Mel Gibson & The Scapegoat

Too conscious an awareness of all that the "scapegoat" connotes in modern usage eliminates the essential point that the persecutors believe in the guilt of their victim; they are imprisoned in the illusion of persecution that is no simple idea but a full system.

- Rene Girard, The Scapegoat

Mel Gibson is back in the spotlight again - not that he ever left.

News broke earlier this month that Gibson will be producing (and possibly directing) a film about Jewish warrior Judah Maccabee written by Joe Eszterhas (screenwriter of Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Catholic convert). Some Jewish leaders are understandably upset about this.

There's plenty negative to say about Mel Gibson and his outlandish anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist remarks in recent years - but, as one Jewish writer notes, "you can love the art...and believe that the creator might be in need of psychiatric help or even that he might just be a bad guy."

In that spirit, I'll focus this article not on Gibson's merits as a man, but as a director. In particular, I want to show that there is a universal and noble theme uniting his four films (Apocalypto, The Passion of the Christ, Braveheart, and The Man Without a Face): the concept of the scapegoat.

The Harlem River Dispatch: Beauty in the Breakdown - The Films of Paul Thomas Anderson

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

- Helen Keller

In the early to mid-nineties, independent cinema was on the rise, taking by storm a lethargic Hollywood that in previous years had seemed to grow weary of itself. As edgy and low-budget films made by young maverick filmmakers were dominating film festivals all over the world, risk-taking production companies began to scoop them up, signing several of them to development deals.

Over at Miramax, Bob and Harvey Weinstein had picked up hotshot writer-directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith, while Michael De Luca and the folks over at New Line Cinemas latched onto their own wunderkind: the scruffy and boyish looking Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson quickly revealed himself to have a point of view apart from his peers that was both highly original and unflinchingly brave, but also brimming with humanity, truth and compassion.

Documentary About "A Confederacy of Dunces" Author

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

-Jonathan Swift

While driving through Biloxi, Mississippi this past summer, I found myself hopelessly lost. After wandering across a long bridge to a remote residential area, I decided to rely on my instincts instead of Google Maps (which proved to be the wiser decision). After turning around on Popps Ferry Road and re-traversing the bridge, I finally found the work site (which was - of course - not where Google Maps said it was). 

A week later, I was reading about John Kennedy Toole (who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces), and learned that Toole, after driving cross-country to California and back to Georgia in March of 1969, spent his last day alive in Biloxi, Mississippi. Worse than that - it was on that exact road, Popps Ferry Road, just yards away from where I'd been, that Toole tragically ended his own life at the young age of 32.

Book Review: Peter Kreeft - "An Ocean Full of Angels"

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

Philosopher Peter Kreeft has given us a great many books (over 50) in his 30 years of writing, including I Surf Therefore I Am, The Philosophy of Tolkein, Socrates Meets Descartes, and The Sea Within, just to name a few. When he is not writing, he is lecturing, debating, or surfing; but always, in all things Kreeft, philosophy is part and parcel of the operation.

So it is without much surprise or regret that Kreeft's debut full-length novel, An Ocean Full of Angels, is an unconventional love story for poets and philosophers.

Paul Simon's New Album: A Shared Spiritual Space

True love is delicate and kind, full of gentle perception and understanding, full of beauty and grace, full of joy unutterable.

-Dorothy Day

If you were watching media coverage of the ten-year memorial service of 9/11 at ground zero this past Sunday, you may have seen singer-songwriter Paul Simon replace the scheduled performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" with the more melancholic and haunting "The Sound of Silence." Tears flowed all across the country; the performance was as heartbreaking as it was beautiful, a reminder not only of the horribly tragic events of September 11th, but also of the curative power of remembrance, compassion, and love. Simon's eyes, like the reflecting pools beneath him, glimmered with fortitude and hope, despite the great despair surrounding the event.

What many might not know is that, for Paul Simon, this emphasis on the power of music to continually transform and inspire us is not mere 60's nostalgia, but a living reality. In fact, some, including Elvis Costello, are even calling his 2011 album, So Beautiful or So What (download here for just 8 dollars) his finest - it is also, incidentally, his most spiritual.

The Harlem River Dispatch: From Angst to Awareness - The Spiritual Evolution of Pearl Jam

Twenty years ago, the music industry like a hawk descended upon the dour city of Seattle, Washington to capitalize on the emerging grunge rock scene. Garage bands made up of flannel shirted youths with long greasy hair suddenly were gaining national attention with a jarring style of music which greatly differed from the hair metal bands which populated the pop culture of the eighties.

Among them was the band Pearl Jam led by front man Eddie Vedder, a wild-eyed, far from mellow surfer dude who possessed a powerful baritone voice and had the alluring magnetism of a lone mangy wolf. Vedder, along with his four band mates, released their debut album Ten in 1991, which featured a variety of rock anthems and power ballads which dealt with an array of dark and disturbing subject matters.

The Honorable Message of Lil Wayne's "How to Love" Video

*WARNING*: Video contains some graphic content

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast':

that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

-GK Chesterton

This past weekend, in the starry haze of a Brooklyn rooftop, I had a beer-fueled debate with some old friends about the merits of Lil Wayne's music. They insisted that Lil Wayne is a worthy artist, if only for providing rollicking, devil-may-care party music. I gladly took up the foot-dragging skepticism of a hip-hop connoisseur, who refuses to see a respectable art form decimated with ignorance, egoism, profanity, and negativity.

You'll find plenty of the aformetioned in Wayne's latest effort, "Tha Carter IV," and for that reason we can't endorse the entire album - but a surprising video released last week for his single "How to Love" transmits something very worthy, very relevant, and profoundly positive.

It's been written that the beginning of wisdom is the hatred of evil - and to hate evil, one should love love. But how should we love? What is true love, and how does the conclusion of Wayne's video get it right?

"Transcendent Man": Us, Robots?

Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man...What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever...Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness.

-CS Lewis

Have you ever asked yourself, looking back on the exponential explosion of computers, cell phones, and the internet in the past thirty years: Where is all this technology headed? What's the "end game"?

According to inventor Ray Kurzweil, subject of the documentary Transcendent Man (now available for instant watch on Netflix), technology is headed right toward us - into us, in fact. Kurzweil has said that by the year 2029, an exponential increase in nanotechnology, genetics, and robotics will result in a brave new world known as "the singularity," in which man and his machines are no longer distinguishable, because machines will become human, and humans will become machines - free from all traces of disease, deficiency, and death.