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Bought and watched Pasolini's Gospel according to St Matthew. It's like a silent film in the gestures and affect of the (amateur - mostly) actors. And the marvelous line: "Birds have their nests, Foxes their dens - but the son of man has no place..."

It's beautiful that a gay, agnostic, communist was able to make such great movie about this subject (to paraphrase Fr. Berrigan in a recent
interview).
In fact, it was his comparison of this movie with Scorcese's The Last Temptation... that made me get the film and watch it.
In the spirit of Kierkegaard's quote below:
"The thoughts of their heart are too puny to be sinful. For a worm it might conceivable be regarded a sin to harbor such thoughts as theirs, not for a man who is formed in the image of God."

We try to be daring and transgressive but there is a minor quality to certain attempts - Last Temptation; Decalogue (the Polish director (Kriesevski...(?)) ; the silly Dogma; and others.

I hate the notion of a lapsed Catholic. The ones especially with the stories of nuns that beat them. Who the fuck cares. Only George Carlin does that routine justice and that is because he does not hate himself nor where he comes from. But it's more than that - almost like we have lost the ability to even IMAGINE the divine. I hate to sound like a crypto-fascist like Pound or Eliot. ("Even the Christian beauty defects/ After Samothrace") ("Where the walls of Magnus Martyr still hold inexplicable splendor..."), etc...

Or in a tone of less reverence - Burroughs telling the hilarious story of the American millionaire going to the Yucatan to try and hire the Corn God to wipe out some troublesome people, ends with the line:

"Stupid vulgar American son-of-abitch - thought he could hire Death as a company cop."

To continue the previous thought. As a Catholic I see the seeming irrelevance of Catholocism. And here is where I trot out a bit of a red herring in the form of a misappropriation of an Adorno statement from his Lectures on Hegel. In answereing the famous question of Benedetto Croce: "What is living and what is dead in Hegel" he counters with a different question "What does the present mean in terms of Hegel?"

One line from Marx - "All critiques begin with the critique of religion". It is so because the religious impulse is a deep expression desire - not simply to improve in a material or positivistic sence - towards true community. What religious utopia and Marxist utopias share is this desire to cancel out the alienation not only of capitalist oppression but ultimately alienation itself. No us and them. No us and it (ie Nature). A polymorphously (perverse p'raps) plural subjectivity.

In a sence the goal of religion should be to cancel even itself out. The desire to truly see god implies entire obliteration of oneself - for anyone in a JudeoChristian context to be sure but also in the Upanishads (when Krishna (the charioteer) reveals himself to Arjuna); the Buddhist notions of killing the Buddha; Blake; and I'm sure plentyof others I cant think of at the moment.

Pasolini's crucifixion scene - where the walls crumble and the structures which are barely different than the hillsides they are on are reincorporated into the dust they came out of - made me think of how it the RC Church should crumble to dust to save itself. It will take too long for women to become priests, gay marriages, real answers to over-population and othe rproblems of scale. The little segements of K.'s Decalogue are quaint in that thay remind me of those little moral conundrums that were posed to us by the Benedictine's in Catholic Ethics class freshman year... Little scenarios involving burning buildings, babies and firemen who have to choose between self destruction or the death of the baby...etc. When they should have been posing questions about owning stocks in multinational corps...

"The son of man has no place..."

Watching pasolini's austere Christ deliver that line I realized that it perhaps had the meaning of Adorno's line "What does the present mean in terms of Christ?"
Christ is truly a homeless wanderer passing through own towns and cities and finding no place to lay his/her head. Not the sentimental homeless of John Steinbeck nor the Village Voicebut a Blakean presence whose form we are loosing the ability to even imagine.
posted by Michael Bubb at 10:43 AM

What do you think about the events in Cincinnati? Similar things in Las Vegas, though not national news. Are black neighborhoods the way they are because of white people?
posted by Thomas Schmidt at 2:42 PM

from Kierkegaard's Diapsalmata:

Let others complain that the times are wicked. I complain that they are paltry; for they are without passion. The thoughts of men are thin and frail like lace, and they themselves are as feeble as girl lace-makers. The thoughts of their heart are too puny to be sinful. For a worm it might conceivable be regarded a sin to harbor such thoughts as theirs, not for a man who is formed in the image of God.
Their lusts are staid and sluggish, their passions sleepy; they do their duty, theses sordid minds but permit themselves...to trim the coins just the least little bit, thinking that if our Lord keep tab of them ever so carefully one might yet safely venture to fool him a bit. Fye upon them!
It is therefore my soul ever returns to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that one is dealing with men and women; there one hates and loves, there one murders one's enemy and curses his issue through all generations. There one sins.
posted by Michael Bubb at 6:04 AM

MLK's "Been to the Mountaintop" speech - an excerpt.
(Th) indicates Thunderclaps that punctuate the speech:

…Bull Connor next would say turn the fire hoses on
but as I said the other evening to you, Bull Connor didn’t know history
He knew a kind of Physics that some how didn’t relate to the trans-Physics (Th) that we knew about
And that was the fact that there is a certain kind of fire that no water could put out (Th)
And we went before the fire hoses
We had known water if we were Baptists or some other denomination we had been immersed
If we were Methodists and some others we had been sprinkled

But we knew water – that couldn’t stop us
And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them
And we would go on before the water hoses and we would look at it
And we would just go on singing ‘Over my head I see freedom in there’


And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in and old Bull would say ‘take ‘em off’ – and they did and we would just go on in the paddy wagons singing ‘We Shall Overcome’
And every now and then we would get in jail and we would see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, being moved by our words and our songs – and there was a power there that Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer and we won our struggle in Birmingham
posted by Michael Bubb at 7:26 PM

I like it when things kind of fall apart, like when I was with a group of people I'd just met and we were waiting at the airport to go to Japan and there was a lengthy public announcement in Japanese during which I said, "I'm excited!" When the announcement ended one guy asked this woman who had studied Japanese, "what did he say?" and she replied, "he said he's excited." "No, I mean..." began the guy, but I was already laughing loudly at the idea that the invisible, official-sounding Japanese microphone man was announcing that he was excited.
posted by Thomas Schmidt at 9:13 PM

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"
Thelonius Monk
posted by Michael Bubb at 8:43 PM

"Philosophy is transedental homelessness; it is the urge to be at home everywhere" G Lukacs
posted by Michael Bubb at 11:48 PM