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.

Mimetic Desire in the Bad Girls Club

"A Bad Girl knows what she wants and how to get it. She makes her own way, makes her own rules and she makes no apologies. A Bad Girl blazes her own trail and removes obstacles from her path. A Bad Girl fights and forces her way to the top with style and beauty. A Bad Girl believes in jumping first and looking later. People will love you. People will hate you. Others will secretly wish to be you. A Bad Girl is you."

-Bad Girls Club Oath

Public Domain Pick of the Week: Haxan

This week's pick is the 1922 Swedish/Danish co-production Haxan or Witchcraft through the Ages. This is the original longer version without the William S. Burroughs narration or the free jazz soundtrack. Instead, the soundtrack is early 20th century recordings of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, and others. I like the way it sounds so much I just play the movie in a separate window while I'm working to listen to the music.

If you've never seen it, it's an exposition of beliefs about witches in medieval and early modern Europe (including lots of recreations) that ends with a coda about the rationalization of witchcraft beliefs into modern concepts about mental illness.

You can watch this entire brilliant Swedish movie online here.

Non-Canonical Scholarship in the NYT

I am trying to slowly but surely get this blog back on its feet after months of neglect, so here's a start. This article from the November 12 New York Times mentions Jeff Kripal and his work at the AAR, but sadly not the panel on which he sat when he gave his paper on Charles Fort.