Spike is Best

One Cent

2012-01-26T08:37:00.000-08:00

Canada has been on route to getting rid of the penny.

From wikipedia:

"There have been repeated talks about getting rid of the penny as it is estimated that it costs the Royal Canadian Mint 1.8¢ to produce a 1¢ coin, even though the Royal Canadian Mint claims it costs only 0.8¢ to produce a penny. The Canadian penny costs at least $130 million annually to keep in circulation, estimates a financial institution (the Desjardins Group) that called for an end to the penny. The Mint refuses to release the cost, citing competition, despite having a monopoly. According to a 2007 survey, only 37 percent of Canadians use pennies, but the government continues to produce about 816 million pennies per year, equal to 25 pennies per Canadian.

"On March 31, 2008, NDP MP Pat Martin introduced a private member's bill that would eliminate the penny from circulation. The Swedish rounding system is the suggested replacement for cash transactions. In mid-2010 the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance began a study on the future of the one-cent coin.

"On December 14, 2010, The Senate finance committee recommended the penny be removed from circulation, arguing that a century of inflation has eroded the value and usefulness of the one-cent piece. Presently it costs more to produce each penny (1.5¢) than it is worth monetarily. The Royal Canadian Mint has been forced to produce more such coins because pennies disappear from circulation as Canadians hoard these coins, or just cannot be bothered to use them."

While it may be true that it would save money (But what does that mean for rounding at stores? Rounding up? But what if you're Scottish?), I think it's just the preliminaries to getting rid of cash altogether and making it all electronic credit.

I say keep the penny. Hah!

Linkthanks for video: Catholic and Enjoying It!

Worth the Watch

2012-01-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

Bill Still says Ron Pauler "Gold Bugs" address the problem rightly, but have the wrong solution. Watch from the 1:00:00 mark to the end. Fun!

Milton Friedman: "Boy, if you kill the Fed and you don't do anything about fractional reserve lending, you've done nothing!"

Doing something about fractional reserve lending would, what, fall under government regulation?

2012-01-24T00:41:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils 2H, 6B, HB and might have used F

Misc.

2012-01-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

We fear not living long enough, not having a long life, and yet we fear old age and the loss of youth.

*

If a teacher were to swat the head of one of his students in anger then that teacher would be immediately reprimanded and likely removed from his position, either indefinitely or on suspension with a great list of counseling sessions to go through - if not jail or some such. Superficially, we like to think that children are so much more protected than they were in the savage days of yore in which a parent or teacher wouldn't think twice about physical punishment. Yet children today are indoctrinated from the earliest ages into sexualization, through the same school systems (and mind-controlling culture) that would reprimand the teacher for swatting one of his students, many of whom are set upon a path towards objectification, abortion, sexually transmitted disease - in short, a life of ruination. Oh, that and the fact that this present age is likely the worst history has seen in regards to the harm of children. Oh, and the fact that we murder children in the womb.

*

Some people who say abortion is wrong actually think we need to retain the choice of abortion, for otherwise if we were to outlaw it, then how could we possibly say that a woman who kept her baby was truly exercising virtue? Such are the broken thoughts from false prophets who would have us believe that Roe vs. Wade was created on the sixth day and then God rested.

*

There are a number of certain things, of which we can be most certain that they are certain; and some of these have to do with the uncertainty of things.

We can be certain that one day we will die, which is the uncertainty of the longevity of our life. Even such sad deluded people like Ray Kurzweil prove by dint of their very fighting against it and the likelihood that their efforts will fail, that one day, they will die. And their efforts will indeed fail.

One could die before even getting to the end of this blog post. Some may be thinking yes, please, let it be so.

The other thing of which we can be certain is that we ultimately have no control over the manner in which we will die. There is some wiggle room here; we can reduce the likelihood of dying in some manner by avoiding certain things or doing certain things, but ultimately we have no control or say in the manner in which we will die.

The evil of the suicide is that in saying he will determine the manner in which he will die, he in fact gives a great big fat middle finger to the Goodness of the fact that he was brought into existence and had no say in it.

*

There is a funny little strain of Inquisitorial Eroticizers of the baptismal faith who like to flatter themselves with the thought that they are making people uncomfortable. If they only knew how mind-blowingly boring they actually come across.

*

An artist cannot break or twist a symbol without committing suicide on some level of his relational being (and thus his creative being).

*

Of late, I keep coming back to the thirteenth apostle. He scares me, in the way that the Good scares; not because of him per se, but because of his conversion, the confession to which he clung. In a way, he never really stopped falling from that horse: from the moment he hit the ground, his mission began and never ceased until his head was chopped off. That's the power of Christ. It's said that in later life he really bore the stigmata. I can see that. For whether he bore the stigmata or not, the other saint he is most akin with is St. Francis of Assisi.

You have to know him in order to see it. Those who regard him as the unpleasant hardcase have scales yet to fall from their eyes.

Worth the Watch

2012-01-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

"Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money...of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural." --Aristotle - 325 B.C.

2012-01-19T19:37:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils 2H, F and 2B

Which is based on which?

2012-01-19T17:56:00.000-08:00

Say, if the dollar were to be totally backed by the gold standard, which is based on which?

So a man one day says, "Damn it, I want the real thing! Only gold for me! None of this fake money baloney! Gold is gold through all the ages!"

So he buys a gold bar.

"Say you, what's that gold bar worth?"

"I say, it's worth 25, 000 smackers - yeehaw!"

"25, 000 smackers of that fake money baloney?"

"Wait, what?"

So how can the gold be said to back the dollar? Which is backing which?

The only way Joe can buy some farm equipment with his gold coins is that the seller trusts he can exchange those gold coins for...dollars! How about that!

That's all well and good. Gold is nice. You can do so much with it; it never corrodes. But clearly gold is not what truly backs the currency, nor can it truly ever - that is, if one wants a healthy economy.

Money Question

2012-01-19T13:57:00.001-08:00

Here is a question:

How does backing the dollar with the gold standard suddenly turn the dollar into "honest money" (into the veritable, the real)?

Explanation?

Whatever one's explanation is, it won't be any better than this one: Gold has great magical powers that will make the dollar "honest money".

Here's another question: how does backing the dollar with the gold standard create true wealth other than through impoverishing the vast majority?

Update: I changed the phrasing a bit to hopefully avoid confusion of meanings of the words, "honest money".

Chichikov

2012-01-15T16:16:00.000-08:00

FIFTY MEGATONS
By Pavel Chichikov

Lopshenga is a settlement alongside the White Sea,
Rolling tundra, sand and shingle, inaccessibility,
A dozen houses, kitchen gardens, potatoes and some greens,
But people live by fishing, according to their means

A radio for medical removal or advice,
Say a body breaks a hip by slipping on the ice,
A coffin for a burial is carried by flatbed,
There is no formal carriage for the isolated dead

I flew in once by helicopter one long summer day
Only for some hours before I went away,
That is how they liked it when the Oblast or Moscow
Stretched out an arm and finger to the people long ago

Excellent it is to be remote and out of reach
When government is well-disposed to sanction or to preach,
Hopeful were the villagers that Moscow could forget
Their minimal existence where the sea and tundra met

But over the horizon once, near Novaya Zemlya
A giant detonation lit the sky like an aurora,
The burst of an effusion rose of fifty megatons—
No matter how remote they were, they were the closest ones

PROVE THAT SANITY HOLDS ON
By Pavel Chichikov

The law has ratified abortion
But demonstrate to us the dead child’s showing
And see the most of us recoil in horror and disgust

If that fetus is no child, why should they recoil?
Why revolt to see a simple mass of cells?
Even Romans at the Coliseum had more guts

They watched and cheered as mutilated losers
Were dragged out by the hooks of roustabouts—
We will not see a child hooked living from the womb

We turn our eyes away, cover up our eyes
Though eyes are closed when nightmares come
And we will see them in the dark, as in the light

It is still possible to draw the gasp of rage
To make the viewer turn away, in fury and disgust
To prove that sanity holds on to us, but just

________

The Poetry of Pavel Chichikov

That youtube religion is bad video

2012-01-15T14:34:00.000-08:00

So that fella with the doggerel and rather dogmatic and self-righteous youtube video about religion - which is to say, about the religious institution known as the Catholic Church - and how Jesus apparently destroyed it on the cross...yee-aaaaawwwwwn.

One could get into the scriptural passages and everything (oh yeah, the Bible! which we wouldn't have were it not for institutional religion), you know, do not think I came to abolish the law and all that jazz with Him being the New Covenant and to do this in memory of Me...

But really, getting down to the gnitty, what is his rant but Gnosticism? Heresies come in pairs. Like in the way holding forth an opposing division between nature and grace can lead one not to becoming a Manichean but to becoming a pantheist - if only a closet pantheist (watch The Tree of Life to see this in operation). One heresy gives birth to its opposite. So it goes: saying that Christ destroyed institutional religion on the cross and that the reality of doctrines, creeds, dogmas etc. are abolished as man-centered codes, leads not to the free and steady application of God's salvation of man, openly received (indeed, in such a world there would ultimately not be any "application" or "receiving"), but rather it leads to the reduction of Christ's manifestation and of His wide open grace to secret, self-applied - you might say, Pharisaical - coded knowledge: to Gnosticism.

It is precisely an institution founded by Christ (with its religious practices and observations) that preserves His operative grace (indeed, makes operative) being freely open to all men from becoming Gnosticism - Gnosticism, which is sundered from the saving action of Christ's sacrifice on the cross; the self-righteous knowledge of the Pharisees.

Funny how it works like that, no? As they say, truth is stranger than fiction. That fella is rather self-righteous in his little video too, is he not?

If Christ's singular acts of death and resurrection have no formation of a Church, of a singular, concrete religious institution, then why the bother with even becoming incarnate and dying? Did God simply don a man's body in order to get the sacrifice done? If instituting a church, instituting an institutional body, was not His plan, then why not? Why not just say He was God who only donned a man's body but wasn't truly fully man? That all those Jewish religious customs He observed was just make-believe, was all pretend - Him just sort of faking it? Why didn't He just wave a magical Harry Potter wand from the clouds and go zap, your sins are destroyed?

God seeking man? What do you think Sacred Doctrine is? Where do you think your very notion of God seeking man comes from? A spontaneous magical Harry Potter thought? It comes from Sacred Doctrine you fool. Given from the martyrdom of the minds of countless fathers and doctors of the Institutional Church who conformed their minds to Revelation which in turn flowers to us as Sacred Doctrine whose one subject is God - Who became man, was crucified, died, and was buried and rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven and sent forth His Holy Spirit to institute His Church that flowered, and continues to flower, with said Sacred Doctrine making manifest to us the truth of His mysteries in Jesus Christ.

Update: Owen has a related post worth reading: Confession: I am not a 'follower of Jesus'

2012-01-15T01:26:00.000-08:00

I like Rubenstein playing Chopin. He "gets" him. Though I'm no expert.

Listening

2012-01-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

"Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."

Isn't that one of the best phrases, one of the best prayers - so simple, so powerful, so direct? The very first word, "speak", takes away from the one speaking and puts the imperative on the One being spoken to. By the word, "speak", the speaker is already fallen silent. And the speaker addresses himself as "your servant", referring to himself only through the Master he is speaking to.

How much better are these words than something like, "Here I am, Lord, I come to do Your will." Gah, how horrid! Ta da! Here I am! With my trumpet! Now hand me that crosier! I'm here to do Your will - too-ta-too-ta-tooooooooooot!

"...and you do not belong to yourself; for you were bought with a great price..."

2012-01-14T00:53:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils (can't remember which ones)

2012-01-14T00:33:00.000-08:00

Medium: B Pencil

The Signature of the World

2012-01-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

The destruction to the Our Lady of Lourdes statue at the front of our parish was first noticed on the feast of the Mother of God. Perhaps it was done late the night before.

When I came out of morning Mass the Monday after the feast day, not knowing what had been done, I went up to our Lady to make a prayer and was dumbstruck with horror - and then frustrated, angry weeping.

Say what one wants about the randomness of vandalism; this is not random. Such an affront, however unconscious, is not arbitrary mischief. It is the signature of the world, for those to see who have eyes.

This is how the world regards its Mother.

So go ahead, make all the concessions to it that you want; seek out its praises and its honours.

I must be posting this because I'm practicing "easy virtue", or some such thing, and what I need is to be "challenged". After all, it's easy to post this because I am merely confirming myself in my righteous paradigm. Which is why I also post Vortex videos.

2012-01-12T12:27:00.001-08:00

Mark Shea's and Elizabeth Scalia's Folk Hero joking about partial-birth abortion:

Because it's only comedians now who give us the truth, so say some.

Linkthanks to Spirit Daily.

Update: Graphic abortion ads will air during Super Bowl XLVI. Good.

Linkthanks to Cresca t.

2012-01-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

Medium: 2B Pencil

Misc.

2012-01-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

A little story a priest once told in a homily:

There was a group of students in a large woodshop and one of the students lost his watch. They spent a good amount of time looking for the watch while the woodshop was running, and couldn't find it. After everyone left, one student remained behind and laid himself down on the floor of the woodshop. In the stillness and silence he listened - and he heard the faintest ticking. By that ticking he located the watch.

*

I do not believe that those who were brought to Jesus to be delivered, who scriptures say were possessed by demons, were epileptics and that Jesus healed them of their epilepsy. Nope, I think there really were numbers of people possessed. Because there are signs that go along with both possession and the demon being excorcised. Names are spoken and the demon exposed and words of authority commanding the evil spirit to come out.

What evidence is there that people back then did not know that epileptic seizures were not demonic possession? We're very stupid to think they were primitive.

*

I remember a priest - a good priest - who spoke in his homily about Christ calling, indirectly, that Canaanite woman a dog. The priest attempted to soften it by referring to how things were socially in that time. I can't remember exactly what it was he said, but he ended up only making it look worse. And at no point did he simply mention that Jesus was testing the woman's faith. Would have saved a lot of trouble. Fact is, the passage doesn't even look bad from the get-go. It's only politically correct people constantly aware to discrimination who bring up such things, where there are none.

*

But you see, even the thought that Jesus would analogously align a woman with a dog even as a front, as a testing repertoire - indeed, actually leading the woman to her wonderful response of humility and faith - is unthinkable to certain people.

*

People rely on labels in a fundamental way in their attempts to be non-labeling, or in their attempts to show how arbitrary are labels; and so they end up entrenching labels into our language beyond what any bigot could do. Like those who avoid the Left and the RightTM. Or like those who love to blather about how no creed can contain God or how no name can limit God: they do not end up thereby enlarging our view of God; they end up diminishing our view of words into something worse than barbarism.

*

Religion is not just a crutch for the weak-minded. It is an entire hospital. At least the Catholic Church is like a hospital - in fact, the only hospital.

Those who say religion is a crutch for the weak-minded are oblivious to the fact that they themselves go through life on an array of various crutches; they go from one crutch to the other with such rapidity and unconsciousness that the crutches simply do not appear as such. It makes one think of that Simpsons episode where the doctors discover that Burns is being kept alive not through a healthy body, but because of the perfect balance of innumerable diseases.

The Blogosphere:

2012-01-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

which would include this blog as well.

Blah this and blah that; a cannonade of canonists; Santorum-Paul-Gingrich-Romney-making-sure-Obama-becomes-President-for-second-term; the Unofficial Lay Ministries are tunneling under Mark Shea's house - whatever.

Well, this piece from Marc Barnes on how Descartes' false dichotomy between soul and body ruined sex is worthwhile reading.

Okay, okay, so everything is fascinating! I lied.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2012-01-10T00:19:00.000-08:00

The Pacific Cinematheque (pronounced cinemateck) in Vancouver has launched its screenings of most of Tarkovsky's films. I saw Stalker there a while back, which was my first time seeing it on a theater screen, and it was like seeing it for the first time.

Here is the Cinemateck's synopsis/official blurb for its Tarkovsky screenings:

"The seven features “sculpted in time” by Russian master and mystic Andrei Tarkovsky in a career cut short by lung cancer in 1986 (Tarkovsky was 54) are among the most influential, acclaimed, audacious, and awe-inspiring film works to emerge from postwar Europe. Meditative, metaphysical, uncommonly lyrical, remarkably textured, and incomparably visual, Tarkovsky’s is a cinema of moral and spiritual questing, of powerful apocalyptic poetry, of tour-de-force long takes and tracking shots, of expressive monochrome and muted colour, of unforgettable images and dreamlike landscapes. Steeped in Eastern Orthodox mysticism, abounding in elemental symbolism, sometimes venturing forth into hauntingly enigmatic science fiction, Tarkovsky’s films conjure up a hermetic, hallucinatory world that often speaks, forcefully, resonantly, mysteriously, more directly to the subconscious than to the rational mind. The result is cinema of the rarest order: transcendent, transfixing and transformative, rigorous and redemptive, utterly singular..."

I almost want to backhand the person who wrote that gobbling piece of garbage - three times over. "Master and mystic", "powerful apocalyptic poetry", "tour-de-force long takes", "Eastern Orthodox mysticism" (gotta love that one), "hermetic, hallucinatory world"...the whole thing; the higher it attempts praise, the more wrong and perverse it goes.

It makes me think of this other sort of slobbering swine-talk from Robert Johnson (a.k.a., "a spiritual elder") that I recently read, as quoted by Heather King in her comment box:

"The Catholic Mass is a masterpiece of balancing our cultural life. If one has the courage to see, the Mass is full of the darkest things: there is incest, betrayal, rejection, torture, death—and worse. All this leads to revelation but not until the dark side has been portrayed as vividly as possible. If one went to Mass in high consciousness one would tremble at the awfulness of it—and be redeemed by its balancing effect…One ought to pale with terror at the Mass."

One ought to pale with terror at the thought of unfathomably insulting Christ through one's own slobbering swine-talk. You know, like those who slobber all over themselves about the "eroticism" of the poetry of St. John of the Cross.

But anyways, the Pacific quote reminded me most of all of something Tarkovsky himself said about the very same thing:

"I have to admit that even when professional critics praised my work I was often left unsatisfied by their ideas and comments--at least, I quite often had the feeling that these critics were either indifferent to my work or else not competent to criticise: so often they would use well-worn phrases taken from current cinema journalese instead of talking about the film's direct, intimate effect on the audience."

Max Monday

2012-01-09T23:58:00.001-08:00

Resting Woman with Carnations - Max Beckmann

Merry Christmas!

2012-01-05T01:28:00.000-08:00

And the adulation following the entrance of the anti-Christ will be "Peace, peace".

But there will be none.

2012-01-04T20:03:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils F and 2B

Resolve to Evangelize

2012-01-04T12:40:00.001-08:00

It's basically what Voris has been telling his audiences in his talks: take something that you do in your routine and give it up in order to study the faith of the Church in its place, and do this every day. Then be prepared to speak that truth in the world at large without apology. Sort of Chesterton's maxim to stop enjoying yourself.

In the words of the indubitable Catholic and Enjoying It!: makes sense to me.

2012-01-03T23:51:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils HB and 2B

The Hobbit Trailer

2012-01-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

Check out the new The Hobbit trailer:

I have to say, it looks freaking awesome.

Hat tip for the trailer to the Shrine of the Holy Whopper, which is back up and running.

Merry Christmas

2012-01-03T01:07:00.001-08:00

Yep

2012-01-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

Put Christ back in Christmas.

It's okay to say Merry Christmas to me.

Wear the right buttons.

And don't say happy holiday.

Go, say Merry Christmas to someone this week of January.

Bet you can't do it.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2012-01-03T00:28:00.001-08:00

New Peach Pit Carving - Holy Name and Fish

2012-01-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

This one is not finished but I thought I would show where it's at so far. Both sides need refining; I just put some food-safe oil on for now. When the carving is done I'll probably stain it. I don't have a digital camera that does good close-ups, so these shots will have to do for now (click on them to enlarge).

Then the other side of the same pit:

2012-01-01T20:18:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

Medium: HB Pencil and maybe some others, can't recall

2011-12-30T16:43:00.000-08:00

Medium: Brush Pen

2011-12-30T16:41:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils HB, 2B and maybe others

He would be angry

2011-12-29T23:54:00.000-08:00

"I am afraid I have been far too casual about 'magic' and especially the use of the word; though Galadriel and others show by the criticism of the 'mortal' use of the word, that the thought about it is not altogether casual. But it is a v. large question, and difficult; and a story which, as you so rightly say, is largely about motives (choice, temptations etc.) and the intentions for using whatever is found in the world, could hardly be burdened with a pseudo-philosophic disquisition! I do not intend to involve myself in any debate whether 'magic' in any sense is real or really possible in the world. But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.

Both sides live mainly by 'ordinary' means. The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go in for 'machinery' – with destructive and evil effects — because 'magicians', who have become chiefly concerned to use magia for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills; but not of Sharkey and Sandyman's use of them.

Anyway, a difference in the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by by 'lore' or spells; but is in an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such. Aragorn's 'healing' might be regarded as 'magical', or at least a blend of magic with pharmacy and 'hypnotic' processes. But it is (in theory) reported by hobbits who have very little notions of philosophy and science; while A. is not a pure 'Man', but at long remove one of the 'children of Luthien'."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter # 155, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Bold italics mine)

"Of course The L.R. does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent would of a child. I am comforted to know that it has good friends to defend it against the malice of its enemies. (But all the fools are not in the other camp.)"

--J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #328, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Bold italics mine)

Yep, I wonder sometimes what Beren himself would have to say (were he alive today) about the present-day neo-conservative, mechanistic flattening of Middle-earth - and the consequent denigration thereof - to fit with Potterworld as a means of justifying Potterworld and its occult practices represented as a good.

2011-12-29T18:48:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils F and B

2011-12-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

Medium: B Pencil

Shroud for Atheists

2011-12-27T16:59:00.001-08:00

2011-12-26T22:13:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils HB, 3H and 2B

Why do the heathen rage? Why do the nations rage?

2011-12-24T22:51:00.000-08:00

-The Lord hath said to me: Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.

-Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?

-Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

-The Lord hath said to me: Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2011-12-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

"Some critics are terribly anxious to see a filmic spectacle shown simultaneously on several--even on six--screens. But the movement of the film frame has its own nature, which is not that of the musical note; 'polyscreen' cinema should be compared not with a chord, or harmony, or polyphony, but rather with the sound produced by several orchestras playing different pieces of music at the same time.

The only result would be chaos, the laws of perception would be broken, and the author of the polyscreen film would inevitably be faced with the task of somehow reducing simultaneity to sequence, in other words of thinking up for each instance an elaborate system of conventions. And it would be rather like putting one's right arm all the way round one's left ear in order to touch the right nostril with the right hand. Is it not better to accept, once and for all, the simple and binding condition of cinema as a succession of visuals, and to work from that starting-point? A person is quite simply not capable of watching several actions at once; it is beyond his psychophysiology."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

I think those words could be applied, in a way, to modern life.

Sequence from Solaris

2011-12-18T00:06:00.000-08:00

Medium: HB Pencil

2011-12-15T00:18:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils 3H, HB and I might have used 2B

Coloured Pictures

2011-12-14T10:06:00.000-08:00

This is the sort of book we like
(For you and I are very small),
With pictures stuck in anyhow,
And hardly any words at all.

You will not understand a word
Of all the words, including mine;
Never you trouble; you can see,
And all directness is divine—

Stand up and keep your childishness:
Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;
But don’t believe in anything
That can’t be told in coloured pictures.

---

A poem that G.K.C. wrote in a Randolph Caldecott picture book that he presented to a young friend.

2011-12-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

Medium: HB Pencil

A World of Good

2011-12-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

"Mind you, the most perfect steersman that you can have, and the best helm, lie in the triumphal gateway of copying from nature. And this outdoes all other models; and always rely on this with a stout heart, especially as you begin to gain some judgment in draftsmanship. Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worth while, and will do you a world of good."

--Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook

Misc.

2011-12-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

Some dumpsters at the unenclosed - and thus publicly viewable - backs of various stores and marketplaces now get painted with bright, flowery, folksy types of pictures. This is relatively new (and up to the decision of the store owners), the intention being to eradicate, or gloss over, the dreary sight of ponderous garbage bins and thus the awareness of uncleanliness standing near. It shares a similarity with the phenomenon of guerrilla gardening. Except that whoever is painting them is obviously getting paid.

This has also been done for some years now - with sophisticated digital realism - over utility boxes, to blend them into their surroundings more, or just to take that hard utilitarian edge off of them. Though with these, it is an initiative of city councils; and is, in effect, actually more artificial than if the utility boxes were left in their stark original state. For at least the dumpsters' folksy paintings require the hand of a living person, being clearly recognizable. The utility boxes are coated, using some laminate technology, as mentioned, with pre-made photo-realistic images.

The dichotomy this creates is strange: which is more hateful - a dumpsterish dumpster or an Easter-egg dumpster; a utilitarian utility box or a screen-saver-image utility box? As much as beauty can be seen in utilitarian surroundings - and even have a certain angular clarity because of the contrast made by nature that demarks itself always in spite of urban sprawl - such surroundings are still hateful. Metal dumpsters, traffic lights, stark steel streetlamps, telephone poles, endless asphalt are all ugly and so are utility boxes. The collective presence of such artifacts of convenience and utility cause an oppression that we have assimilated ourselves to - way too much.

But what is equally hateful - maybe even more - is the prettification of something that pretty much stinks all the time. It's a more benign parallel to, say, an abortion clinic all clean and brightly-lit with happy pictures on the walls: come on in and have your child dismembered - it's happy hour.

Part of us wants to say: if you are going to have a dumpster there, then let it be an honest dumpster, with nothing but rust stains and mounds of bird shit for its decoration. Another part likes the colourful change, the human stamp (which is most unlike a stamp) of cheer, flare, communication, beauty. But the latter is the part that ought not to be satisfied with dumpsters as its material; much as it ought not to be satisfied with beauty as the great "anti-pornography".

*

At the grocery store that was my previous employment, someone one morning threw a litter of newly born kittens into the back dumpster, and I went in there and fetched them out one by one: tiny mewlings that my palm could almost entirely enclose, their little mews piped out here and there from the trash.

The man who originally spied them came back and, putting them into another box, intended to take them to the SPCA to save them. I don't know if he was able to save them. He was so indignant. He kept expressing his indignation, and I wondered if he agreed with abortion.

*

Another time some lady had her dog tied up outside the front of the store and the dog kept yelping and yelping. It was cold outside. Maybe the dog just wanted the owner to come back. This other lady came in, vocalizing her indignation that a dog was tied up outside and yelping. After having it explained to her that the owner was finishing her shopping and would be outside shortly, she kept pronouncing how much it disturbed her to see the dog tied up and how much she did not like seeing it. Quite vocal, but in sanctimonious and pleading tones, she expressed disturbance several times until it became apparent she cared only about herself coming across as a compassionate woman.

What a drama queen you are, I thought. And I wondered if she agreed with abortion.

*

The latest Dappled Things is out, along with a new website. If you haven't subscribed to them, do, go for it. I eagerly await each issue in the mail. I wonder if I got knocked off the mailing list, as I haven't yet received the latest email about the new issue.

*

The other day I went to Elizabeth Scalia's blog, The Anchoress, which I don't go to very often, and glanced over a small post she did on Dorothy Day - probably one in a gazillion billion posts she's done on Dorothy Day if I were to make a wild guess - and noticed she posted an "icon" by Robert Lentz of Dorothy Day to go along with the post.

I don't cruise peoples sites going tut-tut over things they've posted, but my general rule of thumb on the interwebs is: if a thought occurs to you then mention it for its own sake; express ideas singularly without IMHO's; and try not to assimilate to the unspoken club atmosphere that so often prevails; that is, in short, do not assimilate to the atmosphere that is perpetual high school.

So, I commented in a state of complete detachment:

Why post an “icon” by Robert Lentz? She hasn’t been canonized, therefore depicting her in the iconographic tradition (though that “icon” is by no means iconographic) with a halo is denigrating of the sacredness of real icons.

She replied:

[I posted it because I likes it. Your mileage may vary. You don't have to like it. That's what freedom is all about. And once upon a time, someone would say, "well, meh, I don't like it, but it's a free country and there's no accounting for taste." Then the internet happened, and everyone decided they had to comment on everyone else's choices, all the time! :-) -admin]

Then I replied:

But you see Mrs. Scalia, it's goes beyond what you "likes", or what I like. It was pretty obvious by the fact that you posted the "icon" that you likes it. Nor am I impinging on your freedom by asking what I asked.

I asked a simple question that brought up the fact that the "icon" - aside from being the work of one who blasphemes God, degrades the saints, and the iconographic tradition all together - uses a halo for Dorothy Day (just like he uses a halo for Thomas Merton, Martin Luther [King Jr.] etc.) when she has not been canonized.

You are perhaps aware of iconographic language and symbol. Using the halo in iconography is veritably, literally the same as writing "Saint" - officially. It is the exact same as if you were to write, "Saint Dorothy Day" in total seriousness as though that is what the Church has declared.

This sort of willy-nilly use of iconographic language is denigrating of the sacredness of icons. You post it because you like it. That's nice. There are some things that require one's consideration to go beyond "likes".

Yes, the internet happened, which is where you post your writings on a public blog (which also happens to garner you financial support just by me clicking on your blog). So yeah, me asking you that question is not exactly the same as me nosing into your personal likes. I don't care about that.

But thanks for your patronizing response.

:)

This thought of having consideration for objective realities beyond one's own likes has made me think I should probably read Pope John Paul II's encyclical on freedom and responsibility. I should probably finish The Splendour of Truth first. I believe in freedom of speech, but always with a certain nameless disbelief in the sovereignty that seems to go along with that phrase.

I've seen it a lot; people appeal to freedom of speech in order to shut down discussion, to shut down speech. Americans seem especially susceptible to this virus. In fact, in this matter they can be grossly arrogant. What's interesting is that this is one of the big things that conservative Christians criticize enemies of the Church for: they decry enemies of the Church who, appealing to free speech, cause eternal harm to souls through the culture.

When you have a public blog, what you post on it is inherently open to public question (otherwise your blog would be privatized). You can set the rules of play and conduct, such as no anonymous comments are allowed, no ad hominem attacks, you can ban people left and right according to your whim's content and so forth, but to appeal absolutely to the hilt that your public blog, in all of the things you choose to post to the world, is somehow your personal private home beyond all questioning is ridiculous. That whole internet thing, that is your public blog's inherent ontology, kind of renders that majorly inaccurate metaphorical appeal, well, stupid.

*

Hilary Jane Margaret White has this article in The Remnant about the definition of neo-Catholic.

"In brief then, neo-Catholics, or neo-conservative Catholics are people who like to think of themselves as conservatives both politically and religiously, who are terrified by the idea of looking like a fanatic, who like to talk a great deal about how the Church has "a place in the public debate". Though they object to being called "moderate", they secretly love the term to be applied to them, and feel like they are at last being taken seriously by The Big Kids at the New York Times, the BBC and CNN when they are invited to comment on debate programmes. In general they are mostly an American phenomenon, with a bit of spillage over the Canadian border."

That part about being terrified of looking like a fanatic caught my eye especially, as one of the thoughts that has occurred to me over and over again through the years of reading various sites on the web has been, namely, that many, or some, seem to be overruled by a fanatical desire to not appear fanatical - The Great Normal is the title we should attain to with fanatical ferocity - like certain Potterheads for instance.

*

Take any quote, heck, this quote, from any thoughtful critic. Here's one from Dr. Edoardo Rialti, as quoted in Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture by Michael O' Brien:

"[Although] on the surface there may apparently be many points in common, the imaginative source and the educational proposal as the base of Rowling's novels is very different from that of Tolkien and Lewis, and communicates a vision of the world and of man that is full of errors and deeply dangerous suggestions; and these are all the more seductive because they are interposed with half-truths and enthralling writing. But as Lewis warned, "poisons, as they become sweeter, do not stop killing." The truly great fantasies in healthy Western tradition have always been a window opened on the profound order of the created universe and on mankind. Tolkien, in his major essay on fairy tales, recalls that the narrator of fairy tales can move away from the physically-created universe, but not its moral order: we can imagine a universe illuminated by a green sun, but we must not succumb to the temptation to present as a positive reality the situation where spiritual and moral structures are reversed or confused: a world where evil is good.

This is exactly what happens in Harry Potter. Although single positive values can be found in the story, at the heart of this tale witchcraft is proposed as a positive ideal, including the violent manipulation of things and persons thanks to occult knowledge and the prerogative of the few, and ends justifying the means, since the wise, the chosen, the intellectual know how to control the dark powers and turn them into good, isn't it so? This is the "civilisation of the machines" against which Lewis warned us. Bernanos and John Paul II have discussed this as well.

This is a deep and serious lie, the ancient Gnostic temptation to unite salvation and the truth with secret knowledge. ... Harry Potter is nevertheless rich in Christian values, but they are detached from the real source that makes them be, the true order of things."

See now the Potterhead's face burning red like a tomato and steam blowing out of his ears, which are presently whistling like a kettle, upon his hero The Potter being criticized in terms that adhere to the unchangeable reality that Christian symbology manifests and which cannot be mutated without harm to persons. See him fume and guffaw as though his grandfather had just shuffled by and made thuddish-sounding criticisms that he could not allow even an inch to, for it would mean that he has been - God forbid - impressionable, worst of all faults to the neo-con soldier! Look how they then seem to release - without meaning to, because their kneejerk thrashing conniption fits can't help it - curses and spells against their enemy critics that their subconscious learned from the series' subtext of symbolic inversions and corruptions. See him now casting his spell into his google account's password box [Horcrux666] as he prepares to unleash in answer a torrent of horribly banal neo-conservative logic on the internet, and lo, the account obeys his very command!

See him now precisely begin to resemble those fanatical Lila Rose supporters when they said things like, "Oh! Oh! So you want babies to be killed then! Oh, oh! So you think police should not do sting operations on sexual predators and drug dealers! Oh, oh! So you think telling your children about Santa Claus is a lying sin! Oh, oh! So you think we should no longer read The Odyssey! Oh, oh! So you think we shouldn't read any classical pagan work! Oh, oh, So you think that St. Paul should not have appealed to the Unknown God! Oh, oh! and you think we should do away with the Bible!"

See him now, gleefully satisfied that his glaring superficiality is somehow the Great Normal of the day (which of course it is), as he then lights upon his broomstick and, showing his supreme disdain for all the stupid Muggles of the world, up, up, up and aways into the air, going, "Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Nah nah nah nah boo boo, stick your head in horse poo!"

*

What you see before you is called the Silky Zubat:

A Japanese pull saw. Those Japanese know how to make saws. This side of a chainsaw, something like the Silky Zubat is as close as you will get to cutting through tree branches and trunks like butter.

Of course, I'm sure those old-time hand saws, such as a team of two would use in the lumber industry before chainsaws and such, are just as good.

*

I will make Christstollen again this year for Christmas. It appeals to me. I've never had Christmas pudding, like Father Z. makes. I'm sure it's great. But my German ancestry, however little it may be, has a staid, firm foot in the door. Christstollen is for the quiet night all muffled in the snow and warm fruits found nicely stowed under it. Christmas pudding is all a blazing glory of richness with the lighting it on fire and everybody going, "Ooo-la-la" - very Dickens.

*

"Thank you very much for the instructive book. It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly."

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, March 7, 2003, letter to Gabriele Kuby

"Thank you very much for your courageous engagement against occultism and magic."

--Josef Ratzinger, December 2003, hand-written Christmas card sent to Gabriele Kuby

*

:)

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Ho! Ho! Ho!

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Snow!

2011-12-11T00:04:00.001-08:00

Medium: F Pencil

2011-12-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

Medium: HB pencil and some other ones I can't quite remember

2011-12-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

Medium: Brush Pen

Icon - Mother of God

2011-12-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

The latest icon.

For those who do not know, the three stars (shoulders and head) represent her perpetual virginity: before, during and after birth of Christ.

2011-12-01T23:12:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils HB, 2B, 3H and maybe B

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2011-11-29T22:42:00.000-08:00

Sequence from Nostalghia.

2011-11-25T17:14:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils 6B and 2B

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2011-11-22T22:52:00.001-08:00

"It was no accident that at the beginning of this chapter I applied the word 'capital' to the responsibility borne by the cinema author. By pointing up the idea like that -- even if the result is an exaggeration -- I wanted to emphasise the fact that the most convincing of the arts demands a special responsibility on the part of those who work in it: the methods by which cinema affects audiences can be used far more easily and rapidly for their moral decomposition, for the destruction of their spiritual defences, than the means of the old, traditional art forms. Actually providing spiritual weapons, of course, and directing people towards good, must always be difficult...

The director's task is to recreate life: its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of truth he has seen -- even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable..."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

2011-11-22T22:46:00.001-08:00

Medium: HB Pencil

2011-11-22T01:08:00.000-08:00

Medium: B Pencil

2011-11-17T22:55:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils 3H, B, HB

2011-11-16T17:11:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils, 3H, B and HB

2011-11-14T20:28:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils B, 2B, 3H and HB

Max Monday

2011-11-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

Max Beckmann - Die Landschaft, Cannes

Max Beckmann - Harbor by Bandol (Gray) and Palms

Max Beckmann - Beaulieu

Max Beckmann - Promenade des Anglais à Nice

2011-11-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils HB, 2B and probably other ones

2011-11-08T21:25:00.000-08:00

Medium: Pencils B, 2B, HB and 3H

2011-11-06T01:32:00.001-07:00

In the Fourth Age

2011-11-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Sauron], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless - while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors - like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow - but it would be just that. Not worth doing." --J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #256, Letters of Tolkien

"I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldarion about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)" --J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #338; Letters of Tolkien

The Departed

2011-11-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

After work this evening I went to the cemetery for All Souls' Day and prayed a decade of the rosary in the rain.

All this month is dedicated to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Isn't it neat how the Church calls them holy souls? They have the hope of the assurance of Heaven. Where there's hope there's ascension; where there's ascension there's holiness.

During work today two great blue herons flew over the hedge above me, side by side, flying low; their masterful wings working in that slow, strong sort of langour that makes me think of the way giant manta rays swim in the ocean.

Nature abounds with signs.

Pray for the holy souls in purgatory. They help us in turn. You know how people make sure to get into a person's intentions when that person has stated he is going on a pilgrimage to a holy place? You know, you're going to the tomb of Padre Pio? Oh, can you remember to pray for ______ when you're there please? We want something of ourselves to go along with them.

The ones in purgatory are on their way to the ultimate Holy of Holies. Wouldn't you want to make sure they have some trinket of your remembrance, that you helped them along the way?

They're going through the gates and you want to leave a note or something in their pockets to take out before the throne of God. Hey, what's this here in my pocket? Oh yeah, it's whatshisname - he helped me here Lord!

Cemeteries are so silent.

"But as it is written, Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him." --1 Corinthians 2:9

"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." --Steve Jobs' last words

2011-11-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

The origin of Christmas is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The origin of Easter is the resurrection of Jesus Christ - as the origin of Good Friday is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

These are origins that are absolutely historical and absolutely supernatural. They are, in a more real sense, origins that are historical because they are supernatural - being neither merely historical nor merely supernatural. They are origins based in singular events.

Halloween has no such origin. This obvious statement is not made to the severely normal who already know it, but to the professional online Catholic apologists who, in their obsessive eagerness to show through a collation of factoids that Halloween is sooooooooo Catholic, end up doing nothing but make it look like Halloween is the third most important celebration in the Catholic Church after Easter and Christmas. Which, to be even more obvious, does nothing but denigrate Easter and Christmas into relativistic culture pie and culturally relativistic mish-mash. Like, everything's Catholic man; pass the bong.

As they all well understand, it's not even on the Catholic celebration roster. It's just the eve of a feast day - a feast day that used to be regarded with more importance than it is now. In Canada, All Saints Day is not even a holy day of obligation, which is sad.

One could even say that Halloween as we know it does not have an origin in any sense of the word. Definitely not in the sense of having an origin in an event. Certainly not an event as those originating Christmas and Easter; but neither an event that is merely historical, for any event that went into the Halloween weave through the years (such as Guy Fawkes) was no event of origin. It's just this kind of open-ended cultural phenomenon coming together, and yet coming together in no fully realized form or meaning, through strange meeting points in history.

It's more a long mutating string, or coalescing strings, of various practices, from various continents, from various times, all of them purely cultural, without any one event of origin; but the apologists point to them as though it were as definitively - nay, dogmatically - Catholic as the Apostolic line. (And God forbid you apostatize on the dogma of Halloween.) Their final, solid, resounding claim of the Catholic "origin" of Halloween, through pointing to the patchwork of past historical currents, is actually just as tenuous and hybridized today as it was back then.

The so-called puritanical person who suspects Halloween as so much ingratiation towards evil has in fact just as much a say (as much as one may disagree with him), based on the evidence of his eyes, as those who say that Halloween is soooooooo Catholic, without nary a one of them being any less Catholic or any more heretical than the other (though I'll put my money on the latter as the heretic). Why? Because they are both purely cultural appraisals about something that is, in its "origins" (which, again, are not origins really but meeting points between running historical developments), purely cultural.

I have fond memories of Halloween as a kid. I think it's great for kids to dress in costumes and trick-or-treat, and for adults to dress in costumes and to blow off fireworks and to party. Do I feel the need to defend it as being soooooooo Catholic? No. That it is merely All Hallows Eve (which just happens to be very culturally open-ended) is good enough for me. It's also a pretty good way of not becoming attached to it. It seems there are some though, like certain Potterheads, who simply cannot stand it for a second to have their entertainments questioned, even remotely. It's quite sad and pathetic.

At the end of the day there will still be seasoned Veterans who don't like watching war films, and Holocaust survivors who can't stand the sight of firearms, and people who have been awash in the occult, or been in contact with serious demonic infestation, who have reservations about what they see going on on Halloween. The day I would say to any of them that their suspicions make them puritanical and that they are just sooooooooo not Catholic and need to get more with it would be the day you find me at a big jubilant tent revival, jumping around and shouting, "Alleluia! I've seen the light!"

There are some things where it's better to just say that it's fun, and that that is the reason. Let the Catholic cards fall where they may.

Because, as it is, I just don't really believe that the neighbours down the street with their front plastic graveyard sets and polyester spider webs that they purchased at Wal-mart are exercising the same cathartic impulse to face the inevitability of death as those who painted scenes of the dance macabre during the Bubonic Plague. Just a hunch I have.

(But for fun? Good enough for me.)

And because I don't like the dictatorship of relativism that's being pawned off as Catholicism.

Hey, I just said 'Catholicism'!

I deserve a candy bar for that!

Hey! I just said 'candy bar'!

I'm so highfalutin.

2011-10-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

Medium: Pencils 2B, B, HB and 3H

2011-10-28T02:09:00.000-07:00

Medium: Pencils B, 2B and 3H

2011-10-25T22:46:00.001-07:00

Medium: Pencils HB and B

2011-10-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

Medium: 2B Pencil

Sorry, had to do something with that single stroke "2-2-2 drawing" below...

2011-10-18T00:56:00.001-07:00

Medium: Pencils 2B and B

The Van Gogh Mystery

2011-10-17T23:25:00.000-07:00

Go here to read about what most likely really happened to bring about Vincent Van Gogh's death by gunshot.

It makes sense to me. I don't think he would have shot himself. It never did strike me as true.

2011-10-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

Medium: 2B Pencil

Hey! This is this blog's two hundredth and twenty second drawing post!

That's 2-2-2!

And what does that mean?

The next celebration is 333! And if I make it to the number of the beast there will be no celebration and I'll make sure to have two drawings ready to bump it over!

Max Monday

2011-10-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles

"Here again, black is the dominant color and sets the tragic mood. In contrast to the Cubists who would transform a woman with a guitar into a still life, Beckmann endows his still lifes with human qualities. The table here has become a stage and no shadows are allowed to obscure the austere integrity of the mysterious event. This simple still life, like Cezanne's Black Clock, is a memento mori: the two largest candles are fallen heroes, while the other two stand in mourning, guarding against the "dark black hole" of space and infinity behind them. Indeed, a year later he painted a similar composition on a larger scale and introduced a book - a script as it were - with the word "Eternity" on its title page." --Peter Selz

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles and Mirror

2011-10-16T01:04:00.000-07:00

2011-10-16T00:20:00.001-07:00

Medium: Soft oil base black pencil and 2B pencil

What's Wrong with Canada - in short sum

2011-10-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

I remember one man in a group conversation who admitted that he voted for Pierre Trudeau back in the day simply because he thought he was cool. Heh.

Basically the same reason why many voted for that Kenyan-born liar down south.

I Don't Know

2011-10-14T23:08:00.001-07:00

Since the satellite hasn't been getting used much at all, and it's typically dvds that get played here, it was cancelled; but one of the last things I caught while flipping channels was a double Richard Dreyfuss feature of Stand By Me and Jaws. I caught the latter half of Stand By Me while watching all of Jaws. While Stand By Me wasn't my favourite growing up, I liked it back then; I found it fascinating; it seemed to express something I couldn't articulate, while the ending sort of depressed me. And I still like the film, more than I did before.

It's intriguing, isn't it, how many popular films in the 80's were about father/son issues.

The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, Field of Dreams, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand By Me...(my mind is at a blank right now, so feel free to add any others in combox)

Even The Princess Bride is quite literally book-ended by the relationship of the grandfather and his grandson.

In all of them the father/son theme is quite different from the other, exploring different aspects, and different in the ways they go about it; some archetypal and dramatic, like the two latter Star Wars films, intimate and underplayed like in Field of Dreams. In The Karate Kid it's very subtle, almost invisible, but ultimately the film's unspoken backbone. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off it's more of an appendage near the end, but the film's most serious note. In Back to the Future the theme actually runs quite deep. The way the comedy suddenly lands one in the heart of the familial and its universal consequences is moving. When George McFly decks Biff, it has all the cathartic import of Darth Vader giving the Emperor the heave-ho.

And I think Stand By Me is about father/son issues sort of the way the ocean is about the water: there's a lot of other things in it, but don't overlook the water.

Oh, there's E.T. and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade...

But then there's also a kind of subset of films to this; films not necessarily about father/son issues but extensions of, and therefore connected to, them. Movies about men - this is going to sound lame - finding the man inside them, like Innerspace: about a daring man literally inside of an unadventurous man who makes him brave and courageous. Top Gun and Iron Eagle (which one is worse? LOL) I know there's others here too, but I can't think of them now...

It just seems to me this was the general current of popular (and maybe not so popular) 80's movies. Was the 80's taking revenge on the 70's and 60's?

Oil Sketch

2011-10-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

Just one way of saying I was too lazy to finish it.

Oil on canvas paper, 12in. x 16in.

More Whatcott

2011-10-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

"A limited limit." That's a good one. Bureaucrat speak and weasel words.

Censorship: part of the official homosexual agenda.

But if you're a Muslim loon who wants to come here and incite violence against various groups, no problem.

Two Things

2011-10-12T20:18:00.001-07:00

You may notice this caption on the sidebar:

I got it from Dymphna's Road. Thanks Dymphna's Road!

I recently watched the film The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It was made in the seventies, and I watched it in two parts on youtube. The film is around three hours - a decent length for a film. It could have been longer; I wouldn't have noticed.

I'm hesitant to say the film is "hypnotic" or "mesmerizing", for the superficial connotations of those words. But the film channels that aspect of cinema which is one of its most potent - that of rhythm.

It works on you like a solid wooden high-backed chair, putting your back straight; not luxuriously comfortable, but not discomforting either. The nimble quickness with which the labour of the land is carried out, the efforts that go into keeping a home sanitary (and warm), the proper way of slaughtering a pig, the poetics that go into growing early tomatoes: peasant life is by no means sentimentalized, not because the film has the ambition of realism, but because the film itself is speaking in the rhythms it chronicles.

And by the end, the film can also be said to be a protest. I don't know many films that can be called protests against injustice; I'm sure there are lots. But the "protest", the cry at the end of this film has absolutely no whiff of propaganda.

I really recommend watching it. (Again, it's in two parts.)

Update: third thing. I wrote a lame post several days back about using the word, "Catholicism". I didn't think of those who use the word as the very header of their blogs. My apologies to them. I wasn't thinking. I deleted the post, though I still think that when it's possible to use the words "Catholic Church", one shouldn't substitute "Catholicism" instead. And of course there are times when one can only use "Catholicism" and not anything else. I guess it doesn't matter.

Oh, and if anyone writes a blog and wants to delete a blog post, but doesn't like the fact that the post still remains on google reader after you delete it, the solution is simple: before deleting your post, go into your post to edit. Then delete all the words of the post in the box. Then publish your post again. It will now publish in google reader as a blank. Then you can delete it from your blog.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2011-10-11T23:50:00.001-07:00

"The cinema image, then, is basically observation of life's facts within time, organised according to the pattern of life itself, and observing its time laws. Observations are selective: we leave on film only what is justified as integral to the image. Not that the cinematic image can be divided and segmented against its time-nature, current time cannot be removed from it. The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time lives within it, even within each separate frame.

No 'dead' object - table, chair, glass - taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time.

You only have to by-pass this condition to make it possible to take over any number of properties from one of the neighbour arts. And with their help you can indeed make very effective films; only from the point of view of cinematic form these will be incompatible with the true development of the nature, essence and potential of cinema.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time. I therefore find particularly irritating the pretensions of modern 'poetic cinema', which involves breaking off contact with fact and with time realism, and makes for preciousness and affectation."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Max Monday

2011-10-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

Max Beckmann, Riviera-Landschaft

Max Beckmann, Blick auf Vorstädte am Meer bei Marseille

Max Beckmann, Seascape with Agaves and Old Castle

2011-10-09T23:18:00.001-07:00

Epic

2011-10-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

"I just read it when I was teenager, and it's amazing. It's almost like" -- here, he grabbed my digital recorder, held it to his mouth, and spoke in a portentous movie-announcer voice -- "They profaned his Temple. They killed his father. They... all kinds of stuff. In the face of great odds for something he believed in" -- here he switched out of movie-announcer voice -- "Oh, my God, the odds they faced. The armies they faced had elephants! How cinematic is this! Even Judah's dad -- what's his name? Mattathias? -- you kind of get this guy who more or less is trying to avoid the whole thing, but he just gets to a place where he's had enough, and he just snapped!"

It's rich that the Anti-Defamation League and other official leaders would be put in the position of refusing to admit (via much righteous indignation), as would be expected, that the best person, the most exceptional person, to make a historical epic film of Judah Maccabee, indeed, the only person in Hollywood who would make the film not only a box-office success, but outstandingly watchable and truly searingly epic, is Mr. You-Know-Who.

Absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable. That's the way the world spins. It's not hyperbole to say that there really is not anyone in Hollywood who has the muscle for making such a film into a great one, one that has its own dynamic weight and intensity (rather than just another genre-entrenched biopic) and that if anyone else were to make it, it would flounder at the box-office and would receive middling critical reception (as opposed to the extremes Gibson receives in critical terms) - because the film would be middling. If it even got made, that is. As he has proven, Gibson has the kind of guts that gets unlikely and unprospective films made. Though as Gibson says above in so many words, a film about Judah Maccabee has cinema written all over it.

The film would be especially middling if it was made by Spielberg - just like, well, I won't say Schindler's List is middling (on the contrary), but a host of his other overrated films. (Oh my Lord, I just suggested that Schindler's List is overrated - shoot me now!) Spielberg is topped out - maybe because he never really ruined himself, I don't know; and the last truly creative film he made was Jaws. Oh, oh, maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark (definitely not Saving Private Ryan). Put another way: it's not that he's literally topped out, but that he can't seem to find a top. And for an artist, that is ruinous, partly because there's no risk of meeting with ruin. He now has the capacity of a thousand fully functioning animatronic white sharks indecipherable from real ones, and not a couple of fake-looking clunkers that make filming a veritable hell; and that seems to be part of the problem. Of course, I don't absolutely believe that. He's still a great filmmaker.

It's funny that the film would only get made at all if it was made by Gibson. But then, it's only superficially funny, since he's not really an anti-Semite.

Of course, such a film idea has been on his mind since probably the time of Braveheart. But I want to see the blogosphere, pumping out clever analogies like so much sausage, if and when the film nears its release.

Leading up to it, bloggers, like maybe some of those at the Patheos club, or maybe not, maybe others, (Who knows? Who am I to judge? I'm just a humble little blogger) will likely be whining about how Gibson is just doing it for the P.R. and that he really shouldn't be doing this out of respect and how would we Catholics like it if someone like Philip Pullman made a film about Jesus Christ and then exalting in the praise of how much humility they have for making such a soul-searching post of such naked self-examination and after realizing the film is one of the greatest in decades, will promptly drop the subject, or divert to whining about how "pornographically violent" it is, while film critics who just couldn't help getting political and bringing in their sour biases when reviewing Apocalypto, like Steven Greydanus, will go into a similar position.

It might get volatile. Then throw in the Molotov cocktail of circumcision. The blogosphere is going to go Fukushima. I totally want to be there for it.

Did you catch that? Cocktail...circumcision? Har, har, har.

Oh, by the way, what did the mommy blogger who didn't have her son circumcised say to the mommy blogger who did have her son circumcised?

I don't know, but it's the set-up for a really good joke!

The Rev. Peter A. Pettit, director for the Institute for Jewish-Christian Understanding at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa.,
said Gibson "bankrupted his moral account on my ledger with 'The Passion,' and I now relegate him to the piles of trash film producers whom I simply and effortlessly ignore." --Huffington

Yes, Reverend, which is why you're talking about him.

Bloody Hell

2011-10-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

I think we should excise all those passages from The Divine Comedy in which Dante violently condemns various bishops and clergy by name who were living and/or dead during his lifetime, because people are converted by beauty and those who are newly looking into the Faith will read such vitriolic ugliness and decide that they want nothing to do with the Catholic Church. After we excise those passages, we should then put Michael Voris in some kind of penitentiary - maybe headed by authors from the Patheos Club.

2011-10-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

Medium: Pencils 2B and H

Garden Sprawl Friday

2011-10-07T12:40:00.000-07:00

Appaloosa beans (dry beans). Bought one small pack from a seed company at a Vancouver seed sale. Will plant these ones that were shelled next year. It's about half of the harvest. The others weren't dried enough yet, so left them on the pants for now. Should probably pull up the plants. The outsides of the shells look terrible, but they're perfectly clean on the insides.

They filled up that bowl when they were all shelled.

They're on the oven trays for convenience, not because I put them in the oven. Obviously they dry faster when they're spread out and not on top of each other.

Next maybe I'll show chickpeas.

Art

2011-10-07T00:55:00.000-07:00

Fr. Longenecker from Standing on my Head touches on some aspects of art in this poem, which I liked:

A Secret Language
By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

We wrestle with the mystery of words,
hammering from the vast inchoate
universe, the pointed spears and sharp swords
with which we marshal the inarticulate
chaos of the soul. With precision
we discuss, dissect and delineate;
then define and decide. Each decision
is set in stone—not open to debate.

But beneath the dogma something rebels.
We sense lost treasure buried in a field,
or secret meanings glimmering like jewels
in the dark caverns of the soul. They yield
their bright reward only to those who mine
with the pick and spade of symbol and sign.
In this underground struggle we soon learn:
only the work and liturgy of art
can unlock the secret language of the heart.

2011-10-05T22:54:00.000-07:00

Medium: Micron pens on bristol board

Section 13

2011-10-05T21:02:00.000-07:00

Whiny Lawyerville

Lawyers of Fortune

Shakedown artists

Hucksters

Professional Complaining Class

Highly paid grievance-mongers

Complaining Left

Self-serving lawyers and ethnocrats

Wild Bill

2011-10-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

I once stayed overnight with a friend of mine at the house of a man who is the best friend of Whatcott. His wife made us a lovely spaghetti dinner and we talked into the night. I could not imagine a more polar opposite - in terms of approach to controversial subjects - of Whatcott than this man at whose house we stayed. At one time he lived in a place that runs as a crisis pregnancy centre beside an abortion clinic, and he spent his days approaching women (broaching the dreaded "bubble zone") who were on their way in. He used no signage; he just talked with them. In the front office of this pregnancy centre the walls are plastered with photos of mothers holding their children - mothers who were on their way into the abortion clinic, when this man approached them.

This man and Whatcott are best friends. Whatcott is the kind of pro-lifer whose antics make the other pro-lifers pack up and go home. The point being, if such apparent opposites can abide each other in friendship (Whatcott has even been banned from the Free Dominion website), what is the problem of people whose main contact with Whatcott would be printed material on paper - or digital words? I do not mean what is their problem generally; I mean what is going on that they want the government to silence and punish him?

You have no right to not be offended. You have a right to debate with somebody how what they say offends you. You have a right to utilize the power of the public square to try and shun somebody, without slander.

There's a lot of things that offend me: tailgaters, tabloids, New Atheists, SpongeBob SquarePants, people who throw trash out their vehicle, well-dressed and well-nourished young males posing as beggars and asking for money...but I don't go running and whining to the government or any other legal body looking to censor others.

But you see, that's part of the homosexual agenda.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

2011-10-04T00:27:00.000-07:00

"Who has not written about Raphael and his Sistine Madonna? The idea of man, who had attained at last his own personality in flesh and blood, who had discovered the world and God in himself and around him after centuries of worshipping the medieval Lord, on whom his gaze had been fixed so steadily as to sap his moral strength -- all of this is said to have found its perfect, coherent and ultimate embodiment in that canvas by the genius of Urbino. In a way, perhaps, it has. For the Virgin Mary, in the artist's representation is an ordinary citizen, whose psychological state as reflected in the canvas has its foundation in real life: she is fearful of the fate of her son, given for people in sacrifice. Even though it is in the name of their salvation, he himself is being surrendered in the fight against the temptation to defend him from them.

All of this is indeed vividly written into the picture -- from my point of view, too vividly, for the artist's thought is there for the reading: all too unambiguous and well-defined. One is irritated by the painter's sickly allegorical tendentiousness hanging over the form and overshadowing all the purely painterly qualities of the picture. The artist has concentrated his will on clarity of thought, on the intellectual concept of his work, and paid the price: the painting is flabby and insipid."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

2011-10-03T19:27:00.001-07:00

Medium: 2B Pencil and maybe another

Max Monday

2011-10-03T00:19:00.000-07:00

View of Genoa - Max Beckmann

NachtGarten - Max Beckmann

2011-10-02T20:41:00.001-07:00

Priests in the Pulpit

2011-10-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

What's the grand global total of times in the last 43 years that a priest said in the homily, without preceding his words with any qualifier, something to the effect of: "The use of artificial contraception is a mortal sin. Mortal sin is an offense of grave matter committed with full knowledge and consent, and if a soul dies in it, that soul goes directly to hell after going to God." And then, of course, speaking of God's mercy and the creation of every soul for Heaven.

What, maybe a thousand? Maybe that's being generous?

You have to think, Padre, something like ninety whatever percent of the parish's couples are contracepting, and you spend your priesthood's homilies on the most profound articulations, and then you die - and oh, I didn't mention anything about artificial contraception being a mortal sin, not once; whoops.

Maybe you think it will be taken as stating the obvious in order to be controversial, or something. But the real reason is that you want your parishioners to like you.

And yeah, there's a ton of hypocritical hand-wringers on the web who would read the above words that run, "...and if a soul dies in it, that soul goes directly to hell after going to God." and say, "But that's not for us to decide! Who knows if a soul that practiced artificial contraception went to hell or not; we're not to be that soul's judge and blah blah blah..."

Yes, pantheist, yes; and that means that Pastors shouldn't pastor their flocks. Sin is not sin just because it makes a person miserable.

2011-10-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

Word & Question

2011-09-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

Leave all gardens unguarded, all woods yielding,
but put a circuit round the gutted mall:
a last surveyor, turning, in the night,
like one to watch a ship that's done with sail days,
now yarded in the weedy dark - hulled, unpraised,
waiting to be water-sealed, out of star-sight.

One witness, pert, this official vacancy
beside the zoning fence, make midnight strides,
that none may have the fun of breaking panes,
and wrest from demolitioners their first dig-in,
ruining what projected contract ruin
stands, as stood for years, now its fallow claim:

Beams to be bitten, walls to give way
to further sight; the roof no more a roof.
Rain, birds, air and light, making of the refuse-
the sudden letting of the elements,
water down the sliced front in many singing threads-
a song of a momentary end to use.

Whatever palpitates is for plough's harrowing.
Even hectic creatures as we, draw the stars
together of infinity, size them to suit
the rotting pages of an earthbound book.
How much more our pulsing lots, for plough, who look
in at zones, up at slate, map out routes;

our lots brought low: all world's a homeless sea.
Vast messengers above our heads wage war,
we trust through breakage, though not seeing far.
Cling to waking anguish, relinquish bed's drowse,
for the home of your heart is a falling house:
turn out - leap from the grave in your own heart.

Word: Turning

Question: What is the one thing needful? (At least I think that was the question.)

Was it love at first sight?

Word and Question

Alternate words for lines: Hoisted for yarded, and 'Have him witness' for 'One witness, pert'.