popular culture

Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.

A recent NYT op-ed insists that it was Vivekananda who introduced yoga into the American “national conversation.” But that claim is flat-out wrong. I’m not suggesting that we ignore Vivekananda’s proven significance in the history and development of modern yoga, but the story is much more complex than what Bardach implies. She seems to suggest, after all, that it’s as simple as: Vivekananda introduced yoga to the West, “great minds” loved him, yoga was eventually co-opted by New Age baby-boomers, and it all went downhill from there.

R.I.P. after 31 Years.

Michele Bachmann, in spite of “not always getting things right” revealed a profound truth when she promised to bring back the heady days of $2 a gallon gasoline.

What does this mysterious sculpture depict? Popular answers include: an aardvark, a bird, an Afghan hound, and one of Picasso’s lovers. But to my eyes, it looks like a sphinx—a monster that (like the anamorphic skull haunting Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors) only snaps into focus when viewed from an oblique perspective. To perceive the recumbent sphinx you have to approach the piece not from the front but from behind and to the side.

At first, Michael McIntyre admits, he wasn’t sure why they weren’t making a documentary on yoga, as opposed to women and yoga. I wondered the same thing. Isn’t the stereotype of men that they are even more out of touch with their bodies than women; overscheduled and torn between conflicting demands that don’t allow a minute for introspection, contemplation, or the stillness from which groundedness is born? All these reasons are why the film claims women should do the practice. But Michael came to believe that they were documenting something momentous, and women were leading it. “As a man going to classes taught by men, I was getting the practice, but not the phenomenon,” he said. “ Women are taking it to the next level.”

Several days ago I was in the car, listening to songs shuffled at random. Just as I pulled into the parking lot I heard the opening lines of “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” recorded at one of Cash’s famous 1968 Folsom Prison shows. Transfixed, I sat and listened to the whole seven-minute song, which tells the story of a man who, after winning a heart-pounding spike-driving competition against a machine, lays down his hammer and dies. It is a great story that may be read as a warning to those who equate scientific and technological advance with human progress. What I’d like to ask is this: do stories point us, in even the smallest of ways, toward anything that might be described as the truth?

If there is any communal rite of passage at Burning Man, it is the Temple Burn on Sunday night, the event’s finale. Not everyone comes out for this event; some would rather dance to techno music or chat up a neighbor on the next bar stool instead of joining tens of thousands of Burners sitting on the ground quietly waiting for the temple to burn down, taking all their messages and their pain—they hope—with it.

The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…

RD talks with journalist Amy Waldman whose first novel, The Submission, presciently imagines a controversy, set in post-9/11 New York City, in which the design of a Muslim-American wins a contest to build a 9/11 memorial.