Archive for February, 2008

I am unable to write. I am unable to think. My eloquence is lost. The urge has faded. Something has changed and I have moved into the middle period. The early period is one in which everything is carefully planned. The form is crafted and the content fills in. A sense of structure pervades and one proceeds in a state of conviction. There is a need to account for decisions made. But since last summer I find that the urge and the activity itself have become more natural. It is carried out without thought. And the logic has gone as well. I don’t know what the form will be as I plod along without knowledge - and without the need for confidence. Happy or sad, whatever. There is now nothing to lose.

Is this the Silent Valley?

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I am experiencing big changes and it’s rather overwhelming.

S.

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Mogogo is missing his deadline.

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Odysseus and I had an unexpected and delightful mini-summit this evening. Our subject was Obama and our conclusion was inevitably President. This is a neocratic statement of belief. Not to say that President Obama will heal the world’s ills; he is no divine physician; but he would symbolise the rejuvenation of the true American spirit, a massive and dearly needed power in the world.

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One of the reasons for my Neocratic absence has been my mini-career in film criticism. I will occasionally post some of my pieces, in the sag times between substantial posts.

JJ Abrams can do no wrong. Fresh from the success of his TV creations Lost and Alias and en route to directing the new Star Trek film, he has in Cloverfield produced the best doomsday movie of recent years. read on »

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Architecture?

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The American myth is so potent. I found myself wistfully dreaming of the greyhound bus rides of my youth today, remember that pack of cigarettes and mrs wagner pies. What happened to those days, those dreams, those journeys, that youth, that lover.

Only to remember that i had not actually lived that life. I was nostalgic for someone elese’s dream! Powerful stuff nostalgia, especially when served by the pen of Paul Simon : read on »

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I don’t know if that title makes sense, but it’s official: Obama has won the East.

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Mandel believes. Saleem does too, and I suspect other believers lurk unassumingly in the ranks of the Neocrats. But what inspires such religious worship of the Apple, and fanatic shunning of its competitor? This mystery has inspired a film.

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Friends, Cloverfield is required neocratic viewing. Woe betide those who don’t get its brilliance.

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The best laid plans of mice and men, said someone somewhere in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, oft go astray. I’m not sure what role the mice play in the Bard’s world-embracing stage, where we’re all players, but it’s true that life rarely works out as tidily as one’s grand designs on the back of an envelope. Or in my case, on the back foot.

It would be neither meet nor seemly to disclose how things are happening differently than planned and perhaps better than expected. Nothing is yet engraved and I daren’t tempt fate, though I often come close. The possibilities are still just ephemeral sprays of ink in the wind. But there is a great virtue in letting that process happen to you. Gird up the loins of purposeful endeavour, and if it’s for the right reasons, there’s often an inexplicable and providential obviousness that infuses the life around you. read on »

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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The Neocrats should read them some Wendell Berry. The world now confronts the reality that the habits of the industrial age are finally showing their true colors. The world in which we Neocrats have all grown up is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about what human activities the planet can sustain. Berry has things to say about this, and better words to prove it to you than I have. So read him. I’ll give you two good reasons.

First, you’ll never be able to figure out whether Berry is a liberal or a conservative. In one paragraph, he sounds exactly like the deepest green hippy in Arcata, CA. In the next, you’ll swear he’s more reactionary than the hardest line of the crazy fundamentalists bred only in the American South. But through it all, he maintains a consistency of position in his argument that would make a boulder blink first. This is a man whose underling philosophy is so stable and his identification with that philosophy so deep that even where you disagree with him, you can’t for a moment disrespect him. read on »

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The sickness emanating from Babylon knows no reason, no measure.

In amongst the razzmatazz of super duper tuesday, of sarkozy boning bruni, of britney going doolally, a minor story may have passed you by. A story of a cowardice and horror unsurpassed in the cowardice and horror with which Babylon has become curiously synonymous.

On Friday in Baghdad two bombs exploded. Nothing new there. Strapped to two devotees of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. Nothing new there. 99 innocents, market traders and shoppers died in the blasts. Nothing new there. The bombers were women. Nothing new there. They were mad. Nothing new there. No, they really were mad. Retarded. With Downs syndrome. Their bombs were detonated remotely, no doubt by some man standing at a safe distance from the decapitation and flesh. read on »

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