. This article from the BBC talks about the decline of fancy hats coinciding with the rise in car culture, and you can say the same thing with coats. People used to wear huge overcoats in the winter to keep warm, but once cars became the norm, people found that their huge coat got in the way of getting in and out of cars, not to mention all of the bunching up it had to do when they sat down. And since the cars were heated anyway, there was no need for such a huge coat - just walk quickly from warm place to warm place.

Footwear is another issue. People can wear sandals everywhere only if they walk, use public transport, or drive a car with an automatic transmission. Operating a clutch pedal with sandals is a pain, as is riding a bicycle with them on. I don’t wear sandals much anymore because they don’t give a good platform for my feet to push down on when I pedal and because they are open-toed and hence kind of dangerous.

This gravitation towards cycling-spscific clothing does have its downsides, though. Wool pants should be dry-cleaned and are really hot in even mild weather. On hotter days my clothing gets soaked in sweat, requiring me to take a second shirt along at the very least. Deodorant needs to be kept in the backpack, along with perhaps some extra socks. Having to wear shoes all the time can be a pain. I can’t really wear fancy hats, either. All of that, however, is a small price to pay for the joy that bicycling gives me.

Riding a bicycle everywhere has allowed me to see clothing in a new way. Function tends to follow form in cycling, and comfort while riding is key. After all, transportation is a major part of our daily lives, and discomfort there will affect other spheres of social life. Stumbling upon new ways of seeing things is awesome, and as I continue to move at the speed of bike, hopefully discovering wool pants will just be the beginning.

_DZ

Throw Down a Yo-Yo and Memories Come Back Up

2010-05-12T20:42:00.003-05:00

It isn’t often that you are reminded of your yo-yoing past. Playing with a yo-yo is one of those things that you easily forgot you did until you are reminded that, yes, you too once practiced a completely useless skill for hours until you could look cool for your elementary school peers. Reminding me of all of that was this video, posted on the page of a Facebook friend.

The guy is obviously a sham who has no skills in yo-yoing whatsoever, but at least he tries. And he got on TV, which is more than my yo-yoing ever got me.

I bought my first yo-yo when I was in third grade, a scrawny little white kid in a suburban Japanese elementary school. Yo-yos were the hot new toy in Japanese youth culture, with the accompanying TV shows and manga series and how-to books that come with every new marketing scheme. Mine was a purple and black Yomega Steal

th Fire, a wing-shaped yo-yo good for doing string tricks but lame if you wanted to do any serious looping. Soon I added a glow-in-the-dark Duncan and a Yomega Stealth Brain (the type that automatically retracts after a certain time) to the stable. These were all pretty cheap yo-yos, with solid bodies and plastic bearings. With lots of practice I could soon do all of the beginner tricks, almost all of the intermediate tricks, and a few advanced tricks. I was still behind my best friend, though, who could ‘yo’ like nobody’s business.

Despite my relative ineptitude I kept up yo-yoing until seventh grade, when it was just not cool to do that kinda stuff anymore. The year before I had bought a Yomega RB2 that had a metallic ball-bearing axle - a huge step up from the plastic ones. I could throw that yo-yo down like a crazy man and have it spinning harder than a cordless drill in the hands of Michael J. Fox. It unlocked a few more advanced tricks for me, but soon ended up in a box in the closet.

I still have that yo-yo and know where it is, now ten years later. I can still do some of the tricks - tricks that I couldn’t teach anyone else but can still do because my hands move automatically from the countless hours of practice. I pick the RB2 up once in a while because it’s a fun reminder of childhood. Playing with a yo-yo was something I genuinely enjoyed doing, regardless of how useless a skill it was. That’s still all it is - a fun diversion - and certainly not a way to get infamous on Wisconsin local television.

_DZ

In Which I Speculate About Why I Used To Have Long Hair (PICS)

2010-04-30T11:51:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time I had really long hair for a boy. I was 18, 19, and 20 during that time.

Classic rock destroyed any hope I had of being cool. An obsession with crappy mainstream rock throughout high school led me into a hopeless devotion to classic rock during my senior year. I idolized Axl Rose, which is, by any stretch of the imagination, completely embarrassing. I thought Axl was the coolest, and because of him I wanted to be in a rock band. But before any of that could take place, I had to look like him. As a result I let my hair grow out, wore leather jackets, and perched a pair of aviators over top of a bandana around my head. There is even a picture of me in my senior yearbook that captures this look. It is horrendous, and I am glad that I grew out of that phase.

(I am pretty proud of my ability to match clothes here)

But I thought it was cool then, and continued to grow my hair until just before my twentieth birthday. By that time it reached down to my nipples and had started to wave and curl in ways that didn’t know my hair could do. My hair took multiple hours to dry and I would shed like crazy, but at least I could headbang like nobody’s business! Eventually I cut it because I got a job working around industrial machinery and really, really didn’t want my hair to get sucked into metal rollers operating at high speeds.

But ever since I cut it I’ve been wondering why I let it grow out as long as it did. I can think of two main reasons, besides wanting to be a rockstar.

First, I was too lazy to maintain it. My hair has a awkward point at which a certain cowlick refuses to stay down, but once it passes that length, it is OK and I am not embarrassed about it. I hate maintaining my hair, so it has to be either really long or really short. If it is short, I can wake up and start my day - no worries. If it is long, I can wake up and throw it in a ponytail and, likewise, no worries. I don’t have to mess with blow-drying or gelling of moussing or anything. It is simple and nice.

My second reason was that I thought it made me more accessible to a certain type of people who I wouldn’t be able to talk to/ hang out with nearly as easily if I had had short hair. I thought that it would be great - that I would be able to hang out with kids who I normally wouldn’t get a chance to, like maybe some non-Christian kids who wouldn’t give clean-cut Christians the time of day. What really happened was I spent a lot of my time with long hair at a Christian college, where most everyone was already clean-cut. Nice. And ultimately the impression I think that other people got of me was that I was secretly a potheaded hippy. I did walk barefooted everywhere, but I didn’t do any drugs.

(I suppose it is easy to see where they got that from)

The long hair did afford me some fun experiences though. I had my wet hair freeze outside in an Illinois February. I went to rock clubs and headbanged like a rockstar. I went to dance clubs and had guys dance up on me, thinking I was a girl. Ok, so that wasn’t so fun, but at least my friend Danielle got a kick out of it.

Would I do it again? I don’t think so. I don’t think the benefits outweighed the hassle and false perceptions that came along with it, and, when you think about it, being clean-cut makes you more accessible to a wider range of people. Besides, now I own clippers and cut my own hair for super cheap, which is a super minimalist thing to do. I like it that way.

(Look at how ridiculous we look!)

_DZ

I Was in a National Newspaper!

2010-04-29T08:40:00.004-05:00

Anybody who has googled me recently (try it today!) knows this already, but a couple months ago I was interviewed by Sandra Block for her column in USA Today. For those of you who don't want to click on the link, here is the part mentioning me.

"...many consumer experts say that responsible use of credit cards is one of the most effective ways to build a good credit record. Those concerns haven't swayed Dann Zinke, 22, of St. Paul, who works at a gas station to save money for college. He's never owned a credit card and doesn't plan to get one any time soon. 'I refuse to recognize it as a rite of passage into adulthood,' he says. 'I don't want to go through the hassle of signing up and receiving other credit card offers.'"

I don't remember saying the second line, but the first line of my quotation I found rather clever, if I do say so myself.

Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard to contact a reporter of a major newspaper. I had heard her being interviewed on MPR, talking about how she was soliciting stories from twenty-somethings who didn't want credit cards. I emailed her about that, and she got back to me right away, wanting to set up a phone interview. She called me the next morning and we talked for maybe fifteen minutes, tops. I had over-prepared for it, of course, and had three pages of notes detailing what I might say, none of which I had time to use.

Overall I found the article encouraging. Despite it opening with a non-sequitur (Emily has never had a credit card, yet she has also never felt comfortable owning one?) I thought it provided a very balanced view of the pros and cons of credit card ownership. In particular I appreciated the highlighting of the increased use of debit cards, because without mine I would be up a serious creek without a paddle. Or in a serious supermarket without a checkbook. I only write checks for rent, and am guaranteed to make a horrible checkbook-balancer. Though the article claims debit cards as less secure than the credit kind, as long as I keep mine in my wallet and use it only when I need to, I think I will be OK.

_DZ

Free Chrome Shoes and Wildly Effective Internet Guerrilla Marketing

2010-04-17T22:07:00.004-05:00

So yesterday a free pair of brand-new shoes showed up at my door. Yeah, you read that right. I got a free pair of shoes shipped to me from California. So how did I get this sweet deal? Pretty simple. I hang out with people who ride bicycles, and we all hang out on the Internet.

As geeky as that sounds, it is true. Chrome Industries is a bicycle apparel company out of San Francisco, and they had a two-day Internet marketing campaign back on March 17 and 18, spread through Facebook and Twitter. The promise was simple - “Send us a pair of your old, crappy, beat-up shoes, let us know your address and shoe size, and we will send you a brand new pair of our shoes.” Not only that, but they promised to donate to charity the shoes that could still be worn and recycle the rest that could not. Sound too good to be true? My cyclist friends found out, told me, and I hurriedly mailed away an old pair of sneakers, because I am a man who likes to get free stuff. (One of the many traits I share with the elite 15-98 year-old cyclist demographic.) And guess what? My new shoes, which normally retail for $70, showed up yesterday. They look like this, which pleases me greatly, because my current shoes look like this(but whiter).

I don’t have to tell you that this was a gutsy thing for Chrome to do. They no doubt gave away thousands of pairs of shoes for free. It cost them a lot of money in postage to ship shoes all over the world (the campaign wasn’t limited to the US). They had a lot of logistics to cover to ensure that they could fulfill their promise. And what were they thinking, potentially alienating their hardcore fanbase by giving away an expensive product, an urban cycling status symbol?

But that doesn’t matter, because as I see it, they just pulled off an extremely successful guerrilla marketing scheme that penetrated a very niche market with great depth for very little cost. Hundreds of thousands of cyclists will now here the word “Chrome” and instantly think of environmental responsibility, quality products, and the giving away of sweet loot. Not only that, but the total number of people wearing Chrome shoes in the world just doubled. And I wrote a blog post about it. It would have taken a lot of money and a super-effective traditional advertising campaign to get anywhere near the same effect. Every time I get a comment on my Chrome shoes I will answer, “Yeah, I got them for free. Chromes are sweet!” Even people who don’t care one bit about Chrome shoes will have to put up with me telling about how I mailed in a beat-up pair of Adidas and got a free pair of Chromes.

But what about those people who didn’t get them for free but rather bought them new? Now their (admittedly small) reference group is flooded with shoes that, to be honest, cost a lot of money for what you get. Chromes are more cycling status symbol than comfortable shoe. Those early adopters are now going to be stuck with a bunch of people riding bikes asking each other smug questions like “Hey dude, nice Chromes. How much did you pay for those. Wait! Let me guess!” Maybe we will get some lamenting of all the newbies ruining the Chrome “scene” with their “poseur” ways. Maybe Chromes will go “mainstream” and now owning a pair will be “so 2009”. Regardless, Chrome has made a lot of people happy, and I know that if and when I am in the market for a new messenger bag, there will be one place that will totally hook me up.

_DZ

Isaiah 43: 5-7

2010-04-01T09:12:00.002-05:00

⁵ Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.

⁶ I will say to the north, 'Give them up!'
and to the south, 'Do not hold them back.'
Bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the ends of the earth-

⁷ everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made."

April is the month of every year with the highest number of suicides, so be nice to your neighbors. If you have an encouraging word to spare, say it.

Thank you.

-Dann

_DZ

Computers In A Time Continuum and Also My Awkward Middle School Years

2010-03-01T13:49:00.001-06:00

I’ll start this out with this picture that doesn’t serve any purpose but to remind me of days gone past.

Madden 2011 is coming out. The last time I cared about Madden was 2001, when Eddie George, the guy in that picture, was on the cover of the game. I was in 8th grade at the time, and when you’re that age video games are the greatest thing around. Actually, electronics were pretty much the greatest thing around, too. Throughout seventh and eighth grade I was obsessed with computers. I got my first computer, a laptop running Windows 3.1, in 1999 and we were pretty much inseparable. My life goal at the time was to have a printer in my room (sadly this never happened).

That laptop didn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I played Madden on my dad’s desktop. My parents were pretty strict about computer usage, limiting my access to an hour a day. This was before I we had the Internet at home, so pretty much the only thing to do on the computer was play games. I spent countless hours in front of the screen playing Madden, making sure that I had all the top players in order to have a guaranteed win at the virtual Super Bowl. (It actually was even less of a deal then it seems, because if I lost I would just not save and restart until I won.)

Madden (and my laptop) started a trend of sorts - one in which I valued gaming and technology more than learning and studying. I was never a big fan of schoolwork in high school, which is something I attribute to my middle school habits. School wasn’t cool or attractive, and technology was. If a school assignment couldn’t be done on a computer, is was by definition less important. I went out of my way to use computers to complete projects even if it was easier to do it without one. This is probably the main reason why I have terrible handwriting now as an adult.

But back to school itself. It wasn’t that I didn’t like learning - in fact, I don’t think anyone dislikes learning - only that I didn’t like or wasn’t good at school. The cool subjects to study in school were binary subjects like math and science. It was easy to compete with classmates there - you either got the answer right or you didn’t. I liked competing, but I wasn’t very good at math and science. The other subjects, particularly English, were ones that I was better at but didn’t really like. I could write and spell and identify parts of speech and prepositional phrases, but where did that get you in school? Also, literary criticism? Boooooriiinng. So I went through school not good at the stuff I wanted to like and ignoring the stuff that I was good at.

My way to psychologically get around this was to choose style over substance and use a computer for everything. This was how I got through my eighth grade science project. I chose magic squares for my project- a topic I and no one I knew had any clue about. My entire project was research and presentation - I made no hypotheses, did no experiments, and produced zero original material. But it did use computers! When the fair date came around I dutifully set up my presentation about a part of recreational mathematics that had no real-world applications. The guy kitty-corner from me had built his own wind tunnel. I stood there in my sweater and tried to forget that middle school was not a great time in my life.

In high school I tried to do as little work as possible in my classes and usually pulled Bs. The science and math homework was done at the minimum; sometimes copied. The English work was done at the last minute because I could easily hammer out a paper or two. All of my papers were typed, all of my images harvested from the web, and all of my tables and graphs done in Excel. When I got to senior year I dropped math and science all together. I had earned a D in pre-calc the year before and wanted nothing more to do with math. I remember sitting down to my first class of physics my senior year and getting a homework assignment of all the odd problems on a worksheet. I looked at the paper on my desk and thought, “I hate lists of problems. And I am not spending my year doing work that I hate.” That was that, and I dropped physics. All that stuff about wave dynamics and planetary gears and the square root of the length of a pendulum being proportional to its period and what not, who needs it? I decided to take Yearbook, because then I could sit in my corner in front of a screen and work on layouts.

Computers, on the whole, probably made me a worse student. I don’t regret the skills I learned from all the time spent with a computer (after all, I do spend a few hours every day using one), but I do regret thinking that computers would solve all of my problems. They don’t, and they never will. I used them as a substitute for effort, and that was wrong. In this age where “efficient use of technology and information are going to be of paramount importance as we move forward to cure the ills in our present world,” the microchip is hailed as the universal band-aid; the zenith of human achievement. But let’s not fool ourselves; cavemen probably said the same thing about hammers and axes. Agrarian man hailed the plow and the windmill. Then came electricity and vaccines. The car. Nuclear power. Computers are part of a grand continuum of human self-delusion. I was obsessed with Madden for a short time, years ago. We as a culture have been obsessed with our own grand progress for much longer than that.

_DZ

Hipsters In High Town

2010-02-26T10:24:00.003-06:00

Is the hipster movement dying down? Probably not. At least not till they run out of money. Because that’s all it is - group of young people with too much money and not enough time. Not that there’s anything wrong with having money, but when an entire social movement is centered around available buying power and status symbols rather than ideology or political reform, there is no winning way out. There is no goal to reach, no final destination. Only enjoyment of material comfort until the cash runs out. It’s a total lose-lose situation.

Have there been any other social classes based entirely on buying power? I can only think of two: the formation of the middle class in the early nineteenth century and the burst of yuppie culture in the late twentieth. Both yielded a pornocopia of new trends and fashions, rooted in the newfound leisure time that they had or the wild increases in salary speculations, respectively. Emergent-middle class Britons had more time then they previously knew what to do with, and twenty-eight-year-old financial advisors in New York made more money in a week then their blue-collar grandfathers did in a year. Middle class citizens (aided by the consumer revolution) redefined what it meant to live comfortably. Suburban anywhere would never be the same. Yuppies, however, succeeded in nothing more than annoying millions of sensible people, mostly from the already-comfortable middle class.

THE ANTICREATIVE

Hipsters lie well outside of that cultural creative plane. They aren’t redefining what it means to live a certain way nor are they curating a mindset in which they view themselves as the acme of human achievement. The ideal hipster, cigarette dangling from his lips as he leaves his loft to mount his brakeless bicycle. Wearing his keffiyeh, skinny jeans, and emo glasses rides to the pub to drink some PBR and shoot a ‘collabo’ photoset with his friends for upload to their Tumblr account, he is blissfully content in his slacker ethic and consuming mindset. Hipsterdom is all about what you buy, and nothing about what you believe. In the effect that they all act and look pretty much the same - they are all standardized culture-hogging zombies. In that they are all in for the ride until the cash runs out (despite the blue-collar addictive habits they cultivate, they don’t actually like to “work”) they are all hopelessly standardized losers.

Perhaps the scariest thing about this trend, though, is the penchant of the hipster commune to appropriate any item of culture for its own use, rendering mere possession of said object equal to high hipster status. They recycle culture in a way that renders is useless for future men. One minute Polaroid cameras are objects of ridicule, and the next minute you are a the poster child for the hipster movement for taking pictures of rusty industrial complexes with the one strung around your neck. The attack could come from anywhere. Hipsters march from product to product, glorifying it, consuming it, and disposing of it in favor of a new “passion”. It is a vicious cycle that, again, will only end once the money runs out.

A DEAD END?

If the money does run out, the hipster has no recourse, apart from one that involves some real “work.” I am talking, of course, about documenting and packaging other people’s culture for bite-size consumption in the form of a video documentary. The hipster will do what he does best and appropriate someone else’s interests for his own gain; a neat little bundle to add to the pile of self-promotion. This isn’t a guaranteed venue for generating some extra coin for beer - there is no money tree to ravage - but it certainly embodies more hope that the hipster’s musical efforts with his “indie band.” After all, being in a band takes work, while making a documentary just involves walking around with expensive audio-visual equipment. With the appropriately-priced tools, salvation is near.

But you still have to buy it. The hyper-consumerism ideal that drove the past fifteen years continues to manifest in absurd forms of expression. Hipsters are the children of image and wonderlust. Society have created an abomination - one that power-walks through a mall, iPod blaring, to get to the hottest vegan restaurant chain. They are for sale as cultural fashionistas but not as productive citizens.

All play and no work. All consumer and no creator. A firework ember that dies out in the starry night.

_DZ

Sons of God in the Face of National Crisis

2010-02-17T09:37:00.005-06:00

“The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion,” writes Chris Hedges in his feature article published in the latest issue of Adbusters magazine. He writes about his perception of the U.S. as a corporately-controlled state, a world power in which we and our politics are slaves to corporate interest. Quoting philosopher Sheldon Wolin: “The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.” A sorry showcase, indeed. Hedges laments our situation as one in which we have little to no power, where the status quo is already set and maintained by those with money. We can only stand by and watch as they fail, flailing to grasp onto the shards of their former glory. We could fight, but what’s the use when they control the banks, the media, the very government itself? It is a complete failure of our political and economic systems, brought about by mismanagement and power lust.

We are a generation with no direction. Raised by TV, educated with corporate money, placed as a cog in an economic drivetrain, and spoon-fed the ideals of middle-class consumerism, we are the children of “truth through advertising.” Our national leader is a political brand. Our ethics are wrapped up in how we consume. We are sheep circling a drain.

Solutions are few and far between. Though he denies any fraternity with those purporting violent, anarchic insurrection and chaos, Hedges also refutes the idea that pacifism can overcome such odds. In a long and self-contradictory paragraph he asserts that, “When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force...[violence] must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.” A corrupt, deformed, and perverted survival, but a survival nonetheless.

What else is at stake but our survival? Our supremely great American politics? Our grand economic machine that churns ever forward? These are but dust and will pass, just like every system before us; those of Alexander, Julius Caesar, Stalin, Hirohito, and the Native American. If our survival is not at stake, then there is no point in the article, yet Hedges asserts that violence in only necessary in this facet of our current situation. The danger we face is not the collapse and rebirth of our system, but the violence enacted upon us by those who wish to maintain status. Hedges, however, wishes to save us from the system without resorting to violence.

His “solutions” are the standard liberal fare; sustainable living, forging local networks, global compassion, environmental preservation, conservation of resources. In a country that’s too big to fail, the answers he sets forth are ones that withhold the fuel for big government and fragment the monopolies of the elite. He spells it out for us:

“Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.”

Not only is his solution meaningless (we remain alive through imperceptible acts of defiance?) but it is equally hopeless. This is the only victory possible. This is his view of the future. We meaninglessly defy, just to make ourselves feel better, until the whole system collapses, possibly resulting in violent anarchy. And after all of this, we “should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible.” That makes for great rhetoric, but fails to see the decrepitude of the human condition.

Lest I sound even more hopeless than Hedges, allow me to offer an alternative to his solutions. I have no faith in politics to save this nation. I have no faith in economics to save this nation. I don’t believe that being more environmentally conscious will solve anything. And I don’t have any faith in violence. My faith is in the words of Jesus Christ.

Pacifism, one should note, does NOT mean passivity towards an aggressor. Pacifism in the face of violence is an act of defiance; an act of courage when confronted with anger and hate. Pacifism, to me, means having faith, having hope, that through your pacifism your enemy will turn into a friend. Sometimes this will involve pain or even death. But this is what the Jesus of the Bible commands of us. “Love your enemies, and do good to those who persecute you.” (Mt 5:44) This is a statement intended to be woven into your soul. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” (Mt. 5:9)

Reading the words of Jesus and applying them is important, lest we simply hide behind the banner of “Christianity” - an all-too easy grievance to commit in Christian America. Hedges rightly condemns it as much:

“The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross.”

These people will see Christianity as useful; useful in furthering their own purposes. This misuse of Christianity is a sorry state of affairs and makes my heart frown, because Jesus did not call us to earthly power. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5) The illicit union between power-hungry Christians and politics is staggeringly unfortunate. Christ wasn’t political, so why should we be? We should be loving peacemakers.

What, then, could my - could our - response be? Again, Jesus again lays it our for us: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt. 22:37-38) Our attempts to create a perfect system in which no party is marginalized or oppressed, in which everybody has enough, and in which our highest ideals our realized is unattainable. Should we resist consumerism and care for the environment? Sure. But not through grand schemes and political plots. It should be through perceptible acts of love, through perceptible nonviolent resistance, and through other beneficent actions firmly grounded in the hope that Christ gives us: that if we love Him, serve Him, and love others, we will become sons of God.

_DZ

Lady Gaga Is Going Down or Breaking Out

2010-02-01T13:00:00.001-06:00

Since a major theme of this blog is commentary on culture, it would be an injudicious oversight of me to not talk about the hottest cultural icon at the moment: Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta. In talking with people about her, the most comment remark I hear is, “Yeah, she’s cool, but weird. Really weird.” This is true, as she approaches stardom from, what some would say, far left field. Others would say she’s not even in a ballpark, that she’s off on her own planet. Regardless, her pop image, dance-oriented music, and rise to fame are worth examining, as is her worldview.

Since exploding onto the world pop scene in late 2008, Lady Gaga has fast become a household name. Her songs incessantly catchy and her music videos decidedly brilliant yet weird/creepy, she has garnered enough fame to work with numerous other artists, including Beyonce and Brittney Spears. She’s on pop radio twice an hour, TV loves her, and eight million of her records have found a place in households worldwide. But is she a legitimate artist, or just another flash-in-the-pan pop phenomenon?

It’s easy to draw parallels from Gaga to other pop stars such as David Bowie, Madonna, and the late King of Pop. Indeed, Lady herself connects those dots. Some could even claim that she a a gothic Christina Aguilera of the era when she was singing songs like “Fighter” and making music videos of boys’ kissing. Despite Lady’s professions of raw originality, however, her image is merely a glossy amalgam of her own pop idols. Outrageous fashions and the quirky appeal to the marginalized of early Ziggy-era Bowie, unabashed bad-girl sexuality and proto-feminism of Madonna, and the slick production, coordinated dance moves, and seamless choreography of MJ, are all fused together in a girl who can actually sing, produced by people who are thoroughly schooled in pop psychology, and dispensed to the masses radio single after radio single. A grueling tour of live shows, in themselves grandiose productions not un-derserving of a Tony Award, support her recent album, The Fame Monster. She proudly proclaims that she lives for the show, that she revels in the glitter and drama and sound of it.

For Lady Gaga, fashion and music are one and the same. She has said that she writes songs based on an image of an outfit she has in her head; her songs are an excuse to wear something outrageous on stage. Each of her music videos feature her in no less than five outfits, and her taste in dress ranges from avant-garde pop diva to back alley prostitute to haute couture fashion model. Nothing is off limits, from a faux-nostalgic 1950’s dress to her monster ball outfit evoking the image on anime princess, or even a bra that spits sparks, if it fits her vision for art, she wears it. Makeup, outfit, props; the whole shebang is planned and executed in style.

While this is all grand and exciting, I can’t help but wonder what the overarching goal is. Especially in light of her newest single, “Bad Romance,” I have an uneasy feeling about where her career is headed. There is an inherent danger in living just for the show and soaking up the pleasures of a hedonic lifestyle; if you go and paint the town red, you will eventually run out of paint. As much as Gaga admires Bowie and his artistry, Bowie now is a far cry from the Bowie of the Ziggy, Thin White Duke, or “Let’s Dance” fame. He ran out of steam by the eighties and nearly crashed, resulting in him toning down his pop star image. If Lady Gaga thinks she can have all of the fun and none of the consequences, she needs to think again, because as it stands now, I see three possible directions that her career could go.

First, and least interesting, is that, despite her claims, that she is merely a cultivated pop icon whose script is written by record labels, no different from Ms. Spears. This would be incredibly disappointing for her fanbase, and detract a great deal from her ‘raw’ image.

Much more interesting and, in my opinion, necessary for the survival of her music career, is if Ms. Germanotta played Lady Gaga like Bowie played Ziggy; a pop act, no doubt, but an act that arrived, gained fame, and then left. Ziggy was a monstrous success - one that would probably have destroyed Bowie’s career should he have continued to play him. Bowie no doubt lost some fans because of the move, as would Ms. Stefani, but considering the alternative, I think it would be a wise move.

Equally interesting but decidedly hopeless is the possibility that Lady Gaga is all there is. I say ‘hopeless’ because, as I see it, her current persona - exemplified by the lyrics of (celebrating an emotionally parasitical and mentally unstable relationships) and accompanying video to “Bad Romance” - as unsustainable. That video (and other videos like it) is not the work of someone who is opening up new creative avenues; it is the aestheticization of a pop star’s destruction. Lady Gaga got the fame she wanted - the question is how long can she hold onto it? And if she does hold onto it, in which new, exciting direction will she take it?

_DZ

We Are Not The Twitter Generation!

2010-01-29T15:33:00.001-06:00

In my article yesterday I dished out some elbows to the ribs of a Mr. John Pike. Today I will be throwing more elbows, but I have to be careful less I turn into a large, maleficent cephalopod. I don’t want to say that Mr. Pike is misguided, however I would not be surprised if he made it a habit of wearing camo pants that had zippers. I’m just sayin’.

The main source of my irritation is this quote that he had in a recent article: "I'm not sure it's true for the Twitter generation."

He called survey respondents under 30 “the Twitter generation.”

NOhohoho. Absolutely not. I refuse. You cannot take a free internet service that came out less than two years ago and use it to label a generation that lived for 28 years before it. My objections to this are two-fold.

First, my generation will not be defined by a convenient, free service. We were around when you had to pay for CDs to get music, before filesharing and BitTorrent. We were around before DVDs. We remember when playing video games with “good graphics” meant going to an actual arcade. Not everything was delivered to us.

Second, we will not be defined by anything on the Internet. We are not the Facebook generation, the MySpace generation, or even (heaven forbid) the Xanga generation. All of our formative years came before that time. The Internet was not mainstream when were were growing up, so calling us with time-appropriate names like the “Netscape generation” or the “dial-up” generation won’t work either.

So what are some names I am OK with? The Mario Kart generation. Perhaps the N64 generation. The Oklahoma City Bombing generation (I kid, I kid). The ADD generation.

We are a generation playing catch-up. The high-tech industry exploded, and we are led with promises of a new and faster everything just around the corner. When I was in seventh grade it was incredible that you could buy a complete and capable home computer for under $1,000. That was also the year that CPU speeds topped 1GHz. You can’t even give those computers away now. We are in a world where what we have is obsolete and what we want will be.

But whatever we are, Mr Pike is dead wrong. We are not the “Twitter generation.” The “Twitter generation” isn’t even old enough to read his quote.

_DZ

Isolationism and The Growing Disgust with Old Media

2010-01-28T10:24:00.001-06:00

I want to highlight an article about isolationism today, not because I have particularly strong feelings about the subject, but rather to highlight poor quality journalism. I highly encourage you to read this article, written by Rick Montgomery and syndicated by the Pioneer Press, for a solid alternative to The Onion. It covers American public opinion of the USA being “world police” and is not only unworthy of front page news (which it was, right below a big picture of the Vikings losing), but is altogether unworthy of publication.

The article starts off in a wary yet reserved tone, saying that, “talk of a ‘new isolationism’ is spreading”, and that “it seems to be happening across the political spectrum.” Ok, so we don’t know anything yet. There are some rumors going around.

But wait, Montgomery claims that “public trepidation toward the rest of the world [is] spiking to historic highs”! On what research does he base this claim? Two poll questions were asked to Americans, and the results were, and I quote, either “[the U.S.] should mind its own business internationally” or “‘we should go our own way’ and not worry whether other nations disagree.”

But wait, you say, those questions are vague! Don’t worry, Montgomery AND the pollsters agree with you! So why is this an article if they’re reporting on vague questions? There is a qualifier: “But when similar questions were asked in 1964, not even one in five Americans thought going it alone or staying out were good ideas.”

This tells me only that people forty-six years ago were more hesitant to answer vague questions. That people today are more interested in expressing their opinion than wondering about whether or not they are making good sense.

Obviously Montgomery was getting nowhere, so he decided to get an “expert,” Mr. John Pike, from GlobalSecurity.org (brought to you by Nissan and Google AdSense). His site is basically a news aggregator and military portal, rife with advertising and poorly designed site navigation buttons. Anyway, Mr. Pike has some interesting things to say, including that older generations are more likely to approve of American meddling in foreign affairs because of their experience with WWII. According to him, the idea that America had a right to get involved overseas was, “just self-evidently true.” Dropping heavy phrases like that, ladies and gents, is clearly the ticket to joining a “defense think tank.”

The fun doesn’t stop there! Take this short paragraph as another example: “Just five years ago, 45 percent of Americans in a survey for the Council on Foreign Relations said the nation's role as a "world leader" was more important than it had been a decade earlier. In a recent poll, only 25 percent said so.”

I always thought five years was a pretty recent poll, but it turns out I’m wrong. So how recent is this poll? They don’t say.

But not to worry, because Karlyn Bowman, poll tracker at the American Enterprise Institute, assures us that she’s "confident (the surveys) are tapping something real." Of course she’s confident! If the paper had actually done its job, you’d see that Karlyn’s employer’s full name is actually the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. If Karlyn isn’t confident, she has no job. She’s biased.

People wonder why big media is struggling, and why this hip, young generation gravitates towards blogs and shows like The Colbert Report. You want to know why? Because those outlets aren’t governed by a need to create news where there is none. A blog can report once a day or fifteen times. The Colbert Report culls stories that are interesting from other sources. Meanwhile, newspapers like the Pioneer Press need to fill space to justify all the advertising they run in their pages. The result is these kind of meaningless stories, and the result of that is me and others like me reading less newspapers. But wait, hold on, here comes a pollster asking me about my reading habits!

_DZ

SkyMall and Targeted Advertising: Are You a Target?

2010-01-26T14:08:00.005-06:00

A recent flight to my parents house ( I wanted to avoid snow-filled ditches this Christmas season) reminded me how interesting traditional targeted advertising can be.

If you have ever flown, you have no doubt browsed through the SkyMall catalogue thoughtfully placed in the seatback in front of you. I’ve never ordered anything out of it, partly because I don’t know how, but mostly because everything in its pages is overpriced luxuries. Flipping through them you will find a replica of Tutankhamun’s chair, plated in gold leaf, for $900. Also featured is an ultraviolet dental sanitizer and, I am not making this up, a telekinetic obstacle course ($99.95). You can buy a Mt. Rushmore garden stature ($39.95) or even a 14k gold bracelet with Philippians 4:13 engraved on it. ($1,798). This stuff is beyond ridiculous.

Pictured enjoying all these products are neat, well-dressed people with plastic smiles. Every car you need to accessorize is clean and shining, and every home needing embellishment is bright, airy, and orderly. It’s almost like the people who live in them are never home.

But what if “people who are never home” is actually the targeted demographic? The question that every commercial should beg of us is, “To whom is this product targeted?” After all, marketers want to make money, and no money will be made if a well-crafted ad falls on an uninterested audience.

As I browse through the SkyMall pages I see three categories of luxury products: those to ease travel, those to ease business, and those to improve/enrich home life and atmosphere. Some of the items are no doubt intended as gifts, while others are for personal use. The catalogue houses all categories of products, from clothes and toys to appliances and collectibles. It is also placed on a plane, where the most repeat exposure will be to business travelers - some of whom fly three or four times a week. The main impression I get from browsing through it is that these are all items for people who have lots of money but no time.

This prompts two questions that need to be discussed. First, Do people actually need this stuff? And second, is this the kind of target audience I want to become? If having a lot of money, enough to throw away on luxuries, means not having enough time, do I want money? Is it a fair trade? Everything in this catalogue is a meant as a substitute for time spent. Don’t hang out with your dog enough? Buy him a huge helmet-shaped dog house ($480). Missed your wife’s birthday on business? An expensive necklace should do the trick.

Making fun of a lavish lifestyle is all well and good, but there is an important point to be made here. There will always be more stuff to buy. There will never be a shortage of people trying to separate you from your money. But amidst all of that, it is vital to realize that you are always a target market. And what you decide to watch, listen to, and browse will reflect what type of advertising you are exposed to. The question is, Do you want to be the person that advertisers think you are?

_DZ

If you understand this sentence, sasuga

2010-01-12T20:36:00.002-06:00

A recent blog post by jibtv blogger Anna Kunnecke got me thinking about uniquely Japanese words. Her deconstruction of the word bimyou highlights what is so hard about the Japanese language - that is is full of words that represent abstract ideas. Bimyou is definable, but depending on the context will mean different things. Anna has already written about that word, so I will turn my attention to a different word: sasuga (流石).

Sasuga is one of those words that Japanese ex-pats love to drop when talking with other ex-pats. (One of them even uses it as a clever title for his blog.) It can be an adjective or an adverb, and is defined something along the lines of “clever, adept, good, expectations, as one would expect.” Example dialog: “Did you just see what Gary did!? He climbed that 50-foot fence using only his arms!” “Ooh! Sasuga Gary!”

This use of sasuga would be appropriate if Gary had a penchant for climbing things with only his arms, but had never attempted something as tall as 50 feet. You would expect Gary to top his old record.

Sasuga also carries the connotation that you would not expect anything less of a person, and in this context can be used to create a humorous situation out of a decidedly maladroit action. If you already expected someone to screw up, uttering a sarcastic "Sasuga!" when they do something like this is appropriate.

It’s this dichotomy that makes sasuga a joy to utter and a bane to hear, because the the word can either be praising or belittling with no audible difference in intonation. You just don’t know. You don’t know if your friend is praising you or veiledly saying, “Surprise surprise, you lived up to what we thought you could do.”

In this way sasuga is brothers (or sisters, if you prefer) with the term atarimae, which means ‘expected’, ‘reasonable’ or ‘blatantly obvious.’ In Tokyo, for instance, it is atarimae that the trains run on time. Knowing the connotations of atarimae is extremely helpful, because if someone does something that is atarimae only to receive a reply of “sasuga,” then it is likely a sarcastic comment.

All this to say that when a foreigner new to the country hears the phrase “sasuga gaijin(foreigner),” they have no way of knowing whether or not it is a complement, because they have not yet learned what is atarimae and what is not. It’s one of those things you have to, as Anna says, take as a quicksilver-kind of word and go with the flow until you can determine the context. And if you figure out the context more quickly than your other gaijin friends, then I have one thing to say.

Sasuga!

_DZ

Dann writes from his home in snowy Minnesota, where sasuga is the correct response to -15F weather.

My Top Six Albums Going Into 2010

2010-01-03T11:21:00.001-06:00

Chelsea Walls Soundtrack - Jeff Tweedy

I bought this CD over two years ago for ¥100 in Tokyo only because it had the words “Jeff Tweedy” on the side of it. I have still never seen the movie it was made for, nor do I own any Wilco albums. Nonetheless, this album is very enjoyable to listen to, with its mostly-instrumental lineup punctuated by poignant songs. Highlights include Jimmy Scott’s cover of Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” and Robert Sean Leonard’s contribution on “The Lonely 1”. Overall a very relaxing album to put on after a long day.

Electric Tears - Buckethead

After an initial listen I discarded this instrumental album as uninteresting and unworthy of Buckethead. After I let it sit on my shelf for a while I gave it another chance. Color me impressed! The whole album has almost no accompaniment, with Buckethead instead choosing to layer acoustic and electric guitar tracks to create a hollow and dreamy soundscape which he then fills with peaceful melodies and gentle guitar noodling. Standout tracks are “All in the Waiting”, “Mustang”, “Witches on the Hearth”, and “Kansas Storm”.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today - David Byrne and Brian Eno

Prompted to buy the album by the hit single “Strange Overtones”, this was one of the my favorite albums of the year. It sounds like it belongs in the 80s, back when Byrne and Eno were making ...Bush of Ghosts. (Not being able to buy that album this year might drive me nuts.) The song-writing is top-notch throughout, as is Byrne’s tone and Eno’s sonic atmospheres. Best of all, this doesn’t sound like two guys collaborating because they know that anything with their name on it will sell. It sounds fresh; like they're exploring new avenues. These guys have worked together for close to twenty years, and are still able to produce a fun album like this. Go them.

Mr Big - Mr Big

This might be the only album I bought because of the bassist. After hearing Billy Sheehan’s work on David Lee Roth’s Eat’em and Smile, I wanted more bass. I own all four of Mr. Big’s albums, but this one still stands out, mainly because of the top-notch musicianship of Sheehan and guitarist Paul Gilbert. Their hallmark song, “Addicted To That Rush,” is four-and-a-half minutes of them trading solos and trying to out-shred each other. Overall, the songwriting is unremarkable, with popular themes being sex, partying, adolescent irresponsibility, dramatic heartbreak. Gilbert’s tone is flawless throughout, particularly during the solos of “Had Enough” and “Anything For You”, where it is nearly tear-jerking because, unlike his contemporaries, he chooses meaningful phrasing over trying to cram as many sixteenth-notes into a measure as possible.

Tales of the Inexpressible - Shpongle

Psytrance affectionado Shpongle’s sophomore effort, coming after their already-impressive debut Are You Shpongled?, is one of the best $5 AmazonMP3 deals I have bought. It’s trippy, it’s catchy, it’s playful, and, dare I say, it’s even more organic electronica than anything Infected Mushroom can produce. Granted, IM makes faster paced music that takes you with it, while Shpongle are more interested in creating engrossing electronic worlds for your mind to explore. Some might say that this makes Shpongle less focused, but I don’t think so. This whole album is a seamless experience, perhaps best described by a snippet of the lyrics from the “StarShpongled Banner”:

I am a shaman, magician

The sun is purple

3D dimensions

I am for mental extensions.

Ki - The Devin Townsend Project

Ki is the start of a new era for Townsend, as he, in his own words, “has stopped drinking and stopped smoking marijuana.” His previous work, notably with extreme hate-metal band Strapping Young Lad, was offset by the much more mellow Devin Townsend Band albums, one of which I reviewed last year. The two projects showed very different sides of Devin, perhaps rightly, as he had been diagnosed bipolar. SYL was, what Devin callled, “happens when someone who is predisposed to mental illness takes steady amounts of mind-altering drugs.” Devin has since has a life-changing experience, and hence the DTP and Ki. Devin is a man who makes half-albums, and by that I mean his albums are a seamless experience for half of the record. On Infinity it was the first five tracks, on Ocean Machine/Biomech it was the last half of the album, while on Terria various tracks are crafted around and link back to the nine-plus-minute long epic “Earth day.” Ki more or less follows the pattern, though the album follows more of a sensory-experience-type of curve, building with the first six tracks to the holistic set of tracks eight through eleven, with the final two tracks being a comedown. The climactic title track, clocking in at over seven minutes long, is a microcosm of the album, building layer upon layer of sound until the music explodes in all its glory (Devin’s operatic voice does the honors).

_DZ

2010: Goals for the New Year

2010-01-02T19:55:00.000-06:00

Not buy any new music (really this time!)

Not drive my car (this should be interesting)

Study the works of Marcus Aurelius, David Thoreau, and Thomas Hobbes

Ride my bikes like crazy

Spend at least one hour a week in meditation (Thursday, perhaps)

Write a novel (50,000 words), or at least half of one.

Study the Biblical books of Philippians, Ecclesiastes, and John

No plans for the blog this year, as I want to be able to dedicate more time to writing on paper with a pen. I also plan to spend less time on the computer in general; hopefully Sunday-Tuesday can be computer-less days, or at least internet-less.

We’ll see what the year holds.

Ready, go!

_DZ

New Music to Listen to in 2010!

2010-01-01T12:46:00.006-06:00

A year ago I made a list of music I wanted to listen to more in 2009.

Fortissimo - Virgin Black
1.Outside - David Bowie
Audentity - Klaus Schulze
Mirage - Klaus Schulze
Mistaken Identity - Vernon Reid
Zen Arcade - Hüsker Dü
Wired - Jeff Beck
Real Illusions: Reflections - Steve Vai
Mothership Connection - Parliament

Two of those albums (Mothership Connection and 1.Outside) I didn't listen to as much as I would have liked. That will change this year.

Others, like Audentity, Mirage, and Zen Arcade I really, really enjoyed.

Time to do it again! The list of CD's to listen more to this year is as follows!

Front End Lifter - Yohimbe Brothers

1. Outside - David Bowie

Mothership Connection - Parliament

Terria - Devin Townsend

Goldberg Variations - Bach

Better Living Through Chemistry - Fatboy Slim

In Rainbows - Radiohead

Moving Pictures -Rush

To add to that I expect to spend a month listening only listening to David Bowie. I have thirteen of his albums, so it shouldn't really be that hard.

Also, I plan to be able to recognize each of Beethoven's symphonies by ear by the end of the year. This might be harder than I think. I really want to listen to more classical music in general, so maybe this will be a good start.

_DZ

Hey Look, Adidas is Turning Their Brand Into an Emotion

2010-01-01T10:12:00.003-06:00

_DZ

2009: A Wrap-up of Goals Met and Also Those I Failed To Meet

2009-12-31T23:20:00.005-06:00

So, another year has passed. What a trip! Last year I posted this post detailing my goals for the year. Let's see how I did!

Read at least 20 new books

For your viewing pleasure, I present the entire list of books that I have read this year. The list is 59 books long.

*denotes re-read

- most enjoyable reads in bold

MediaMaking - Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney

Paradox of Choice - Barry Schwartz

High-Tech Heretic - Clifford Stoll

A Quick Guide to Analogue Synthesis - Ian Waugh

Issues in Advertising - Edited by David G. Tucek

Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

All Consuming Images - Stuart Ewen

Model - Michael Gross

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Finally Alive - Dr. John Piper

Renegade Kids, Suburban Outlaws - Wayne S. Wooden

The Faces of Homelessness - Marjore Hope and James Young

Killing Yourself to Live - Chuck Klosterman

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Fool’s Gold - Andrew B. Schmookler

The Wisdom Of Crowds - James Surowiecki

The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

The Communist Manifesto - Marx & Engels

Culture Of Complaint - Robert Hughes

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman

Ideas of the Great Philosophers - William Sahakian

Principles of Biomedical Ethics - Beauchamp and Childress

Bowling Alone - Robert D. Putnam

Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller*

The Communications Revolution - George N. Gordon

The Myth of a Christian Religion - Greg Boyd

Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis

Trapped in the Net - Gene I. Rochlin

The Internet Church - Walter P. Wilson

The Passion of Jesus Christ - Dr. John Piper

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon

Wild At Heart - John Eldredge

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible - Karl Van Der Toorn

Generation Ecstasy - Simon Reynolds*

Don’t Waste Your Life - Dr. John Piper*

Fargo Rock City - Chuck Klosterman

The McDonaldization of Society - George Ritzer

Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi

Chaos - James Gleick

Joy at the End of the Tether - Douglas WIlson

Culture Jam - Kalle Lasn

Nonviolence in Theory and Practice - Edited by Robert L. Holmes

Semantics - Sidney Shanker

Toxic Psychiatry - Peter R. Breggin

Lives of Master Swordsmen - Makoto Sugawara*

There Are No Children Here - Alex Kotlowitz

Winning PR in the Wired World - Don Middleberg

Being Digital - Nicholas Negroponte

Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson

Experiencing Poverty - D.Stanley Eitzen

The Death of Common Sense - Philip K. Howard

Hannibal Rising - Thomas Harris

Technopoly - Neil Postman*

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton*

This Momentary Marriage - Dr. John Piper*

Code of the Samurai - Thomas Cleary

If you are really interested, you can go through my blog posts over the last year and make rough correlations from certain posts to what I was reading at the time. I doubt you will have time to do this. I don't even have time to do this.

Read through the Bible in a year

Completed on 12/27/09! This was a really rewarding experience. Some books, like the prophets, dragged on a bit (I'm looking at you, Isaiah.) Others, like Genesis, still gave me new perspectives on stories I had read dozens of times before.

Not buy any new music

My iTunes tells me that I have added 612 new tracks to my library since 12/31/08. Some of these were gifts, but most were not. FAIL! I did get some really good stuff, though. Some highlights are:

Ki - Devin Townsend
Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw - Pelican
You've Come a Long Way Baby - Fatboy Slim
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today - David Byrne and Brian Eno
Silence Followed by a Deafening Roar - Paul Gilbert
Equinoxe - Jean Michel Jarre
The Man Who Sold The World - David Bowie

Double my blogs posts to 174

The side bar on your right will tell you how I did. Pretty sucky, I guess. Well, 132 is 75% of 174, so I get a C- on that one. But at least I didn't blogspam. I wrote when I felt like it and didn't when I was busy. A big part of my falling short is that I developed a serious interest in cycling over the summer, and spent most of my free time doing that. Looking back, some of my favorite posts from the year:

Memorize a list of logical fallacies

My hard drive crashed during the year, and I lost my web bookmarks. On top of that, I forgot all about this one. So, maybe a 50%.

Produce a piece of ambient music that I like

I got close, I think. But I gave my keyboard back to my parents in June, and haven't touched ambient music since then. A large part of that is lack of interest. After reading Outliers I realized that if I truly want to be good at something, I have to dedicate a LOT of time to it. I decided that making music wasn't something I wanted to pursue even fractionally.

Give away five Macs

This flat out did not happen. The reason for this is that after reading Cliff Stoll's criticisms of computer technology, I realized that kids don't need help being exposed to computers. They can learn to use them well on their own. Hence, this post about computer education. And this one. I did, however, supply three (or four :-( ) people with bicycles, which I am happy about.

What a year! I feel that I learned and grew a lot as a person, and am excited to see what this year will hold. Last year I didn't know I enjoyed cycling so much; what will I learn this year!?

_DZ

Rate This, Quantify That: Last.Fm and Cyclocomputers

2009-12-21T14:51:00.001-06:00

Some of you may be familiar with Last.Fm, the music tracking portal that keeps a record of your musical tastes and recommends you new music. It also offers a downloadable program that plugs into your iTunes and allows you to see, in detail, the breakdown of your music listening habits. This data can be shared, so your friends can know what you have been listening to as of late. Tracking listening habits? Sharing data? I realize that this has all the making of a follow-up article to this post critiquing iTunes, but it is not. This one has to do with quantifying experience, and how that quantification is commonly seen as an end rather then a means.

I used Last.Fm regularly until this summer, generating just short of two years’ worth of data. The top thirty or so of my most reguarly-played artists are in the following chart. If I never told you before that I liked David Bowie, well, now you know.

(click to enlarge)

Everything I played on my iTunes and iPod was tracked, which I thought was going to be exciting, until I realized that tracking what I listened to became more important than actually listening to it. I had some music on both my G4 and my Quicksilver G4, yet I rarely ever used those machines as jukeboxes because they were not online. If the music I listened to wasn’t recorded (pardon the pun) somehow, I effectively perceived it as having never been listened to. What mattered was what was in the dataset. This is significant because we as a society tend to worship data.

Excessive quantification, meaning the quantification of things that cannot or should not be quantified, is a sign of over-reliance on technology. What Last.Fm did for me was not just keep track of what I listened to, but rather provided a way for me to, quantifiably, show that I loved certain artists more than others. That I like Joe Satriani’s music more than Steve Vai’s is obvious, not just because I have eight of Satch’s CDs to Vai’s three, but because Vai is trailing Satch by 288 “points.”

The thing is, I don’t need a computer to tell me that I listen to more Satch than Vai. I already know! I was the one listening! Moreover, the computer can be misleading by showing that I “like” Yngwie Malmsteen more than I do Jason Becker, which is undeniably false. Malmsteen only has more “points” because I’ve been listening to the four CDs (pared down from like eight or nine) I have of his since right out of high school. I bought Becker’s Perpetual Burn a year-and-a-half ago, and it’s brilliant. (The same can be said of my enjoyment of Jean-Michel Jarre, whose 125 plays all came from the only album of his I have; Oxygène.)

But I am straying from my main point, which is that data is something to be used. I recently started budgeting. I have a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers on it that tells me how much money I have spent and how much I have saved and how much I will likely use next month. To keep a budget simply because you enjoy entering and manipulating numbers would be a strange hobby indeed. I collect data for something else, not just for the sake of collecting it.

One of my hobbies, cycling, is rife with the quantification of performance. Maximum output, generated wattage, drag coefficient, gear ratio, cadence, distance travelled: these are all data points that help a cyclist measure how well his or her body is performing. So many recreational cyclists get all caught up in measuring this stuff, but for what? For whom is this data important? For professionals, who need to get the most out of their body and bike. As a recreational cyclist, I ask myself, Is this important? Does distance matter if I enjoy my ride? If I am miserable, yet in my moments of extreme discomfort happen to generate the most power, will that be good for my psyche? What really matters? What matters is that I get exercise and have fun at the same time - otherwise I risk ending up like this guy.

PUSH PULL from Landis Fields on Vimeo.

The omnipotency of data is so prevalent is our society that we seldom question it. After all, data and information make things efficient, and who doesn’t want to be efficient? That depends on who you ask. Ask Socrates, and you’ll hear that efficiency is a problem for the common man, for the peasants and slaves. Trimming things down so that they require less thought is not a pursuit for the philosopher. Ask a man riding the Giro d’Italia, and he’ll tell you that it is everything.

Pro cyclists aside, we must ask, Does efficiency make us more human? Does reducing performance to numbers, eliminating uncertainty, and quantifying experience lead to more caring, sensitive human beings? Does the ability to direct your friends inquiry to a Last.fm list make for more conversation, or less.

And what’s result in comparing music lists? Do we not start to judge who is the “better” music fan, or who is the most avid listener of a preferred band? Are we more content afterwards, or less? Quantification leads to comparison, and comparison breeds resentment. After all, machines are made equal. Humans are not.

I want to listen to music to hear Klaus Schulze’s (at #2) brilliance, and I want to cycle because the wind feels good as it rushes by. I want to bask in custom synth textures and make wild guesses at my speed as I go downhill. What I don’t need, or want, is a sheet to keep track of playcounts or a fancy-schmancy cyclocomputer. Humanity, I feel, is better off without them.

_DZ

On Homosexual Marriage

2009-12-18T15:36:00.001-06:00

I want to talk about something a little less abstract today. I want to talk about homosexual marriage. America is in the midst of a movement to legalize gay marriage, so that gay couples have rights equal to heterosexual couples. Proponents claim that equal people deserve equal rights, and so it’s only fair that we treat everyone equally. This is the same logic that has all government housing wheelchair accessible, despite the fact that a mere 2% of those represented by the disabled lobby are actually in wheelchairs. Everybody has to be equal.

But gay people claim inequality on the basis of a flawed (to Christians) conception of marriage. If two people love one another, why shouldn’t the government extend to them the right to get hitched? Now if you come from a secular worldview, there is no good answer to that. Maybe you have a shot at claiming that, unlike Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights movement, gay marriage is not a civil rights issue. After all, you have a choice to not act on being gay. The default condition may be to be gay, but you can still act on that by choosing to get married. Being a woman and being black are both default conditions, requiring impressive amounts of willpower and money to change. This argument isn’t very strong by itself.

A Christian response, one that I hold, is that maybe God calls gay people to be single. Through the power of Christ they can carry out his work as Godly, celibate, single people. This is not a consolation prize, one step behind marriage. For God promises in Isaiah 56 1-7:

(1)Thus says the LORD: Observe what is right, do what is just; for my salvation is about to come, my justice, about to be revealed. (2) Happy is the man who does this, the son of man who holds to it; Who keeps the sabbath free from profanation, and his hand from any evildoing. (3) Let not the foreigner say, when he would join himself to the LORD, "The LORD will surely exclude me from his people"; Nor let the eunuch say, "See, I am a dry tree." (4) For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who observe my Sabbaths and choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant, (5) I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name Better than sons and daughters; an eternal, imperishable name will I give them. (6) And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, ministering to him, Loving the name of the LORD, and becoming his servants-- All who keep the sabbath free from profanation and hold to my covenant, (7) Them I will bring to my holy mountain and make joyful in my house of prayer; Their holocausts and sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.

Dr. John Piper does a fantastic job of explaining this in a sermon which can be read here. It focuses on verse five, where God promises blessing better than sons and daughters (and by implication, blessings and joys of marriage) to those who stay single and do God’s work.

If God doesn’t call gay people (who follow and trust in Him) to be single, then he will give them the strength to get married heterosexually.

There is a reoccurring debate as to whether or not God condones homosexuality, but I think the Bible is very clear that it does not. While there are passages that explicitly condemn it (in Romans, Leviticus, etc), I want to instead bring to light the subtlety of Ephesian 5:29-33:

(29) After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—( 30) for we are members of his body. (31)"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." (32)This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. (33) However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Verse 31 is a quote from Genesis 2, where God outlines his design for marriage to the first man and woman. From the beginning, God intended it to be this way. God also intended marriage to be a model, a drama, to show how He loves His church. In the way that Christ loves the Christian church, so are husbands to love their wives. This is evident in Ephesians 5: 25-28:

(25)Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (26)to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, (27)and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.(28)In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

I think that this shows why God hates homosexuality; it is a distortion of how He relates to those He loves. I don’t know about you, but I do not like something I made or said being distorted to reflect something not in my intention.This is why I cannot support gay marriage; a position that will get me labeled as a close-minded something-or-other.

But what I think is equally important, along with showing why homosexuality is not biblically OK, is determining how we as Christians should treat gay people around us. Because we really don't seem to be doing a good job of it. Too often we resort to the extremes of either condemning and avoiding them or fully accepting and supporting them - neither of which is loving them. I am only interested in how Jesus would treat them, and I think that that can best be determined, again, by reading the Bible. John 3:17 says that Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world, but rather to save it. I think that’s important. Jesus cares about people, not laws.

When most Christians look at gay people, what do they see? They see a person openly living in sin and debauchery. The easy thing to do is to condemn them, to rank that person’s sin above their own. For some reason Christians today think that homosexuality is worse than other sins, somewhere below murder but definitely above lying to your boss or cheating on your taxes. But this is wrong. After all, if God gave us laws, then when we disobey them, we offend God. If God is an infinitely powerful, worthy, and righteous Being (which He is), then any infraction sustained against him is infinitely grievous. Infinitely. It doesn’t matter if you lied to your sister or have been in a gay relationship for ten years or killed a million people. They are all infinitely grievous actions worthy of God’s wrath. It is therefore rather unwarranted of us Christians to hold homosexual people in higher disdain then anyone else. So the question, simplified, becomes not how to act around homosexual people, but rather how to act around people living in open sexual sin. For an answer to this, we can again turn to Jesus and his interaction with a prostitute in John 8:3-11:

3 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, 4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? 6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. 7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. 8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. 9 And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. 10 When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? 11 She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Jesus was concerned about this woman’s soul; that she not sin and thus not bring God’s wrath upon her. He didn’t condemn her, rather He offered her a second chance out of His infinite love for her.

Our government strives to be politically correct; to provide equality and justice for all. A government without God, however, has no moral compass. In our society there are no evil people - only “sociopaths”. And there is no sin - only “social deviance.” Against these odds and amidst these worldviews, God calls us to love one another. Love, not defined as tolerance, but as pointing people towards the Greatest Good. We aren’t called to vote Yes for Prop 8, but that doesn’t excuse us from not jump-starting your gay neighbor’s partner’s car if he needs help. After all, we’re all guilty of sin and deserving of death, only saved through the blood of Christ Jesus. Making Him glorious through your lifestyle should involve loving those you don’t want to, because He tells you to.

_DZ

The 2009 Project For Awesome - Northside Bike Project

2009-12-17T12:46:00.002-06:00

So, right now, the 2009 Project for Awesome is underway over at YouTube. This is an effort to make the world suck less, and is accomplished via a two-step process.

Step One

Lots of people make a video that promotes an individual charity and then upload it to YouTube.

Step Two

The P4A YouTube community works tirelessly to comment on and rate those videos, thereby making them top the charts as the most popular videos on YouTube for a day or so and thus maximizing their exposure to the general public.

THIS IS A GOOD CAUSE, AND YOU SHOULD ALL GO DO IT.

Having said that, I am promoting my cause here because, as I have already established, I am poop at making videos. My cause is the Northside Bike Project.

The NSBP is a group of people in North Minneapolis, MN, who aim to provide bikes to (primarily) poor, urban youth. A program of giving away bikes, combined with educating the recipients about basic bicycle maintenance, aims to, in their words, "provide a bike for every neighborhood youth who would like one."

Bikes represent freedom for children, who, astride one, can explore their neighborhood, get to school, go to friends' houses, and do a hundred other things. Getting a kid on a bike at a young age will also make them comfortable with one, to the point where, once grown, they will be more likely to see bicycles a a legitimate form of alternative transportation and not just a hobby. More bikes on the road means less cars, and thus less pollution and obesity. After all, cycling is exercise.

Despite being the #2 Best City for Cycling in the US, Minneapolis is seriously lacking in bike infrastructure on the north side. Bike shops are few and far between, as are decent trails. A lack of bike shops means that less bikes are fixed, which means more waste when bikes break. Simple bike maintenance can fix that.

Right now the NSBP is working out of a truck stocked with tools. A NPO bike shop in St Paul, Sibley Bike Depot, has been helping out with volunteers and by sending over some bikes. The NSBP is working to become more and more self-sufficient in the process of reaching its goals.

As far as I can tell, their needs are as follows:

More bikes
Bike locks (Important!)
Tools (you can always use more tools!)
Volunteers

More info can be found at their FaceBook page, which sadly does not have a "donate" link. But in you're in the area, check them out! I certainly plan to be more active in the project in the following months!

_DZ

#21

2009-12-16T07:48:00.003-06:00

(click for larger image)

_DZ

Shaping How We Listen to Control What We Buy

2009-12-02T19:31:00.011-06:00

MP3s are nothing new in 2009. In fact, they’re boring. Most of us have probably been using them since middle school, ripping CDs to our computers and creating a digital music collection that allowed us to listen to our music anywhere, any time, and in any order. We smiled with joy as we looked over our iTunes libraries; no more weighty CD collections to lug around and have stolen!

But what if we missed something? What if we overlooked the peculiarity of being able to listen to multiple tracks by multiple artists out of sequence from their original album format? Maybe we lost something when we all went digital.

Of course, mixing songs into a playlist is not new. Radio stations have been doing it for close to a century, DJs have been creating personal mixtapes for some decades now, and compilation albums have been sold by the millions. All of these examples, however, work under some sort of restriction - radio has but a small sample of radio singles to choose from, and compilation CDs and mixtapes, at least good ones, were arranged and mastered to make a pleasurable holistic listening experience. The tracks were mixed and matched, yes, but usually by a professional with a greater theme in mind.

The mass marketing of CD burners brought to us the ability to create a personal mixtape, and we as a society entered a transitional period where we still conscious of our partaking in the deconstruction on the musical “album,” but, excited by the newfound ability to share custom mixes with friends, staved off thinking about potential consequences.

We often think that new technology can only bring good things, when in fact the introduction of any new technology results in a dynamic give-and-take process. As author Neil Postman writes in his book Technopoly,

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological...One significant change generates total change. If you remove caterpillars from a given habitat, you're not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions for survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that had none.” (p.18)

MP3s weren’t just a new player in the music environment for which CDs had to make room. They weren’t a new form of the CD. They not only allowed you to pick and choose which songs off your CDs you wanted to listen to, but they redefined how music is made, marketed, and consumed. MP3s made possible online music download stores like Napster, iTunes, and AmazonMP3. For the first time, buying just the single off an album was available to the masses.

This had a profound impact on the whole music market, but in particular on the pop, rap, and rock genres. It pushed them away from making a solid cohesive album and towards focusing more on producing a catchy hit single. In more and more cases now, the album is just used to market the single. Overall quality can suffer, because a successful single will sell a mediocre album. Consider a hypothetical example of Lady Gaga:

Suppose her latest single, “Bad Romance,” was released on the Internet and reached the ears of 50 million fans (about twice the population of Texas) who sent a link to nine friends each, exposing 500 million to a really catchy hit single. Now, if a mere 20% of those people bought the single, Lady Gaga would make $100 million. If just 1% of those who bought the single went on to buy the (mediocre) supporting record, The Fame Monster, it would go platinum. This is simple math, and online music distributors like Apple want to get as big a piece of market pie as they can. The more copies of “Bad Romance” that iTunes sells, the more money Apple makes. It is Apple’s best interest, then, as music marketers, to shape the listener’s consumption habits in a way that will make them more accepting of singles. The sale of the album would just be a bonus. The seamless integration of iTunes with the iTunes Store (introduced in version 4) fosters this acceptance. (That iTunes is marketed as music management software is a telling sign. Managing a few hundred CDs? Not that hard. Managing a couple thousand singles? Well, for that you need a computer program.)

Starting in version 4.5, iTunes had a feature called Party Shuffle (now renamed iTunes DJ), an option that let you to listen to your entire music library in random order. This feature was not new per se, as the hundred-disc changers of the 90’s often included such features, but it did take that idea into the realm of the virtual music library.

In iTunes 8, however, a whole new feature called Genius was added. The idea behind Genius was to take the wisdom of crowds, the collective listening preferences of all iTunes users, and harness it to make recommendations, in the form of playlists, to individual users. One could pick any track in his or her library, hit the “Genius” button, and iTunes would compile a playlist culled from the entire music library based on the listening habits of users with similar tastes. It’s an interesting idea, but only useful if you want to listen to music without context or continuous narrative; in other words, a collection of singles. But not all music, obviously, is singles.

If I’m listening to the first movement of Beethoven’s Eighth, the odds are astronomically higher that I would want to finish the whole symphony rather than skip to Mozart to Handel to Haydn to Liszt. The same can be said about any track off of Radiohead’s OK Computer, Steely Dan’s Aja, Devin Townsend’s Infinity, or any other album that provides a seamless listening experience from start to finish.

The iTunes Genius in itself is not a bad thing, but it is important to realize that not all music falls under it’s umbrella. Apple is out to make money, and selling more singles results in more money. Cultivating a userbase who is accepting of these singles, then, is the raison d'être of Genius. From this viewpoint, that iTunes is pushed as a music jukebox for everyone, when in reality it has several features (iTunes DJ, Genius, the Store) that, at least in my view, clearly promote the consumption of commercial-radio-friendly music, is disconcerting.

We are no longer in an environment with caterpillar MP3s; we now have mature, elegant, butterfly music distribution systems. For those who enjoy the endless parade of pop singles, this is a welcome paradigm shift. For others, like me, the marriage of music marketing to the shaping of consumption habits is a reason to be wary. If continuous exposure breeds familiarity, then using iTunes could result in a decline in demand for holistic album experiences. If diversity in music is to be preserved, it is important that we be aware of technology’s subtle influence on artistic expression.

(Image from paradigmshiftstudio.com)

Thankfully, there are those who are aware and involved in a movement to keep the album experience alive. My friend Dan has extensive experience with the underground metal community, and writes,

“[T]here has been a big push in the underground communities (both in metal and alternative/indie music) to refuse to allow their albums to be released on iTunes, with many bands choosing even to release albums on vinyl (Bon Iver and The Raconteurs come to mind at the moment for good examples of this). I also know that many underground punk bands have been doing this for years, with some of them at the dawn of the 90's even resisting the rise of the CD by using vinyl. Examples of this are The Circle Jerks, Lars Fredrikson and the Bastards, as well as Helmet.”

The Raconteurs, of course, are one of Jack White’s - the man notorious for still recording on reel-to-reel machines - side projects. I still can’t tell if he uses those machines for legitimate musical reasons or just to separate himself from the pack by generating a faux-nostalgia over archaic equipment. Regardless, he is indeed known as a staunch proponent of vinyl. I wrote an article a while back about the resurrection of vinyl, and, judging by Amazon’s vinyl Hot Releases page, it seems that vinyl is still doing pretty well. It’s worth noting that the irony of Lady Gaga’s album being available on vinyl is not lost on me.

Vinyl or no vinyl, the countermeasures taken by bands against the MP3 takeover succeed only because of the Internet, the very device that exacerbates the problem. This is the ecosystem which must be balanced. One one side we have singles dominating popular music, and on the other we have bands who resist and sell their albums to dedicated fans via a website. The masses who want the singles are appeased, and the fans, equally, have a place to gather. It is these fans, with their chant of “A new delivery method doesn’t render an old one invalid!”, who are crucial in maintaining that the two live in harmony. For just like Huxley warned in A Brave New World, the danger lies not in our old system being dominated and forcibly repressed, but in it being appraised and portrayed as useless and thus discarded.

So keep your MP3s, iPods, and iTunes. And keep your CDs and LPs. Find the unique contributions of each one and maximize them. For they are not only important as storage mediums, but as representations of a consumer mindset. Make room in your musical ecosystem for both, and enjoy the fullness that each brings to the diversity and taste of the music market.

_DZ

Life Lessons From The Car Business

2009-11-27T11:47:00.001-06:00

If you’ve read some of my other posts on this site, you know that I spent some time, eleven months, to be exact, working in the car business. I learned a lot of lessons during my time there, some more valuable then others, but none more meaningful than how wrong it is to judge others. Not only are you usually wildly inaccurate in your preconceptions, but in constructing them you also build yourself up to be someone you are not. This is a lesson I still haven’t fully learned yet, though perhaps I will never fully get over being judgmental.

In America, where who you are is so often tied to what you drive, what you drive is seemingly of paramount importance. Nowhere is this mentality more evident than among car salesman. The minute you drive onto a car lot, the salesman busy themselves with evaluating who you are and what kind of car you might buy, as if they’ve known you for years. Are you driving a beaten ‘93 Taurus? You’re buying a Hyundai or a Ford Focus. Do you have a notebook in your hand in which you compare prices and features? You’re looking for something Japanese, probably a Subaru. Old and driving a Cadillac? You plan to keep buying American, and what model of car isn’t really important as long it looks nice and has enough trunk space for two or three golf bags.

It’s been two years since I held that job, and I can still rattle off stereotypes like that so fast I scare myself. And this kind of stuff goes on all the time. There was a simple rule that I used to go by when appraising what people bought: If their new car had fog lights, the buyer was competent and well-off. Fog lights usually only come on the top-end models of cars; hence, whatever the car, if it had fog lights, I could assume that the person knew why they wanted that specific car, and that they wanted the most car for their money. Unless their new car was already a base-model subcompact, I judged the customer could do better by downgrading to a smaller car with more options (like fog lights). Quality tends to be higher. Oh, and always buy Japanese.

It was with this mentality that one day I found myself preparing a Dodge Caravan for a customer I had not met. (My job was of the cashier-checkout sort. I made sure the customer’s car was good to go and walked them through their final paperwork.) This Caravan had zero options. Nothing. Not even automatic windows, And it was a Dodge Caravan, which tend to be at the bottom of the minivan genre in terms of quality. I could not have been less impressed with this customer’s choice and available cash.

All that changed, though, once I sat down with the customer. Instead of a overweight, lower-class white mom with unruly children, as I had expected, I was met by a smart, competent, father of five. Throughout the course of the paperwork I learned that he was a minister of a small rural church, and that this was his first new car in over ten years. I tried to concentrate on being prompt and courteous, but inside I could not have been more ashamed of myself. I identified with more characteristics in this man’s life then perhaps any other customer I had encountered, yet a half-hour before I had been joking with one of the detailers about how cleaning this car was barely worth our time. I was a horrible human being.

In an earlier post I talked about how missionaries always drove vans, and how as kids we always bragged about them. At that moment, sitting at that desk, I looked at the man sitting across from me and felt like I had practically grown up in his family. He wasn’t looking for a fancy car, because he had more important things to care about, like serving God. In all likelihood he was more concerned about being grateful to God for providing for his needs, just like my parents were and still are, than about impressing others. And there I was, judging a person’s worth by what they owned.

I drove home that night a different person from when I had woken up. Before, it was easy to play the labeling game with the salesmen. Now I didn’t care. Before, I put stock in what I drove. Now it was a car that got me from A to B, a gift God had given me that I didn’t deserve. I drove slowly, the realization washing over me that nothing I owned was a credit to my own success. Everything around me was put there to show me God - to teach me lessons.

_DZ

Thanksgiving Thanks

2009-11-26T14:08:00.001-06:00

Things I am thankful for this year.

-Parents who call me.
-Books for learning from
-Money for food
-My job, in this economy
-Working bicycles
-People to bicycle with
-Enough insulin
-A warm apartment
-Ample clothing
-Good health
-My church
-Music

All these things may seem may seem rather ordinary and boring, and I might agree, if you were only looking at them separately. But for all of these things to converge on one person? God is clearly blessing me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

_DZ

The Fleeting Value of Professional Sports When Viewed Through The Lens of a Traveller

2009-11-25T10:14:00.000-06:00

As a kid, I was a huge sports fan. I watched sports whenever possible, played sports, and talked sports to whoever would listen. During my kindergarten and early elementary years I liked Japanese baseball, and followed teams like the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Orix Bluewave, Seibu Lions, and Kintetsu Buffaloes with enthusiasm. Unlike in American sports, where a city or state owns a team, Japanese sports are sponsored by companies - the Yomiuri is a major newspaper, Orix is a financial firm, and Kintetsu and Seibu are both railway conglomerates. Sumo was another favorite sport, and for the first two weeks of every other month my family and I would crowd around the TV during the 5-6pm hour to watch the great wrestlers duke it out with one another. Participation in soccer during my later elementary years paved the way for interest in the Japanese soccer league, or J.League for short. Favorite teams included the Yokohama Marinos, Kawasaki Verdy, and Kashima Antlers. Sometimes my private soccer club would play the elementary prep teams of these clubs, who were always formidable opponents.

During this time I also followed American basketball with a passion, the Chicago Bulls being my favorite team to follow. Every morning I would tear through the newspaper to find the sports section and read up on the happenings in the NBA, halfway across the world. If the paper happened to run a picture of MJ, it was a glorious day for my scrapbook.

Card-collecting was another way I was in-touch with sports. I collected baseball, basketball, and occasionally football cards throughout elementary, but only basketball card collection continued throughout middle school. Basketball cards were a way for me to stay close to my American roots, and I took great pride in my collection. A far as I knew, the Japanese card-trading scene was non-existent, and I saw trading cards as a uniquely American thing.

Interest in following sports slowly waned beginning in high school. I still played sports, but just didn’t care about sports as a whole as much. I had other interests, I guess, like music, cars, and computer games. I went to see the occasional game, but as far as memorizing stats and removing newspaper articles, that had ceased.

I had a brief love affair with European football (Arsenal woo!) in the past few years, but for the most part I have avoided following sports too closely. This year I tried to follow the international Formula-1 racing circuit, but lost interest half-way through June.

All this to say, really, that the more I think about it the more I can’t help but opine that following sports with enthusiasm is merely a construct of increased proximity - a mild form of nationalism, as it were. Right now I live in Minnesota, whose Vikings are 9-1. I don’t really care about the Vikings, yet find myself caught up in all the excitement over their new-found success. Come Monday I inevitably wander over to NFL.com to see how they fared the previous weekend. ‘They’re in MY city, and them doing well reflects well on me,’ I poorly rationalize. Why should I care?

If passionately following sports is indeed a mild form of nationalism, then it all seems very silly to me, a third-culture kid. I’ve seen kids crazy about J.League, teens going nuts over the NBA, college kids raving about their favorite English footy team, and adults getting uproariously drunk and high-fiving over a touchdown against those worthless Packers. It’s all the same everywhere. And what difference does caring about sports make, if indeed you’re only excited about the sport because of it’s proximity to your residence? When you move a lot, like I have, it becomes rather tiring to have to start all over again with a new sport or team to match each new city. Teams win, teams lose, and over the long run it seems pretty pointless and of fugitive disposition to get excited over the present state of a team. Equally useless is reminiscing over how good your football team was ‘back in the day’ (pre-2000 for Detroit. Zing.) Are there not better things to spend time on?

Obsessing over a sports team is revealed to be the hollow joy that it is when you confront it a set of eyes that have spent time examining it’s evanescent qualities regardless of the home culture. The only logical choice to make is to either follow sports passionately wherever you are, which quickly becomes exhausting, or to disregard sports almost entirely, by which you risk potential alienation at the water cooler. This is not to say that following sports is bad; sports, all sports, are exciting, electrifying, and, hopefully, God-honoring. But you don't need to follow any kind of team to enjoy it. I simply think that knowing beyond the simple “Yeah the Vikes played Seattle last weekend and won” is not worth it. It is simply too broad a world out there to narrowly focus on one little corner .

_DZ

Jump Rope 2: Jump Harder with a Vengeance

2009-11-20T14:09:00.004-06:00

If you were at any time a Japanese elementary school student, it’s practically a given that you can jump rope at a professional level. I am not even joking. Japanese kids can jump rope like it’s their job. The public school system, subsidized by both the government and the jump rope industry, is largely to thank for this, as they make jumping rope a three-month-long mandatory P.E. staple. Prizes are given out to those who can jump rope the longest, resulting in kids jumping in class, starving during lunch, and wetting themselves on a regular basis. Learning to run while jumping rope is an important skill to learn at this stage in development. The highlight (or, for me, the lowlight) of the year is the school-wide competition that marks the end of the jumping season. This is where kids break out their Nike Shox, trash-talk dictionaries, and carbon fiber jump ropes and proceed to double-jump until their arms almost fall off. This routine is repeated ever year, so that the average elementary school graduate has (roughly) over 13,000 hours of jump-roping experience and no rotator cuffs.

Double-jumping, passing the rope beneath your feet twice in one jump, is not an easy task for a foreigner like me to accomplish. I never was able to do it, and this relegated me to 45th string on any and every jump rope team and exposed me to repeated kickings of sand in my face. You see, Japanese kids have refined jumping rope to a surprisingly deep level, complete with many different jumping styles, such as Aya Jumping, alternately crisscrossing your arms with each jump, and Kousa Jumping, in which you keep your arms permanently crossed while you jump. At the higher levels both of these techniques are combined with double-jumping, resulting in a whirr of activity that turns a cord of nylon into carbon-hardened steel and a mere elementary school child into its martial arts master, no doubt employable at a thousand different sushi restaurants nation wide. I, meanwhile, was off in the corner, spitting out sand and trying to synchronize my body so that both feet lifted off the ground at the same time.

For those less inclined to individual competition, jumping rope could be turned into a group exercise through utilization of the O-nawa, or large rope. This rope, held by one person on each end, was rotated slowly, the goal being to see how many kids could hop in and synchronously jump. I, of course, was still working on my coordination so I usually was relegated to be a holder, since I was tall for my age and could move my arm in a more or less consistent circular motion.

Japan, however, wastes this potentially profitable natural resource, as once the Japanese student graduates elementary, jumping rope is never spoken of again. It is treated as a stage in life that one must go through and then move on, much like soccer is considered in the US. It’s something that, regardless of how good you get at it, you must discard it and grow up. This means that now is the prime time in my life to get good at it, so I can reclaim some lost dignity from my youth. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some Shox to buy and some sand to kick.

Dann writes from his home in Minnesota where, unfortunately, his mediocre rope-jumping skills are his main way of keeping warm.

Nike, Iggy Pop, Shock Advertising, and Cleaning Up Public Space

2009-11-18T12:47:00.006-06:00

If you follow my posts much, you know that I enjoy a good round of Guitar Hero. While Guitar Hero has been a source of new music for me from time to time, it has also helped me look at advertising habits at a deeper level, albeit indirectly. It was from playing Guitar Hero that I recognized this song (Iggy Pop’s “Search and Destroy”), and that allowed me to subsequently find the following Nike advertisement on YouTube.

That ad showed on NBC in 1996, during Game 6 of the NBA Finals. I was nine at the time, and was in the throes of Michael Jordan idolization. A family friend had taped Games 5 and 6 and mailed them to my family in Japan. The Nike ad only played once, but I watched the whole game so many times that the ad is permanently branded in my memory.

The content of the ad no doubt contributed to its "stickiness". Below is a haunting shot of a camera smashing at second thirty-one. That scene stuck with me more than any other.

The guy barfing is pretty dramatic, too.

The overall impression that I got from this advert was that sports was painful, hard, and punishing. There was very little glory depicted, and I certainly didn’t get the impression that Nike was the brand of winners. All the athletes involved wore Nike clothing, from Carl Lewis completing a successful jump to the guy on the ground trying not to be trampled.

Throughout the length of the video the two-second gratuity-shot of Scottie Pippen’s sneakers is all that really tells you that you’re watching a Nike ad. I remember those shoes well, though I never owned a pair because I thought they were ugly.

All this to say that this was the first instance of watching TV that made me uncomfortable. As I saw it, Nike had put together montage of people failing at sports and getting hurt in the process, all to sell a product. It was the first piece of video that I was fascinated by, because of the fast editing and pounding rock song, but didn’t actually like. The whole clip kinda made me nauseous, actually. Maybe the flying blood and the aforeinserted barfing guy had something to do with it.

This feeling, the feeling of “Why am I excited by this when it disgusts me?”, I think, is good to retain. So often we see things that annoy or shock us, but we are too jaded by a lifetime of media exposure to really care. There are biological ways we react to things, ways we don’t know about but advertisers do, that can catch us off-guard. A recent example might be this vile divorce ad.

It catches you off-guard just enough so that you might consider the possibility. We don’t need this kind of advertising here, there, or anywhere. These are the things we should search for and destroy.

_DZ

In Which I Write 3000 Words About My International Peer Groups

2009-11-11T23:43:00.005-06:00

We all know what the word “peer” means. Our teachers and parents use it often. We hear the terms “peer pressure” and “peer review” and know how to react. There's usually no question who our peers are - they are the people around us in our age group. Everyone is your second grade class is your peer, but not every second grader in your county. Second graders in France are not your peers, unless you’re a French second-grader.

It is these people (peers, not the French) who have the most influence over us as we grow up, exhibited linearly in grade school and then exponentially in high school. Our peers influence what we wear, how we talk, and what music we listen to. We know where we fit in amongst them; who’s cooler than whom. It is painfully obvious who fits in and who doesn’t, but we certainly don’t imagine that there are people who don’t feel that they belong in the peer group. Of course everyone is included, the logic goes. We say you are one of us, so you are. We compare ourselves to you, so you have to do the same.

Yet as a missionary kid growing up in Japan, I never felt I belonged in a set peer group. I was never purveyed that acceptance. My situation, though, is rather unique in that I had a few different groups from which to choose as my peers.

At an early age I was whisked off to Japan - a white missionary kid in an Asian country. I had three potential groups to choose from: white kids, Japanese kids, and missionary kids (MKs). All three of these groups seem equally large when you’re a missionary kid, though that idea of course seems silly now.

The straight-forward choice is that I should have decided to fit in with the Japanese kids. After all, I spent almost all of my elementary school years in Japan, going to both Japanese kindergarten and public elementary school. They were my classmates - my peers. I spoke their language. This was really the best choice, but I didn’t take it for reasons explained later.

The worst choice was to consider the white kids in America as my peers. Even though they looked like me, I only saw them once every four years due to the missionary home assignment cycle, and kids change a lot in four years. Yet this was half of my peer group. See, I had the unfortunate lot of being born in June. American schools run the school year Sept-May, so people born over the summer, myself included, are tacked on at the end as the youngest in the class. Japanese school, however, runs April-March, meaning that kids with June birthdays are some of the oldest in the class. That was also me. The result was that, because of my family’s moving schedule, I enrolled in American first grade, completed seven months, and then enrolled in Japanese first grade. (The later result of this is that I only attended two months of fifth grade, but that is irrelevant.)

If I had not taken Japanese first grade, I think I may have adjusted to the Japanese as my peers. My parents would have explained that I was a big second grader now and that is what second grade was, like how the Japanese did it. I would have accepted that and everything would have been fine. The problem was, I had my American first grade experience to compare to this new Japanese first grade, and I liked the American one much, much better. I knew the kids there looked like me and that I fit in with them. American kids were cool and played with cool toys. Japan, I soon thought, was the opposite of cool. I had to speak a different language. Kids at my school, kids who played with less-cool toys*, all pointed and giggled at the little blond kid. Hence, pretty much my entire Japanese elementary career was spent comparing the “crappy Japanese system” to my “utopian American experience”. Very early on I forged a massive superiority complex; I saw myself as a super-gifted and special kid forced to live in a system that was so far below him it wasn’t funny. Since I saw myself this way, it was only natural that I developed a feeling of learned helplessness. I was stuck; I wanted the American kids as my peers, but they were no longer around.

I tried to deal with this by finding other white kids around me, other missionary kids, and using them as the other half of my peer group. The problems with this were that A) I only saw them a few times a year and B) I didn’t confine my peers to my age group. As long as they were missionary kids, I saw them as peers. As stated earlier, our peers influence how we behave as we grow and mature. My cues as to how to act, dress, and talk, then, came from two sources - my memories of my “peers” in America, and my fellow missionary kids whom I saw but a few times per year. With these two groups largely absent, I spent a lot of my elementary years alone.

Since a good chunk of peer interaction is comparison on a daily basis, and I didn’t have that, I saw myself as constantly behind the times. Every time I hung out with missionary kids they had newer, cooler shoes or were throwing around a new slang buzzword that I didn’t know. I was constantly playing catch-up, which only added to the frustration of being stuck in Japanese school. Not only was I stuck at school with kids who weren’t my peers, but I was on the low side of cool every time I was with kids who were. Older MKs got to do stuff that I could not, and I would look at that as my failure to meet some universal standard of cool rather than just, you know, because I was younger.

This inability to consistently engage with people I considered peers cultivated my belief that what was important was owning things that cool kids had. In order to be cool, you had to have what the cool kids had and dress the way they did. It never occurred to me that they were probably just as insecure as I was, or that they were influenced by others as to how to dress or act.

I’ll acknowledge here, then, that, yes, I was completely unaware that experiences I had were not universal. I grew up thinking that I had a super-vanilla, mega-boring life, and that every other MK got to have way more fun then I did, all the time. It didn’t occur to me that I had had experiences that others would envy. I assumed that every MK had everything I did, plus more. So thus, I was determined to make up that difference. This obviously never happened, because we can’t all have the same life experiences.

With sixth grade came the rotation of one year in America, and I was anxious to get back to my “real friends” and my “authentic” peer group. I was enrolled in a private Christian school full of kids who looked like me - the same kids whom I had learned with as a first-grader. I had a lot of catching up to do, but that was the easy part - I just had to buy (or get my parents to buy) the right stuff. Having my own interests took a backseat to what I thought would make me cool. Soon my room was full of basketball gear and apparel, street hockey equipment, Tech Decks, Beanie Babies, a portable CD player, sports trading cards, Hot Wheels cars, and vintage American coinage. From a fridge full of Gatorade to Atomic Warheads in my mouth and Lee Pipes on my legs, if I thought it would make me more American, I wanted it. Though this strategy would prove to fail as a long-term strategy in the near future, that failure was not something that my sixth-grade self had to face, because I moved back to Japan after a year.

The four years between ages twelve to sixteen, my family’s third term in Japan, marked what I like to call the Span Of Floundering and Alienation, or SOFA for short. Seventh grade was the year that I was enrolled at the Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ), a school for missionary kids - a school of, that’s right, my peers. I had gone for twelve years without a set peer group, and now I had one with which I had to interact every single day. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know how to act on a daily basis around kids whom I knew to be exactly like me. I was white, spoke two languages, had lived in two countries, had lived in the Japanese system and had educated parents, just like most of them. I couldn’t use the excuse of being white (as I did in suburban Japan) or the excuse of being a missionary kid (as I did in the US) to explain why I did things my way to these CAJ kids, and buying stuff alone wasn’t going to get me accepted into their group. I had to learn how to interact with a peer group, my peer group, in a dynamic, flowing, relational way. I never thought that I could be part of such an intimate peer group and all of a sudden I realized I could be, if I could only figure out the cryptic rite of passage. The SOFA was marked by my consistent failure to do so.

Why was this so hard for me to do? A small part of it was, no doubt, my lack of access to unlimited money with which to buy my acceptance. Another (less tongue-in-cheek) part of it was that a large part of my class had grown up together through elementary school, and it’s always hard for an outsider to break into a close-knit group. The biggest and most glaring problem, though, was that I was a teenager who didn’t really know how to make friends. In America I had made friends with the children of my mom’s friends, or with kids who had wanted to hang out with the “kid from Japan.” I had kids practically lining up to talk to me, and could pick and choose those to whom I would grant my friendship. In Japanese school I was pretty much a loner who made a different new best** friend every year, though I think they may have befriended me out of pity. I had four, maybe five kids who I enjoyed hanging out with and would rotate among them every few months.† The missionary kids I hung out with I saw as friends by default - their camaraderie not unlike that enjoyed by prisoners of war.

Seventh and eight grade were the years when my superiority complex was destroyed. I realized that I wasn’t some superkid who everyone wanted to hang out with. I had to earn my place in the peer group. I wasn’t some, as Tyler Durden puts it, “beautiful and unique snowflake.” I was floundering. I had to find my niche, my talent that set me apart. Most of those two years was spent by myself, trying to make myself special, and I tried a lot of things. I wrote for the middle school paper, ran for student government, and acted in plays. I taught myself some BASIC programming and spent countless hours learning my way around the Internet, Windows 98, and Mac OS. I played soccer, basketball, ran track, and wrestled. I wore skate shoes, rode a Razor scooter, sagged my jeans and backpack, and used adult language with increasing frequency. None of that seemed to matter, though, because I still didn’t watch the right movies, listen to the right music, own an MD player, wear the right clothes, or get invited to any sleepovers. I wasn’t popular with girls.†† I wasn’t cool.

Ninth and tenth grades, the later half of my SOFA, were less tough times because I had, in effect, lapsed back into helplessness and resolved that I wouldn’t be able to weasel my way in with my peers. I had to look out for myself and find my own friends. The few close friends I made happened to be those who also, for various reasons, didn’t conform with the normal social peer group. We were the rebels, I suppose - the fringe participants. I was still active in sports and extra-curricular activities, though most of the time spent outside those was spent alone. I had a girlfriend‡, but she dumped me after a month. I cared less about school and more about computer games. I slowly gave up on trying to buy stuff to fit in. I listened to my own music and read my own books. Looking back now, I see that I still had suppressed resentment over being in Japan, because I remember eagerly anticipating the move back to America for my junior year of high school.

Junior year brought with it two revelations: that I was an emotionally stunted person (surprise!) and that I was much less rooted in America then I had led myself to believe. My emotional state was a result of the previous two years, during which I had idealized the military and its lifestyle. Basically I believed that showing emotion was a sign of weakness, a sign of being out of control. My subconscious helplessness that showed signs of bubbling up was suppressed by feeling that I could be in control of my feelings. Since emotion is something you have to cultivate, suppressing it for long enough will diminish your overall ability to feel it, and the early signs of that stage were beginning to manifest in my daily demeanor.

My parents sent me to counseling for it, which I thought was weak but went anyway. After a few sessions my counselor was seriously considering putting me on medication, but I eventually started opening up to him. It was actually an extraordinarily pleasant experience, and now I believe that everyone should have at least three months of counseling. It didn’t help, though, with fitting in with my peers.

Going to high school in America made me realize that there were indeed many aspects of my life that kids with no overseas experience could simply not understand. Many of my habits, mannerisms, and ways of thinking were notably different. Being in America made me realize that I could not refer to myself as “American” as a way to validate my actions. I had to accept that I was, most likely, more Japanese than American.

This I accepted, and my senior year back in Japan was marked by a time of personal growth as a self-confident person. I thought I knew where I fit in in the world and therefore was comfortable with myself. Looking back, I think I was fooling myself and just hiding behind my girlfriend. I had a steady girlfriend during the entire year, a cute Asian a year younger than me, and she was my life. We were together all the time, which meant that I didn’t have to worry about interacting with my peers to gain validation. I had her, and she thought I was awesome. I ignored my peer group, life seemed good, and I proceeded to end high school.

I wish I could say that this story has a happy ending, but it really doesn’t. I still struggle to be comfortable around people my own age. My SOFA mentality still bugs me. I’m fine around kids even one year younger or older than I am, but if someone graduated high school in 2005 like I did, they should prepare for me to feel awkward and inferior around them for no real reason. It’s pretty frustrating that I still feel this way.

So what do I think could have made a difference? Not repeating a grade might have helped. That was where I got the superiority complex and accompanying helplessness. Not being enrolled in a private bubble school in America might have helped. It was there where I had kids line up to interact with me. Those might have been things my parents could have changed. But what could I have changed? I could have not used my skin color (in Japan) or my international experience (elsewhere) to excuse myself. I could have faced the challenges that I chose to ignore or maybe completed my senior year alone in order to grow more. But I didn’t. But you know what? That’s OK, because I got through it and am able to look back on it and learn from it now. I don’t have any regrets, because having regrets means that I’m not comfortable with who I am now, and that’s not true. I write my experiences down so that others, so that you, can learn from them and perhaps find meaning in some experiences in your own life that you have missed until now. The journey is long, and you shouldn’t have to walk it alone.

*This part I suppose I can blame on my parents, who never really let me indulge in the fad-oriented Japanese youth culture. I never had a NES, SNES, N64, Tamagotchi, Digimon, battle pencils, or a battery-operated plastic train set. I never played Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh, never watched Dragonball, Ultraman, Power Rangers, Kamen-Rider, or any animated television series, and never read a single manga series while in elementary. In general, I never watched Japanese TV, and thus was left out of the hype surrounding the newest toys. To this day, I can’t recall a single Japanese toy commercial. To be fair, though, I did have Mini Yonkus, a few hyper-yo-yos, and a ton of LEGOs.

**Or “only” - whichever you prefer.

†Three, if you only count full names that I can remember. Kobayashi Akihiro, Yoshino Yuya, and Nakao Soutaro.

††This is probably still true.

‡She was Japanese, attended a different international school and was a grade younger than I. I did not see her as a peer.

_DZ

Fort Hood Shootings as a Step Towards Gun Control?

2009-11-05T20:28:00.005-06:00

In the wake of the terrible incident at Fort Hood, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tells us not to jump to conclusions without getting all of the facts. (CNN.com)

What's most interesting about this article is the following quote from the senator:

"Once we have ascertained all the facts, working with our military leaders and law enforcement officials on the ground, we can determine what exactly happened at Fort Hood today and how to prevent something like this from ever happening again." (italics mine)

Really? Because that seems far-fetched. Either Sen. Cornyn is an idealist who makes promises he has no intention of keeping, in which case we should ignore him, or he is laying precedent for increased government intervention in civilian and military affairs, which upon hearing should perk our ears. He's talking about increased gun control, basically. The only way to ensure that this never happens again is if the US bans guns outright. And as I've mentioned before, I am a fan of banning guns.

This isn't a "failure of therapy" nor a "unfortunate oversight". This is emotionally disturbed people having access to guns. "Re-evaluating protocol" won't fix this. As long as you allow people access to guns, there exists the possibility that they will use them on other people.

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people. And monkeys kill people, if they have a gun."

_DZ

Ramen Noodles - Junk Food as Art

2009-11-04T20:42:00.002-06:00

Ramen noodles seem to have a bad reputation here in America. Maligned as the food of poor college students and those seeking empty carbs, ramen is looked at merely as warm junk food. The producers of popular ramen, such as Maruchan, don’t help either when they price a block of ramen for less than 40¢ a package. Drop a Kennedy, heat some water, stir and cover. A meal in thirty seconds! As a man who grew up in Japan, however, I know that there is much more to ramen than that. Most American ramen is a disgrace to ramen as I know it.

The Japanese love their ramen. It is a ubiquitous food throughout the country - a Japanese microcosm of the global dominance of McDonald's. That means that, yes, there is the budget-quality stuff available there too, but it is referred to as “the cheap stuff” rather than just “ramen”. What the Japanese usually have in mind when they talk about ramen is the stuff that you find in restaurants. This is my mindset as well. To get good ramen, you go to a restaurant.

Every ramen noodle shop makes their ramen a little bit differently, according to the standards of the target demographic. Average prices for a decent bowl of ramen range from ¥280-¥550 ($2.50-$5), while niche ramen restaurants can charge upwards of ¥980 for a bowl. Prices, of course, also reflect ingredients used, and a good rule of thumb is that the more expensive the bowl, the more meat/higher quality meat is included. Pork is the preferred meat, and it is sliced and placed on top of the noodles. Two or three slices is common, but I have seen as many as six.

The number of different ingredients that can be added to ramen is staggering. Vegetables, seaweed, soy sauce, eggs, meat, fish products, and myriad spices are all fair game. Most common ramen offerings will have a few slices of fatty pork, seaweed, a slice or two of kamaboko (a processed seafood product), and a sliced vegetables.

As I mentioned, a factor in making good ramen is the amount/quality of the toppings ingredients. The variation in noodle texture and quality, however, also contribute to making a good ramen. Some shops hand-make their noodles, which ensures quality at the added expense to the customer. Other places just buy dried blocks of noodles and boil them. These noodles are generally stiffer and harder to chew.

The main part of the ramen that separates the good stuff from the bad, though, is the broth. High-end noodle shops guard their broth recipes like Colonel Sanders guards his herbs and spices. Drinking the broth after finishing the noodles is an integral part of ramen consumption, and is how you tell the good stuff from the ordinary stuff.

I would go so far as to say that a good bowl ramen noodles is an art form. It is junk food, yes, but it is also art. Don’t believe me? Well, America has an equivalent junk-food-turned-art: the barbecue. Thousands of cooks all across the States slave over making the best-tasting sauce to slather onto fatty meats. Sure Arby’s makes a BBQ Roast Beef, but if you wanted a foreigner to get a good taste of “American barbecue,” you would send them to your secret local hole-in-the-wall joint, or maybe to a respected restaurant like Damon’s Grill. They might as well get the good stuff.

And just like there are BBQ fanatics, there are ramen otaku. One of my high school youth group leaders was one - a guy who traveled all over Tokyo in search of good ramen restaurants. That was what he enjoyed doing, and he wouldn’t hesitate to steer you in the direction of a good ramen shop if you were looking for food in the area.

One nation’s junk food is another one’s passion. Just like American chefs pour time and effort into their BBQ creations, so do the Japanese into their ramen dishes. Ramen is more than just a cheap college food, it is an honored national staple. There may not be many ramen restaurants here in America, but I think the arty-junk-food spirit is vibrant here, and it causes me to smile every time I pass a barbecue stand.

_DZ

Apparently They Make Color-Safe Bleach

2009-11-03T10:15:00.003-06:00

I stumbled across the YouTube trailer for the movie Juno the other day, and had forgotten some of the pure gem lines that that movie has. The trailer can be seen here.

Mark: Why do people think yellow is gender-neutral? I don’t know one man with a yellow bedroom.
---
Vanessa: Well, Juno, your parents must be wondering where you are. You might want to head home.
Juno: Nah. I'm already pregnant, so they figure nothing worse could happen to me.
---
Juno: You're shorts are looking especially gold today.
Bleeker: My mom uses color-safe bleach.

Truly, this is better living through chemistry.

_DZ

Corporate "Expertise" and "Beneficial" Beverages

2009-10-29T19:37:00.008-05:00

I don’t buy soda very often, but occasionally I will buy some 12-packs if they are on sale. One such recent sale had me snapping up some Diet Coke Plus (marketed with slogan “We include the “L” so you don't make a wry face^®”) which, as far as soda goes, is right up there behind root beer. Despite the colorful logo it seems that Diet Coke Plus has a hard time selling, because the advertising copy writers are now digging deep into their reserves of “phrases we can use to sell sugar water.” A quick picture of the box will explain what I mean.

Refreshing. Uplifting. Hydrating?
It’s true. Research shows that all beverages contribute to proper hydration. That means that whether it’s your first can of the day or your afternoon pick-me-up, Diet Coke Plus helps you stay hydrated all day long. So stick with the Diet Coke Plus taste you love. Your body will thank you for it.

While it’s true that drinking fluids does hydrate you, claiming that Coke is an efficient way of doing so is a lot like saying that smoking cigarettes "contributes to air inhalation and lung expansion," or that eating Twinkies "contributes to reducing hunger." It is technically true, but it’s not, as soccer players would say, in the spirit of the game. Appealing to the lowest common denominator, human health, is not an effective marketing strategy. Neither is suggesting that drinking carbonated soda in the morning is normal. Not even if you have an accompanying website.

Coca-Cola appeals to research, but they don’t tell who’s research. Their own? An independent third-party’s? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Because they are an multi-national corporation, surely they can be trusted, right? After all, they have statistics, so they must be the experts.

Corporations claiming expertise is hot-button issue with me. A while back I went to a seafood restaurant. While I was being seated I was assured that a server would be with me shortly, and that they would be a seafood expert. Much to my astonishment, a teen-age girl soon arrived, menus in hand. Now, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but, having visited a world-class fish market years earlier, I already had a pretty ingrained image of what a “seafood expert” was. This girl, on the other hand, might not have known how to pronounce ‘cichlid’. My prejudice can perhaps be best portrayed in this Venn diagram.

Calling everyone who works for you an “expert,” whether in seafood restaurants, car audio installation booths, or cheap bars, doesn’t make me want to recommend your business establishment to anyone. I want to decide, to make the judgment, on whether or not you employ experts.

There’s a clerk at my local Hollywood video who "researches" so many movies that she writes her DVD rentals off her taxes as a work expense. She can recommend five other movies that you may like based on your current and past selections. If someone I know needs some movie variety, I’d send them to her. Likewise there is a hole-in-the-wall yakitori restaurant in Tokyo that I enjoy that was recommended to me by my friend, who himself is friends with a yakitori connoisseur. It is truly delicious, and it took two experts (the chef and the connoisseur) to allow me to partake in excellent yakitori.

But it’s not just the corporately-instituted “experts” that bug me - it’s the unique naming of employees by corporations in general. Some companies do it rather conservatively, like Wal-Mart (“associates)” and Target (“team members”). Other places do not fair so well. I don’t care what anyone says, putting ingredients that I ask for on my sandwich for me does not make someone a “sandwich artist”.

These days, corporately-bestowed expertise practically precludes actual knowledge or significant ability. Rather, customer-recognized expertise should be honored, and hopefully it is at thousands of businesses around the country. Is the flood of so-called “experts” a passing symptom of global corporatization, or a portent of impending mediocrity? Whatever it is, I think I now need a vitamin-enhanced water beverage with which to rehydrate myself.

_DZ

give po’ man a break

Sometimes You Just Really Need Help

2009-10-28T18:55:00.002-05:00

I no longer actively play video games, but I still manage to crack a smile when I see the sly hand of a Goodwill gamer at work.

_DZ

Pink Ribbons for the Cure!

2009-10-26T00:33:00.002-05:00

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which is cool, because fighting breast cancer helps the world suck less. It also means that my store stocks pink suckers and Susan G. Komen cookies - fun products that let me use my sweet marketing psychology skills to good-naturedly rib regular (male) customers.

ME: “Hey, how’s it goin?”
CUSTOMER: “Pretty sweet. The sun’s out.”
ME: “Yeah. Just the milk for you today?
CUSTOMER: “Yeah, that’ll do it.”
ME: “Ok. You should totally buy one of those pink suckers and support the fight against breast cancer.”
CUSTOMER: “I think I’ll be OK with these, thanks”
ME: “If you don’t buy one, it means you hate breasts!”
CUSTOMER: “Wow.”
ME: “I bet you’re standing there right now thinking, ‘What have breasts ever done for me?’ That’s cold, man.”
CUSTOMER: “You put me in an awkward situation now, because I do like breasts.”
ME: “I know! So buy one.”
CUSTOMER: “So a sucker, or what, those cookies over there?”
ME: “Yup. And buy two, because breasts come in pairs!”

You all have no idea how often this works.

My sentiments are best summed up in what my coworker yelled after a female customer today -

Happy Breast Awareness Month!

_DZ

Bicycing Is Only As Expensive As You Let It Become

2009-10-22T23:31:00.006-05:00

About an hour ago I got home from a two-hour bike ride. Tonight it was a little above forty degrees here in Minnesota. I am turning into Calvin’s father.

It’s funny how cycling gets to be addictive. One day you pedal into downtown and back, and before you know it you’re covering seventy miles in spandex. Tonight I was riding my Cannondale, trying out my new pedal system. It sounds really snobby to use the phrase “pedal system,” but by that I only mean the pedals, cleats, and cycling shoes. Yes - sigh - I own cycling shoes. I own two pair, actually. I didn’t plan for that to happen, but the snookering corporate cycling giants pulled a fast one on me.

I bought a pair of used road pedals off of craigslist early in the summer to use with my track bike. I knew next to nothing about pedals, so I assumed they would work with any old cycling road shoe. After I bought the cheapest pair of road shoes on Amazon.com, I found that this was not the case. See, I had bought a pair of older Shimano Ultegra pedals that were fairly high-end. And, as it turns out, you need higher-end road shoes to fit higher-end pedals. I had bought shoes that could not possibly accommodate such high-end pedals. I did some more research and found out that there are three or four different pedal/shoe systems out there, so I had to go out and buy different pedals (Keo Look) to fit my shoes. I used that combination all summer.

This week, however, I was again browsing craigslist when I found a guy selling brand new carbon fiber road shoes for a fraction of their original cost. These were high-end shoes that would work with my higher-end pedals that had been sitting under my bed all summer, so I snapped them up. I then go to attach the pedal cleats (the part that you screw on the shoe so it can click into the pedal tightly) only to find that the cleats are A) in pretty poor condition and B) missing parts. No big deal, I say to myself, cleats should only be a few bucks.

Well, new ‘new’ cleats are only a few bucks. New ‘old’ cleats are more than a few bucks. By the time I finally got my pedal system ready to go tonight (many thanks to Grand Performance), I had put over $100 into it. Thankfully, it turns out to be a pretty great pedal system, and hopefully I’m not just saying that to avoid admitting that I spent a lot of money for nothing.

This brings me an actual point, which is to highlight the needless “improvements” that the cycling industry markets on a yearly basis. I would flesh out my concerns in full, but the gloriously irreverent cycling blogger BikeSnobNYC has already done it for me. He did it last year, too. Even if you don’t know much about cycling, they are good reads.

It is truly ridiculous how expensive some of these bikes are getting, and how all the new parts are perplexingly incompatible with the old ones that fulfill the exact same function. Performance is one thing, but we are talking about machines that essentially do the same thing they were doing in the seventies - converting "circular pedaling" motion into "rolling wheels" motion, steering said motion, and stopping said motion. There’s a guy riding in my area who has a nice road bike with 30,000 miles on it. He obviously doesn’t see the need to “upgrade”, and after my pedal fiasco, I’m not sure I do now either.

_DZ

Buying a New (old) Razor Brings Increased Savings!

2009-10-21T14:47:00.001-05:00

Recently I saved a bunch of money, reduced waste, improved my personal hygiene, learned a new skill, and stuck it to the Man. In short, I decreased worldsuck in one swift minimalist blow. What did I do? you may ask. I’ll tell you. I bought a new razor.
It’s true, decreasing worldsuck by buying a new razor seems a but far-fetched, but it’s not! Allow me to explain, for those of you who didn’t stop reading after you saw that I “improved my personal hygiene.”

I used to shave with a Gillette M3Power vibrating razor. It required 1 AAA battery to vibrate the blade, supposedly to help facial hairs stand up so they could then be shaven off. The Amazon.com copy for this razor reads like some dude rushed to finish his 4:45 assignment before squealing his tires in search of a cheap happy hour.

"World's best shave. The first micro-powered shaving system from Gillette, for a totally new shaving experience and Gillette's best shave ever. Micro-Power: Turn on it's tiny motor and feel the micro power. In just one M3POWER stroke, you get a closer and more thorough shave. So thorough, there is less need to reshave, which means less irritation. PowerGlide Blades: Patented blade coating produces Gillette's smoothest blade surface for incredible glide, and a level of comfort that only M3Power can give. Indicator Lubrastrip with Vitamin E and Aloe. Gillette's best shave ever - the M3Power razor plus PowerGlide blades."

It is supposed to provide, via “micro-power”, the world’s best shave. Gillette’s best shave, even. I can tell you one thing - using it, I didn’t feel any micro-power. I felt a vibrating, $10, plastic razor. Actually, it came with two blade cartridges, so make that a $5 plastic razor. The glide was, however, incredible.

But, man, the blades killed me. Sixteen cartridges would cost me close to forty bucks. You have to call them cartridges nowadays because they pack multiple blades in one cartridge. The M3 carts had three blades each, and they are spring-loaded. I am not making this up. They are spring loaded, coated with Easy-Glide (“for your pleasure”, I am assuming), and had an “Indicator Lubrastrip” that told you when they were dull and useless. Also, did I mention they were $2.50 a pop? Assuming I got five good shaves out of them (I got, at most, four), that would equal $.50 a shave. A fun equation for this overall cost, for use later, is 10(cost of razor)+2.5x(cost per blade).

I decided to switch razors because this cost was getting ridiculous, the blade cartridges were wasteful, the thin spaces between the blades were hard to clean, I didn’t want to pay for batteries, and the micro-powered, “world’s best shave” was irritating my face. So I decided on a new razor. I admit that I was a bit hesitant about the change, because I had never used any other razor but the M3Power. (Well, excluding that run-in I had with an electric one back in ‘04. )

This is that new razor.

This, ladies and gents, is a Merkur 178. Amazon’s copy for it is remarkably straightforward!

"The Merkur Safety Razor has a chrome finish. Its double edge design provides a very close shave. Its comfortable handle is designed for a non-slip grip. The safety razor has a straight edge especially great for an extra close shave. Blade replacement is so easy - simply turn the knob on bottom of handle turns to screw or unscrew head. Comes with one stainless steel razor blade. Made in Germany. Razor 3" in length."

Three re-reads later, I am still not quite sure if the razor provides a “very close” or “extra close” shave, but I suppose it does not matter. What matters is that the razor is 3” long, which is precisely the amount of space I allot on my sink for shaving devices.

ANYWAY, this razor is everything the M3Power is not: durable, pretty, good for my face, easy to clean, and cheap in the long run. And have you seen prices for straight-edge blades recently? You can buy one hundred for $17. One hundred! And you know these blades are razor-sharp, because they are open-source.

You know how razor companies are always adding more blades and selling new, “better” models of razors? And every new one advertises to be the “best ever” shave, right? My brother has a theory that every time a new model comes out, the blades on the older models get slightly duller on purpose. Think about it. How long does each blade touch a grinder to be sharpened? Milliseconds, maybe? So, if the company reduces sharpening time from 750ms to 550ms, the blade is slightly duller, the assembly line moves more quickly, and the newest razor lives up to its promise of being the “best ever.” Of course, blade cartridges are proprietary property, so, Gillette, perhaps, can restrict anyone else from making them, thus eliminating competition. The blades for my new razor suffer no such fate. Multiple companies make them, so they are motivated to make their blades the sharpest in order to get ahead of the competition. The consumer wins!

At $35 the razor is considerably more expensive, but it’s durable. And I still get about four shaves to the blade, making the cost equation super awesome, coming out to something like 35+.17x. Let’s look at this on an eye-ruining graphing calculator.

Hey, Mr. WebAdmin, that color scheme makes math considerably less cool. Of interest, though, is that graph. The really vertical one represents the M3Power, while the more-horizontal one represents the Merkur. The intersect of those two lines is at 10.7, meaning that as long I can limit my lifetime usage of the M3Power to 10 blades, I have less net spending. The minute I need to use that eleventh blade, however, I save money by using the Merkur. It is not micro-powered, but I think I can live with that.

Are there disadvantages to using the Merkur? I suppose a few. You have to take care of it - wash it, take it apart, dry it, etc. Handling the blades could be dangerous. You have take more time to shave and be more careful with it so as not to cut your face open. But this is where the skill comes in. Electing to learn a skill rather then solely rely on technology is minimalist because you enrich yourself instead of a corporate pocketbook. The more I shave, the faster and better I become at it. Shaving has no longer become a chore, but rather an opportunity to improve a skill.

_DZ

Moving Towards Abstraction

2009-10-19T15:54:00.000-05:00

The world around us is fascinated by that which is not there. By this I mean that which is not tangible; a sliver of representation of something meant to be found in real space. That which is an abstraction. As culture morphs and flows it seems to progressively strip down concepts, ideas, and images until they are shells of what they once were.

Take modern art for instance, as this article does. It follows paintings of trees as they move from depictions of real trees to lines meant to represent the tree in abstract. Your mind has to fill in the blanks. Or take this gorgeous image, for example.

It is a person, but only when you don’t look directly at it. In being incomplete, it is wide open to interpretation. Each individual viewer is encouraged to supply their own completing fetal image.

Stuart Ewen’s fantastic book All Consuming Images highlights this trend of abstraction as well, citing several examples.

-The fashion world used to advertise with paper dolls dressed up is rich, detailed depictions of clothing. Gradually the designs moved onto magazine covers, and sketches of clothes became more and more about the lines and less and less about the textures and colors. Nowadays two lines can represent a woman’s body and the clothes covering (however much of) it.

-Old cathedrals used to be stately, solid, stone buildings. They were imposing structures, meant to convey the power of the church. Then the Gothic style took over, and rather then using stone to impress, architects turned to light. How light filled the place - how God filled the place - became significant.

-Important buildings used to be built with a huge floor plan, but now they are built narrow and tall. These buildings, skyscrapers, make the pedestrian look up at the tops of them, where the buildings often end in a vanishing point. Abstraction.

-Money, an abstraction of value in itself, used to be coinage and then paper currency. But we deemed cash too weighty and created credit cards, an abstraction of an abstraction. Green-colored cards, like laminated dollar bills, are the entry level cards. The higher up we go in terms of card class - Silver, Gold Platinum - the more valuable our abstraction is. When we hit the top, the Black credit card, we reach nothingness. Void. It is the point where money must not matter. And now we have PayPal and online cash transfers, and if they take over we might never have to see visual representations of money again.

Having electronic money is easier, they say. In fact, the less humans have to handle things, the more efficient the world is. Everything is becoming more and more digital, and hence, they tell us, more efficient. You used to have to go to a theater to see a film. Then you could rent it on video. Then DVD came along. Now you can download Blu-Ray movies from iTunes. Amazon’s Kindle device lets you download and read books in digital, clicking buttons to turn pages. How efficient is that? You never even have (or get) to touch what you buy.

Folk and rock music are often recorded in a way to recreate experiences. Classical music has definite themes and is meant to evoke certain images. It has emotion. Techno, on the other hand, combines sounds and rhythms that don’t happen in nature - they are synthesized, making the listener create a virtual soundscape. One person can listen to a track and say they hear a freight train going through a tunnel of suspended water; to another person, like Simon Reynolds(link), that track could depict “an ice cream truck doing rounds on one of Saturn’s moons”. It is abstract music for infinite, subjective, interpretations.

The Internet is full of these abstractions. They are what “social news” sites like Digg and reddit are based around. When everything on the Internet is screaming in demand for your time, you have to choose what you will spend it on based on interesting abstractions. What ends up being popular are things that can be effectively condensed into a (preferably witty) fifteen-word summary sentence. The problem here is that not every great, worthy idea can be

A) be condensed in this way or
B) be given the treatment by someone who knows how to do it effectively.

Equally problematic is when someone who knows how to condense effectively is working on nothing but inane “news” items and, more often then not, they conjure up misleading sentences that do nothing but grab attention, resulting in us reading disappointing-yet-effectively-packaged non-news items and passing up the important ones. I have to face this dilemma on my blog all the time - how to construct interesting yet not blatantly misleading post titles.

Before friendship moved online, it used to mean bowling or playing board games on Friday nights. Then it meant playing video games together. Now it means having a digital Facebook connection. Facebook is an abstraction of a social circle.

We have tweets - abstractions of consciousness. Impulsive ideas that we feel need to be broadcast so others can try and decipher our thoughts.

What, you may ask, then, are the implications of this? So what? Isn’t more efficient better? Isn’t making things open to interpretation a more tolerant way of expression? A way of accommodating other peoples’ views and ideas? Perhaps. But we have to ask, “in what direction does that lead us?” If efficiency and single-minded goals are our objective, then we are on the right track. But should everything be streamlined to maximum efficiency?

We are now in an era where seemingly anything and everything can be considered “art.” If you don’t understand it, well, then that art isn’t for you I guess. When ideas are depicted in the abstract, they are often intentionally ambiguous. They are everything to every one. As our ideas of value become less and less concrete, value becomes harder and harder to define. If relativity was the essential theme of postmodernism, then abstraction is the theme of post-postmodernism.

As more and more things in our lives - friendships, art, music, money - move into the abstract, it is easier for even more things, perhaps things never meant to be represented in the abstract, to move there. The abstract is meant to represent something, but if we are conditioned to only think in abstract terms then one person’s abstract is another’s reality. This is only true, however, in a limited sphere, and the thoughts in this abstract sphere are guided by the person or institution from whose hands the abstraction manifests. The creator controls the thoughts.

This shift towards relativity of value, control through ambiguity, and the results of combining them with concrete things illegitimately dragged into the abstract realm is my primary concern. There are some things that, frankly, I don’t think belong in the abstract. I think that the less friendships are ‘open to interpretation,’ the healthier they will be. I have learned that earmarking, highlighting, and writing in the margins of books I own is a valuable memory device. I notice that when I use cash, I am more hesitant to spend.

How many things must their be in our daily lives that we need to pull out of abstraction? Our views of love? God? Life?

_DZ

The Worldy Self-Direction Ethos Does Not Work in Your Favor

2009-10-18T11:40:00.001-05:00

The other day a regular customer was in my store preparing some nachos. We have a nacho bar where one can decorate nachos with chili and cheese and stuff, and this guy was whipping up a tray of nachos.

“So,” he turned to me and asked, “are these nachos any good?”

“That depends,” I gamely replied, “You get out of them what you put in!”

“That bad, huh?” he chuckled.

“Not really. But if they are, it’s not our fault.”

We both laughed. I said it in jest, but there was some truth to it. It’s actually a rather scary ethos, all things considered.

You get out of life what you put into it. Life is all about you. And now we have a Web, Web 2.0, that mirrors that ethos. What is important is what you contribute to the “conversation”. User-generated content is what counts. In some cases, like Wikipedia, it is good. In others, (90% of YouTube is a good example), it is not. It is junk.

But I digress. The point is that we’re still believing that we are in control of what happens to us. We get out of bed thinking, “Today is a blank slate, and I can sculpt my day to be the perfect day for me! Everything will go well because I say it will.”

This rubs me wrong in two ways. First, I don't like the self-centered vibe it emits, because ‘constructing the perfect day’ usually involves complacent activities like sitting in front of the TV eating ice cream and pizza, or impulse-shopping at the Mall of America. (Current MOA ad slogans include “The road to economic recovery will be long. You’ll need shoes,” “You could probably do without it, but why take that chance?,” and “Is that a new purse, of did you just get more interesting?”)

The main reason that the self-direction ethos bugs me, though, is that it A) doesn’t include space for “random” (read: predestined) events, and B) it places all of the responsibility, and, hence, the potential guilt, of a failed day squarely on you. Just like if that guy had ended up with a crappy tray of nachos, the self-direction ethos dictates that if you have a crappy day, it is completely your fault. After a while, these days start to add up. Week after week, month after month, year after year. If you’re having crappy days, you’re obviously not doing enough to prevent them. The astute reader will make the connection that depression will soon entail, followed by utter hopelessness. The universe, without God, does not work in your favor. However...

-Ephesians 2:10

"For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

-Romans 8:28

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

-Philippians 2:13

"...for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose."

Cheers.

_DZ

The Rise of The Idiots

2009-10-10T11:02:00.001-05:00

That billboard. Yes that one. The one that’s in front of you. Read it? It says, “Have a two-some.” It’s for cigarettes that cost $5.60 a pack. They come from a company that puts millions of dollars into advertising every year. They have whole committees that decide what ads will work, and those committees chose this ad. Some ad guy seriously turned to another one and said, “You know what I think will sell more cigs to people? Ads filled with pointless sexual innuendo.” And they both agreed that, yes, this idea was new and fresh.

They think we’re idiots.

Cigarettes. The guy sitting across from me is holding one. He’s wearing a Ché shirt (the revolutionary spirit can, of course, be bought) and waxing poetic about how he fights the system. “Man,” he says, “I don’t pay taxes. You know? I fight the man, fight the system. Don’t support the oppressive system that takes your hard-earned money. Paying income tax should be optional.”

At his side is a beer. Alcohol and cigarettes - two of the most heavily taxed items in the country, and he regularly indulges in both. Ignorance may be bliss, but it doesn’t change the hypocritical duality in his lifestyle.

He’s an idiot.

Duality. Double-standards. They’re everywhere. You don’t need to believe in the cause to participate. You just have to have money. Incongruities are everywhere, and people are too oblivious to notice. Too oblivious to notice the irony of buying a pack of cigs and an Odwalla juice together. Everything in balance, right?

They’re idiots.

Balance? A life of balance? A life spent trying to harmonize the good and bad forces at work? Pizza delivered to your door and then a five-mile run after lunch? Steroids at the gym and then off to yoga? This is your life we’re talking about, not the picture of breakfast on the back of a cereal box. Why appease the evil side?

You’re an idiot.

But that duality was advertised on TV! You know the one. The big HDTV sitting in your living room. You bought it because all of your friends had one. Plus, the picture is so much better! Never mind that HDTV doesn’t make the programming any more interesting or engaging. Still the same old banal shows. Still the same ads for bras and skateboards. But you bought the TV nonetheless.

You’re an idiot.

Skateboards. You rode one to work this morning, yet you’re pushing 30. You spend all day at a coffee shop, writing code in Ruby or Python. You say it liberates you, lets you work on your own time. But really, you just enjoy not having to grow up. You don’t have a stressful life; you just want to stay in your pajamas until noon and watch YouTube videos while “at work”. You’re not a friggin’ rock star - you’re a freelance codemonkey.

And an idiot.

You drink your coffee. The big poster behind the barista proclaims “Brewed fresh daily!” Not at this store, mind you. Here, everything comes in air-tight baggies. But somewhere, the company is brewing fresh stuff daily. It’s a little misleading, sure, but the idea of fresh-brewed java sells more product.

After all, customers are idiots.

Customers walk out of the store, and the cashier drones a friendly “Have a good one!” after them. The cashier doesn’t really care, mind you, but the “friendly touch” proves popular with customers. This practice hearkens back to a time when cashiers actually knew almost all of their customers on a first-name basis. You wanted Sally to have a nice day because she lived down the street, cut your wife’s hair, and had your kids over to play last week. Now genuine interest has become repetitive; a stale formality that people engage in though they don’t really care about each others’ personal well-being.

After all, what if they’re idiots?

_DZ

Multicultural Stereotypes and Politically Incorrect Adolescents

2009-09-30T15:58:00.006-05:00

Growing up in a multicultural environment, amidst people with unique backgrounds and varying cultural norms, means that one gets to experience relationships with a myriad of individuals. Most of us grow up among people who look like them and act like they do, and more or less live lives homogenous with those on their same city block. For others, myself included, how we look and act are not necessarily tied with that same bond of cultural peer pressure. The main lesson you learn from a multicultural experience is that people are much more complicated than they look.

I spent my high school years at CAJ, an international school filled with caucasian Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, South-East Asians, Indians, Aussies, Norwegians, and kids from various African countries. Despite our differences, such as whether we had parents who spoke English or not, we had a few things in common - for one, we lived in Japan and spoke English. Most of us spoke more than one language, and conversation that seamlessly integrated multiple languages was commonplace.

Most of us had also spent significant time in another country. Depending on the years spent in which country, the development of a classmate might gravitate towards a culture different from the Japanese culture in which we were all currently immersed. In other words, you couldn’t tell how a classmate was going to talk or act based on how they looked. You had to, at least briefly, interact with them to see what they were about.

For example, a minority on the campus were the American kids who only spoke English. They (probably) had American parents, spoke English fluently, and went out of their way to stay that way. This meant not taking Japanese language courses, eating only American food, paying for American cable television, etc. As a minority they no doubt felt a little self-conscious, as they were often excluded from the bilingual chatter that dominated the international school scene.

These kids were the rare exception where outward appearance meshed with their general behavior - how they talked, acted, dressed, etc. More common were the kids who had mixed identities, or who acted like they belonged in a culture even if they didn’t look the part. People are, of course, much more complicated than one-word labels, but adolescents, given the chance to create labels for each other, will inevitably do so. The following chart attempts to document the labels that I heard during my years as an international school student in Japan.

What You Were on the Outside vs. What You Were on the Inside

Some of these labels are humorous, others possibly offensive, and others might be just plain dumb. Why they are based on food, I don’t know. Most of them are blatant stereotypes but, as the old adage goes, stereotypes are created to mimic reality. And indeed, even in my small social circle, there were individuals who fit these descriptions to a T.

There were the Asian kids who listened to hip-hop and dressed in Phat Farm or FUBU, or the white kids, the Eggs, who spoke mainly in Japanese and followed anime and manga. CAJ, a school founded for missionary kids, was the cheapest international high school in Tokyo, thus spawning the division of Japanese kids, the business kids, whose parents might have cared less about the religious element of the school but still wanted them to have an English education.

My presentation of a neat chart like the one above obviously begs the question, “So, which one are you?” Like most people, I don’t think I fit neatly into one category. I think I’m somewhere in between American and Egg. Being an Egg was something I grew out of as I aged, and the longer I am away from Japan, the less egg-y I get. It’s not a permanent condition, though. Put me with a few other Eggs or a couple of Twinkies and I’ll be right back into it.

_DZ

Remembering 9/11

2009-09-22T10:32:00.002-05:00

September 11, 2001, was just another school day for me. I was in Japan, 14 hours ahead of the US, so the WTC attacks happened close to 10 at night my time, and I, a high school freshman, was already in bed. I started Wednesday morning like any other day - by rolling over on my futon and turning on the Armed Forces Radio Network morning show. I was still pretty groggy, so it took me a bit to realize that I wasn’t hearing the usual banter between the airmen-first-class and the chief-petty-officer morning DJs. In fact, the announcer dude sounded pretty serious. Something about a high state of alert and possible terrorist attacks. Probably some dude in a foreign country blew himself up again, I thought, and hence the military was all paranoid. Then I heard the magic words - “Due to safety concerns, all Department of Defense and international schools are closed until further notice.” Yessssssss. I clicked off the radio.

That’s when my mom walked in. I failed to notice the grave look on her face. “School’s closed, Mom. Sweet.”

“No, it’s not good. Come watch the TV.”

Man, there’s nothing worse then getting a day off of school only to have your parents plan it out for you. At least Mom seemed significantly perturbed, so maybe something exciting was on TV.

Most of the rest of the day was spent watching planes hit buildings and fields, and dust clouds envelop lower Manhattan. All of that made for compelling television programming, though nobody knew anything about what was happening. All I knew was that I didn’t have to go to school.

“Further notice” for my school turned out to be a day, so the next day was spent talking excitedly to classmates about what had happened, and asking if they knew anybody in NYC, and complaining that it wasn’t fair that we had to be back in school while the higher profile schools - schools like the American School in Japan (ASIJ) and the base high schools - were closed until further notice. After all, we were all in Japan, and nothing exciting or dangerous happens to foreigners in Japan. We all thought it was rather silly that ASIJ decided to paint over their school name on the sides of their entire school bus fleet for safety reasons. Was a bus full of diplomats’ kids (from a range of countries) really going to be a target in Japan? Better safe then sorry I guess, but we were still going to make fun of them for it.

The emotional element of the attacks was something rather removed for me. I didn’t have the sense that my “homeland” was under attack or that my freedoms were being encroached upon. I didn’t know anyone who lived or worked in Manhattan, the Pentagon, or the field in Pennsylvania. The only Arabs I knew were the illegal immigrants whom my dad befriended - Iranians, Pakistanis, Persians. They were nice people, even if they did hold a baseball bat like they were protecting a cricket wicket.

I wasn’t a patriot. I didn’t own an American flag or have a t-shirt emblazoned with an eagle. I had no gun rack. What did I have to be mad about? What had been taken from me? Sure, 3,000 people dying in an act of unmitigated aggression was 3,000 people too many, but how many was that in contrast to the hundreds of thousands dying in other countries from preventable causes? I rationalized because I didn’t know what to think. I should feel bad, right? I mean, I was American, right? Maybe, but not enough that the events had a remotely serious impact on me.

I don’t mean to sound cynical - what happened was terrible. I guess I want to voice that not everyone thinks that 9/11 was the worst thing to happen to the US in the last ten years. Not every American used it as an excuse to become more patriotic. For me it was much like any other day. Except I got to watch more TV.

_DZ

Album Review: Underworld - Change the Weather

2009-09-19T12:15:00.002-05:00

Artist: Underworld

Album: Change The Weather

Genre: Unoriginal

Year Released: 1989

This is not a glowing, positive review like those on most private sites. I’m not going to plug how great an album is and tell you to go out (right now!) and buy it. In fact, I’ll tell you my conclusion right up front: This album sucks. It is not good. So why even review it? I think I’m going through all of the trouble because it is interesting to see how Underworld, as a band, progressed through the Nineties. This album is what they were doing is 1989. This is what they were doing ten years later. What a change!

It’s really amazing, actually, that Underworld stayed a band, because Change The Weather is a stunningly boring album if I ever heard one. There’s not a single original idea on the entire album, and everything from the cheesy gothic synth-rock riffs and the passive-aggressive emo lyrics (”The Beach”) to the pseudo-New Wave black-and-white liner photos screams “we’re a Depeche Mode rip-off”. Singer Kyle Hyde even tries his best to sound like the Mode’s David Gahan by singing in a spacey echo chamber all the time. It’s pathetic.

This is a band that doesn’t know if it it goth-rock or synth pop, and the result is an album that sounds like the Stone Roses would have if they dicked around with a keytar while on heroin. Fortunately that didn’t actually happen, because the Stone Roses were too busy doing E and making a fantastic self-titled record of their own in 1989.

Again, as someone who was introduced, like most others were, to Underworld through their hit Born Slippy (Nuxx), it is genuinely shocking to see Underworld at this stage of underdevelopment. “Stand Up” and “Mr. Universe” are both rejected feel-good summer anthems, the former featuring an inane guitar solo while the later incorporates pointless vocoding mated to a bland acoustic guitar loop. Bland guitar noodling supports a tale of being a liberated mariachi who is a slave to love in “Texas”. Track five, “Mercy,” is only a song if you count the same verse being framed by the same chorus and being repeated twice.

There are some hints of the future Underworld to come, if ever so brief. The tracks “Fever” and “Thrash” are both testing grounds for the classic effect that Underworld would bestow on nearly all their vocals throughout the Nineties. “Fever” also has the beginnings of the synth line that would dominate the future track “Moaner.”

Judging from the cowboy apparel and western imagery prevalent throughout the album, Underworld clearly sees themselves as mavericks of the early nineties. Shame on them. As history shows, they did indeed go onto to become major players in the house scene, but these “humble” beginnings showcase only boring conformity to a genre already in full swing. This genre already has superb leadership - mainly Martin L. Gore and his posse. Thank goodness the UK house scene was on the horizon, or the world would have been stuck with a band whose music was decidedly under the weather.

_DZ

Really, Facebook?

2009-08-20T15:26:00.000-05:00

I usually just ignore Facebook advertising. Even though it is targeted directly at me, I can usually avoid the temptations to buy David Bowie merchandise or books by Malcolm Gladwell. But when targeted advertising moves beyond just my Personal Interests and infringes upon my Personal Life, things just get weird.

Now they're poking fun at my singleness. So I've been single for four years. Big deal. Have they kept track of that? What's next, Facebook? If I suddenly choose to post on a lot of females' walls will ads for condoms appear? If I get engaged will they start with ads for rings? Will DeBeers take over my profile page? What are the ads targeted at when I get married? Cribs? Diapers? Earplugs? Mortgages? Do recent college graduates get inundated with debt consolidation ads? I want to know. What would happen if I put "sports bras" in my Interests? Would I get promotions for good deals? Would I get flyers for LGBT bars?

Facebook makes money off of catering to what I say I am.

What's funny is when Facebook gets it wrong. Apparently it thinks I want careers in radio broadcasting or criminal justice. It also thinks I like Ghostbusters. Oh Facebook...

_DZ

A Stolen Bicycle and The Supremacy of God

2009-08-19T13:35:00.003-05:00

*Sigh
So someone stole my fixed-gear black track bike, my $400 Bianchi Pista, off my porch last night. I had the bike for a little over a year, and for most of that time it was my only bike. I rode it everywhere. I got comments from everyone who saw it, and I was pretty proud of it. My porch is enclosed and there’s no way to see it from the street, so I can only assume that the person who took it knew that the bike was there. Maybe it was even someone I know. This sense of premeditated violation is I guess what bugs me the most. It wasn’t some impulsive action brought on by seeing a nice bike on the street - that’s still not very nice but is a little easier to deal with. This was planned out. I’ve never had anything remotely valuable stolen form me (the last thing I can remember was my Razor scooter in tenth grade), so this is kind of a first for me. I hope my bike is OK, and that the new owner is treating it well.

I should have every right to be mad about it, right? After all, it was a relatively expensive purchase and I loved the bike. And someone DID violate my personal space, as they had to open a door to get on my porch. Someone took something that wasn’t theirs, and I should be mad about it. I lost a monetary investment and a mode of transportation. I also lost my opportunity to ride on the velodrome in Blaine in the conceivable future.

On the other hand, though, I had a nice bike that I didn’t deserve that I bought with money from a job that I didn’t deserve. It was a nicer bike than I needed to have. Taking it to race on the track is a luxury in which few people in the world can afford to indulge. Riding brakeless around the city was a youthful passion rather disregarding of the perilous position into which I was placing myself. Spending $400 on a bike probably wasn’t the best use of the resources that God has given me. God gave, I enjoyed, and God took away. I guess I don’t see how any righteous indignation on my part is in order.

More importantly, perhaps, the bike was a source of pride for me. I was proud that I could afford it. I was proud with how well I could ride it. I was proud with how clean I kept it. Like I said, it elicited many compliments from those around me, which made me feel good. With every, “Hey, nice bike!” I heard I secretly added, “Wow, you are pretty cool to have such a good taste in bikes!”

And see, that is completely untrue. I didn’t even know what a fixed-gear bike was when I bought my Pista. I just knew that if I spent $400, I could get a good bike. It wasn’t a conscious decision to end up with the bike I did. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me from soaking up praise.

But perhaps God wanted me to have the bike? What if God was blessing me with it? Maybe He was, but I certainly wasn’t humble about it. As author and pastor John Piper puts it, our purpose in life is to magnify the glory and supremacy of Jesus Christ to the world - to be lights that show how infinitely worthy Christ is. If Christ blesses me, it is to show that He is an infinitely glorious God worthy of all my praise and so much more. Is owning nice things like a Bianchi bike bad? No. But when was the last time God was glorified because I rode a Bianchi? I’m ashamed to say, probably never.

So like I said before, God gave, I enjoyed, and God took away. I have nothing to be angry over. God did it for a reason, and I believe that that reason is in my best interest, even if I don’t understand it right now. That’s part of what makes God so great, though - that He is able to work for my good in ways that don’t make sense or are even painful for me.

But perhaps part of God’s plan is me getting my bike back, in which case, if you know anything about it, please let me know. I would really like it back.

_DZ

TOMS, Product Red, and Selfish Altruism Decried

2009-08-03T17:00:00.003-05:00

There seems to be a growing trend these days towards what I will call “socially beneficial consumerism” - that is, the idea that if we as consumers can only *somehow* consume in the right way, then we will solve problems of hunger, lack of clothing, disease, and poverty around the world. At heart the issue here is that we like buying things for ourselves and not giving our money away to others, even though we know we should, and there are some companies out there that are making it easy to appease our guilty consciences while still allowing us to buy fancy stuff for ourselves. This is different from supporting fair trade economics and the like; when you partake in this new movement and buy from a company that claims to donate some of their profits to the less fortunate, the company making the product is still turning a profit. Fair trade, simplified, is a system in which when you buy fair trade coffee (for instance), the farmer who grew the coffee - and not the international corporate middleman - is getting most of the money. Even though charities still will get money from socially beneficial consumerism, it is less money then they would have gotten if you had given them all of your money instead of buying something for yourself. Let’s examine a few of these new upstart efforts.

TOMS Shoes is a “conscientious consumer” enabler that sells shoes (well, slippers, really) to fund its drive to provide shoes to impoverished kids all around the globe. Every pair sold allows a poor child to have shoes. “One for One,” their website proclaims. This solution appears, at first, a shoe-in, and I am all for helping poor children, until you look at the cost of the shoes that TOMS sells - $44-$68 a pair. For slippers! Surely these don’t cost upwards of $30 to make and market. After all, half the shoes produced are not even for the consumer market. I thought the appeal of these simple, durable shoes is that they are cheap to produce and distribute to the poor. Right? TOMS is probably netting a nice profit on every pair.

This reduces the shoes to a status symbol for the first-world wearer. “Look at how generous my shoes say I am,” is the underlying message to all the folks walking by you on the paved streets. But this is not true altruism. After all, any cost-conscious altruistic citizen would satisfy their need for shoes for the lowest cost possible and then donate the remainder to charity. Sure, they don’t get the status symbol that they can flaunt in public, but more of their hard-earned money actually goes to, you know, worthy causes that aim to make a difference in the world.

If $70 for shoes isn’t enough money to make someone feel self-righteouss, then they can always move on to bigger and better status symbols, like the OLPC. The One Laptop Per Child Project, through their Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) program, aims to put a laptop in the hands of third-world children - for educational purposes of course. Technology for everyone! Now of course I am skeptical about the very nature of this project, but that is not the focus of this article. My beef here is that you pay $400, $200 for each laptop, just to receive a laptop that you most likely don’t need. What use could you have for a plastic, green, kid-size, Linux-based laptop? Chances are you’ll end up giving it to your kid so that they can have some solidarity with those less fortunate, while you can still look good at dinner parties. Never mind how far $400 could have gone at your local homeless shelter to help out the poor in your community; your kid has a cool gadget that shows how much you care about others.

There seems to be two main camps of opposition to this trend. One one hand you have groups who directly speak out against it, like the Adbusters magazine and website. On the other hand you have organizations like (Product) Red who try to incorporate altruism into the mainstream consumer culture. I think that both paths are misguided.

Adbusters magazine, the outspoken source for all things anti-consumerist, offers hemp shoes made without sweatshop labor, branded only with a black circle. The circle, an anti-corporate scowl of sorts, aims to demote the brand logo as a source of self-worth. The price for a pair? A lofty $75-$99. Congratulations, Adbusters - you offer unbranded merchandise at brand-name prices. The anti-consumer will no doubt choose a cheaper option and shop elsewhere. And those people who usually buy $200+ shoes who you might try and entice with lower prices? They have never heard of your magazine.

The rich, though, may have heard of (Product) Red. This brand, an affiliation with a charity, is on everything from credit cards to clothes to iPods and promises that a percentage of the profits for each branded item sold will be given to various social causes. Apparently the hip thing to do these days is to take a regular iPod, paint it (Red), and sell it so that consumers can claim that they are actually donating money to charity. It is a bold initiative to change the world through the frivolous expenditure of cash on personal luxury items. Since (Red) works on streamlining the consumer’s desire with social justice and altruism, a large part of their campaign is focused on advertising. After all, if they can’t tout the benefits of paying for red paint, people will always buy what’s cheapest or most attractive. More money gone to waste on advertising that could have been put up to help those less fortunate.

“Desire and virtue. Together at last,” their website claims. I wasn’t aware that these were irreconcilable qualities up until now, but since (Red) has pointed it out, let’s think about it. Why is it that we brand desire as ‘evil’ and those who lust after things as lacking virtue? I associate rampant desire with lacking self-discipline, and come to the conclusion that a large part of what we call ‘being virtuous’ is really just being disciplined. (Red) thinks that they have solved a paradox, allowing desire and virtue, in this case more akin to altruism, to go hand in hand. You can now spend frivolously, confident that as long as you are buying (Red), your dollars are working overtime to propel you into sainthood.

I don’t think I can summon the language to appropriately describe how misguided and false this idea is.

When you are rewarded for being altruistic, you cannot truly be being altruistic. Selfless giving, the kind that is motivated by morals or ethics, does not ask for anything in return. Flaunting TOMS shoes or an OLPC so that others will marvel at your generous spirit nullifies the altruistic ideal. Altruism is giving while expecting nothing in return. Altruism decries selfishness, and this is what the companies want you to forget. I’m all for supporting the poor, but I’m completely against the idea that you can put your self-interest on par with your concern for the poor and say that you are being altruistic, which is what these companies seem to be promoting.

Should you support the poor and less fortunate? Absolutely. Should you provide for yourself? Certainly. Should you take advantage of opportunities that allow you to integrate those interests? Yes, but do so with caution and with no premonition that what you are doing is pure altruism. If you are going to provide for yourself, do so. If you are going do help the less fortunate, do so. But do not spend money on “conscientious consumer” status symbols that excuse frivolous spending. Jesus Christ probably said it best in Matthew 6 when he said, “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Consuming correctly won’t make the world better; giving, giving generously, and remembering to put others’ interests above you own will.

_DZ

#20

2009-07-31T17:00:00.000-05:00

(click image to enlarge)

_DZ

On Putting Childish Things Behind Us And Growing Up

2009-07-30T16:28:00.002-05:00

Lately I’ve been meditating (and I don’t mean meditating in the “cross-legged in the dark” way, but rather the “meditate on my words day and night” kind of Biblical way) on the apostle Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:11 where he says,

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” (NIV)

What kind of childish ways is Paul talking about here? And what is the benefit of putting them behind us?

I think it is fair to say that Paul is not talking about childish things out of which we naturally mature. He’s not talking about riding bikes with training wheels or playing marbles or collecting Pokémon cards. He’s addressing talking, thinking, and reasoning. He’s talking about thought processes and behaviors that stem from personal growth and development over time - things that we have to nurture and cultivate.

I don’t think that “thinking” here refers to superficial things like what Johnny thinks of you, or whether you should start thinking about what to eat for dinner, or what you think about the Dodgers this year. I think Paul is talking about deep things that kids don’t think about. Things like “Why am I here?” “What does my life mean?” “Is there eternity?”, and “If God exists, of what consequence is that to me?” These are questions worth thinking about and worth finding answers for. If we don’t think about them or choose to ignore them, it means we have not matured.

Talking, I think, refers to what James says about taming the tongue in chapter 3 of his book. It means thinking before you say things. How do kids talk? Kids gossip on the playground. Kids lash out when insulted. They wail and complain when they don’t get their way. Kids are vocal about the fairness of life. Kids swear because it provokes a reaction. Kids boast about their possessions or parents, things over which they have relatively little or no control. These are the things that we should put behind us. Growing up means gaining wisdom, discretion, and holding your tongue until after you analyze the many colors that taint a situation.

A child’s world is fairly black-and-white, and it is easy to reason in such a world. If you fall off your bike, you get scrapes. If Billy hits you, you hit him back. If you eat a slushie too fast, your head hurts. If little Susie down the street likes you, that’s gross. It’s all too easy to extend this logic to the grown-up world as well. If they are poor, they deserved it. If he drives a nicer car, he is more successful then you. If they have more money, God likes them better. This kind of logic leads to envy, contempt, malice, and depression. It shows a shallow understanding of the people around us and the world in which we live. Adults should rather eschew judgment for insight and anger for patience.

Giving up childish ways is a step towards perfection in Jesus Christ. As He is perfect, so we must strive to be like Him. Through striving to be like Him, we mirror, though poorly, His character to the world. By growing up in speech, though, and reason we let Christ’s light shine through us. As the Bible is the Word of God, through reading it can we know God’s character and hence the goals and essential qualities that we should aim to attain. These are grown-up qualities, and require investing some real time and effort to acheive.

_DZ