Hello, Berkeley!

I am in Berkeley.

Getting here was harder than it should have been. The flight I was supposed to be on was delayed by more than four hours. Southwest rerouted the passengers, which caused nice full-to-the-brim flights, oh and everyone's baggage got nice and left-behind. By the time I got myself and my luggage together it was too late to get to the hostel in Berkeley, so I ended up at a hotel near the airport for the night, fuming and having vivid dreams of trying to catch my luggage. Murr... So instead of arriving in Berkeley at about 7 pm on Thursday, I arrived in Berkeley at about 11 am on Friday. Dropped my luggage in the hostel office, found lunch, bought a bus pass :), and made it to my first potential-roommate interview with next to no trouble.

So far, Berkeley is quite pleasant. The streets and buses are crowded with people. This has produced a small degree of cognitive dissonance, as my brain associates crowded streets and buses with hearing Russian. So I've been walking around expecting to hear Russian. This wasn't helped by the three Russian-language conversations I overheard today within ten minutes. (There was also a lady speaking some Slavic language on the bus on day one, but I think the language was Polish.)

So far, I'm quite happy with the bus system. I'm sure that eventually, I'll even absorb that bus schedules actually mean something here. I'm also happy that street-harassment is nothing like Memphis. As of yet, nothing, and that includes my trip today to a not-so-nice (but still not really bad) area of town.

The only "fun" thing I've done was wandering down to the Marina, which is quite pretty and pleasant and nice and SUNNY, so I'm nicely burnt.

The goal is to find a room, so if anyone knows someone looking for a roommate is Berkeley, holler, sing out, do whatever it is that you do!

And no, I haven't yet had the guts to even try anything purporting to be BBQ.

Memphis...

I fall in love easily. Or at least, that was the case with Memphis, when I was sixteen and declared to my mother while visiting that I thought Memphis was great and I wanted to live there.

I "left" Memphis a couple of weeks ago, but it hadn't really sunk in. Tomorrow, I'm leaving Tennessee for Berkeley, CA. The vast majority of Tennessee I'm kind of happy to be escaping, but glorious, midtown Memphis . . . Memphis, I will miss. I'm going to miss the bungalows. I'm going to miss driving down North Parkway with a canopy of trees. I'm going to miss not being able to figure out for certain if it's the monkeys at the zoo or the fratboys making noise. I'm going to miss Al Rayan's amazing food, the BBQ Tofu at Tracks, Central BBQ, the freaking Sputnik outside of Joe's Wines and Liquors, getting lost and exploring a new part of the city, Cooper-Young, the Campus Safety office, the churches, Elmwood cemetery, the random funky signs that are everywhere, hitting all the thrift stores on Summer Ave., Summer Ave., the pretty that is Peabody, driving back from West Memphis at night, the Mississippi, the flat terrain . . .

I'm going to miss that Memphis won't allow her lovers to become trapped in a white tower and forget reality, both the ways it's beautiful and flaws that need to be fixed.

Memphis, I will miss you.

Big Summer Movie!

If you have anything of a geek in your body at all, you should probably go see The Dark Knight at some point. As superhero movies go, this one's up there with the first of the X-Men trilogy and the first Spiderman. The plotline is well enough developed to carry the special effects, the hand to hand combat, the chase scenes, and the techie gadgets.

Yes, there may be spoilers in the rest of this, read with caution.

This may only be due to Heath Ledger. And I would say that even if I weren't dangerously close to being in the category of people who are only seeing The Dark Knight in his honor. Ledger's take on the Joker is brilliant. To paraphrase the WaPo's film critic -- you can see the broken boy peeking out from behind the makeup. The Joker is twitchy, goading, sadomasochistic, terrifying and often appears saner than the population around him: at one point, he comments that people are calm as long as everything goes according to the plan -- no matter how terrible that plan is. He's a man who has stared straight into the void and realized that you can ask why all you want but an answer won't be forthcoming. The Joker exposes the madness of the paradigm by taking it to it's logical extreme.

I was underwhelmed by the film's other two leading men. (The effect was probably intensified by my lack of finding either Christian Bale or Aaron Eckhart attractive in the least. Conversely, my sister grins a little when talking about Christian Bale who's "just so cute.") Bale doesn't need a wide range to play his character. He has to be brooding and gruff with a side of plastic playboy. Aaron Eckhart was not bad, but he didn't manage to capture much of an edge to add to his character.

Sadly, Maggie Gyllenhaal was visibly constrained in her role. Rachel had more guts in her left little finger than Harvey had in his whole body, and yet she's stuck playing second fiddle to him and Batman both. Sad times. She's definitely an improvement over the withering "Betty" from The Incredible Hulk, but it's rather maddening to her Harvey Dent mourned as "the best of us" and Rachel essentially forgotten.

Which brings me around to my next feminist beef with the film. It's my understanding that Commissioner Gordon's daugther, Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, aka Oracle, has far more of a role in the Batman universe. So why is Commissioner Gordon's son the child who is somewhat developed in the film? (Daughter appears, but only to be shielded from seeing bad things by mom.) Ergh. Come on, people! It's okay for girls to want to grow up to kick some supervillain ass!

But, honestly, I wasn't expecting a feminist subtext, and the film was a definite improvement on strongly anti-feminist subtext of The Incredible Hulk and the somewhat less anti-feminist subtext of Prince Caspian.

Ever wonder what religious studies majors pass around in their free time?

Eye rolls of the Day

First and foremost -- Christians feel "offended" by English translations of the Koran being left on their doors. Read more at Barthlomew's Notes on Religion. (Via. The Wild Hunt and The Jaded Hippy.)

Now how many Gideon Bibles and Chick tracts have I scored lately? Hmm...

Second, via Ramblings a gay man is suing Zondervan and Thomas Nelson claiming that the references to homosexuality in the KJV and NKJV and probably NIV have violated his constitutional rights by causing him emotional suffering.

The intent of the publisher was to design a religious, sacred document to reflect an individual opinion or a group's conclusion to cause "me or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence ... including murder," Fowler wrote.

You know, I'm sure that the translations in question have caused him pain and contribute to the anti-gay bigotry of evangelical Christian culture. I'm inclined to think that the verses implied are, in fact, mistranslated. (Of course, I also think that to a great extent they are untranslatable.) And as for Zondervan's study materials, I don't think too highly of them. But, seriously, is this the best way to go about educating people as to the problems with those translations and study materials? And to paraphrase answers to one family of anti-porn arguments, the Bible doesn't kill people, violent bigots kill people.

In defense of the rest of us on the super-progressive side of world, this is not how we generally operate. I shall now return to reading subversively. ;)

Michelle Obama

Frankly, folks, I kinda wish she were running for president. It's high time some leader in the country stopped pandering nationalistic bullshit and did something to fix the problems that can be fixed and improve what demands to be improved. It's all relative, darlings. I doubt the British papers painted Jefferson, Madison, Washington, et al. as "patriots."

It's also high time that the supposedly fair and balanced Fox news network quite using fearmongering and smear campaigns to up their ratings.

Let's Talk About Sex

The following theoretical was written as a response to a question about how to determine correct sexual ethics on a rather nicely varied discussion board of the Christian persuasion. I'm debating whether or not to post it, and probably sign it -- the celibate libertine.

I’m very wary of declarations of the “Biblical” code of sexuality. I think to a very large extent concepts don’t translate well between 1st and 2nd centuries C.E. and today.

The Biblical view of sexuality is complicated, to say the very least. For instance, if I said that rape (in the modern sex-without-consent understanding) is immoral, I would hope that I wouldn’t get much argument. But if you consider the way marriage has worked for the vast majority of human history, an awful lot of sex-without-consent has taken place while being dubbed marriage. (Ladies, close your eyes and think of England!) The idea of consent is constructed in a very different way – for instance, modern ethics would insist (and rightly so) on the consent of both parties involved; whereas, historically, the consent of the fathers involved was considered to be more important to forming a legitimate marriage or sexual union. Examples off the top of my head: Lot offering his daughters to be raped and the rule in Deuteronomy 22: 28-29, where if a man “rapes” a unbetrothed girl he’s to pay off the father and marry her. (I recognize that the law at least ensures financial security for the woman involved, or perhaps just relives her father of needing to provide for her – but I think it still illustrates the vastly different understanding of “moral” behavior in different times.)

The Bible is also an extremely androcentric book, which is another point to consider. There was a thread on another board about whether or not masturbation was moral. Well, the directly applicable Bible verses relate only to male masturbation. If we limit the scope to the Old Testament, this also applies to homosexuality. Male homosexuality is condemned, but there’s no mention of female homosexuality. Much of the Bible also assumes a male audience – one illustrative quip I’ve heard is that if a group of lesbian women were instructed that they were not to lie with a man as with a woman, the response would be something along the lines of “well, of course!”

My point is not that the Bible, Church tradition, community standards, what have you, should be ignored -- a egotistic standard of sexuality that is not in conversation with these and other sources is certainly not going to be moral. My point, which I think, a number of us here would agree on to varying degrees, is that reasonable people could disagree of the exact parameters of "moral" sexuality in good faith.

Working from Jesus’s command to love your neighbor as yourself, and the recognition of the basic personhood of women, I think the most fundamental rule for any Christian of any gender would be that exploitative sex and nonconsensual sex are absolutely wrong. The description of marriage in Ephesians 5 is one of the relatively few positive descriptions of human sexuality in the Bible. Frequently, the headship of the husband is emphasized as the defining feature, but it really is more proper to emphasize the idea that the husband is to love his wife as his own flesh. The trust, love, and loss of egotism in the relationship between the two partners is the defining element.* In fact, my feminist addition, is that the androcentric nature of the text should lead one to emphasize the action of the husband as the defining factor. (Now if we harmonize this with Galatians 3:16, treat husband and wife as arbitary constructs of human society, things get interesting.)

Depending on one’s understanding of the Bible, Church tradition, which Church tradition, I also believe that there can be a number of good faith understandings of how that principle should be put into practice. Additionally, while I firmly disagree, I don’t take issue with the belief, based on a literal reading of the Bible or logical paths, that homosexual activity is a sin provided that the person holding said belief treats all people with basic human respect. And now, I'll piss people off and say that treating all people with basic human respect means NOT forcing your opinions on what constitutes sin onto someone else's life via the secular government.

‘Tis complicated. To not even bring up the issue of exactly how the categories of immoral, unethical, and sinful should be broken up. Cheerios!

*There's varied several texts I'm drawing this idea from: First, a podcast from Ancient Faith Radio, you can find at: http://audio.ancientfaith.com/paradosis/par_2008-06-18_pc.mp3
For an extremely different and yet similar understanding see Vladimir Soloviev's essay, "The Meaning of Love" (which was actually written to defend a long-running affair). It's published in the collection The Heart of Reality, trans. Vladimir Wozniuk.