Amanda F*cking Palmer Music Monday - It runs in the Family

Great song... I am so sick of typical 4/4 Rock and Roll - the triplets in this song really give it a nice sense of manic build... More from Amanda F*cking Palmer next week.

Code Monkey Music Monday

On Heresy

XGH posted something regarding which Jews are considered 'heretics'. One of the things that I started to wonder as I read his post is whether you can still call people heretics if 90 percent of Jews are non-Orthodox. In some ways it's like the saying 'if everyone around you is crazy, and you're sane, perhaps it's the other way around'.

Interestingly, I stumbled upon this excerpt from the current Pope, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, which in some ways addresses the same issue (emphasis mine!):

“Cardinal” Joseph Ratzinger, The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood, pp. 87-88: “The difficulty in the way of giving an answer is a profound one. Ultimately it is due to the fact that there is no appropriate category in Catholic thought for the phenomenon of Protestantism today (one could say the same of the relationship to the separated churches of the East). It is obvious that the old category of ‘heresy’ is no longer of any value. Heresy, for Scripture and the early Church, includes the idea of a personal decision against the unity of the Church, and heresy’s characteristic is pertinacia, the obstinacy of him who persists in his own private way. This, however, cannot be regarded as an appropriate description of the spiritual situation of the Protestant Christian. In the course of a now centuries-old history, Protestantism has made an important contribution to the realization of Christian faith, fulfilling a positive function in the development of the Christian message and, above all, often giving rise to a sincere and profound faith in the individual non-Catholic Christian, whose separation from the Catholic affirmation has nothing to do with the pertinacia characteristic of heresy. Perhaps we may here invert a saying of St. Augustine’s: that an old schism becomes a heresy. The very passage of time alters the character of a division, so that an old division is something essentially different from a new one. Something that was once rightly condemned as heresy cannot later simply become true, but it can gradually develop its own positive ecclesial nature, with which the individual is presented as his church and in which he lives as a believer, not as a heretic. This organization of one group, however, ultimately has an effect on the whole. The conclusion is inescapable, then: Protestantism today is something different from heresy in the traditional sense, a phenomenon whose true theological place has not yet been determined.”

Annette Hanshaw Music Monday - Daddy Won't You Please Come Home

The Undead

My daughter confided to my wife that she really was freaked out by having to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Further investigation on our part uncovered that her teacher told the class that when you go to sleep Hashem takes your soul out of your body for the night. Apparently my daughter was under the impression that her body was soul-less during her nightly trips to the bathroom - sort of like an innocuous zombie...

Devajyoti Ray - Setting Notes

The Indian Pseudo-realist school...

Sita sings the blues

There is a controversial movie out there called "Sita Sings the Blues" - I've only seen excerpts of it. In some ways it's like "The Hours" - it interweaves real life with the classic Hindu epic of the Ramayana. Basically, the woman who made this movie was married to a guy who went off to India for a long term project, and wound up dumping her. She had a crisis, found comfort in reading the Ramayana, and decided to make an animated movie. To her surprise, she found herself viciously attacked by the conservative Hindu movements for what they feel was an insult to their sacred text. She was also decried by left wing liberals as a racist and neocolonialist, since in their eyes, no white woman should make any statements about a non-white topic which can be in any way interpreted as controversial.

Discounting the left wingers (which is a separate discussion altogether), what I find funny and sad about this situation is that the two sides so totally don't get where the other side is coming from. The filmmaker cannot understand why her personal interpretation of the Ramayana, which she clearly made as a labor of love, should be interpreted as in any way offensive. While the conservative Hindus cannot understand how someone can have the creative urge to build upon their epic, yet be able to critique it and adjust it to their own worldview.

It's kinda funny, because one of the commenters on the Youtube page basically summarized it like this: The director got dumped by her husband in India, so what better way is there to crap over all Indians than to denigrate the Ramayana.

He just doesn't get it...

BTW, Here is the trailer of the film...

Melancholy Baby Music Monday