This coming Tuesday, my daughter Alyssa is going to graduate from Wyoming Park High School. This is a significant moment for our family, obviously. She's the oldest of our children and has done remarkably well as a student, earning some competitive scholarships and a bunch of "outstanding student" awards in four different subjects. Her ambitions are to attend Grand Valley State University this fall, where she will be an art major. Personally, I'm very proud and eager to support her goal of becoming a professional artist. Her great love right now is anime, and she has a fair amount of her art on display in the form of a web gallery. (This link is only one of several, and I don't think it contains her newest stuff, but I can't find the other ones...) Perhaps she will wind up doing this kind of illustration as a career, but it's just as likely that she will move in some other direction. Right now, the pressure to choose her destiny is as light as I would want it to be. I want her to go to college and just enjoy the opportunity to learn in a way that I myself was never able to enjoy. And I like the idea that she's going in as a pure, impractical, liberal arts major, dedicated to ideas, symbols and the aesthetic things of life. It seems to me that our world needs more people to dedicate themselves to such pursuits.

I've already seen "Matrix: Reloaded" twice, and I enjoyed even more the second time I saw it. The first night, Wednesday, was great just to be there with a bunch of friends and a crowd of people all quite eager to get into it. The movie is, as the name indicates, quite heavily loaded, so the first viewing was just saturated with the task of taking it all in. The movie creates a pretty strong sensory experience in the action sequences, but slows down considerably during the expositions and dialogues. At least, that's how it struck me at the first viewing. Seeing it all again two nights later was more satisfying to me because I was able to focus more on background details and see how all the various parts of the story fit together. I saw a fair number of reviews that took the film to task for being too pretentious or muddled, and even though I was somewhat open to that interpretation, I never found myself fully agreeing with it after the first showing because there are just too many superior qualities to the film for me to take an essentially negative view of it. And now that I've had two full screenings, I am over some of the small reservations that I had at first (like Morpheus' temple speech, the "rave in the cave" sequence, and the fact that the matrix no longer seems to have much in common with the world that you and I live in.) Though I might have liked to see the story move in some slightly different directions, I'm willing to say that the makers of this film got it quite right overall, and I think they have set another very high bar as far as sci-fi and action filmmaking is concerned. The Lord of the Rings is the only comparable movie spectacle that I think has a chance to raise the bar any higher, of the projects I know of right now anyway. That's going to be incredible having both of those "finales" opening this winter! As for the Hulk, Terminator 3 or any other would-be blockbuster, while I think they may wind up being interesting and hopefully fun movies to watch, I don't think they will have anywhere near the impact that the Matrix films have already made.

There are a lot of ideas in M:R that I could discuss here but I'm more inclined to do that in my email groups.

Bookshelf (currently or recently read):

Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan
Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks
Doing Local Theology by Clemens Sedmak
God: Stories edited by C. Michael Curtis
The Story We Find Ourselves In by Brian McLaren

Music:

Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan
Timeless by Goldie
Sea Change by Beck
Armed Forces by Elvis Costello
The Stooges by The Stooges
Cross of Changes by Enigma
In Sides by Orbital
Europe '72 by the Grateful Dead
Pioneers Who Got Scalped by Devo

So what's up with me today... not much. I'm not much into posting to any of the lists I subscribe to lately. I'm busy with a lot of other things and when I am on the computer, I feel like doing other stuff besides getting engrossed in discussion threads that are in many ways rehashing issues that I've already addressed before in my own sorting out of faith and what I believe. I recently let my spiritual director of the past three years or so know that I'm taking a break from our regularly scheduled meetings, because, in my assessment, the crisis has passed. Even though I still have a few unresolved matters, such as what kind of a worship community I want to get involved with, I am at a point where I don't feel a sense of anguish or urgency about my spiritual condition. This may, of course, be a symptom of an undesirable complacency but I think I would recognize complacency if that were the case. Spiritual questions and sensitivities are still on my mind, quite often actually, but I'm just in a state of "attentive observation" of what is happening around me, not too moved to any particular emotional extreme as I go through my days. Life is simply unfolding in due course, there are certainly interesting changes taking place, such as my daughter's impending graduation from high school in less than a month. But mostly I'm in "day or week at a time" mode, not in any hurry to move on to whatever is going to happen next. Compared to other phases of my life, it's not a bad place to be at all...

I went to see the new X-Men movie last night, which was cool and all but the honest truth is that it's just tiding me over until Matrix: Reloaded comes out in a coupla weeks. "X2" had it share of noteworthy themes and of course was a very entertaining spectacle all the way around. I am not as huge of a comic book fan as I once was but I know these characters and enjoyed seeing how their different abilities and personalities were put to use, so to speak, in the story.

To me, the main theme that stands out in the film is the state of tension that exists between humans and mutants. Even though there's no such "clear distinction" in the real world between various types of people, there are all kinds of parallels that can be drawn from the plotline of this movie to our own society: the war on terrorism, racism, religious discrimination and intolerance, any number of "conformist" and "us vs. them" pressure and control tactics that exist in the world today (and have for a long time.) The story challenges us to not give in to our worst fears and suspicions, but I'm not sure that it's so profound or philosophically rich as to warrant a full-scale probing and pondering. I'll recommend the sequel more enthusiastically than I felt about the original X-Men movie, but I'm not raving about it either. It's a couple of notches above your average summer-time popcorn flick, but I think the filmmakers knew that it was better for them to get in ahead of M:R rather than get lost in the aftermath of what will most likely be the biggest blockbuster until "Return of the King" is released in November.