Avat-aren’t: the moment of the failed imagination in what could have been a revolutionary film

So by now you’ve read my title, and know that this is going to criticize the recent film Avatar. What you should also know is that it might also spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t seen it and still wants to be bedazzled by it’s juicy bursting eye-smacking wonders. So don’t say I didn’t [...]

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watching whales watching us

Yesterday evening and this morning I read this wonderful article in the NY Times magazine, “Watching Whales Watching Us“, about the return of almost-extinct gray whales to lagoons of Baja. They are called “Friendlies” by the locals and the biologists who study them, because they appear to be trying to gently communicate with the same [...]

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horse people help horse people

In times like these, what folks need is a heartening tale. I myself have been looking for creativity in odd places, when I find that I’m at the end of my rope and don’t know what else to do to find a job or to rally my spirits. On BBC radio this week, I heard [...]

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authenticity over artifice

Wallace Stegner is one of the most natural voices of western literature (in my opinion). He influenced the United States to set aside vast tracks of land for preservation and protection. You can read his famous Wilderness Letter here. A few excerpts (for those who won’t read the whole thing–lazy!): “Something will have gone out [...]

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the chicken or the palace?

On origins of things; how important are the ideas that came before us? How important is tradition? How much are we shaped by those ideas?

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arne naess

Norwegian mountaineer, philosopher, founder of “deep ecology”, dies at 96. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/europe/15naess.html?_r=1

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was that a smile, berlin?

The verdict is in: Berlin looks better in the sun. We went away to summer in Australia—an incredible experience of nature, Sydney, time together with J’s family, backpacking on the coast, swimming each morning in the ocean, cooking over a camp stove, being swept away by huge gentle waves, blue-bottle jellyfish, kangaroos in the campsite, [...]

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strange animal encounters

In planning our backpacking trip along the east coast of Australia, I kept reading in some places that you could expect to wake up to a troop of kangaroos surrounding your tent. I told my sister about that, and she related a story about her one-time camping trip to New Orleans, when she woke up [...]

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i wander as i wonder

In case you’re wondering, I’m still meandering around, having some interesting conversations, sometimes laying around in saunas, still wrapping my brain’s little wrinkles around the problem of the subjunctive mood in German, and in general living as though in one of those dreams that drifts merrily merrily merrily merrily downstream. One of my favorite parts [...]

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