strumming on the old banjo

Rising above the ranks of unabashed, unapologetic romancing of statues of Confederate military leaders, Damon Young shares his encounter with a surpassingly offensive monument that he’d managed to overlook his whole life, despite being in the same city. The bronze of US songwriter Stephen Collin Foster was cast and dedicated in 1900 in the city of Pittsburgh near the campuses of the Carnegie Institutes (not that the provenance is any excuse for the portrayal) and depicts Foster elevated over an African America ostensibly performing some of the minstrel tunes that either inspired Foster or rather that Foster just committed to sheet-music and took the credit for.  Standards of decency and propriety had advanced, at least one could be forgiven for thinking, that is until one reads an excerpt from a city newspaper article written one hundred and ten years after its dedication (which directed the author to the statue’s existence in the first place) that is couched in dated, racist terms.  You’ll do a double-take too.

beyond the long now

Acclaim for Kottke for directing our attention to the well-curated Wikipedia property that concerns itself with distant future scenarios for the known Cosmos as we presently understand it, beginning with events postulated to take place beyond ten thousand years from now.
As illustrated in this timeline, due to the gradual shift of the lunisolar calendar, in AD 20 874 Gregorian and Islamic calendars will share the same year number, just a few hundred years after Chernobyl becomes once again safely habitable for humans, and still five thousand years until the earliest possible receipt of the Arecibo message by an alien intelligence. Assuming the same limitations still apply, a reply would take another twenty-five thousand years—coinciding with the planned return and unsealing of an orbiting space time capsule to be launched in 2019. There’s a lot of fascinating facts to wade through and I’m sure everyone will find something resounding to stand in awe of. Off this scale by many orders of magnitude and of course a gradual and on-going occurrence, astronomers poignantly believe that by one hundred billion years in the future the Universe will have expanded to the point that no civilization would see starry night skies and look up to wonder about their neighbours.

jai guru deva om

Against the advice of his gurus and meditative-betters, philosopher and author Robert Wright not only took notes to be later adapted into a book during his silent retreats, he also shared his feelings of inadequacies and failing when it comes to practicing mindfulness.  
Why Buddhism is True does not privilege it above other religious traditions and articles of faith are not addressed but is rather true in the sense that its core teachings and methods of coping—suffering comes from misunderstanding and meditation leads to liberation—work on a physical and psychological level because they allow us to transcend the inscrutables of billions of generations of evolution. The great chain of being that has led to you and your condition is miraculous but also has brought the hitchhikers of history which may have conferred advantage (Fear is the mind-killer.) at one point when our lives were more precarious but are now nuisances and sources of unbidden bias and anxiety. Perhaps not to be edited away could we identify the offending gene, the willingness to be still and confront and embrace the distressing renders it less powerful. The take-away is—by the way—that there is no wrong way of being attentive (Do or do not. There is no try.) and that daily practice yields daily reward.

oppède-le-vieux

Having discovered and explored this enchanting place ourselves back in October 2013 but not knowing the full story behind how the town came to be abandoned and left to fall into disrepair only to see a brief resurgence, we really appreciated this travelogue by Messy Nessy Chic correspondent Luke Spenser on Oppède in Vaucluse, near the Côte d’Azur. From the Latin for town (oppidum) this place is actually comprise of two towns, a valley settlement (Oppède-les-Poulivets, “with the nice view”) and an old town, Oppède-le-Vieux, hewn into the ramparts of the Petit Luberon mastiff. As picturesque as the old town was, the local agricultural community grew less and less willing to make the arduous climb up and down the mountain to work the fields every day and eventually transplanted themselves to the valley permanently. Roofs of buildings above were removed so the former residents were no longer liable for property taxes. During World War II and Nazi occupation, members of the resistance formed a short-lived artist colony amid the rubble and ruin. One member of that community was writer and artist Consuelo de Saint Exupéry (née Suncín), who was the inspiring but rather tumultuous muse for the character of Rose in her husband’s work The Little Prince. The article brought back some nice memories and I think it is high time to return to that part of France.

algorithmic engagement

We’ve previously explored numerous times how fraught social media is with manipulative and inscrutable sets of instructions that determine what content one is presented—or confronted with—that has led to people bemoaning the changes in myriad ways. We ought not be so obsessed with what’s hot off the presses but missives can grow stale and many times pledges and opinion do not age well—and it’s a psychological distressing struggle that a billion denizens charge towards daily and mostly fail by the hour.  People rate what comes across as an asynchronous jumble from a nuisance when they’d just care to experience events chronologically without some strange dream sequences or unbidden flashbacks to something more sinister when something from weeks and months past is unearthed.
Considering the geopolitical climate of the present, however, it seems that the war for our attention is going far beyond the vaguely menacing to the patently terrorising insofar as the figurative war is being translated into very real ones in the name of optimising revenue and we lose on both fronts. Online engagement is perhaps its own apotheosis in reality, but sensationalism distorts our perception of threats and given that our experience across all demographics is necessarily either dogmatic and doctrinaire or impressionable because of the limits of what we can know and can take part in have suddenly been made rather unlimited and the propagandists were the first on the scene.