Matthew Henry John Bartlett

mhjb.substack.com

Here’s a great lecture on the ‘American Sublime’ by one Jackson Lears. What we long for feels like some essential part of ourselves, but it might be the leftovers of some dude’s overcooked ponderings a couple of hundred years ago.

Featuring such artworks as:

Lears warns that the sublime is coming back, ending with a bit of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

Now that we’re well and truly settled in our new house (14 months in), I was interested to compare the energy usage here with our previous rental.

The happy gist is that the new Norway Street house costs about $730 less per year in energy (including heating, cooking, hot water etc), despite being about 38% larger in floor area than the Brooklyn rental. The new house also has the strange and wonderful feature of being warm everywhere in the house, all the time.

Our architects and builders put quite a lot of effort into making the house energy efficient, chiefly through air-tightness, insulation, window quality, and care with thermal bridging. Now it would be really interesting to compare the energy use with a similar-sized new house built closer to the standard required by the building code. Perhaps I can convince the neighbours …

American Factory, which is on Netflix, and which Dad tells me was funded by the Obamas, is very much worth watching. It’s the story of the Chinese resuscitation of a windshield factory in Dayton, Ohio.

The film is beautiful to look at, and offers many insights into what life might feel like for workers in the superpowers. Driving the film are the obvious clashes of culture and interests, plus a fight about whether to unionise (the Workers’ Paradise has strong feelings about unions not controlled by the CCCP). You can imagine how Trump might have some appeal in this world — ‘Make America Great Again’ might be heard as ‘put the Americans back in charge of our factory’ or ‘put our wages back up to $29/hour’ (rather than the US$14/hour starter rate under the new management). Amazing to me is the degree of access the filmmakers got — as well as the many interviews with people at all levels of the plant, you get to listen in (well, read the translation) when the Chinese boss explains to the Chinese portion of the staff how to deal with American workers who’ve been pampered since birth.

Michele Obama made the ridiculous comment that the film ‘doesn’t come in with a perspective; it’s not an editorial’ (and can you believe they call their production company ‘Higher Ground’?); much more illuminating is an interview with the filmmakers, Julia Reichert & Steve Bognar, by the Centre for Media and Social Impact, which I gather was published closer to the time of a previous film of theirs about the earlier closure of the same factory, when it was owned by General Motors.

? how much does your (New Zealand) dentist charge? fill in this anonymous spreadsheet https://t.co/qPq2erE3n0 and pass it on ? pic.twitter.com/ZVgYsAfZeI

— Matthew Bartlett ? (@mhjb) May 9, 2017

Psephizo: (How) does Acts 15 help us with difficult decisions? (via Peter Carrell)
John Smart: Your Personal Sim: The Brave New World of Smart Agents (video, via Richard Dennis Bartlett)
Renters United rank Wellington mayoral candidates
What you miss when you take notes on your laptop
Robert Fisk: Isis was quick to understand a truth the West must now confront
Greenpeace: Landcorp, NZ’s biggest farmer, quits palm kernel expeller
All the world’s immigration (2010–15) on one map (wassup Saudi Arabia?)

Barack Obama’s stirring, impressive eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney
How New Zealand’s missing the mark on climate change
The myth of the ethical shopper (via Craig Ambrose)
Anthony Cabraal reflecting on why he quit advertising six years ago to work in social enterprise

This time last week we were at a church retreat on the shore of Lake Wairarapa. It was good. Great snacks. The content oddly orthodox & compelling: Jesus & St Paul. A good world marred. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. The word for that is sin. Both out there in the violent oppressive destructive alienating structures, but also right in here, in me, in everyone. So we have a problem. So God has a problem. God’s world’s not right. God’s mana offended. Jesus is the remedy. Jesus the man put to death in a religiously authorised state execution. The cross is mysterious and beyond final explanation, but many metaphors are used to try and get at it. Metaphors coalesce on Jesus being God; God in Jesus himself experiencing it all, humiliated, vulnerable, alienated; and that somehow dealing with the sin inside and out, redeeming it, putting things right. The word is next year will be about the resurrection.

A sermon from me for All Saints Sunday

I’m having a good time building a WordPress website at the moment. I’m learning lots of bits and pieces along the way. About:

• getting the site to look good on different screen sizes using css media queries
• Google Chrome’s ‘device mode’, which lets you preview the screen shapes of various devices (e.g. iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy Tab)
• using FontAwesome for icons
• using a semi-transparent PNG image to give a div a translucent background (thanks minichate @ Stack Overflow)
• having a background image change once a day by seeding rand() with today’s date (thanks Cronco @ Stack Exchange)

More here