The brilliant creativity of minimalism. I’d love to meet this art director.

The Far Right world you’ll discover [...] is one of counterintuitive contradictions, where virginity is upheld as a standard by people also secretly ogling porn and brooding over the “fact” that the Federal Reserve is harboring the anti-Christ and/or, at the very least, is in the Grip of Socialists out to take our country away from Us Real Americans. These are the same folks against all legal abortions and also against distributing contraceptives. These are the people who defend legalized torture but think health care for all is demonic and communist. And they do it all in the Name of Jesus. Go figure. Overt racism will play a part but its the sex scandals that will (no pun) keep coming. Sexual frustration and dysfunction seems to me to be the heart of the culture wars. Conservative Christians are reeling from damaging family experiences — ranging from being beaten (in the interest of “godly discipline”) to being indoctrinated about science, sexuality and politics. And they’re in for disillusionment: finding out that their leaders (in the various personality cults they join that pass for “churches”) aren’t just fallen sinners in some general theological sense, but are actually cynical manipulators and willful liars, not to mention total hypocrites.

– Frank Schaeffer, Huffington Post.

This basically summarizes my experience and frustrations with Western Christian culture, if not Christianity in general.

I understand that a lot of Americans feel really uncomfortable talking about race, but that’s no excuse for the week we spent debating whether the NAACP is racist against white people, or the fact that the Obama administration punished a dedicated federal employee for the “crime” of speaking honestly about race. Instead of tackling these issues with maturity and candor, we spend our time rebuffing accusations of racism — because there are no racists in America — and shouting nonsense complaints about “reverse racism,” while provocateurs like Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck distort our understanding of racism and prejudice.

It’s been almost two years since America collectively patted itself on the back for electing a black president. And since then, we’ve proved conclusively that we are a nation of cowards when it comes to race. I’m just wondering when we’re going to finally grow up?

– Jamelle Bouie writing in The American Prospect.

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I think the NAACP ought to consider the possibility that the residuum of racism that exist today are more thoughts of omission than acts of commission. Racism is a very different beast today than it was on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, or on the eve of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, it is so difficult to detect and even harder to eradicate precisely because it is no longer hidden behind a white conical hood.

Because our standard for what counts as “post-racialism” has gone up with each civil rights milestone, the NAACP should realize that as the old in-your-face racism is gone, so too should the old confrontational techniques of accusation and litigation. Unconscious racism can only be taught and remedied by explanation, not declamation.

– Elvin Lim, Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University, writing in a blog post regarding the recent spat between the National Tea Party movement and the NAACP.

A little backstory: last week, the NAACP passed a resolution condemning racist elements within the Tea Party. I’ve been somewhat loosely following how this story has unfolded over the last couple weeks and this seems to be the only summarization that clearly explains the dismissive logic being used by members of  the Tea Party to deride the NAACP as being inappropriate and out of touch. Frankly, I’m a little shocked that anyone could dismiss the NAACP when it’s suggested by them that they may be harboring inappropriate racial attitudes, but this is why Lim’s argument seems all the more compelling as reality.

Tea Partiers, it seems, are completely unwilling to admit elements of racism because they don’t believe their attitudes or actions to be racist. The NAACP’s charges of racism are then met with frustration and anger from individuals who resent the notion that they are being racially insensitive. Both groups are operating under an older, historically categorized idea of what racism is and what it looks like, when in fact our attitudes with regards to race have come to look much different. It’s a willful ignorance by an insular group with a martyrdom complex, but it also reflects the NAACP’s unwillingness to change the terms of the discussion. Believing that we live in a post-racial society isn’t a justification for racially insensitive actions and statements dismissive of an entire community of American citizens, but it is an explanation for the behavior. I don’t see a solution to such endemic division between class and race without first a willingness to experience other cultures and communities. But that’s never been very comfortable, has it?

Shyness will not, of course, say anything on its own behalf. Bashful is a vigorous word, suggestive of fierce blushes, batting eyes, a whole drama of internal repression. Embarrassed has a kind of wobbly Elizabethan grandeur. Coy is even a tiny bit saucy. But shy…. A dwindling susurration, a kind of verbal shrinking away. At the very moment of utterance it begins to efface itself.

And let’s not confuse shyness with modesty or humility. Charles Darwin, who was very interested in shyness, correctly diagnosed it as a form of “self-attention” — a preoccupation with self. How do I fit in here? What do they think of me? It’s not always virtuous to sit on one’s personality and refuse.

– James Parker, writing in his fascinating treatise on shyness for the WaPo.

I tend to be very shy until I’m introduced to an individual, at which point I become quite interested in talking. I call it selective introversion.

This was my favorite pretend-game growing up, but we had to be discreet. The Evangelicals didn’t look too kindly on games involving Ghosts — unless you count the flopping around that happened at revivals.

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Artist Nils Guadagnin has achieved one of my dreams by creating a prototype of the Hoverboard from Back to the Future II. You can’t ride it, but the technology he’s using does allow it to float in the installation.

(Public School)

From Rolf Sachs.

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(Hark! A Vagrant)