Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

 India

Homo sapiens are uniquely adept at utilizing systems of communication for self-expression. In addition to the exchange of ideas and information through language communication, each cultural tradition has evolved a complex set of non-verbal signals capable of conveying at a glance detailed ideas about identity and ideology.

 El Salvador

Some of these culturally evolved signals are almost universally recognizable by all sapiens.  They are a sort of communication short cut, rich in information, that function to quickly define the relationship between the recipient and the signaler, making reciprocal behavioral expectations clear to both parties.

Professor Nemesis

Professor Nemesis is obnoxious even in small doses, but especially so when accompanied by his own self-aggrandizement and his personal group of sycophants.  His academic fame was established back in the day, when he'd finessed a multi-million dollar research grant to come to the conclusion that people who use television as their primary source of information tend to be less well informed than people who read newspapers, and that education levels - he likes the word mediated - have a lot to do with this.

He was on all the talk shows, even Larry King.  His methodology was impeccable, indeed elegant.  I often heard him bragging about it over the din at lunchtime in the staff canteen, explaining that the data collection itself was a display of logistics that would have inspired the heart of any sergeant major.  The world owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Nemesis and this is a fact that he misses no opportunity to communicate.

            Don’t be too quick to accuse me of bitterness.  It’s just that I grew to know his classroom methods very well.  His main tactics are intimidation and ridicule and he uses both very liberally and with sadistic skill.  He speaks an ugly language, using lots of abstract nouns that activate my spell checker; nouns like textuality, discursivity, supplementarity, synchronicity, plurality.  At one time or another, I had every one of his graduate students weeping and snivelling and blowing their noses into tissues in my office over the burning humiliation they felt in his presence.

            “Why haven’t you read Goffman?” he’d thunder at them across a silent, anxious seminar table, pointing an accusing finger; though Goffman wasn’t on the reading list, only things authored, or more accurately, co-authored with earlier generations of graduate students, by Nemesis himself.

Ruins of Heliopolis

 Heliopolis, located in modern Lebanon at the town of Balbec, was, at its peak in the 2nd century CE, the largest spiritual sanctuary in the classical world.  Its temples feature the largest stones ever quarried, moved and set in place by human endeavor; some weighing almost 1,000 tonnes. The city dwindled in importance as Christianity gradually took hold in the area in the subsequent centuries.  A series of devastating earthquakes did the rest.

Sufficient Justification

Long to be free of hunger and rage. Seek to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion. Outgrow dependence. Eat a balanced diet and brush your teeth after every meal. Cultivate an indifference to life itself. Acknowledge its passing. Take moderate exercise, cook with olive oil, drink a little red wine every day, and stay away from cigarettes and heroin. Be intoxicated with laughter. Let curses dissolve like the evaporation of a nightmare on awakening. Be noble, be strong, be great in heart and be compassionate. Practice forbearance. Give. Ask for nothing. Hope for nothing. Don't be afraid. The will to live is sufficient justification for being alive.

The World in Black and White

Twice a day, everyday.

Quetta, Pakistan

High Art and Low

Consider this music called jazz. With its social and cultural origins among the illiterate and more or less despised and dispossessed African diasporas of the southern American states: brothel pianists, nomadic cotton pickers, watchers of passing trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, out-casts and strumpets, it has expanded and evolved to include a cultural community that today cuts across boundaries of age, sex, economic status, vocation, ethnicity and the state. The most vital in the abundance of contemporary music, jazz has become established world-wide as the mother vernacular of urban popular music.

Globally, jazz complements each individual cultural musical tradition by offering a universality that has not become lost in vulgarity and self-reference. More importantly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads most to hold a view of composition and music history that is truly global in scope. Just as jazz was born in America in an amalgam of African and European Diasporas, it has continued the practice of absorbing different musical influences and has remained capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing either its dignity or identity.

In a global cultural landscape in which popular music has become increasingly strident, aggressive and barren, jazz continues to exalt the simple charm of existence without much demand for reflection on the part of the listener. With the music of contemporary high culture becoming progressively rarefied, abstract and minimal, leaving room for only highly sublimated emotions, jazz, by its raw exuberance, brings an element of balance. It is at once both high art and low; the true classical music of the global, post-modern age and also its genuine folk expression; through its various fusions the living, growing, musical incarnation of the global cultural personality, its once oral traditions of generational transmission now accomplished electronically.

If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings related to what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existentialist art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as both the global classical music of post-modernity and as its folk music.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

Plane to see...

The Age of Reason

The age of reason was six, we were told, my first grade classmates and I.  With it came the ability to distinguish evil from good, right from wrong, and the state of sin from a state of grace.  Our baptisms had freed us from the guilt of original sin, a guilt that even then I wasn’t willing to acknowledge because it wasn’t fair.  Now, through confession and the Eucharist we would be fully members of the one, true, apostolic and universal church, unlike the poor, dead, un-baptized African babies who were condemned to the spiritual and sensory deprivation of Limbo.

            While far away in Moscow, Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin, and in New York City, Charlie Parker lay dying, painstaking preparations drilled us in our catechism as if we were a flock of talking parrots and set us to commit to memory the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and mea culpa, the Confiteor, the confession of faith.

            We were told the Mysteries.  Ah, the Mysteries; the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the tongues of fire and the infallibility of the Pope.  And somehow I began to acquire the elements of an image of the source of all evil as a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and a sulphurous smell.  All this before the Second Vatican Council, when the priest turned around and started speaking English instead of Latin and we were told not to say Holy Ghost anymore, it was Spirit, Holy Spirit, because we didn’t believe in ghosts.