by Ted Tuvera Posted on 03/05/2014 11:15 PM |Updated 03/06/2014 2:15 PM

As a kid, I grew up with a dream of serving God and my country. I'm now 18 and I'm branded as a rebel."

Priesthood has always been perceived as a rather radical path among young wits I grew up with. My peers had always been for their American dreams of engineering, accountancy, commerce, education for such are deemed ventures on future financial stability and security. Looking back now, perhaps, my college course on journalism is not a sure job choice.

The former was an aspiration that sprouted from the noble lives of Francis and Augustine, who were heroes to me when I was in the critical stage of high school. Their mere mortal perfection led me to that idealism of fulfilling Matthew 6:24 to its most literal sense: I even fantasized a more highfaluting step on the religious vow of poverty.

Quarters before graduation, I became open to a lot of (what I now declare as) bourgeois liberalism that made me, in the spirit of maturity, see life in different perspectives: new-age religion or theosophy, the political satires of Lourd de Veyra, the blasphemous art of Mideo Cruz, the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll music of Guns n Roses, Noli and Fili, nudity as a form of art, and a lot more of counter-culture. I ended up critical on religion, thus, ending my saintly deeds with the Church.

In the same period, I became acquainted with activists. Yes, the leftists. This acquaintance motivated the shift of my childhood radicalism in favor of the peoples struggle. The reality of how peasants are brutally terrorized in the countryside, on how the workers are facing the dreadful working conditions despite hazardous jobs, and, why, despite the hard work they do, are they poor while landlords and big capitalists are very rich? And a more critical inquiry: why, despite the Philippines rich natural resources, are the masses still in poverty?

Stop. Look. Listen. They are just reminders of what young people today do not care about for the contrary worship of popular, mainstream culture. Dispel the brainwashing conspiracies, such basic realities that are now graded as propagandas must be an injury-causing slap for those who enjoy the comforts of a blindfolded society.

We do not need to argue ideologies on basically observing the unequal military and economic relations of the US and the Philippines. Why are they allowed to sail along some of our vast seas while local fisher folks are not? Why are big foreign companies encouraged to invest widely in the Philippines because of raw material resources that are very much available and on the contrary why is it that there is no national industry of our own? Why is it that there is no auto industry in the Philippines despite the engineering geniuses and raw materials present in the Philippines? Sure enough, we are not a bobo people.

One with the masses

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On being Catholic and leftist

Details Published on Monday, 03 March 2014 19:33

Stay positive./Pic from positivethoughts.inI don't know about you, but I am knackered. I wake up knackered, and spend each morning limply punching away at the fog inside my skull. I eat lunch knackered, then swear at every inanimate object in front of me. I try not to fall asleep at my desk, then stagger to my sofa, pass out in my clothes and crawl into bed for another night of infuriatingly broken sleep. That is my life. It's not like I even do very much.

I daren't complain about this out loud, of course, because I don't want to get into a game of competitive exhaustion with anyone. I don't want to tell somebody that I had four hours' sleep, because they'll reply that they had only three, plus their mattress caught fire at midnight. Worse, what if they're a new parent? "How are you?" they'll ask. "Bit tired," I'll reply. "Oh yeah?" they'll snap back. "Well, I haven't slept since October because I've been scraping baby diarrhoea off my fridge door with a spatula." You can't win with new parents.

But I am tired, and I blame myself. Like most people I know, my life has fallen into the quicksand of modernity, filled with a whirl of televisions and phones and sirens and emails and Twitter and lights and noise and bleeps. Simpsons quotes, video game sound effects and fairground music riverdance madly across the surface of my brain. Switching off takes deliberate effort, and even then it doesn't always work. I'll almost be asleep and suddenly my mind will shriek: "Have you remembered to set your alarm?" or, "You didn't reply to that woman yesterday, you idiot" or, "Remember the Nyan Cat song? No? OK, I'm going to repeat it over and over again at the top of my voice until 6am, hope that's cool."

To shut out the world, I have turned to transcendental meditation. This was not my first choice. First I tried the sleep app Pzizz, where you get bombarded by binaural sound effects until you drop off. This didn't work because I was convinced it would subliminally order me to eat my parents in my sleep. Then I tried flotation tanks, where you lie inside a tiny pod full of salty water for an hour. This didn't work because it turns out that splashing around inside a dark plastic coffin full of boiling hot tears is the precise opposite of relaxing. After that, I tried mindfulness.

Chances are you've already heard of mindfulness, because people won't shut up about it. Once, Buddhists and monks had mindfulness all to themselves, as a way of concentrating on their thought processes during meditation. Now that we've found a way of stripping out the spiritual aspect, it's everywhere. There are books. There are seminars. Therapists and counsellors prescribe it. There are apps, like the incredibly popular Headspace, where you're guided through 10 minutes of breathing exercises and top-down self-diagnostic checks on various parts of your body until you become the perfect model of beaming self-realisation.

Mindfulness helps thousands of people every day; people with depression and eating disorders and addiction problems. But it's not for me. Mindfulness requires self-observation, and self-observation is exhausting. You have to sit and pay attention to everything. How you're breathing, what your posture's like, what you're thinking about, why you're thinking about it, what to do because you're thinking about whatever you're thinking. It goes on and on. I know people who have been put on mindfulness courses by doctors, only to run away screaming at the piles of homework they're expected to do.

Plus mindfulness makes me neurotic. One exercise I did involved writing down every thought that passed through my mind over the course of half an hour. This taught me that I was worried about work. I didn't know I had been worried about work, but the knowledge sent me into a panicky death spiral. In retrospect, I should have just pushed all my feelings down into the pit of my stomach and ignored them until they turned into heart disease and killed me at a tragically young age. This is the Heritage way.

So I turned to transcendental meditation. I was wary at first, because I clearly remember watching a party political broadcast for the Natural Law party, the politicised wing of transcendental meditation, about 20 years ago. I still remember how colossally creepy it was. There was a man with a thick Selleck tache sitting behind a desk and explaining, in a cartoonishly sinister way, how his party wanted to unite the country beneath a field of collective consciousness. There was a horrible purple mural of the galaxy, the sort of thing you find in shops that sell under-the-counter bongs to 12-year-olds. There were the Yogic Flyers, who were basically a couple of blokes flapping around on a mattress in their pyjamas. There was the claim that the Yogic Flyers had single-handedly reduced crime in Merseyside by 60%, presumably by bouncing cross-legged around Toxteth like a squadron of low-flying Batmen. Some of us tried to yogic-fly up and down the CDT block at school the next day. It did our knees in.

The Natural Law party looked like the smug dinner party guest who had it all figured out and wanted to condescend you into submission. But times change. The Natural Law party deregistered a decade ago. Every idiot's got a beard now. More importantly, transcendental meditation has undergone an enormous PR overhaul. In recent years, it has been reframed as a practical lifestyle choice rather than something for bead-liking soap-dodgers.

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Science is a method of understanding nature, as such, it can only be fully understood through analyzing the art, literature and culture of the worlds inhabitants.

The Rutgers British Studies Center had this understanding in mind when they invited like-minded professionals to speak at Scientific (R)evolutions last Friday in Alexander Librarys Teleconference Lecture Hall.

Erin Kelly, coordinator of the event, wanted to break boundaries between disciplines to achieve a higher understanding of sciences impact on society and vice versa.

Kelly, a graduate student from the Department of English, said the conference proved the continuities between seemingly unrelated subjects. They put a lot of effort into organizing the panels into unrelated topics.

Even if the person is [in] a completely different field than your own, you can have conversations that link different texts, she said.

They had people talking about contemporary poetry and creating coherent threads with science, Kelly said.

John Tresch, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed the impacts of spirituality and multiculturalism on the progress of science. He said these other forms of thought are constructive for science.

The Society for Psychical Research from the late 19th century was a moment when loads of physicists were very convinced by spiritualism, as it existed then, he said.

On the other hand, he said, scientists frequently draw borders with what counts as believable, excluding ideas that have no concrete material manifestation. Many scientists will scoff at theories of spiritualism that require invisible forces.

In the earlier 20th century these ideas had more leniency, he said. While it is easy to find cases of simple opposition, his interest is in studying spiritualism and different cultures and its effects on mainstream science.

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Interdisciplinary conference explores science via culture

Pope Francis greets pilgrims in St. Peter's Square during the Wednesday general audience on Dec. 4, 2013. Credit: Kyle Burkhart/CNA.

AVILA, SPAIN: Pope Francis received a letter Wednesday from the president of the Spanish region of Castile and Leon, Juan Vicente Herrera, inviting him to visit Spain to mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of St. Teresa of Avila.

The invitation was delivered Feb. 26 to the Holy Father during an audience held with a delegation from the Foundation for the Commemoration of the 500th Centenary of St. Teresa of Jesus, the government of Castile and Leon, and the city of Avila. The Holy Father was also presented with the pastoral, cultural, and scientific program for the event.

The delegation included Bishop Jesus Garcia Burillo of Avila; Jose Martinez Gonzalez, vicar general of the Discalced Carmelite Order; Alicia Garcia, culture and tourism adviser of Castile and Leon; and Miguel Garcia Nieto, mayor of Avila.

According to EFE news agency, the delegation met with the Father General of the Carmelite Order in Rome, Friar Saverio Cannistra, and with Spain's ambassador to the Holy See, Eduardo Guitierrez Saenz de Buruaga.

The foundation hopes Pope Francis will travel to Avila in 2015 to preside at the closing ceremony of the centenary, which is being officially celebrated by the Spanish government.

Castile and Leon, where Avila is located, will play a key role in the celebrations, as the region where St. Teresa was born and died, and where she founded 17 convents.

St. Teresa was born in Avila March 28, 1515, and was largely responsible for the reform of the Carmelite Order, along with St. John of the Cross.

Teresa of Jesus had no academic education but always set great store by the teachings of theologians, men of letters and spiritual teachers, Benedict XVI said of her during his Feb. 2, 2011, General Audience. As a writer, she always adhered to what she had lived personally through or had seen in the experience of others, in other words basing herself on her own first-hand knowledge.

Teresa had the opportunity to build up relations of spiritual friendship with many Saints and with St John of the Cross in particular. At the same time she nourished herself by reading the Fathers of the Church, St Jerome, St Gregory the Great and St Augustine.

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Almira Astudillo Gilles' favorite quote comes from Mother Theresa: "We may think that what we do is but a drop in the ocean, but the ocean would be less without that one drop." These words have inspired and motivated her in a very profound way. Whether it is through her award-winning literary works, civic leadership, and efforts to preserve the natural resources and cultural collections of the Philippines, she has made an impact on Filipino society abroad and in the motherland.

"I keep busy and remember that I have an obligation to be the best person I can become, to be useful. I always keep my eye on the objective I want to achieve, and little bumps in the road just make the journey more interesting," she says as she reflects on her body of work.

Gilles, who is based in Chicago, Ill., was on island in late October to speak to students at the University of Guam and St. Anthony Catholic School. She was invited by the group of Filipino professors at UOG who started the Philippine Studies Lecture Series. Lilnabeth Somera, associate professor of communication at UOG, recognizes Gilles as a rising author among the new generation of Filipino writers. "We need to expose our students to different ideas and perspectives beyond the classroom. When I brought her to St. Anthony School, the kids were enthralled to meet a real Filipino author. Such connections are important for children and adults as well," she explains.

Gilles' works include fiction, nonfiction, novels, plays, poetry, and short stories. She is also an editor and conservationist and has delivered presentations on multicultural literature and Philippine heritage in various venues including educational institutions, museums, and festivals across the United States.

"Her discussion regarding the need to preserve the Philippine heritage in different places which are part of the diaspora was memorable. It generated the most insightful comments from the students in the audience. It was encouraging to note that there is this questioning going on in the minds of young people about their cultural identity and connections to the Philippines," adds Somera.

Gilles was the fourth speaker in the Philippine lecture series, which started in 2010. The main objective of the series is to highlight different areas of Philippine Studies and bring speakers to the university and local Guam community who have a cultural affinity and interest in Philippine culture.

The 54-year-old author earned the "Pamana ng Pilipino Presidential Award" for writing, bestowed by President Benigno Aquino in Dec. 2012. The award is given to Filipinos overseas, who, in exemplifying the talent and industry of the Filipino, have brought the country honor and recognition through excellence and distinction in the pursuit of their work or profession.

"It opened so many doors to other opportunities and resources that allowed me to pursue my goals," says Gilles. "Also, I discovered that the one thing that truly motivates me, aside from my children is contributing to the progress and development of the Philippines," she explains. Incidentally, Allan Pineda, better known as "apl.de.ap," of the Grammy-Award winning group Black Eyed Peas was also given the award at the same ceremony Gilles attended.

Gilles' first novel, "The Fire Beneath (Tales of Gold)" was named a finalist for the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Awards for 2013. It's one of three finalists in the Traditional Fiction category. Inspired by a true event in the Philippines, the story is about a bulldozer operator who discovers gold artifacts.

Much more than the familiar narrative of unexpected fortune and perilous descent, the book is an exploration of contrasts: discovery and concealment, greed and generosity, secularization and spirituality. It examines the demands we place on ourselves, our relationships, and institutions. It asks if we are justified in pursuing the kind of life we want despite the demands of others and examines who should judge such choices. Some of the gold described in the novel is displayed in a permanent collection at the Ayala Museum in the Philippines.

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One drop in the ocean: Almira Gilles proves that small things can make big differences

Feature Article of Saturday, 1 March 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyones head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children(Amilcar Cabral).

A fool is a wise mans ladder (A South African Proverb).

This is not to say China, like the West, does not benefit from Africa by supplying arms to pariah regimes in Africa, Sudan and others, further adding to the balkanization of the African world. It is to underscore why the research focus of our institutions should be morally expansive and ideologically progressive, pushing through and beyond the concrete narrowness of ethnic, racial, or national trivialities. Peter Tosh also asked that real criminals in society should be clearly identified by the powers that be rather than their merely pontifying about crime. This is a very good question. Who are the real criminals in the dehumanizing enterprise of the non-Western world, particularly of the African world, we may alternatively pose in his behalf?

However, the real criminals may as well include the Eurocentric leadership of the African world, enemies of the African worlds progress on matters related to development, growth, democratization, economic sustainability, and self-reliance. Tosh also said the attainment of equal rights and justice should constitute the moral prerequisites for peace (See Equal Rights). That also means its the moral responsibility of Afrocentric researchers to smoke out these sheepish Africans leaders, their unscrupulous and shadowy patrons, from their Eurocentric carapace and throw them at the devouring feet of the roaring tigerish masses. But why do we go hungry when Africa has vast expanse of land part of which she leases to Western multinationals and Asians? Why do we import petroleum products when Africa is awash in natural gas and other petroleum products?

Why do we face energy problems when the equator cuts through Africa like a hot knife driven through a solidified bar of butter? Why do we import Western-made chocolate products when Ghana and Ivory Coast count among the worlds largest producers of cocoa beans? Why do we lack engineers when many of our engineers count among the best in the West (world)? Why do we lack health professionals when many of our nurses, doctors, pharmacists, psychologists, and psychiatrists count among the best in the West (world)? Why do we lack philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, sociology, English, history, and engineering professors and researchers when many of our people in these disciplines count among the best in the West (world)? Progressive African culture should be part of the totality of institutional or organizational exercise.

What is culture? The generally accepted meaning of culture is that its the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of people or human beings and transmitted from generation to another, writes Bennie A. Khompa, adding: It includes, according to Sekou Toureall the material and immaterial works of art and science, plus knowledge, manners, education, mode of thought, behavior and attitudes accumulated by the people both through and by virtue of their struggle for freedom from the hold and domination of nature. We also include the result of their efforts to destroy the deviationist politics, social systems of domination and exploitation through the productive process of social life (See Khompas The African Personality). Interestingly, Khompa shows through his brilliant and powerful essay that thought culture may appear alike in all societies, in fact, it is not universal.

He, therefore, employs the conceptualization of African Personality, a theory advanced by the likes of Nkrumah and Nyerere to buttress his case. Then again, culture has a language dimension and therein lies moral demands for cultural relativism. For instance, Prof. Daniel L. Everetts influential work calls Chomskyan Universal Grammar into question (See Everetts Language: The Cultural Tool, and Dont Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle; see also Robert Lowies Culture & Ethnology, Donnellys Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, and Roger L. Blackburns 2011 study of the Universal Periodic Reviews). Among other important conclusions that can be drawn from these works is the fact that there is nothing called cultural universalism. Nkrumahs progressive ideas are still very relevant to our contemporary civilization.

In other words, culture is relative. And culture is not static. Change is the only constant in life, as some prefer to put it. Therefore, the changes we introduce in our cultural thinking should positively address Africas pressing needs. This is precisely why the theory of Afrocentricity eschews uncritical copying of non-African ideas. Indeed, Molefi Kete Asante has advised us to always make sure, first, we have progressive African ideas firmly in place, then second, we use that as the evaluative foundation upon which other progressive ideas from without should be raised (See Decolonizing Our University, international conference held in Malaysia, 2011). These questions directly lead to the political economy of brain drain, political instability, and lack of opportunities for intellectual independence and growth, among others, in some parts of the African world. Consequently, an Afrocentric organization should try to answer these questions without ideological or sociopolitical partiality.

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A Moral Imperative For Organizing (ll)

Gravity is a movie set in space and a movie about space, a movie that uses the physical and imaginative space of the movie screen in new ways, using the maligned 3-D format to reproduce a three-dimensional realm without up or down, right or left. It has made much more money than any other major Oscar nominee (a dazzling total of $700 million-plus, most of that outside the United States) and has a 100-percent rating from the top critics on Rotten Tomatoes, present company included. This is a picture that has claimed the elusive devils-candy combination every Hollywood filmmaker dreams about commercial success and artistic credibility like nothing else made in 2013. Can director Alfonso Cuarn and his collaborators overcome Oscar voters evident bias against effects-driven sci-fi spectacle and cap off this triumphant run with a best-picture prize?

Most Hollywood tea-leaf readers appear to think not, although in a race thats likely to be decided by a tiny margin, and shaped by the academys preferential-voting system, even the best-connected insiders are just guessing. As I wrote earlier this week while pondering American Hustle, this years Oscar race reaches the finish line as an unprecedented three-way tie, and almost any outcome remains plausible. Im less interested in the accuracy of all these prognostications than in figuring out how they help us think about this movie, and what they tell us about the film industrys current self-understanding. Many observers are predicting that the impressive technical achievement of Gravity will be rewarded with the best-director prize, but not with best picture. Although this is regarded as an unusual outcome, exactly the same thing happened last year, when Ang Lee won best director for Life of Pi, a special-effects showcase that, like Gravity, consists largely of human actors pasted into CGI environments.

This may reflect the widespread perception that one anonymous Oscar voter expressed to the Hollywood Reporter in cynical and highly entertaining terms, that being the idea that Gravity is a feat of engineering or a planetarium show rather than a movie in the old-fashioned sense. In my initial (and largely positive) review, I compared Gravity to a roller coaster ride or a Rube Goldberg machine designed to demonstrate Murphys Law with every clank of the gears. Watching it a second time on DVD, rather than in 3-D on a big screen I was struck even more by the clunky, exaggerated storytelling beats, and by the way Ed Harris godlike Houston voice supplies crucial plot details without which the whole thing becomes a near-abstract art film. There isnt much talking in the domino-effect, action-packed screenplay (written by Cuarn with his son, Jons), but almost every time Sandra Bullock or George Clooney opened their mouths, I wished they hadnt.

After two viewings of Gravity Im still not entirely sure how to feel about it, although theres no question its a cinematic landmark. If this is a planetarium show, its a remarkably gorgeous one that was created by a master craftsman of cinema and a team of artisanal technicians who skillfully elide the distance between engineering and art. The unanimously positive reviews, to my mind, reflect the amount of overthinking among movie critics and many film buffs over the transition from photochemical film to digital video, and from physical or optical effects to CGI. Gravity is a film made at the absolute cutting edge of digital technology, and more than anything else we were relieved to find out that all that money and machinery can produce something that looks beautiful, something that rewards the eye, something that does not involve blue New Age indigenous peoples.

Indeed, Cuarn and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki even throw a not-insignificant bone to old-school photographic film loyalists. (Do I have to be clear about this? OK, I do: Spoiler alert!) Most of Gravity was shot on the nearly ubiquitous Arri Alexa, the high-end digital camera of the moment and since much of that footage was digitally constructed, it only counts as photography in a virtual or metaphorical sense. But the final scene, with Bullocks terrestrial splashdown and her straight-outta-Terrence Malick aquatic rebirth, was shot on location at Lake Powell, Ariz., using the near-defunct 65mm film format. (Actually, there are numerous recent examples of an all-digital production incorporating a few images of old-school film for visual or thematic contrast. The future of the photochemical medium, at least in the Hollywood context, may be as a flavoring ingredient, the cumin of movies.)

My problem with Gravity was that I got bored with its cascade of nested, melodramatic disasters, and its predigested nuggets of imported spirituality, long before we got to that scene of Sandy swimming with the froggies. At the end of the film, Cuarn is clearly aiming for a revelatory and mysterious vision, a literal and figurative regeneration somewhat akin to the concluding images in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he gets there by way of an overwrought tale about a maiden tied to a railroad track, one who despite her bravery and knowhow and male-coded given name requires the last-minute intervention of a white knight to save her life. Yes, the white knight is a ghost or a hallucination or a projection of her own ego onto the universe. But he still looks an awful lot like George Clooney.

That scene, two-thirds of the way through the film, is the only one in the entire movie where Clooney and Bullock interact in the same physical space. (The space-capsule interiors are sets constructed at Shepperton Studios in England, with some digital effects added.) Just as Bullocks Ryan Stone has decided to shut down the compromised Russian capsule where shes taken refuge and give up hope, Clooneys Matt Kowalski, the mission commander who untethered himself and drifted away many hours earlier, appears outside, knocks on the door and lets himself in. (This movie has several technical gaffes, by the way, but the idea that you could open a capsule briefly without disaster is not one of them. The exploding eyeballs seen in many sci-fi films are hyperbolic, and a few seconds of exposure to the frozen vacuum of space probably wouldnt kill you.)

As a moment of epistemological rupture in a film whose primary mode appears to be scientific realism, this scene is ingenious. Of course its wildly unlikely that Kowalski could have survived that long in space, and pretty much impossible that he could have found his way to Stone aboard the Soyuz. But for at least a few seconds, we sit there struggling with suspension of disbelief: Is Cuarn seriously proposing a miracle, and are we willing to go along with it? Kowalskis spectral return immediately follows Bullocks biggest acting showpiece, the mutually unintelligible conversation with a Greenlandic radio operator where Stone gets to hear dogs barking, a baby crying and a father singing a cradle song, all presumably for the last time.

While Clooney delivers the scene in his best mode of casual bonhomie, digging out a hidden vodka bottle and toasting the Russian cosmonaut whose space-walk record he has just broken, hes boxed into a cornball angelic-visitation role that seems to have teleported in from a Frank Capra movie. Ive watched the scene four times, and I find myself actively resisting the dialogue, which amounts to: So your kid died! Buck up! Thats no reason for you to die alone out here in space! As if the apocalyptic scenario of Gravity and the main characters solitary and desperate predicament werent enough, we have to throw in a dead child and some vague musing about fate, faith and randomness. (If this woman is emotionally damaged and has a death wish, that doesnt
say a lot for NASAs psychological screening.)

But if that scene exposes the weakness and incoherence of Gravity as drama, the films very first scene a single, extraordinary virtual shot that lasts almost 13 minutes, in a movie that clocks in at just over 90 nearly makes up for it. It begins with a breathtaking vista of the earth, seen from orbit, proceeds through the easy banter and technical jargon of the astronauts, abruptly shifts into a mood of emergency and impending disaster, delivers a harrowing set of shocks and ends with Stone, alone and disoriented, spinning away into infinity. It contains all the ideas, all the thrills and terror and all the ambiguous balance between oblivion and transcendence that Cuarn struggles to deliver, in more literal and linear fashion, throughout the rest of the movie. That first shot is Gravity, a mesmerizing but chilly accomplishment that has altered the course of cinematic history. Everything that follows is clumsy exposition. What happens on Sunday night will reveal how Hollywood insiders understand that equation.

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Best moments of the Oscar front-runners: The dazzling breakthrough of Gravity

An upcoming free exhibition of historic photographs at the University of Sydney's Macleay Museum offers a fascinating look at life in the Pacific during the early colonial period.

Dating from the late 1850s the images on display are drawn exclusively from the Macleay Museum's extensive historic photograph collection. The show includes photographs taken by missionaries, anthropologists, tourists, and early government expeditions. They offer intriguing insights into the history of some of Australia's nearest neighbours.

Points of Focus features images of the British proclamation of a protectorate in Papua in 1884, colonial and civil war in Samoa in the late 19th century, and Douglas Mawson's first scientific expedition - to Vanuatu in 1903. The personal side of colonial service is shown in the family photos of Sir Hubert Murray (Australian Lieutenant-Governor of Papua for over thirty years, up until 1940). Detailed and intimate glimpses of Solomon Islanders' every day and ceremonial life are seen in the images captured by anthropologists working in the region in the early 20th century. There are five themes to the exhibition: community, sea & land, governance, spirituality and the market.

"We wanted to depict people, places and times that don't receive a lot of attention in history books but have an important historical and ongoing relationship with Australia," says exhibition curator Rebecca Conway.

Rebecca developed Points of Focus after researching Pacific collections in Britain, France and the Netherlands.

"There are some similarities between our holdings and significant overseas collections - for the exhibition we have selected a really interesting cross-section of unique and commonly seen images. The exhibition tracks the changing idea and visual conception of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders from the late 19th and into the 20th century from a diversity of perspectives. Working with these photographs was like travelling back in time, seeing both dramatic moments of Pacific history, such as the 1937 volcanic eruption that swallowed Rabaul, and the closer, more detailed views of individuals, the daily lives of Pacific Islanders and the foreigners who they met with."

Exhibition details:What: Points of Focus: historic photographs from the Pacific When: 1 March until September Opening hours: 10am-4.30pm weekdays, 12-4pm on the first Saturday of each month Where:The Macleay Museum, Gosper Lane, off Science Road, University of Sydney Camperdown campus. Contact: Macleay Museum, 02 9036 5253, macleay.museum@sydney.edu.au

Phone: 02 935

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Free photographic exhibition traces Pacific history

In yet another sign that the new age lingo of the 1960sis still very much with us, mindfulness has become the new sustainability: no one quite knows what it is, but everyone seems to be for it. It recently made thecoverofTimemagazine, while a long list of celebrities - Arianna Huffington, Deepak Chopra, Paolo Coelho - are all tirelessly preaching the virtues of curbing technology-induced stress and regulating the oppressiveness of constant connectivity, often at conferences with titles like Wisdom 2.0.

The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. Consider Huffington, whose eponymous publication has even launched a stress-tracking app with the poetic name of GPS for the Soul - a new app to fight the distraction caused by the old apps - and turned the business of mindfulness into a dedicated beat. Or take Googles chairman, Eric Schmidt, who has warned that we need to define times when we are on and off and announced his commitment to make his meals gadget-free. There are also apps and firms that, at a fee, will help you enforce your own digital sabbath, undertake a digital detox, or join like-minded refuseniks in a dedicated camp that bars all devices. Never before has connectivity offered us so many ways to disconnect.

In essence, we are being urged to unplug - for an hour, a day, a week - so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigour upon returning to the land of distraction. Here the quest for mindfulness plays the same role as Buddhism. In our maddeningly complex world, where everything is in flux and defies comprehension, the only reasonable attitude is to renounce any efforts at control and adopt a Zen-like attitude of non-domination. Accept the world as it is - and simply try to find a few moments of peace in it. The reactionary tendency of such an outlook is easy to grasp. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek once quipped, If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to hisProtestant Ethic, entitledThe Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. And what a wonderful Kindle Single that would make!

CEOs embrace mindfulness for the same reason that they embrace all the other forms of the new spirit of capitalism, be it yoga in the workplace or flip-flops in the boardroom: Down with alienation, long live transgression and emancipation! No wonder Huffington hopes that the pursuit of mindfulness can finally reconcile spirituality and capitalism. There is a growing body of scientific evidence that shows that these two worlds are, in fact, very much aligned - or at least that they can, and should, be, she wrote ina recent column. So yes, I do want to talk about maximising profits and beating expectations - by emphasising the notion that whats good for us as individuals is also good for corporate Americas bottom line.

But couldnt the disconnectionists - as one critic has recently dubbedthis emerging social movement - pursue an agenda a tad more radical than digital detoxification? For one, the language of detox implies our incessant craving for permanent connectivity is a medical condition - as if the fault entirely resided with consumers. And that reflects a broader flaw in their thinking: The disconnectionists dont seem to have a robust political plan for addressing their concerns; its all about small-scale individual action. Individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems of our time just as any individuals local, organic dietary habits dont solve global agricultures issues,complainedthetechnology critic Alexis MadrigalinThe Atlantic.

Note that its the act of disconnection - the unplugging - that becomes the target of criticism, as if there are no good reasons to be suspicious of the always-on mode championed by Silicon Valley, what is called real-time. Madrigal, for example, draws an intriguing parallel between our attitudes to processed foods (once celebrated for their contribution to social mobility but now widely condemned, at least by the upper classes) and processed communications (by which, he means all digital interactions). Like processed foods, social media and text messages are increasingly perceived as inferior, giving rise to an odd form of technophobic - but extremely artisanal - living. As Madrigal sardonically observes, [T]he solution is to make local friends, hang out organically, and only communicate through means your Grandma would recognise. Its so conservative its radical!

Theres some truth to this, but in their efforts to reveal the upper-class biases of the digital detox crowdby arguing, for example, that the act of unplugging falls somewhere between wearing vintage clothes and consuming artisanal cheese - critics like Madrigal risk absolving the very exploitative strategies of Twitter and Facebook.

So far, our debate about distraction has hinged on the assumption that the feelings of anxiety and personal insecurity that we experience when interacting with social media are the natural price we pay for living in what some technology pundits call the attention economy.

But what if this economy is not as autonomous and self-regulating as we are lead to believe? Twitter, for instance, nudges us to check how many people have interacted with our tweets. That nagging temptation to trace the destiny of our every tweet, in perpetuity and with the most comprehensive analytics, is anything but self-evident. The business agenda is obvious: The more data we can surrender - by endlessly clicking around - the more appealing Twitter looks to advertisers. But what is in Twitters business interest is not necessarily in our communicative interest.

We must subject social media to the kind of scrutiny that has been applied to the design of gambling machines in Las Vegas casinos. As Natasha Dow Schll shows in her excellentbookAddiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, while casino operators want us to think that addiction is the result of our moral failings or some biological imbalance, they themselves are to blame for designing gambling machines in a way that feeds addiction. With social media - much like with gambling machines or fast food - our addiction is manufactured, not natural.

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The Energy Debate

Orem, UT (PRWEB) February 20, 2014

Stress strategist, coach and author Angela Bussio announces the launch of a new digital magazine, Real Stress Solutions (http://bit.ly/1jhQIbK), available on Newsstand for iPhone and iPad devices.

I have taken a successful weekly newsletter model and decided to expand it into a magazine, Angela says about her decision to go digital. Having mobile and tablet access to her content was a driving force for her decision, as well as a desire to expand her content and offer more to her subscribers. I have a model of the six core causes of stress, and it just seemed like I always fell short of delivering the amount of useful information I wanted to deliver in the newsletter, she adds.

The new format certainly offers her that chance. Each of the six core causes of stress now has its own section. With the digital format, the information can now be offered in a multi media format as well, with articles, videos, podcasts and one-click purchases on product offerings. There are also sections for childrens stress, pet stress and a highlight of scientific innovations that have been developed to make life less stressful . Many of these products are so new that the mainstream population would probably never know about them until years down the road, Angela added.

A list of pioneering scientists, psychologists and experts in the fields of nutrition, exercise and environmental issues that have all contributed to her newsletter and website http://www.attractingjoyu.com join Angela each month. My hope is to provide my readers with a collection of 21st century stateofthe art solutions for living in a stressful modern world, she says.

To subscribe to Real Stress Solutions digital magazine for iPhones and iPads, visit http://bit.ly/1jhQIbK. The price is $6.99 for one month or $57.99 for one year.

About Angela Bussio Angela Bussio is a stress strategist, coach, best-selling author, speaker and motivational trainer. Her coaching programs, books and online programs empower people with skills and tools to become their own authority in managing stressful negative emotional states using state-of-the art Energy Method techniques and information to build the life they are destined to live and to make a greater difference in the world. For more information, visit http://www.angelabussio.com or http://attractingjoyu.com.

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Angela Bussio Launches Real Stress Solutions Digital Magazine