Films, Wines, and Intellectuals
Mar. 17th, 2018 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipMonday evening we went to The Astor to see Liquid Sky, which I hadn't seen in about thirty years or so. It is a decidedly B-grade film in terms of production and acting, but does a good presentation of the glam-punk fashion scene of the time, and has a superb plot. April is looking like a challenging month there with Eraserhead, Dune, Inception, and Interstellar all playing. On a related level, played Eclipse Phase on Friday night (we were completely hosed due to an ill-thought snap decision) and will be running another session on Sunday.
University House hosted another wine masterclass on Friday, this time German Riesling. It was a good overview of the only region of Germany I really know by experience, although try as they might there is nothing astounding about any Riesling, sweet or dry. It's the rice congee of wines. Appalling if bad, but usually satisfying and shouldn't cost more than $10 a bowl. I'm rather looking forward to the next event of South American wines; I am, of course, familiar with Chilean varieties, but I must admit I have no experience of Brazilian.
Current Affairs has published a superb critique of Jordan Peterson, outlying a method that combines banality with obscurity, with a fundamentalist's dogma. It is a far cry from, for example, Noam Chomsky's declaration that public intelectuals need to "expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions", of Habermas' "courage to take normative stances and the imagination to adopt novel perspectives", even in the age of the Internet, or Foucault's claims to universalism mixed with a Gramscian proletarian-orientated "organic intellectual", which develops in a very different form in Hannah Arendt's refugee-cosmopolitan experience. Looking a the world, it should be clear that the intellectual world needs more of this ilk, rather than that of individual self-help texts raised to political ideology, as offered by Peterson.
University House hosted another wine masterclass on Friday, this time German Riesling. It was a good overview of the only region of Germany I really know by experience, although try as they might there is nothing astounding about any Riesling, sweet or dry. It's the rice congee of wines. Appalling if bad, but usually satisfying and shouldn't cost more than $10 a bowl. I'm rather looking forward to the next event of South American wines; I am, of course, familiar with Chilean varieties, but I must admit I have no experience of Brazilian.
Current Affairs has published a superb critique of Jordan Peterson, outlying a method that combines banality with obscurity, with a fundamentalist's dogma. It is a far cry from, for example, Noam Chomsky's declaration that public intelectuals need to "expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions", of Habermas' "courage to take normative stances and the imagination to adopt novel perspectives", even in the age of the Internet, or Foucault's claims to universalism mixed with a Gramscian proletarian-orientated "organic intellectual", which develops in a very different form in Hannah Arendt's refugee-cosmopolitan experience. Looking a the world, it should be clear that the intellectual world needs more of this ilk, rather than that of individual self-help texts raised to political ideology, as offered by Peterson.