Marisa Bowe and Ken Kurson
Jesus' Son vs. the Moneychangers
By Marisa Bowe
Posted Wednesday, June 28, 2000, at 5:09 PM ETAfternoon, Kenny.
I just read Sam Lipsyte's review of Jesus' Son, the movie, in Feed. I don't agree with his take on the movie much, except he did a wonderful description of the book--"its drugs, its controlled beatnik flourishes, its deadpan cool in the face of the heart's horrors"--and how Johnson "tends to zoom out at the end of the story for some addled but poetic reflection from the narrator, as in this summing up of "Dundun":
"Will you believe me when I tell you there was a kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into something like that."
God I loved that book. I enhanced its pleasure by reading it in the waiting room at Gouverneur, the big public hospital way down in far eastern Chinatown. When you go to a public hospital you wait for hours, and this one has an amazing mix of immigrants that gives you such a different perspective on New York than if you were waiting in, say, Pastis.
I didn't think the movie was such a success; maybe I worship the book too much to ever be able to like a movie made of it. But it was trying in part to capture something that I discovered in a totally different movie-from-book, High Fidelity. I liked that book an awful lot, didn't love the movie but liked it OK. The part that, to my total surprise, kind of knocked me out, were the little scenes in the record store, with the snotty, music-obsessed record clerks competing over music trivia, sneering at customers who weren't part of the initiated elite, and generally treating this area of culture as a matter of the utmost seriousness. It was religious, really.
When I lived in Minneapolis during the late 1970s, there was a sort of punk/new wave thing going on there and all of my friends were like those record clerks. Some of my friends and boyfriends were record clerks. And until I saw High Fidelity, I hadn't realized just how sickened unto death I've been, finally, by money mania, dot-com fever, blah blah blah. I am thrilled that so many people made so much money and that there were lots of jobs created. But I was just almost moved to tears by the spectacle of these guys pouring all of their emotional energy and time into something purely because they loved it.
The constant buzzing of money, and buzz itself, was missing from that world--as it was from the world of Jesus' Son in an even more extreme way. That's at least part of what makes the heroin drifting of Jesus' Son so incredibly attractive. Doing heroin a lot is not so smart, from what I hear, and it's not a solution to, you know, the world being too much with us. And Ken, I would never advocate that people neglect, say, their personal finances, because they'll regret it later. But there has got to be some happy medium between the world of Jesus' Son and the world of, I don't know, doing road shows for venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Hey, ex-punk-rocker, do you know where that happy medium is?
Jesus' Son vs. the Moneychangers
By Marisa Bowe
Posted Wednesday, June 28, 2000, at 5:09 PM ETMarisa Bowe is the editor-in-chief of Word, the executive producer of Sissyfight.com, and a co-editor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium (click here to buy it). Ken Kurson is the editor of GreenMagazine.com, writes the "Green" column each month in Esquire, and is the author of The Green Magazine Guide to Personal Finance (click here to buy it). Reader Response from The Fray (to be read after the final entry):
[From the Fray Editor: Ken, Ken you didn't need to mention homosexuality or abortion to encourage controversy--saying there are too many people and they live too long (Tuesday) worked just fine. Fray posters came out in force, bringing with them Spinoza and a 95-year-old grandmother. The post below was titled Don't tell me when to die Mr Kurson:]
What an ugly letter by Mr Kurson! How exactly is the premise that people should live longer demonstrably false? I like the idea of using government money to prolong life (especially my life, it's demonstrably true that my life is cool). We have a right and responsibility to know what makes us tick and we have a right and responsibility to use that knowledge to help people better enjoy their lives. If science produces a way for people to live longer, I will gladly participate. If you don't want to, Mr Kurson, then don't. I'd hate to see you go, but I won't interfere. Just don't go around saying that longer lifespans are demonstrably bad--it might not seem so biting on the abstract level, but it's hurtful to individuals who are dying and would rather live. Whether or not this new knowledge brings us a step closer to godhood remains to be seen. Even if the answer is no, or if the question is irrelevant, it does make me happy to see that we humans are so clever, curious and philosophical that we've finally started to figure ourselves out--if not metaphysically, at least physically.
--Michael Maiello
(To reply, click
here.)
Since when are books not technology [Tuesday's entry]? I suppose Ken's definition of technology is any invention that makes people better off in a way of which he disapproves. But hey, if utter incoherence lets him live more comfortably in his savage little world, more power to him. Just don't make me live in it too.
--Ananda Gupta
(To reply, click
here.)
[This is part of a much longer post, detailing the many ways in which the writer disapproved of Mr Kurson's views and disliked the choice of Breakfast Table participants.]
(6/29)
What was the last big discovery that had so many scientists crowing and so many empty talking heads yelping at some utopian moon [genome project, Tuesday]? Splitting the atom, yes? After so many decades, what wonderful benefits has that achievement provided to us? Good lord, I can't think of any. (Don't give me any jive about radiation therapy.) Is there no one who can analyze this situation in a realistic way without sentimentalizing about God or waxing rhapsodic about science? Give us a damn break. You're not going to see any benefits derived from geeks in labcoats mucking around with genes.
--tek
(To reply, click
here.)
To tek: Humanity is richer, healthier, and happier today than ever before, largely because of scientific and technological advance. Please spare us the self-indulgent crap about lab-coated guys ruining life. In fact, it's been the damn artsy types (Hitler, Stalin, Mao--all prided themselves on their artistic abilities, none was a scientific or technical guy) who have been the architects of the last century's horrors. Where's the responsibility for that?
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click
here.)
[And this argument ran and ran--"had smallpox lately tek?" "No, how about AIDS?" "I feel quite the moron responding" "Trust your feelings".]
There's a huge amount of information in life other than DNA. Protein folding is one of the less complex and difficult. This is why Marisa Bowes is considering things that couldn't possibly be explained by DNA. I'm sure it's well for her to ask, but it's clear that the brain that questions the genetic code is extremely more complex than is the DNA that pointed it in the right direction.
What happens in the brain has crucial roots in DNA, yet its complexity and operation are far more ordered by the brain's environment, inside and outside of the body, than it is by DNA. You don't ask of anything as complex as a thought what its relation is to DNA without severe reductionism. The sooner the media learn something of the complexity of everything, the sooner we'll learn something of the complexity of what they usually report on. They've moved in that direction in the last 10 or 20 years. They still have a long way to go. One hopes the genome sequencing will take the media that way.
--Glen Davidson
(To reply, click
here.)
[Ms Bowe responded to this post in her second Tuesday entry.]
(6/27)
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Reader Response from The Fray (to be read after the final entry):
[From the Fray Editor: Ken, Ken you didn't need to mention homosexuality or abortion to encourage controversy--saying there are too many people and they live too long (Tuesday) worked just fine. Fray posters came out in force, bringing with them Spinoza and a 95-year-old grandmother. The post below was titled Don't tell me when to die Mr Kurson:]
What an ugly letter by Mr Kurson! How exactly is the premise that people should live longer demonstrably false? I like the idea of using government money to prolong life (especially my life, it's demonstrably true that my life is cool). We have a right and responsibility to know what makes us tick and we have a right and responsibility to use that knowledge to help people better enjoy their lives. If science produces a way for people to live longer, I will gladly participate. If you don't want to, Mr Kurson, then don't. I'd hate to see you go, but I won't interfere. Just don't go around saying that longer lifespans are demonstrably bad--it might not seem so biting on the abstract level, but it's hurtful to individuals who are dying and would rather live. Whether or not this new knowledge brings us a step closer to godhood remains to be seen. Even if the answer is no, or if the question is irrelevant, it does make me happy to see that we humans are so clever, curious and philosophical that we've finally started to figure ourselves out--if not metaphysically, at least physically.
--Michael Maiello
(To reply, click here.)
Since when are books not technology [Tuesday's entry]? I suppose Ken's definition of technology is any invention that makes people better off in a way of which he disapproves. But hey, if utter incoherence lets him live more comfortably in his savage little world, more power to him. Just don't make me live in it too.
--Ananda Gupta
(To reply, click here.)
[This is part of a much longer post, detailing the many ways in which the writer disapproved of Mr Kurson's views and disliked the choice of Breakfast Table participants.]
(6/29)
What was the last big discovery that had so many scientists crowing and so many empty talking heads yelping at some utopian moon [genome project, Tuesday]? Splitting the atom, yes? After so many decades, what wonderful benefits has that achievement provided to us? Good lord, I can't think of any. (Don't give me any jive about radiation therapy.) Is there no one who can analyze this situation in a realistic way without sentimentalizing about God or waxing rhapsodic about science? Give us a damn break. You're not going to see any benefits derived from geeks in labcoats mucking around with genes.
--tek
(To reply, click here.)
To tek: Humanity is richer, healthier, and happier today than ever before, largely because of scientific and technological advance. Please spare us the self-indulgent crap about lab-coated guys ruining life. In fact, it's been the damn artsy types (Hitler, Stalin, Mao--all prided themselves on their artistic abilities, none was a scientific or technical guy) who have been the architects of the last century's horrors. Where's the responsibility for that?
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click here.)
[And this argument ran and ran--"had smallpox lately tek?" "No, how about AIDS?" "I feel quite the moron responding" "Trust your feelings".]
There's a huge amount of information in life other than DNA. Protein folding is one of the less complex and difficult. This is why Marisa Bowes is considering things that couldn't possibly be explained by DNA. I'm sure it's well for her to ask, but it's clear that the brain that questions the genetic code is extremely more complex than is the DNA that pointed it in the right direction.
What happens in the brain has crucial roots in DNA, yet its complexity and operation are far more ordered by the brain's environment, inside and outside of the body, than it is by DNA. You don't ask of anything as complex as a thought what its relation is to DNA without severe reductionism. The sooner the media learn something of the complexity of everything, the sooner we'll learn something of the complexity of what they usually report on. They've moved in that direction in the last 10 or 20 years. They still have a long way to go. One hopes the genome sequencing will take the media that way.
--Glen Davidson
(To reply, click here.)
[Ms Bowe responded to this post in her second Tuesday entry.]
(6/27)