I've just made the most brilliant variation on tabuleh the world has ever seen. Actually, it's probably already been made by someone, and has a name and everything. But it's mine now! Anyway:

bulgar wheat
lemon juice (LOTS of it, 1.5 lemons worth)
onion
olive oil
salt
pepper

Same as what I learned from my mother all those years ago. But instead of copious amounts of parsley, rather less fresh mint! Instead of tomato, red bell pepper! And yummy creamy sheep feta, just because. It is glorious, and makes me glad to be alive

1998 ~ R.E.M. in their entirety

When I was 15 I decided that the way to get to know people was to have something in common to talk about. Sadly, instead of seeking out my fellow fantasy geeks, I chose to attempt to normalize a bit (didn't really take, though). I got a subscription to Seventeen for a year, so that I could learn what normal teenagers were like. I started watching VH1, a lot of Storytellers and Behind the Music and Pop-Up Video. I learned that in the winter of 1996 the colors of choice were chocolately brown and icy blue, though of course I didn't do anything with that knowledge except wonder why I've remembered it for so many years. I learned a ridiculous amount of trivia about 80s musicians. And in the fall of 1998 I watched a program called Greatest Videos of the 90s, or something along those lines, and I saw the video for Losing My Religion.

I'd heard of R.E.M. before, almost inevitably. My little sister, always more in step with the rest of the world, bought Monster just after it came out in 1994, just like everyone else did. Used record stores won't take that one, generally. I remember when she played it for the first time quite vividly, because I thought it was the most awful thing I'd ever heard. My poor wee delicate ears were accustomed to gentle Celtic sounds, and the classical music my Dad listened to. "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" sounded mostly like chainsaws. Angry, mean chainsaws.

In 1998 though, I'd been attempting to normalize for a good long while. I made good solid efforts to appreciate Michael Jackson and some momentary R&B lady named Deborah Cox. I'd made some solid headway on Sheryl Crow and Green Day, and I'd settled on The Wallflowers as my favorite. But watching the Losing My Religion for the first time was rather different. It was more like locking eyes with my soulmate across a crowded room than choosing a new favorite. I didn't understand how serious this relationship was going to be at the time, I just knew that I liked the medieval vibe of the video and that I had to know more.

I actually had quite a powerful hatred for The Wallflowers for years after that because I had this absurd but unshakable conviction that they'd tricked me somehow. That they'd pretended to be what R.E.M. really was. Imposters! Nasty, sneaky imposters. It's hard to remember now how powerfully I felt this back then, even though I knew how ridiculous it was then too. Or at least I figured it out eventually.

So that was the beginning of the great musical love affair of my life. Now I wish I'd written this earlier, so I could remember in what order I bought the 11 albums they'd released at that point. Out of Time was first, of course. I believe New Adventures in Hi-Fi was relatively early in the process, though I didn't work my way up to actually appreciating that level of abrasiveness for some time. That was one of my favorite things about R.E.M. I followed their music like a trail of delight from the most mildly pastoral, all the way up to the crunchiest songs on Monster. Let Me In was the last one that clicked, almost exactly two years later. Just a wash of noise with some anguished, distorted lyrics. And hit me so powerfully when I finally got it that I had to paint about it, and thereafter I've been capable of hearing music in the most abstract works. Toru Takemitsu, Messiaen, ect. Up became my favorite album at some point.

For the first year, until the fall of 1999 and the start of college, I listened to nothing but R.E.M. During that year I believed that "You Are the Everything" completely described me as a person, that having R.E.M. as my emotional support was better than having friends would have been, because I'd bought and paid for those songs, and they were always going to be there for me. For the next few years every bit of new music I sought out had an R.E.M. connection. Patti Smith, Radiohead, Grant Lee Buffalo. Sillier ones that didn't stick. Michael's matter of fact words about being an artist helped me get through my first year at art school. I think I'll never be able to see them live again because the first few time were so overwhelmingly magical that the inevitable onset of clear vision has proved to be entirely too disappointing. Also, of course, now that they've turned me into a lifelong music fan, I've gotten quite accustomed to my magical shows be in a little room with an audience of 200 people or so. But I will never experience any music again like I experienced R.E.M. from 1998-2000. My life is too rich now, and my interests too broad. I miss it and I don't miss it at the same time.

I have formed a notion of a project. There are certain albums, or songs, or artists, that are simply mine, and will always be mine. When I retreat a bit from finding the next great thing, these are the old friends I return to. For most of them there are even specific moments of realization, when they inserted themselves into my heart forever with an almost audible pop. So I'll try this in chronological order, as well as I can remember.

1995-6? ~ Heather Alexander's Wanderlust

The only music I truly loved before I heard this one was Celtic Twilight II, and I don't listen to it anymore because it seems very silly now. It has fallen off the roster, but it deserves a brief mention.

Wanderlust came to my attention, appropriately enough, through novels. When I was 13 or so my aunt sent me and my sister a huge box of all the fantasy and science fiction books she didn't want anymore. This box was actually a rather defining moment in my life. I lost for a time my early ambition to read everything and know everything, and just read and loved these few dozen books with all my heart, and then went out and bought all the rest of the books by the writers of the ones in the box. One of the major writers featured in that early rush of the joy of stories was Mercedes Lackey.

A few years after we received the books, my little sister found that there were actually recordings of many of the songs described therein. The primary musician involved was a lady named Heather Alexander, and my sister soon got interested enough to seek out her own original music, the first of which was Wanderlust. This wasn't one those vibrant moments I was talking about above, it was more of a gradual seeping in. I didn't really listen to any music intentionally at that point in my life. My dad listened to music almost constantly when he wasn't playing it on our piano, so it was always in the background, but never really loved. Except for Celtic Twilight II, but that was silly. I was beginning to attempt an appreciation of music around this time. I bought some Michael Jackson, some Deborah Cox, some Wallflowers. None of them really stuck, and I actually became rather angry at the Wallflowers, but that's a story for the next entry.

I'd always thought of Wanderlust as my sister's music, almost off limits for me (we weren't always the best at sharing). But some time after moving out for college, I realized I had to have my own copy. And it seems that as the years go by I just love it more and more, though I don't really enjoy any of her other music. I suppose besides its own fine qualities, it reminds me of what it was like being a teenager obsessed with swords and magic and dragons.

An interesting note: I was looking around for more information a couple years ago, thinking I would quite like to see her live someday, but there was such an air of finality about her website that I was under the impression that she'd mysteriously died. I was looking just now for more information to round out my story here, and it seems that she is now a he. So I'll be seeing him live someday, maybe. Probably not, though.

There are over time changes in the way humanity as a whole perceives the world. Most of these changes are no doubt too far back in time for our collective memory to ever reach, but there are some that are recent enough to be wondered about and examined. What, for example, to use two famous figures, was the shift between the times of the legend of King Arthur and Mussolini? They are not so different. The modern idea of “cult of personality” could be applied to either one, in the sense that they wished to be and were loved by their people because of who they were. They both claimed absolute authority, and while in power constantly fought wars for the expansion of their territories. Yet the way in which they have been remembered afterwards could not be more different. This shift in thinking, so extreme that of two similar men, one is remembered as a hero and savior and the other as evil, is perhaps the longest one still remembered, stretching as it does from beyond the edge of recorded history to just a few decades ago. And yet the key moment the began the shift, in all that great expanse of time, can still be picked out. The introduction of printing into Europe was the catalyst for the breaking down of the old vertical power structures, and the introduction of an entirely new way of thinking. This new way of thinking led to limitless new ideas, of which nationalism was the most prominent and the most powerful in shaping the modern world.


Up until the fifteenth century, the vast majority of the population obtained all their information from face to face conversation. Whether it was from their priest, their lord, or merely a friend, there was a structure in place, that of the giver of information and of the receiver. Verbal communication does not only lessen the number of people who can be reached at once, it also lessens the necessity of imagining the place from which the information had come and what it could lead to, because there is an actual person present who is speaking. That person dispensing information could do anything from answering problematic questions to taking complete control of and reponsibility for the actions of the people they speak to. The exchange of information in this manner implies all by itself a detailed hierarchy, for example feudalism, as there is one person speaking and others who have no choice but to listen (This is of course very different from the modern idea of a speech). Since only small groups of people could be reached by a single speaker, for basic physical reasons, i.e. the size of buildings that could be constructed and the lack of means other than buildings for amplification, a person who wished to communicate to large populations had to have a high place within the hierearchy. Through the complex chain of speakers and listeners, say from the pope or a king down through a peasant, only simple ideas could be reliably transmitted, and nearly all of those had the sole purpose of keeping the originator in power and comfort.


Print on the other hand enabled newly vast numbers of people to be reached by a single person’s thoughts, without the chain of command. And almost more important than the numbers were what kinds of people could be reached. Knowledge of individuals was no longer necessary for communication with them, nor was it necessary to be in the same or higher social class as the one whom one was instructing, as printed words have no stigma of inferiority at first glance in the same way a person can. Print can be both more illusory and more concrete than spoken word, existing in physical form and as a separate entity from the person who initiated it, but making more wild imaginings of community and purpose possible by its very lack of concrete, personal nature. Distance in any sense, be it social, geographic or temporal no longer had real bearing on the sharing of ideas. In fact, language itself became the only real barrier. Though surmountable by translation, it was this final barrier that constrained in the end the easy flow of ideas and hence the establishment of a proper community of ideas, or the idea of a community, or nation.


In this way, according to Anderson, print could hold together vast groups of people together in homogeneous empty time. In times past, when the aristocracy held power, they did so through the fact that they were a relatively small group, who could meet each other in person or at least know each other’s names and histories. As larger groups of people took control of their societies, that kind of familiarity was of course impossible. Though the bourgousie, and later lower classes, could conceive of themselves as a social class, a group with characteristics in common, they could not possibly have any concrete knowledge of the existance of more than a tiny percentage of their group. These much larger groups could create their imagined communities by the things they did have in common, which besides approximate positions in life, were the ways in which they obtained information, namely the newspapers. If their thoughts could have a common source, for example, a newspaper with a wide circulation, they belonged to a community of ideas. In this way a community of shared ideas was created, as opposed to a community of actual individuals, and as those ideas just so happened to be contained within the minds of thousands of people, then those people found themselves within an unfamilar and vast community for which there was no precident. In this new kind of community a very isolated member may have no actual knowledge of a single other member and yet still be part of the community simply by virtue of what occurs within his own head.


Thus the concept of a nation, with mainly intellectual but very real bonds between people, became possible. No particular individual was inextricably attached to the ideas that spread in the age of nationalism, and so once the ideas became abstract and grandiose enough, every one of the tens of thousands of citizens of a nation could own the idea of nationalism all at once, and make it their own. And it was no accident that nationalism became the most powerful idea in the world of powerful ideologies established by the introduction of printing. Nationalism was the one idea that essentially created the reality of a world literally governed by ideas. The idea of nationalism became more powerful than any monarch, as each of these in turn bowed to its demands to, for example, share a language with the nation they attempted to rule, which until recently had merely been those people who happened to be their subjects.


But though a shared language may have been the main ideological base of nationhood in the beginning, perhaps simply by virtue of the natural boundries the lack of such created, even the elites who shared the same language as many of their subjects generally had no use for nationalism. The true elites’ existance as the holders of a higher status, by whatever means, is still based, even today, on the fact that they are individuals. A good example of the dichotomy of these ideas can be found in The Congo of the late fifties. According to De Witte, Lumumba broke away from the elite of Congo between 1956 and 1958, and began to consider the masses a viable alternative. By taking the wider populace of his fellow Congolese seriously, he could rise above the small-minded elites who merely considered themselves to be elevated individuals by subsuming his own identity to his ideas. He became someone who could inspire incredible loyalty from his countrymen not because he was an individual with power, but because he allowed himself to become nothing more than the embodiment of incredibly powerful ideas.


In following this line of thought, De Witte’s explaination of Lumumba’s downfall becomes particularly resonant. “That Lumumba’s political memory remains linked to the exploits of an individual is due to the fact that, for the last few decades, there has been no Congolese movement capable of continuing his struggle and putting into practice the true importance of his convictions and political stance” (De Witte 174). The deposition of Lumumba was even more tragic, according to De Witte, because he was merely seen as an individual by those who would lessen his movement as a valid, modern, nation based one. They insisted on seeing him, and in disseminating the image of him, as only as a misguided individual instead of a true speaker for the imagined communtity of the Congolese people that was in the process of defining itself. As De Witte puts it, “surely the Western powers which led these operation did not ignite one of the biggest crises since the Second World War soley to get rid of an isolated and unique political leader.” (De Witte 174).


To combine the ideas of De Witte and Anderson, the imposition of outside forces into what was perhaps the most vulnurable stage of this development, when the imagined community of Congo was finally put forward as reality for the world to observe, was the true tragedy associated with the destruction of Lumumba’s government and his assasination.


The power of ideas has long since supplanted the power of individuals. The most powerful individuals in our society are supposedly the citizens, but only as a deindividualized group, and it is the idea of these people being citizens, with the power to, with their vote, approve or disapprove of the ideas that are being proposed to them, that our entire government is focused around. The idea of this sort of imagined community has, by now, even spread somewhat beyond the old borders of nations, making simple nationalism one of the cruder ideas which we are now governed by. The proof of this is the new concept of the international treaty which is based more on specific ideas, like the Kyoto treaty or the Geneva convention, which does not depend on specific nations’ specific relationships to each other, but rather on adherance to and the willingness to be governed by the same ideas. People may create ideas, but they will never again, individually, be given respect of same magnitude as the products of their minds. Thus while centuries ago King Arthur was glorified merely for being a great individual, in relatively modern times Mussolini was despised for daring to claim to be more powerful than ideas.



Bibliograhpy

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso. London, New York. 1991

De Witte, Ludo. The Assasination of Lumumba. Trans. Anne Wright and Renee Fenby. Verso. London, New York. 2001.

I was reading my own journal. Which is why I write this sort of stuff, basically, because I have a supremely non-functional memory, which means I forget who I was a year ago, a month ago, maybe even a day ago. I barely even remember writing most of these things, but they're written by someone very, very similar to me, so they move and impress me more than one might admit if one's aim were to achieve a sociable level of humility. But they were essentially written by someone else! So I'm not bragging about myself now, I'm speaking fondly of the charming adorable person I used to be. Or something ridiculous like that. Anyway, the only point I meant to make is that I will be posting here more, because it's more satisfying by leaps and bounds to read paragraphs than facebook updates.

I haven't bought this stuff in years, but it was time. I had a craving for the ancient blend of mayonnaise and canned tuna. And I made something magnificent out of it. I can't give a proper recipe, because I didn't measure, but the key points are tons of parsley (and I should have had more), three cloves of garlic, WALNUTS!, hot sauce, a bit of salt and pepper. Very light and filling and delectable. Perhaps about a tablespoon of onion would have made it entirely perfect. I shall now proceed to stink happily of garlic and live forever.

I found this essay the other day, and I like it quite a bit. It's about one facet of the revolution that I do feel that we're living through, because isn't the internet at least as powerful change in the way information is circulated as the printing press? And the world is changing so fast in so many other ways too. But maybe this has happened before, maybe this isn't the final acceleration toward the end of history, though it's hard to imagine a slowdown at this point. Anyway, it's always nice to find the work of someone more articulate than me who I happen to agree with:

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

In a way no leader of this country ever has been, or probably ever will be again. Something about the way he thinks, and of course speaks, can move me and inspire me in a way that is utterly unfamiliar. It's a little alarming, actually. It feels much safer to be entirely wary of the government, entirely disdainful of politicians. But I can't be this time. It's almost like he's forcing me to believe in him against my will. Not that I ever thought he was a bad guy, I just thought he was too inexperienced at first, like everyone else did. But then I read a speech, I have no idea which one, and it moved me to tears. And I was freakishly inspired, and I decided that this guy needed to be our next president. That he could be the greatest president of my lifetime. And so I donated, and looked into volunteering, and I guess he had the same effect on enough other people that, well, here he is. But I'm a sensible person who maintains my general sense of optimism and hope through a rigorous regimen of low expectations, so by this morning I was back to a place where I was hoping for some competence, and that was about it. And then I went and read some portions of his inaugural address, and here I am back in the place I was when I thought he might be the best president I'd ever see, if we could only get him elected. And here he's elected now, and I'm freakishly inspired again. And it might be that the biggest problem I'll have for the next four years is maintaining my skepticism, not my hope. And it's a little scary.

My new notion of the existence of these eternal concepts is that "art" is the declaration (to oneself and others) of one's existence as a unique entity, and "craft" is the means by which you make "art", which is merely an idea, come to be. Or rather less than what we normally think of as an idea, because the words or images required to form a clear mental construct would be part of the craft aspect. The first step in the process of transforming a thing so elusive we can't quite fix our minds on it into an actual something. A step which it's more efficient to not really be aware of. An idea for how to go about creating is plenty to occupy one's time. And thinking about the other is really quite impossible anyway. Better to just make stuff and not even think about this. Except that I think it might be useful, in the eternal quest to make art, as opposed to just craft, to think about what it is I most want to make in any given moment. Not what would be clever, or beautiful, or interesting to other people, or new, or unique, or (though I don't tend towards this) shocking. And I shouldn't be trying to avoid being shocking, either. The only way to access my capacity for art, to make something truly of me, is to let all those other considerations take care of themselves, and trust in my inspiration. This is so redolant of common sense. Perhaps not even worth writing down. But maybe the overthinking brought on by art school makes it necessary.

And I do want to say that craft is awesome, and I love making it myself. It's just different. And not by category. A table exquisitely carved is art; a hack novel...oh, but there I go making value judgements the distinction. It was so clear in my head, before I tried to set it down.

I'll retry this later, with more time to percolate.

I got this Oscar Wilde Collection thing from the library, and it was mostly kind of standard British TV stuff. But the last one was absolutely spectacular, and I might buy the whole collection if that's the only way to own it.

Helen Little, playing Lady Windermere was pretty much perfect throughout. In the beginning she was a somewhat brittle character, charming but shallow. And so painfully young. I loved her understated acting...the woman playing Gwedolen in "The Importance of Being Earnest" in the same collection almost ruined the whole thing for me. And she just inhabits her part so well, and I found myself caring about her character so much, that I couldn't bear to finish watching the play the first two nights I tried. I hate spoilers more than anyone I know, but in the end I had to make sure she'd be ok before I could finish watching. And she was more than ok, she became a far better person than she started out. It's something that I've never seen done as well, I think, a total break with innocence, with the character remaining remaining good throughout, and stronger afterwards.

But even, so she's not as interesting to me in the end as Stephanie Turner, playing Mrs. Erlynne. I suppose I knew this character would be ok, no matter what her circumstance. This was a more dramatic, darker, less innocent role, and I loved to watch her in both her light, flirty, Wildean mode and in her moments of revealing intensity, when she seemed to gain twenty years in a moment. Watching her switch back and forth was one of the amazing things I've seen an actor do. Her story, her character arc, feels incomplete to me in the best possible way. I hope she finds the courage someday to admit her secret. I might actually have to go and write a little sequel myself someday, I'm so weirdly involved in all these character's lives now.