Every page now has Seesmic/Disqus video commenting. Scroll to the bottom to see or post video comments. To read a text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog on your iPhone or other mobile phone, click here. Or to see the graphics with less text, click here.
Lenin
- 1:16 PM Thursday, February 5, 2009
[The HOW of implementing the Marxian revolution.]
For a long time, I've been wanting to blog about V. I. Lenin, the Soviet revolutionary whose ideas and deeds virtually define what is now known as "left-wing." The problem with blogging about Lenin is keeping it short and to the point. I set myself the goal of finding a maximum of three points I could make about Lenin. I think I've done that, and will make those points, after a little background information:
I've written before in the Coffeeblog about what it was like growing up as a Jewish boy, more or less, in a Christian country, more or less. As Christmas rolls around again (Hanukkah already started a few days ago), my thoughts turn to this theme once again. I began writing this on Christmas Eve, 2008. Although the terms are confusing, I want to write about Jews who consider themselves Christians, and about Christians who consider themselves Jewish. A good starting point is the life of one Jesus of Nazereth, born in the northern region of the land of Israel called Galilee, approximately 2,008 years ago (Wikipedia says the Jesus was probably born some time between 2 and 7 AD). It is in honor of the birth of Jesus that the holiday of Christmas is being celebrated today in Christian countries, but also in places like Japan. Even a self-designated atheist like the Jewish-born Ayn Rand enjoyed, supported, and celebrated Christmas.
Don't Shrug Her Off
- 2:10 PM Monday, December 15, 2008
[Movie Review: The Passion of Ayn Rand]
I have long been, and still am, a fan of the great Russian-born Hollywood screenwriter, novelist, philosopher, and radical advocate of capitalism, Ayn Rand. Her name surfaced again recently in a Newsweek article which blamed her for the current worldwide financial meltdown. This is not about that, however, but about a movie made about Miss Rand by Showtime, an adaptation of Barbara Branden's book, "The Passion of Ayn Rand," which I saw on a Netflix rental DVD. I loved the movie, which I had never seen though it came out in 1999.
The Third Rome
- 10:49 PM Sunday, November 16, 2008
[Translatio Imperii, Part Two]
I recently wrote in the Coffeeblog about a medieval political theory called, in Latin, translatio imperii, meaning transfer of power, promoting the idea that the Germanic kingdoms of Northern Europe were direct descendants of the Western Roman Empire. At this moment I am extending that idea to Russian history, beginning with a mysterious monk from Pskov, his Legend of the White Cowl, and his compelling idea that Russia was the Third Rome. The First Rome, of course, was the western empire ruled from Rome itself, which according to legend was founded by brothers Romulus and Remus. The Second Rome was the name for the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and created by Constantine the Great. According to the Pskov monk, whose name was Philotheus (Filofey in Russian), Constantine had given a white cowl to the pope, who sent it to Philotheus, who passed it on to the Archbishop of Novogorod, which was an important medieval Russian city. The Archbishop died in 1352. In 1453, 101 years after the Archbishop's death, Constantinople, the Second Rome, was taken by Ottoman forces and has been ever since a major Muslim capital, now called Istanbul. Russia, having received the white cowl, became the successor to the Byzantine Empire according to Filofey's doctrine of the Third Rome. This doctrine is not a mere historical footnote, but an idea to be taken quite seriously during our present era.
Ukraine
- 3:16 PM Saturday, October 25, 2008
[But Ukraine is no Disneyland]
I must say that I have mixed feelings writing about Ukraine. It gives me butterflies in the stomach. More about that later, but I will start with a 2002 article by US ambassador to Ukraine, where he asserts that Ukraine is not "a political football between Russia and the United States." OK. Political, maybe not, but football? It seems to me that Ukraine's long history of being fought over by opposing "teams;" and of her inhabitants being kicked around for ages (as well as kicking each other around) justifies the football metaphor.
Gloomy Sunday
- 7:00 PM Sunday, October 5, 2008
[Dead people in the streets. Everywhere.]
Yes, it's Sunday, and yes it's gloomy. Not totally gloomy. In fact, the sun is out and it's near the end of a beautiful day. So why am I writing about this? Because I'm feeling kind of gloomy, and there's no better day to write about gloomy Sundays and about the song "Gloomy Sunday," which has an interesting story behind it. If you had read my last blogpost, you might have gotten the idea that I was skeptical about the huge financial bill that was pending before the US Congress, skeptical because the same people who caused the financial crisis were now lobbying hard for a $700 billion-dollar fix. And, although there is much evidence that the bill was opposed by a large majority of Americans, it was passed anyway. And, yes, it's October, autumn already, and yes, it's Sunday, the gloomiest day of the week second only to "blue Monday." My last two blogposts were grim, melancholy, and morose, and now: Gloomy Sunday. Will I ever pull out of this spiritual nosedive? You betcha. But not in this blogpost, which is all about gloom. Not gloom and doom. Just gloom.
The past few days I've been distracted by major political/economic events, which have caused me great concern, worry, and frustration. As I write this the US Congress is supposedly closing a deal where hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debt will be purchased at a discount, purportedly by zhlubs like me, the American taxpayer. My mind boggles. I am no economist, but I am caught between the threat (the collapse of the world economy!) articulated by our Hyas Muckamuck, US President George W. Bush, and the knowledge, reinforced by plain common sense, that the same muckamucks who got us into the mess are now promising to get us out. Fortunately, I have found another way of understanding this whole mess. You see, I have just returned from a vacation in Alaska.
Denixonizing China
- 1:55 PM Saturday, April 26, 2008
[Is there a double standard in Beijing?]
Recently when the Olympic Torch passed through San Francisco, city officials engaged in well-intended skulduggery when they extinguished the original torch and successfully routed a second torch in another part of town. On the announced route, fans, onlookers, and angry demonstrators on both sides of the "Free Tibet" issue had gathered to show their enthusiasm and outrage. It turned out that the rerouting subterfuge prevented violence, but I was struck by the era-defining implications of this event, and other demonstrations which had begin on March 10 in China's Tibet Autonomous Region and soon after had become internationalized. I decided to write something about this in the Coffeeblog, and this is it. The more I learn about Tibet, however, the more complex the issue appears. Read on.
It's Tuesday, April 8, 2008 5:17:01 PM US/Pacific. I just looked at the Coffeeblog and learned that my last post was March 20: Purim. It's over. It's been over for 17 days. And yet, until this item, I haven't posted anything to the Coffeeblog. Seventeen days. Two weeks and three days. And that troubles me. I experience it as stressful. The stress of not blogging. And that brings me to a recent meme purveyed in the dead tree medium known as the New York Times. As their recent headline (April 6) trumpeted (in part) "Writers Blog Till They Drop."
Universonal
- 7:38 PM Tuesday, March 18, 2008
[When the personal is universal and vice versa.]
I've been more and more satisfied with what I've posted to the Coffeeblog over the past few months, and I'm getting more page views from visitors. How much these visitors read of what I've written, I don't know. But they're visiting, and some of them, according to my statistical software, stick around and read other things I've written after they read the stuff they were searching for. There is another trend, however, over the past few months: I've been posting to the Coffeeblog less often. What does that mean? Am I getting bored with blogging? (No.) Are my standards getting higher (Yes.), and therefore am I intimidating myself about writing more and posting new images? (Maybe.) I think I know what is happening. The Coffeeblog has transcended mere ego-tripping, hobbyism, and showing off, though it is all of the above. It has become nothing less than a repository for my sense of personal identity. In decades past, that role was filled by college, job, ideological identification, and to a lesser extent, lifestyle. Now, as a certified old geezer (I collect Social Security!) I have needed to rewrite the whole saga before my demise, which even if it should happen fifty years from today, will be untimely. (I guess my health is good enough for me to still think that way.) What all of this lengthy paragraph implies is that the Coffeeblog is very, very personal. But there's much more to it than that.
Later in life I'm becoming a history buff. In college I considered the study of history burdensome, with all those details to memorize for the exam, but now, whenever I hear a news headline about some world trouble spot, I want to go immediately to the Internet to get the background. This impulse has led to previous Coffeeblog posts such as The Right-Left Politics Meme, Anselm Kiefer's May-Beetle, and Ismail and the Safavids. Well, it's happened again. This past week or so, the new nation of Kosovo declared its independence, following which it was recognized by the US, following which there were huge demonstrations in Serbia against the US, plus riots by angry Serbs who set fire to a US Embassy office, a McDonalds restaurant, and multiple American Flags. "So what else is new?," you might be saying if you're a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist, who has not kept up-to-date on your Serbian history. "Of course the Muslims are burning the US Embassy. That's what Muslims do. The US must have been caught flushing another Koran or something." But guess what? The Serbs are not Muslims. They are Christians (Serbian Orthodox) or atheists too. So why are they angry? Well, the brand-new nation of Kosovo is populated primarily by ethnic Albanians (there is also an independent nation of Albania}, and most of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are Muslims. So the US supports a new Muslim nation and the Christians burn our flag? Well, yeah. For me, that means it's Google time again.
Yesterday was the last day of this year's (2008) MacWorld Expo, the huge Apple event in San Francisco, and as usual Apple CEO Steve Jobs was going to knock our socks off with his presentation of astounding, revolutionary new products. This year, his main offering was an ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop computer which Apple calls the MacBook Air. As I left MacWorld Expo, I was humming that great Peggy Lee standard, "Is That All There Is?" I was kinda disappointed....
This past weekend I celebrated another year of my life with an annual visit to Big Sur on California's central coast. Named in Spanish for the big river of the South, El Rio Grande del Sur, Big Sur was barely accessible until the 1940's when Highway 1 was built along the precarious cliffs where the mountains of the Ventana Wilderness meet the rocky shore of the Pacific. Writers Robinson Jeffers, Jaime de Angulo, and Henry Miller brought fame to the region as a place for Americans and Europeans who wanted to get away from it all; in other words, to Drop Out. ...
Bad Parent Movies
- 2:38 PM Sunday, December 30, 2007
[Is the new Hollywood really the old Hollywood?]
For some reason I haven't written for Jonathan's Coffeeblog for a few weeks, but I've been busy with other stuff, including much frustrating interaction with bureaucracies. However, I did watch a few movies during that time, three of which, by strange coincidence, all dealt with impassioned young people who were overreacting to nasty, overbearing "control freak" parents. Did I discover a new Hollywood obsession, a meme as it were, or perhaps an unconscious personal motive in the choice of films to see next: Into the Wild (in a theater), Transamerica, and Factory Girl (the latter two on DVD)? In the first of the three, a recent male college graduate resentfully makes a charitable donation of $24,000 given to him by his parents to buy a new car. He then disappears and goes on a grim journey, which he considers liberating, during which he works as a Dakota combine operator, travels with sympathetic hippy couple, tries life as a wetback (he abandons his ID before re-entering the US from Mexico), as a homeless street person and as a daredevil river kayaker. He becomes a surrogate grandson to a lonely old man, and finally tests his mettle alone against Alaska's Denali wilderness. The wilderness wins.
As a boy growing up in Pennsylvania I felt like a small Jewish fish swimming in a vast, boundless sea of Christians, while Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus were the stuff of storybooks. Now, however, I am repeatedly encountering the idea, on the Internet and in the mass media, that Christianity is running out of time. Today I Googled the phrase "demise of Christianity" and got 766,000 hits. The themes under that category included secularization of former Christians; the choice not to have children; a preference for personal spirituality over organized churches, and escalating geographic relocations due to competition from other, more assertive religions. Many believe that Christianity is not only vanishing from places like Lebanon and Iraq, but drastically losing numbers in Italy, the UK, and elsewhere. These dramatic current events described aroused my curiosity about where all of the Christians came from in the first place, and that led me to the story of the Roman emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, and that of his mother Flavia Iulia Helena Augusta....
I am Curiousyellow
- 12:07 PM Thursday, November 15, 2007
[Long? Boring? Banned in Massachusetts?]
The month after I started Jonathan's Coffeeblog, I was curious about the process of starting a blog using the Blogger website. I gave my exploratory blog the title "Curious" with the username (changed later) of "curiousyellow," which I made up on the moment, suddenly recalling the 1967 Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow). Since then, curiousyellow has been my username on many social websites, including Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Seesmic. Recently I decided to see the movie again to see if my opinion of it had changed. It has changed....
For those of you who may not know what a "Moleskine" is, it's a notebook made by an Italian firm, Modo e Modo, and marketed in bookstores, art supply stores, upscale stationery stores, museums, and the like. What makes a Moleskine different from other notebooks is that it's probably better-made than most (though there is some serious competition, especially price competition), it has some Italian pizzazz (like Alfa Romeos and bruschetta), it has an unusual name, and, probably most importantly, it has become a cult object, creating in turn, an aura of celebrity among certain other examples of such a prosaic product as a notebook. Moleskines come in assorted sizes, bindings, page layouts, and with or without pre-loaded information....
The colors of the foliage during autumn in New England are legendary, at least here in the USA. We Californians who were born and raised in the Eastern USA lament the loss of the seasonal changes, especially as October rolls around. An occasional earthquake or mudslide we can stand, but we are nostalgic for fall foliage. Or so we believe. As for me, at this time of year, I am always pleasantly surprised: we do have fall colors. Autumn is a beautiful time in Berkeley....
In the year 1258, the Mongol Il-Khan Hulagu ordered the sack of Baghdad, which for 508 years had been the capital of a Muslim empire, ruled by a Caliph, and called the Abbasids after `Abbas ibn `Abd al-Muttalib, paternal uncle and companion of the Prophet Mohammad. The Abbasids were staunch Sunni Muslims. Baghdad, prior to Hulagu's arrival, was renowned for its architecture and culture, including the House of Wisdom, a huge library and scholarly institution housing works in, and translated from Persian, Syriac, and Greek in the fields of astrology, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and philosophy....
444 Ocampo Drive
- 7:35 PM Sunday, August 19, 2007
[On a bluff over the Pacific]
I finally went there to see it: the house in Pacific Palisades, California, where Henry Miller spent the last 20 years of his life. Miller died on June 7, 1980; I believe he died in that house. It is a typical upper-middle-class American house (or at least it was when Miller lived there.) It is now for sale for almost 5 million dollars. When I walked around, there was no plaque, sign or other visible reference to Miller; there is a plaque on the front of the apartment he shared in the Paris suburb of Clichy, about which he wrote Quiet Days in Clichy....
While working on a Coffeeblog post about theocracies I discovered that the word, Greek-derived (meaning dictatorship of a god) appeared in the writing of T. F. Josephus, a fascinating fellow who was born in the land of Israel around 37 years before the Christian era. Descended from priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, he wrote in Greek and became a citizen of Rome. Having written about Jesus, his writing has become part of the controversy among secular scholars and historians whether Jesus actually existed. I find Josephus fascinating for a variety of reasons, shedding light on contemporary tensions between religion vs. secularism, empires vs. "national liberation," and theocracy vs. liberalism. His life also makes vivid the nature of the Near East before Mohammad, and how those pre-Islamic cultures impact the region, and the world, today....
Theodor Holm Nelson, generally credited with inventing hypertext, calls himself a nexialist. Although the word does not appear in the Wiktionary or have a Google definition, I find it to be a very appealing and useful world, meaning, presumably, someone who studies the connections between things which are ordinarily studied in isolation by various scientific specialties. The word comes from a science fiction novel by A. E. Van Vogt....
This is a story about an extraordinary man who was born in 1487 and died at age 36, of a broken heart, it is said, because his beloved wife was taken hostage by the Turkish Sultan. He was a famous poet who wrote in two languages under the pen name of Khata'i. He was better known, however, by the name of Ismail the First, Shah of Iran, who came to the throne before the age of 16. (This Coffeeblog post is based on Wikipedia articles.)...
I suppose it started with Aunt Clara, my mother's aunt. She was a very interesting lady in her own way, and if she were still alive and had email, I would probably now be asking her a lot of questions about the 1930's in bohemian New York and similar topics. But, as my father used to say, "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a taxi cab," and Aunt Clara, who was never to know the thrill of incoming email, died decades ago. The last time I saw her, which was when she was visiting San Francisco, she pointed towards the Golden Gate, and said, "Oh I see they built a bridge there!" (I didn't make that up. Yes, she had been here before. Long before.)...
Deadwood
- 3:56 PM Friday, February 2, 2007
[There is a lot of bluntness in Deadwood.]
A few years ago, fed up with my local monopoly cable TV service, I cancelled it and instead subscribed to DSL internet access for around the same cost. Giving up TV was not all that hard—for a while—but I gradually found myself spending more time watching Blockbuster rentals, and finally, I joined Netflix. What have I learned? Among other things, I learned that there are great movies out there that never get shown in the theaters (as, for example, those produced by HBO, the "home box office"}. Great in what sense? As series that can go on for thirteen hours every year, for years, they can make use of character, plot, and background material in ways that can't be done in a typical feature film. Compare, for example, the Godfather I through III feature film series, with The Sopranos....
Some time ago I threatened to write a series about war songs, and I hereby post part 2 of that series. LiliMarleen, written as a poem by Hans Leip in 1915, and set to music by prolific German songwriter Norbert Schutlze in 1938, concerned a girl waiting for her soldier boyfriend underneath a lantern: "Wenn sich die späten Nebel drehen, werd' ich bei der Laterne stehen, wie einst Lili Marleen, Wie einst Lili Marleen." (If the late-night mists swirl, I'll be standing by the lantern, as I once did, Lili Marlene.")...
Technorati is a company in the San Francisco Bay Area which has supported the blogosphere by providing search services for weblogs. Web search services like Google search the whole Internet, not just weblogs. Someone seeking their ideal blog on a specific topic is likely to be overwhelmed with too many hits if they use Google. Technorati not only searches keywords, such as "coffeeblog", it can search tags which will bring up photographs on Flickr and Buzznet as well as bookmarks on de.licio.us and Furl which have been given the same tag by readers....
A Thousand Hits
- 12:59 PM Wednesday, April 27, 2005
[Andy Warhol was right!]
At 12:44 PM Pacific Time today, according to my Site Meter, the Coffeeblog has racked up its thousandth site visit. That means that on one thousand separate occasions, someone other than me has visited the site over the Internet. And they're not only visiting, they're actually looking at the different pages. And they're not just Californians or Americans, but readers in Australia, Japan, Germany, the UK, Mexico, the Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, France, Sweden, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Cool, huh? I'm very proud of my fifteen minutes of fame....
Once upon a time there were artists who created large, exciting paintings, who didn't try to make pictures of anything, but just used beautiful colors to make people go "ooooh" and "ahhhhh." These artists were called the "Abstract Expressionists." Grownups said some nice things about these paintings and also some bad things. Some grownups liked the colors and the oooohing and the ahhhhing, because they knew that these artists were painting what they felt in the spirit of the moment: they were "expressing themselves." Other grownups said that the painters were cheating because they didn't make detailed pictures like photographs. "Hey, any kid could do that", they said.
Jonathan's Coffeeblog was not prefabricated, but custom-built with Tinderbox, a nice piece of software which lets me build, remodel, and renovate the blog as I go along. Today I am adding a new category for my blog posts, called "People". To read all the "People" posts, just click on the navigation link at the top and the end of the blog posts, or use the Go menu in the sidebar.—JDL
This hair-raising story of a feminist Iranian blogger arrested for doing what bloggers do (blogging) was reported in the Los Angeles Times (for the full article click here.) The woman is known as Farouz Farzami, not her real name.—JDL
As I was writing my last coffeeblog post I was sitting at a table at Espresso Roma with Barbara and a group of Jazzerbabes. "Are you writing about us?" one of the 'Babes asked. At the time, I wasn't. But then I started to think about it, why not? There was a cultural phenomenon going on here that goes almost unnoticed. It was indeed noticed by Cyndi Lauper when she sang in the '80's about girls having fun. It was also noted in a recent issue of the New York times magazine where the Red Hat phenomenon was reported. And, if red hats don't do it for her, maybe she's a latent Sweet Potato Queen. As the father of two daughters, now adults, I observed daily for decades that Lauper was right.
This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004)....
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 