by Joshua Wilbur

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”  —Annie Dillard

According to a July 2018 report from Nielsen, American adults now spend more than 11 hours a day on average consuming some form of media. The study considered time spent on television, radio, apps on smartphones, apps on tablets, internet on a computer, game consoles, and other devices.  The study excluded print formats, such as books, magazines, and newspapers.

Eleven hours per day is a lot of time. Even if we add print formats to the mix—with the  implicit judgement that “book hours” are superior to those dedicated to Netflix or Instagram—the fact remains that the majority of our waking lives is spent in engagement with the creations of other people. More than ever before, we are socially-hungry, story-obsessed, entertainment-seeking creatures.  

It’s easy enough to decry this state of affairs. Postmodernists on the Left have long cast a critical glance at consumer culture, commodity fetishism, and the struggle between greedy hoarders of capital and passive wage-earners, who, like the singing Prole woman in Orwell’s 1984, are free to amuse themselves to death. In the 1960s, Guy Debord characterized the modern West as a “Society of the Spectacle” in a book of the same name. According to Debord, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” We prefer action shows to real adventure, rom-coms to actual romance, hi-def images to genuine experiences.  Will Self, who just months ago wrote an essay called “The Printed Word in Peril” for Harper’s Magazine, described his impressions of Debord’s treatise in a 2013 article for the Guardian: “Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again […] by Debord’s astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we’re still in?”

And yet, for all the well-placed critique, I can’t help but feel that Debord’s picture of people as ideology-drugged spectators reflects our reality in the worst possible light and, in any case, bemoaning it doesn’t get one very far. Read more »

by Holly A. Case

There is a nice neighborhood in Istanbul called Kadıköy, which means “village of the kadı,” or “judge.” One might as well call it Kediköy, however: “village of the cat.” There are a lot of stray cats there, as there are throughout the city. Once I saw a poster with a photo of a cat that said “Lost” at the bottom, then a phone number (rather like seeing a sign on the beach with a picture of a shell reading “Lost,” then a phone number). The sign was taped to a utility box on the street. On top of the box was a stray cat, lounging. It looked a lot like the one in the photo.

A few years ago, I met a retired architect who came down to the promenade along the reinforced shoreline every morning to feed the stray cats. “If there is a heaven and hell, which I don’t believe there is, but if there is, I will go to heaven on their prayers,” he told me.

In a different part of the city, my friend Kerim—a tailor—begins his two-hour commute to work at 6 a.m. Six days a week he pets the stray dogs on one side of the highway, then crosses to the other side to catch the bus where he meets a second pack of strays and pets them. Recently he constructed a luxury home for a stray cat who had taken up residence at the bus stop. It’s a cardboard box wrapped in plastic (to keep it dry), with a styrofoam roof (for insulation), a bubble-wrap subfloor (also for insulation), cardboard flooring, and an interior wall-to-wall rag (for extra comfort). He proudly showed me a photo of it with the occupant just visible inside. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

Like millions of other people in the US, I often begin the day by listening to ‘Morning Edition,’ the early morning news program on National Public Radio. Sometimes, though, I get so disgusted by the rubbish spewed by the politicians being interviewed, or so infuriated by the flimsiness of the questions put to them, that I just can’t stand it and have to take myself out of earshot. Friday was a case in point.

The topic, of course, was the partial shutdown of the federal government. Congressman Gary Palmer, a Republican from Alabama, came on to be interviewed. Here was the first question

“Both sides have to give in any kind of compromise deal… Where should the Republicans and the president be willing to compromise?”

Right there was where I’d had enough. It is simply nonsense that in every negotiation both sides have to compromise, moving toward some sort of shared middle ground. This is not the received wisdom when it comes to dealing with hostage takers. And that is exactly the situation the House of Representatives is currently in. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

I met Arnie at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting the year before I got sober for the first time. I was high as fuck, eyes lit and hands fidgeting in my lap, then my jacket pockets, then my lap again. Maybe I thought being in a room full of non-high people would help even my scorecard with God. I had a lot of interesting thoughts back then, but I was usually smart enough to keep them to myself.

Arnie was wearing a neon orange trucker hat with the word “Grandma” scrawled above the brim in what looked like sharpie. His long, sixty-something body stretched out from beneath a threadbare track suit, and his sneakers were both untied. I remember being distracted by this, the laces calling my name, Tamuira, Tamuira! Come tie me! I would later learn, over our decade of friendship, that he was claustrophobic, and his feet needed so be able to “breathe better”.

And this was what I found most comforting about about Arnie; his weirdness, his eccentricities. He didn’t need drugs to take him into an altered state because he was already in one.

“Wanna get coffee?”

I rolled my eyes and lifted up my Styrofoam cup, thinking he was just another gross  old-timer in the program,  picking-up on a newbie.

“I have a sponsor already.”

“I’m not hitting on you, honey. I’m gay,” he said, grabbing a cookie off the table and breaking it in half. “Straight guys don’t do neon.”

“I’m not really sober right now,” I confided. Partly to get rid of him, partly to ease my guilty conscious.

“I can tell. Your jaw is like a goddamn meat grinder.” Read more »

by Samia Altaf

In October of 2014, a bunch of young men and women did their university proud. A couple of engineers, two finance graduates, a biology major, some finishing accounting and business degrees, and a clutch from the school of humanities and social sciences; Muslims mostly, two Christians, a lone Hindu, one Buddhist wannabe, and two oblivious to religion though aware of its place in other folks’ lives. They came together from Sahiwal, Karachi, Gilgit, Swat, Peshawar, Gujranwala, one from Quetta (non-Baluchi), and two from Delhi via the University of Texas. Though the majority of students and faculty stayed away, these young men and women with similar features and skin tones, in colorful flowing kurtas, chooridars, skinny jeans, funky T-shirts, and hijabs, got together to celebrate Diwali, a festival that celebrates Ram’s return from exile.

Diwali, along with Holi, if not officially banned, have been marginalized in Pakistan as “Hindu” festivals although in the multi-religious society of the colonial period they were celebrated with as much enthusiasm as Eid and Christmas. The largest Diwali celebration in Lahore was held at the famous Laxmi Chowk, home to the Laxmi building, a marvel of Indo-European architecture and once the throbbing heart of the local film industry. All citizens, men, women, children, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsis gathered to celebrate the return of Ram to Ayodhya at Chowk with the adjoining building lit bright with lamps.

Almost seventy years on, these young people united in defiance to mark this heritage of their plural past. Ignoring looks of puzzlement and disapproval, they lighted the little lamps—diyas—fired with mustard oil as in the past, each lighted lovingly, one at a time, coaxing the hand-rolled cotton wick to sputter and then hold its own—quite like the event—knowing in their hearts that nurturing the flame symbolized a larger, more tenuous, goal. So they celebrated Diwali, and, I suppose, their own lives for the evening was mellow and they are young and alive and still hopeful. (Wordsworth: what a joy it was to be alive). They shared Mithai, music, poetry, thoughts, laughter, tears, and hopes and dreams for this land and its people wondering about their own place in it. They worried about the shape of tomorrow’s world and asked what they could do to make it better. It was a celebration of hope and harmony arrayed against a background of doom and despair—would there really be a return from the long exile? Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

A group of young women performing exercises at the ballet barre and an angry mob chanting “lock her up.” These two situations, where the exact same action is performed by a group of people, may have more in common than it appears at first. Kinesthetic empathy, a recent topic of research for neurobiologists, dance theorists and a range of scholars and professionals in between, offers an interesting perspective on this issue, since it points to the emotional effect of physical activities carried out in group settings.

Empathy is a blanket term for a wide range of interpersonal phenomena: it is probably most commonly understood as an other-oriented feeling of concern or compassion. Empathy can also be defined as an ability to imagine what the other person is going through, or as an intuitive understanding of another person, including an understanding that is more physical than mental. Mirror neurons in the brain—for example, those firing both when we itch our foot and when we see someone else itching their foot—are probably involved in such a body-mediated and body-motivated awareness of the other.

It is remarkable that we can also feel empathy towards a fictional character, say in a book, a film, or in the theater. The latter situation is especially interesting because by understanding how audience members relate emotionally to what they see onstage we may gain access to how the audience as a gathering of disparate individuals becomes a group, a collective whose emotions and reactions can be manipulated and controlled. When the aesthetic medium is dance, the nexus of emotional reactions and physical experience is more obvious, even if not easier to parse; for it is through the body and without the mediation of words that we are “moved.” Read more »

by Joan Harvey

I no longer remember how or when I stumbled on Concertzender.nl, an internet radio station located in Utrecht, but it has been with me through changes in location, partners, through raising a son: it has been with me from before they had an English translation on the website and before people from overseas could make donations, before they had an app. According to the website, “Thirty-four years ago, a group of music lovers shared the strongly felt urgency to create a sanctuary where everything revolves around music, music and musicians having the highest word, music in (almost) all its facets can be listened to as it is intended, no boundaries are drawn between genres and styles, almost every music lover comes into their own and no concessions have to be made to non-musical secondary goals.”

Max Roach. Contemporary Korean music. Electronic female artists from around the globe. Artie Shaw. Italian “infernal industrial” band Satanismo. Schnittke and Ustvolskaya. “Theremin genius” Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Bach. Abbey Lincoln. Gregorian Chant. Songs by Kurt Weill. Music for the oboe family. Chanson. Motets. Makossa, the popular urban music movement originally from Cameroon. Mudhoney. Hummel. Liszt. Psychic TV. Frank Bridge. The Swans. Songs about refugees. Gogol Bordello. Bollywood Bhangra Disco Masala.

The is just a tiny fraction of the variety of music to be found on Concertzender. One click opens up a vast musical world. Read more »

by Michael Liss

What is it about immigration that causes us to lose our minds?

I’m not even referring to the absurd spectacle of toilets overflowing at national monuments and hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay. In theory, at least, there’s a reason for that: The President promised his supporters a magnificent structure across the Southern Border, and the Democrats don’t want to advance Mexico the money to pay for it.

I’m talking about the insanity of not addressing the root issue—actual immigration policy. Let’s be honest with ourselves, a few billion dollars for something that seems to be morphing in composition and cost every day doesn’t solve our immigration woes. It doesn’t build a Wall, either. We would be taking on the largest infrastructure project since the build-out of the national highway system, lasting many years and including enough eminent domain (because a considerable amount of border land in Texas is in private hands) to cause conservative heads to explode. A few billion is barely seed money for the lobbyists.

So, let’s talk about what we should be talking about: Immigration policy. And let’s start with a hypothetical: The nation has decided to make you Immigration Czar. You have the absolute power to determine policy for the next two years. What do you want to do with it? Read more »