Singapore political architect Lee Kwan Yew and his offhand critic, the American global anthropologist Clifford Geertz, needed to talk. About colonialism, democracy, culture. . . First of two essays on the possible city-state of the future.
What is culture? At first glance the amiable sales person was Chinese, but this was not China and we were dealing in English. I wanted a cultural experience, not the camera. Or so I thought.
(IN SEVEN PARTS ) By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY As we, Patricia and I, began our drive in a Murano loaded with camping gear on a southern route from Crestone to Washington D.C. we established an informal division of blog labor, a reversal of occupational roles. She would be the journalist. I would be the judge. She would tell stories and keep track of things. I would hand down opinions. Soon I wanted to trade jobs because while she could enjoy the ride and report on whatever came down the pike, I would have to think. I did not […]
By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY The threat by the Toronto Film Festival to put a partial eclipse on films that premiered a week earlier at Telluride did not dim any lights on the old mining town’s opera house “SHOW” sign. The 41st Telluride Film Festival directors got everything they wanted for the Labor Day weekend program, according to volunteers who heard it from them. Harvey Weinstein (yes, before he was disgraced), who was adept at Telluride premiers that go on to win best picture Oscars, did not withhold his “The Imitation Game.” Gary Meyer (call him top dog, though he does […]
At a restaurant called EAT in neon letters three feet high I ordered chicken fried steak and gravy, which is the essence of the official Oklahoma State Meal, created by the legislature in 1988 to promote beef and other agricultural derivatives including corn bread and pecan pie. EAT was crowded, and many of the noon customers were voluminous. There is no famine in this land (Gen 26: 1). Not at least the sort of famine that drove Abraham and then Jacob and his sons into Egypt, where God saved them. The biblical stories of manna from heaven and the miracle […]
Because much of the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas is federal, all the campgrounds were closed, so we found ourselves checking-in at the Dogwood Motel in Mountainview (pop. c. 3000). The young man at the desk recommended a catfish restaurant and the Ozark Culture Center north of town. Catfish needs no definition. Even anthropologists argue endlessly about culture, but at the proud little state park culture is about music and storytelling and broom making and copper annealing and dress making and wood carving and wool carding and weaving and cigar-box guitars and letter-press printing and quilting. You go from studio to […]
Thich Nhat Hanh teaches walking meditation. Early one morning in Hanoi he took a long line of us walking — slow and mindful, step by step, breath by breath — against the rush-hour torrent of 125 cc motor scooters, as government agents, no doubt, watched. I am wondering how walking meditation would go over in the small towns of the American South, if I tried it. The region is mostly Protestant and about one-third Southern Baptist. Our drive through Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee on backroads left the impression that another third of the people attend non-denominational churches distinguished from each […]
Appalachian “hollers” (hollows) are perfect little worlds, or used to be. They provided everything a large family needed: timber, firewood and game from the surrounding mountains, grazing on the descending slopes, farming in the fertile bottom lands, and even fish in the streams. And in almost every holler was a church and a cemetery next to it. The people were Baptists. They baptized in the water — total immersion. My grandfather and grandmother on my dad’s side were from the Appalachia’s of western North Carolina, near Mars Hill, which now is a picturesque little college town. The college was started […]
In a time of militant religiosity, when “God Bless America” is the standard ending of most political speeches, it was encouraging to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, Washington’s newest. There is no “God” in the 14 quotations approved by his family to be cut in white stone. How do you explain a memorial to a powerful minister that does not mention God? Certainly he was not Godless, this man of peace, liberation and non-violence. Suddenly it occurred to me that the divine presence there on the edge of the Tidal Basin on the nation’s spacious capitol grounds […]
When I was a boy one of my father’s sisters gave him a tree, a sapling, and we planted it in the back yard in Denver. He said it was a black walnut from the mountains of western North Carolina, which are practically owned by the Scotch-Irish, his people. That gnarly stick of a tree survived from winter to Colorado winter, growing a few feet a year in the rich alluvial soil of our back yard. Each summer I’d look for the black walnuts – a blossom, a green pod on a branch, a fallen clunker with a shell […]