Recently I flew with my son to grandma’s house. Upon boarding the plane, once the doors were sealed like a tomb and my son was settled in next to me, I noticed Southwest’s magazine Spirit poking out of the seat pocket in front and on the cover was an article that got me thinking.
If the world is flat, are we about to fall off the edge into an unknown universe? The article was about Second Life.
While it’s debatable if Jewish souls live forever in an Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come), Jews have clearly found a Second Life.
If you’ve haven’t been transported yet, Second Life (SL) is a virtual world which exists on the Internet and according to its website has over 5 million “residents”. Some accounts report that number to be greatly exaggerated as several residents might belong to one person. In the world of second life, residents are avatars or animated characters that embody characteristics of your own choosing.
As God made man in his own image, so man plays God recreating another version (usually more buff than real life or RL.)
Second Life has a synagogue, a yeshiva as well as a Holocaust museum. It also just published its own Jewish Magazine 2Life. Separately, I looked over the first issue which seeks to cover “the multiple Jewish aspects and developments on this virtual platform with news, background reporting and features on a monthly basis.”
I’d previously read some articles about Second Life and even poked around a bit, but flying over the real world and above the clouds at night watching the sunset next to your child is a RL experience that’s hard, if not impossible, to replicate. Okay, avid users would disagree and would remind me that in SL, you don’t even need a plane to fly. The main mode of transportation is teleporting where your avatar can float above like in a Chagall painting.
Staring out the airplane’s window in RL gazing at the lighted cities also got me thinking about the dangers this world offers. It made me wonder if Second Life is a kind of fallout shelter for our society at a time when we’re in need of a place to hide.
It’s no such thing. Second Life is created by humans and retains the same good, bad and ugly aspects.
For example, Reuters, which has a news center in SL (no kidding), reports that weaponry is a booming business. There have also been reports of terrorism and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, which established a virtual HQ, has rioted with Leftist organizations.
While nobody really gets physically hurt, you can lose money and lots of it. SL includes a virtual exchange center, where real dough can be converted into Linden dollars for use on the site and as of this writing $1,744,027 has been spent.
It’s fascinating to observe and wonder why we go to such lengths to dream up such fantastic worlds.
Judaism’s guiding principles are to value this life, as both The Torah and Talmud focus on the purpose of earthly life. SL seems to be an attempt to find the spiritual world. The schism between RL and shadows on the wall is as old as Plato and Aristotle and in fact Tehiyat Hameitim means the Resurrection of the Dead and is a concept that entered Judaism under a Hellenistic influence long after the Torah was completed.
Second Life is no afterlife, but perhaps it’s our all to human attempt at it.
Returning to the place of my birth with my son was a kind of spiritual journey. Not long into the flight home, he took out his Superman book where we played and read all about that other strange visitor from another planet.
That’s when I figured, if a nice Jewish boy from Krypton can find and make a second life here on earth, so can we.
Abe
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Saturday, March 17, 2007
HyperEvil
Some movies stick with you for days, weeks and sometimes, a lot longer. They can occupy a space in your mind that provokes a sudden chuckle while driving alone in the car. Other times, they reinforce the creepy realization that the world is filled with despicable souls, buttressing the presence of evil in the world.
Lost in the Cineplex this past week, I was caught in evil’s grip. I took in the epic Battle of Thermopylae, between East and West in 300 and the trail of a serial killer in Zodiac.
Both films were based on historical facts. Both are stories that resonate today.
One was a large-scale projection of a gruesome war and a film adaptation of a graphic novel shot against a Bluescreen to duplicate the imagery and style of the original book.
The other, a tighter, more focused lens on the evil of one depraved man, a demon who embodied a killer.
One was the socio-political battle between good and evil on a grand scale. The other, a psychologically twisted mystery, almost unbearable to watch, because it was so real in its depiction.
Both, while just movies, smacked of today’s headlines bringing them that much closer to home (literally, on my driveway.)
At the bus stop where I drop my son off and as I waited on the corner with all the children, I started to describe to a neighborhood mom the effect Zodiac had on me. In one particular scene, the murderer endangers a child. Her reply was, “I can’t watch those kinds of things.” I understood. In the theatre, there were times I had to turn away and not look.
But when I came back home and picked up The Baltimore Sun, my eyes were met with a monster’s and a headline that read, “Killer casts a shadow of violence.” According to The Sun, Lawrence Banks was convicted of shooting to death a friend in Pasadena and then his own son in Baltimore on the same day in 1991. He killed his son because the son and a daughter claimed that Banks had abused them, the daughter sexually and both of them physically.
In 1976, he had been sentenced to 15 years for throwing that daughter, then a 7-month-old, through a glass door during an argument with his wife. Just before Banks went to trial in that case, his wife was found dead in an East Baltimore apartment. Her body was so decomposed that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.
Reading this news I was stunned at the malevolence. I had to read it again; to be sure I was soaking it in. Moments earlier, describing what I thought was distant celluloid and so easy to dismiss, seeped back into my doorway.
That was the front page. On the one where movies are listed, I found that
300 has angered Iranians who say the action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran. Remembering what happened a few years ago, after Danish cartoons set off riots throughout the Muslim world, I wondered, given the tension today, how “epic” things could get.
Our world is like one of those overhead projectors we had in high school. We read the news and think reality couldn’t get any worse. Then we layer on top it another sheet of cellophane causing us to see that same image, in a completely different, often more distorted, way.
Earlier this month, the French critic and theorist, Jean Baudrillard died. He theorized a world of hyperreality. Wikipedia defines hyperreality as a world of simulation where illusion is what is real and where a consciousness loses its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.
Spliced between headlines and movielines, where global conflicts and metro crime are across the aisle, one can’t escape the intersection these parallel worlds pull us down into.
The reel is real and the real is reel.
Lost in the Cineplex this past week, I was caught in evil’s grip. I took in the epic Battle of Thermopylae, between East and West in 300 and the trail of a serial killer in Zodiac.
Both films were based on historical facts. Both are stories that resonate today.
One was a large-scale projection of a gruesome war and a film adaptation of a graphic novel shot against a Bluescreen to duplicate the imagery and style of the original book.
The other, a tighter, more focused lens on the evil of one depraved man, a demon who embodied a killer.
One was the socio-political battle between good and evil on a grand scale. The other, a psychologically twisted mystery, almost unbearable to watch, because it was so real in its depiction.
Both, while just movies, smacked of today’s headlines bringing them that much closer to home (literally, on my driveway.)
At the bus stop where I drop my son off and as I waited on the corner with all the children, I started to describe to a neighborhood mom the effect Zodiac had on me. In one particular scene, the murderer endangers a child. Her reply was, “I can’t watch those kinds of things.” I understood. In the theatre, there were times I had to turn away and not look.
But when I came back home and picked up The Baltimore Sun, my eyes were met with a monster’s and a headline that read, “Killer casts a shadow of violence.” According to The Sun, Lawrence Banks was convicted of shooting to death a friend in Pasadena and then his own son in Baltimore on the same day in 1991. He killed his son because the son and a daughter claimed that Banks had abused them, the daughter sexually and both of them physically.
In 1976, he had been sentenced to 15 years for throwing that daughter, then a 7-month-old, through a glass door during an argument with his wife. Just before Banks went to trial in that case, his wife was found dead in an East Baltimore apartment. Her body was so decomposed that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.
Reading this news I was stunned at the malevolence. I had to read it again; to be sure I was soaking it in. Moments earlier, describing what I thought was distant celluloid and so easy to dismiss, seeped back into my doorway.
That was the front page. On the one where movies are listed, I found that
300 has angered Iranians who say the action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran. Remembering what happened a few years ago, after Danish cartoons set off riots throughout the Muslim world, I wondered, given the tension today, how “epic” things could get.
Our world is like one of those overhead projectors we had in high school. We read the news and think reality couldn’t get any worse. Then we layer on top it another sheet of cellophane causing us to see that same image, in a completely different, often more distorted, way.
Earlier this month, the French critic and theorist, Jean Baudrillard died. He theorized a world of hyperreality. Wikipedia defines hyperreality as a world of simulation where illusion is what is real and where a consciousness loses its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.
Spliced between headlines and movielines, where global conflicts and metro crime are across the aisle, one can’t escape the intersection these parallel worlds pull us down into.
The reel is real and the real is reel.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Iranna
Combining the hoopla of Anna Nicole with the seriousness of Iran, I came up with ––Iranna.
Like one of Anna Nicole’s spaghetti straps hanging on for dear life, support for Bush’s war is being stretched to its limit. America is ready to snap.
The heavy weight of what was an inflated false reality possessing a serious lack of intelligence, has become a pathetic attempt at propping up a vapid, apparitional illusion.
Observing the deceased starlet pose and preen for the cameras, knowing there was nothing in the way of integrity behind her empty veneer, only brought to light how the war, like she, was manufactured synthetically.
Underneath this garment of death that’s Iraq, has been a tabloid media unwilling or unable to stop itself on the catwalk to perdition.
This was made evident last week on PBS when Frontline’s News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin reported how the press created an echo chamber for an administration intent on war. Courageously, Frontline also collapsed the image of the gallant reporter from revealer of truth to lapdog.
In an online discussion after the program and sponsored by the Washington Post with Producer Raney Aronson, one viewer wrote, “Bob Woodward -- perhaps the most eminent American journalist – was shown in the program last night saying “there was a zero percent chance that there are no WMDs in Iraq.” The MSM (main stream media) journalists like Woodward were so taken in by the Administration that they lost their independence and judgment – perhaps forever.”
That’s a serious disintegration of trust. Yet that response wasn’t the only one expressing such a concern and with a majority of Americans disapproving of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq, the feeling of being duped and mislead by our government is only part of the story. By threading the false line from Al-Qaeda to WMD in the drumbeat of war, the media became the enabler to the fabrication.
Of more serious concern today is how that same media loop, that swirls celebrities like Anna Nicole at us on an endless cycle, is caught pumping out more of the same lines when it comes to Iran.
The run-up to Iraq is back. After reacting to the boy who cried Wolfowitz, a skeptical country––one marred by four years of war, over 3,100 dead soldiers and a burned media––is suspiciously turning its camera gaze on Iran.
Rewinding the tape back, Iraq certainly seemed for many of us an ominous threat. We were still in a daze after being hit, followed by the jingoistic jolt of war’s intoxicating lure.
But now, with the clearer distance of time and analysis to tame us, wrestling with Iran in light of Iraq, has become a far more cautious exercise and one we’re unwilling to race toward even with the gun ready to go off.
Ever so soberly, walking a dangerous line we ask, “What if Ahmadinejad is the real wolf––his casual look only a sheep’s disguise? What if his promises of wiping Israel off the map are not false threats but replicas of Hitler sketches?”
We’ve sewn ourselves into a tough spot.
American’s are in no shape, nor do they have the stomach for a war with Iran. Hawking a sequel, when most of us want to return the original version, we’re caught, frozen in frame.
Cosmetic surgery, like a quickie air-war to take out the nukes may sound revitalizing, like a weekend at Canyon Ranch, but is it really the way to deal with the fundamental problem? (Temporary fix. What’ll it look like after?)
Long-term, like any celeb entering detox, we need to wean ourselves off the oil drug and whip ourselves into ecological shape by getting rid of the flabby dirty pollutants rife in our system.
Anna Nicole was clearly the embodiment of something unreal and phony, yet we couldn’t seem to get enough of her. (No wonder Jewish mothers warned us of latching onto big blonde shiksas!)
Her recurring phantom specter the last two weeks, left me wondering how we ever became wedded to this war through an overblown and puffed up media and why, another romp with the wrong bombshell, should be avoided at all costs.
Like one of Anna Nicole’s spaghetti straps hanging on for dear life, support for Bush’s war is being stretched to its limit. America is ready to snap.
The heavy weight of what was an inflated false reality possessing a serious lack of intelligence, has become a pathetic attempt at propping up a vapid, apparitional illusion.
Observing the deceased starlet pose and preen for the cameras, knowing there was nothing in the way of integrity behind her empty veneer, only brought to light how the war, like she, was manufactured synthetically.
Underneath this garment of death that’s Iraq, has been a tabloid media unwilling or unable to stop itself on the catwalk to perdition.
This was made evident last week on PBS when Frontline’s News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin reported how the press created an echo chamber for an administration intent on war. Courageously, Frontline also collapsed the image of the gallant reporter from revealer of truth to lapdog.
In an online discussion after the program and sponsored by the Washington Post with Producer Raney Aronson, one viewer wrote, “Bob Woodward -- perhaps the most eminent American journalist – was shown in the program last night saying “there was a zero percent chance that there are no WMDs in Iraq.” The MSM (main stream media) journalists like Woodward were so taken in by the Administration that they lost their independence and judgment – perhaps forever.”
That’s a serious disintegration of trust. Yet that response wasn’t the only one expressing such a concern and with a majority of Americans disapproving of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq, the feeling of being duped and mislead by our government is only part of the story. By threading the false line from Al-Qaeda to WMD in the drumbeat of war, the media became the enabler to the fabrication.
Of more serious concern today is how that same media loop, that swirls celebrities like Anna Nicole at us on an endless cycle, is caught pumping out more of the same lines when it comes to Iran.
The run-up to Iraq is back. After reacting to the boy who cried Wolfowitz, a skeptical country––one marred by four years of war, over 3,100 dead soldiers and a burned media––is suspiciously turning its camera gaze on Iran.
Rewinding the tape back, Iraq certainly seemed for many of us an ominous threat. We were still in a daze after being hit, followed by the jingoistic jolt of war’s intoxicating lure.
But now, with the clearer distance of time and analysis to tame us, wrestling with Iran in light of Iraq, has become a far more cautious exercise and one we’re unwilling to race toward even with the gun ready to go off.
Ever so soberly, walking a dangerous line we ask, “What if Ahmadinejad is the real wolf––his casual look only a sheep’s disguise? What if his promises of wiping Israel off the map are not false threats but replicas of Hitler sketches?”
We’ve sewn ourselves into a tough spot.
American’s are in no shape, nor do they have the stomach for a war with Iran. Hawking a sequel, when most of us want to return the original version, we’re caught, frozen in frame.
Cosmetic surgery, like a quickie air-war to take out the nukes may sound revitalizing, like a weekend at Canyon Ranch, but is it really the way to deal with the fundamental problem? (Temporary fix. What’ll it look like after?)
Long-term, like any celeb entering detox, we need to wean ourselves off the oil drug and whip ourselves into ecological shape by getting rid of the flabby dirty pollutants rife in our system.
Anna Nicole was clearly the embodiment of something unreal and phony, yet we couldn’t seem to get enough of her. (No wonder Jewish mothers warned us of latching onto big blonde shiksas!)
Her recurring phantom specter the last two weeks, left me wondering how we ever became wedded to this war through an overblown and puffed up media and why, another romp with the wrong bombshell, should be avoided at all costs.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
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