Category Archives: CULTURE

Soulless Embodiment

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“The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim.”

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage 2nd ed. 1991), p. 11. Continue reading →

“It is what it is.” (?)

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As someone with an on again, off again dedication to the sport of golf, Buddhist thought and meditation, and the politics and contradictions of culture writ large and small, I have been interested to listen to Tiger Woods’ recent post-tournament comments in light of his fall from the iconic cultural graces of pop culture celebrity after his “crash” late last November and current struggles on the golf course since he returned to play in the Masters golf tournament about a month ago.

I am especially interested in speculating on his rhetorical recommitment to Buddhist practice that he made during his statement of apology back in February which he said he had abandoned and which, fundamentally, he asserted had led to his disastrous extramarital deviance and likely divorce from Elin Nordegren. Continue reading →

Talking to pets and the individual sacred

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While eating my egg and cheese sandwich/coffee breakfast this morning, I perused the paper and discovered that for some married folks pets are better listeners than their spouses.

While I can’t verify any of that from personal experience since I’ve never married, I have listened to plenty of talk from espoused male friends about their communicative challenges with their wives, usually, I think, with a certain masculine hyperbole attached that plays on gendered stereotypes of often puzzled and clueless male tolerance of female chattering.

(Why this or any poll focuses on the marriage class other than the cultural bias toward and privileging of that specific cultural institution despite it’s common dissolution continually befuddles me. It goes to the problematic of polls generally, their design flaws including and starting with the questions that are asked and their format. Most of them are ridiculously flawed!) Continue reading →

On Woods and Ochoa

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When I read that Lorena Ochoa, one of the best contemporary women professional golfers who would have been a shoe-in for the LPGA Hall of Fame if she’d only played two more years on the tour, announced her retirement from golf to pursue personal/family goals (including having children with her husband of a few years) and devoting more time to charitable work, I couldn’t help but think of the contrast with Tiger Wood’s brief “retirement” after being caught by his wife and the media living a lie.

Based on what I’ve read and witnessed from a distance it’s clear to me that the two examples of living with extreme talent and fortune, albeit in fundamentally different performance spheres, exhibit starkly different levels of mindfulness (that ability to live in the moment with sensitivity and openness to one’s surroundings while maintaining the focus on the task at hand) and character (that sense of one’s humanity that respects in a mindful way one’s spiritual and physical relationship to one’s environment and to the reciprocal desires and obligations for living life fully engaged). Continue reading →

A Code for Dating (?)

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On the continuum of thinking that we are rational, self-controlled beings to acting like instinctual evolutionary creatures, I think we are deluded about thinking we are the former and clueless about how much we are indeed the latter.

My assertion rises from a newspaper article this morning about contemporary dating doldrums and about the ongoing failure of social conventions and their regularly updated “rules” to get us past the normal dating confusion and challenges and onto the path of successful, healthy, long-term connubial bliss.

I suppose there have always been cultural schema for initiating and developing long-lasting intimate reproductive relations: Continue reading →

Inscrutability, felines and heroes

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As a cat lover, critic of heroic mythologies, and observer of masculinity in general, I have a few thoughts to air prior to Tiger Woods’ unscripted press conference today at 2:00 pm ET at the site of the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia.

One of the characteristics that highlight the feline personality in a somewhat stereotypical way is the seeming inscrutability of the animal. The relative lack of facial expression, compared to other domestic animals like dogs, that might expose the physical or emotional or psychological state of the creature that is relied on in the evolutionary struggle for survival might be a key to the animal’s predatory success especially in more “wild” natural settings where signs of weakness and vulnerability can be especially dangerous. Continue reading →

Los San Patricios

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Quizas un poco tarde en el dia para poner este video celebrando el dia de San Patricios, pero justo lo encontre.  Simboliza algo significante en cuanto a la cuestion de la hibridez cultural en general y en la vida de yo mismo.  Asi que, esto es para mis parientes mexicanos e irlandeses.  Orale!

[vsw id=”LJM2Hd_ET5c&hl” source=”youtube” width=”425″ height=”344″ autoplay=”no”]

Incorporating the imagined body

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Since I watched controversial Russian ice dancers Domnina’s and Shabalin‘s faux Australian aboriginal folk routine earlier this week during the 2010 Olympics “original” ice dance competition, I have been thinking about how the cultural “other” is imagined and enacted to reproduce notions of cultural authority and power.

More specifically, I have addressed in other essays on my blog the importance of the culturally imagined/defined body as a site of colonization and imperial control.  Indeed, the body as an experienced reality is simultaneously a metaphor that is ideologically mapped with value and power in cultural, economic, and political/ideological terms.  It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that fundamental to any examination of social and ideological relations of power, bodies and the way they are imagined would be at its center implicitly, if not explicitly. Continue reading →

Will it be Barry or Barack?

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Growing up working class and biracial in Utah, son of a Mexican American man and Scots-Irish woman, in a white, politically conservative, Mormon community, I was always reminded to “not cause problems.”

Especially by my Mexican American father.

It made sense to me as a young boy, at the time.

I considered myself a “Mormon” boy, preparing to inherit a spiritual wealth of blessings if I simply obeyed the Ten Commandments as most good Christian boys understood them and acted within the additional spiritual obligations that Mormon boys understood to be their future rights. Continue reading →

(Post) Colonial Vampires

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While driving home from fly-fishing yesterday afternoon, I happened to listen to a PRI: The World story about a recent blog written by the current British ambassador to the United States.

It was about his observation of the trend that British actors are popular fill for vampire roles in mainstream film, American television series, and an upcoming PBS drama.

The PRI piece about the blog and the ambassador’s blog itself are “fun,” slightly tongue-in-cheek pieces about this phenomenon which on its face seems verifiably factual.  I don’t intend to fact check the actual numbers of British actors versus American actors in vampire roles.  Even if the view of a trend is a British conceit, there might be something to it.

The pieces got me thinking because, like a lot of material in popular media including superficially “intellectual” sites like NPR, PRI, etc. there is still a lot of description that passes for or at least implies “explanation.”  And in the current cultural epoch where assertion attempts to pass for description, explanation, and analysis all at once, a bit of analysis from them would have been interesting. Continue reading →