Monday, December 8, 2008
1
A Date That Will Live: Pearl Harbor and the Blue Marble
Written by Zach in News

 

Yesterday was the 67th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of America’s involvement in the Second World’s War.  Perhaps less well known is that it also marks the anniversary of the photograph marked AS17-148-22727.  This was Nasa’s designation for a photograph of Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 as it headed to the moon.  It is now universally referred to as “The Blue Marble Photograph.”  Some suggest that it is the most widely distributed image of the earth, though all acknowledge that it marks the first clear image of our illuminated planet.

 

 

 

The fact that the anniversaries for Pearl Harbor and the Blue Marble photograph occur on the same day strikes me like an Eisensteinian montage.  A third meaning seems to emanate from the touching of the two events, but I can’t identify it presicely.  The harmony is elusive.  The contrast is not.  On one day the earth, I’m sure, seemed expansive, tragic, and unmanageable.  On the other day the earth seemed small, serene, and so manageable that viewers compared it to a child’s plaything.

I feel as though the two events in synthesis might hint at something profound, but the conclusion seems just beyond the horizon of my brain.  Maybe there is no synthesis.  Maybe they are only two different visions colliding in the attempt to knock the other outside the circle in the sand.

Thursday, December 4, 2008
2
NoiseTrade, Finalist in the Open Web Awards
Written by Matt in News

This year, one of our biggest interactive projects has been Noisetrade.com. It’s a place where musicians can share their music with fans, and fans determine the price. There’s even a way for people to download music for free when they tell other friends about it. Just yesterday, it was announced on mashable.com that NoiseTrade is one of three finalists in the Music category for the Open Web Awards. We’re up against Last FM and Pandora…good company! So now we need everyone’s help in voting every day for NoiseTrade. You can use this widget below to vote. Just select the Music category, and then choose NoiseTrade. Thanks!

Tuesday, December 2, 2008
1
Get Out of Here, Go Swimming, and Save Western Civilization
Written by Zach in Art News

 

 

Advocates of Western civilization increasingly suffer bewilderment.  It is the type of bewilderment described in a nightmare of Malcolm Muggerridge’s.  The setting was backstage in a theater.  As he waits in the wings for his cue, he hears the play bumbling along.  Suddenly he realizes that the play he hears is not the play for which he has the script.  “Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what I should do.  Then I get my cue  Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way on to the stage, and there look for guidance to the prompter, whose head I can just see rising out of the floor boards.  Alas, he only signals helplessly to me, and I realise that of course his script is different from mine.  I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience who begin to hiss and shout: ‘Get off the stage!’ ‘Let the play go on!’ ‘You’re interrupting!’   I am paralysed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don’t fit.  The only lines I know.”

This happened to Mark Helprin when he clashed with an audience from a university town in Massachusetts.  “By some quirk which I hope never to see reproduced, and before I knew what was happening, I found myself debating my entire audience on the subjects of human sacrifice and cannibalism. These well-educated and polite people — only a few of whom would actually have murdered or eaten one another — who had sons and daughters, Ph.D.s, and BMWs, were defending the Mayan and Aztec practice of human sacrifice — that is, in the main, of children — and the South Sea custom of cannibalism.”  Helprin suggests that when faced with the option to defend Western Civilization or cannibalism, it is more fashionable to defend cannibalism.  

The legendary American literary critic Leslie Fielder once wrote:

“We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom and novelty is originality.  In these circumstances it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion  that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his city crumbling down.”

Leslie Fielder wrote this well before Jesse Jackson led Stanford University students in the chant: “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.”  He also wrote it before the University of Chicago ignored its student council, both of its student papers, it’s alumni (including Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow), the National Association of Scholars, and decided to phase out its popular and celebrated History of Western Civilization class.  University of Chicago president Don Randel seemed to believe that an appreciation for our culture was a 19th century phenomena that we’ve moved beyond.

Sometimes one can find a fellow cast member who possesses the same script.  I feel that novelist Mark Helprin is such a fellow.  In a 2002 commencement speech, he expanded Clarence Darrow’s charge to the class of 1918.  Darrow commanded, “Get out of here, and go swimming.”  Helprin lengthened this by a third: “Get out of here, go swimming, and save Western Civilization.”  

 

Here’s an excerpt from his beautiful 2002 speech: 

 

If civilization can be attacked on many fronts, it can also be defended on many fronts, and to do so you need not necessarily drop into Afghanistan by parachute or found a political party. Last summer, in Venice, I was walking from room to room in the Accademia, which, unlike timid American museums, throws its windows wide open to the light and air of day. As if to bring even further alive the greatness and truth of the Bellinis and the Giorgiones on the walls, the galleries were flooded with music. As is most everything in Italy, it was unofficial. It came from a guitarist and a soprano on a side street. He played while she sang — gloriously — Bach, Handel, Mozart, and anonymous folk songs of the 18th Century. Because it was music, I cannot properly convey to you how beautiful it was, but it was accomplished, precise, and infused with the ineffable quality that lifts great art above that which merely aspires to or pretends to be great art. I could not see them from the windows, but when, several hours later, I went outside, they had neither ceased, nor skipped a beat, nor produced a single false note.

They were impoverished Poles, who appeared to be in their late twenties. She was thin, sharp-featured, and hauntingly beautiful. Most people simply passed them by, some dropped a few coins in a basket at her feet, and the visitors to the Accademia had no idea who they were, but she sang as if she were bathed in the footlights of La Scala, where she should have been, and where someday she may be. It did not matter that they were unrecognized, that they sang on the street, or that they were desperately poor, because that day in Venice they rose above everyone else, except perhaps the saints. In this they shared a brotherhood with the American soldier who made the first parachute jump, in the dark, into Afghanistan. For they and he were defending the civilization of the West, and they and he are inextricably linked. Without the soldier, they could not exist except in subjugation, and without them, he would not have enough to fight for.

I ask you to join this brotherhood, and, in your own way, whatever that may be, to defend and champion the sanctity of the individual, free and objective inquiry, government by consent of the governed, freedom of conscience, and the pursuit — rather than the degradation and denial — of truth and of beauty.

 

This weekend I did the incomprehensible confusing drawing up above with the intent to illustrate Helprin’s wonderful story.  Thankfully, Western Civilization has more capable defenders.

Monday, December 1, 2008
0
Cyber Monday Special
Written by Matt in News

 

Today and tomorrow only! If you use the coupon code “cyber” in our store while checking out, you will receive 25% off everything! Books, shirts, photoshop tools, and even Christmas Cards! 

The National Retail Federation said that this past weekend Americans spent 3% more on holiday shopping then they did last year at this time, so we decided to jump on the bandwagon. 

Thanks for shopping with us! Here’s a link to the Portland Store.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
2
Happy Thanksgiving
Written by Zach in News

I can’t help but think that this animal was created to be beheaded.  I mean, look at its head.

It’s bright red, as if to say, “remove!”  The turkey head, seems to be to be Nature’s own Highlight’s-magazine-one-of-these-things-does-not-belong game.

Traditionally, the President of the United States pardons a turkey at thanksgiving.  These turkeys used to go to the suspiciously named Frying Pan Park.  But for the past 3 years, they’ve gone to live at Disneyland.  Not joking.  I miss the days of Eisenhower.  When somebody sent him a turkey, he ate it.  He didn’t pack it off to a fun-filled, family-friendly, magical resort!  The world has officially gone crazy.

Some journalists have mistakenly suggested that the pardoned Turkey spends the remainder of its days at a petting zoo.  Obviously false!  Who on earth would want to pet a turkey head?  It’d be like petting a tumor.  It sends chills up my spine just thinking about it.  

Clearly, the only sane thing to do is to remove the head and eat the body.

I hope all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving and if you must pet a turkey, do it with a knife and some butter.

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