Inspired Readings

Happy New Years to all. The below links should provide some inspiration for those wanting to improve themselves this year.

Peter Whitehead was one of the first to explore the music video promo in the 60's. His promo videos are usually shown only in film festivals and thus are hard to come by, which is too bad since they are great examples of a now ubiquitous format in its infancy. His story, though, goes far beyond film. His bio, as told in the above link, could kick start anyone to drop the remote (or close the internet browser) and follow their myth in one form or another.

Philip Hoffman An actor that has deftly balanced pursuing his craft in its more pure (and less financially rewarding) form with commercial blockbuster roles without acquiring the almost inevitable over-inflated ego.

Eartha Kitt Can anyone else top her combined longevity, toughness, and sass?

Ron Rivera: “How is it that scientists can work so hard on improving TVs and cellphones when so many people don’t even have clean water to drink?” As a patent agent, I am all too familiar with this sad reality. At this point, I only have sheepishness to offer in response to Mr. Rivera's inquiry.

Beer in Bavaria: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly...The Good?

The Good

In Bavaria, beer is classified as food and not an alcoholic drink. Therefore, wherever food is allowed, beer is too. Drink anywhere you like at any time. No worries Mate! Beer comes in bottles no smaller than 17 ounces. On the bottles themselves, you can usually see a light ring of paper and glue from a previous label, indicating bottles are recycled quite regularly. Hooray for the Germans for being both bigger drunks and better environmentalists than the Americans.

Beer gardens during the summer can be idyllic and a perfect setting for making new friends. (The Dutch model works quite well too: make bars so small that you can’t help but talk to strangers.) In my experience in Europe, sitting with and talking to strangers is perfectly acceptable. Social barriers here are a mere gate latch, compared to the concrete and barbed walls sometimes encountered in the US. I acknowledge, though, some special treatment being a foreigner.

The Bad

In Munich at least, importing beers seems to be a (smirk) foreign concept. I have had many a blank stare when indicated my occasional want for a Belgium spiced ale or an American IPA. The attitude seems to be: We have the best beer, why would anyone want to drink anything else? But it cuts deeper than that. Even some of my regional favorites like Ayinger (brewed a mere 40 km from Munich) can be difficult to find and most of the great monastery brews are simply not found outside their small towns. A great pity.

Worse yet, most restaurants and bars are sponsored by a particular brewery (think Pepsi/Coke) and thus only serve beer from that particular brewery.

Copenhagen, a smaller and some ways more provincial city compared to Munich, had wonderful specialty beer shops, bars, and blooming micro brew scene. All absent in Munich. Which leads me to…

The Ugly

Bavaria has a narrow range of available styles on offer despite its hundreds of breweries (around 600). They are: Pilz, Helles (a light, delicate lager), Dunkles (darker in color and sweeter than Helles), Hefeweizen, and Dunkelweizen. That’s it, or at least 95 percent of what is reasonably available all year round. There is one brew pub (a micro brewery with a restaurant) in all of Munich. It brews a Hefeweizen and a Dunkelweizen.

Although “in Belgium, 70% of the market may be boring pils, a large part of the remaining 30% consists of natural, bottle-conditioned beers. Serious beers have a significant share.” Beeref. And those beers are exported to most of the Western world. Germany has many interesting beers, but as I mentioned earlier, they are quite difficult to find.

Is there any rational explanation as to why Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Madrid, Spain; or Milan, Italy has a great micro-brew scene and access to Belgian beers and Bavaria does not?

German consumers are a partial explanation:

A survey in 2006 of 500 drinkers from all over Germany by the Linzer Market-Institut (Brauwelt 2007, Issue 3, page 44) found that 50% had only bought one brand of beer in the last 3 months. Amongst the remaining 50%, the majority had not bought more than three. While 60% of drinkers limited themselves to drinking only Pils, 21% had never even tried it. For other mainstream styles the results were even worse: 36% had never drunk Hefeweizen, 44% no Schwarzbier and 65% no Kölsch. More exotic styles such as Rauchbier or even Bock were virtually unknown. Beeref.

The German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) also didn’t help cultivating an open and experimental brewing culture. Originally enacted in Bavaria to prevent grains better suited for bread to be used for brewing, it all but decimated the diverse beers of northern Germany (similar to the spiced and fruit beers found in Belgium) when the Reinheitsgebot was extended to cover the whole of Germany as a part of German unification. Beeref. The law does not allow a brewere to name a beverage beer unless is only contains water, hops, barley, and yeast. To date, it is my understanding that the law sill allows other types of beer to be brewed (but it did not in the past), but prevents it to be labled beer. More research is needed.

The Good?

Maybe there is a more inspirational explanation. Is it that the Germans don’t care or they care about other things? A good beer garden experience needs only a few decent to good beers. Old stand-bys. The same goes for the most famous beer festival in the world. With my most rosy of rose-tinted glasses on, I suspect another factor is that German beer culture centers around more the company of others and solidarity than a consumeristic bent demanding 99 flavors from around the globe. But, hey, would it hurt to open up a little?

P.S.: The above critique is in a style named, "love sandwich," which supposedly is an effective way to write a critique for co-workers, etc... without hurting anyone's feelings. Good, Bad, Good = Love Sandwich.

Gay-volution

Chris Rock has said in a few skits, "Everyone in this room has at least one gay cousin. You're all thinking about them now aren't you?"

If you do have a gay bro or sis, it turns out that you you are likely to score more with the opposite sex than those without. Or as The Economist, succinctly stated, "Genes that make some people gay make their brothers and sisters fecund". And perhaps my fave excerpt from the article:

Personality tests also show differences [between heteros and homos], with gay men ranking higher than straight men in standardised tests for agreeableness, expressiveness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. Lesbians tend to be more assertive and less neurotic than straight women.

It does not seem debated that in order for the genetics that tend to "make" people gay to survive "the ruthless imperatives of natural selection", the genes (and/or the gay family member) must provide a great advantage to compensate their heterosexual kin. (Links between gayness and genetics are well established: "Studies of identical twins, for example, show that if one of a pair (regardless of sex) is homosexual, the other has a 50% chance of being so too.")

In trying to answer how such a counter intuitive trait (from a Darwinian perspective) could survive, a Brisbane team of scientists believe that the "genes which cause men to be more feminine in appearance, outlook and behaviour and those that make women more masculine in those attributes, confer reproductive advantages as long as they do not push the individual possessing them all the way to homosexuality." The study found the "that heterosexuals with a homosexual twin tend to have more sexual partners than heterosexuals with a heterosexual twin."

I think this leaves fundis in a tight spot. How can such an "unnatural" characteristic convey an advantage for its followers "to be fruitful and multiply [and] populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it." (Gen. 9:7 New American Standard Bible)

Artist of the week: Cee-Lo

My First Munich Concert

A little weird, but most of weirdness was probably due to the setting: three large recording studio halls in the office building a major German broadcasting company. Along with indie hip-hop, pop, and sad-bastard music (not my term), coat checking, ear-plug dispensers, and wurst were apart of the offerings.

Beer? Surely beer was to be kept on the outside and not in the studio halls with parquet flooring and delicate acoustical wall installations. I would be wrong. In a combination of perhaps strong social responsibility and a stronger Bavarian beer culture, Helles and Pilz were indeed plentiful inside the studio halls. I even caught an ephemeral whiff or two of hops' botanical cousin.

But the "laid-back" lifestyle that Bavarians' proudly claim came with a few twists. Dress code is what I would label Business Concert: smart, conservative, and polished all too well. The clean shaven outnumbered the growthers. Dancing was limited to the first 2-5 rows of people. Average age, to be conservative 30, but probably closer to 35. Even at the midnight shows, there were a few silver heads in the audience. Party on!

By far the highlight of the festival was Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip. With a bottle of goon in his left hand (which he shared a couple times with a tall blond in the audience by pouring some in her outstretched wine glass) and a mic in another, Scroobious Pip performed for an audience willing to get down.

From what I can tell, Dan le Sac is the beat maker/vocalist and Scroobius Pip is the MC. Pip is something of a MC Moses with a long, antediluvian-style beard and even has his own "Thall Shall Nots", directing that "Thou shall Always Kill" (He is advocating killing in a metaphorical sense, not literal.).

After one particularly somber song concluded a few concert-goers let out a few "Whoos." Pip responded, "You must be fans of teenage suicide," which was a theme in the song.

Their album can be downloaded on iTunes. Here are a couple of his videos: The Beat that my Heart Skipped and Letter from God (for the Radiohead fans).

Neoconservatives: the power of myth

In a few weeks, the Neoconservative administration will end, leaving behind a chaotic domestic and foreign state of affairs. In particular, its economic and foreign policy has wrecked havoc on millions of lives. I won't discuss the economic side (which the NeoCon philosophy and solution to all problems are free markets, free markets, and more free markets), but a good introduction to NeoCon going-ons and how it lead to the current financial meltdown can be found here.

In foreign affairs, what has been the single most dangerous characteristic of NeoCon thought is the ends justify almost any means. That is, they are so sure that their agenda and goals are on the side of righteousness, that the most any means are justified. Sounds a bit of the ole Al Qaeda.

Specifically, both have wielded a powerful, but dangerous combination of fear and religion to gain influence through narratives which exaggerate or contradict the truth in order to progress their respective agendas. The importance of these ancient and fundamental components of human psychology (fear and religion), is explained in A History of Civilizations:

Dictating a society's attitudes, guiding its choice, confirming it prejudices and directing its actions, this very much a fact of civilization. Far more than the accidents or the historical and social circumstance of a period, it derives from the distant past, from ancient beliefs, fears and anxieties which are almost unconscious—an immense contamination whose germs are lost to memory but transmitted from generation to generation. A society’s reaction to the events of the day, to the pressures upon it, to the decisions it must face, are less a matter of logic or even self-interests than the response to an unexpressed and often inexpressible compulsion arising from the collective unconscious.

I submit the NeoCons and Al Qaeda have been two of the most effective groups directing the collective unconscious of their respective societies. In the age of instantaneous, omnipresent media, moreover, reactions to the events of the day can be shaped and formed, even superseding the immense contamination of germs lost to memory if desired.

In 3 one-hour segments, Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear explores the history of both the NeoCons and Al Qaeda. His insight show how both groups parallel each other in fundamental ways.

In watching The Power of Nightmares, I was astonished at my ignorance of the history of radical Islam. Why is this history ignored in the constant babble of news media? To progress on "the war on terror" sans brute force it is a history we must be familiar with. Without it, it will be impossible to make policy decisions based on sound facts, rather than provocative narratives.

The Power of Nightmares can be seen on Google Video.

Second First Post

I started this blog last year and let it wallow into oblivion. Its back. I promise to post at least once a week, partially in proxy of communicating with friends and family back in the US, which I am terrible at. The second-first post is political, but most of the topics will be lighter in nature including music, health, science, anyone who would like to guest blog. So without further ado...

objects

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