March 31, 2005
let's ride
I just ran across the website of these two high school guys — brothers two years apart — who have been making music. I picked up their first album this summer when I was working with Josh at NUTC, but this website is a whole new level of their musical seriousness. I’m usually not a fan of this “lap-pop” stuff, so maybe it’s just because I know them (and the UMass library) that I dig this, but this one track had some lines that spoke to me. And the accompanying music video, despite tapping into that Napoleon Dynamite and Rushmore hipster image that I usually scorn, gave me the warm fuzzies.
Posted by nick at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 30, 2005
I'm big in Japan
I just finished Haruki Murakami’s latest, Kafka at the Shore. I had always found it easy to disappear into one of his books and not emerge for a week or so. If you have never sampled Murakami’s narrative nectar, he has one protagonist whose personality manifests in a new character in each novel. You know this guy, he is the soul-searching, sex-hungry, sensitive and self-aware male (sound familiar yet?) and he is usually accompanied by between one and three mysterious and sensual women with supple ear-lobes. The books read on the one hand like a good Clancy page-turner, complete with murders and lots of sex but then, oh yeah, there’s also nuanced Japanese folk-religious and philosophical undertones.
Specifically, I like the humbleness of the characters, the way that they are in gentle awe of the very tangible spiritual forces that course through their lives. My little book on Shinto has a few little nuggets that give a good description of this folk-religion:
Kami are the object of worship in Shinto…the term is an honorific of noble, sacred spirits, which implies a sense of adoration for their virtues and nobility. All beings have such spirits so in a sense all beings can be called kami or be regarded as potential kami…
Among the objects or phenomena designated from ancient times as kami are the qualities of growth, fertility, and production; natural phenomena, such as wind and thunder; natural objects, such as the sun, mountains, rivers, trees and rocks; some animals; and ancestral spirits.
The direct worship and appreciation of the natural world stands out to me from these descriptions. I think of the thunder and rain in Rashomon, the deep dark woods in My Neighbor Totoro. Shinto is more than a religion, it’s a several-millenia-old way of life, a set of values. But when I think of the original values of American life that relate to the environment it’s a frontier ethic, that of conquering the wilderness. U.S. culture is a culture of selfishness, right? And the effect of that selfishness on me is these phrases: “I want good food to eat” or “I need to live in the country and work in the city or escape out to the wilderness in my car” or even “I want to reproduce”. I am guilty of all three of these sentiments. Even though I’m far from religious, could that selfish sensibility in my culture and (dominant societal) religion be forcing me to think this way. God (is He out there?) cares about me and my sins, he will listen to me and forgive me. I don’t like the external validation process implicit here, the judgement of my actions by someone else’s code of morality. But three core values in Shinto took root as I read Murakami: reverence (for nature), equity (there’s no central diety) and tolerance (“to those who worship kami, ‘Shinto’ is a collective noun denoting all faiths.”)
So I think my point is that cultures form around religions. Japan’s population is getting older, a sure sign of a population that doesn’t procreate enough. Or isn’t selfish enough to want to. It’s us selfish ones we need to worry about, although as Taus points out in his recent post, educated people�(is this some measure of social awareness? if so, i’m a little wary.) aren’t reproducing fast enough to replace themselves, just like the Japanese.
Posted by nick at 09:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 26, 2005
springtime rituals
Last weekend my housemates Joe and Margot accompanied Johanna and I out to Leverett, MA, where my parents have lived for 20+ years and where I grew up. It’s the height of maple sugaring season and my family has for years had their own pint-sized sugaring operation. We tap about six or seven sugar maples around the perimeter of our property, hanging usually one bucket per tree (but on the bigger-trunks you’ll see two and, in one case, three). There’s always this narrow window of a few weeks in March and April when the nights are in the 20s and the days are in the high 40s and 50s. During these few weeks, the sap is running and you know you’re in the heart of sugaring season. A tree whose sap is “running fast” will play an adagio tempo (one or two drops per second) with it’s metal pail.
Joe (who, when I first met him quaffed a cup or more of a pina-colada mix and curry powder (to “impress me” he later says)) went straight for the sap, pouring himself a small glass of the sugar water, amazed by it’s similarity to normal water in appearance and tickled by the gentle sugar flavor. We stood in the shade of the three-bucket tree and imagined the water from under our feet being sucked into the little tendrils of roots and being filtered through maple fibers and delivered to us, through the metallic spout. Consensus: the tree likely is a better filter than our PurWater contraption at home.
This morning, I enjoyed some of the syrup we boiled down in my oatmeal. The final nectar of this labor-intensive distillation/boiling down process is usually best when you’ve achieved a 40:1 ration between initial sap and final syrup product.
Posted by nick at 12:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 25, 2005
Test two
there is madness here at anize.org. I think nick made the computer mad…
—dfc
Posted by dfc at 07:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
this is a test
This is a test. Nick is not responsible for this content…
Posted by dfc at 07:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2005
Decision point
Looks like we (Johanna and I) are Baltimore-bound. I haven’t sent the papers into Johns Hopkins yet, but they accepted me to their Biostatistics program for a PhD. Johanna’s looking into an environmental/community nursing program down there and is being individually wined and dined early in April by the director of the program. She’s not sold on this particular program yet, so she’s also looking into some opportunities that would keep her on the organizing side of things before bolting for the softer life in academia. Many things are still out of focus about the move such as when will it happen, which Baltimore neighborhoods are hip, how much vacation do we siphon off in the limbo period, etc…
Posted by nick at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 20, 2005
BP
Last week I biked over to the local batting cage to take some BP for the first time in nine years. After half an hour of swinging a wooden bat at the pock-marked plastic yellow balls thrown at me by a pitching machine (that used to be Mo Vaughn’s, I’m told by the owner), my hands were in tatters. Do blisters really build character? If not, then at least the evidence of hard work was enough to get me on a legit hardball team this spring. Cheapest seat for good ball in town isn’t at Fenway, folks.
Posted by nick at 05:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack