Blue Angels

For the first time, St Cloud will be hosting a real air show featuring the Blue Angels, June 26th-27th, 2010.

Aviation Nation 2009

Nellis AFB, Las Vegas, NV 2009.11.14-15

Nellis AFB, being probably the most active and largest base in the Air Force, as well as the home of the Thunderbirds, is now the site of the Air Force's premier air show.

Performers (military jet):

Thunderbirds

Nellis flyby (F-15C, F-16C, A-10C, F-22A)

A-10C demo, and QF-4E heritage flight

C-17A demo

F/A-18F demo

Royal Netherlands F-16B demo

Static Displays (highlights):

F-22A, F-15E, F-16C, A-10

F-15C and F-16C aggressors

F-16C

F/A-18C

F/A-18F

B-1B

B-52H

C-17A
HC-130

C-5A

T-38C

MV-22

RC-135

E-3

Nellis Range Tour

Nevada outback road trip 2009.11.16

I couldn't go to Las Vegas without going out to see the various military locations around the Nellis Range.  Besides wanting to bring to life some of the remotest areas and the "loneliest roads," there is something captivating about the historical uniqueness of this area.  The isolation, the potential secrets - the mystique.  All of it waiting "out there".  Here are the dark, hidden inner workings of the Cold War, and the who-knows-what activities that are surely still conducted.  So, with a large supply of water and a small but precise survival kit, one that would let Bear Grylls live comfortably, we set off at first light to circumnavigate this immense area.

After leaving Las Vegas the first point of interest was Creech AFB, There were a few C-17s parked, and a few Predators were being worked on out on the ramp.

One thing that becomes quite clear by the time one leaves Indian Springs is how perfect this place is for covert activities. The mountains seem to become a giant natural wall that seals off the NTTR on the south, west, most of the north and the east.

The next waypoint was passing the "town' of Mercury. If one could, taking Mercury Road into the NTS would lead past a nuclear wasteland of hundreds of Cold War explosions, and as the road turned into Groom Lake Road would go through Station 700 into Area 51 and out to Highway 375 by Rachel.

After a detour into Death Valley we passed some of the visible radar stations of the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range.  Despite a Green Flag in progress, there were no aircraft out at his point.  With the exception of Goldfield, an extremely aged and run-down gas-less town, there is nothing between Beatty and Tonopah.  Well, except a few brothels (some shut down), some radar domes, a strange hillside construct,  and a gas station abandoned eons ago about 25 miles north of Beatty.  After six hours, we reached Tonopah, where we stopped for lunch and to gas up for the remote leg of the trip.

We then set out on Highway 6, the "Grand Army of the Republic Highway" (a name which makes me hear the voice of Emperor Palpatine). This highway runs along the north side of the Nellis Range and through the heart of the flight operations, as the Desert and Reveille MOAs extend far beyond the NTTS.  Coming out of the Tonopah mountains into the Ralston Valley really gives an introduction into the type of terrain in this region. One can see for twenty miles to the next range, but in that visual space there is nothing.  Eventually, as one seems to be making no progress to the other side, roads begin to pop up.  After passing the derelict Tonopah Airport, we came to the entrance of the Tonopah Test Range, the original and final home of the F-117.  Unfortunately there were no B-2s (or anything else) flying weapons tests.

Looking down AR502 to the Tonopah Test Range

Upon reaching Warm Springs - which is one abandoned building: The Warm Springs Bar & Cafe (apparently built in the late 70s and probably shut down in the late 80s), we turned on to the "Extraterrestrial Highway".  Although one could continue on to see other interesting things: the Base Camp airfield a few miles up and the nuclear test sites of Project Faultless and Halligan Mesa. At this point we had passed approximately nine cars since leaving Tonopah.

The first thing one sees past Warm Springs are signs warning of "Low Flying Aircraft", the one here being to changed to "Cow Flying Aircraft". Despite these signs in the valleys of Reveille, Sand Spring, Tikaboo, and Pahranagat, there were no indications of any aircraft.  After progressing through the first valley, the road begins to turn through the mountains and into open range farms.  This stretch of road gets really long, and attention is required to avoid the cows in the road.  The only objects of interest is the occasional body of water, some of it iced over.  As expected, the most treacherous part of the journey was between Tonopah and Rachel, particularly after Warm Springs.  Finally, after about half an hour without any signs of humanity, a truck passed near the Twin Springs Ranch.  From here there were about four cars before Rachel.  After passing the Cedar Gate turnoff and entering Queen City Summit Pass, the Sand Spring Valley finally opened.  The first thing that was noticeable was a truck moving behind The Farms, possibly to the Area 51 back gate. Secondly the white dots of Rachel were visible, although still twenty miles away, as Rachel sits at the south end of a massive bowl, north of the highway is twenty-five miles of nothing.

After stopping to look down the road to the back gate of Area 51, we headed up to Mailbox Road.  Here we stopped at the infamous black mailbox.  Some pictures I've seen showed it sporting a KQRS sticker, but this seems to have been removed by 2008.  As I photographed it, I noticed that truck parked here was an Area 51 security vehicle, with a Camo Dude listening to the radio (which is apparently an unusual occurrence).

Moving on, we came to Groom Lake Road after a nine hour drive.  A fast moving vehicle could be seen approaching Groom Road from Mailbox Road.  As this was my first excursion to the area, everything felt intense, and I didn't feel like waiting for whomever it was to show up. 

Once again, the sky was silent.  There were no exotic, uber-secret flight tests coming from over the mountains.  And there were no B-1s, B-52s or A-10s making bombing runs on Range 61.  The day was beginning to fade, and after a few brief moments it was time to move on from the surreal, serene isolation back to the hyper-real kinetics of The Strip.  Making our way back into mountains, the terrain seemed less isolating.  We passed the new Alien Research Center and the shell of the original Alien Jerky building as we moved on to Crystal Springs, a wonderful shaded lake, where there were a large number of vehicles parked without anyone in sight (possibly a commuter lot for clandestine contractors?  As it has been reported that cars parked here are unusual, it would seem to indicate extra activity in the area.)

Driving down through the peaceful Pahranagat Valley, the sun began to slowly set, casting a red light. The calmness was unbroken as no Red Force aggressors were coming in from Caliente. At Alamo, 170 miles from the last gas station, we filled up.  Once dark, the drive seemed to feel long, this stretch didn't really have much to see.  Finally the darkness was broken by the intensity of the Las Vegas lights.

The End of Victory Culture

Last Book Read - The End of  Victory Culture - Tom Engelhardt

Fifty years ago today, October 2nd, 1959, The Twilight Zone premiered on television, portraying a new dimension of horror and uncertainty which has become a fundamental inspiration for an entire era of culture, including the recent ultra-post-modern Lost.  Like film noir before it, the themes of  The Twilight Zone, the uncertainty, the hidden dangers, the fear of the unknown, were possible only through the holes forming in American victory culture. The underlying neuroses of the culture, created by the beginnings of the Cold War and the nuclear age, were finally breaking through to the surface, and while not addressed overtly, they were omnipresent and influencing all aspects of American culture.

In The End of Victory Culture, Engelhardt traces the demise of victory culture through its earliest origins to the post 9/11 world.  He begins long before World War II, tracing the lineage back to colonial America, discussing atrocities throughout American history.  I think its easy to understand that this victory culture - the one we learned in school, and the one that likes to come out during oversimplified conversation, was always a facade but was a construct that was sustainable - for a time -under an emerging American leadership. Of course, anyone with any depth could tell by 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, that the American myth was dead.  So it seems that his historic introduction is far too lengthy and sometimes unnecessary, but finally we get to the beginning of the Cold War.


The atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima also blasted openings into a netherworld of consciousness where victory and defeat, enemy and self, threatened to merge.  Shadowed by the bomb, victory became conceivable only under the most limited of conditions, and an enemy too diffuse to be comfortably located beyond national borders had to be confronted in an un-American spirit of doubt (6).

Faced with doomsday weapons of our own creation, wars were now unfightable, or at least unwinnable.  This led to the necessity of new operative agencies and underground freedom fighters and proxy wars.  "'War' had ceased to be a military operation. Left to the armed forces in those years was fantasy." (81)  Unable to find global solutions, America lost itself in the world of consumerism. "the United States was involved in a global 'war', yet Americans were military unmenaced. . .the country was reimagining itself as a magic kingdom."

In 1950s America, the worlds of consumer arcadia and global fear, of twenty-four-hour-a-day television and twenty-four-hour-a-day airborne nuclear-armed bombers coexisted.  In one of these worlds, Americans half-fancied that they had stepped beyond history into a postindustrial landscape of 'affluence' where 'leisure' might soon replace work almost entirely and the main problem was an inability to find problems. (87)

 This leisure filled existence "looked like a mass society from which there might be no exit for the individual."  While containment kept communism secured, it also kept the individual contained in the American lifestyle where image became valued over substance.  Traditional narratives fell apart and the only stories that seemed to hold their form were in pop culture, particularly television.  Here Engelhartd discusses the contradictions inherent in this mass culture where elements of sub-culture were appropriated, purified and produced for consumption.  White pop music took from underground black music and brought with it "an element of disorder and sexuality associated with darkness."

"Some of [the young] rushed to embrace the very nightmares their parents were conjuring up. In the rhythms of an unknown music, some were ready to discover a new kind of freedom story. In grown-up terrors, some found dark humor.  Behind a frozen universe of abundance and destruction, some spotted pleasure,excitement, movement, energy." (136)  The gruesome horror-filled comics became a target of decency advocates, but were eventually taken over to be corporate controlled.  Rock music and television came to be major industries by being marketed to the young.

Meanwhile the victory weapon became unusable. Engelhardt points out how the popular fears of nuclear conflict dissipated after the Cuban Missile Crisis, while in reality the Soviets were finally fielding a force that was highly capable of devastation. "With weapons of seemingly limitless destructive capacity, however, the idea of victory began to shrink." Conflicts had to be restricted and containment applied to oneself.  These limited wars would "perform a function midway between the abstractness of a show of force and the terrible concreteness of annihilative conflict." They could not bring about a "radical alteration in the distribution of power." (159)  We were locked into a stalemate, unable to win or lose.  Credibility replaced victory, but it could not be a viable substitute.  A quote by Daniel Ellsberg reveals the dangers we faced as a victorious entity, "we have been in the process of fighting monsters without stop for a generation and a half, looking all that time into the nuclear abyss.  And the abyss had looked back into us." This danger was, of course, that we had solely used nuclear weapons in the past, and at several points in the early Cold War had seriously discussed using them again.

Like all Cold War books, Engelhardt spends a great deal of time discussing Vietnam.  Most interesting here, is his illustration of "reversals"  Unable to achieve limited victory despite how much military might we expended, the U.S. military was forced to reverse all normal notions of success and failure.  President Nixon himself was forced to reverse that office's image and become a "madman" (A lesson learned well and now deployed by the "axis of evil") to convince the enemy he was capable of anything in an effort to provoke their surrender. The streets of America became a battlefield at home and at wars end reconstruction needed to be done here rather than in theater.  This reconstruction really peaked during the Reagan years (and the buildup to the Second Cold War).  After a decade of feeling the loss of the Vietnam War, we were finally able to achieve victory through pop culture, mainly in film.

When Engelhardt comes to discussing Desert Storm, his analysis would fit in completely with Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.  He approaches it from the angle that the entire event was really just a staged production by the American military and government.  But, I think he really reads too much into it, particularly regarding the public's understanding of it.  It would seem that America was more concerned about getting it right and provided (from a strategic standpoint) everything necessary to ensure a swift and contained victory.  If it was just a one-sided bloodbath, then at least we have apparently learned from it.  I believe that it was the last war that will ever be fought in a conventional style.  The 2003 "shock and awe" campaign  was nothing of the sort, compared to twelve years earlier.  Furthermore, our continued Middle East campaign has become much more surgical in nature.  For instance, our bomb size has gone from 2000 lb to 250 lb now in order to minimize blast.  We have built MOABs and Bunker Busters, but when used these will certainly be less devastating than a massive assault of hundreds of aircraft that was normal by the end of Vietnam.

Finally, with the end of the Cold War, Engelhardt notes that we were really left without an identifiable enemy, and this led to complications of our own identity.  Even the latest incarnation of G.I. Joe was left to find new types of wars and new enemies. Until 9/11.

With the events of 9/11,  "the bomb's most essential message- of potentially civilization busting, planet-rendering, or even planet-ending destruction- reinforced over so many years by terrifying Cold War fears and pop culture fantasies, had finally come home" (306).  The destruction, although tremendous and considered "ground zero," was not nuclear and was not as nearly devastating as it could have been.  The president, a better actor than anyone previous, attempted to resurrect victory culture.  But now, following year after year of stalled progress,  this victory culture is clearly unsustainable.

In discussing the events of post-9/11 America, Engelhardt picks up where he left off with Desert Storm, the media production.  He notes that the history of the late twentieth century, aside from a few key points of the Cold War could be defined in terms of consumer technology, from the automobile to the ipod.  He discusses consumer society, "in the cyber-marketplace, history has been superseded by an new kind of storytelling." (329)  These fabricated narratives, used to sell toys, games, television and film are the same kinds of narratives used by the government to sell wars.  Military reality has crossed into fiction, and the distinction has been blurred, leaving new weapons inspired by fiction and new fictions inspired by weapons.


It's been a long path from August 6th, 1945, to the present moment, a long, long time to wait for apocalyptic catastrophe to strike in the most victorious nation on the planet, which, in more recent times, has been touted as the globe's last superpower, its sole hyperpower, its global sheriff, its New Rome. (332)


Throughout the book Engelhardt refers to a "narrative" and the resulting lack of narrative. While he uses these terms for the specifically American world, its interesting to view the events discussed here in terms of a more historic and global theory. What he says has much in common with the post-modern theorists.  He discusses technology, consumerism and corporatism in the same light. Landmarks are gone, leaving only the logos.  The "real" sources are gone, leaving only the baseless hyper-real.  There are no more narratives, or a meta-narrative, of history.  The only one now are created in television, films and games, existing independently, and their reality is blurry like the reality of post-Cold War history.  The more we progress as a technological society, the more truth seems obscured and lost in The Twilight Zone.

While being overly verbose and perhaps too politically correct, this book does shed interesting light on the underlying psychology of America at the end of the modern age. What is most interesting is not what is explicitly stated but the implications suggested by the resulting "lack of a narrative." As revealed here, the Cold War was the force driving America from the modern to the post-modern world, a notion emphasized in the post-9/11 conclusions.

The Death of God and the Meaning of Life

Last Book Read - The Death of God & the Meaning of Life - Julian Young

In this work, Young presents an excellent history of the development of thought concerning meaning from the pre-modern age to the current postmodern era.  Central to the progression of history from one period to another is the death-of-God, a fundamental change in human understanding. He presents this transition as a stream of thought beginning with Galileo and the advent of science and ending with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.  As Nietzsche noted when he originally announced the death of God in 1882, that when Galileo unchained the Earth from the center of the universe, we were placed in a cold, dark void, moving in an uncertain direction with no up or down.  There was no longer any fixed point of reference, and no longer a fixed source of meaning.  We were left with the dangerous possibility of nihilism.  The modern age responded by providing new methods of fixed systems.  The worlds conceived by Hegel and Marx moved the true-world of religion into the future history of humanity.  This true-world was no longer an other-world in space, but existed away from us in time.  But this illusion could only be sustained for so long.  With the end of functioning Marxism in 1989, this revision of religion also became defunct, providing a final death of God.

Young suggests that Continental philosophy deals with the death of God - conservative continental philosophy being the modern-era revisioning of God.  With the end of that came radical continental philosophy, which finds any replacement for God to be impossible.  "A religion is anything that postulates or promises a true world."   Here we have worldviews such as non-theist religions and schools of thought such as Marxism, that all function as religions the same as theism does.  When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he proposed that any of these systems were no longer possible in performing the function that they had done in pre-modern world.

I think that we could view radical continental philosophy as the philosophies of existentialism.  There may be some non-existential worldviews that have subsequently developed in the branch of post-modernism, but I would hesitate to call these complete philosophies, but rather culture theories, at this point. In other words, I think that all philosophy of meaning following the death of God is existential in nature.

Young examines the philosophy of four existential philosophers: Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, as well as the two postmodernists Foucalt and Derrida. He divides Nietzsche into three distinct periods of thought (early, late and posthumous), Heidegger into early and late and Sartre into two different early versions (ignoring the late).

He begins by tracing the lineage of thought of other-world meaning from Plato to Kant.  Schopenhauer takes Kant's notion of the hidden other-world and applies it to his pessimism, where passing from this world to the other is preferable.  Nietzsche continues this "European Buddhism" and attempts to overcome the implicit nihilism by suggesting that we can experience the other world through art.  Hegel and Marx continue a non-supernatural view of the other-world by relocating it to history.

When Nietzsche finally changes his mind about pessimism, he creates a whole new track of thought - radical continental philosophy- negating all the true-world views. Young then discusses Nietzsche's attempt at creating meaning by creating the self as a work of art, a complete narrative.  However, there is a problem of choice - the question of what life to choose.  He suggests these are the problems of authority and the immoral script.  Young then moves on to Heidegger, discussing historicity and the discovery of the authentic life.  For Heidegger your heritage, your community, are central to the meaning of life. But what if these traditions are not moral or meaningful themselves?  The problems of authority remain.

Sartre is up next. Dividing the work of Being and Nothingness, Young finds two views of  Sartre, based on slightly different interpretations of absurdity, as well as opposing views of humanity's desire to be God.  Sartre-two he dismisses as a nihilist based on this Sartre's understanding that all of life is conflict with others,  making life both meaningless and eternal conflict.  The views of Sartre-one come down to this: "(1) God is Dead. (2)Since there is no God to authorize the good, we have to do it ourselves. But (3) we have no authority over ourselves. Hence (4) we possess no authoritative account of the good, and life is meaningless (and so worthless)."

Finally we have Camus who views life as absurd - that is the disparity between how things are and how we want them to be.  But as many have argued (such as David Cooper and Camus himself ), the absurd hero of Camus' vision accepts this absurdity and happily lives in alienation, and this sets him apart from the existentialists.  Young suggest here that Camus believes life is better with no meaning. There is simply no possibility of a grand-narrative meaning.   What Camus really wants is life full of experience, "an ethics of quantity."  He looks to the "Barbarian Gods" on the beaches of Algeria, living without appeal and a lust for experience. Camus' version of the overman lives without appeal, because there is no divinity to appeal to, but rather lives with strength and majesty in this absence.  Aimlessness is preferable because a project of disciplined self development causes one to be a slave to their goals. Freedom is reduced and one always lives in the future, never in the now.  The absurd hero is indifferent to time and is only concerned with "being there."  Young ultimately rejects Camus' view and his hero as constructing static person that "will not change." Without some kind of goal, one will ultimately have a life that is simply boring.  He regards building one's life through self-defining goals as essential.

After analyzing the traps of existentialism and the unoriginality of the postmodernists, Young returns to Heidegger. He is clearly a Heidegarrian and takes the late un-existential Heidegger track as a means of escape from nihilism. Meaning is discovered rather than created, it is realizing the proper disclosure of the world and your place within it. Meaning comes from facticity - essence and existence become inseparable, according to Young.  Guardianship of the world, of Being, becomes our central task. This "Being" does not exist in a theistic sense,  but it is rather "the god of the poets," immanent in everything. 

Young does a better job at revealing underlying flaws in existential philosophy than other religious anti-existentialists that I have mentioned in the past.  He also provides an interesting and refreshing solution to the problem of meaning, by being non-theist and non-existential.  I am, at this point, however, not ready to dismiss Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus quite as easily.  I think that perhaps Young neglects some of the horrors of World War II and the Cold War, and their effects on modern philosophy, which explain some of the dark, nihilist leanings found within it.  Nevertheless, I believe existentialism is still optimistic and the right direction for finding post-death of God meaning.  As for Heidegger, his final position of Being is at least a non-true-world one.  Therefore, I can only assume that this Being, as sacred but not God, is a form of pantheism.  Of course, this leads to the question if Being is non-true-world, then does that mean pantheism is not religion?  Atheism and pantheism certainly function the same in practice, but any more on this matter will have to wait for another time.

Overall this book is highly recommended as one of the best works on philosophy in recent years.  It is an excellent work on many levels, first explaining the development of modern philosophy, as well as elucidating the existential positions and highlighting their particular details. Finally, it functions as a current state analysis of history by showing the progression from modernism to post-modernism through death-of-God realizations and the failed and desperate attempts at true-world transmutations.

Achtung Baby

The 18.09.09 episode of Sound Opinions discussed the evolution of U2 and proposed that Actung Baby was a turning point in the band's career, a position I fully embrace.

1991 saw the completion of the transition from the modern world to the postmodern one, a phase which began with World War II and lasted until the end of the Cold War.  Nowhere was more central to this history than Germany.  The post-Cold War left a vacuous space with no remaining metanarrative.  At the heart of this time and place U2 recorded what many would argue is their masterpiece, Achtung Baby.  For a new time emerged a new sound and attitude from a band that had been at the forefront of events in the 1980s. This world had a new sensibility and the record reflected that: it was darker, more complicated but in many ways less serious.  The future was open, free - but also very uncertain.

Every aspect of Achtung Baby showed that U2 had evolved.  The guitars not only gained an industrial-esque distortion, but a rawness and urgency.  The beat gained more dynamic rhythms and the bass developed a deeper influence.  The vocals also received distortion and different voicings.  Lyrically and thematically, this album revealed a deeper introspection and reached new levels of metaphor.  The album was noted for being U2's "heaviest" work, and as "dark," "intense," "dense" and "violent."  All of these words are quite appropriate and reveal the depth of the album.

Artistically, Achtung Baby was a success by being not only highly relevant, but showing an awareness of its point in history. It felt dynamic, and being musically innovative was progressing forward into the future. After two albums of exploring American music, this album is purely European and as such seems less stuck in one place or time.  The album is consistent throughout in a way no previous album has been.  The Fly, being the first single, as well as the opening track Zoo Station provided the most abrupt departure in sound through heavy beats and power guitar riffs.  Upon first hearing these tracks, the listener was exposed to a new world, something not heard before.  Even Better Than the Real Thing exemplified awareness of the hyper-real postmodernism of the era.  Until the End of the World continued the guitar-driven momentum and brought the album to inner depths of despair, guilt and betrayal.  One personifies the most conventional U2 track on the album, but thematically centers it with the concepts of separation and unification.  Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses and Mysterious Ways provided the lightest and brightest pop on the album.  So Cruel and Tryin to Throw Your Arms Around the World contribute the slowest and quietest moments of introspection.  Ultraviolet and Acrobat pick up the pace and contain the final push of the album to find meaning.  Finally Love is Blindness is the dark conclusion.  None of these songs are particularly "daylight" songs, it seems hard to visualize any of them except in dark rooms and streets.

It could be said that U2 was in a period of "irony and nihilism" (Assayas, 294).  But, I would say, a better description would be that U2 was in a period of hyper-awareness - of postmodernism, and the record (as well as Bono's extracurricular activities) was an attempt to overcome the nihilism in this world was lacking a firm foundation.  The artistry found on this record expanded U2's vision.  Subjectively, the work is much more individualistic - involving a personal contemplation, and conversely, it showed a historical and global awareness - the pulse of the Zeitgeist.  It would seem that U2 found a perfect balance of gravity in this period, always serious, but here the awareness of gravity is also an attempt to overcome it. When the band took this new record on tour, the result - Zoo TV-  was a massive presentation of this postmodern feel.  An epic display of the hyper-real through facades and technology.  But, as Bono says, the music was only "wrapped in irony. Actually, there was real blood going through those veins." (Assayas, 295)

The continued experimentation found on Zooropa and Pop was almost certainly more innovative, but did not reach a similar level of achievement. [2] The first was far too eclectic and viscerally inconsistent and the latter suffered from bad production [3] and a superficiality - the irony just seemed stretched a little too far and the balance of gravity seemed off.

Is Achtung Baby their masterpiece?  It often makes the list of best albums of all time.  And it rests at the center of these polarized discussions.  I will certainly claim that is a driving force in these debates and is therefore one of the leading contenders.  Is it a departure?  The band certainly intended it to be.  They needed to break the tension that had risen from the success of Joshua Tree.  And they felt it was - there was trepidation by the band about releasing it because they thought it so different.  The experiment was to see if all of the band's "outward manifestations" could be removed but leave that "spark" that is the essence of U2.  Of course, the result is something that is still purely U2.

Is Achtung Baby better than the revered Joshua Tree? I would certainly argue yes, beginning with the reasons stated above. Being innovative, the freshness of the sound has lasted longer.  The main problem with the Joshua Tree is its success [1]. While Actung has a more multi-era sound, Joshua Tree has a very 80s sound which has lead to the successful tracks being considered more as "80s hits." The sound is stripped-down, more acoustic and more Americanized.   Its track list is also inconsistent.  With or Without You and Where the Streets Have No Name are definitely A-grade U2. The third super-track, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, despite being their most well known, is perhaps their weakest single and most over-rated track on the album, in my opinion.  Bullet The Blue Sky has survived as a concert favorite, but comes through better with the post-Zoo TV energy.  Running to Stand Still, In God's Country, Trip Through Your Wires and One Tree Hill are all good songs, but a little too uniform, lacking a certain edginess.  Red Hill Mining Town is more of the same - not bad, just not breaking any new ground.  Exit and Mothers of the Disappeared become the low points of this album, lacking enough significance for independent interest.  On the other hand, I would concede that some of these weaknesses are strengths.  In many ways this record is the antithesis of Achtung Baby [4].  Here the songs can be visualized in daylight, and in open spaces.  The murky, layered depths are not present, and everything is clearer and less confused.  The album is a good example of stripped-down simplicity.

But when it comes to creating a masterpiece, I think complexity is a necessity.  The depth of the material found later on Rattle & Hum foreshadows what would develop on Achtung Baby and shows an evolving maturity that surpasses Joshua Tree.  Rattle & Hum showed U2 expanding as musicians, but Actung Baby showed them progressing as artists. They were no longer a rebel New Wave band, but something more.  Certainly Bono in reflection seems to know that Actung Baby and Zoo TV was a major turning point in the band's evolution.  It was U2's exercise of "judo" to overcome the criticisms of their past, and through this experiment they propelled themselves to new levels of achievement.

U2 has always evolved their sound over trilogies.  Boy/ October/ War debuted the band as a New Wave rebellion.  They then began their global ascent with the Unforgettable Fire, broke out with The Joshua Tree, and continued with Rattle & Hum.  This trilogy formed the "classic" U2 sound.  They re-emerged with the post-modern Achtung Baby and continued experimenting with Zooropa and Pop.  As a new millenuium dawned, they returned with All That You Can't Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and closed the decade with No Line on the Horizon.  [5] These three form what I consider the "neo-classic" trilogy. The core sound returned, but as always when one returns to a place from where they started, everything that has been learned is re-incorporated, and the neo-classic represents a synthesis between modern and post-modern U2[6].

U2 will be playing a free concert in Germany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the death of communism. Hopefully the set will draw heavily from Actung Baby. [edit 10.29.09]


[1] I would compare The Joshua Tree to Rush's Moving Pictures.  Both had three standout A-side tracks become iconic.  In both cases these three tracks were brilliant, but became identified synonymously with the band and were extremely overplayed.  Decades later, these songs are inseparable from the band and often blind people from experiencing better material.
[2] The post-modern themes of Achtung Baby were developed even further on Zooropa.  The title track is a great exploration of the postmodern condition of hyper-reality.  The album as a whole shows its own postmodern essence through it eclecticism.  Beginning with the slick, electronic European Zooropa and ending with the more acoustic, raw, American The Wanderer shows a journey  ending in its opposite.  But as a complete work of music, this variation is less interesting and a bit less cohesive.
[3] Most discussions of Pop seem to place the blame on the production.  I can't tell myself, I only know the album is displeasing to my ears.
[4] I think its quite appropriate that the only song U2 released between JT/R&H and AB/Zooropa was Night and Day.  The symbolism could not have been more perfect .
[5] Its possible that the release of  Songs of Ascent will change this pattern.
[6] U2 also functions on another post-modern level.  As members of the New Wave that helped build Modern Rock, their status in the 80s was unquestionable.  Once Modern Rock aged and receded farther in time to exist alongside Classic Rock, what came after was literally Post-Modern Rock.  As their status as one of the greatest rock bands has continued to persevere throughout this time period, they have continued to contribute to the definition of contemporary rock music.



Sources:

U2 & Philosophy, Mark A. Wrathall, Open Court, 2006
Bono in Conversation, Michka Assayas, Riverhead, 2005
Cultural Theory And Popular Culture: A Reader, John Storey,  University of Georgia Press; 2006

Fargo 2009

Fargo Air Show 2009.08.22

FULL POST



PHOTO SET

A Nightmare to Remember

Dream Theater @ The Orpheum Theater, Minneapolis, 2009.08.21

Once again Dream Theater has embarked on a Progressive Nation Tour. This year's show, despite being propelled by a massive amount of energy and the usual precision performance of the band, suffered from an abysmally awful setlist.  The show consisted of three songs from the latest album, featuring some of their heaviest material, and roughly one song from every other album from the last nine years, which meant the exclusion of Images and Words, Awake and Falling into Infinity [1].  This willful abandonment of their three best works seems to me to be a pure sacrilege. It's as though they have gone from a progressive band with metal influence to throwing away their past and trying to be the heaviest progressive metal band.  Ever since Train of Thought the band has tried to push the envelope too far.  Octavarium and Systematic Chaos came out well, but the latest- Black Cloud & Silver Linings falls right back into that trap, as it tries to be loud and heavy for no reason.

I have to give credit to Dream Theater for switching up their setlists, and I've always hated it when bands have to play "that one song." But I still think that their are some essential elements to the career of any band which can hopefully still be kept fluid and dynamic.  For Dream Theater, I think a show must consist of one of the following: Pull Me Under, Metropolis, A Change of Seasons, or Surrounded.  I guess that means that there must be some reference to Images and Words, or at least some selections from Awake or its B-sides.  This night's list started as an alternate that usually contained Hollow Years to at least slow things down for a moment and most contain Take the Time (the night before).  The prime sets contained Metropolis (such as the next night). There was even one performance of Pull Me Under (two nights before) and the inclusion of The Camera Eye in Toronto (four nights earlier).  I could point to virtually any previous night of the tour and show why it was a better setlist.   But it seems the sets are getting increasingly newer and heavier, and here the line of balance was severely crossed and the result is something that is frustrating to the ears and to the brain.

As for Progressive Nation 2009, I'm bewildered by the inclusion of Zappa Plays Zappa.  If anything it sounds like Progressive Nation 1978, and I wouldn't even call it progressive, just psychedelic weirdness produced by a lost decade of excessive substance intake.  The performers were quite good in their own respects, but the songs are, well not really songs in this sense - just freeform jams, lacking a basic necessary structure.  It seems a waste when there are many good progressive bands out there, Enchant for instance, that could fulfill the intent of the tour. But Dream Theater keeps recruiting the weird or hyper-heavy metal bands. I think its time for them to take a rest from Progressive Nation, and do a well planned tour consisting of a extended set spanning the history of their work which highlights the quality and depth that they can achieve.

Setlist:

A Nightmare To Remember /A Rite Of Passage /Keyboard Solo/ Prophets of War /The Dance of Eternity /One Last Time / Solitary Shell / In the Name of God /The Count Of Tuscany

[1] When Dream and Day Unite and A Change of Seasons not included.

The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists

A recent article on Time.com was entitled The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists. This may be the best notion I've seen in journalism lately, and I was impressed that it made it to the mainstream. The main point being: "they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal." I would love to see more in-depth analysis of this revelation.

On August 19th, Jon Stewart did an excellent piece on Fox News being the "New Liberals," pointing out how for eight years they have called protesters "loons" and unpatriotic. But now that the protesters are conservatives, civil disobedience and dissension are the patriotic methods. Furthermore, Fox has claimed the mainstream media is liberal and that they are the only alternative voice. So for Fox to really be liberal they would have to part of the mainstream. Of course, while attacking the major media outlets, Fox has at the same time been promoting how much bigger they are than their competing media outlets, claiming to be the most powerful - thereby cementing their "liberal" status.

Finally, to quote Seth Macfarlane from his recent interview in Playboy about Obama's liberalness, "he's a hell of a lot less liberal than Bush is conservative."

And, speaking of Seth, he also said that Carl Sagan was "an antidote to the superstition, fundamentalism and mysticism that runs rampant in this country." Recently I heard the BBC claim that America was a world of "stone-age superstition."  Of course books like The Sceptics Guide to Atheism [1] claim that worlwide theism is going up, only Western views on theism are declining due to the lingering effects of Logical Positivism.  The only truth I can discern from this position is that theism is declining in the West.  Meanwhile, America looks like it is in the stone age because of the reactionary ultra-conservative anatgonism to progress.

[1] Information taken from Philosophy Now, June/July 2009 

Now Its Dark

Just a post of no particular significance:

Now that the heat and haze are done from the latest summer assault, the sky is again clear.  It's amazing how the seasonal changes begin to accelerate this time of year.  Even though summer is still at full strength, nature is already foreshadowing fall.  5 AM is now completely dark and feels much different than just a week ago.  The air is thin and cool.  Jupiter has left the Eastern sky.  And this morning marks my reaquaintance with the Hunter.  I got my first prominent sighting of the year as I watched Orion rise along with a slivering Moon and Venus over the Eastern trees, trailed closely by (a much gentler) Dawn Light. 

Existentialism is a Humanism

Last Book Read: Existentialism and Human Emotions - J.P. Sartre

In this short work, Sartre responds to some criticism and attempts to lay out basic principles of existentialism. These principles derive from the foundation that Man is the being whose being is the lack of being. This nothingness is brought into the world through consciousness, leaving Man alone to be the creator of values, unable to escape from freedom. There are many overtones of Nietzsche throughout this work: the transvaluation of values, the spirit of seriousness, and the will to power. Here Sartre tries to make a new, solid foundation and pronounces that Existentialism is the realization that for Man, existence precedes essence.

Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to lunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe God exists, but we think the problem of His existence is not the issue.

"Man is nothing else than what he makes of himself." This is the first principle of existentialism - subjectivity. Sartre defines freedom and responsibility and explains why we can never escape these. We can always go to others for advice, but in doing so we choose who to seek out for this advice, and we choose whose responses we will consider. It ultimately always comes back to ourselves.

Sartre goes on to discuss existential psychoanalysis, by which one attempts to find their original project, their original choice. Here Sartre dismisses the notion of the unconscious mind and attempts to refute Freudian and empirical psychoanalysis. He even thinks the tastes we have for certain foods can be consciously linked to our original project. Sartre then discusses holes, and how life is an attempt to fill these holes , to "preserve the totality of the In-itself." Ultimately Man attempts to become God, by synthesizing For-itself into In-itself-for-itself, which is self defeating. This is what God would be, but because it is a logical impossibility, it can never be achieved.

After a rather incomplete discussion of this analysis Sartre move on to ethical implications. Sartre noted that in aesthetics, there are no a priori values. The same could be said for ethics. " What art and ethics have in common is that we have creation and invention in both cases. . . Man makes himself. He isn't ready made at the start. In choosing his ethics, he makes himself." "The one thing that counts is knowing whether the inventing that has been done, has been done in the name of freedom." But, in the final chapter on ethics Sartre delays discussion to a future work- one which would never come.

This work really just contains basic principles that can be found in any introduction book, and here they are somewhat obscured by technical languauge, but there are many small details which enhance Sartre's philosophy.

The Infinite Book

Last Book Read: The Infinite Book - John D. Barrow

"I could bounded in a nutshell and count myself as a king of infinite space"

-Hamlet


Barrow follows up his Book of Nothing by examining its opposite, infinity. He presents many illustrations of infinity and clearly shows that one infinite set can be a different size from another infinite set. But, the more profound question remains: can there be actual infinities? Barrow examines the categories of mathematical, actual, and absolute infinities and some of the historical thinkers that held views about their existence. Beyond the ultimately obvious mathematical infinites, however, I am not led to the conclusion that there are actual infinities in "real" existence. For instance, if the universe is infinitely large, that means there is another one exactly like you, in fact there are infinite number of "you". Nothing would be unique at all. I think this only complicates reality, and using Occam's razor we must hold off making this a likely conclusion. As we get a sharper picture of the universe, it seems that there is a limited quantity of everything - matter, energy, space and time -at least in one "universe."

One of the most interesting stops on this journey through the infinite, is Barrows examination of Hamlet, which he shows to be an allegory of the paradigm shift from the Earth-center model of the universe to the Sun-centered one. Hamlet was written at the time when Shakespeare's friend, Thomas Digges was contemplating a model for the infinite universe. This is yet another layer of Hamlet, one that I had not conceived of before.

While discussing the likeliness of an infinite or eternal universe, Barrow discusses a thorough sampling of cosmological models. The major question encompassing all of this involves the possibility that the universe is just one part of a multiverse. Here, we are shown the complex geography that might result from an infinite universe, where our universe would be just one of many connected bubble inflations. In this "Kandinsky Universe", each region would have its own physical laws, and the entire set of possible universes would exist in one sheet of space, rather than parallel realities.

Barrow goes on to briefly discuss the possibility of a simulated universe, infinite machines and super-tasks, and immortality, as well as touching on the implied ethics. The Infinite Book shows that infinity becomes a relevant variable when attempting to resolve the major questions of the fabric of existence.

So, to try to put my political perspectives into some kind of objective relation, I took a few internet quizzes, here are the results:

The results of this first one are not perfectly accurate, as some of the questions are framed in a stereotypical black/white choice, when other choices would be more appropriate for the issue.

You Are 30% Conservative, 70% Liberal

Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal Fiscal Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal Defense and Crime: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

Star Trek

I never suspected that J.J. Abrams would have a major influence on my contemplation of time travel. First we have Lost discussing the nature of a single unchangeable timeline, and now Star Trek with its splitting timelines.

The first thing to deal with when viewing the new Star Trek is the alternate universe. Many fans seem to be quite upset with this, suggesting that it wipes out the history that we have watched over the last 40 years. They just can't understand the concept, even though it was explicitly revealed in the film. A reboot, a la Batman, Battlestar Galactica, and James Bond, would have wiped out that history. But thankfully in this case we have an escape built in to the Star Trek Universe. Now, Trek has had it both ways, showing many times a single changeable timeline, but it has also shown parallel universes before, starting with the venerable "Mirror, Mirror." In the Next Gen episode "Parallels", we watch Worf jump between universes a la Sliders, finally resulting in the converge of 285,000 Enterprises. Other notable episodes were "Yesterday's Enterprise," and "All Good Things", each portraying other ways things could have worked out. Producers of the new film have suggested that every time travel event in Star Trek history has produced a new universe, although I would argue that "Parallels" claimed that each universe had a unique quantum signature, and that one could return to their original home universe, so I think this explaination is unneccessary. [1]

I would also point out here that I fully contend that this new universe was pre-existing and that it was not "caused" by the Spock singularity. Federation technology was already on a different track, with the Kelvin being more advanced than its prime counterparts. It has been estimated that if the multiple universe theories are true, that only a googol universes would need to exist to allow for an infinite number of different outcomes. [2] So, it would seem that these googol universe already exists, otherwise any one of our decisions would create the energy and matter of an entire universe, and that seems far too extraordinary too any of this.

The second point to come to terms with is the new actors playing the sacrosanct characters of Kirk, et al. This has already been dealt with by some fans, with Star Trek: New Voyages, and I'll quote their website:

"Star Trek: Phase II's producers/crew feel that Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest should be treated as "classic" characters like Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings or even Hamlet, Othello or Romeo. Many actors have and can play the roles, each offering a different interpretation of said character. Though the character is the same, the interpretation of the actor is what's in question. We feel that the crew of the Enterprise has more to teach us about life and each other than has been explored to date. We also feel the new actors can add to the legend in a believable and contemporary way. The timelessness of the classic characters was recognized by JJ Abrams."

It is certainly true that Captain Kirk has joined the ranks of some other great fictional characters and has become part of contemporary mythology. All I can say is that the actors did a great job, bringin new dimesnions to the characters, while giving a nod to their original incarnations.

Thematically, this Star Trek is a bit of a departure. It is a more dangerous universe, cold and traumatic. There are clearly influences from Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars, both in terms of visual style and action - being bold and dynamic, and in the story. Star trek has always been timely, from the height of the Cold War to the end of the Cold War . This is a post 9/11 Trek, with the destruction of a planet as their central history point. It would seem that planets and civilizations are now no longer safe in any of the great sci-fi worlds.

The major drawback of this film is the design of its most important character- the Enterprise. Externally, this one is simply ugly. It is obvioulsy much larger than its prime counterpart, as depicted by the interior.[3] [4] Internally, it is an incredible departure. It may have the nicest bridge on any sci-fi ship, with an ultra-modern Correllian design and a 300+ inch screen. Curiously some have noted that the engineering locations look like a brewery, with massive tanks. I guess these are just all the things that used to appear in Enterprise deck plans, but have now been magnified to usuable preportions. The interiors of the secondary hull contain immense levels of scaffolding and catwalks, looking like a 20th century industrial building. This gives an interesting contrast to the ipod-ness of the main hull. The shuttle bay is also massive, besides being influenced by the aforementioned epics, it also expands on the attempts made in TMP, although this time its exterior is enlarged to contain it.

What's next, and what will it be called? Will it be STII, or STXII? I was hoping that this film would do well enough for Paramount to do another Next Generation movie, as Levar Burton has suggested. I feel that the Enterprise E story is not over yet, but I also want to see another film with this cast. Perhaps the next one can feature the prime Enterprise following the missing spock, and they can call it The Search for Spock.


[1] This interview details canon and continuity.
[2] Once again, I refer to Time Machines
[3] USS_Enterprise_(alternate_reality)
[4]

Metropolis Pt 1

"It only ends once, anything that happens before that is just progress" - Jacob, Lost

The season five finale of Lost may have had the best opening scene, ever. Immediately we see the statue, the Black Rock, Jacob [and Cerberus] and in one scene the scope of the overall story dramatically increased, revealing the epic nature we have been waiting for. My only disappointment, is that I now wish we hadn't seen the statue earlier this season. If this had been our first view of it since season two, the dramatic impact would have been more intense. As the story spirals out further each season, we see that the conflicts of the main characters are insignificant to the overall story, and they only are significant in particular events of history. But , it would seem the overall conflict involves Jacob and "Man #2", shown in a black/white dichotomy. This episode had a very biblical feel to it, and this character may be Esau, as they were both mentioned in the fictional book Bad Twin. There are also overtones of Cain/Abel and Set/Osiris. I suspect, however, that the Jacob / Nemesis situation may not be as simple as we have been shown and perhaps some of what has been attributed to Jacob may in fact be his other (i.e. the cabin). It would also seem that the Cerberus monster fits in here somewhere. At this point the Nemesis and Locke (or Locke-2) would seem to be the best candidate for being the monster, as he appeared after Ben summoned him. This all seems to go back to the first episode, when Locke was explaining backgammon: "Two players. Two sides. One is light, one is dark."

I suspect that the time loop flight 815 is caught in may only be part of a larger time cycle. This is why the island "is not done" with certain people, and why when these people try to do things like kill themselves they are told "the island won't let you." Because this all may have happened already and can't be changed. Jacob clearly represents freewill and freedom of choice, emphasizing to each person he encounters the freedom of their choice. This is a polar opposition to the notions of fate and destiny we have seen attributed to the island. Perhaps this has to do with Jacob's nemesis, the two of them defining the archetypes of opposing groups on the island. These differing schools of thought are played out by evermore social groups of "others" who are constantly changing and reforming. The Nemesis takes a pessimistic viewpoint and views newcomers as ones who "fight, destroy and corrupt", while Jacob is more social and optimistic, unconcerned about the future. This would fit with the Nemesis being the monster, the security system of the island. The theme of immortality is also introduced , and besides Richard, it seems that Jacob is an immortal, unable to die, yet ready for it. Finally, everything has changed, reversed, with this episode and its white ending. The season 6 teaser shows eyes opening, presumably Juliet, though they have become a different color [1]. I propose that the explosion will neither destroy the island or reverse time, but rather propel the survivors back to their original time, where their exile and search for meaning will continue.

As a side note, I still believe that Desmond is a major part of the center of the story (he is certainly is the dramatic center). So far he has been the only one to experience two timelines, or rather a changing single timeline, making him "special. He seems to me to be a Christ figure, although that may have something to do with Henry Ian Cusak once playing Jesus. After he imploded the hatch he traveled back to his former life, and then was forced to choose returning to the island, although changed. This echoes Christ's decent into hell and resurrection (and I mean that in a Last Temptation sort of way.) He may be the one that saves them after all.


I am reminded of the Dream Theater song Metropolis, inspired by the ancient tale of Romulus and Remus. In this rendition, the two twins are locked in conflict throughout time in the lives of others. In any case, the underlying tone of this episode evoked this song in my mind.

The smile of dawn
Arrived in early May
She carried a gift from her home
The night shed a tear
To tell her of fear
And of sorrow and pain
She'll never outgrow

Death is the first dance, eternal

There's no more freedom
The both of you will be
confined to this mind

I was told there's a miracle for each day that I try
I was told there's a new love that's born for each one that has died
I was told there'd be no one to call on when I feel alone and afraid
I was told if you dream of the next world
You'll find yourself swimming in a lake of fire

As a child, I thought I could live without pain without sorrow
But as a man Ive found its all caught up with me
Im asleep yet Im so afraid

Somewhere like a scene from a memory
Theres a picture worth a thousand words
Eluding stares from faces before me
It hides away and will never be heard of again

Deceit is the second without end

The citys cold blood teaches us to survive
Just keep my heart in your eyes and well stay alive

The third arrives...

Before the leaves have fallen
Before we lock the doors
There must be a third and last dance
This one will last forever
Metropolis watches and thoughtfully smiles
Shes taken you to your home

It can only take place
When the struggle between our children has ended
Now the miracle and the sleeper know that the third is love

-Dream Theater, Metropolis from Images & Words, 1992


[1] Read Lost is a Game for an extraordinary theory of the show. While I'm not convinced its the absolute solution, his research and attention to recurring details is amazing (the change in eye color, for example)

The Death of Daniel Faraday

With the episode "The Variable," Lost has moved into the endgame chapter - everything is in place for the final season. When I wrote last year about the book Time Machines, I never suspected that it would pertain so much to Lost, which is to my mind the most significant example of postmodernism in current pop culture. The view expressed in that book is that time travel is possible, but that the universe consists of a single time-line, so what ever has been done in the past is fixed. This is precisely the view that has been enumerated several times on Lost, since the survivors started jumping through time with the commencement of this season. They usually express the view in terms of "whatever happened, happened." But now, Daniel Faraday has theorized that the timeline can be changed, and has refocused his concentration on constants to that of variables- people with freewill. Of course that presents many problems: obviously whatever has happened has become reality by occurring. The only way out is to split the universe into a parallel reality where the future is changeable, or do what even God cannot logically do - erase history. This last option seems to be the one that the survivors will ambitiously attempt to do, make it so their plane ( and 5 years of adventures) never happens. They will begin this attempt by detonating a hydrogen bomb (presumably this years' finale explosion). We may very well see in the last episode, Flight 815 safely landing, unaware of the events that were erased and skipped and the characters will continue on as they were. I hope the ending is not this simple, and even if the plane does land, hopefully the characters will remember their experiences. What is particularly interesting at this point is the existential crisis confronting them. If it is possible to erase your life, should you do it? It is your life and who you are now. Undoing it may be the greatest sin of life.

But I think the writers still have a more important meta-story to tell here. Even if the survivors were to return to their original lives, there must be a significant point to the mysteries of Richard, Jacob, Widmore, Cerberus and the Island itself. Flight 815 is a mechanism for furthering some greater purpose, and even if the survivors escape the rhizomic conditions they are currently in, their interaction in it will have made profound changes. This may have been one of the most brain-straining seasons of television, and the next year promises to be just as enthralling.

Sting is lined up to play a one-off show, consisting of Dominic Miller, David Sancious, and Josh Freese. I couldn't ask for a better line-up. We know Dom has been in Italy working with Sting, hopefully they are finishing up work on tracks that have been started over the last five years. This could be the return of something great.

The Universe Next Door

Last Book Read: The Universe Next Door - James W. Sire


I came across this book in a thrift store and I can't pass up any book that discusses existentialism and postmodernism. Written as a Christian criticism of different worldviews, I figured reading this would be any interesting exercise. I will limit my comments here to the chapters on nihilism, existentialism and postmodernism.

Sire's take on nihilism is that it is logical conclusion from naturalism, that is things are as they are in an objective and contingent world. There is no inherent meaning in anything, and none can be concluded. The biggest problem with this chapter is his confusion of nihilism and absurdism. He quotes much from Camus and Douglas Adams, as well as Beckett and Kafka. All of these writers are concerned with absurdism, and I certainly wouldn't consider any of these as nihilists. None of them deny value, they only claim that it is absurd and possibly unknowable. He does cite Nietzsche, as is necessary in any discussion of nihilism, but he does not recognize Nietzsche's anticipation of escape from this "box". Nihilism is not a live option for a philosophy, and is really more of a rejection of philosophy. Sire seems to confuse two types of nihilism: epistemological, the position that there can be no truths, and existential, the position that there can be no meaning. Nihilism may be a logical paradox, as Sire claims, when it is epistemological nihilism. But that does not mean naturalism is necessarily false. Knowledge is a construct, dependant on human conciousness. Let's not confuse truths and facts, the universe doesn't care how we frame and catalog our experience of reality, it just is. It may be a fact that the universe is nothing but random atoms joined purely by chance, but nihilism is not inherently linked with this explanation. The paradox arises within the human understanding, and not in the external world. Furthermore, this epistemoligcal nihilism is not a necessary component of all nihilsm. It is in the existential sense that nihilism is most often used, and I think this is what Sire means when he claims that worldviews end in nihilism, because all values are equaled, and hence lose meaning. This is exactly what Nietzsche argued when discussing the "devaluation of values". It is also present in Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. I think history has proven the real presence and danger of existential nihilsm, it can exist without paradox. But many people such as Pirsig and Nietzsche have shown solutions that do not reject a naturalistic framework. Finally, he claims Nietzsche "ended in an asylum" because of his links with nihilism. This is purely false, his mental disorders were a direct result of a biological infection and not a philosophical one.

Next, Sire moves on to existentialism. He correctly notes existentialism as a response and a solution to nihilism (as is much of philosophy and art). Here, we see the introduction of subject into the universe. Human consciousness changes existence, and makes meaning and value possible. This meaning is not pre-determined, however. It is created by the activity of consciousness. Sire's rejection of existentialism begins with the danger of solipsism, where the value of the "I" is the only one and no one else is recognized in the equation. But, he also recognizes that Sartre has already addressed this. The very center of existentialism is the realization that we are being-for-itself, and others are also being-for-itself. We must recognize others as subject and not as objects. Now, existentialist ethics are never a simple matter, and Sartre himself was unable to complete his works on it. But, here Sire over-simplifies the whole notion of an existentialist ethics and quickly moves past it without a detailed examination. His main argument is that in existentialism good is created by choosing, so what ever one freely chooses is the good and non-choice is evil. This, of course, ignores the major element of existentialism, responsibility. Because we have freedom we cannot pass off our choices, and any evil they create, to anyone else. We alone are responsible for the outcome. Choice itself is not the good, but we are given the opportunity to create good and make universal our choices, thereby creating the world we want to live in. Sire would do well to read de Beavoiur's Ethics of Ambiguity for an explanation of existential evil. He does admit that Camus' The Plague is a case for living the moral life in a world where values are ungrounded. But, Sire's problem still remains, they are ungrounded. Just because humans can affirm values, they do not gain any more of a base and they can be countered by opposite affirmations. Then, when these conflicts arise, how can we know which one is "right"? Here again, a more detailed analysis of freedom and responsibility would help narrow the range of possibilities and take us away from pure relativism. Sire does not touch at all on authenticity, and this, I would argue, is the centerpiece of existentialism , and without recognizing that, we cannot adequately explain or analyze it. When we recognize the freedom of others, and our responsibility to them, we go a long way forward in creating a morality that is close to "traditional", without unnecessary essences and exterior explanations. It is not that far removed from the virtue ethics of Aristotle.

Moving on to postmodernism, Sire does provide some decent background discussion, noting the historical changes from being to knowing to meaning. He does not think postmodernism will be with us "for the long haul." I think this has been quite disproven, as postmodernism continues to more accurately explain the current world. His charge that postmodernism is completely dismissed by scientists is also complete nonsense. Here some readings from Kellner and Best would illuminate that criticism. I do agree that postmodernism is inadequate when it comes to areas like ethics, leaving only a vague relativism. While I think postmodernism is an excellent descriptive philosophy, I believe it is very incomplete as a prescriptive philosophy. Finally, Sire attempts a lethal blow by claiming that the position "there are no metanarratives" is itself a metanarrative and therefore self-nullifies the whole philosophy. Once again he tries to force the position of epistemological nihilism on a worldview. I'm not convinced that the postmodern claim is that there are no truths or no knowable truths, rather that there are only experiential truths. These truths are not enough to provide a metanarrative without an external source from beyond experience, and there is no evidence of this source. We can only know what we experience, and can create stories or narratives about that. But there is no way to step outside our experience and view ourselves and the totality of existence objectively.

Sire states that this is not a work of professional philosophy and he is quite right. It is far too shallow and brief for that. Nevertheless, Sire tries to claim that he logically proved the self-inconsistencies in each of these worldviews, but that simply was not possibly in the limited manner of this work . For instance, he claims to have shown pantheism inconsistent, but nowhere in the book did he provide a full proof of that. Despite what many readers of this book have thought, it is also not a good catalog of worldviews. If it attempted to casually present a collection of worldviews it might succeed. But, Sire isn't that casual, he over-simplifies and quickly tries to dismiss everything he disagrees with and prove his own view correct. So, this book is stuck between being a serious work of critique, and a casual work of general introduction, accomplishing neither. As a final insult, after revealing the illogical form of these views, he presents his own without any logical basis. At best his theistic view, even if fully accepted, could not be defended purely on logical grounds. Sire has proven himself logically inconsistent. Since he has to accept a groundless fact for the very basis of his worldview, theism, this should not be a basis to reject other theories. The views presented here are based on facts, or at least perceptions and experience, rather than extension of belief, which leads Sire to a very unstable point for his attacks. He would be better off arguing why these philosophies could be true, were it not for an inadequacy or defect, namely the existence of his theism, and then argue why one should accept this theism as a starting point, being ungrounded, and reject plain experience for something more.