by Summer Block • January 15, 2006
Every summer I make a point of going to exactly one county fair. These annual pilgrimages impart profound if merciless lessons. Make no mistake – the county fair is our nation’s most puritanically rigorous form of moral instruction. Like a father forcing his child to smoke an entire pack of pilfered cigarettes to ensure he never takes a puff again, the county fair offers you every possible type of enjoyment while sneering, “Here, you want fun? Well, here you go, here’s fun for you – and I hope you choke on it.” Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • January 1, 2006
As a Christmas gift, I was given a DVD of a movie called “What the Bleep Do We know!?” I had never heard of the film. On the cover it said, “Science and spirituality come together in this mind-bending trip down the rabbit hole.” On the back cover, it mentioned “quantum physics”, and had a picture of an archetypal mad scientist. I assumed that it was a documentary on quantum mechanics, something we might see on PBS. On the surface, the actual movie does look like that. It is a mixture of interviews with “experts” and a fictional narrative centered around a female photographer whose life is filled with alienating jobs and frustrating personal conflicts; in other words, someone just like all of us—presumably, that is. If you did not catch onto the subtext of this film, you might assume that there is no difference between this film and what we see on PBS, but it is actually a propaganda film for a religious sect. Read »
by George Kenney • December 18, 2005
In 1995, I wrote a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine where I tried to get a handle on how many people had actually been killed in the war in Bosnia. Estimates had been grossly abused, people (both journalists and policymakers) were basically hallucinating about the nature of the war—and drawing the consequent conclusions. At the time my piece was published I took a lot of flack. Among other barrages, one feature put me on the cover of the Washington Post’s Sunday Magazine (an irony here) and talked about how looking at me was like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope. “How dare he insult the dead?” Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • December 4, 2005
Recently, my wife went to a small stationary store in our neighborhood to buy some office supplies, where she saw spiritual words of wisdom posted around the cash register. She asked the Indian man behind the counter what his religion was. He said he had no religion. He then gave her a copy of the book he wrote. My wife came home excitedly and gave me the book called “Seeking Home—An Immigrant’s Realization” by Jayant Patel. She had a hunch that I would be interested in reading it, for I too am an immigrant. She was right. Something about it, especially the story of how she got the book, was intriguing to me. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • November 19, 2005
As I’ve said in the past, pursuit of happiness is rather superficial, and therefore overrated. When I said it, I did not have a child of my own, and did not even want one, at least not consciously. Now that I do have a child of my own, one might expect me to take it back. To my own surprise, I find my own statement truer than ever. In fact, I can go as far as to claim that, at the time, I didn’t even know the true meaning of what I was saying. Happiness indeed is superficial. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • October 8, 2005
Whenever I hear about or read any theories of child-rearing or education, I feel confounded by their underlying assumptions. Unless we agree on some form of an ideal human being, how could we assert in general terms anything to be good or bad for kids? In most cases, if we question the existence of an ideal human being, the theories collapse. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • August 8, 2005
Being free of having a meaning of life is not as easy as commonly thought. It is analogous to racism; most people are quick to deny being a racist, when in fact they are. Just because they consciously negate it, does not mean that they have no racial prejudice in them. In fact, their conscious negation makes it difficult for them to address the problem, because they don’t even know that they have a problem. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • August 4, 2005
As I took a walk in the park this afternoon, I noticed a man with a sign in front of him that said, “Tell me a funny story about living in New York.” About a minute later, I remembered a story I could have told him. Instead of going back to him, I decided to write. It is something I should have written down while my memory was clearer, but I figured it’s still better to do so now than later. It’s a story of how I ended up spending one summer fishing for mice out of my window. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • July 29, 2005
The concept of ego as an image of oneself is incomplete and therefore misleading. One cannot form an image of oneself independent of the images of others one has. It is by creating contrast with others that one can form an image of oneself. When A speaks with B, the image of A’s self is created by contrasting himself with B. His ego, therefore, is a result of differentiating A and B. Then it follows that his ego between A and B is different from his ego between A and C. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • July 21, 2005
I’ve always been interested in reading the insiders’ views of the academia of philosophy. Philosophy has always been close to my heart, but I’ve always resisted entering the academia. I believe my ego has always wanted to, but my heart has always rejected it. Being Japanese with deeply ingrained Zen values, for me, an academic pursuit of philosophy was self-contradiction of sorts. When I read that Wittgenstein had always advised his students to leave the academic life and to get real jobs if they wanted to be a real philosopher, I felt vindicated (just another manifestation of my petty ego). Yet, my superficial ego has never been able to resist peeking into the academia every so often, and wondered what it’s like to be immersed in it. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • July 21, 2005
It’s been my dream to coin a word that gets used by the general populace, and today my dream came true. This morning, I woke up to my wife calling my name excitedly. A local TV news channel, NY1, was describing an article in New York Daily News called “Muffin-top mayhem!” I coined that word, “muffin-top”, back in May of 2003, and I submitted it to pseudodictionary.com. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • June 22, 2005
When my daughter was about two month old, she would cry from pulling her own hair. Apparently this is quite common. My parents told me that my sister did the same when she was a baby. A baby at that age is not aware of her own body. Her existence is strictly limited to the physical world, and there is nothing outside of her body that can see it objectively. Once we develop mental awareness of our own bodies, crying from pulling her own hair appears comical. We have transcended the physical world by developing intelligence that understands the causal relationship between pulling hair and feeling the pain. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • May 2, 2005
When you have a child, you are supposed become wiser and more mature. Not true. You will be surprised by how superficial you can be. Perhaps a child enhances everything good and bad in you, like what MSG does to food. If you have recently had a baby, you would know what Bugaboo is. It is an $800 stroller that is all the rage even among parents who are not so rich. If you are a superficial parent like me, and if you live in New York City, you would notice them everywhere. Read »
by Ken Stuart • April 27, 2005
It’s the 21st Century. You now have a vast array of music channels to choose from, either from Satellite Radio, Internet Radio or Satellite and cable TV music channels. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • April 5, 2005
George W. Bush is arguably the most influential and controversial performance artist in the history of Western art. Born as the son of George HW Bush senior, he learned early on how politics works. After studying at Yale and Harvard, he chose politics as his medium for art. In the 80s, like many other artists of the time, he was influenced by the French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard. He was particularly interested in the following passage in the book “Simulacra and Simulation”: Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • April 5, 2005
I attended a symposium at The Guggenheim Museum titled “Echoes of Art: Emulation As a Preservation Strategy.” The panel consisted of well-known figures of the digital art world, half of it being artists and the other half critics and curators. They shared their concerns about conservation of digital art. One of the most poignant “problems” discussed was the fate of hardware-dependent artworks. The artist John F. Simon, Jr. presented a slide of his work which was constructed from a laptop computer, and told us a story of one of his collectors asking him to fix the broken hard drive. He was able to fix it only because the replacement drive was still available. He was not sure what he would do in the future when the parts are no longer available. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • April 5, 2005
“Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization” by Alex Galloway is an excellent book for those who are interested in learning how the Internet works. Most books of this nature cover only technical aspects, but this book tells the story of the Internet from political, historical, economical, ideological, and commercial perspectives. The book is also helpful in learning about the subcultures formed around the technology, like hackers and digital artists. However, as you could probably tell from the title of the book, these are not the primary concerns of the author. And, this is where I must raise some issues with this book. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • March 24, 2005
Almost everything I thought was going to be was wrong. It’s rather pointless to make a long-term plan about having a child, because you change and so do your values and judgment. Before the birth of my baby girl, “child” meant “responsibility”, which in turn meant “compromise”, “self-sacrifice”, and “conservatism.” I figured I had to be ready to put my child before anything else. I prepared myself to work hard even if I hated my job. I accepted that my creative life would be substantially compromised, mainly because I would have no time, money, or energy to do anything else other than working and taking care of the child. Now, I realize that I need to behave exactly the opposite of what I expected. Read »
by Dyske Suematsu • February 16, 2005
Five days ago, a baby girl came into my life through the process that now seems like a surreal dream. One learns extraordinary things through extraordinary experiences, and I certainly learned something extraordinary from it. Before the details of my memory fade out, I want to write them down. Read »
by Rasheed Tazudeen • January 18, 2005
Shiina Ringo, a 25-year-old Japanese singer / guitarist / drummer / pianist, has been invaluable in suggesting a much-needed new direction for contemporary Japanese music in an age when modern Japanese culture in general is commonly (and almost reflexively) perceived if not as a direct imitation of Western culture, then as something that is and always has been derived from a limited understanding of the West (a perception over 100 years old). Read »
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