Alberto's place

Historical Voyeurism

2011-11-25T01:22:00.001-05:00

One of the first books that made a deep impression on me – one that I discovered by myself, not one that was bought for me or read to me – was Life in Camelot: The Kennedy Years. I was in elementary school and found it in the school library in Taiwan. I remember being attracted to it because it looked different from all of the other books on the shelves. First was its size: it was large-format and fit awkwardly in the shelf, jutting out into the aisles, waiting to be opened. Then there were the beautiful photographs – the black-and-white glamour shots of Jackie, the contemplative shots of Jack, the horrifying pictures of the lifeless body in the surgery room. I was mesmerized by the book, and I remember that I would try to go the library after a couple of months to flip through the book. I think it was around the same time that I watched Oliver Stone’s movie JFK for the first time.[1] I don’t think I completely understood the movie at the time – I didn’t pick up on the nuances of the various conspiracy theories but the movie impressed on me that there was something dark and sinister that lay beneath the glamorous surface of Camelot.[2]

Why was I, living in Taiwan in the early 1990s, with very little cultural connection to anything the Kennedies represented, so fascinated by their stories? I think JFK’s world was alluring precisely because of its foreignness. Not only did it represent a time and place that was completely outside of my individual experience, but to a child on the cusp of adolescence, it was the world of “grown-ups;” a different world that was filled with sex, glamour, mystery, danger, and secrets existed. The JFK books provided me with peek into a world still forbidden to me. Maybe I couldn’t or would never participate in that world, but at least I could study it.

I had forgotten about my obsession with JFK until the recent resurgence of articles and books commemorating the 48th anniversary of the assassination. Stephen King has just published an alternate history of the event, and Chris Matthews has been making the rounds with his new “interpretive” (read hagiographic) biography of JFK. Frank Rich writes a really smart piece comparing the general hatred towards JFK with the current vitriol towards Obama, and the continuing menace of violence on the American political landscape. Colin Kidd in the LRB wonders why the JFK assassination attempt continue to fascinate and engender multiple conspiracy theories.

Errol Morris’s beautiful “Op-Doc” in the NYTimes on “The Umbrella Man” posits some compelling answers about why so many people continue to be bewitched by the JFK assassinations. Morris uses the case of “The Umbrella Man” (why was somebody standing under an open umbrella on a beautiful, sunny day in Dallas, almost exactly at the spot where JFK was shot?) to point to the infinite possibilities for historical interpretation and the fragility of supposed historical truths. Other than the highly dramatic assassination itself – a young, charming President killed in his prime with his wife by his side – the subsequent bizarre turn of events, such as Oswald’s silencing and the debates surrounding the Warren Commission Report [3], laid bare the fact that writing and interpreting history is problematic, contentious, and often flimsy at best. As Stephen King quotes Norman Mailer in an interview with Errol Morris, “people find it very difficult to believe it could have happened the way it happened because it suggests an absurd universe.” And I do think that’s largely why there are so many conspiracy theorists – it’s a way to continue to generate meaning in the face of a world full of events that make no sense to us.

What shocked me was how quickly these reviews and films drew me back to the curiosity and emotions of my childhood. After watching the Errol Morris short, I started Youtubing clips of the Zapruder film, and began reading through some of conspiracy theory forums. Almost two hours later, I was still clicking on links to different things. Reflecting on it, I realized how deeply the event had unconsciously shaped my intellectual interests throughout the years. My unending fascination with the 1960s, ideological fanaticism, and historical methodology, in a way, all have roots in my childhood interest in the JFK assassination. And sometimes I wonder how much I’ve changed exactly – is what I’m doing now just another way of performing what Colin Kidd calls a “historically informed voyeurism of the present?”

Thinking about it now, how was I allowed to watch this R-rated movie at 10? ↩
For awhile, I read a bunch of Mob-related books, because I was convinced of the connection between Cuba, the Mob, and the Kennedy assassination, detailed in books such as Mob Lawyer. ↩
See, for example, discussion of the “Magic Bullet.” ↩

Occupy

2011-11-17T02:58:00.001-05:00

I came across this poster from 1979 in the UC Jazz Ensemble library. Other than noticing how cheap jazz tickets were at the time, I was shocked that they could feature two big bands and five combos at their semester concerts. As the UC Jazz Ensembles stand now, our showcases are half the size -- there's one big band and three advanced combos (there are more than three combos now, but by that logic there were probably a lot more combos in the 70s too). It's indicative about the decline in the popularity of jazz at Berkeley, and in America at large. I commented on this to the director of the jazz ensembles, Ted Moore, and he responded, "wow, that must have cost a lot of money." He then proceeded to tell me how the UC budget cuts had gotten rid of all of the salaries of all the jazz faculty, and also required him to to go on a part-time salary. Thanks to some timely donations, the program was able to retain its faculty for this year. But the funding is by no means permanent.

And this is exactly what the UC protests are about. The UC Jazz program dates back to the 1960s and has a long-history of allowing non-professional, non-music majors play and perform together. These budget cuts threaten the survival of this institution, which promotes a form of music that embodies all of the best of American ideals -- democracy, freedom, and liberation. And of course it's not just UC jazz that is threatened, but education across the board. Already this year I feel like the course offerings from the history department are fewer than they were in years past.

November 15th was UC Berkeley's "Day of Action." It was one of those picturesque Californian days that makes one's heart sing. The protests struck a perfect tone -- I've never been more proud to be a Berkeley student. The whole vibe on Sproul plaza was a wonderful mix of carnivalesque and serious. There were teach-ins by famous UC faculty like George Lakoff on the meaning of the word Occupy, impromptu performances, and cooperative public art installations.

For a brief moment, as news of a shooting at the Haas Business School leaked out in the early afternoon, it seemed like the thin, fragile line between peaceful protest and the outbreak of violence seemed to have been breached. In spite of the confusion slight panic, the events on Sproul continued.

The day ended with Robert Reich delivering the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture in the evening. The mood was electric -- even though Sproul was packed with people, the crowd silenced to a hush to listen to Reich's words. He invoked the memory of Mario Savio. To end his speech, he talked about how he was bullied as a child, but a friend of his named Micky would protect him. Micky was Michael Schwerner, who was murdered by the Ku Klax Klan during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Something changed in Reich after learning of the news. He learned that he needed to stand up to bullies, just as Micky had. Reich ended, "The days of apathy are over, folks."

When Institutions Fall

2011-11-11T03:36:00.001-05:00

The year I graduated from college, 2005, Lehman Brothers was the hottest investment bank on the block. Months before graduation, several of my friends had nervously applied for jobs in the banking sector, and Lehman was the consensus choice among all of the job applicants as the ideal place to work. They explained that Lehman was doing the best job of mixing traditional trading practices with “innovative” new tools. Two of my closest were ecstatic when they learned that they had gotten jobs at Lehman. I was truly happy for them. Little did I know that the “innovative” tools that they were talking about were the CDOs and other mortgage backed securities that helped to get us into the financial mess we’re in now.

The Penn State football team entered into my radar screen several months after I graduated. Homesick in Germany, I tried to follow as many American sports as I could, and I started to read up more about college sports. One of the major story-lines that year was the return of Joe Paterno and Penn State into the elite class of college football teams. After two straight losing seasons, which prompted a flurry of articles in the media asking“is Joe Paterno going to retire” and calls for his resignation, PSU finished the 2005–2006 season with an 11–1 record and ended up being ranked third in the nation.[1] The whole media began fawning over him, lauding the “old-school” virtues of Joe Paterno, who graduated players and was running a “clean” program.[2] Racist assumptions underpinned all of the media coverage – Paterno’s winning season came a year after the resolution of the protracted battle between Maurice Clarett and the NFL, the poster child for entitled, narcissistic football players who left school early in pursuit of fame and fortune.[3] The up-standing, “student-athlete” program that Paterno was running was often mentioned as a counterpoint to attacks on college football.

But there were always signs that problems lurked beneath. There was the casual and dismissive attitude towards sexual harassment charges against an FSU football player. There were the mildly racist comments that we just chalked up to age. Similarly, at Lehman, there had been signs of the impending crash long before it actually did in 2008.

And since then, the lies have been exposed. The institutions have been shown to be morally and economically bankrupt. What’s the most tragic about both of these cases is that they preyed on the hopes and promises of the youth. A football coach uses his prestige and power in the community to draw in troubled youth and rapes them. Lehman drew in the best and brightest of our generation, ran them through the grinder, chewed them up and spit them out, asking them to commit fraudulent acts in the process. The betrayal runs deep. I saw this happen to one of my friends. He was burned out by the end of one year.

If Wikileaks, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party have taught us anything, we’re living in a moment of complete distrust of American institutions. Of course, this distrust of institutions – of governments, of political parties, of universities – is nothing new. Richard Hofstadter has written eloquently about the “paranoid style” of American politics. What does seem different, though, is that ever since Watergate, we now have much more effective tools and the ability to rapidly check and disseminate information to corraborate or debunk these paranoid fantasies. Sometimes these tools fail us, and sometimes they succeed.

What happens to institutions after the fall? We expect change to be instantaneous. Our technologies change at a rapid pace, why can’t institutions? But institutions are more often than not immovable; they are resistant to change. We forget that people’s lives, careers, upbringing, mindsets are tied up in these institutions. They’ve invested and sunk too many resources into the status quo for there to be real incentive for radical change. Moreover, there’s hubris. What galls us most about Wall Street is the complete lack of remorse that they have in the face of this economic crisis.

But we shouldn’t hold out hope for reform. One of the periods I’m most fascinated in is the 1920s. Immediately after the devastation of the First World War, the intellectual validity and legitimacy of Christianity was questioned. Faced with rising attacks from various critics, Christianity changed. It embraced new ideas and more diverse sets of peoples. It modified its theology and outlook. Change was slow, painful, contested, and protracted, but it happened, and certain strands of Christianity survived with a much stronger foundation for the future.

Is this moment that we’re living in enough of a crisis to force these institutions to change? We’ll have to wait and see. But for these institutions to change, it’s going to take a long, protracted, and contentious fight.

The national title game featured USC vs. Texas, which remains as the best college football game I have ever watched. USC would later have to vacate its season because of Reggie Bush, which would technically mean that PSU was no. 2 that season. ↩
With, of course, the obligatory immediate celebratory literature about the season. ↩
Maurice Clarett was the reason I started watching college football. He’s the same age as me. He captivated me – he was that rare athlete that combined speed, ferocity, skill, and attitude. He played offense and defense. And, like all compelling figures, had a dramatic rise, fall, and slow road towards redemption. Knowing what we do about Jim Tressel now,, shouldn’t we re-consider Clarett’s college troubles, to some degree? ↩

On the Taiwanese Elections 2012

2011-11-08T02:46:00.001-05:00

Paul Katz’s recent post on The China Beat is a pretty good rundown of some of the central issues surrounding the upcoming Taiwanese presidential election. He begins with what seems to be the quizzical element surrounding the election – by most measures, with Ma Ying-jeou at the helm since 2008, Taiwan has outperformed economic benchmarks during the worst global recession since the Great Depression, so why is Ma facing such a tough re-election campaign? Katz has a good round-up of the domestic economic problems that undercuts Ma’s campaign – rising inequality is one of the major problems that threatens the social fabric of Taiwanese society, which has for decades boasted of its “middle-class entrepreneurial spirit.” There are other structural problems – such as the infrastructural gap between Taipei and Taidong – that have plagued Taiwan ever since the 1950s that continue to go unnoticed by politicians in Taipei.

What Katz misses, though, is that a series of George Bush-esque gaffes have marred Ma Ying-jeou’s government and undermined his “charisma.” Ma’s Kanye West Moment (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”) came during a heated exchange with some aboriginal tribes who were protesting a government’s policy to relocate them after the devastating Typhoon Morakot in 2009 had eroded a large portion of the mountainside and endangered their homes. Ma meant to reassure the indigenous tribes of the generosity of governmental policy, but his response (“if you move to the cities, we will treat you like humans”) instead came across as incredibly arrogant and imperialistic, suffused with “civilizing” rhetoric that sounded straight out of Han Chinese pacification campaigns of the “primitives” during the Qing dynasty. Ma’s whole handling of the Morakot disaster relief was tin-eared, as he was caught attending several wedding banquet right after the typhoon had hit. The discontent towards Ma is thus not only economic, but one rooted in long existing critiques of the KMT. What has been most galling to Ma’s critics is the complete lack of self-reflection that the administration has held in various moments of controvery. Ma’s campaign in 2008 proclaimed him as the face of a “new and improved” KMT, but his presidency has only exposed how Ma is deeply entrenched within party ideology: he’s a party man through and through. Nowhere is this more clear in a campaign ad that pushes Confucian ideology throughout the larger Chinese region.

What Katz also ignores is the saavy and truly innovative campaign of Tsai Ying-wen. Tsai represents something new in DPP politics. Whereas Chen Shuibian drew upon nativist slogans and ideology of the 1970s and 80s, and tried to construct an image of himself as the “son of Taiwan,” Tsai’s campaign has focused on her cosmopolitanism. Tsai’s first major campaign ad shows her confidently submerged in the urban jungles of Berlin and London, fully integrated but also fully ready to take on the challenges of globalization. The older generation of DPP politicians were, at their worst, populist demagogues; Tsai has very carefully cultivated her image as a deliberate, thoughtful spokesperson. And this appeals deeply to a large swath of DPP and middle-of-the road voters who were swept up by the promise of Chen Shuibian’s initial victory in 2000, but who were then disillusioned by how quickly his administration was marred in scandal after scandal.

The wildcard in all this, to me, is not the entrance of James Soong into the race. But rather, it’s the implicit at times, overt at others, discourse surrounding gender and sexuality. Debates over gender and sexuality have been more prominent in this election than ever before. The critiques of Ma Ying-jeou and his “inappropriate” relationship with Jin Pucong always border on hints of homophobia. This latent homophobia went public when the provacateur Shih Mingde demanded that Tsai Ying-wen reveal her sexual orientation earlier in the year. The rise of these overt homophobic statements is no coincidence, as earlier in the year a debate arose over the teaching of homosexuality in elementary school textbooks. The fight over equal gender and sexual rights probably won’t become major debating points for both parties as the campaign gears up, but it lies in the background to all of the campaigning as the potential for Taiwanese to vote in their first female president increasingly becomes a reality. Ever since the mid-1990s, Taiwanese politics has always had–from an American political perspective– a strange relationship of progressive political legislation on social issues such as gay rights and abortion, but deeply entrenched culturally conservative perspectives on these issues.1 I think this election could be a watershed moment in seeing whether there’s a sea-change in the cultural landscape of Taiwan. As the stage director Wu Nianzhen said in an interview,

“if one day our commander in chief presides over the annual military parade in a skirt, I think Taiwan will have took one major step forward. If we, living in such a patriarchal society, can elect a female president, then that will be a major collective achievement.”

For example, despite incredibly progressive state health care policies towards HIV/AIDS, such as completely free care, including free HAART, for HIV-positive people, the incident of the accidental transplant of HIV-positive organs in May shows how deeply a culture of shame, fear, and silence continues to plague HIV-positive people in Taiwan. ↩

Ending the Hiatus

2011-11-07T02:09:00.001-05:00

Once again, I have let this blog slip into months of neglect. If I can discern any recurring patterns, I'll have a flurry of posts in the next couple of weeks and go dark again soon after that. But several things have converged in the past couple of weeks that has inspired me to dust off the blog again. Several friends have independently encouraged me to start blogging again. I stopped blogging because I felt a bit inundated with too much digital information. But awhile back there were a bunch of posts on the "death of the blog," which convinced me even more that blogs should and can play an important function. I remember the exhilaration of finding bloggers like Andrew Sullivan in the early days when blogs were gaining traction, and I still find myself enjoying the personal/professional bloggers, who are able to mix and match their personal and professional lives, like the blogs of Ezra Klein, Tenured Radical, Juan Cole, and the New Yorker Newsdesk. I stopped writing for awhile because I couldn't find a niche to blog about. But I've decided to embrace that inability to focus, and here returns an attempt at random ramblings on a bunch of disconnected topics.

In the meantime, enjoy a photo from Cambodia, in Angkor Wat.

Rhythm-A-Ning

2011-04-13T11:09:00.001-04:00

Three types of lessons have occupied the time when I’m not working on the dissertation – jazz guitar, Taiwanese, and tennis. They all challenge and engage different parts of my mind and body in different ways. But I’m realizing that I end up making the same types of mistakes in all three classes. The mistakes all invariably return to some form of rhythmic cough-up; in some way or another I either can’t feel or hear the beat when I’m playing the guitar, the timing of my backhand is off, or I rush the way a sentence or word should be read.

Oliver Sacks argues that our sense of rhythm is what makes us human; you can’t teach dogs and chimpanzees how to dance. But how do you teach a person how to feel certain senses of time? Is the “groove” teachable? How can non-native speakers of a language sound increasingly native? I’m realizing in order to get into the the right rhythmic groove, it requires an intense amount of practice and preparation. But staying in the groove ultimately comes down to a matter of trust – trusting in yourself, in your body, believing that you’ve practiced and prepared enough for the moment at hand. This belief isn’t even necessarily conscious. Moreover, self-consciousness is the enemy. Even the slightest amount of self-doubt will throw you off track and jolt you. And that self-doubt is immediately apparent; even a minuscule hesitation can mean the difference between hitting a good backhand or shanking it wide, between a focused and tight solo or an unconfident, rambling one, between an intelligible sentence and gibberish.

The Duke was right – “it ain’t mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing.”

Moving

2011-03-17T12:23:00.001-04:00

I've had trouble with my Blogger account ever since Google bought it --somewhere down the line I was denied administrator privileges, so even though I can post and update content, I can't change the actual template and the aesthetic look of the blog. So I've been tinkering with a Wordpress blog for a bit, and finally have settled on something that I like. I'll probably still cross-post stuff here, just for sentimental reasons (and also for the Buzz integration). But for seeing how the post "should" look, go here.

Desire, Technology, and Jesuits

2011-03-17T12:02:00.001-04:00

I met a young Polish Jesuit Brother the other day, who is learning Mandarin at the language institute where I am taking Taiwanese classes. He has an effervescent personality, and has learned an amazing amount of Chinese in a short period of time. He said that he was saving money to buy an iPod Touch. The Jesuits give him an allowance of about 3000 NTD (about 100 USD) a month, and he said that if he saved all that money for 3 months, he would be able to buy an iPod Touch. He started walking instead of taking the subway to class, in order to save money.

I've been listening to a bunch of technology podcasts lately. I like listening to them because I've inherited a love of gadgets and technology from my dad, and, for the most part, the podcasts consist of smart people talking about fun/nerdy topics, with informed, (mostly) sharp analysis.

But what makes me uncomfortable about tech podcasts, and the tech industry in general, is the never ending cycle of consumption and the creation of consumer desire. Pundits hype up a new product, leading to intense consumer demand, a new wave of consumption happens, repeat in the next quarter. Apple has really mastered this strategy in the past 10 years, and they're probably at the top of the creation of consumer demand and desire game. The underlying ideological assumption that justifies these never ending consumer cycles is that this type of cutthroat competition drives newer cycles of innovation, which leads to better and cheaper products, which leads to a rise in standards of living, and a rising GDP for everybody. Hooray.

I decided to give my old, first generation iPod Touch to the Polish Brother. It was a first generation iPod touch, and I had used it for a good three years, before recently getting an iPhone, so it was collecting dust on my desk. The Polish Brother was ecstatic when he received it. The next time I saw him, he had already downloaded the Chinese-English dictionary software, Pleco, and various other apps that he could use to read Polish books. He was clearly a savvy technology user who had done his research and knew how to use the device, right off the bat. It turns out he wanted an iPod Touch just so that he could use Pleco and not have to lug a huge dictionary around with him. The fact that it was three year-old, "outdated" technology didn't bother him one bit.

He excitedly told me, "Now I can give the money I've saved to somebody who needs it!"

That one line has stuck with me and provided me with so much inspiration -- much more so than the countless hours of technology punditry I've listened to in the past month.

Silence

2011-03-12T11:00:00.001-05:00

What I remember most from the last major earthquake I experienced was the silence immediately after the quake. It was a jarring juxtaposition -- one moment the earth was shaking and groaning, rattling and shaking the metal bars that propped up our windows, and suddenly nothing but silence. The silence soon transformed into disbelief, with minds processing and racing, trying to understand what had just happened.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performed in Taipei today, and they asked for a moment of silence for the dead and suffering before starting the performance. The opening horn blasts of Bruckner's 8th could not have sounded more like the beginning of a funeral dirge, its final drum rolls and trumpet sounds a cry to the heavens.

In Germany Again

2010-12-01T07:12:00.001-05:00

The Rhine in late August, with green and lush fields, grape vines still visible.

The Rhine now, on the first day of December, with a thin blanket of snow covering it.

James Wood on the Relation Between Music and Prose

2010-11-29T10:38:00.001-05:00

In his reflection about Keith Moon in the November 29th issue of the New Yorker (sorry, subscription required), James Wood articulates the relationship between music and prose perfectly:

On "Won't Get Fooled Again," the drumming is staggeringly vital, with Moon at once rhythmically tight and massively spontaneous. On both that song and "Behind Blue Eyes," you can hear him do something that was instinctive, probably, but which is hardly ever done in ordinary rock drumming: breaking for a fill, Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjabment.
For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body surrenders its awful self-consciousness.

The rest of the article is well worth a read, and Wood's description of rock music as a liberating force resonated with me Wood's comparison of Moon and Glenn Gould is also apt and smart.

Thoughts on Freaks and Geeks

2010-10-02T13:48:00.002-04:00

I know I'm like, 10 years late on this, but have been recently engrossed in watching Freaks and Geeks, after having heard Judd Apatow's interview with Marc Maron (part 2 here) a couple of weeks ago. Here are some thoughts on it.

In the world of Freaks and Geeks, nothing is as it seems. Fronts are put on, emotions are hidden, waiting like dormant volcanos ready to explode any time. Both the "freaks" and the "geeks" are outsiders, but of different sorts -- the "freaks" are the older, grungier slackers who have given up on school, while the "geeks" are three nerdy freshmen, physically awkward, and wide-eyed. The setting is nondescript high school in suburban America, standing in as a supposed universal experience, a rite of passage. It's a cruel world, one filled with insults, dashed dreams, broken families, loneliness and despair. No wonder these characters need to construct these layers of defense, inhabiting characters in orde to shield themselves from the aggressive and malicious outside world

For the freaks, the writers use each episode to excavate the characters; the writers peel away of the layers of skin and protection that the characters have constructed (or inhabited?) in order to defend themselves against the cruelty of high school and the real world. For the geeks, each episode shows how these shields are in the process of being constructed. For the geeks, we witness a process of becoming, and for the freaks, we watch a process of deconstruction.

In both cases, we see how fragile egos are, how fluid identity formation is, and how painful it can be. The most brilliant episodes in the season are when the writers keep you guessing who's the hero and the anti-hero. I'm thinking particularly of an episode where, Daniel, played by James Franco is caught cheating for a math test in high school, and Lindsey, the main female lead played by Linda Cardellini, helps him cheat by feeding him the answers on a stolen test. In moments of brilliant acting, Franco is able to present his character as simultaneously manipulating Lindsey, the school system, and himself. You never know whose side to take.

At the heart of the show is a contest between an optimism and belief in the promise and the possibility of the American myth (as long as you try hard enough, you can be successful, beautiful, popular, well-liked, etc!), and a pessimism that the cards and the system are stacked against you, that people are lost and entrapped in the system. Like the best in American television -- the Wire, Mad Men -- Freaks and Geeks places these two poles in constant tension, never giving easy answers, showing us both the seductive and soul-crushing qualities of the American dream. But what is perhaps most compelling about Freaks and Geeks is that it shows so heartbreakingly the moments when a adolescents and young adult come to realize that perhaps their future is not limitless. "Dad, I really think that I can make it as a drummer." Nick, played by Jason Segel, says after his father threatens to send him to the Army if he can't keep a C+ average. "Nick, I really thought that I could walk on the moon, but, you just don't see any moon rocks around here, do ya?"

Impressions of Shanghai, Part II: Xujiahui, Tianzifang, the Bund

2010-07-26T19:03:00.001-04:00

We continued our tour of Shanghai by heading to Xujiahui, where a grand Catholic Cathedral, built by Jesuits in 1847, stands. The area is called Xujiahui because it was once grounds owned by Xu Guangqi, who was China's most famous convert in the 1500s, and collaborated with Matteo Ricci to translate famous Western mathematical and philosophical texts into Chinese. This is a statue of him.

The plaque memorializing Xu conveniently skips over the fact that he was a Christian convert. Instead, it focuses on the fact that he was a scientist and a famous Chinese official.

This is the Catholic cathedral, with a nice and well-kept park surrounding it. Unfortunately, we missed its opening hours and weren't able to go inside.

The park was filled with dog-walkers, and we caught sight of this ridiculous dog outfit. I have no idea why he had pajamas on, it wasn't even cold out! The little booties killed me. They were part of a wedding party that was taking glamour shots in front of the Cathedral.

We then moved more into the heart of the old French concession, and we went to Tianzifang, which is an area filled with shikumen houses -- two or three story town houses built in the 1860s that blended Western and traditional Chinese architecture. Shanghai was filled with these old style houses at one point, but soon were replaced by tall high-rises and apartment blocks. This area still retains its shikumen style buildings, but was renovated and revitalized in 2007 into a boutique shops/bars/touristy area. The old narrow street ways are still the primary attraction of the place, and it's nice to walk around to get the feel of "old Shanghai," with its winding alleyways and omnipresent electric lines.

Revitalized area of Taikang Road.

We then ended our day by heading towards the Bund, which was the center of the British settlement (and later the International Settlement), and had many of the major financial institutions on its banks. The Bund was amazingly crowded and lively at night, there was a vibe and excitement there that I hadn't really experienced before. Most of the tourists there were Chinese tourists visiting Shanghai -- there were massive tour groups of Chinese people walking around.
This is a major pedestrian and shopping area that heads towards the Bund.

This is on the Bund, I think this is the chartered Bank of India, Australia and China.

More banks on the Bund.

This is the view of the bank opposite the Bund, where the Oriental Pearl Tower looms in the distance. Also known as Pudong, the area has developed rapidly since the 1990s and has now become the financial hub of China.

Statue of Chen Yi, major of Shanghai from 1949 to 1958, envisioning the rise of the New China.

Impressions of Shanghai, pt. 1: Yuyuan Gardens and City God Temple

2010-07-25T19:07:00.001-04:00

Another busy month of traveling (I was in Rome for half of the month), which means this blog has been neglected. I've been posting some pictures over at my flickr account of my travels, but I'll use the blog to catch up on some of the things I've been seeing, and write more in-depth commentary. I still have some stuff to catch-up on from my trip to Shanghai, so I'll start there.

Shanghai really blew me away -- there's a vibrancy and vitality in the city that I have rarely felt in other urban areas. There's an excitement that is palpable in many parts of the city. Much of the media coverage surrounding the Expo has focused on the amount of construction and the wide-spread dislocation of old parts of the city. The construction was totally amazing. Margaret took me on the brand-new subway lines that were literally finished within 10-12 months. They were massive in scale. She also showed me this huge plaza/square that was finished within 3 months. Impressive.

But a lot of the monumentality of the new Shanghai feels a little bit off to me. The subway, despite its new-ness, often does not feel like it's scaled to fit the size of the amount of people riding it. Also, a lot of the subway does not feel completely user-friendly -- there is little attention to detail that would benefit users of the trains -- such as easily readable maps, schedules, subsequent stops on the train etc.

And despite the rapid changes and increase in wealth, you still have charming reminders of its less wealthy parts -- such as clothes drying between telephone poles.

And drying racks everywhere you look!

My favorite part of Shanghai was found in parts of the old town. I loved seeing the Yuyuan Garden, which dates back to the 1550s, during the Ming Dynasty. There are some amazing rooftops, entry ways, decorative rocks, as well as fake waterfalls. We started our visit by eating at this amazing dumpling place. I never knew you could make spring rolls this good, but they were able to make something both crispy and fluffy.

We then entered the garden, here's a typical shot of what the garden looks like.

I loved the statues on the rooftops.

Dragons on the rooftops. Oh Disney, why did you have to ruin my image of dragons (cue Eddie Murphy voice a la Mulan)?

This was the roof inlay of one of the outdoor stages.

What was probably most moving to me was seeing a group of older Chinese tourists, excited to be in Shanghai for the first time, walking around in the garden, taking pictures of the digital camera in front of one of the fake waterfalls. As much as the American media likes to demonize the economic ascent of China, I can't but help think of the amount of turmoil these older Chinese people must have suffered throughout the 60s and 70s, and to think that they can now travel around to Shanghai, taking pictures in front of places they probably never could have dreamed of. That has to be somewhat of a good thing, right?

We then walked to the nearby City God Temple (Chenghuang miao), which was restored and reconsecrated by Daoists in 2006. I was curious to see what the face of public worship looked like in China.

This was the main plaza inside the temple, with a altar to burn incense.

Prayers of the people. All of the red envelopes on the ceilings represent little prayers and wishes that you can purchase from Daoist clergy. The three major types of prayers, as indicated on the wall, are wishes for good results in the college entrance exam, health and peace, and financial success.

Bad picture, but the people sitting at the desk are selling the prayers.

More from my Shanghai trip in the next post...

Ancient/Modern and Something in Between

2010-06-30T19:00:00.001-04:00

It's been a busy month or so of travel (and I'm leaving for Rome tomorrow morning). I went to the World Expo in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago. Like most people who go to the expo, I was blown away by the amazing architecture of a lot of the pavilions (you can find some amazing photos here). But what has been under-reported are the actual content inside the pavilions. Because of the long wait times, we didn't really get to go into a lot of the popular pavilions (the wait time for the Japan pavilion was 7 hours!!), which meant that we saw a lot of the less popular, and to put it politely, "hastily put together" exhibitions.

What was a common thread among a lot of the "lesser" pavilions was that they were trying to prove that they were simultaneously an "ancient" and wise civilization, but also one that was "modern" and technologically advanced.

No where was this more clear than in the Iran pavilion, where there were billboards trying to show their "ancient-ness."

But they also wanted to show that they were modern -- photos from proving that they can make aircrafts! And that they have amazing oil refineries!

They also displayed their home-made satellites.

The North Korean pavilion was absurd on numerous levels, starting with the insinuation that there are always rainbows in the land, along with the shameless sign "paradise for people."

They also had the complete works of Kim Jong-il on sale. Didn't know that was required reading in paradise.

What was also disturbing was the reification of various stereotypes in many of the booths and pavilions. See for example, the friendly gorilla holding up a "welcome to Rwanda sign" in the African Union pavilion.

Much more can be said about the ahistorical nature of a lot of the pavilion exhibitions, which raise numerous questions -- what exactly is the function of a world fair, who's the audience, and what types of messages are being presented? Some of the pavilions were tastefully done, and tried to educate the audience on the complicated historical relations between its nation and the world, while at the same time laying out a vision for future collaboration. Others peddled clichés, and at times, offensive, stereotypes.

Enjoying Eurovision in Kreuzberg

2010-06-07T17:41:00.003-04:00

Drag queens as hosts. Campy dance numbers. Giant outdoor screens. Diplomatic intrigue laced with gestures towards a democratic voting system. What else could it be, other than the annual Eurovision contest, projected onto a huge screen in Kreuzberg, at the "Freiluftkino"!

It was my first time watching the Eurovision contest, and I was most intrigued by the voting system. Eurovision was founded in the 1950s to promote "European unity" (and most famously launched the careers of ABBA, the foundation for two global camps since the 1970s -- ABBA-lovers or ABBA-haters). But Eastern European countries didn't join the competition until 1993. But they still tend to vote in "blocs" -- as our drag queen hosts for the night predicted, "Romania will give 10 points to Russia," even the Russian singer gave probably one of the most putrid performances I've ever seen on a global stage. I know that there have been academic papers examining the politics behind Eurovision voting, but I wonder if the expanding notion of "Europe" has been investigated through the lens of the Eurovision contest?

In the end faux-Adele (an innocuous German singer named Lena who did have a catchy tune) beat out Turkish Linkin Park and the so-called "Romanian Bruce Springsteen." The Germans went wild, as expected, and sang along with verve. I thought Moldova had the best performance (faux-Lady Gaga with a rotating electric violinist and scintillating saxophone riff), but alas, they placed 22nd, due to lack of international "friends."

And here was the winning performance by Lena:

The Missionary Conundrum

2010-06-03T18:01:00.001-04:00

The second act of This American Life's May 21st Episode (408: Island Time) resonates with a lot of the themes that I've been encountering and thinking about for my dissertation. The reporter, Apricot Irving, returns to the missionary compound in Haiti where she grew up, and she interviews some of the mentors and figures who remained in Haiti. Irving reports how in the decades since she has left, the missionaries have changed their methods from foreigners-in-charge to more local-led "community" or "capacity" building. In a revealing exchange between Irving and one of the missionary doctors Steve, Steve says that he had to make an either/or choice:

In the face of dysfunction, and in the face of extreme human need, what was required of me was to build a citadel, to become a dictator. And in that benevolent dictatorship, I could be the cowboy who could fix the problems, that would bring efficiency, service, and security. And what's wrong with that? Why not become a benevolent dictator?
The problem I found with that... was that model creates a new slave plantation mentality, where the slaves become dependent on the slave masters. And in the end one reaps the fruits of slavery -- discontent, anger, and violence.
The choice to then go to the other extreme, to purposefully work hard at not becoming a dictator... means that people are going suffer, people are going to die, goods will not be provided, services will not be rendered.

This conundrum also stood at the heart of a lot of the German missionary work I study, although the German missionaries were a lot less self-conscious of the cultural biases that they carried with them (although they were also obsessed with the idea of inculcating a slave-mentality and a spirit of dependence). The goal of transforming societies and communities on a larger-scale is slow and hard work, but the imperative of saving souls (literally and metaphorically) is one that requires immediate results.

Mourning the Suns

2010-05-30T17:59:00.000-04:00

My favorite moment of this NBA season came in game four of the Western Conference Finals, Phoenix vs. LA. The Suns bench had played an excellent second quarter to give Phoenix a ten point lead, but the Lakers had come roaring back. The bench came in again, and rattled off an 18-3 run, capped by this amazing spinning lay-up by Goran Dragic with his right hand (Dragic is left-handed). My favorite part of this clip is the reaction on the bench -- the starters are all going nuts, Robin Lopez is about to have a heart attack, and the joy on Suns bench is overflowing.

Sports writing and the sports world are littered with clichés, and writing about the Phoenix Suns this year has been full of them, but I seriously can't remember an NBA team with such an infectious and joyful demeanor, where they actually look like they're enjoying playing the game. The NBA has gone through an intense phase of commercialization and professionalization in past couple of years that has virtually squeezed all the joy out of the game. I'm about as loyal a fan of NBA basketball as there is, and I'll defend it to the death, but I often feel turned off by the blasé attitude that most players and teams exhibit throughout the season. The Suns this season were the antithesis of that joylessness. I haven't been so invested in an NBA team for awhile. I was really hoping they would be able to win this series.

And now we have to suffer through another Celtics-Lakers finals. Ugh.

Gopnik's New Yorker Article

2010-05-28T18:28:00.001-04:00

IMG_4990 Originally uploaded by albertowu2002

The impulse of orthodoxy has always been to suppress the wrangling as a sign of weakness; the impulse of more modern theology is to embrace it as a sign of life. The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants.

Adam Gopnik's New Yorker review essay on recent books dealing with the "historical Jesus" is a thought-provoking read (hat tip to Margaret for the recommendation!). Gopnik surveys the recent popular scholarship well, and gives you a good sense of the basic tensions and questions driving the books. I wish he would have devoted more time digging into the arguments of the books, but the article does give you a feel for how each author leans and contributes to the scholarship.

What's most compelling about the article is that Gopnik interweaves his own reading of the Gospel with his interpretation of the scholarship that he's reading. For Gopnik, the reason why Jesus remains such a compelling figure stems from the various ambiguities, silences, and inconsistencies found within the Gospels, as well as the long history of arguments and interpretation to try to understand this ambiguity. Was Jesus God or human; was Jesus egalitarian or vengeful? These are questions that find no clear answer within the Gospels themselves, which is what continues to generate such fruitful works.

Gopnik gestures towards future readings of the Gospel that transcend the binaries of orthodoxy (supress ambiguity) and "modern liberal theology" (uncertainty is good!). I wonder what that type of reading would look like? Would it take interpretations from people of a completely different faith background or cultural perspective, from somebody who has no bone to pick in the orthodoxy vs. modernism battle?

Surviving the Archives

2010-05-27T16:24:00.001-04:00

What do you do all day?

That's probably the most common question I get from my non-historian friends when they ask about my life. I usually answer by mumbling something like "I sit in an archive and read documents from 9-4, or more like, 10:30 to 4, with an extended lunch break sometime around 1 PM." I wish I could describe the daily battles of boredom, self-doubt, and crises of intellectual clarity that dominate most days in the archives. Archival work often consists of hours of flipping through pages that are indecipherable (because of bad handwriting or because of my own lack of a larger context to understand what the documents are talking about) or uninteresting.

But there are moments when things start clicking in the archives -- the documents make sense, the language becomes somewhat less foreign, and you feel like you're getting a deeper understanding of the world that your figures inhabit. I'm not sure if it makes those moments of existential angst worth it, but it certainly provides a balm for the wounds.

Today was one of those days that combined both feelings of confusion and clarity. For the first couple of hours, I was sleepy, unmotivated, and bored by the documents in front of me. But suddenly I stumbled across some documents with some polemical arguments, some colorful characters, and events that had some significance to my project. What had started out as a long, seemingly endless day, suddenly felt too short.

Christian Diversity

2010-05-26T18:15:00.001-04:00

IMG_5019
Originally uploaded by albertowu2002

I stumbled upon this gorgeous wood panel in the Cloisters museum in New York. The panels are from Spain, and they are supposed to accompany a sculpture of the Madonna and child. Along with the vibrant colors, I was struck by the dragon-like (crocodile?) creature on the bottom panel. It's supposed to be a representation of Christ in limbo. The first image when I think of Christ descending into Hell is not that of a gigantic crocodile-like animal with jaws wide open. The picture reminded me of the diversity and bizarre kaleidoscope of Christian thought that has existed throughout the years.

One of the central arguments in Diarmaid MacCulloch's monumental book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Yearsis that it's more accurate to talk about the history Christianities rather than of Christianity. The history of the Christian faith is one filled with competing ideas, as well as unexpected twists and turns. One of the greatest disservices of contemporary American evangelical Christianity is its constant flattening out and ignorance of the Christian historical tradition. I wish more churches would discuss the various different challenges to theological orthodoxy throughout the history of Christianity, and discuss the various ways that Christians have tried to deal with these various challenges, whether they be in abhorrent ways or not.

Calling

2010-05-25T16:48:00.003-04:00

I was in New York City, attending my good friend Victor's wedding. The visit inspired me in many ways. One of Victor's other groomsmen was Julian Lage, one of the greatest jazz guitarists working in the scene today. I've known Julian ever since he was 15 or 16, and I've followed his career throughout the years. What has always impressed me about Julian is the rare combination of joy and harmonic sophistication in his playing.

We got to hang out a little bit this weekend, and what amazed me was that every 15 minutes or so, Julian would get antsy if he didn't have a guitar in his hands. We would be sitting around, and he would ask if we would mind if he played some guitar or not. He would then proceed to "fool around" on the guitar, which already sounded pretty wondrous. I was witnessing somebody who had truly found his calling. Can you think of anything you do (other than eating, drinking, and the essentials) that consumes you so you HAVE to work on it, that it makes you uncomfortable when you don't do it? Here's hoping we can all find our own callings.

Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist

2010-02-26T17:50:00.006-05:00

One of the most thrilling moments in Sylvain Chomet's new film, The Illusionist, occurs when Chomet's animated "illusionist," based on Jacques Tati, in a moment of anguish, ducks into a movie theater and sees the "real" Jacques Tati drifting around on screen. There's a slight pause in the action, and the animated Jacques puzzles over the strange mirroring. It's one of the most poignant reflections on the nature of entertainment and film; the magician himself being conned by the illusion of cinema.

Sylvain Chomet rose to fame with his 2003 feature, The Triplets of Belleville, and he returns to similar themes explored in Triplets -- nostalgia for the past, the cruelty of modern society, intergenerational relationships. Despite the exploration of similar themes, the tone of the two films differ. Triplets was a fast-paced surrealist adventure story that doubled as a defiant stance against the erasure of certain traditional cultures. But unlike Triplets, The Illusionist is a wistful acceptance of that fate, and in turn becomes more of a meditation on the dilemmas of generations having to deal with and accept the rapid changes in the modern world. At the heart of both stories are the inter-generational relationships (in Triplets, between Grandmother and Grandson, and in The Illusionist, between the Tati character and a young girl) and the inability, at times, to communicate and bring about true happiness.

The motor that drives The Illusionist is this uneasy coexistence between the old and the new that runs through almost every single scene. Chomet is at his best when he depicts a dying world in the face of extinction -- such as the vaudevillian forms of entertainment in the face of a new generation of rock and roll artists, and the relationship between the aging Tati and the young girl's infatuation with him. The best part of the movie is how he is able to capture the pulse of Edinburgh, and show the decrepit underside of the city that coexists uneasily with the modernizing side of the city, full of new forms of transportation and other things..

The only thing about the movie that disturbed me was the mildly sexist depiction of the child, which came off as showing women as fickle. Like Triplets, The Illusionist is carried off with little dialogue but with a stunning soundtrack, which enhances the mood of the film. It's really a remarkable film and I hope it gets a wider release soon.

Berlinale Impressions

2010-02-21T17:11:00.006-05:00

The 60th Berlin International Film Festival took place for the past ten days, and having never been to a film festival before, I sort of went crazy and ended up seeing something like 11 films. The greatest thing about the film festival is getting on the subway and seeing everyone around you reading about the film festival, whether it be newspaper reviews or the festival catalogue. I've never seen a city so united by one event. The films were really well attended; almost every screening I went to was pretty much sold-out, and the vibe was just great all around. The film's really varied in quality, which is also part of the fun; you never know what to expect when you walk into a theater. I'll write some longer reviews of some of the films that made deeper impressions on me for future posts, but here are some quick impressions of some movies--

Red Hill, a campy modern Western set in Australia from first time director Patrick Hughes , was fun, violent, and a more comic version of No Country for Old Men. Involved a heavily foreshadowed scene where the "outlaw's" identity and guilt is re-examined, as well as a heavy dose of white liberal guilt over the injustices perpetrated on Australia's indigenous population. The editing was snappy, but the dialogue was cheesy and often cringe-inducing. A fun time overall.

I went into Constantin Popescu's Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man with high hopes, but came out bored and disappointed. The film is about a group of Romanian anti-Communist resisters who take to the hills and engage in "guerilla" warfare against the Communists. Sounds like a fascinating premise, right? But he director forgot how to edit himself, and churned out a running loop of skirmishes in Romanian hills, stock scenes of Communist brutality, rebels and rebels foraging for food. Imagine the same three scenes looped for three hours. Insufferable. What's worst is that the movie was supposed to make the audience relate or understand the plights of the characters, but we left the move still unsure of who the characters actually were. The scenes depicting Romanian secret police brutality went nowhere and just smelled of propaganda; by the end of the movie, I was even rooting for the Communists to catch the rebel heroes so that the movie could end earlier. I agree 100% with Neil Young's review in The Hollywood Reporter and Blair Stewart's blurb in Daily Film Dose.

Trent Cooper's Father of Invention, starring the usually great Kevin Spacey, was a comedic version of American Beauty replete with Spacey's character once more trying to seduce one of his daughter's friends. At least there was one thing in common with American Beauty -- Spacey didn't seem any less creepy. There was the usual Hollywood clichés of the father discovering the really valuable things in life, with required speech in front of journalists and reconciliation with family members. Spacey's acting is flat, and the first thirty minutes has a pretty interesting appearance by Heather Graham (who likes 20 years old and constant thoughts of "what was the last movie I saw with Heather Graham"). But it turns into the most offensive caricature of lesbianism that I've seen in a movie, and made me want to walk out. Camilla Belle plays Spacey's daughter, and it turns out she has mastered two facial expressions -- a frown and a slight smirk. My least favorite movie I saw at Berlinale.

Berlinale Shorts I -- A collection of five shorts from Japan (two from Japan), Croatia, the US, and Italy. Some quick notes:

Aramaki Wanted to like this meditation on desperation, environmentalism, suicidal impulses, and our relationship to animals, but I couldn't get past the grating heavy metal opening tune and heavy handed use of Toru Takemitsu-esque atonal music. The marinated meats grossed me out.

Akai Mori no Uta(The Song of the Red Forest) Loved the cute animated animals and the beautiful breathing forest, but the "song" and the singing made me want to strangle the cute animated animals. Probably the opposite effect from what the film maker was looking for.

Zuti mjesec (Yellow Moon) Loved, loved, loved this. The tension and suspense builds, the acting is superb, and the ending leaves you on an edge and wanting more.

In the Air -- The first 10 minutes are really promising and seems like its going somewhere, which is completely shattered by the kitschy dance number. I love uplift and all, but...

Giardina di luce -- Reminded me why Catholicism is awesome and insane at the same time. Loved the use of accelerated stop-motion, and the material was just fascinating. Hoping to experience a Saint's feast in a Catholic town sometime soon.

Longer and more in depth reviews of some other films soon.

TAL's Historians

2010-02-08T16:54:00.003-05:00

This week's episode of This American Life is probably the best distillation and presentation of the seductive qualities of studying history. The episode begins with the eleven year old Adam Beckman, along with his brother and best friend, stumbling upon an abandoned house in a small town in New Hampshire. The house is filled with crumbling letters, cans and whiskey bottles from the Prohibition era, and tattered dresses and clothes that had been untouched for decades. What begins as an adventure with his brothers into a spooky, abandoned home, soon grows into an obsession with the house and its previous tenants, the Nasons.

Adam's description of his increasing obsession with the Nasons is one of the best description of the allure of historical research that I've ever heard. His encounter with real documents, and his imagination of the family's lives capture the allure of historical inquiry, how investigating the stories of people's lives can be addictive and insatiable, and how stories inevitably lead to further mysteries and questions, which in turn fuel further investigation.

The episode also illuminates difficulties of historical research. The ephemerality of documents and historical artifacts are front and center here, and reminds us that the fact that any historical documents even still exist are oftentimes accidents of history. The story also shows how difficult the practice of historical interpretation can be. How can we explain the disappearance of a family within larger historical movements, and situate those tiny dramas within changes in society.

Probably the most heart-wrenching part of the show, for me, was when Adam heard the neighbors and sons describe the historical artifacts, which he had carefully preserved and obsessed over in the past twenty years as "junk" or "crap." And perhaps that's the ultimate job of the historian -- to convince others that stories that are going to be tossed into oblivion are worth telling and preserving. Beckman certainly succeeds in doing so here. I would recommend everyone to download and listen to this episode (I think their mp3s stay free for a week for downloads).

My Research

2010-02-01T16:41:00.006-05:00

"Scene in a Chinese Opium Palace, San Francisco": From Harper's Weekly: Harper's Weekly, Vol. 24
The Chinese : Many Handed But Soulless" [cover]: From The Wasp: v. 15, July - Dec. 1885

Images are from the Library of Congress's website on American Memory, taken from the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Once again, I’ve left this blog out in the cold for a couple of months now. Really no excuses for the hiatus other than laziness and a serious case of writer’s block. But I’m going to try to be more diligent in updating this -- at least until my next 2-3 month silence.

Mr. G asked me to describe my dissertation research, so I’ll try my best to organize my scattered thoughts. I’m doing research on the German Christian missionary movement in China, starting roughly around the 1860s and ending in the 1930s.

If you pick up any missionary journal from the late 19th century and read its depiction of the China and the Chinese, the picture is negative and what we would now consider racist. The missionary journals mostly depict the Chinese as opium smoking polygamists, who sell their children into slavery and are blinded by their superstitions (the pictures above are from the US, but the sentiments flowed throughout the "West"). Confucianism is something that needs to be destroyed; it hinders the development and entry of China into the league of “modern” nations. A tone of triumphalism accompanies late 19th century missionary tomes -- the missionaries are confident that Christianity is going to sweep through China and transform it.

By the 1950s, missionary theologians and journals have lost this tone of triumphalism is gone. Christianity in China is considered a “failure,” and Confucianism is being studied and taught seriously in universities in the West. Chinese Christians, on the other hand, are calling for a complete separation between Chinese Christianity and its Western, or “imperialistic” influences.

I’m trying to figure out how this transformation occurred, and what larger implications the “failure” of Christianity in China had on ideas about Christianity in Germany. My hypothesis is that this “failure” of Christianity in China forced missionaries and mission theologians in Germany to re-conceptualize and re-think not only the missionary strategy, but the nature of the Christian message itself. I’m still not sure how this plays out, but I’m hoping I’ll have a clearer sense by the time I leave Germany in August.

Some Thoughts on Opera

2009-12-05T05:26:00.003-05:00

Watched Verdi's La Traviata last night, which was gloriously staged at the Deutsche Oper. My stay in Berlin this time around has been filled with opera, and I've really come to enjoy going to operas. This is a pretty new development for me -- I used to find operas long, the plots insufferably trite, the emotions overplayed. What I've realized is that time moves differently in operas; it's less a linear progression or narrative of time, but more a build-up of tension that finds release at certain musical moments. The build-up may meander, but the release makes it all worth it. The clip above pretty much sums up all of conflicted emotions. The cheesy dialogue, the over-wrought inner emotions, the unnecessary hand-wringing; but wow, isn't that aria (starting around 2:30 in the clip) divine? I think that's partly why Wagner can be so frustrating/interesting. In Tristan and Isolde he plays with all these expectations of tensions and release, never really giving us a final resolution until literally the final chord in the piece. It's infuriating but intriguing, boring yet divine.

Berlin Again

2009-11-06T16:35:00.008-05:00

I've been in Berlin for a little over two months now. I've had ambivalent feelings about Berlin in the past, as my past two extended stays here were not so pleasant. But just this past week, as I was walking towards the library (where I spend most of my days), I thought to myself -- I actually like this city!

A big part of the change in heart stems from my new living condition. The last time I was here, I was living in really cheap housing, but it was an old, unrenovated Berlin apartment, and I was constantly freezing, and the bathroom did not have convenient showering facilities (or barely had any facilities at all). There was no internet, the phone didn't really work, and I felt isolated, lonely, and homesick. This time around, I’m living in a lovely apartment, centrally located. I’m part of a program, so there’s a community here that I’m enjoying. My mom has also been here since early October, and I’ve really enjoyed having her here, even though now it may be her turn to feel a bit homesick.

And oh my, the culture! Some of the music that I’ve heard in the past two months: Fly Trio, Miguel Zenon Quintet (which was AMAZING live), Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, the Berlin Philharmonic with Ivan Fischer and Simon Rattle playing Brahms, Schönberg and other major works. Wagner’s works have been a particular revelation. I never thought that I would be able to sit through a complete Wagner opera, but each time I’ve been quite engrossed by the music and the new interpretations and stagings.

I’m also a lot more confident in my linguistic abilities this time around. I’m still not fluent, and can’t express all of my ideas fluently, but I feel great in terms of comprehension, both aural and visual.

So all in all, a good start to the research trip here, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of months here. I’ll try to post more often, and update more on ideas about research and the cultural stuff that I’ve been seeing. But I’m feeling good about being here, which is a far cry from the apprehension I felt in August, when I was moving out of Berkeley.

Istanbul

2009-10-20T14:57:00.005-04:00

I can't quite figure out what it was about Istanbul that resonated so deeply with me. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for touristy trinkets and architectural monuments, which Istanbul is filled with. I'm also attracted to crowds -- and boy is Istanbul crowded. But there's something about the sights, the sounds, and the smells, that stirred a certain feeling of comfort, of belonging -- even though I couldn't understand anything written or uttered on the street. The Egyptian Spice Market reminded me of the traditional Taiwanese markets that I used to roam in when I was a kid, and the streets of the bazaar evoked memories of Taiwanese street vendors, lining the sidewalks with their fake brand names and wares.

The Hagia Sophia was my favorite site that we visited. The fusion of all the different historical elements and religions -- Christian, Muslim, secular -- was evident and on full display. The minarets, fused and standing next to the Romanesque arches, are testaments to the complicated intersections and interweaving of Christian and Muslim histories, and a challenge to those who demagogically claim that a clash between these two civilizations is a historical inevitability and necessity. It was a personal reminder to why I love the study of history.

Turkey

2009-10-17T20:42:00.002-04:00

Egyptian Spice Market
Originally uploaded by albertowu2002

I just got back from five day trip to Turkey -- spent most of the time in Istanbul and a couple of days in Ankara. I'll try to post some pictures and stories on this blog when I get everything together.

Thoughts on Religion and Civic Association

2009-08-12T23:09:00.008-04:00

Paul Katz, writing for the group blog The China Beat, reports on the disaster relief efforts in response to Typhoon Morakot, which pummeled southern Taiwan this past weekend. Katz points out that the most active organizations in helping with disaster relief are religious organizations, such as the Buddhist Compassion Relief Merit Society (Fojiao Ciji gongdehui 佛教慈濟功德會), Foguang Shan, the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, and World Vision.

Ever since I took an intellectual history class on Alexis de Tocqueville when I was an undergraduate, I've been interested in the functions of civil associations that operate apart from the state. I've been particularly interested in how religious organizations differ from secular ones as sites of mobilization for political purposes. For the class, I wrote a final paper on secular and religious forms of mobilization, arguing that religious organizations played a vital part in the landscape for political and religious mobilization. When talking over the paper, my professor asked me a question that stumped me -- when it comes to dealing with issues of a non-religious nature, what is it that a religious organization does that a secular humanist organization can't? In other words, when it comes to disaster relief, what difference does it make that a Christian or Buddhist organization (like Ciji or Catholic Relief Services) is heading the disaster relief, as opposed to one that is completely secular (like Doctors without Borders)? I still don't have a good answer to that question.

Part of my fascination with missionaries stems from this desire to answer this question -- how exactly does religion make a difference? Why do people become missionaries? Do people, who claim to be motivated by religion, act in a different way than people who don't?

As Katz points out, one of the most inspiring thing is seeing the Internet emerge as the dominant site for quick and fast mobilization. We saw this happen with the Iranian elections a couple of months back as well. It will be interesting to track how the Internet augments and challenges more "traditional" forms of voluntary associational life.

Here's hoping all the best for the recovery in southern Taiwan.

Cluttered

2009-08-06T02:40:00.005-04:00

I've been slowly cleaning up my place, in preparation for the big move in September. My big project has been paring down my book collection -- I'm trying to keep only four boxes of books. The rest I've been carting around either to second-hand bookstores or donating them to the Berkeley Public Library. It's quite appalling how little monetary value books retain; as my roommate says -- "if you want your money back, invest in gold, people, not books!" And not only do you have to deal with how little money you get back in return for books that you were important or interesting to you (some of these books I've had since college), you have to suffer withstand condescending store clerks who take a look at your book and either reject it or throw it into the gigantic pile of used books that they still need to process. I feel like I have to beg them to keep my books. Thanks for puncturing any sense of material sentimentality guys, thanks a lot.

But in my cleaning I came across a box of documents that I forgot had existed. The box was a strange mish-mash of files -- syllabi of courses that meant a lot to me, some papers from college, and almost all of the playbills of the concerts and plays that I attended when I was in New York (including the playbill of the first opera I have ever been to, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the NYC Opera in November 2001). And in an instant, I realized why I had kept these documents in this box -- in a way, this is my college education crystallized and collected in one place. As much as I'm afraid of clutter and trying to get rid of it now, it's still wonderful to have that physical, material reminder of the things that you've learned and how they've shaped you as a person.

California Dreamin'

2009-08-04T01:25:00.008-04:00

Marc Cooper, writing in the Nation, has a pretty clear reckoning of the recent budget crisis in California. The article gives a clear sense that the state is in a tangled and unsightly mess, including a political gridlock within the state senate, with Democrats voting against their traditional political interests, but also deep systemic problems that have been waiting to explode for decades. What I like about Cooper's analysis is that it is complex and multi-faceted; California's crisis cannot be explained simply as a "war against the poor." But Cooper does have a prime culprit: Prop 13, an extremely unprogressive tax law that caps the amount of property tax that owners have to pay to at 1%. This means that most of the state's revenues come from income taxes, and, as Cooper points out, "the state is far too dependent on income tax: when times are good, there's plenty of money; when they're sour, California goes bust. In just the first five months of this year, revenues from this tax plummeted 34 percent."

What intrigues me most about the article is Cooper's claim that "California has always been as much a state of mind as a physical reality. The state's natural resources, along with its inhabitants' capacity to exploit them, made The Dream more likely than not." Before I moved to California, I never found much appeal in the romanticism of the California Dream; the rugged individualism of the Wild West felt like nothing more than peacock strutting by testosterone fueled macho men, and the Kerouacian road trip that ended in self-discovery via drug-induced stupors in Haight Ashbury always seemed a bit narcissistic and infantile to me. But ever since I started at Berkeley (perhaps I've drank the Kool-Aid), I've been more and more drawn to Berkeley's mission of a democratic, egalitarian mission of education that is open to all (Californians). I love the expansiveness and intellectual liberty that the University, at its best, offers. It's really the compromising of this vision, of equal access to the best public facilities that the state has to offer (health care, education, etc) that really is the tragedy in the midst of this crisis.

Thoughts on Guitar Hero

2009-08-03T00:40:00.005-04:00

I've played Guitar Hero and Rock Band several times, and I love the game; I think that it does a pretty decent job simulating the rhythmic complexities of playing music in a band. And it's a great party game. But having played in a band, something always feels slightly off to me about the experience (other than the plasticity of the 'instruments' themselves). I was playing the new PS3 version of Guitar Hero yesterday with some friends, and realized exactly what it is that the game lacks that is critical to playing in a band -- listening. The game doesn't teach players how to listen to each other. One of the most crucial elements of being in a band, as well as, in my opinion, one of its most enjoyable elements, is listening to one another play. There's always a dialogic relationship between the members of the band, as you feel through the rhythms and the patterns together. It's a conversation that is constantly changing; you speed up, you slow down, you try to be attentive to the minute shifts and changes of the other members in the band.

Instead, the game is essentially an individual contest between the players and the machine, the only real visual contact is between you and the TV screen. And that's when I realized what is missing. Even though it may not seem like it from an audience's perspective, a lot of music playing involves visual contact between humans -- symphony players watching the conductor, singers looking at pianists, guitarists locking eyes with the percussionist. It's that brief moment of human solidarity, where time and space fade away, that makes the act of creating music such a transcendent experience. Guitar Hero and Rock Band create the illusion that you are playing as a collective, when in reality you are still atomized units raging against the cascade of dots flowing across the machines.

Buchenwald

2009-07-22T10:59:00.002-04:00

I was in Germany for two weeks, on a summer seminar sponsored by the German Historical Institute. One of the stops on our trip was the concentration camp Buchenwald. I’d never been to a concentration camp before then. Buchenwald is about twenty minutes from the city of Weimar. In a way, Weimar and Buchenwald represent the Janus-faced view of German history -- Weimar, a center of high cultural production, the residence of Goethe and Schiller, lying less than 20 kilometers away from the unimaginably brutal concentration camp. On the bus ride towards Buchenwald, I was even more surprised by how green and idyllic the landscape was -- the camp was located in a place fit for being set aside as a natural reserve. In fact, the camp guards ended up setting up a zoo right next to the camp, where visitors came to look at the animals. There was even an incident once where one of the camp superintendents reprimanded some of the camp guards for their cruel treatment of animals, totally disregarding the human suffering before their very eyes. In a way, the beautiful, natural setting helped me have much more sympathy for the much-maligned German people, who are blamed for their (willful) ignorance in the face of such obvious evidence that knowledge of the camp must have been widespread. But I can now understand how one could convince oneself that such brutal acts were impossible in such a peaceful place, or how one could convince oneself that whoever was behind bars deserved it, considering that it was a time of war and chaos.

We went on a gorgeous day, where the blue sky stretched on for eternity, a day where the imprint of God on the world seemed everywhere. The place was deathly silent, and I wondered what the camps would have sounded like when they were in full swing. But the remains of the camp -- the hollow ovens that transformed human flesh into ash, the lifts that mechanically moved corpses from the cellar to the ground -- spit in the face of the idea of a loving, all-merciful God. How can one believe in God after the camps? How can one believe in art as a transformative spiritual experience when there is such overwhelming evidence of desolation and loneliness in this cruel world?

Listening to "Big Bands"

2009-06-01T19:36:00.005-04:00

My introduction to jazz was through the smaller combo groups of the late 50s and early 60s -- the (first) Miles Davis Quintet, the Bill Evans Trio, the John Coltrane Quartet, and so on. For me, jazz evoked an image of intimate improvisational conversation between three or four, no greater than five, musicians, set to the background of clinking glasses in an underground, tightly packed club. I had no interest in big bands. They seemed staid and over-arranged; big bands conjured up ideas of cruise ship orchestras, replete with swing dancers politely rocking back and forth next to degenerate gamblers. As I got more into avant-garde jazz, my prejudices against big bands grew. Small combo music stood for dissonance and carried tones of political emancipation, while big bands were the over-commercialized establishment that softened the hard edges of jazz and made it "palatable" to polite society. Ellington disabused me of some of these notions, with his dark and sultry, at times dissonant, harmonies, but even then I preferred his smaller, more intimate albums, such as "Money Jungle" with Mingus and Roach, or his album with Coltrane. "Money Jungle" has a chaotic, uncontrollable impulse that propels the album forward, containing surprises at every turn that I didn't find in Ellington's big band production.

Three recent big band albums -- Maria Schneider's "Sky Blue," Darcy James Argue's "Infernal Machines," and Charles Tolliver's "Emperor March: Live at the Blue Note" (all of the albums are also available via iTunes)-- have forced me to completely rethink my position on big bands. In many ways, the term big band is misleading, because the modern big bands sound completely different from the swing era bands of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Modern big bands have incorporated a much more "small combo" sensibility of open and free improvisation into the harmonic complexity that big bands are capable of attaining.

Of the three bands, Tolliver's retains the deepest sense of the old-school swing, as well as the most traditional format of song selection and arrangement. At points during the album, his songs break off into trio or quartet format, with the occasional horns as harmonic accompaniment. But in no way should this imply that the arrangements are staid or boring. The album pulses and prods with life. Take the opening track. The horns and winds start out blazing, with a triumphant call to attention, and soon the band dissolves into chaotic layers of noise, as the drums, piano and all the other instruments pile on. After the initial call ebbs, the drums settle into a deep groove and the different registers engage in a funky call and response of reiterating the theme. You never quite know where the hook or refrain is, all you get is a sense of the different sections riffing off one another. The arrangement is complex and dissonant, but it never overwhelms you with its complexity. Once the tenor sax breaks through for the first solo, a sense of order is restored. But the soloist, Marcus Strickland does not settle into a comfortable spot, but instead eggs the rest of the band onto further heights. Big Band soloists know that they have a limited amount of time to make their statement, so all the tricks of growls and howls and high-pitched screeches come out of the bag, pushing the rest of the harmonic support into a frenzied state. It's a wonder to behold when a band is locked in like that. What impresses me the most about Tolliver's band is precisely this interaction between the soloists and the rest of the band. The band intensifies the solo in a way that small combos are unable; they push and probe harmonically and dynamically in a much more satisfying and, in some sense, a more primal way, than small combos can. This is far from polite music. This is music grabs you and shakes you; this is music that, in Mingus's words, "gits in your soul!"

Darcy James Argue's long anticipated debut album, on the other hand, could not be more different. I have been a long-time follower of his excellent blog, and he has oodles of audio from his live sets that will give you a sense of what the music is like. DJA calls the music of his Secret Society "big band steam-punk," and from an instrumental standpoint, he has incorporated electric guitars and basses, synthesizer sound effects, and grooves that do not "swing" in a traditional manner. Argue's "steam-punk" induces more head-bopping than it does body-shaking. The compositions are smart and full of unexpected twists and turns. The emotional centerpiece of the album, "Habeas Corpus (for Maher Arar)" is an homage to Steve Reich, and Argue uses Reich's minimalist repetition to create a claustrophobic, almost paranoid soundscape, as a way of recreating the emotional anguish of solitary confinement that Arar had to endure. The piece shifts gears multiple times, and eventually turns into literal cries of anguish, as the horns and woodwinds blaze over the recurring motif. Despite the innovative take on the Big Band tradition, there's little in this album for the listener to hold on to. The music crawls under your skin, and you are left with a dark, almost sinister, feeling. But ultimately, "Infernal Machines" failed to hold onto my attention, and I felt that my attention kept drifting; this was music that intrigued me, but didn't touch me or move me. Nonetheless, I look forward to his future output and anticipate that he will become a major voice in the jazz world.

If DJA's music evokes the dark, paranoid, sinister underbellies of life, Maria Schneider's music conjures up images of bright, open spaces, filled with a zest for life. Her music does not betray song titles such as "Cerulean Skies," "Sky Blue," and "The Pretty Road." Schneider's music also does not "swing" in the traditional sense, but her music is so compelling because she has an amazing knack for capturing melodies, accentuating them, and amplifying the emotional intensity of the tune through her intricate compositions. She is able to capture the essence of a mood, and slowly build and probe those moods by adding layers of sound. Take, for example, her epic, magnificent, and majestic "Cerulean Skies," which alone is worth the price of the album and won a Grammy in 2008 for Best Instrumental Composition. The piece begins with the winds and other effects mimicking bird cries in a minimal way, and the different sections layer on so that they crescendo and play in unison to introduce the first theme. A passionate saxophone solo ensues, and the soloist is able to create tension by weaving in and out of the harmonic web that the rest of the orchestra creates. The orchestra also ebbs and flows dynamically with the soloist, and the saxophonist builds to an emotional climax, supported and propelled by the rest of the orchestra as it reintroduces the first theme. And this only brings us through less than one third of the song, as there are several more themes and twists and turns that Schneider has in store. For me, Schneider's Orchestra embodies the best of what the modern big band has to offer -- complex and beautiful compositions mixed with passionate individual solos, backed by wonderful orchestral arrangements. There's a joy and brightness in her music that is irrepressible.

Ultimately, my prejudices against big bands have been punctured, and I'm looking forward to listening to more post-War Big Band music, like the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, John Hollenbeck, and others.

Pixar and History (Mild Spoilers)

2009-05-31T23:07:00.006-04:00

For two movies in a row now, Pixar has provided us with some of the most profound public meditations on the importance of history. In Wall-E, Pixar showed us a dystopic world of humans living without collective history (thanks to my friend Josh for this insight), where humans become immobile gerbils, solely living in the moment, waiting for the next meal and entertainment buzz. What makes Wall-E, the trash-collecting machine, more "human" than the humans is his obsession with collecting historical artifacts and his ability to discriminate between "trash" and historical memorabilia. Aristotle defined the difference between humans and animals as humankind's capacity for speech and politics. Perhaps Pixar would add historical thinking as a third component to the definition.

While Wall-E reflects on humanity's need to retain its collective history, Up considers the weight of history on a personal level. Pixar is the king at using allegories to repackage and rework traditional morality tales (a French rat as the quintessential underdog, clown fish as stand-ins for father-son relationships, etc), and Up continues in this vein. Carl's house represents all of the memories, the personal history, that we must carry with us. The central dilemma of Up revolves around the question of whether Carl should let go of the past, and of the house, in the face of new challenges and adventures. Thankfully, Pixar does not provide any easy answers, and the melancholy that undergirds the picture is grounded in the difficulty of history that faces us all -- how much does the past haunt us? How much of it can we shed without dishonoring the memory of those we love? Pixar deals with these deeply human questions with taste and beauty.

Impressions of L. A.

2009-05-26T03:23:00.012-04:00

Flying into L. A., I couldn't help but feel awed by the sprawl of the city. As soon as the pilot announced that we were making our descent, already I could see rows of houses and cars teeming and glittering in the desert landscape. Descending into New York is a different experience altogether; one moment you see nothing but water, and within the blink of an eye the city appears, the skyscrapers emerging as spikes, threatening to poke the wings of the aircraft. From the air, L. A. menaces and impresses in a more indirect, less in-your-face way. Instead, it's an impression that crawls underneath your skin. New York and Paris have often been compared to mechanical gigantic octopi, extending their tentacles into the heartland and sucking out its resources and life. From a bird's perspective, L. A. exudes a certain feeling of organicism that New York lacks. L. A.'s architecture reflects the desert plantlife that surrounds the city, the low-lying houses looking like thousands of little prickly pears, concentrated around the looming cacti-like skyscrapers that are concentrated in various pockets of the city. New York dazzles the first-time visitor through its brute display of human invention, through its dense verticality, while L. A. hypnotizes through its expansiveness -- the enormous canvas of the city seems to extend beyond the scope of human imagination. Both cities are testaments to the ingenuity of human constructions of space, but in very different ways.

Paul Krugman recently made a quip on his blog about these two different methods of constructing space, calling Hong Kong's vertical buildings "the way the future was supposed to look," while belittling the sprawl, sprawl, and even more sprawl" of Atlanta, "a landscape of boxy malls and McMansions," as "Bo-ring." L. A.'s sprawl could not have been more different. Sure, the distances between neighborhoods were enormous, and everything was only accessible by car, but the neighborhoods were vibrant and multi-cultural, anything but "Bo-ring."

Krugman's follow-up post to that piece defensively points out how pro-sprawl urbanists tend to be conservatives, while "pointy-headed intellectuals" like himself prefer dense urban areas like Portland, replete with *gasp*, public transportation. I think there's something to that analysis. I did feel a certain primal, rugged free-market individualism on the streets of Los Angeles, where cars become stand-ins for personal identity politics, which could be read as a cipher for conservative politics. Similarly, despite the multi-cultural valences within the city, racial and social segregation was painfully obvious and exacerbated by the insulated social spaces of cars. But Krugman oversimplifies by painting as this a liberal vs. conservative issue. New York's dense urban areas does not necessarily facilitate better social or racial integration, nor does it promote more environmental standards or practices. Nor are dense urban areas more resistant to the encroachment of "boxy malls and McMansions" (cf. 42nd Street).

I wonder if the fundamental difference is between an organic conception of cityscape and a certain mechanistic, futuristic, modernist imagining of city space. I find this juxtaposition much more compelling than a "conservative vs. liberal" dichotomy, because in all cities, you find an uneasy coexistence of these different modes of urban planning. Peep shows from the 1980s stand in the shadow of a Disneyfied Times Square, just as Skid Row is overshadowed by Walt Disney Hall. The abuse of power, the misallocation of resources, and the social immiseration of the poor are endemic to both dense urban areas as they are to urban sprawl. I find it much more productive to investigate how power is abused and misallocated, rather than demonizing certain types of cityscapes as "liberal" or "conservative."

Paumgarten on the Financial Crisis in the New Yorker

2009-05-16T13:41:00.001-04:00

“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.”

“You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit... It is true: the peddlers of the chicken shit paid to have it magically pronounced chicken salad, a conflict of interest that most investors ignored.”

“[Margaret Atwood] goes on, ‘whole theology of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you might get out of paying by having someone else pay instead.’ (By this standard, America really is a Christian nation.) She adds, ‘It rests too, on a long pre-Christian history of scapegoat figures -- including human sacrificies -- who take your sins away for you.’ For the repayment of our debts, we look to the government; the TARP, you might say, is Jesus.”

The current issue of the New Yorker (the May 18th issue) has a long, but really good piece on the financial crisis (subscription required, but there’s a pretty good 10 minute podcast that sums up the whole piece in an interview with the author, Nick Paumgarten). Paumgarten’s approach is different from most pieces I’ve read on the financial crisis. Most articles I’ve read try to pinpoint a villain, or a set of culprits, who are responsible for the current crisis. Simon Johnson’s article in The Atlantic, for example, blames an American “financial oligarchy” for hijacking the government’s plans for reforming the financial industry. Matt Taibbi takes a similar route in Rolling Stone, calling it “the big takeover.”

Paumgarten refuses to play the “blame game.” Instead he provides vignettes and snippets of explanations that he hears from Wall Street insiders, and the article becomes an extended meditation not only on his own confusion towards the crisis, but it also exposes how many of the Wall Street insiders also don’t have an adequate language or idea to grasp what happened.

What’s been most interesting to me, however, is the quasi-religious, quasi-metaphysical rhetoric that undergirds much of the explanations that these Wall Street apologists employ. Paumgarten draws attention to the interesting linkages between the religious idea of debt and salvation and the current financial crisis. While these Wall Street bankers trumpeted the predictive power of their “complex financial instruments” when it was a bull market and they were raking in huge amounts of money, once the shit hit the fan and their models were exposed as fictions, they resort to the “Oh, it’s human nature to be greedy” as a defense. The intellectual cover-up and hypocrisy is stunning. But is it unavoidable? Is it inevitable that we turn to religious explanations when it comes to catastrophes of this scale (ideas of the apocalypse abound, for example)? Perhaps the gulf between science and religion are a lot smaller than we’d like to think; rationality is always tinged with a hint of irrationality, while the sacred is to be found in the profane.

New Yorker Love

2009-05-15T02:15:00.000-04:00

I’ve been reading The New Yorker loyally for about a month now, ever since it became available for the Kindle. I’m amazed weekly by the amount of quality articles -- and the range of material they report on, from science to sports to education -- that the magazine produces. There are always at least one or two long-form pieces each week that are captivating, and the art/music/dance reviews (what attracted me to the New Yorker in the first place) are consistently excellent.

I especially love the long-form reporting. The profiles always stick out to me -- the magazine is good at capturing portraits of interesting people, who have eccentric, new perspectives on tackling old problems. The May 11th issue has a piece on Steve Barr, who is trying to reform the LA education system through charter schools. Vilayanur Ramachandran, a behavioral neurologist at UCSD, famous for his work with “phantom limbs” and bizarre neurological disorders, also receives extensive praise in the same issue.

What I’ve realized is that, probably like most people, I’m attracted to biographical sketches. In the past 40 years, the historical profession has distanced itself from biography as a genre -- biographers are often attacked for assuming a “Great Man in History” approach to interpreting historical events. But I still find biography a captivating way of studying history. It provides flesh to the lifeless abstractions that we call “institutions” and “structures.” It also provides us with a better sense of the craziness and the complexity of reality. And studying these individuals provides us with a refracted lens to better understand the larger invisible “structures” that govern this world.

(Nerve) Endings

2009-05-13T03:32:00.001-04:00

Every year, the History Department hosts a “101 Circus,” where undergraduates present their senior theses to a group of their fellow peers or professors. The “101” is a code for the senior thesis seminar that the students take, and it usually represents the culmination of a semester-long or year-long project that the students have researched and written. I love going to these events, not only because I get to learn about a wide-range of topics -- this year’s papers ranged from a paper on a Japanese castaways who landed in Baja California in the 1840s to one on Ecuadorian indigenous resistance groups in the 1980s -- but also because I get to see young minds articulate, perhaps for the first time in a formal setting, ideas in front of an audience.

It’s astonishing to see how different people perform under duress. Some are calm, collected, and mature beyond their age in terms of presentation and style. Others crack under the pressure. One of the presenters, who had a fascinating paper with amazing slides and stories, blanked under pressure, and at moments would lose his place in his presentation and just start staring into space. But what makes the event gratifying for me, is when all the moments click, all the pieces fit, and the presenter succeeds in conveying both the narrative and a complete mastery over argumentation.

I’ve always recommended to students who are thinking about graduate work in history: do a senior thesis and make a decision then. There’s nothing quite like writing the senior thesis. For the first time, not only do you get to choose a topic you’re interested in, but you also devise the reading list, the primary sources, and the different materials you want to work in by yourself. Making all these pieces come together is a momentous task. But when it happens, it’s a moment of true revelation, and it’s gratifying to see that moment work for certain students on a small stage.

San Francisco Gold Rush Walking Tour

2009-05-11T03:44:00.005-04:00

I'm a bit ashamed to admit this -- in the three years that I've been in the Bay Area, I've probably only been to San Francisco only a handful of times (not counting the times when I went to the orchestra). I took some of my students on a walking tour of San Francisco, with SF City Guides. We learned about the impact of the Gold Rush on the early formation of the City. I was shocked by how much of the current city is just landfill. Jackson Square Historic District, one of the city's oldest commercial districts, charmed me with its beautiful brick houses. Here are some pictures from the tour.

Old and New San Francisco. The Transamerica Pyramid dates from 1972, and the brick houses in the foreground from the 1860s.

The Transamerica Pyramid up close.

One of the charming brick houses in Jackson square. I loved the red brick.

A close up of one of the brick houses in Jackson Square, with steel-protected windows.

This was part of the Barbary Coast tour. The Barbary Coast became known as the "pleasure quarters" of old San Francisco, where gambling, prostitution, and smuggling of liquor became the norm.

Some traces of the old prostitution and crime of the Barbary Coast still exist. This was taken outside the Hippodrome, a former racetrack in the neighborhood.

Easter Thoughts

2009-04-12T03:30:00.001-04:00

Robert Krulwich’s meditation on silence in the Bible, done for the Radiolab Podcast, is one of the most beautiful sermons I have ever heard. Listen to it; it’ll take about 20 minutes of your time.

The most moving moment of the Easter Vigil service, for me, is the baptism and confirmation of new members into the Church. This is the second Easter Vigil service since my baptism, and both times I’ve been overcome by joy, as I remembered the moment of my own baptism. Sometimes we invert the meaning of Easter -- we think of Lent as a time of recommitting ourselves to living out our Christian faith through fasting or engaging in some sort of spiritual discipline for 40 days. But the Easter Vigil reminds us that Easter is not the end of Lent and spiritual discipleship, it’s the beginning. Through the public act of baptism, not only are we reminded of our own moments of commitment and baptism, but it is also a moment for us to reaffirm our support for one another and the newly baptised. Lent is a moment of entering into the barrenness and darkness, of encountering the despair of Christ. Easter is a moment of remembering the joys and the promise, of rejoicing, but also of remembering God’s commitment to us.

Universalism and Particularism

2009-04-11T02:42:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite photoblogs, the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture, has a series of photos of scenes from Holy Week across the globe. Many of the pictures are startling, and unsettling, to me -- pictures of flagellation, hoods that evoke images of the KKK, crucifixion, and so on. It’s humbling to be reminded of how diverse and wide-ranging Christian practice manifests itself around the world. One wonders if we have the same type of faith or believe in the same God.

The problem of universalism and particularism has been with Christianity since its inception. You find it in Galatians, when Paul argues with Peter over whether to tailor the message of the Gospel to Jew and Gentile alike. You find it in the Roman Empire, when Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity, elevating a particular religion to a universal one in the Empire. And of course, you find it wherever Christian missionaries have gone since -- China, Africa, the Philippines -- as the missionaries struggle with the question of how much indigenous practice they should incorporate into not only the institutional structures of Christian Churches, but also the theological outlook of the Church.

But I think these pictures give pretty definitive answers. The Church lives and breathes through its diverse practices. As much as it tries to define orthodoxy and orthopraxy, there will be just as many alternative, and oppositional practices, and beliefs, that survive and flourish. It’s precisely this ability to constantly recreate and re-interpret the Christian doctrine that will keep faith vital and flexible.

Rereading Paul

2009-03-31T04:36:00.002-04:00

Do confident people necessarily come off as assholes to the people around them? I’ve been re-reading Galatians with Margaret, and perhaps I just haven’t read Paul in awhile, but I couldn’t help thinking -- gee, Paul sure comes off as an asshole here (ducking for cover). Take the beginning of Galatians, for example. Paul is writing a letter to the Galatians, and he’s obviously unhappy about how the church plant is going. He chastises the Galatians for “deserting” the gospel that he has preached for a different one, “which is really no gospel at all.” We later find out that this is a contest between Peter over interpretations about following the law vs. grace. More on that later. To establish the authority of his version of the Gospel over Peter’s, Paul goes on to tell the Galatians this:
13For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. 14I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. 15But when God, who set me apart from birth[a] and called me by his grace, was pleased 16to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, 17nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus.
18Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter[b] and stayed with him fifteen days. 19I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord's brother. 20I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. 21Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. 22I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. 23They only heard the report: "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." 24And they praised God because of me.

What’s struck me about this passage is that Paul asserts that his authority is derived from his isolation from the rest of the Christian community. He had come to his understanding of the Gospel even though he “did not consult any man.” He was “personally unknown to the churches of Judea,” and the only person that he had met after his conversion was Peter and James. He stresses that God had “set him apart from birth,” and people “praised God” because of his conversion.

It’s clear that Paul is confident in his message and tries to buttress it by relating it through his personal experiences. But I couldn’t help but thinking about it from the Galatian perspective. Here you are, trying to figure out how to live a good, decent, spiritual life, and one apostle, Peter, tells you, follow these rules and regulations -- circumcise your kids, prepare the foods a certain way -- as basic spiritual disciplines and regulations. And in comes an itinerant outsider, who lambasts you, calling you “foolish,” asserting his own authority through divine revelation. I’m not saying that Paul wasn’t right, but if I were a Galatian, I probably would have thought that he was a bit of an asshole.

But that leads me to my bigger question -- if you feel like you have a certain hold on the truth, and that everybody else is wrong, does that have to lead to abrasive action? Or is this a matter of personality? Paul does mention how he was “extremely zealous” before his conversion, so maybe this is a character trait, more than a question of fervent belief?

Caught Between the Cracks

2009-03-29T04:23:00.001-04:00

I read this post on the Berkeley Livejournal Community, an online community where students trade information and rants, and was sad to read how the poster felt that she had wasted four years of her time studying engineering, and how college had killed her curiosity for learning. “I spent 4 years and got nothing more than what I think is a shoddy vocational training from the College of Engineering,” she complains. Some of the comments in response to the post are heartbreaking as well, echoing her frustrations with Berkeley and how it has sucked the life out of their curiosity for learning.

The problem with Berkeley, as with most other major universities in the US today, is that it is a battleground where two competing visions of education are at war. On one side stands the mantra and rhetoric of the liberal arts education. According to this liberal arts tradition, the mission of the university is to train a new generation of well-rounded thinkers, who are equipped to perform their civic duties. The competing vision is one of specialization and increasing professionalization of academic life. Universities are meant to be places that teach professional, “useful” skills that equip students to become useful “doers,” members of society who have some form of expertise. In America, this contest over the mission of the university has been waging ever since the 1850s, with the founding of land-grant colleges, which provided an alternative to the German model of the purely academic university. The University of California was created under the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, with the aim of creating an agricultural college so that the research created within universities could be funneled back to the public, and so that more people could benefit from the knowledge produced in higher education. The University merged the private College of California and the public agricultural college created by the land-grant act. The idea of an elite, exclusive, classical liberal education thus coexisted uneasily with a more democratic, “practical,” and specialized vision of higher learning. It wasn’t until Clark Kerr, the president who bungled the management of the Berkeley student riots in the 1960s (but was then hailed as a visionary reformer of higher education), who pushed forward the reform of the California state system. With the baby boom and the influx of students into higher education, Kerr set up a three tier system, with the the UCs (Berkeley, LA, Santa Cruz, etc.) devoted to research, the Cal States devoted to undergraduate education, and community colleges providing vocational training.

Of course, these boundaries between different types of knowledge have always been fluid and incoherent. I think it’s these fluid and overlapping boundaries that often leave students, and professors for that matter, caught between the cracks. While the UCs have the simultaneous goal of creating cutting-edge research and an undergraduate liberal education, what often happens is that professors are torn between devoting time to teaching and spending more time on their research. In theory, we’re often fed the rhetoric that the two benefit one another (cutting edge research produces good teaching), but in reality, it often becomes an either/or choice -- stories of jet-setting researchers who abandon their students are all too common in academia. Students are further trapped, as they are presented with two options: specializing in a trade with the promise of getting a job after college, or a liberal arts education that (on the surface) leaves you less competitive on the job market. What this means is that college is best suited for individually precocious students, or people who have the initiative and foresight to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives when they’re 18 or 19. But therein lies the rub. How can we expect them to know what they want to do with their lives or fashion their careers when they’re still teenagers?

I’m not sure how to bridge the gap between these two differing visions of education. But I think, from the teacher’s standpoint, Barry Schwartz reminds us of a good place to start: let’s get back to teaching practical wisdom. In his talk at the TED conference, Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice, argues that the problems with society today is that we stopped being wise, instead, we’ve become a society obsessed with rules and incentives. We’ve forgotten how to relate with each other morally; we’ve neglected the cultivation of virtues like honesty and courage in the midst of trying to become more competitive. And we’ve consigned the teaching of ethics to specific “ethics courses,” instead of presenting ethics as a problem that needs to be addressed in all fields. Let’s return to wisdom, Schwartz says, and I think he’s right.

Record Shopping

2009-03-27T04:26:00.002-04:00

I saw pictures of the Virgin Megastore in Times Square closing down today and weeped a little. As the linked post reports, this marks the end of major record stores in New York City, with Tower Records and Kim’s having gone out of business last year and earlier this year. Although I have no fond memories of the inflated CD prices, I have numerous memories of heading down towards Lincoln Center and Times Square after midterms or finals, browsing the racks to see what new music was out, hoping to find that perfect CD.

My addiction to record stores began when I started listening to jazz in high school. Prior to that, I listened exclusively to rock and pop, and my trips to CD stores were pit-stops. I would stop by a CD store to pick up the latest record that other people were listening to, or just take a quick look at the top 10 list and be on my way. The whole shopping experience would be twenty minutes tops. But when I got into jazz in high school, purchasing a CD became an ordeal, almost a ritual, for me.

The ritual began with research. The Internet during those days consisted of dial-up modems and “Hotbot” searches, so I didn’t really know whether there were resources online, nor did I have the time or patience to search for them. My high school history teacher was my wikipedia, and he gave me a list of CDs and artists that I should check out. After he left, one of my dad’s students happened to be a jazz buff, and we would chat every week. He was supposed to tutor me in chemistry, since I was abroad during the 10th grade, and missed a year’s worth of high school chemistry. Instead of talking about electron transfers, we would talk about Monk, Coltrane, and Ellington. He was the first person who introduced me to Brad Mehldau, and I still remember the first time I heard of Mehldau. My “tutor” excitedly ended our session by taking out Mehldau’s Art of the Trio 4 from his backpack and shoved the disc into my hand. Every month, I would usually have a list of CD recommendations in hand, ready to look for them in the CD store.

Thankfully, the jazz sections in Taiwan’s CD stores were small. The problem with American CDs in Taiwan is that the Taiwanese record labels cover the spine of the CD case with an extra case, oftentimes bearing a Chinese transliteration of both the musicians name and the album title. Even though the CD inside is an exact replica of what you find in the US, there is an extra layer of packaging. Miles Davis thus becomes 麥爾斯·戴維斯, which meant that most of the time I wasn’t sure what the CD was or who the musicians was until I slid the CD out of the rack. I would thus have to inspect each CD, look at the album covers, and determine whether I would buy it. Oftentimes this would be a two to three hour ordeal. Afternoons would be devoted to record shopping.

Listening to the music was a physical experience for me. I would wait with anticipation until I got home, and slowly open the plastic casing. I would read the liner notes, carefully taking notes about who the sidemen were, how the writer described the music. I still contend that I learned most of my knowledge about jazz from liner notes, and it’s a shame that they don’t have professional writers write those anymore. I would then plop on my bed, put on my head phones, and listen. There would inevitably be the disappointing CD. But there was nothing like finding the treasures. I still remember exactly where I was when I heard Saxophone Colossus for the first time, lying on my bed, gazing up into the ceiling, with the liner notes and CD case right next to my pillow.

Hsinchu was not a “hotbed” of jazz. My appetite for records soon meant that I had to set my sights on Taipei. My dad’s student gave me a list of CD stores that I had to go visit. That was just around the time the subway (MRT) became operational in Taipei, and there was a Tower Records close to one of the MRT lines in Taipei. There was also a collection of smaller, but also more specialized record shops around the train station. I would head to Taipei, get off the bus, spend an afternoon in record shops, and catch the bus back to Hsinchu. On the bus ride back, I would rip open the CD case, pop it into my Sony Walkman Portable CD Player (remember those?) and listen to my new find. The bus ride would fly by to the tunes of Clifford Brown and Max Roach.

So New York was heaven to me. Not only was there a Kim’s next to Columbia, but also a Tower Records and Virgin Megastore right off subway lines. In my freshman year, I also got into vinyl, because of the the thousands of second hand record shops that sold jazz. My favorite was Gryphon Record Store on 72nd street. But Jazz Record Center on 26th Street was also amazing -- I still remember to this day the euphoria of walking out of the elevator and seeing the rows and rows of vinyl. It was amazing. I would also go to the record fairs put on by WFMU every year.

All of this probably just sounds like commodity fetishism, but the larger point is that my interaction with music was so different during the age of the CD. It’s strange to think that the medium has gone out of style within less than 10 years. I rarely buy CDs anymore now, and I download a lot of songs. It’s cheaper, I can find out-of-print stuff more readily, I don’t need to leave my house to have fresh music at my ears. It’s convenient. It’s easy. There’s none of the clutter for my already space-less room But I also don’t have the same type of relationship to the music anymore. I don’t digest songs anymore. My attention span for music has diminished. If an artist can’t catch my attention within the first 30 second of a song, I switch songs; I’ve stockpiled so much other music that I have little patience for it. I rarely sit and listen to one full album in one sitting. Strangely, my listening habits have narrowed. Even though I have a ton of music, I find myself listening to the same several songs over and over again. The promise of unlimited choice has paralyzed my listening habits. I rarely feel the freshness and anticipation that I used to feel when I was opening up a new CD.

Maybe I’ll go browsing in a CD store this weekend.

Spiritual Melancholy

2009-03-21T13:35:00.001-04:00

This has been a year of spiritual melancholy for me. The roots of the melancholy has not been doubt of the Gospel -- my faith in the urgency of Christ’s message of love and forgiveness in the world has not ebbed. I think it’s been more a sense of spiritual dislocation. Part of this has been my continual dissatisfaction with the church communities that I’ve been attending (which was the root of my posts on community). I haven’t been able to find a church where I completely feel at home. This has been a cross-denominational phenomenon. The Catholic Church that I attend has been consistently uninspiring, in terms of preaching, music, and hospitality. I’ve been going to a Protestant church, which has a really well produced and slick production. But in terms of preaching, despite the heavy emphasis on social justice and global missions, there’s been a remarkable tin ear to (what I feel are) the relevant issues of the day. Perhaps it’s just been me, but I find the silence of all these churches regarding the current financial crises morally irresponsible. As much as I admire the emphasis on global missions and global justice, I find this a convenient way to export and turn our gazes away from the problems around us. It’s much easier to mobilize outrage over “distant suffering” than it is to address problems at home. I know this is an incredibly individualistic way of viewing church attendance, but I just feel like the churches I attend are not addressing the spiritual questions that I’ve been struggling with: how to apply and think about our current world from a Biblically informed perspective. Nor does it seem like there’s a community that is interested in openly engaging with these issues.

The China I Never Knew

2009-03-20T00:05:00.006-04:00

只是我自己的寂寞是不可不驅除的，因為這于我太痛苦。我于是用了種種法來麻醉自己的靈魂，使我沉入于國民中，使我回到古代去，後來也親歷或旁觀過幾樣更寂寞更悲哀的事，都為我所不願追懷，甘心使他們和我的腦一同消滅在泥土里的，但我的麻醉法卻也似乎已經奏了功，再沒有青年時候的慷慨激昂的意思了。-- 魯迅, 《吶喊》

But I had no choice but to expel my loneliness, for it was too painful for me. I thus used various means to anesthetize my soul, so that I sunk within the will of the people, and found solace within the ancients. Later I experienced and witness events that exacerbated my loneliness and sorrow, so painful that I am unwilling to remember them, hoping that they perish into the ground with me. But the attempt to anesthesize my soul seems to have worked, for I have lost the fervor and vigor of my youth. -- Lu Xun, Preface to Call to Arms

National narratives erase the past, and one of the characters that was erased from the Taiwanese educational narrative of my youth was Lu Xun. I had heard of Lu Xun growing up, but he was hardly celebrated; perhaps I was insulated from that type of literature anyway in the bilingual school that I went to, but the modern writer that we were all forced to read was Xu Zhimo. His sentimental poem about leaving Cambridge《再別康橋》was etched into my brain when I was in middle school, and I can still recite lines from it today. The textbooks glamorized Xu Zhimo's life, filled with wanderings to top universities in the Anglo-American world, highly publicized love affairs and scandals, and a tragic plane accident that cut short his short but brilliant career. Xu embodied an image that the Republic of China had hoped to project to the West -- Romantic, cosmopolitan, bourgeois, brilliantly and unapologetically adept at navigating the modern, Western world. His shortened life also stood as a warning: if not for some unfortunate circumstances, we could have made it too.

I'm being examined in Chinese literature for my exams in May, and I've been fascinated by how marginal Xu Zhimo is, in comparison to the towering figure of the field, Lu Xun. And for good reason. Reading Lu Xun has been one of the most harrowing and fulfilling experiences of my graduate school career thus far. It's difficult to explain the types of emotions that Lu Xun evokes in me. His deep melancholy and mental anguish drip off each page. But his writing is not nostalgia for a certain idealized and lost past. Rather, his writing is a unflinching examination of a soul and society in deep crisis. This is fiction that cuts, that scrapes, that looks reality straight in the eye, but with a distant and critical irony. There is a smoldering anger that rumbles beneath the page, but it is not the chest-thumping nationalism that we saw during the Olympics, nor is it the victimized outrage that we hear(d) from Chen Shui-bien. This is a China that is willing to look reality in the eye and denounce the social evils of the past, but also not slavishly imitate foreign powers. This is a China that I never knew existed, and I think I've fallen in love with it.

Paradoxes

2009-03-13T03:17:00.003-04:00

This New Yorker piece on David Foster Wallace moved me. It is an example of great journalistic writing -- it combines extensive research of Foster's life with a deep and rich interpretation of not only Wallace's inner demons but also the social milieu which created the burdens that eventually led to his death. The article is suffused with a deep sorrow; it laments the passing of a brilliant individual, trapped in a cycle of self-doubt, depression, and addiction.

The article reminded me of Radio Lab's episode on "Choice." One of the first interviews in the show is done with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice. Schwartz points out that despite the unprecedented amount of choice and wealth that is available to the current generation of Americans, rates of clinical depression have also skyrocketed. The tragedy of this generation has been the paralysis that accompanies the promise of unlimited choice; instead of liberating us, unlimited choices have crippled and overwhelmed us.

In the article, Foster comes across as brilliant, but trapped by his own ingenuity. Max describes how Foster could do anything he wanted -- he was good at math, a tennis protege, obviously a great writer. After his rise to literary fame, he was plagued by the burden of trying to be great, of trying to live up to his previous success. It's easy to think about Foster's story as the tragic end of a singular genius. But I think Foster's tragedy embodies the tragedy of our age, one of having to grapple with the paradoxes of the post-modern world.

Thinking about Collapse

2009-03-11T04:26:00.005-04:00

Michael Spencer, otherwise known as the Internet Monk, has a post in the Christian Science Monitor on the "coming evangelical collapse." There's quite a bit of dire predictions in the article for the future of evangelicals. I've been reading Spencer for years now, so I realize some of his writing verges on the hysterical, but it all originates from a deep desire to understand discipleship and reinvigorate evangelicalism with a more "Jesus-centric" message. His main critique of present evangelicalism has been its capitulation to culture at large (he has great rants on Contemporary Christian Music); instead of putting Jesus at the center of their preaching, evangelical churches have presented a watered-down, feel-good, get-rich-quick version of the gospel. Instead of setting themselves apart from culture and being a trenchant critique of society, evangelicals have become too embedded within it. And Spencer predicts that culture is going to become increasingly secular and inhospitable to evangelicals to the point that the churches will collapse.

I agree a lot with Spencer's criticisms of popular evangelicalism, and I've been disillusioned with the evangelical church for a lot of the same reasons. But as much as I'm sympathetic to his agenda of revitalizing evangelical faith, I think he operates on one fundamentally shaky assumption -- the problem of orthodoxy. For Spencer, the key to revitalizing the evangelical Church is to return to the basics, a return to teaching the "orthodox" positions of faith. The problem with this is -- what does "orthodoxy" mean in a Protestant context? The history of Christianity has been a two thousand year struggle over the content of orthodoxy, and to say that we can somehow return to a point where we all agree is "orthodox" and then start over from there is wishful fantasy. Yes, I agree that God's love is unchanging, but the way we as Christians interpret that love is constantly changing, and we need to renew those interpretations in order for them to remain relevant to the social and political landscape.

This is not to say that Christians should just sway and move with larger political and social movements. I think the great lesson of 20th century Protestantism is that the Church should not connect its fate with one political party too closely. Mainline Protestantism made a fateful alliance with the anti-Vietnam protests, and once the war was over and the culture had shifted against 70s counter-culture radicalism, the legitimacy of the mainline Churches was deeply undercut. Likewise, I think Spencer is dead on that the evangelical embrace of hard-right conservatism has undermined their larger message.

I think the way for the churches to renew themselves is to once again pick up the mantle of prophetic preaching, to address social issues from a Biblical perspective, drawing on the lessons that we've learned from the past. This prophetic preaching should not be the self-righteous chest thumping of the liberal left, nor the hell-fire and brimstone guilt trips of the right. Instead, it should be an honest, humble attempt at trying to work through difficult issues from a Christ-centered perspective. Instead of pretending that we have a monopoly on the truth, we need to be honest and proclaim that we don't know what the future will hold, but we believe that there are certain truths that can help guide our actions.

On a more personal note, I've been attending a Presbyterian Church for the past couple of months, and not once has the pastor engaged the problem of the financial crisis at length. Not once! People are confused, frustrated, and scared, and you're telling me that the Bible has nothing to say about this? Instead the usual platitudes of putting yourself at the feet of Jesus, giving your life over to the Lord drone on. I think this is the crisis that the Church faces -- a message that becomes increasingly irrelevant and marginalized. A retreat from politics into "orthodoxy" will not save evangelicals from that marginalization.

Reconnecting with a former Self

2009-03-08T05:39:00.010-04:00

Honoré Daumier's Ratapoil, courtesy of the Web Gallery of Art

"The masterpiece of the Second Republic is Ratapoil -- directly political in subject and intention, but in its style stepping out of the nineteenth century altogether. Apart from Death in Rethel's New Dance of Death -- and this in itself is an image which imitates the past quite deliberatley -- there is no source for Ratapoil... [Ratapoil] is villain, but also hero; the servant of power but also its dupe; his clothes are ragged and threadbare; his face and beard are a death's head but also a comic mask... In Ratapoil the broken surface, marked with the comb at every point, seems to eat into the solid of the figure, making it tenuous and fragile. That is why the sculpture conjures up skeletons and the dance of deth: the wrinkled trousers and the great billow of the ceased tail-coat are mimicked, on a smaller scale, by the folds and openings of every surface, so that there seems to be no flesh inside the clothes." -- T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois, on Honoré Daumier's sculpture Ratapoil.

One of the most gratifying (or perhaps frightening) moments in life is discovering the story behind an unexplained object, person, or action that once held your attention. It could be re-connecting with a long-lost friend, or figuring out the name of a song that you once heard in a fleeting moment on the radio. I had that experience today, when reading T. J. Clark's masterful The Absolute Bourgeois, which analyzes art produced under the Second Republic in France, right after the Revolutions of 1848 up until the coup d'état by Louis Napoleon in 1851.

I first came across Honoré Daumier's Ratapoil the summer of my junior year in college. It was my first trip to Paris on my own, and I was strolling through the Museé D'Orsay. Daumier's sculpture immediately stood out to me. There was a life, a vitality, a mischievousness to the piece that instantly grabbed me. I loved the form of the body, and how the artist used space to give life to the form. I had no idea who Daumier was, and I didn't know what the placard Ratapoil meant -- was he the name of some figure? Was Ratapoil a member of a certain social class, a certain social type? I remember thinking to myself that he seemed like a Don Quixote type of character. I took some picture of the figure and the placard, and soon moved on. I thought to myself -- make sure to look this up when you get home. Of course, I never did look him up, but the image of the piece stuck with me.

Fast forward to March, 2009. I was gripped by Clark's account of the artistic world, and when he provided the delicious descriptions of Daumier's Ratapoil, something rung a bell. I quickly flipped to the pictures, and there he was -- mischievously glancing up at me, as if asking me "What took you so long to find me?" But this time, of course, I actually understood who he was, and what the stakes were in the production of the piece. The first time around, I was attracted to the sculpture solely on aesthetic grounds; this time around, I was fascinated by the social and political critiques and caricatures that the work embodied.

I've been having moments like this a lot this year. I've re-read books that I used to think were completely impossible and incomprehensible, and the second time around thinking, "Oh, so THAT'S what it's all about?" On the one hand, I laugh out loud to think how uninformed and stupid I was in the past. On the other, I marvel at how much I've actually learned. It's like re-connecting with a long-lost friend, and the momentary joy of realizing the amount you've both grown and experienced in the intermittent years, tempered by commiserating together over how arduous and painful that process was. Except this time, it's reconnecting with a former self. It's these little moments of reconnection, in the midst of the drudgery of graduate school, that make it all worth it.

Yet more on community-building, with a dab of Nostalgia

2009-03-06T03:52:00.009-05:00

For the class I'm teaching, we read a piece on the destruction of Tokyo during the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which registered 8.3 (!!!) on the Richter scale and devastated the city. The quake occurred around noon, and many lamps and fire stoves exploded, and the fires killed more than 100,000 people. The so-called "Low-City," which consisted of the old Edo entertainment quarters and other iconic parts of the old town that stood for its vibrancy and diversity, was essentially flattened. The article details the ideological and political battles over the reconstruction of the city. Modernizers rejoiced at the chance to sweep away the old and rebuild Tokyo along rational, modern, Western principles, replete with gas lamps, wide streets suited for automobiles and the like. Yet, a pervasive sense of nostalgia also ran through the political discussions of the day; people also longed for a return to the "idyllic" times of Edo. We all know what happened next -- the modernizers won out. The seeds of the modern Tokyo, a behemoth with subway lines, skyscrapers, and organized parks and gardens, were thus planted (of course it needed to rebuild again in 1945, but that's another story).

Does the appearance of nostalgia always run parallel to the formation of new types of communities? Both the dreams of the modernist urban planners and the nostalgic reveries of the people were different ways of coping with the real and traumatic events of death and destruction. Yet they also acted as defensive mechanisms in response to the creation of new bonds and urban spaces. Nostalgia was a defensive posture that not only idealized the past, but also provided an avenue to criticize the hyper modernist, soulless urban planning that was sweeping through the city. Progressive optimism not only legitimized the modernist vision the city, but also provided a faith in the future through the abandonment of the old.

The prospect of exploring new, unforeseen territory frightens, and one is oftentimes pushed into adopting one of two stances -- embrace the new or romanticize the old. Are there other positions one can take?

"Communities" Redux

2009-03-04T04:25:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking about "communities" more, and I keep wondering what it is that bothers me so much when I hear Christian Churches exhort its congregation to "build communities." Upon further reflection, I think that I'm uncomfortable with this notion of "creating community" because of the underlying, inherent violence that those decisions entail. Yes, on the one hand "creating community" is an act of making new bonds and extending yourself in new directions, but this also means that potentially some old ties are weakened, severed, or in most extreme cases, demolished. Most of the time, these are relatively painless, low-stakes decisions -- choosing to go serve at a soup kitchen or a prayer meeting, rather than hanging out with a college friend, for example.

But what lingers in my mind, and what makes me wary of this rhetoric of "communal building," are the countless historical examples of "community building" with higher, much more tragic stakes. Such as the numerous cases of nation building in the 19th and 20th centuries -- Serbian Christians, for example, who had lived in peace next to Albanian Muslims, called upon to fight one another in the name of Greater Serbia or Liberation.

What bothers me, then, is how little self-consciousness most evangelical churches approach the question of "community," and how they don't take a more critical stance to what they mean when they seek to "build communities" -- they fail to realize that sometimes when they build new communities, they are actively destroying old ones as well.

"Communities"

2009-03-02T03:35:00.005-05:00

The great white whale that all evangelical churches chase after is the ideal "community." No church service ends without some sort of appeal to the further development and improvement of the "community," whether that be to create a more fervent "community of believers," or a "community of seekers," or "community of justice-doers," or a "community committed to X or Y cause." In a way, the rhetoric of "community" is less a concrete proposal that teaches the congregation how to create or engender a new type of community than it is an acknowledgement that such a "community" does not exist. An appeal to a "community of believers who lift each other up in prayer" often times is more of an admonishment that "you aren't praying for each other enough" than it is actually giving concrete, applicable advice for how to build that community -- how to pray for one another, speak to one another, and be spiritual companions to one another.

Because ultimately, the term "community" is vague. We'll know what it looks like when we see it, but until we do, keep trying on building it. Within the academy, the term "community" has been widely debated, especially among sociologists. What is the difference between, say, a fantasy basketball league and a church small group? Are there any differences? It becomes dicey for academics who look at groups of people who have multiple overlapping communal commitments, or also communities that cross multiple categories and boundaries. For example, many people I know are simultaneously in fantasy basketball groups and small groups. Why is that necessary? Why would somebody actively seek to be part of a small group and a fantasy basketball group that consist of the same group of people? In the historical literature, there has been a lot of discussion about the importance of associational groups, and how the existence of voluntary associational groups is key for there to be potential avenues for mobilizing and resisting state oppression.

When I was writing up my post yesterday about the last Cal home game and my feelings about Cal basketball, I couldn't help but notice the religious metaphors that kept popping up in my mind. Modern day sports has been called elsewhere as the "new religion," and I think there's something to that. Stadiums are the Cathedrals of the 20th and 21st centuries, and people talk of "pilgrimages" to Lambeau Field and Fenway Park. On a personal level as well, the type of emotional and spiritual ecstasy that I experienced after Cal beat Stanford (sorry Josh) has probably never been equaled by any church service I've been to.

So what's the point? I'm not entirely sure, and I'm still trying to work out in my head the meaning of these different types of "communities" and how they are formed. But I think one of the fundamental tensions within Christianity, or for any other associational group for that matter, is how to deal with the question of overlapping commitments, given the finite amount of resources and time that a person has. How can a Christian be in this world but not be of it? How can one be a good parent and a good academic at the same time? How can one be a filial son in a country that does not stress filial piety?

Last Home Game

2009-02-28T23:52:00.000-05:00

Today was the last home game for the Cal men's basketball team. The outcome of the game was a tough loss to UCLA in a close game; Cal out-played UCLA for most of the game, but UCLA went on a 16-2 run to get a big lead. We rallied but fell short in the end.

As a basketball fan, there are certain teams that stay with you; you feel a special connection with them, and they occupy almost a spiritual space in your soul. I've been a basketball fan for almost my whole conscious life, and I hold three teams in special regard -- the '94-'95 Orlando Magic, the '03-'04 Detroit Pistons, and the '08-'09 Cal Bears.

I don't remember the exact moment when I fell in love with the Orlando Magic. My brother was always a Shaquille O'Neal fan, ever since he entered the league, so we would always tune in to their games if they were on TV. We collected basketball cards then, and I remember him buying a Shaq rookie card and framing it in a plastic seal for "posterity's sake." But I remember seeing clips of the Orlando Magic play on shows like NBA Inside Stuff and NBA Jam (this was when NBA Inside Stuff and NBA Jam were weekly religious viewings) and being hooked. They were marketed as young, brash, and exciting. What I loved about that team was that everybody had such a defined role -- there was the sharp-shooter in Dennis Scott, the slasher/shooter in Nick Anderson, the dominant center in Shaq, the hard-working power forward in Horace Grant, and the effervescent Penny Hardaway. The offense was beautiful to watch. I remember taping the first half of Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets, and to this day it's probably the most enjoyable half of basketball I've seen played, where everybody was clicking with each other. Everything went down hill after that.

The second team that I felt a particular bond for was the '03-'04 Detroit Pistons. Like the '94-'95 Magic team, they had a closely knit starting five that set the tone. Everyone knew their roles and complemented one another well. I loved how all of the starting five were members who had been unwanted by other teams. I enjoyed watching the team because there was no one dominant player, but when the five players were clicking together, nobody could beat them.

The '08-'09 Cal Bears are similar. Everybody projected them to go last, or at the bottom of the Pac-10. The team is undersized, and we don't have any players who can dominate their positions. Instead, we have a group of players who are well-coached, who play smart, who can shoot the ball, and who play hard every game. They're a joy to watch, and when they're moving and the shots are falling, they're hard to beat.

But more than anything, the reason why this team means a lot to me is the amount of excitement over basketball that it's brought to Berkeley. This is the first time that I've felt fully invested in a "local" sport. I never felt allegiance to New York sports, and I could never really get completely into Columbia basketball. But the transformation that Mike Montgomery and this team has brought to Berkeley basketball is astounding. Games last year were poisonous at times, and the attitude of the fans got downright nasty towards our former coach. On the other hand, the game watching experience has been completely different this year. I've never seen the stadium so packed, with so much excitement surrounding the game. I'll always remember this team for its ability to build community almost instantly, and its ability to transform the atmosphere at games so profoundly.

Defending History?

2009-02-27T03:57:00.004-05:00

This New York Times article has been making the rounds both within the blogosphere and among my friends who either teach the humanities or are in Ph. D programs. The article basically predicts a grim outlook for the humanities within American universities due to the economic downtown, as universities are finding ways to cut costs. And which programs are the first to go? The ones that don't have any "public utility." Other than an initial snarky response -- "wait a second, the people who got us into this mess were math, science, and MBAs, and WE get cut for it?" -- I was at a loss about how to respond. Which has really troubled me. This is my fourth semester GSI-ing (otherwise known as TA-ing at other universities), and every semester I begin with the hope of ending the semester with some type of rousing appeal to why studying history is important. I still haven't delivered that speech.

In a way, I've been asking myself this question ever since my sophomore year of college, when I decided to major in history. Why study history? Why is it important? Is it useful? There's no doubt of the personal fulfillment historical studies has provided my life -- I love talking about ideas and I love books.

The public utility bit? I'm not so sure about that. In all honesty, I don't know if there's any truth to the hackneyed clichés about history. These include the time tested phrases -- History helps foster critical thinking (what kind of history? And what kind of critical thinking? Some types of historical writing foster blind unquestioning as well). It helps us become more well-rounded people (in what sense? Well-rounded with respect to what?). It helps prevent us from repeating the mistakes of the past (whenever I hear that statement being thrown around, I shudder).

But what I've found most compelling about studying history ever since I entered graduate school has been the constant reminder of the fragility and contingent nature of most historical processes and decisions. History is as much about the study, analysis, and critique of what happened as it is the study of what might have been. And these glimpses into the contingent nature provides us with a bit of optimism for the construction of a more just, egalitarian, and radically different society than the messed up world we have now.

Does history offer concrete policy plans for how society can be reformed? I'm not so sure. But it damn well provides us with hope that there is the possibility for change.

Ash Wednesday Reflections

2009-02-26T03:00:00.003-05:00

I'm not really sure what this says about me, but Lent is my favorite season of the liturgical calendar. I love the season of Advent as well, but the promises and the types of reflections that each season engenders are fundamentally different. The Christmas season is about finding redemption in the radically unexpected, surprising, joyfully sacred corners of life -- the King is a vulnerable baby privately born in a manger, hunted but protected by the warmth and glow of the myrrh and hay. Easter is about finding salvation also in the most unexpected of places, but but this time in most public, socially despised square -- the King is crucified and hung on a cross for all to see, spat on and humiliated.

Yet the processes of celebrating these two seasons are curiously inverted. We celebrate Jesus's private birth in a manger, by extending our sights outward, embracing our friends and families and seeking the love of God in others. But during Lent, in remembering Jesus's public act of crucifixion, instead the Church exhorts us to turn inwards and retreat into self-reflection. Both seasons are periods where we celebrate the promises of wholeness and healing that Jesus represents, but the acts of worship take radically different forms.

Perhaps it's the narcissist in me that prefers Lent over Christmas, that yearns for a retreat into the self rather than an extension of the self towards others. But I think it's also because Lent provides the hope that we can perhaps glimpse glimmers of salvation and perfection within ourselves. While Christmas focuses on the radical otherness of God's ministry, Lent is a time to reflect on the radical human-ness of God's love. Christmas is much easier -- it's much easier to find God's image within the ones we love. Lent, on the other hand, is hard work. It's a time of digging, scraping, and wallowing through the muck that covers our souls, in hope of perhaps catching a glimpse of that divine spark that resides within each and every one of us.

Which is why, every Lent, I look forward to the digging.

Listening to Mehldau

2008-08-15T06:00:00.004-04:00

Brad Mehldau is one of those rare jazz musicians who has entered the jazz stratosphere, where every release of a new Mehldau album obligates universal praise from the critics. His most recent album, "Brad Mehldau Trio Live," culled from a series of performances at the Village Vanguard with his trio of Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard in 2006, is no exception. Every review I've read of the album has been of four stars or more, hailing this as another example of "contemporary piano jazz at its finest," or some other type of cliched platitude.

Brad Mehldau's music produces two simultaneous and polar opposite responses within me. On the one hand, there's the feeling of unabashed adoration and admiration. I remember hearing his rendition of "All the Things You Are," on Art of the Trio, Vol 4: Back at the Village Vanguard, for the first time, and being blown away by the vitality and creativity that Mehldau injected into a familiar tune. This was the Mehldau who stretched the imaginations of listeners, one who was able to surprise and to delight with his reharmonizations, his long flowing and ever unfolding lines of improvisation. The other Mehldau album that comes close to reproducing these feelings within me is his solo album, Live in Tokyo, where he lets his imagination runs free.

The other feeling, though, that Mehldau provokes is one of frustration. And perhaps this is the lot of all prodigious artists who publish and record constantly: the quality of the work becomes uneven, lacking in inspiration. A lot of his work flat out bores me. Mehldau is a stylistic chameleon; he is comfortable in almost every setting, whether that be pop covers, straightahead jazz, or music bordering on free jazz. Mehldau's sound is flighty, darty, "cerebral." It's this elusivity that so often frustrates me. Mehldau lacks a certain bravado, a conviction perhaps, in his playing. As opposed to The Bad Plus, who sledge-hammer their musical statements on stage, Mehldau often seems one step removed from his playing. It's as if he's observing himself from outside of his body, thinking, oh, what if I push forward here, what if I do this run there? The best type of jazz improvisation, in my mind, lies in that invisible line where a musician has complete mastery and control over the music, but that mastery is volatile, and at anytime the musician can be swept away by the overwhelming chaos inherent in the music. It's the same reason why people love to watch NASCAR racing -- we love to watch the control, of the cars, but at the same time we know that at those speeds, anything could happen, things could fall apart in an instant. And isn't that the essence of swing -- you're riding the wave, but the wave also rides you. We know Mehldau can swing with the best of them, hell, he knows he can swing with the best, but it often sounds like Mehldau is unwilling to let the music itself transform and sweep him away; he's always in control. But when he does push those boundaries, when he probes those moments of chaos, the outcomes are revelations.

The new album evokes these two types of emotions. As always, it's tightly produced, meticulously recorded, and the music is, as always, perfectly played -- boringly perfect. The arrangements are smart, the tunes well chosen ("Wonderwall," in particular, adopts a nasty funk-like groove, a delight to hear such a familiar tune in such different territory). For almost 40 minutes in the first CD, there are no surprises -- no twists and turns, where the moment of improvisation and musical ingenuity take flight. Rather, it's the same old Brad Mehldau, in control, master of his musical universe.

There is a moment, though, in "The Very Thought of You," Mehldau's last track on the first CD, where after some fine and subtle playing, the drum and bass cut out, and he starts playing solo. The improvisation is typical Mehldau, with jarring, dissonant chords and impressive two hand dissonant arpeggio runs, interspersed with some one-note repititions and lower range hits. But what's different is that there's some life, some kick, where Mehldau seems to be letting go of some of his control (or at least presents the illusion of letting himself go). It's a brief moment, and I had to wait almost 40 minutes to get there, but it was worth the wait .

Frederic Bourdin and Tony Soprano

2008-08-08T04:15:00.006-04:00

Read David Grann's fascinating article in the New Yorker on Frederic Bourdin, a thirty year-old French con artist who impersonated a series of teenagers throughout Spain and France. He eventually ended up in Texas, pretending to be Nicholas Barclay, a missing 14 year old boy. About midway, the article shifts almost into a detective-novel mode, where it becomes as much about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay as it does about the imposter Bourdin. This makes for riveting reading, but disappointing analysis. David Grann is content to rely on pop-psychology, allowing Bourdin to analyze himself. Bourdin believes that his insatiable desire to continue impersonating others is the result of a broken childhood, and that he impersonates in order to fulfill an emotional void. He keeps looking for a family that he never had. As much as I loved this article, this type of pop-psychoanalysis failed to satisfy -- I left the article without any deeper understanding of why Bourdin chose to live a life of an imposter. And perhaps David Grann couldn't offer up more explanations, that a further rationalization of the type of behavior would trivialize the complexities and mysteries of the human psyche.

It's precisely this type of tension, between the desire to rationalize violent and the inability to explain the source of it, that provides much of the drama in The Sopranos. Much of the conflict within The Sopranos centers around Tony Soprano's resistance to psycho-therapy -- he doesn't want to blame his violent temper attacks on a bad family background; he wants to take full responsibility for his actions. Yet, at the same time, he can't control his depression and panic attacks, and he realizes that if he were fully in control, these problems would not exist. Thus, at the heart of The Sopranos lay the questions that all great literature dramatizes: do we have power in this world? Do we make our own fates or are we subject to the whims of Fate?

And maybe this would have been a lens to understand Bourdin's impersonation. Deception, at heart, is a matter of asserting power. It's a way for maintaining a unilateral domination on knowledge and "truth." Perhaps impersonation was the only way that Bourdin could sustain some form of control in a world where he had been abused and neglected. Ironically, it was by becoming a child, the supposedly weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, that Bourdin felt the ultimate control and mastery over his emotional life.

Discernment

2008-07-18T20:08:00.002-04:00

Ever since I wrote about Federer, I've been thinking more about the question of "discernment," and how one can become more "discerning" in taste. If the internet has taught us anything, it's that developing a keen sense of taste is crucial to be able to wade through the constant flow of information that is thrown. I've been a big proponent of blogs and other forms of independent media for a good 3-4 years now. But it's gotten to a point where I've been over-saturated with blogs that I subscribe to, never able to really get through all the new information that was in my inbox each day. The past couple of days I've been just purging my feeds of almost all of the political blogs that I've been reading, and it's been such a liberating experience. I think I'm just going to stick to some more "traditional" news sources for my news. I think the problem with some of these really prolific bloggers is that they produce so much content, that each post becomes meaningless. Regardless of how important some independent commentary can be, there really is still no substitute for good investigative reporting, or more in-depth analysis of current events. I think the exception to this rule are sports blogs, which are able to provide a fresh and different view that most political blogs are unable to do.

But onto this question of "discernment." On the one hand, I associate discernment with sharper judgment, "critical thinking," which is a term often thrown around as being the goal of "liberal" education, but never really clearly defined and articulated. I know as a teacher that I want to inculcate in my students better skills for "critical thinking," but what does that actually mean? But on the other hand, there's part of me always hears a religious connotation in the word "discernment." Christians often times throw around the phrase "going through a discernment process," "discerning the will of God." The way discernment is used here is almost completely opposite of discernment in the sense of "critical thinking," here discernment has a totally mystical, transcendent meaning, where instead of critically distancing yourself from certain ideas or processes, you're encouraged to embrace the totality and look for a higher transcendent meaning in it.

It seems to me that it's the constant interplay of these seemingly contradictory feelings that lead to the development of "taste." You find something that you love -- a sport, a song, a book, an artform -- and you devote yourself to it wholeheartedly, blindly giving yourself up to those glimmers of transcendence. But the more you try to replicate those feelings of transcendence, the more you read and do and learn, the more critical and distanced you become to the event. You start making decisions on what type of things are actually worth your time; you start developing your own sense of taste.

On Federer and Obsession

2008-07-13T16:50:00.005-04:00

©AP / A. Niedringhaus

It's been a week, and I still can't stop thinking about that match. Yes, THAT match, the Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final that went almost 5 hours in playing time, 8 hours in total elapsed time, survived two rain delays, and produced some of the most awesome tennis that we've ever seen. But more than anything, I've been surprised by how much a "little" tennis match can reveal about my own obsessive habits, and how deeply my "infatuations" can transform my day-to-day behavior.

My infatuation with Roger Federer began a little over two years ago, at exactly the moment when I started playing tennis. It was the summer before I headed to graduate school(2006) -- I was at home in Taiwan, anxious about the move to California, and with a lot of time on my hands. My mom suggested that I try playing tennis. My parent had some really good experiences with a coach that taught regularly at the Academia Sinica, and she put me in touch with him. I immediately said yes, thinking that it would give me something to do and distract me from my some of my anxieties.

Tennis certainly was therapeutic. I put my whole body and mind into practice sessions with the coach, and soon it became that I was playing 2-3 hours every other day. I loved it. Enter Roger Federer. I had been a casual tennis fan since when I was a kid; I would watch Wimbledon every year, and I was a big Steffi Graf and Pete Sampras fan. So I remembered Federer's name as the punk-ass with a pony-tail who dethroned Sampras (can you take anybody with a pony-tail like that seriously?), and I remember rooting against him when he beat Andy Roddick in the Wimbledon finals. My impressions of him weren't good.

I don't even remember when I converted to the cult of Federer. It definitely wasn't a Saul/Paul experience on the way to Damascus. Perhaps it was reading David Foster Wallace's piece on Federer before the Wimbledon finals. Perhaps it was the lead up to the Wimbledon finals, where I watched an obscene amount of tennis. All I remember is that by the start of the Wimbledon finals against Nadal, I wanted so badly for Federer to win in three sets, so that his perfect streak of not losing any sets in Wimbledon would remain. Federer would win in four.

(Glad he ditched this look)

It's hard articulating the difference between being a practicing and non-practicing fan of something, whether that be sports, arts, or the like. The knowledge of technical aspects and subtleties colors the way one views the fundamental nature of the sport or of the art. One becomes more critical, but at the same time, much more awestruck by the types of things that grab hold of the attention. I remember the first time I started playing jazz, after having listened to the music for a good 3-4 years. Everything changed. In a way, a good deal of the music became less enjoyable; I was less impressed by a large amount of the music that was out there. But when I came something that was truly killer, I would become obsessed with that album for a longer period of time. For lack of a better word, I became more discerning in my tastes.

Federer soon became for me a full-blown obsession. As I struggled to hit a clean back-hand, I would watch and re-watch clips of his backhand in slow motion. As I tripped and bobbled on the court, I would marvel at the grace and speed in which he moved from base-line to the net. As I smashed and swore at my racquet when I mishit a ball, I wondered how he was able to keep his cool in every single type of situation. Basically, whenever I hit a ball, I had Federer's image imprinted in my mind: how would Federer hit a backhand? Let me try that. I soon found myself downloading old Federer matches off of bittorrent sites, scouring the internet for every scrap that I could find about the guy. The only other athlete that I've been completely obsessed with was Penny Hardaway, when I was 12 years old. I wanted to be Penny; I wanted his shoes, I mimicked his dribble, the way he shot his free-throws, the way he threw a pass. But Federer took it to another level. I've never found myself admiring a professional athlete so much off of the court -- his grace, his multi-lingualism, his charm, his attempts at humility (although it can seem a bit fake at times, and his fashion sense seems a bit off to me).

Fast forward to July 6th, 2008. I'm a ball of nerves before the match starts. My shoulders are tense, my stomach is feeling queasy. I've had too many cups of tea on an empty stomach. I've never been so nervous about a sporting match in my life. I'm worried about Federer -- he's looked sluggish since January, he was demolished by Nadal in the French Open, and even though Roger (am I allowed to write of him on a first-name basis?) looked good in his path to the finals, Nadal has looked just as good. It seems that Nadal's got his number. First two sets don't change that impression. But somehow, I knew the game was going five sets -- Federer was serving too well for it to be just a walk over. It's hard to describe the swing of motions between Federer down 5-2 in the fourth set tiebreak, and hitting that back hand winner down the line at 6-7 when it looked like a forehand winner for sure. But deep down, even when Federer was up 3-2 and had a break point, for some reason I kept preparing myself for a Federer loss -- it just didn't look like Nadal was ever going to lose that match. When that forehand hit the net, my stomach dropped. I was drained, disappointed, but at the same time exhilarated by what I had just saw.

What's surprised me the most about this whole thing is how I seem to not be able to get the match out of my head. I keep re-watching clips on NBC, analyzing how Federer played. When I'm walking on the street, I keep on thinking about certain cross-court forehands that both players hit in the match. I spent a couple of hours last night reading interviews from 2002 and 2003, before Federer became "Federer."

I've realized that obsession and infatuation is such a big part of how I operate on numerous levels, not just with Roger Federer. It was obsession and infatuation that drove me to dig deep into jazz. It's partly also what drives me when I do research in history -- when something grabs my attention, I try to find every bit that I can about that subject. It's such a powerful motivating force in my life. But I've realized that it can be a bit unhealthy -- why was spending an hour reading fan mail to Roger from 2002? But I guess that's the thing with obsessions -- they simultaneously nurture and consume the creative spirit.

Things I think I think

2008-07-04T17:48:00.003-04:00

More random ramblings:

Writer's block sucks. I don't know what's the source of writer's block -- lack of motivation or over-input of stimulus? On the one hand, I have so much that I could potentially blog about, but it's the question of hunkering down and making something coherent and worth reading that's the problem.

I think the latest Coldplay album pretty much settles the question of whether they are "pretenders" or the "real deal." I mean, how can you work on an album for three years and only put out one semi-listenable song? The only song that's semi-good on that album is "Viva La Vida," and the second song that's semi-decent is the opening track that contains the inspiring lyrics "Oh-oh-oh" that come in about 2 minutes in a 2 1/2 minute song. I mean, seriously? That being said, "Viva La Vida" is pretty catchy. On the other hand, Radiohead's latest album probably has the second best 4-track song sequence that I've ever heard, after Kind of Blue's sequence of "So What-Freddie Freeloader-Blue in Green-All Blues." I mean, the sequence of "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi -All I need - Faust Arp - Reckoner" probably plumbs the heights and depths of all human emotion within the short span of 20 minutes. It's unreal. And that's not even counting the pump-you-up opener "15 Step" and probably the best single on the album, "Jigsaw Falling Into Place."

I'm concerned about this Federer-Nadal match coming up. Nadal looks good. Very good. As in, wow that forehand is terrifying, and half a second later, OH MY GOD DID YOU JUST SEE THAT BACKHAND WINNER DOWN THE LINE AS HE WAS ON THE RUN AND TOTALLY OUT OF POSITION TO MAKE ANY PLAYS?! Federer looks like he's on cruise control the whole time. I wonder what it'll take to make that man show some emotion during a match.

Still chugging along in the Wagner Ring cycle. I started out hating Die Walküre, the whole Siegmund-Sieglinde love-incest relationship just sort of creeped me out. But Act 2 and 3 was so emotionally tense, complex, and fulfilling that it totally made up for it. The Wotan-Brünnhilde duet at the end of Act 3 was amazing. Wotan really is shaping up to be a much more complex and interesting character than I would have given credit for based on Das Rheingold.

I still can't believe I spent so much money on a pair of shoes -- I bought some Camper walking shoes because I needed something that was comfy but also looked somewhat "legit" since I was visiting archives. The thought that I spent so much money on a pair of shoes make me sick. But man, they are comfortable.

I love the Amazon Kindle. It has totally changed my reading habits -- I'm now reading something like 6 books at a time, since it's so easy to upload old books onto the device. Gutenberg.org has a wealth of 19th century, out of copyright books. Also, there's a lot of free stuff on the web if you look at it. I love how light it is, and the screen does make reading pretty comfortable. When I travel now, I have my trustyAlphaSmart NEO keyboard to take notes, my kindle for reading, and an iPod Touch for music/internet if there's wireless. It's a little sick how many gadgets I have, but it makes travelling so much lighter -- no need to lug around my heavy laptop.

Baron Davis -- WHY? Clay Bennett -- WHY?!? Oklahama City -- Where the hell is that?!?!

Germany-Spain was a lot of fun, especially the endlessly amusing sight of drunken Germans on the subway yelling "Fucking Spaniards!" all the way home.

Berlin is magical during the summer, but there's something about this trip that just makes me want to go home. I was incredibly homesick two weeks ago, and although things are getting better, and I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing here, but I just want to go home. Part of it is the routine -- even though I enjoy the work, basically every day I wake up at 8, head to the library/archives, leave at 4 or 6, find food, come home, walk around/chat online for a bit, watch a little bit of the Ring, read a little more, sleep; repeat next day. I think I just need a break. The other big part of it is the food -- I'm not cooking for myself, and there's only so many times before falafel gets boring. I realize also that I really miss playing tennis. Perhaps it's just a function of getting older -- my Wanderlust has diminished. And since I've been to Berlin before, it's not like I want to go out exploring every weekend. The other thing about it is that I never feel completely comfortable here. I get weird stares from people. The other day, I was sitting in the park, and an old man was riding on his bike and he kept staring at me even though he had long rode past me and I was out of his line of sight. I felt threatened and uncomfortable the whole time.

Reading Marx's Capital -- finally. Been meaning to do it for a long time. Going through it slowly while also watching David Harvey's lectures. More thoughts on this later, but I think the first two chapters are some of the most lucid writings on economics I've ever read -- that economics is based in a social relationship.

Finished season 1 of the Sopranos -- all I need to say is I'm glad I didn't download Season 2, or else I'd be on the couch watching the Sopranos the whole time I've been here. I think I watched 5 episodes in one day last weekend. Terrible!

OK that's it for now...

Bielefeld Pics

2008-07-04T17:23:00.003-04:00

Pictures from Bielefeld, where I stayed overnight when I went to watch Federer at Halle.
Intrigued by this photo, because it's a clergyman's "Pieta."
The Catholic monastery in Bielefeld.
Typical Weser-Renaissance Facade. You'll see these all over North Germany.
Jesus on the door of the Old Nikolaikirche -- the oldest church in town.
Double-spired Cathedral, the Marienkirche, also dating from the 1200s.
Front of the Modern art museum.
Statue in front of the modern art museum.
I love old store signs! I wish I could take them down and collect them.
Charming old city center.

Federer Worship

2008-07-04T16:18:00.004-04:00

As promised, here are some pics from Halle.
A beautiful stadium with a retractable roof. It came in handy too, since it rained the whole time I was there.
I concur.
The "liquid whip" of a forehand.
Federer with the trophy.
I've posted more photos on facebook...

Two Fresh Air Interviews

2008-06-27T13:04:00.003-04:00

I listen to NPR's Fresh Air, a daily radio show hosted by Terry Gross, on a pretty regular basis. The shows can be hit or miss, but there have been two episodes from the past week that have been particularly fascinating to me. The first is an interview with the neurological scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who recovered from a stroke to the left side of her brain. It's a fascinating conversation, and Taylor makes some pretty radical claims about the nature of the brain, saying that the left and the right hemispheres have "different personalities."

The other show is an interview with the photographer Brent Stirton, who photographed murdered gorillas in Virunga National Park in the Congo. Again, it's an incredible story well worth listening to. There's also a National Geographic story to accompany the interview, as well as Stirton's own website with a bunch of amazing photos.

Blogging the Ring Cycle: Das Rheingold

2008-06-22T16:11:00.000-04:00

As promised, I've done a bit of journaling as I've been watching The Ring Cycle. I've just been jotting down some notes, if you want a complete synopsis of the characters and the plot of the Ring, check out the Wikipedia site.

Just finished Das Rheingold, and I was much more engaged than I thought I would be. I've started numerous times tying to watch/listen to Das Rheingold, but have always inevitably failed, for some reason. Das Rheingold starts with these very slow, shimmering horn lines, that slowly build up and crest into a billowing, loud, crashing chords. Wagner intended the music to personify the rushing currents of the Rhine River, but also more importantly, the gradual unfolding and creation of his mystical world. The Kupfer staging uses green lasers, at first single beams that shoot out from the set, and slowly merge, along with the crescending music, into one single sheet of light. The Nymphs of the Rhine appear from the river, and burst into joyous song, singing of their delights in both the wonders of the river and also of magical treasure that they are sworn to protect, the Gold of the Rhine.

Soon, an ominous figure appears on the stage. Alberich, the lecherous Nibelung dwarf, tries to force himself on the Rhine maidens, singing with both lust and frustration of unfulfilled desire. The Rhine maidens tease and pretend to seduce him, enraging him all the more. Yet, in the midst of their playful tormenting of the Dwarf, they reveal the secrets behind the treasure that they are protecting. The nymphs are unafraid of Alberich stealing the Rhine Gold because only one who has the ability to renounce all love in this world can snatch the gold. The nymphs see the lustiness of Alberich, and deem him as too low a character to be able to embark on such a tortuorous path. Alberich, entranced by the warmth, lush light of the gold emanating from the depths of the Rhine, is overcome with greed. Having never tasted the sweet joys of love, he vengefully forsakes all of his ties with the world, and plunges into the deep of the Ocean and steals the gold. Thus the dramatic conflict at the heart of the Ring cycle is introduced -- the gold that will be used to forge the Ring of Power is stolen, and the world's serenity and order has been irrevecably destroyed.

The character that fascinates me the most in Das Rheingold is Loge. He's a demi-god, not truly a member of Wotan's crew, but he serves as Wotan's guide into the underworld of the dwarfs. Loge displays a certain amount of self-consciousness and self-reflection that is lacking in all the other characters. While Wotan and Alberich are both driven by their all-consuming desries to gain more power, Loge weighs the different consequences, he sees the bigger picture of the slippery slope that Wotan and the other gods embark upon.

The anti-semitic undertones of the work are definitely there -- as the Nibelung can be read as pseudo-Jewish characters. But then again, Wagner is also critical of the gods just as much as he is of the Nibelung.

Spontaneous "Pilgrimage"

2008-06-17T15:58:00.005-04:00

Probably one of the most spontaneous trips of my life. I saw Roger Federer playing on TV at 3 PM on Friday, and realized he was playing in Halle (Westfalen), which is 4 hours away from Berlin. Quickly went onto the Internet to check train times, called to see if there were any tickets left, and next thing you know, I'm on a train to Halle. I didn't even know what the hell is in Halle, other than Roger Federer playing in a stadium. I knew I couldn't pass up seeing Federer live.

That's the thing I love about Germany. Travel is so easy, especially for non-drivers like me. When a couple of friends and I were planning to go to see Andy Roddick play in San Jose, it took forever for us to figure out the best way to get to San Jose from Berkeley, and ended up having to rent a car. If I had to rent a car to go and see Roger Federer play, I don't think this trip would have been possible at all.

It was exciting to see Roger play live. He dispatched Nicolas Kiefer, his semi-final opponent, handily. The first set was one of those magical Federer sets where he just destroyed his opponent -- two breaks and he finished the set 6-1. He's faster than he appears in TV -- somehow TV slows down both the ball and his movement, you can't really analyze his stroke the way you can on TV, his ground strokes are like David Foster Wallace described it, a "liquid whip." The thing about the matches that you can't really sense on TV is the gravity of the points and the tension that you feel in the players. There was a certain point in the second set where you felt that Federer was just cruising along, holding serve, and then suddenly, he knew he had to turn it on and break serve. I think it was 4-4 at that point, and he broke Kiefer. The crowd could feel it, you saw a transformation in Federer's game. He just played the larger points better, and you could see the desire in his eyes. Same thing happened in the Final, when he played Philip Kohlschrieber. Early on in his first service game, Federer was down 15-40, and the crowd got rowdy, anticipating a break. But Federer just came up with some dazzling serves, leaving Kohlschrieber no chance whatsoever to break. He ended up holding serve for the rest of the match -- he didn't lose one single service game in the whole TOURNAMENT. This really just shows you how utterly dominant Nadal was on clay, when Federer only won 4 games. On grass, he didn't lose one single service game. Insane.

I was hoping for a Blake-Federer final, but the Blake final was one of the strangest tennis matches I've seen. Again, this is one where you had to be there live to see the subtleties in the game. Blake actually held serve easily, and had Kohlschrieber at 0-40, with three breakpoints. The crowd ended up cheering Kohlschrieber to even the game and eventually win it. I'm not sure what exactly ticked Blake off, but I think it may have been the audience noise, and the umpire's reluctance to quiet the crowd, but Blake kept jawing with the umpire throughout the whole game. You could tell he was off, and lost concentration. Next thing you know, he had lost the set, and the match was pretty much over.

Pictures to come when I have them sorted out and uploaded.

Taking the Plunge

2008-06-13T13:11:00.004-04:00

Things I love about Berlin no. 453: The Berlin Philharmonic.

The Philharmonic reflects the strangeness of Berlin, as the Philharmonic is a meeting point for an array of seemingly disparate parts that fit uneasily together. From the Richard Serra sculpture at the entrance from buying the ticket, to the awkwardly-placed garderobe area, to the Cathedral-resembling stain-glass adornment, to the man who has the sole job of opening the bathroom door, to the confusing floorplan that makes finding your seat close to impossible, there really is no other musical experience that is comparable. And oh, the acoustics of the music hall! Just glorious, you can literally hear the violinists turning their knobs from any seat in the house.

Simon Rattle conducted the first act of Richard Wagner's Siegfried last night, with Ben Heppner singing the role of Siegfried. It was one of the most powerful and engaging musical experiences that I've had. I've been flirting with the idea of watching the Ring Cycle for such a long time, but I've just never been able to devote time and energy to watch the whole tetralogy. After last night, I've decided to take the plunge. I went out today and got the whole Ring Cycle on DVD, with Daniel Barenboim conducting and Harry Kupfer's staging. I'm psyched. I don't know how regularly, but I'll be blogging my impression about the Ring cycle for sure.

Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise

2008-06-11T15:44:00.004-04:00

Quick book recommendation:

I'm reading Alex Ross's book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, which is an enthralling book. Ross tackles some of the central questions facing classical music today -- how does what we call "classical" music today become such an esoteric and "niche" music within the span of a century? What exactly are the boundaries between "classical" and "popular" music. He starts the book with fin-de-siecle Vienna, with the musical scandal of Richard Strauss's Salome. How do we go from that period of culture where that type of music is able to attract such critical and popular attention, create such huge scandal, to now when the music of Strauss is left to the devoted few?

Ross is the New Yorker's classical music critic, and a damn fine critic, I must say. His descriptions and analyses of the actual music is some of the best writing on music I have ever read. He's able to bring out the gravitas and the drama of the music itself and unfold it all on the page. Not a small feat. You can read some of his descriptions and hear samples here.

Ross is also a great teller of stories. He has a good eye for the eccentricities, the small tales, and the various complexities of the lives of these different composers that makes the story all the more fascinating. What the book does lack, however, is a larger and broader analytical frame to explain these important historical shifts that Ross is so concerned about. I haven't finished the whole book, so perhaps this is too early of a judgment. I'm 1/3 through the book, and so far the book reads as a compilation of different composer biographies, peppered with some interesting musical analysis refracted through the lens of personal experience. I fail to see a larger narrative arc or "argument" that he's trying to push forward. But I should wait until I finish the book to pass judgment.

Pilgrimages and the European Cup

2008-06-09T17:10:00.000-04:00

I've always been fascinated by the idea of pilgrimages. What kind of power could attract and inspire thousands upon thousands of people to uproot themselves from the comforts of their lives and embark on perilous, dangerous journeys to far away and unknown places? At the heart of most pilgrimages are yearnings and belief in abstract, future promises -- it's not like the well of Canterbury had actually cured anything in the life of the pilgrims yet, but it was the promise of the future cure that spurred them on. What fascinates me about pilgrimages is the idea that humans have always demonstrated a need to demarcate and define sacred spaces, something that is set apart from the ordinary and the profane. Skeptics can rightfully criticize the social control aspect of it -- money grubbing archbishops have tried to mobilize pilgrimages as funding campaigns for new cathedrals, or swindlers have masqueraded their perfume as Holy water ever since the time of Chaucer. But perhaps that is the nature of faith: the line between the sacred and the profane is always a thin and precarious one. Perhaps that is why Jesus constantly warns against believing in false prophets.

Reflections on this all stemmed from thinking about the European Cup, as I witnessed hundreds of people huddling in front of a projection screen in a Biergarten, and seeing thousands of people on TV, gathered in an outside park cheering on their national team. As I saw these throngs of people waving their flags, I thought to myself, "What has the German national team ever done for you personally, materially?" But it's that embrace of the abstract idea of national unity, the belief in that moment of possible transcendence, of communal ecstasy, that propels the faithful forward.

In Berlin Again

2008-06-08T06:21:00.002-04:00

Last time I was in Berlin, I lived in former West Berlin. I lived only several minutes away from the center of capitalist Berlin, Kurfurstendamm, or Ku'Damm. My apartment was in a pleasant residential district called Wilmersdorf. And even though my own apartment was old and a bit run down, the whole street felt developed and almost "suburban." The street was quiet and pretty much dead by 9 O'clock at night.

This time around, I'm living on a charming street called Alte Schönhauser Strasse in Mitte, the historic center of Berlin. Mitte lies in the former East, and I live several minutes away from the old center of the East, Alexanderplatz. The imprints of Communist rule are readily visible. Street names still bear the name of former Communist heroes. Yet, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg would be spinning in their grave if they knew that overlooking the intersection that bears their name stands a gigantic iPod commercial, with an anonymous figure dancing to the inspiration of white earbuds, all to the backdrop of fantastic technicolor. Capitalism may have won the day for now, but the hopes and struggles for a better future remain embedded within the landscape.

The area is changing rapidly. The previously mass produced socialist houses still stand tall, and are now covered with graffitti. There is a grittiness and a griminess to the area that could not be more different than Wilmersdorf. There is also a vitality that is unseen in the former West. Shops were still brimming with people at 11 PM, and most places were open until 1 or 2 AM, or even longer. The city is hopping with life for the European Cup. Every restaurant has a TV/projector set up for viewing, and people are out and about in general revelry. It's going to be an interesting two months.

Oscar Wao, The Wire, and visions of America

2008-06-05T05:08:00.002-04:00

Junot Diaz, with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer this year for Best Fiction, possibly the most prestigious award for American writers. His short story collection Drown also received widespread critical acclaim, and critics like Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times have hailed Diaz as "one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible voices."

Unlike Diaz's award winning book, the TV show The Wire has never won the most prestigious award in TV business, an Emmy. It tanked in the ratings for five straight seasons. Yet, like Arrested Development, which also tanked in the rantings, The Wire has received almost bombastic critical reception. An enthusiastic reviewer in the Financial Times writes, "Some experiences are so great that you want to tell the whole world about them, so that they can share your joy. In fact you can't stop talking about them. I feel that way about The Wire , HBO's devastating police series that has just started its fifth and final season in the US. "

In Oscar Wao and in The Wire, we get two distinctly different visions of America. Diaz's work captures the depth, the diversity, and the vitality of the immigrant experience. Diaz's hero is an outsider -- Oscar is the quintessential "nerd," the "loser." For Oscar, the promise of the American dream lies not in its materialist promises for a better life. Rather, the allure of the New World lies in its escapism. America provides the outlets for Oscar to indulge in fantasy and science-fiction, to access the world of Star Trek and Marvel instead of dregs of Paterson, NJ. The picture that Diaz paints of the immigrant vision punctures holes in the myth of the "American dream," where self-made individuals can recreate and refashion themselves however they please. For Diaz (and we see this also in Jhumpa Lahiri's books as well), the promises of the future are invariably weighed down by the burdens of the past. The past never leaves us; the stories that we carry tint our visions and mold our beings. This is the weight that immigrants must bear, the baggage of the past. The ghosts of the past are always with us. Redemption does not come cheap.

But for Diaz, redemption does come. In a way, despite the tragedy and the struggles, America has provided a way out for Oscar and his family family. Despite the cultural clash and the struggle between generations, Lola and Oscar get an education, they're able to travel across the world. There is a price to pay for the experience, but it sure beats Trujillo's Dominican Republic, where decent folk disappear in the middle night just for accidently letting an inappropriate joke slip. Diaz's book is thus not a direct critique of American society per se, but an up-close view of the fabric of the American experience.

Where Diaz zooms in and focuses in on specific strands, David Simon et al dissect and obliterate rest the myth of the American dream. Simon's cadavar is Baltimore, and he analyzes his cross sections through the multiple interconnections of the drug trade. Each season focuses on how different institutions continue to perpetuate cycles of violence, despair, and incompetence. Without a doubt, Simon presents a bleak view of the contemporary American scene. The America that we see in The Wire is not the piddling mediocrity that Tocqueville prophesizes. We do see flashes of brilliance and we witness people of moral fortitude -- there is brilliance and ruthlessness on both sides of the law. The Wire critiques "The Game," that is played on all sides, and the inability of real change to ever take place. Simon and company lobby their missiles at institutions, and the inability for bureaucracy to reform. Yet, this is no libertarian screed against the inefficiency of government, and the evils of institutions. Rather all of society co-operates and perpetuates "The Game," and individuals become the collateral damage swept up in its path of destruction.

And this is the main difference in the vision of American between Oscar Wao and The Wire. For Diaz, redemption for the individual is possible. Diaz's story is bittersweet, but its story leaves us hope for the future. For David Simon, "the Game" is going to be "the Game," no matter the high-minded rhetoric and ideals that we try to profess. It's a vision of America that disturbs and haunts.

Update/Ramblings

2008-06-03T08:34:00.004-04:00

Again, I've allowed several months to pass by without posting anything on my blog. I'm a terrible blogger, I know. Life intervened, what can I say? Now that the semester's over, and I have a slight lull before I head off to Germany to do research for the summer I can finally update my blog.

Random thoughts on my mind --

1. Teaching this semester was incredibly rewarding. I was lucky and got a great group of students. I had 17 in all, and despite the long discussion sections (2 hours!), they were extremely enthusiastic and engaged throughout. Never a dull moment in teaching really. I started out a little bit too ambitious in the beginning -- every week they would turn in a different assignment (short, no more than five sentences), and I would return comments. By the fourth week, I was burned out. When I teach again next semester, I think I'll cut that out, and instead just make them turn in questions each week. I was impressed, week after week, by the quality of their responses.
1a. I hate grading though. The time commitment doesn't bother me, nor does the actual editing and commenting. The hard part is providing a numerical, quantitative grade to a paper. It's pretty easy to distinguish between an A range paper and a B range paper, or a B range paper from a C range paper. But what about the difference between an A- and a B+, a B and a B-? Those distinctions are hard to make.

2. Tennis has kept me sane throughout the semester. I never thought I would be this addicted to playing tennis -- but now when I don't play for a week, I feel antsy. It's such a nuanced game; any little movement can drastically alter the outcome of a shot, and there are so many different parts that you have to pay attention to in order to pull off a good shot.

3. Speaking of sports, I've fallen into a bit of a summer routine for the past couple of years -- come home to Taiwan, play tennis, watch the Pistons lose in the NBA playoffs. I love this Pistons team. Despite their inability to sustain some sort of competitive intensity for a stretches, something about their style of play really resonates with me. When they're on, they're a joy to watch. So it'll be sad to watch Joe Dumars blow up this team, which it seems increasingly the inevitable path to take. I am happy for the Celtics though. KG and Paul Pierce deserve a trip to the finals.

4. My favorite history book this semester was probably Andrew Gordon's Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. It's a masterful study of the widespread labor unrest in Japan before World War II, attempting to understand why these protests and riots ultimately became sublimated into support for Japanese fascism. The book is ambitious in scope and meticulous in execution.

5. My favorite non-history book was Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I think I'm going to post more on this later, and flesh out my ideas on this more later. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times describes Diaz as "one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." I can't help but nod in agreement.

6. I read parts of Diaz's book on my new Amazon Kindle. I've been following the Kindle closely ever since it came out, and I finally decided to splurge on it, considering that the alternative would have been to carry a bunch of books in my suitcase. So far, I'm loving it. I never realized how much material was available freely online through Project Gutenberg. Their catalogue of 19th century material is astounding, and I'm reading a lot of stuff that I've always wanted to take a glance at -- been dabbling with some James Joyce, PG Wodehouse, GK Chesterton, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. I think this is finally the summer where I'm going to read some Russian literature -- I have some Turgenev and Tolstoy loaded on the device already. The device itself is still not that suited for academic purposes -- it's hard to skim through books, and to jump around from points to points, to get a sense and "feel" for the book. But as a device for linear reading -- ie reading novels and other things that you want to read carefully, it's great.

7. I'm in Taiwan right now, resting before I head to Berlin for the summer. I'm excited! I'm doing research for the first time in German archives. My apartment will be five minutes from the Archives, and I'm living in Mitte, the historic center of Berlin. Only a couple of minutes from the Museum Island, etc. I'm also planning on making several trips around Germany, but we'll see how much work I can get done.

8. The other obsession that I've developed in the past two months is The Wire. I've watched all five seasons since Spring Break, and it's probably the best TV show I've ever seen. That's a new development for me in the past year -- I've watched two TV shows: Arrested Development and The Wire. And I've loved both. More on The Wire later.

That's it for now...

Be Kind, Rewind

2008-03-16T03:50:00.003-04:00

I just watched Michel Gondry's newest film, Be Kind, Rewind. I've written about Gondry on this blog a couple of times already -- he's an artist that I feel deeply attached to, somebody who I feel produces work that speaks directly to me, and he's somebody that I know I will follow closely and watch all of his new movies as long as he's still directing.

Be Kind, Rewind is a love poem to the magic of movie making. Gondry is a Romantic, and all of his films are suffused, in a way, with some form of encounter with the unknowable, the irrational, and the strange. Yet, unlike the Romantics of the 19th century, a glimpse into the unknown does not threaten to terrorize or destroy the soul (as it does in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Sandman). Rather, Gondry's depiction of the mysteries of humanity is non-threatening; it's quirky, eccentric, off-the-wall, and humorous. But the questions that Gondry asks are the same as those of the Romantics -- what animates the human soul? Why is art so powerful? What is the relationship between art and the community?

Gondry has produced another touching and beautiful film. Like always, certain scenes will stick with me for a long time -- Gondry is a master at producing enduring images. This is also his first foray into movies with an overt political message -- although politics, I must say, is not his forte. Nor does he pretend that it is. This is a movie about movies, and the joy of movies, and the ability for movies to bring people together. I already can't wait for his next one.

Keith Jarrett in SF

2008-03-09T04:48:00.007-04:00

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I have strange habits when it comes to listening to music. I go through periods of intense obsession, where I can listen to only one artist. I try to collect everything I can find of that artist. Sometimes I can only listen to one album, or even one song, over and over again. And then, for some reason, something snaps -- I find a new album or artist to obsess over, or maybe I just get tired of listening to that album over and over again. And then I'll go maybe two or three months (sometimes even years!) without touching that album at all, and then something in my memory will push me to listen to that artist/album again. The new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, was like that for me last year; I listened to it basically non-stop for two months, and one day just stopped. Just last week, something compelled me to listen to the album again. I love that feeling of "re-discovering" an artist, of remembering how much I enjoyed listening to that album, but at the same time picking up on new subtleties in the re-listening.

The "re-discovery" experience is even more gratifying when listening to the music live. Keith Jarrett was in SF tonight. I hadn't thought about Keith Jarrett for awhile -- not since I listened continuously to The Carnegie Hall Concert for a couple of months last year. On Thursday, though, I got an SF Jazz email, saying that Keith Jarrett was coming to town.

Now I must admit, I have a mild obsession with Keith Jarrett. I've heard him four times in concert now, and own almost his complete discography. Why am I so obsessed with this guy? I think it's a combination of his idiosyncratic performance style, obnoxious arrogance, and brilliance that simultaneously repulses and fascinates me. My first exposure to him was listening to the Köln Concert in high school. Expecting it to be a bunch of avant-garde solo piano mumbo jumbo, I was surprised at how accessible it was, captured by its melodic nature, and shocked GROOVY it was. I never realized a pianist could lay down such an intricate groove with one hand. I remember hearing his album Expectations for the first time on LP, and I was transfixed -- I had never heard such a combination of groove, intensity, and intelligence. My first Keith Jarrett trio concert was akin to a religious experience. I remember walking out of Carnegie Hall, shaken to the core, especially after hearing "When I Fall in Love," which he played as one of his encore pieces. When he ended that piece, the collective cathartic sigh that he evoked from the whole audience at Carnegie, which was hanging on to every single note of his playing, is still one of the most memorable live music moments I've ever experienced. In my mind, it's still the benchmark of perfect synergy between audience and performer.

I knew I couldn't pass up hearing him again, so I gathered some friends and went. It was a re-discovery; I had forgotten how much I enjoyed hearing Keith play. Moreover, perhaps my ears have matured, but I was picking up a lot more of the subtleties in the interplay that this trio has. I realized how I could pick up how they so easily slipped in and out of complex rhythms, but always nursing the groove, staying firmly in the pocket, while at the same time constantly stretching the boundaries, poking, prodding, testing, playing. It's almost three hours since the concert has ended, and I still can't get their playing of "When I Fall in Love" out of my head. And yes, they played it as an encore.

On Teaching

2008-02-18T02:45:00.002-05:00

I vividly remember one of my first major intellectual "moments." It was second semester of my sophomore year of college, and we were reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison for Contemporary Civilization. I had struggled through the reading, and I expected to be completely confused in seminar. But the professor provided one of the most lucid explanations of the book, and the discussion about the dynamics of power were so eye-opening, that it felt like a bomb had exploded in my head. I came out of the classroom exhilarated. I went into that summer and devoured as much Foucault as I could (it's ironic because I now pretty much see anything related to Foucault as anathema).

Four weeks into teaching, and I can only hope that I can recreate that sort of intellectual exhilaration, the joy of intellectual discovery. I have to say it's the most exhausting, but at the same time most rewarding endeavor that I've tried. By the end of 2 hours of discussion on Thursday nights, I feel like I can't think or talk for the next three weeks.

I've gone into every single class with butterflies in my stomach, nervous about the "performance." But every single time, the moment class started, I was in a different place. So far, so good. I think the students are enjoying the class, and I hope they're learning something. I think that's the hardest thing about teaching for me -- I have no way to gauge the amount of learning, the amount of absorption that takes place. After every single class, the relief of having finished a class and feeling satisfied about the way discussion went is always mixed with self-doubt and insecurity -- "Did they understand the difference between Hobbes and Locke? Did I make my point about absolutism clear? Oh shoot, I forgot to mention that Machiavelli's ideas are not incompatible with religion..." There's a constant fear of whether I lectured too much, whether the students generated the ideas on their own, or whether I've imposed my own will on the discussion.

I've heard several professors say now that throughout their careers, they "learned the most from their students." I think I'm starting to understand this now. On the one hand, there's learning from the different comments that they say in class that help clarify your own thinking. For example, one student asked a question about Locke's ideas of sovereignty that helped unlock my own confusion on the subject. Yet, I think the self-doubt generates an even greater impetus to learn. You want to come back next week with a better lesson plan, a more coherent statement, a more clear idea of what the texts are talking about. You want to share that feeling of exhilaration, you want to see it in your students. But you never do get to see it; or at least, you never get to see the full extent of those epiphanies. So you try harder, and learn even more in the process.

Initial Reactions to the Taiwanese Elections

2008-01-12T15:35:00.000-05:00

The DPP was crushed in Taiwan's legislative election yesterday, winning only 27 seats out of a possible 115. I'm not going to defend the DPP's election strategy, which I found abominable and self-defeating. I've never thought that focusing on identity politics was the right way to go. The DPP also shot itself in the foot when the "New Wave" faction of the DPP openly broke with the Chen Shui-bian in the midst of all the corruption charges. So I'm not going to defend the DPP's politics.

I am, however, going to defend the DPP's record in governance. The DPP's critics have accused it as being an ineffective executive body, going so far as to say that the DPP "has done nothing in the past eight years."

I beg to differ. Let's just take a look at major construction projects have either been completed, or started, under DPP leadership. And remember, some of these were even done despite a gridlocked budget that the KMT refused to ratify.

1. The Taipei MRT -- The first MRT line, Muza, was completed in 1996, under then-Mayor Chen Shui-bian. Subsequently the Danshui line was completed in 1997, also under Chen (OK, I know this is pre-2000, but I couldn't resist).

2. The Kao-shiung MRT -- Started in 2001 when Frank Hsieh was Mayor of Kao-shiung, expected to be completed in 2008, also under a DPP mayor.

3. East-West highway (Xueshan suidao) -- Started in 2001 and completed in 2006, when Chen Shui-bian was president. This is the longest mountain tunnel in all of Asia, and the only tunnel that provides a connection between East and West Taiwan in the North. Originally Taipei-Ilan would have taken 3 hours, now it takes 30 minutes (without traffic).

4. Taiwan High Speed Rail (Bullet Train) -- Began operations in 2007. Taipei to Kaoshiung in 90 minutes, Taipei to Hsinchu in 20.

5. National Highway No. 4 -- First phase completed in 2001, fully operational in 2003. National Highway that mainly runs through Taichung.

6. Renovation of the National Palace Museum -- Completed in 2007. I worked here as an intern in 2001 before the renovations, and it's a complete facelift.

It's 5 AM and I can't be bothered to think of more. These are all major national constructions that have made significant impact on the lives of Taiwanese citizens. The DPP also initiated an ambitious "New Ten Major Constructions" in 2003 that is still ongoing. The original "Ten Major Constructions" took Taiwan a good 15 years to complete (from the 1970s to mid 1980s), so it seems like the time frame is comparable. These records speak for themselves; I would hardly say that the DPP has "done nothing" in its time at the executive Yuan. I haven't even mentioned some of the progressive legislation that the DPP has pushed on science and technology initiatives, reproductive rights, gender equality, environmental protection, and minorities rights.

As for answering allegations of rampant DPP corruption, this deserves a separate post. But I'm way too tired to deal with that now.

Links!

2008-01-11T10:55:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to post a bunch of links for awhile, so here they are:

1. Even though I listen to NPR's Fresh Air pretty regularly, I'm not the biggest fan of Terry Gross, because I find her questions annoying and inane at times. But once in a while she'll hit interviewing gold, when her rapport with her guest is so perfect, and the questions asked are so incisive. Her interview with Dave Grohl, leader of the Foo Fighters and former drummer of Nirvana, is a case in point. Grohl comes off as articulate, funny, warm, and so down-to-earth, and reveals a lot about his time with Nirvana. Check it out. Contrast that with her interview with Denzel Washington, which was an absolute flop. The questions were horrible, and there was absolutely no chemistry there.

2. Radio shows can be magical. Perhaps its the space for mental imagination and self-produced pictures. Perhaps its the intimacy of the speaker, and the warmth and depth of the human voice, that can vibrate at exactly the right frequency that brings joy both to the ears and to the heart. Garrison Keillor captures this magic beautifully. I've been listening to his "News from Lake Woebegon" Podcast, and the 12/29 monologue was a gem. Listen for a story about a lonely libertarian school teacher accidentally firing a gun during a date in a lonely cabin. Listen more in that episode for a soulful rendition of the hymn "How Can I Keep from Singing?" by Martin Sheen.

3. I've spent most of my winter break reformatting my iBook G4, upgrading to Leopard OSX, organizing my files and fiddling around with software that will help with my work. One of the great thing about the Mac is that a lot of independent software developers devote a lot of time to producing great programs. I've said goodbye to Microsoft Office, which is outrageously expensive and ineffective in comparison. Here are some links to great software that I've discovered that help me with organizing my information and writing. Wish I could provide some links for Windows users. The only cross platform program I have is:

Zotero: This is an extension for your Firefox web browser. It is a bibliographic manager that helps you automatically download article and citation information within your web browser. If you use Endnote or Bookends (see below), imagine that integrated into your web browser -- if you're reading the NYTimes, and you like the article, it'll give you the option to "clip" all the citation information directly.

Freeware:
Things: I don't really understand the whole "Getting Things Done" (GTD) craze, and Things is an app that is based on GTD philosophy. It's basically a simple, elegant software that helps organize to-do lists and prioritize your work flows. This software is still in the Alpha testing phase (and thus free), and it's already been really helpful for me to prioritize my days and remind me of tasks that I need to finish.

Skim: Freeware PDF reading software. A much better and faster alternative to Adobe Acrobat or Preview. Best part is that you can make notes and annotations.

NeoOffice: Free alternative to MSWord. I still need a copy of NeoOffice because so many professors use the track changes function to make edits to papers.

Software that Costs Money:
DevonThink Pro: I can't rave enough about this program. It's completely changed the way I organize information and interact with my computer. It's basically the Ultimate Database program that also functions as a Text editor, Wiki, scanner program, web browser and many other functions. The learning curve on the program is a bit steep (I had to watch a bunch of online video tutorials in order to figure out what the program can actually do), but I'm glad I took the time to do so. The search engine also uses AI that suggests links that you may not have thought of. The program was recommended in the NYTimes Magazine awhile back. The program is a bit pricey, but you can download it and test it for a month or so. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Scrivener: Beautiful program that helps you draft and organize during the early stages of writing. There are so many functions in this program, but I'll just outline some -- you can write in full-screen mode (thus blocking out all distractions), there's a great outlining tool, you can easily edit and work with multiple documents at once in a split screen mode. You can export all of your work in all the major formats -- .rtf, .doc, plain text, so you don't have to worry about your information being "locked in." This program also costs money, but you can also have a free trial for 2 months.

Mellel: Versatile, simple, and great word processing program. Will make you forget MSWord forever. I'm still trying to figure out all the functions, such as the whole "Styles" system. But the main reason why I use Mellel is because there's seamless integration with the bibliographic software that I use -- Bookends, which I'll talk about next.

Bookends: Bibliographic software database that beats Endnote anyday. The learning curve on this is also steeper than Endnote, but once you get a hang of it, it's a much more powerful bibliographic manager than Endnote. You can directly search a lot of the major academic databases, like Library of Congress and all the major universities. Some non-academic databases are also included, such as Amazon, which Endnote doesn't allow. There is flawless integration with Mellel, which makes importing footnotes and making bibliographies almost painless. It takes awhile to figure out all of the ways to format citation styles, but once you get the hang of the logic, it makes sense.

So my workflow now goes something like this: I basically dump all of my research and daily life thoughts, ideas, snippets, etc. into DevonThink Pro, which acts as a repository for my info. Bookends stores academic books, articles, and other citations. When it comes time to draft papers, etc, I draft my info with Scrivener, including footnotes. When it comes time for the final draft and format editing, I export everything into Mellel.

Machiavelli and Teaching

2008-01-09T01:33:00.000-05:00

I'm discovering the pleasure in re-reading books that I "thought" I had read. I'm re-reading Machiavelli's The Prince, in preparation of teaching for next semester (yes, I'm teaching History 5: The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present and I'm extremely excited about it!). Maybe it's reading a different translation, or maybe it's because I'm paying much closer attention to the text since I'm going to teach it, but it's a much more absorbing read than I ever remembered it. There's such power and conviction in his writing, all of which I failed to grasp the first go-round. Maybe it's just that I've become a more diligent and perceptive reader.

It'll be my first time teaching, so I'm not really sure how I'm going to teach this book. Obviously, I'll have to go over the basics, such as grounding the book within its historical context, its impact on later thought, going over the main themes of the books, etc. I'm trying to recall what sort of discussions I had as an undergraduate that really stuck out in my mind, and helped reinforce the meaning of the book. Any thoughts? I'll be teaching mainly freshmen and sophomores, who might be taking their first history course or just something to fulfill a requirement.

One path that I was thinking about is drawing out contemporary relevance of the book, or how the book remains fresh today. Perhaps this is partly how I've been reading it on the second go-around, but I couldn't help but be struck by the sagely advice that Machiavelli has to offer US incursions into Iraq, such as the danger of changing a country's laws and customs drastically, as well as using mercenaries. But I'm afraid that'll get too political too quickly, which could alienate a part of the class from the get-go (I might be able to work in contemporary politics later, but since this is my first class...)

The other possible route would be to talk about relevance of the Machiavellian worldview in art and personal lives. Last week, I watched the magisterial Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), which won the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The film is decidedly anti-Machiavellian. Machiavellian virtue, or "prowess," is through the efficient governance of power. The hero of Das Leben der Anderen, on the other hand, forsakes power and personal gain. Virtue in the movie is defined by the individual, "moral" choices that the "Everyman" have to make on a daily basis.

What sort of discussions in college made the greatest impression on you? How would you teach a book?

Who knew an orchestra could dance

2007-12-26T21:01:00.000-05:00

Gustavo Dudamel, a 27 year-old conductor and the hottest property in the conducting market, conducts the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Dudamel is taking over the LA in 2009. I'm jealous. More reason to visit LA!

gtltornt9
Uploaded by gtltornt

The inspiring thing about these musicians is that they are part of Venezuela's El Sistema, which provides free musical education and instruments to poor and "at risk" kids.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year all!

Best of/Favorites List

2007-12-21T10:03:00.000-05:00

This is the first time since senior year in college that I've been back in Taiwan during the winter time. I forgot how glorious the weather can be here during the winter. For some reason, it's much warmer than i remember it being? Am I mistaken? Not only is it warmer than I remember, but it's also less humid than I remember. It was a glorious dusk today, with a nice breeze that makes your heart ache and remember childhood pleasures.

But anyway, enough gushing and, in good ol' "year-end" fasion, onto the Best of List from the Semester. More like a favorites list than anything. This will also extend into summer readings/watchings. Sorry, couldn't be bothered to add links.

Favorite academic/non-fiction book: Tie between Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization and Mary Elizabeth Berry's Japan in Print. Kotkin's book is monumental in every sense -- in scope, in content, and in theoretical ambition. Berry's (I took a class with her this semester!) book is just a pleasure to read. Something you could give to a non-academic and he/she would enjoy.

Favorite novel/fiction: Richard Powers, The Goldbug Variations. Ever feel a book was writen just ofr you, and resonated with every single strand in your body? This was such a book for me. Close second -- J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K.

Favorite album -- Radiohead's In Rainbows. Did you know that it's a 2 CD release?

Favorite single/song -- Maria Schneider, "Sky Blue"from her newest album, Sky Blue

Favorite movie -- Edward Yang, Yi Yi. I also really enjoyed Stardust. Just a fun fantasy film.

Favorite concert of the year -- Andras Schiff playing the Beethoven Sonatas at the San Francisco Symphony. Just sublime.

Favorite dance/theater performance of the year -- Mary Zimmerman's Argonautika at the Berkeley Rep.

Favorite sports moment of the year -- Grant Hill dunking on DeSagana Diop. Least Favorite -- Cal losing to Oregon State.

Close second: Youks and Papelbon doing the Irish jig:

Fertig

2007-12-20T01:08:00.000-05:00

Just finished one of the most exhausting and definitely most intellectually challenging semesters I've ever had. Final tally for the semester --

Books read for classes (not including those read for papers, only those that were assigned): 67
Pages written: 97.
Number of pages that I was actually satisfied with among those 97: Probably close to 5.
Undergraduate Papers graded: 32
Undergraduate Midterms graded: 30
Undergraduate Finals graded: 28
Masters Exams taken: 1
Number of hours spent writing for my blog: 0

Lesson learned -- taking three reading seminars, grading for a class, and preparing for a Masters exam means that writing for my blog immediately goes out of the window. Remind me to never do this again. I took three seminars last semester, and I thought I would be able to handle it again this semester, but I was definitely losing steam by the end of the semester. The amount of work was part of it, but I think more of it was just the range of material that I was trying to tackle. One day I would be reading about 1650s Tokugawa Japan, the next I would be in 19th century Germany, then I would move to 1930s Soviet Russia, and I would cap off my week in 20th century China. It's hard to switch mindsets that quickly.

But now I'm home in Taiwan, and I couldn't be happier. I'll be hoping to post more frequently. Next post: best of list!

New Apartment!

2007-08-26T02:52:00.000-04:00

I moved last week, and here are pics from my new apartment! This is my room.

Yay bookshelves!

Here's my closet.

Here's the kitchen. Really nice and spacious.

The stove and fridge.

Dining table in the kitchen.

Corridor that connects my room, the kitchen, and the living room. My room is the second dorr on the right.

Here's the living room.

More of the living room, and the entrance to my roommate's room.

And the best of all... it has wooden floors!

Yi Yi

2007-08-13T03:12:00.001-04:00

Edward Yang's Yi Yi is more than a movie, it's truth. I don't think a movie has ever moved me and resonated with me in quite this way. The movie is about a Taiwanese family and how the members react to the stroke of the family's grandma. Sounds like the makings of a soap-opera, but Yang never descends into melodrama. His characters are real, multi-layered, flawed, scared, beautiful. Despite running at around 3 hours, the movie's pacing is superb, and you ache for more. Yang evokes the sites and sounds of modern Taiwan in every single frame, making it a visual treat for those who call the island home. This is cinema at its finest.

Simple Pleasures

2007-08-10T23:04:00.000-04:00

I actually really like doing the dishes. I'm pretty inept at, and dislike, keeping my room organized (or clean, for that matter) and doing other household tasks like vacuuming, but I can handle the dishes with a certain deal of pleasure. I've had more time to create dirty dishes and wash them since summer has freed up a lot of time for me to actually cook 3-4 times a week. I've been particularly motivated to cook ever since I've signed up with an organic farm in the area that sends weekly veggie boxes. I'm experimenting with different vegetables every week -- whereas before I stuck to a strict diet of zucchini and chicken, due to a lack of imagination rather than for healthful reasons, now I'm getting a variety of vegetables. I cooked with parsley for the first time, and I think I'm addicted. The produce and fruit in California is so good too -- they sent some of the juiciest cantaloupe I've ever eaten, and the tomatoes are in season right now and are unbelievable.

These simple, repetitive tasks -- peeling potatoes skins, scrubbing dishes, stir-frying vegetables, done of course to a soundtrack of music -- really have a certain soothing effect on the soul. Is this a sign that I'm growing up? But if you think about it, cooking and cleaning are simultaneously acts of creation and destruction, the essence of living, I suppose. They're simple acts of living, ones that re-affirm our humanity and existence. I guess it balances out academic work, which sometimes can be so soul-snatching and ungrounded in regular everyday life.

Summer of Coetzee, Comics, and Bergman

2007-08-09T03:20:00.000-04:00

As usual, the summer has been filled with infatuations. Two years ago was the summer of Saul Bellow and Arvo Pärt. Last summer I was obsessed with Philip Roth, Guillermo Klein, and Osvaldo Golijov. I've tried to occupy all of my "free time" this summer (when I've not been getting my butt kicked by Japanese) with J. M. Coetzee, comics, and Ingmar Bergman films.

J. M. Coetzee has probably been the biggest revelation of the summer. I've been meaning to read his works for at least a couple of years now, ever since he won the Nobel prize for Literature, but have never gotten around to it. I finally picked up one of his books, and ended up devouring 4 of his novels -- Life and Times of Michael K., Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello -- within the span of something like 5 days. All of his books are short, around 150-200 pages, so they are quick reads. His vision is incisive, penetrating, and his prose reflects that -- it is tight, condensed, deceptively simple, and never wasteful. My favorite by far was Life and Times of Michael K. I don't think I've ever read such a devastating and truthful account of both the joys and sorrows pregnant within the experience of solitude. I was also incredibly impressed by Coetzee's range of writing. Every book deals with a vastly different time and setting. Life and Times is set in a pseudo-apocalyptic apartheid state; the scene for Waiting for the Barbarians is a non-specific outpost of the "Empire" 300 years ago; Disgrace happens to a University professor in post-apartheid South Africa; Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer. Similar themes of course recur throughout his novels, but he is able to penetrate the human condition so richly in different settings.

Other than Coetzee, I've been sucked into a bunch of comics, or graphic novels. It started with a trip to the local comic book store in search of a birthday present for a friend. It happens that Berkeley has one of the best comic book stores I've ever set foot in at Comic Relief, and I ended up getting Will Eisner's "Contract with God" Trilogy. I've always been fascinated by Depression era literature, and the way that he was able to depict New York City in the midst of this crisis was so invigorating. I then turned to the brilliant but twisted mind of the alternative manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who is recently getting collections of his work translated and published in the states. His portrayal of the immediate post-war era of Japan is so brutally radical, tormented, and different from the usual fantastical world that manga inhabits that I couldn't stop reading his stuff. It's disgusting and heady stuff: wide-scale infanticide and abortions, rampant sexual perversion and adultery, mass alienation, and despair fill his pages.

I then somehow got sucked into reading Super-hero comic books online. I remembered how my cousin had been raving about Daredevil, and I decided to give it a read. I couldn't stop, and quickly came to the conclusion that Daredevil is probably the edgiest, most interesting super-hero comic out there. I read some of the old Frank Miller Daredevil and was hooked. I then moved on to more Marvel stuff, and thanks to the wonders of bittorrent, downloaded all of the Marvel Civil War series. Even though I'm still working through it, it was still just cool reading such a big "event," where all the super-heroes are pitted against each other. It's crazy, since I'm such a huge Superman fan, but it seems like I'm starting to like the Marvel super-heroes a lot more recently. Although I must say, DC's New Frontier was a pretty amazing graphic novel as well.

Finally, R. I. P. Ingmar Bergman. I was watching some of his films before he died, so I was really sad to hear the news of his passing. The Virgin Spring was probably one of the most intense movie experiences I've ever had. Highly recommended.

Ah, I love summer. =)

Podcasts

2007-07-18T01:10:00.000-04:00

Discovered this GREAT podcast recently: Radiolab on WNYC. It's basically popular science meets This American Life, and it explains pretty complex, cutting edge scientific research in clear, interesting stories. It also addresses fundamental questions that the humanities asks in scientific terms, such as how do we understand morality scientifically? It's a really high quality radio show.

I've been on a podcast tirade lately (it being summer and all), and these are some other shows that I think are really worth listening to on a regular basis:

This American Life (Still my favorite radio show, by far)
NPR: Fresh Air (Interviews conducted by Terry Gross, covering a wide-range of topics)
PBS Bill Moyers Journal
The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons aka the Sports Guy (Gotta have at least one sports-related podcast, right?)
Best of Mike and Mike in the Morning (Ok, make that two.)
Savage Lovecast (Weekly sex advice from the awesome Dan Savage... Not for those easily offended.)

Check them out! Remember, they're all FREE.

How to really write about taste

2007-07-11T23:34:00.000-04:00

Again, blown away. Again, just makes me want to quit writing. From pgs. 113-114 of J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K:

"Then came the evening when the first pumpkin was ripe enough to cut. It had grown earlier and fater than the others, in the very centre of the field; K had marked it out as the first fruit, the firstborn. The shell was soft, the knife sank in without a struggle. The flesh, though still rimmed with green, was a deep orange. On the wire grid he had made he laid strips of pumpkin over a bed of coals that glowed brighter and brighter as the dark came on. The fragrance of the burning flesh rose into the sky. Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' With two wire skewers he turned the strips, and in mid-act felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness. It was exactly as they had described it, like a gush of warm water. Now it is completed, he said to himself. All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating the food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains to be a tender of the soil. He lifted the first strip to his mouth. Beneath the crisply charred skin in the flesh was soft and juicy. He chewed with tears of joy in his eyes. The best, he thought, the very best pumpkin I have tasted. For the first time since he had arrived in the country he found pleasure in eating. The aftertaste of the first slice left his mouth aching with sensual delight. He moved the grid off the coals and took a second slice. His teeth bit through the crust into the soft hot pulp. Such pumpkin, he thought, such pumpkin I could eat every day of my life and never want anything else. And what perfection it would be with a pinch of salt -- with a pinch of salt, and a dab of butter, and a sprinkiling of sugar, and a little cinnamon scattered over the top! Eating the third slice, and the fourth and fifth, till half the pumpkin was gone and his belly was full, K wallowed in the recollection of the flavours of salt, butter, sugar, cinnamon, one by one."

Amazing book. I've been using Goodreads to keep track of the books that I've been reading, along with posting short reviews, so join me there! My email to search for is albert.wu@gmail.com My review of the book:

I've been meaning to read Coetzee for a long time, and this was my first exposure to his work. The book tracks the life of Michael K, who lives in a South Africa torn apart by civil war. Michael tries to escort his mother from Cape Town back to her rural home. She dies on the way, leaving him alone and having to fend for himself in the imagined dystopia.

At first Coetzee's descriptions of Michael K seemed distant, emotionless, and jarring. But I soon realized that the prose is meant to reflect Michael's inner and mental state. Michael approaches the world just as the narrator does: with a detached gaze, living an ethereal presence in a war-torn, almost apocalyptic world. The prose soars at a moment of exultation, when Michael tastes freedom when he eats a pumpkin that he had so carefully planted and grown.

Having just read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," I find it interesting to juxtapose the different visions of hope the two authors provide as a remedy for a devastated world. While McCarthy finds hope in the depths of familial love, and eventually, human solidarity, Coetzee sees liberation through the intense experience of solitude and individual human perseverance.

The book is a stunning condemnation against tyranny, imprisonment, and war. Tyranny is not a metaphor here. Michael literally wastes away, unable to eat, vomiting up the food that the internment camp tries to feed him.

It's also a book about the individual in relation to society and nature. The story reminds me of Werner Herzog's work at times, where human kind finds its solace, at the same time nearing the edge of "insanity," alone at the mercy of nature.

It's a quick and gripping read. Once you get past the first 30 pages, the rest of the book goes quick. I think this book will stay with me for a long time

Postcards from Taiwan: Taste

2007-06-30T13:05:00.000-04:00

Photo courtesy of http://www.can.com.sg/content/neocan/en/streetwise/eat/taiwan_food_fight.html

Sorry that this post took so long again. Finally finished "The Gold-Bug Variations" and had a couple of hours to write. I WILL finish this series. =P

"But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one's country -- feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies -- is necessary of political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame." -- Richard Rorty (RIP)

I ran into a "deep-green" (pro-independence, pro-DPP for those uninitatied in Taiwanese political lingo) friend the other day. He's probably the "greenest" person I know (imagine that, Jean, somebody "greener" than me?). Within two minutes of seeing each other, he launched into a tirade about the state of current political affairs in Taiwan, lamenting:"there really isn't much for us Taiwanese to be proud of these days." It's true: our politicians are insane; the "tallest building in the world" looks like a scaly dragon's penis and will probably be surpassed by the South Koreans next week; our competitive advantages in the high-tech industries seem to be wittling away daily by the allure and promise of the Chinese market; and as our budget remains frozen in Parliament, all we can muster is empty rhetoric over whether Chiang Kai-shek was a bad man or not.

But at least we're still proud of our food. I talked to a "deep-blue" (pro-KMT, pro eventual unification) friend of mine the other day, and he commented that since his family no longer lives in Taiwan, there really is no reason for him to go back to Taiwan other than for the food. I guess at least there's something both sides can agree on -- we're proud of our niu-ro-mien. Damn proud, in fact.

But what is Taiwanese cuisine, exactly? Whenever I mention that I'm from Taiwan, one of the questions that inevitably comes up is, "What's the food like in Taiwan?" I never answer straight-out that "Oh, it's just Chinese food," because this conjures images of P. F. Chang, sweet-and-sour pork, and MSG-laden fried noodles -- not quite a realistic picture of Taiwanese food. But there's also the question of what constitutes Chinese food? "Chinese restaurants" are a phenomenon of the West. In China and Taiwan, you never go to a "Chinese restuarant," but rather establishments that serve regional cuisines -- Sichuan, Zhejiang, Beijing, or Shanghai, for example.

So why don't we start by trying to describe a Taiwanese breakfast? Usually this involves a form of rice porridge, sometimes cooked with a yam, mixed with dosese of shredded preserved pork. A leafy green vegetable accompanies... see this is too difficult. There isn't any succinct way to describe Taiwanese food to the uninitiated. There's no 5 second sound-bite to capture it. No sushis, hamburgers, escargots, or Peking ducks, where merely mentioning the food maps onto a wider cultural response and image. It's something that has to be experienced.

So what is it that makes us proud of our cuisine? It's not particularly flavorful like Zhejiang cuisine, not spicy like Sichuan food, nor elegant like Beijing food. It's just... unique. Taiwan has always been a point of intersection for various cultures -- throughout its history the island has been inhabited by Polynesians, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese peoples -- and its cuisine reflects this messy history. The most interesting Taiwanese cuisine has always been the love-child of different cultures coming in contact with each other, dashed with a touch of creative ingenuity -- crepes filled with seafood, green bean smoothies, Taiwanese style Shawarma, oyster omelets, or "Coffin Bread" (thick pieces of French toast filled with crazy fillings such as curry chicken or beef). This is why Taiwan is famous for its street food an night-markets -- the food is cheap and diverse; it's utterly uncategorizable, utterly Taiwanese.

Jetlag

2007-06-15T08:06:00.000-04:00

I hate jetlag. The days can be unbearable, especially around mid-day. But at the same time, there's something wonderful about being completely lucid at 4 AM while the rest of the world sleeps.

I'm back in Berkeley, and I've just started summer Japanese. The pace is intensive -- a year's worth of Japanese crammed into 10 weeks -- and the jetlag is not helping. But Berkeley is absolutely gorgeous during the summer. The weather is marvelous, and the smell of blooming flowers pepper the air.

I'm still planning on finishing my series of posts on Taiwan, but haven't been able to sum up the energy or the courage to do them yet. But speaking of those posts, I read something in Richard Powers's book, The Gold Bug Variations, that puts my description of cicadas to shame. Here it is:

"Tonight, where I grew up, the cicadas have their last seasonal blowout, choral storms outside my childhood window, now serving some other child in the formation of memories. Even from this distance their simmer is audible, a sex-soaked group pulse, a twitch in the dry air swelling to buzz-saw bandwidth. Wind pitches their group shout in a mechanical wave sounding for all the world like a million minature pieces of shook sheet tin. Reaching decible denoument the noise cuts off at the choas instant, fizzling to a few holdouts. The signal from one swarm sets off another, a hundred yards off, flaring in pitch before it too hushes. All down the county line, the overlapping antiphony of bug choirs."

Powers makes me want to quit writing altogether. Have you ever read a book that you felt was written just for you, where every line feels like a thunderous noise that resonates with each strand of your being? This passage for example, I felt was written just for me:

"Whatever his reason, Ressler told me a story. He spoke of a series of nights as a young man when he first discovered the Goldbergs. A week of concentration, when the closed code of music at last broke. 'Dangerously close to turning twenty-six, paid to do genetic research, I instead spent evenings lying in an army barracks bed, listening to that aria over and over in my ears, eyes, throat, and head. I was trying to discover why the thirty minute waltzes reduced me to hopeless emotion, to neutralize them through over-exposure so I could forget them and recover an even emotional keel.' "

This passage reminds me of my days in Europe, when I spent hours alone in my cold Berlin apartment, neglecting my German grammar, lying in bed listening to Schiff play the Goldbergs, over and over again...

I've been at an intellectual standstill since starting the book; I feel like all of my other work has to be put aside at the moment until I finish this book. And I've been savoring it slowly, bit by bit, piece by piece, as Powers unravels his magic. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm on blog hiatus until I finish this book (I'm about halfway through)!

In the meantime, I have pictures from Russia that you can see here. I haven't finished captioning all the pictures yet, but the first couple of days should have enough captions to let you get a sense of what I saw. Also, this gave me the chills and reminds me of the power of music:

Postcards from Taiwan: Sound

2007-06-04T01:19:00.001-04:00

Photos of cicadas courtesy of biology.clc.uc.edu/steincarter/cicadas.htm

This is Part 3 in my 5 part series, Postcards from Taiwan. Sorry for the delay for this post. Writer's block plus various mitigating factors contributed to the slower working speed. I'm also not completely satisfied with the post, but oh well, I've decided to let it run. I'm also going to be in Russia for the next week, so I won't be able to finish the next two posts as soon as I would like. I might even have some "Postcards from Russia" instead.

I love the sound of cicadas. Their voices can sometimes build from nothing, like when an orchestra warms up by tuning their instruments. A single cicada starts with a drone at an irregular beat. Other cicadas join in the tune, as the waves of sound gains momentum and complexity. Soon enough, the individual chirps and irregular beats are absorbed into a homogenous wall of sound. It's deafening, at times intimidating, but oddly soothing and comforting. Standing under a tree filled with cicadas, as the sun begins to set, the sound envelops your body -- it's almost physically tangible -- creating a cocoon of warmth that heightens the pleasures of a gentle summer breeze.

Twilight in Taiwan is a magical time. The heat of the day is done, and the creatures of the earth all seem to breathe a collective sigh of relief. The toads, the cicadas, the mosquitoes all join in a hymn of praise and thanksgiving,rejoicing that they've withstood the perils, dangers, and burdens of day once again. The pitter-patter of children's footsteps, laden with their backpacks, meld with the whirring of exhaust fans and the sizzling of frying pans, as anxious mothers prepare healthy doses of supper to welcome their children home. Elderly citizens bring their stools to sit in front of their doors in hopes of catching some of the elusive evening breeze, listening to the rumbling of cars and motorcycles pass them by.

Among this sweet cacaphony, it's the chirping of cicadas that most strongly evokes the memories of childhood. I'm 13 years-old once again; it's summer in Hsinchu, I've just spent the whole afternoon on the basketball courts in Tsing-hua University, and it's gotten too dark to continue shooting hoops. I dribble my torn-up Spalding indoor-outdoor basketball on my way home, replaying every game and every move in my mind. I pass by several gigantic banyan trees that lie in the path between my house and the courts, and it happens -- The cicadas begin their tune, interrupting my thought processes, demanding my attention. As the cicadas increase their volume, I'm only conscious of my surroundings; it's a moment of blissful serenity.

And perhaps this is the trickery of memory. Memories are fragmented; the mind is selective in what it remembers. Certain details are elevated over others (Why is the imprint of the Spalding ball so vivid in my mind, but not my clothes or shoes?). Despite an illusion of perfection, memories are generally incomplete and distorted. Historians have been obsessed, since the 1980s, with the nebulous relationship between history and memory -- how memories and perceptions of the past shapes our understanding of it, and how "collective consciousnesses" are formed. The academic study of memory has been decidedly anti-nostalgic, because nostalgia presents a sugar-coated past; it's a yearning for a version of the past that never truly existed.

But the academic study of memory is so far removed from the personal experience of it. Memory experienced first-hand is most of the time nostalgic. It's a mourning for a world lost, a love lost, a misstep, innocence lost. We can't quite identify it, but something's changed, and what used to feel natural feels strange, foreign. The cicadas still sing in the banyan trees outside my house, next to the basketball courts. Except that we no longer live in Hsinchu. The house of my childhood is still there, but it's not ours anymore.

Maybe the historian Immanuel Wallerstein was right: "Change is eternal. Nothing ever changes."

Postcards from Taiwan: Touch

2007-05-29T11:01:00.000-04:00

(Photo courtesy of http://www.jlcomicart.de/images/HeatWave1.jpg)

(Photo courtesy of http://static.sky.com/images/pictures/1339449.jpg)

This is part two of my five part series, Postcards from Taiwan. Each post is around 500-600 words, and deals with a different sensory experience from Taiwan. I'm also experimenting with different types of writing and narrative styles. Hope you enjoy it, and feel free to give comments and criticisms, etc.

Heat. It can drive a fool insane. A friend once propounded a ridiculous theory about how civilizations living in hotter climates tend to love war, the usual Shakespearean mumbo-jumbo about how hotter blood translates into fiery tempers -- oh Mercutio, thou art dead! -- which somehow explains why the Middle East never has, and never will be, a peaceful region. "Bull-shiieet," I snorted, not even trying to feign my skepticism. He quickly responded, "Have you ever spent more than 30 minutes outside in 37 degrees Celcius weather (100 degrees Fahrenheit for American readers)? A man can go fuckin' cuh-ray-zeee."

Dude has a point. The heat in Taiwan stifles coherent thought. Actually, it does more than stifle: it screws up your circulation system so that somehow one thinks funny, talks funny, walks funny. Try walking around outside at high-noon during summertime in Taiwan. The heat hits you like a wall of bricks the moment you leave the comforts of your air-conditioned room. Your thoughts quickly become consumed by the oppressive heat, and any sense of relief -- a gust of wind from a store air-conditioning machine or a drop of cold water -- brings an instant sense of gratification. You soon start hunting for that next blast of cooled air, like a mosquito seeking fresh, warm blood.

Perhaps this can explain why Taiwanese politics is so "fuckin' cuh-ray-zeee." Everytime I come home, I am always reminded of -- and repeatedly suprised to see -- how little rational thought is displayed in the Taiwanese media. We are subjected to replays of members of parliament fighting, arguments over non-sensical issues, such as whether Olympic torches should be allowed into the "country," and street fighting between police and protesters. The Taiwanese political experience is a visceral one -- there's a lot of punching, kicking, and screaming involved. As my parents and I watched the latest fracas of protests and counter-protests over the re-naming of an historical site, my parents uttered in frustration, "This is crazy! We can't watch the news here anymore." But the television stayed on; no one changed the channel.

Just like the ever pervasive heat, there's no escaping the political insanity of Taiwan. It's a national mind-set, a perpetual passion. Yet, the insularity of its concerns always astonishes me. Taiwanese political discourse exists in its own little bubble, governed by a peculiar set of internal mechanisms, with its own logic. In the two weeks since I've been home, I don't think I've seen more than 10 minutes of coverage on international politics. Instead, the same madness of scandal after scandal, altercation after altercation, repeats itself daily. It's no wonder we're all going nuts. Actually we're already there: we're all fuckin' cuh-ray-zeee.

And don't even get me started on the humidity.

Postcards from Taiwan: Vision

2007-05-27T23:09:00.000-04:00

(Photo courtesy of http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/photos/taiwan2004/1.html)

I'm going to try something different with my blog so that I can keep myself disciplined with the writing process. I'm going to write a series of blog posts around a central theme. This is the first series, called "Postcards from Taiwan," and I'm going to write five posts on the topic, each dealing with one of the five senses. Each post will be around 500-600 words. This is the first in the series, dealing with vision. Special thanks to Evelyn for pre-editing my post! Any further edits and suggestions are more than welcome.

Two Taiwans exist: one in the spotlight, the other lurking in the shadows. There is the internationalized Taiwan that grabs the eye of the casual observer with skyscrapers, famous corporate logos, digital IMAX theaters, and gigantic department stores. A prime example of this influx of the global market lies in Taipei's Xinyi district, a rapidly developing area around the Taipei City Hall that boasts the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, along with a cornucopia of flashing billboards advertising the latest fashions, the most popular models or the newest blockbuster movie. This is the Taiwan of the trendy and the fashionable, hustling and bustling to the beat of global capitalism.

In the shadow of the glittering lights, a different Taiwan hides and survives. This is the Taiwan of the back-alleys and old streets, where watchful grandpas and grandmas guard over the equivalent of American dDime stores (za-huo-dian), crowded with cheap plastic toys, canned food that seem straight out of the 1980s, and blue-strap flip-flops, a Taiwanese trademark. One could imagine these shops existing here since time immemorial, or at least since the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945. The Taiwanese spirit was born in these alleyways. This is where children watch their parents bargain, where they imbibe the culture of perpetual gossiping over political figures and the neighbor next door. The family dinner table is put on display, exposed for all to see, brought to the public eye. Anonymity is a luxury in these streets.

This mixture -- dare I use that dreadful word, fusion? -- of these two modes of life generates much of Taiwan's dynamism. Ximen Ding, one of the most popular spots for Taiwanese youth, derives much of its vitality from this constant dance between the traditional, down-home appeal of Taiwanese culture with the attraction of fashion and technology inspired by international trends. Ximen Ding, and Taiwan in general, overwhelms one with a wealth of visual stimulation, as colorful store fronts and shop banners compete for your attention, even as you keep an eye on the constant swarm of motorcycles that dart around you. "Illegal" Taiwanese street vendors, peddling wares ranging from fake Spongebob stuffed dolls to fried chicken and ready to flee at any moment from the meddling police, park defiantly with their carts in front of the golden arches of McDonalds and Sony's familiar corporate logo. An unexpected turn into a side-alley in the area transports you to another world -- streets unbothered by the hustle and bustle of the main shops of Ximen Ding, inhabited instead by friendly men in wife-beaters and flip-flops, eyeing you as they smoke, chew betel nut, and criticize politicians. It's a side of Taiwan that co-exists uneasily with the glitz and ritz of "modern" Taiwan. But it's also a side that the "modern" Taiwan would be ill-advised to lose.

Racism and Taiwan

2007-05-19T09:01:00.000-04:00

"They wouldn't hire me to teach English full-time at one bu-xi-ban (a Taiwanese cram school) because I'm not white. They even outright told me that even though I was qualified, they were looking for a white person, rather than someone Taiwanese," a high-school friend of mine who currently teaches English in Taiwan complained to me last week. It's the unspoken rule among many of these privately-run cram schools: your legitimacy as an English teacher stems more from your race than your qualifications. We care more about how you look than how you actually teach.

When compared with the US, the problem of race is not at all an explosive issue in Taiwan, since it is still a pretty much racially homogeneous society. But racist attitudes and practices can be detected throughout Taiwan. Take the Taiwanese "professional" basketball league, the Super Basketball League (have you ever heard of a more idiotic name for a professional sports league?), as an example. This year was the first time in its 5-year history that the league allowed "foreign" basketball players to play. In one of the oddest and most inane rules in sports history, the teams that ended outside of the top-four last year (there are 7 teams in the league), were allowed to hire a foreign player to help improve their fortunes for the next season.

Team Videoland Sports, which ended with the 5th-best record last season, hired Jonathan Sanders, a black journeyman on the international basketball league circuit, and Sanders dominated the league. He averaged 22 points, second-best in the league, and led the league with 16 rebounds a game. Most importantly, Videoland Sports vaulted from 5th to 1st place. By any objective measure, Sanders deserved the award for league Most Valuable Player. But in an interview, Sanders said that he didn't think that the Taiwanese media would give the most coveted and prestigious award in the game to a foreigner. Some commentators rushed to defend the Taiwanese media, saying that the media would be fair and balanced, and should vote for Sanders as MVP. Unfortunately, Sanders was proved right, as the MVP award went to a local player Lin Zhi-jie, a fine player in his own right, but not as deserving of the award as Sanders. The most ridiculous aspect of this whole thing is that Sanders might lose his job if the current rules reamin in effect. Remember, only teams that didn't end up with the top 4 record are allowed to have a foreign player, and since Videoland earned the best record in the league, they technically won't be allowed to keep their foreign player next year. So unless this inane rule is repealed or reformed, Sanders will not be playing in the SBL next year.

These measures stem from various deep-seated racial inferiority complexes: We can't play basketball as well as black people, so we'll have to implement protective measures to insure that our own players can thrive; Asian-looking people can't speak English as well as white people, so we'll have to hire white people. But really, this inferiority complex needs to be exposed. There is the possibility of succesfully integrating "foreign" and "local" elements so that they can complement each other better. The SBL's former incarnation was the Chinese Basketball Alliance, and at the time the league allowed two foreign players to play on each team. That CBA dissolved in 1999 due to a labor dispute, but prior to that it produced exciting, entertaining basketball that drew a lot of crowds. Even though foreign players consistently played well and always produced eye-popping statistics, local players were no slouches either. Sometimes there would be teams that were carried by their two foreign players, but the best teams that consistently won championships and ended at the top of the rankings were those that successfully integrated both foreign and local talent.

As Taiwan increasingly becomes more of a multi-cultural and globalized society, we really must learn how to welcome and integrate diverse elements into our society and eliminate racist practices. These include the massive abuses that we inflict on Filipinos, such as the Kaoshiung MRT incident where migrant Filipino and Thai workers were under-paid, lodged in horrendous conditions, and beaten by guards. Taiwan prides itself as being a flourishing democracy with progressive labor laws, universal health care, and an excellent education system. There's no reason that racist practices should continue to be condoned in such a society. The bigger and more difficult challenge of changing racist attitudes still awaits us.

Conversion

2007-05-17T21:45:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the close to 2-month absence from the blog -- Final papers intervened, I came home to Taiwan, and general end-of-semester craziness. Most importantly, I've been working for close to two-months on this entry on why I decided to get baptized into the Catholic Church. It was a momentous decision for me, but I'm glad and at peace with it. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this blog better updated from now on, since it's summer, but I wouldn't bet on it. =P

It all began in a dingy little Catholic Church in the mountains of Hualien, the province where my parents were born and raised on the Eastern Coast of Taiwan. It was the winter vacation of my sophomore year of college (2002). Three friends -- Gene, Jean, and Tomo -- and I decided to take a trip to see the Eastern Coast of Taiwan, a beautiful area of Taiwan that I cherished because of my annual trips there with my parents. Among our group, I had known Gene and Jean since we were six years old, while it was Tomo's first time in Taiwan. The rest of us wanted to expose Tomo to a Taiwanese experience outside of Taipei, and we decided on the idea of traveling to Hualien.

On the second day of our trip, we stayed at a youth hostel close to Taroko Gorge, a beautiful national park with stunning gorges and scenery. It was still early in morning, and as Jean and Gene were still sleeping, Tomo and I decided to explore the area around the hostel. We discovered a small Catholic Church tucked away in a nook on the side of the mountain.
The sliding doors that led into the sanctuary were unlocked, and we entered the Church. It was simple and unardorned. As we walked around the Church, Tomo asked, "Did you know that all of the Catholic Churches around the world read the same scripture passages every day?" "No," I responded. She motioned towards the altar, where a big Missal lay open on a stand. We flipped to the day's readings, and started reading aloud the passages in Chinese. Tomo opened her own miniature version of the Missal, and they were indeed the same passages as those in Chinese. As we repeated the readings in English, I was struck for the first time by the "catholicity" of the Catholic Church -- it was amazing to think that in every single waking hour somebody in the world was reading, praying, and meditating on the same scriptures, connected through the body of the Church. It idea of "universality" appealed to me, since I was born in the US but growing up in Taiwan, I have always lived in a nebulous, fragmented cultural zone of being "American" but not fully "American," "Taiwanese" yet not fully "Taiwanese." This idea of a central body providing some sort of uniform structure to a diverse and fragmented body sounded seemed fundamentally attractive.

I grew up as an evangelical Protestant. My immediate family is mostly unreligious. My mother was baptized and my uncle is a Presbyterian minister, which was my first exposure to Christianity, but we're not that much of a Church-going family. I was drawn towards Christianity in High school, when I became heavily involved in a Lutheran Church, decidedly filled with evangelical influences, in Hsinchu. Most of my close friends went to Church, and since it was close to my house, I started going too. It was a formative experience in my early Christian life. We had a really tight-knit group that was actively involved in almost all aspects of the Church, from its worship to Bible study. It was there that I fell in love with the Church as the people of God, where I learned what it meant to be part of a community of believers, and to be actively engaged in service to that community. Despite being heavily involved, I was not baptized. My parents wanted me to make the decision after I was 18, when I could make a fully conscious choice in the matter.

In all honesty, I didn't really know the differences between Lutheranism and Presbyterianism growing up, I just knew that I was "Christian." I did know, however, that Catholics were different from us "Christians." Even in Chinese, people often use the the moniker "Christianity"(基督教) to refer to Protestantism (which technically in Chinese should be 新教), using the term Catholicism (天主教) separately, as if they were completely different entities, instead of as a sub-category of a larger group. I believed all of the common misconceptions that many Protestants hold against Catholics -- they're Virgin Mary worshippers, they engage in idol worship , they are bordering on polytheistic worship when praying to their patron saints, and they're the "new Pharisees" because they cling on to law rather than faith.

In college, I joined InterVarsity Christian fellowship, which replicated much of my high school experience with faith. Just as in high school, I became heavily involved in the community. It was there that I met Tomo and had my first real contact with Catholicism. Fast forward to the Spring semester of my sophomore year. In March of 2003, the US declared war on Iraq, and very soon bombs began raining down on Baghdad. I was attending a Protestant evangelical church in New York at the time, and the pastor of the church vigorously supported the war. He preached that “good Christians should also support the war” because God put secular leaders in power, and since God had chosen George Bush to be the President of the United States, Christians should support the president's decision. I was disgusted and bewildered by this type of reasoning, since I opposed the war based on what I thought was grounded in my understanding of Christian scripture. But the pastor's sermon did plant a seed of doubt in my mind: could I really oppose the war and still continue to be a “good” Christian?

I was taking a history seminar at the time where we had to choose a topic that could turn into a senior thesis. In order to "solve" my questions, I decided to investigate the history of Christian anti-war movements, finally settling on a study of an influential ecumenical anti-war organization during the Vietnam War, called Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV), which was spearheaded by prominent religious leaders such as William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The project invigorated me both spiritually and intellectually. I discovered liberal Protestantism and realized that my opposition to war could be justified within a long Christian tradition stemming back to the early Christian church (when all Christians were pacifists and refused to enter the Roman army).

While researching my topic, I became acquainted with the prominent conservative Catholic journal First Things. I learned about First Things because of Father Richard John Neuhaus, a central figure in CALCAV. Neuhaus was a liberal, anti-war Lutheran pastor in the 1960s, but had converted to Catholicism and neo-conservatism in the late 1980s. He founded First Things as an organ to discuss the intersection of politics, religion, culture and society. The journal had a particular impact on my research, because they had a prolonged discussion of just war theory, and whether the Iraq War fulfilled the requirements of a "just war." I disagreed, and still disagree, with Neuhaus and his gang's position on most issues -- abortion, the war, homosexuality, etc. -- but I admired the intellectual rigor in which the journal approached these topics. They also refused to censor debate, as their journal would often feature articles and rebuttals from famous thinkers of different theological and political persuasions from their own. I encountered in further explorations the Catholic social justice tradition, and I came to admire the level of intellectual, political, and social engagement that Catholicism has demonstrated throughout the ages. Coming in contact with these ideas and thinkers also chipped away at my misconceptions and prejudices at Catholicism, and I came to realize my understanding of Catholicism was based on a shallow, mainly anti-Catholic notions.

It was during this time that I fell in love with liturgy. I was first drawn into the deep wonders of liturgy at the historic Riverside Church, which is also located in Morningside Heights and often called the "Cathedral" of liberal Protestantism. Martin Luther King Jr. made his first public denouncement of the Vietnam War at the pulpit of Riverside, and the Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who figured prominently in my research, pastored the Church in the 1980s. I decided to make the 10 minute trek over to the Church. I was immediately blown away. They had a rich and engaging liturgy, adorned with a beautiful choir that made the rituals come alive. I had always learned growing up that rituals were dead, and that they prevented the spirit from truly operating. Riverside overturned that belief, as I came to find myself capable of worshipping through the steady and traditional rhythms of liturgical speech.

I was slowly moving away from evangelical Christianity. The Morningside Heights area is probably the last remaining bastion of the liberal mainline Protestant establishment in the US. Other than Riverside Church, the National Council of Churches, St. John's the Divine, the Episcopal Cathedral, is found there as well. It was exciting to be introduced to that scene, as I started to realize that there was a community of serious believers that grounded their political allegiances in their faith. That their understanding of political reality was an outgrowth of their religious convictions, and not the other way around.

After I graduated from college, I spent the year in Europe. I spent six months in Germany, three months in France. The face of Christianity looks extremely different in Europe from the US. There is almost no equivalent of the American strand of evangelical Christianity in Europe. What this means is that most of the Churches are highly liturgical. The Churches have very little of the capitalist, commercialist impulses that you see in America. In essence, there are no Rick Warrens or Joel Osteens in Europe. There are no megachurches; Christianity does not thrive in the same numbers that it does in America. The interesting phenomenon that I found in Germany was that the Catholic Churches were livelier than the Protestant ones, even though I was living in a traditionally Protestant area of the country.

Living in traditionally Catholic France deepened my appreciation for the Catholic Church. Again, I was reminded of the "catholicity" of the Church. My French was still not good enough to be able to understand everything that was going on in the Mass, but since I knew the liturgy of the Church, I was never lost during the services. It was also during this time that I went on a pilgrimage to visit all of the major Catholic cathedrals in Brittany, in the north of France. My obsession with Cathedrals began when I was still in New York, because I had done some research on New York cathedrals -- St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. John's the Divine, and Riverside. I thus decided to visit the major cathedrals in Amiens, Bayreux, Rouen, Chartres, and Mt. St. Michel. It was an amazing experience, as I came in first-hand contact with the wonderful traditions of the Church. My travel companion during the trip was Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, which detailed his conversion experience (Merton was also a Columbia graduate, so I felt a special connection with him). Merton wrote about being drawn to the monastic life through his introduction to the Liturgy of the Hours, and the highlight of the trip came when I saw those hours first hand at Mt. St. Michel, as I attended several prayer services in the Abbey. It was such a revelation to come in contact with people breathing and living the life of the Church.

By the time I came to Berkeley to start graduate school, I had made the decision that I wanted to find a Church to attend, and I had decided that I would give a Catholic church. Lo and behold, during one of the first get-togethers for first-years, I learned that a fellow historian Chuck was also a Catholic priest. I told him that I was becoming interested in the Church, and wondered if we would go to Church together. He happily agreed to take me to Church.

Chuck's hospitality, along with the hospitality of his religious order, the Holy Cross, showed me a side of Catholicism that I had previously not encountered. The only reservations that I still had towards the Church was its official conservative stance on many issues. Even though I had read much about Liberation Theology and the "socialist" strand of Catholicism, the shadow that First Things cast over my thinking on the Church was still considerable. I still thought of the Church as a reactionary and oppressive force against many of the liberal agendas that I supported. Chuck and the Holy Cross showed me that this was not so, but that indeed a liberal wing existed in the Church. Just like in life, the Church was filled with a diversity of opinions and beliefs, and that the official "Vatican" line did not necessarily translate to belief "on the ground."

But most of all, I started yearning for the Eucharist. The thing I loved about the Mass is that its high point is not the sermon (homily), nor the singing of the hymns, nor the readings, but the Eucharist. Receiving the Body and Blood. I loved how the Mass is centered around a celebration of Christ's presence. When I would occasionally return to Protestant Churches, I would be reminded of how different an aesthetic experience the Mass was from Protestant services. I still admired Protestant services for their emotional fervor, their impassioned preaching, and their exegetical rigor. But I always left the service feeling that something was missing. I left with a longing for the Eucharist.

And that's when I really felt my conversion taking root. Everything else could disappear -- my political allegiances, my "passion" for Christ, my understanding of the Bible -- but the Eucharist would remain. The Eucharist is a symbolic and physical testament to the unity of the body of Christ despite the fractured, divided reality of the Church. And the celebration of the Eucharist provided a temporal connection to the traditional fathers of the faith, to saints such as Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. And also to future generations of the faithful. The Eucharist reminded, and reminds me, that my faith is not my own. It has has always been grounded and created in a community; it has always been a gift from God, nurtured by those around me.

And so to boil it down, it's for this reason that I decided to get baptized Catholic: I rushed to receive the Eucharist. I am still sometimes haunted by the question of how I can associate with such a reactionary, monolithic institution, considering my "progressive" and "liberal" beliefs. In all honesty, I still don't have a good answer to that question. And perhaps I never will. But I do know, that ever since I have become baptized, it really has felt like a "homecoming," and that there's no other place I'd rather be.

Shen Wei Dance

2007-03-25T02:09:00.000-04:00

I feel so compelled to write about something I know that I won't be able to capture fully in words. I just had one of the most exhilarating artistic performance experiences so far in my life. The best sort of art not only creates a different, alternate world and transports you there, but it is also a mirror that allows you to recognize the human potential within yourself, and that you yourself have the ability to transcend the constrictions of your current life and existence -- simply put, good art inspires. I find the most inspirational art not those hat dazzle through virtuosity or tricks, where you stand in awe at somebody else's achievements and abilities, thus leaving yourself floored at technical brilliance that seems impossible to ever achieve. Rather I find the best art that type that hides its virtuosity, but creates a radically different experience that departs from the ordinary, where you feel like you are not only dazzled, but incorporated into the experience as well.

Shen Wei Dance Art created that world for me tonight. The first half of its performance was "dance" set to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a piece that I am extremely familiar with. Shen Wei is not interested in narrative, and he abandoned Stravinsky's traditional storyline in favor of fluid, seemingly random, but also interconnected movements. It traversed the line between improvisation and formal choreography at all times, while never losing its dramatic sense of tension. Instead of seeing human movement, it felt like we were watching atoms dart across a platform, reacting in unison but also individually agitated by the music.

The second half was probably the most sublime dance piece I have ever seen. Set to Arvo Pärt's Für Alina and Spiegel im Spiegel (also two of my favorite pieces by Pärt). The physical vocabulary was painstakingly slow and calculated. It was a meditation on Paul Delvaux's surrealist paintings, and he brought the surrealism to life, creating a visual world that was at the same time wholly alien and familiar. For a moment, I was transported into his world, but at the same time, completely grounded in ours.

Free TimesSelect for University Emails

2007-03-25T01:54:00.000-04:00

Wanted to give people a heads up about this: Free Times Select with a .edu email! Goto:

http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html

Thanks to
IamErica for the link!

2007-03-21T02:35:00.000-04:00

I think I have a man-crush on Ira Glass. I feel that he encapsulates the historian's job so cogently here. The rest of the video series is worth watching too (click on related videos in YouTube).

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