What to think about this campaign? Not sure.
Check out my post about this issue over at Under The Microscope, a blog by Science Creative.
Listen To A Brave New World Narrated By Aldous Huxley
This is great. Aldous Huxley narrates his book A Brave New World as actors perform sections from the book to the music of Bernard Herrmann, the great composer who worked extensively with Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Scorsese and other great diretors.
This is a digital conversion of the original LP so there is a lot of noise, hisses, pops and scratches, but this is brilliant to listen to nonetheless.
Find the MP3s here.
Food, Inc.
I can not wait to see this movie. It’s frightening how much faith we put in the industrial food system. If we are in fact what we eat, then my question is: What are we allowing ourselves as a society to become?
How to Eat Responsibly
Wendell Berry, one of the great voices of American sustainability, agriculture, food and culture has this advice on how to eat responsibly. The following can be found in his essay, “The Pleasures of Eating” where he also writes famously that “eating is an agricultural act.”
Indeed it is. So, then how do we eat responsibly?
- Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer, Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will he fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
- Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
- Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence,
- Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers. and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
- Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?
- Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
- Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
I find Berry’s writings and ideas to be for the most part beautiful. His thoughts on food and the merits of local, sustainable agriculture rings true with me. And while to follow these suggestions is a challenge in our convenience obsessed society, making the effort is well worth the price of participation.
The Self is Everywhere
I love this passage from the Isha Upanishad on the infinite nature of the Self, of mind and consciousness.
The Self is everywhere. Bright is the self,
Indivisible, untouched by sin, wise,
Immanent and transcendent. He it is
Who holds the cosmos together. [Isha, 8]
This is about our non-locality, our pervasiveness throughout the All and our role in the creation of the All. Or, as it has also been written: Tat Tvam Asi.
What is Real?
I find that I question reality more and more lately. This isn’t some psychic break, but a sincere questioning that comes from looking within. We trust so much our perceptions, the senses, and all the filters that process what we then determine to be real. But how is it shaped? How does language help sculpt our conclusions? And what about culture?
Anyway, along similar lines, I came across this quote from a speech by the great Philip K. Dick:
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
We all do in our own way.
Turning Alan Moore Films Into Movies
Here’s to hoping that Watchmen is more in the spirit of V for Vendetta than League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Of course, Moore’s not a fan of either film or any film based on his writings. I can see the aversion. Then again, my favorite Alan Moore comic book by far is Promethea his metaphysical tale about transformation, enlightenment and ascending the Qabalistic Tree of Life in search of our true Self. Heavy reading yes, but oh so entertaining and what a story.
The World As We Are
There’s a thought in the introductory essay of Eknath Easwaran’s translation of The Dhammapada, which is his commentary on the book, that we see the world not as it is, but rather as we are.
We impose a range of biases and past experiences on our present and future actions. Even with regard to our interactions with people, we don’t see others as they see themselves, but as we see them. Therefore, we experience each other and the world in very selfish ways and how the world is perceived will be different based on the mind and ego of the experiencer.
He retells a story that is relevant for today when he writes of two men who go to foreign lands to experience and report back what they find. One found the people basically good at heart and generous. The other, a bit jealous, found that the people he experienced were selfish, scheming and cruel. In turned out that both we describing the same land.
As Easwaran writes, ‘”We see as we are,’ and our foreign policy follows what we see.” When I apply this idea to my country, the whole concept becomes very troubling.
The ultimate idea here is that if we change ourselves, we change the world around us, even if in subtle ways. Because all change, like revolution, starts within. And true revolution, like true change, is about the heart of the individual.
Or, as Robert Anton Wilson always said, “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.”
There Has To Be More To It Than This, Right?
So, is this culture?
There must be more to it, right? Or is consumption all we have left? It sure seems that way to me. Of course, I’m on the inside looking at this problem because I help build brands. Yet I don’t think it’s the marketing that’s the problem. It’s the unchecked consumption. I just read a book that shared some shocking insights regarding consumer tendencies.
For example, did you know that the Self-Storage business has become a $17 billion annual industry? That’s larger that the motion picture business. Which means that in a nation of couch potatoes, the only thing we like more than movies is hoarding stuff like little symbol using squirrels.
Or, here’s something else: We spend more on trash bags than ninety other countries spend on everything. (Via A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. Pink was citing a March, 2003 Polly LaBarre article from Fast Company magazine.)
So we buy and buy and store and store and when we can’t store stuff, we throw stuff away, lots of it, which creates more room to buy even more stuff.
What is that all about?