After The Nutcracker and Dispatches from the Yoga Wars

Last year, Spencer Dew wrote a piece about The Nutcracker for Sightings that I really liked and I meant to get it up before Christmas actually came, but since the Christmas tree in our living room is still up, I think it's not too late.

I have always had a great fondness for Tchaikovsky since I was first introduced to him and Rimsky-Korsakov in music class at St. Timothy's elementary school. I listen to the entire score of both The Nutcracker and Swan Lake nearly every week, and so I was pleased to be able to see the Carolina Ballet's production of The Nutcracker and Black Swan (both of which were great) two weekends ago.

What's Wrong with Dexter?

What Nietzsche called ressentiment has crept into the murderous motivations of the antihero of Showtime's serial killer drama Dexter.

Dexter, a serial killer who preys on serial killers, used to be an emotionless flat-affect void like the type identified in Mark Seltzer's Wound Culture, motivated by bloodlust channeled into more or less acceptable channels by his police detective stepfather,

The "code" that Dexter's stepfather programmed into him when he discovered the boy exhibiting the early traits of a serial killer, specifically killing animals (he may have wet his bed and set fires as well to fit the classic pattern but the show does not tell us), assured that Dexter would only kill those who were a) likely to kill again and b) had somehow escaped the justice of legitimate law enforcement.

Jesus Is Just All Right, Part Two: The Trees Community

This is an article I wrote in the summer of 2008 as a sequel to this unexpectedly controversial article. It never got published, so I thought I'd trot it out here. The music is fantastic.

In the late 1960s, a TV production consultant named William "Shipen" Lebzelter "dropped out" of his life and moved into an abandoned fourth-floor loft in the East Village. Then, together with his close friend Phillip "Ariel" Dross, Shipen embarked on a spiritual quest, exploring disciplines like Kundalini Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism before, in his own words he was, "knocked by Christ off [his] horse."

Shipen's loft, already a meeting place for young village people caught up in the hippie commune vibes of the late 60's, soon became a center for born again Christians (sometimes as many as forty) to meet, pray and meditate.

Buddhism and Violence in Sri Lanka

My pal Ben, who works on Sri Lanka, has written a nice piece on Buddhism as a religion of war. You can read it here.

And for more info about early modern European views of Buddhism as a nihilistic worldview, you can read Nietzsche or Roger-pol Droit's The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha.