How I Mine For Craft: The al-Ramadi Mosque and Mokattam Gardens

Welcome back! Last time, we saw the start of an Egyptian city, with ancient and medieval Egyptian characteristics.

Well, there's more.

Starting at the entrance to the bazaar and port under Mokattam Mountain, we will explore the al-Ramadi Mosque and Mokattam Gardens.

Ancient Levantine ancestor worship, African masks, and the origins of drama and modern Judaism.

It's nothing like you'd imagine.

Of course, whoever made these masks were not Jews; "Jews" didn't exist yet, and wouldn't for thousands of years. But it's probably appropriate to consider that the religious society that made these masks were a part of the greater religious climate of the Middle East at that time.

In those days, the Middle East was the center of the world. Civilization started there; the package of crops and domesticated animals that would conquer the world was freshly put together there at that time and place, as wheat had just been deliberately cultivated a few thousand years ago and people started living in villages, towns and then cities. It was also not a desert: most of the Middle East was forested at that time, at least the parts near sources of water, and it hadn't succumbed to the human-led processes of deforestation and desertification yet.

Open mics.

A lady got up at an open mic and said she was going to read a poem she had written a long time ago. It sounded suspiciously like an email forward, especially when I heard her claim that certain folds stood for shit in the Bible, because you're forbidden by law from hitting the "forward" button on an email unless you mistakenly believe that America was founded as a Christian nation. So I Googled it, and sure enough it was an email forward debunked on Snopes.

See for yourself.

She even read the "Share this with your friends" crap. So she not only was full of shit about why an American flag is folded, but she was full of shit about it being something she wrote, and she wasn't even clever about hiding it.

And then Fish gets up and talks about period sex. I love this place.

Human Sacrifice to the Gods.

(WARNING: the pictures and text below get fairly graphic.)

A few months ago, my friend Tom made a post comparing the modern neoliberal system to the Aztec system of ritual human sacrifice. I don't know why, but last night I had a dream about it. It was troubling, and I couldn't sleep past 7:00 AM on a weekend when normally I sleep in 'til noon. I've been up since then, writing and drawing what comes below.

1. I dreamed I was a Tlaxcalan warrior. We fought against the Aztec Empire, and were defeated.

We were marched to Tenochtitlan, where their priests did worship to the gods. Sweet-smelling smoke billowed from the altars atop the great temples.

We will be sacrificed, and our bodies fed to Huitzilopochtli in the spirit world so that the end of the earth will be delayed. The people cheer, for they will taste our bodies in this world, and they hunger for it - they need the meat we will provide. We are foreigners to them, and defeated in battle. It is right and just that this should happen to us.

Real progress on homelessness, from the last damn people you'd expect.

I've tried not to be too political on this blog. Couldn't really avoid it with the government shutdown, but all my previous blogs were mainly political, and I wanted to break away from that. But this issue is near and dear to my heart; I've seen homelessness up close and personal. Some of the closest people to me were homeless once, and the general hatred and indifference of society to their plight fills me with sadness and rage all at once, so I decided to post about it.

Anyway.

Utah is the reddest state in the nation. Redder than Texas. Redder even than Nebraska or Oklahoma. It is more Republican than a white guy in a Duck Dynasty shirt taking off his gun holster to have sex with his wife on a bed made of money. Utah is so Republican that Mexicans not only don't want to immigrate there, but insisted we take it with us along with Texas and California. Utah is more Republican than saying hi to a cop on your way to a stockholders' meeting. Utah is more Republican than Sarah Palin saying anything.

Point is, you would not expect Utah to be the first state to solve homelessness. And yet.

On guitars, progressions, rock, and worship music.

My friend Vera is hanging out at my place right now and we're playing guitar together.

I've been playing guitar since I was... I wanna say 16? So about 13 years now, and now I feel old. But she just got her guitar this year. She's learned a lot more in this year than I did my first year; I wasted most of my first year or so trying to emulate power metal songs without learning chords or anything but she can play songs already. Granted, they're cheesy three-chord praise and worship songs, but that's still pretty awesome. (For the record, the first songs I learned were also in that genre... and the same goes for a surprising number of musicians. Churches have started musical careers since time immemorial.)

Anyway, I'm giving her some advice because I can. Specifically, I'm teaching her about how progressions work. She started playing this worship song:



I recognize it because I've played it countless times about a decade ago when I was in worship bands. Anyway, apparently my knowledge of music theory's come to a point where I noticed the chord progression and pointed it out to her. I started playing the song above in A instead of D, and then I, without changing the chords, started singing this song:



They have the same progression. The tempo you play changes a bit, but the underlying infrastructure of both songs is the same.

A Facebook convo with Friend X.

Friend X
Dude, thought you'd love this one. My mom posted it on Facebook earlier today.

Friend X
Random photo of horses, check. Contrived and non-specific feel-good religious message, check.

Stuart Richards
That's... breathtakingly awful. I am in awe.

Friend X
Literally laughed out loud at the horses.

Stuart Richards
Like, what are they doing there? The horses look confused too.
They're all looking at you, like "What now, crazy person?"

Friend X
They're like, "WTF are you doing to that photo? Adding a preachy acronym? Naaaay, bro. I vote naaaay."

Stuart Richards
And then they harrumph.

Friend X
Perhaps the easiest overlooked but most random thing is the copyright claim.

Stuart Richards
Good point.
I mean, when you create gold like that, you don't want someone stepping on your legal rights.

Friend X
I copyright the word faith as an acronym. Sorry. All your hopes of making a killing on tee shirts at Family Christian Bookstore are dead now.

The best and worst of humanity all at once.

The New York Times has a good article about the American chaplains to the Nazi war criminals being tried at Nuremberg.

It reminds me of the discussion I was having with a friend recently. She's in the process of reading my book, and wondering if fallen angels really would have the ability to repent. She asked me if it said it anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, the Bible is silent on the issue, and the semicanonical-in-Orthodoxy book of 1 Enoch debatably says no. But I can't imagine that a loving God would deny honest repentance to any sentient creature, no matter how evil it became.

That's not to say that such repentance would be a license to act like nobody should find fault with you, or ignore the grief of your victims, the way that a lot of people I know have acted. "Well yeah I cheated on you, but God forgave me, so why can't you?" is never an acceptable line of argument. But the strongest love should always find a way to forgive even the worst evils. We humans are probably not capable of such perfect love, but it's inspiring when we try, like the chaplains in the article I linked.