lazy thursday

ahhhh...
funny how it takes a whole day off of complete sloth just to get around to being able to take the second day off and get something done. cleaned my bike and listened to all the stacked-up NPR podcasts I haven't listened to of late. which is wonderful because now I want to spend a lot of money on books and movies and music. those rags behind the bike? they started off perfectly white. good, quality downtime...



interesting stuff:

blogging, marriage, and the new electronic world

dreds + violin = awesome

brokeback...to the future

king kong: children and violence

in lucia's eyes (cassanova's lost, bitterness-inducing first love)

michael w. smith in a really interesting social justice film about faith and class?

russian vampire movie grosses more in two weeks than Lord of the Rings

and, finally, the two you should delve into:

mercy killing in new orleans

recently my medic and i sat down and watched the two great ambulance movie classics of all time: Mother, Jugs and Speed (with a young Bill Cosby) and, more importantly, Bringing Out the Dead (with an excellently chosen Nicolas Cage). (yes, Mr. McSteele, I finally watched it...freaky doesn't half describe it--scary was that nothing that happened really surprised me)

working nights on the street is a different experience--very different. there are no soft covers on sharp edges, no blurring and no buffering and no carefully constructed upbeat conclusions to anything. it's a revolving door of ugly, harsh realities that you cannot alter or make pretty enough for normal society, but you will experience again and again and again without any sense of closure until you find yourself laughing at a bad joke while doing CPR on some guy who fell over dead in front of his family, wondering if you'll get the call over quick enough to get lunch before the India Gate closes.

one of the most un-American things you have to do on the job is expressed, appropriately, by the borrowed French word "triage." it's when you step into a situation where you have to decide who you try to save and who you leave to die. then you make those decisions and there's absolutely no way you can even come close to knowing for sure whether you made the right decisions or not--it's not clear cut, there's no slow-motion replays, or clever omniscient narrators. just a lot of educated guesswork and three seconds to make a choice.

it's not American because it's neither victorious nor heroic--you admit defeat, and not just defeat, but defeat due to failed systems of infrastructure, supply, and support. the outcome has everything to do with institutional and situational factors that are insurmountable by individual actors, heroic or not.

on the seventh floor of New Orleans' Memorial Hospital, choices were made to inject critical patients with enough morphine to put them to sleep forever, in the face of dwindling supplies, rising heat and floodwaters, and the chaotic uncertainty and miscommunication surrounding possible evacuation. the doctors and nurses were in a triage situation--they made decisions based on the guesswork and information they had. it's something that makes perfect sense to me--but I do not know what it sounds like to people outside the emergency healthcare system.

watch Bringing Out the Dead: its slow descent into the absolute insanity of bureaucratically institutionalized emergency management is not pleasant--but it's accurate and ungarnished. and enlightening, in a nasty fashion. visit a few city nursing homes and take in the ever-present smells of human urine and decaying people. then you can talk about the ethics of mercy killing and assisted suicide.

dada

in that vein, the dada phenomenon has once more entered my consciousness. the "Christian" worldview tends to present upturned noses to dada art, at least in my experience. to put it briefly, without rant, dada is important. it began, during the bloodshed of World War I, as a response to the absolutely blood-chilling insanity of life in a world that was assumed to be advanced, logical and modern. it was a protest against the gruesome horror and lunacy of existence in the kind of world that could produce chemical and trench warfare, the mental reduction of people and their interrelations to the cold numbers of the mechanistic social sciences, and the inhumanely barbaric actions of "civilising" colonization.

there's definitely a place for dada today. people are waking to a terror about their existence--that our lives are embedded and ingrown with the ugly and the evil and the meaningless, our very society is dying under the weight of an illusory happiness. popping up from Fight Club to I [Heart] Huckabees is the idea that a true examination of our existence will be a horrifying nihilistic trip into cynically twisted ideals and empty significance.

i think that there is nothing more Christlike than the unveiling of emptiness, sickness and insanity of the society we live in and, to a large part, uphold and create with our actions. it's truth-telling to examine and reproduce the things we take for granted to be good in such a way that their vanity and depravity and insanity are plainly and inescapably obvious. to my limited understanding, that's what dada did in its time, and we are ripe for that self-examination, unpleasant and shocking as it may be, in times where it takes more and more effort to ignore or explain or drug away the absolute insanity of our lives.

go dada!

ps--podcasts aren't just for iPodders--you can download then to any computer and, with the appropriate media player, listen to them through your computer's speakers. NPR is an amazing treasure trove of fun things to listen to.

pps--for those of you in western new york--Nils the Norwegian paramedic introduced me to 970AM, where their overnight content is broadcasts by the good ol' British Broadcasting Corporation. if you're up late and want good international news and commentary--tune in!