U2 was Wonderful

The tour has a massive set with an elevated walkway encompassing a large section of the crowd that the band can tour around on.  We were inside the circle and on the outer rail, just where you see the plume of smoke on the left.  It was great to not feel crushed in.  Never shook hands with Bono but it was a great show.

Wow

Ran across this shot online today.  Beautiful and amazing.  We really are wondrous creatures.

ABD

That’s all.

Magnificent

As a U2.com subscriber I get email updates about the band.  They recently released this music video shot in Morocco.  I love the music and the visuals are pretty amazing with the white sheets moving over the North African background of the city.  Pretty cool.

Taken by Cloud Gate

Last weekend, after my academic conference in Chicago was over, I had the choice of hoping a train to the airport so that I could sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers in a crowded a gate area in O’Hare for two hours or wandering around Millennium Park beneath the towers of the city skyline in the cold and the damp with my luggage.  I chose to wander.

I went looking for a snake like bridge which I had seen a picture of.   At the foot of some rather tall buildings on a nondescript concrete pad was a really big and shiny coffee bean which I vaguely remembered from somewhere.

I wandered off towards the lake, found the bridge and walked back by the bean to get to the train.  As I did I paused to watch people interact with it.  Everyone, every child and adult, walked up to it, touched it and wandered around and under it.  It drew you closer like a magnet with its ever changing perspective until you put your hand out to meet your own reflection.

It is an amazingly large concave mirror from every direction.  I loved the way it literally changed the way you saw the city bringing curves to the strait lines of the towers.  (Below you can see the light blue tower in the center still under construction at the top.)

My favorite aspect of Cloud Gate was how it pulled in more of the skyline than you can take in with your own eyes: a giant snow globe with me and my suitcase as dots in the very center.  It gave you a chance to see yourself in the context of the city and I think that is quite the gift.

It was an amazing piece of public art. A wonderful, immense, and playful surprise in the center of the city.  I loved it.

No No Line

I’m loving listening to No Line on the Horizon, the newest U2 album.  It’s earned high praise from a drinking buddy of mine and I’m enjoying it more and more as I find snippets of time to spend with it.

Particularly I’m loving Moment of Surrender which is the best marriage song I’ve ever heard.  I’m forever wondering why musicians don’t write more about marriage and less about new found love.  Maybe because the many years of marriage are a deeper magic that’s hard to capture . . . maybe you have to be old and married to love that magic.

I’m longing to spend some time with the rest of the album.  And I am so so so excited about going to the Charlottesville show.  And who knows, maybe DC as well.

Thanks to Wordle for a bright and fun way to get to know the album.

The Supper of the Lamb

On this gray winter’s afternoon I finished a wonderfully irreverent culinary reflection titled The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farras Capon.  I learned some interesting things about cooking: how to make a broth, why pastry is so amazingly good, but more I loved his wit, his playfulness, and his delight in cooking, fasting, and eating.

Capon’s love for the particulars of cooking is something I’ve been slowly learning and mulling since my time at L’Abri seven years ago when I first began to appreciate eating.  Since then, around Bill &Val’s and Steve & Jeannie’s tables, I’ve come to see dining as something wonderful and extravagant, full of spices and varieties beyond what nutrition requires.   To my mind the ability to experience wonderful and extravagant food from time to time says something amazing about a God who created all those varieties of grapes, animals, and vegetables simply for the unnecessary pleasure of man.

There are lots of divine things about eating (like the love my mother put into every meal she cooked me or the beauty of hospitality to lonely) and to that list I’ll add that there is something deeply divine about the delight of eating and fasting.  So the The Supper of the Lamb is one part how-to cookbook filled with dismissals (electric knives and margarine), loves (wine, cheddar cheese, and butter), and prayers and one part glorification of the magnificent particulars of cooking, of creating and Creation. (For a longer (and excellent) essay on this aspect see Andy Crouch’s review.)

Capon (a priest) loves his table and sees how it reflects his God.  He’s wrathfully dismissive of all those who seek to assault the table: nutritionists, dieters, and children.   Capon speculates that the devil might have evaluated his strategy to corrupt humans and said “In concentrating on offenses against God and neighbor, it (our strategy) had failed to corrupt his relationship to things.  Things by their provision of unique delight and individual admonishments, constituted a continuous  refreshment of the very capacities Hell was at pains to abolish . . . the door of delight must remain firmly closed.”  Capon, I think, is intent on ripping the door open and offering us again the delights of the table.

I’ll finish this post with one of the many sections that made me laugh.  As a teenager I was declared the world’s slowest hiker, not for my fitness, but for my inability to pass by even the smallest of interesting things without stopping.  In Capon I found a kindred spirit.

“Having finished thus the main part of the first half of the initial section of my . . . recipe,* I suggest that we now relax in earnest . . . If you are still with me at this point, it can only be because you are a serious drinker of being: a man who will walk back ten paces to smell privet in bloom; a woman who loves to rap sound turnips with her knuckles.  Let us congratulate one another: The party has taken a distinct turn for the better.  The busybodies with late meetings to attend have long since departed.  The fidgeters who yawned their way through the evening have flaunted their early rising and vanished mercifully into outer darkness.  Rejoice, dear heart; the ribbon clerks are finally out of the game.  At last we may speak freely of the things that matter.  Put away the cooking Sherry, Margaret; only the real ones are left.  The good stuff is in the right hand end of the sideboard.

Our progress to noodles must not be hasty.”

*This “initial section” being page 109 of The Supper of the Lamb!

Other People’s Pictures

This week my sister Katie sent me links to the Boston Globe’s “The Year 2008 in Photographs”  parts one, two, and three.

She wrote “I am totally stunned. The photos cover the year’s stories, but they are so much more than that. They are mostly international, and the breadth of human experience explored is just astonishing.  I can barely believe sometimes all the things that are happening right now in the world…”

I couldn’t agree more.  The photographs are particular and stunning, stunning for their beauty and stunning as the show a powerful glimpse of the bigger trends that they capture.

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PS. The most difficult pictures are hidden with links that will reveal them.  I recommend reading the captions before you decide whether or not to click on those photos.

DPP Day 12: A December’s Moon

Heavenly bodies are pretty amazing.

The Zoo

My job has some nice and unusual benefits; tops among them are the backstage tours.  They make me feel a bit like a kindergartner again as my strongest memories from my one homeschooled year are the field trips to interesting places.

Yesterday I went to the Zoo for a meeting.  Afterwords we saw some projects that have been worked on over the last year.  The best part?  I got to pet a rhino! It was large, slightly wary of me, and very leathery.  So very cool.  Unfortunately nobody got a picture of me but you can see another person from our group petting him.

I also got to scratch the elephant through the wire.  My last visit my big regret was not asking if I could pet her.  I asked if I could pet both the animals this time.  They were pretty amazing: immense, intelligent and wondrous.  It was thrilling to be that close to them.

Meditating on San Francisco

Over the weekend I made my first trip to San Francisco and to California. I went to present my master’s thesis, and to my delight it received favorable reviews from the people who were interested enough to read it.

My trip was a whirlwind. I arrived in San Francisco Airport at 12:30 am local time Friday and departed at 12:30am local time on Saturday morning. In that time I had the great pleasure of playing tourist in one of the world’s great cities for a few hours alongside.

Since I only had five hours to play tourist I set off from my downtown hotel for San Fran’s most famous landmark. I sometimes wonder if you dropped five members of my family in any given city if they would all automatically go to the same spot, in this city the Golden Gate Bridge.

I took the bus through Chinatown and arrived at the Golden Gate for $1.50. The park around the bridge is beautiful, full of lush plants in a climate that feels like a cool rain forest. The light rain and drizzle swept across a confluence of multinational visitors speaking English, French, German, and Hindi, all drawn to this landmark.

I mostly thought of the bridge for its sweeping beauty and the beauty of the setting, nestled in the mountains. When I wrote family and shared some pictures I received this letter from my Grandmother which is a pretty moving perspective,

Imagine what it was to the sailors during WWII when their ship sailed out to the Pacific under the bridge. I just talked to Granddad about when he sailed to the Philippines during the war. He says that the military base was in Oakland and that they sailed from there under the Golden Gate. The war ended while he was in the Philippines and when he returned they sailed under the Golden Gate again. He said it was a wonderful sight.

Wow. I had never thought that the Bridge welcomed home so many soldiers returning from the Pacific after giving up years of their twenties or thirties even as the Statue of Liberty welcomed home those soldiers who could return from Europe following both of the Great Wars of the 20th century.

When I returned, exhausted from my red eye flight and whirlwind tour, Charity asked me if I’d like to go back to San Francisco. I said I’d love to see more of the city, to eat more sushi and to walk around the parks about the bridge. And now, I’d like to return to the bridge again and meditate on what it must have felt like for the millions of American men, American men my age, who departed under the bridge leaving behind their homes, families and jobs for years to fight in such a terrible conflict and to wonder at what they must have felt when they return to America under that same rust red span.

Any Guesses?

What famous landmark did I travel to yesterday for the first time that was just so stinking cool?

How Big is the American Economy?

I don’t know if it’s 100% accurate but it’s definitely makes you think. Hat tip to Thomas Oatley.

So you go to Europe, come back and blog about wild salmon?

I’ve been reading over this Europe trip and much of what I read was a series of essays by David James Duncan titled My Story as Told by Water. It was one of those books that got me agitated in a serious way especially about the issues addressed by this group: http://www.wildsalmon.org/

The gist of the issue is that there are 4 dams on the Snake River that are churning up wild salmon populations and driving them towards extinction. It’s not clear that building these dams were a good idea to begin with: yes they generate power, power boating recreation, and barge runs but the costs are enormous. Aside from flooding beautiful rivers to kayak and fish on, they are driving these salmon species towards extinction. (see the website for details) They also prevent a salmon fishing industry from existing and fish that could be thriving if the dams were removed.

The economic arguments for removal are sound but what really got me was Duncan’s quote from Genesis:

“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, Be fruitful, and multiply and fill the waters in the seas.”

So economic arguments to bring down the dams aside (and I think they are good ones) it seems to me that God thought creating these salmon was good. He thought that salmon had something good to say about who he is and what He’s about. Perhaps it’s the sacrificial act of the salmon’s runs, climbing all that way to one’s death to create life? Perhaps it’s God’s provision for us in the food and sport that comes swimming up out of the ocean to us? Perhaps that God loves beautiful and amazing sights and animals?

Whatever his reasons He saw fit to bring these fish into being. To countenance their extinction is to say to God that we think he’s wrong about having creating these species.

It seems to me that for whatever reason God made these fish I’m inclined to defer to his reasoning.

So I’m encouraging you to take a look and sign the petition online. I think it’s a good idea.

15 minutes that will change some stereotypes of how rich and poor nations are

This morning in my public investment theory class we watched this video clip which I highly recommend. It’s a bit long but very engaging.

If you’re like me and are constantly constructing and amending a mental map of the world, then this video is an interesting check on whether or not our map is really accurate.

I’m currently thinking about how to work this into my class in the fall . . .