Shunya's Notes

On The Road With Jesus

Sam Fentress is a Jack Kerouac of sorts. He travels the roads of America looking to find not himself but Biblical signs and bill boards - messages to praise and persuade.  In his many sojourns he has found farmhouses, grain silos, restaurants, hair salons, gas stations and even traffic signs bearing Biblical messages. An artist and a photographer, Fentress first started photographing roadside biblical messages when a student in his class brought him a picture of a barn covered in Scriptures. Fentress was stunned.

"It just knocked my socks off as a picture," he said. "The boldness of the farmer in covering the roof, the sides — every square foot of the barn had some sort of Bible quote, Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Epistles, Revelation."

Fentress has photographed an urban billboard which rotated its message to read among other things.

• God is like Coke: He's the real thing.
• God is like Pan Am: He makes the going great.
• God is like Tide: He gets the stains out that others leave behind.
• God is like-VO-5 hair spary: He holds through all kinds of weather.
• God is like Alka Seltzer: Try him, you'll like him.

Behind the billboard was a building with a big sign, "Furniture Factory Outlet World." God and mammon jousting for attention.

Now Fentress has a book out of his collection of photographs titled "Bible Road" which he edited for what he hopes is, "interesting both theologically and aesthetically."

Sam Fentress has spent the past 25 years crisscrossing America's highways and byways, stopping along the way to snap shots of religious signs in every state except Hawaii. He found everything from John 3:3 on a farm silo in Ohio to "Obey God or Burn" scratched into a rock in Harlem....

At some point in the late '70s or early '80s, Fentress realized the farmer wasn't alone. Wherever he looked, he saw religious signs along the roadside. He started to methodically photograph thousands of such images over the next two decades. Along the way, he also became a Catholic.

Fentress, 52, has a master of arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and his work is collected by museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the St. Louis Art Museum.

The religious roadside signage is particularly American, he said, given the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and religion and the country's religious diversity.

"Americans are told they can say whatever they want," he said. And people feel free to say it — or perhaps, show it — whether on their front lawn, barn or business.

Fentress said he was intrigued by the juxtaposition of landscape and religious message. Some images capture signs on businesses, which he attributed to a capitalist tendency to co-opt religion into something that can be marketed and sold. But he also recognized the impulse to spread the "good news" wherever possible.

In Las Vegas, he spotted Glorified Bodies Inc., a collision repair shop with the Christian fish symbol on its signpost. He noted the relationship between Jesus' resurrected body, as described in the New Testament, and restoring damaged cars. [Link]

For some samples of Fentress' photos see here.  (Crossposted at Accidental Blogger)

Forbidden City

Surrounded by moat and high walls, the fabled Forbidden City earned its name by being closed to everyone outside the Chinese royal family and their eunuchs and maidservants. The largest surviving palace complex in the world, it was completed in 1420 and remained the ruling seat of China from early Ming Dynasty until the end of dynasties in 1911, when the last Empress Dowager abdicated on behalf of her charge, the child Emperor Puyi, and China was declared a republic.

Thereafter, only the inner courtyards were reserved for the young Emperor and the continuation of his sequestered, privileged life, while the doors to the outer palace were thrown open to the public. Any peasant could now enter and gawk at the home of his former lords. But as a symbol of the imperial, feudal system, even this arrangement couldn’t last and in 1924 the young Puyi was evicted; his childhood home became the Palace Museum, an epic domain of cavernous halls, gilded thrones, yawning courtyards, and half a millennium’s worth of accumulated rich kitsch.

At 720,000 square meters, the sheer size of the palace complex and the beauty of its finest jades and ceramics are awe inspiring, even while its decadence and intellectual blandness raise the hackles. During its heyday, some 6,000 people occupied its nearly one-thousand buildings and over 8,000 rooms, a village unto itself. In spaces with such poetic names as Hall of Supreme Harmony, Hall of Preserving Harmony, Hall of Character Cultivation, Hall of Earthly Peace, and the Gate of Moral Standards, its inhabitants plotted martial campaigns and undertook power grabs, treachery, and murder—we are given to believe, without irony. Virtually isolated from the world of ordinary folk, the anguished grievances, frustrations, and desires of crippled concubines and their castrated manservants, virgin maidservants, and ignoble nobles with too much wealth and power, too little learning or self-knowledge, must have engendered an interpersonal and political dynamic that played out like tragedian theater in a village of the damned.

Buddha's Finger

The monks and proprietors of Famen Temple in China’s northwestern Shaanxi Province, about an hour’s drive outside of Xi’an, believe the Buddha has given them the finger.

Or four.

Legend has it that after the death of Prince Siddharta (aka the Buddha) around 500 BCE, such was the demand among local kings and chieftains to own a piece of him, that they were ready to go to war to claim his remains, also called relics or sarira (roughly: transient body), which are the tiny bits of bone that survive cremation fires. Fortunately, a wise man intervened and convinced Buddha’s unenlightened devotees instead to divide his relics and enshrine them within eight stupas throughout the lands of Buddha’s life and teaching (modern north-central India and southern Nepal). Some 200 years later, Emperor Ashoka, in his zeal to spread Buddhist teachings, broke into those stupas and redistributed the relics far and wide. Just how far and wide is unknown, but it’s said that Ashoka built tens of thousands of stupas and his influence is known to have reached at least from Sri Lanka to Central Asia. So ultimately the precise fate of Buddha’s remains is shrouded in mystery. But, for believers, mystery provides fertile ground for the miraculous discovery of lost relics hundreds or thousands of years later.

According to the men of Famen Temple, Ashoka’s eager emissaries ventured to this very site in the Yellow River valley around 300 BCE (Eastern Zhou Dynasty) to spread Buddhist teachings and leave behind an imperial gift of no less than four little bones, said to be finger bones of the Buddha. But as it happened, the Zhou weren’t much interested in the Buddha’s message, nor were their various successors, and so there’s no surviving news of how the relics were regarded and handled, or how they otherwise got on for the next nine hundred eventful years.

Chinese Food for Thought

In gastronomic matters, I am squarely among the less intrepid of men. Raised by a vegetarian mother who wouldn't allow meat in her kitchen and a near-vegetarian father, I only had chicken and goat meat a handful of times during my teens -- egged on by parents who nevertheless held meat to be salutary for a growing boy. My introduction to fish and prawn came only in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too -- cow, pig, sheep, crab, calamari, etc., once even lobster, snail (Paris), guinea pig (Cuzco), and wild boar (Patagonia). Then one fine day six years ago, I renounced eating mammals, and now prefer veggies over even chicken and fish (though I retain a weakness for Bengali style fish). Long live tofu, beans, and lentils!

Most Indians are even less "experienced" than me. It is no small wonder then, that in neighboring China things are dramatically different. What restaurants serve there would make many a hardy Indian stomach churn. Here are selections from a typical and popular restaurant in Beijing:

1. Traditional Peking style boiled sheep's head
2. Duck blood in a spicy Chongqing style
3. Royal duck tongue / Marinated duck head
4. Braised donkey meat in superior soup
5. Spicy bullfrog
6. Delicious black fungus
7. Braised pork treasures (sic)
8. Duck heart with cumin
9. Eel sects with brown sauce / Toasted Eel
10. Pork ear slices
11. Hot quick duck gizzard
12. Hot duck viscera w/ sunny egg
13. Barbequed suckling pig Lashu style
14. Young frog in bamboo
15. Pig bellies with garlic
16. Hot tasting chicken feet / Duck web [feet] with mustard
17. Stir-fried duck gizzard
18. Chicken claw with pepper
19. Dry fried ass meat in Xiang style
20. Braised pork trotter tendon and sea cucumber

The Cantonese push the limits even for other Chinese, with their taste for dogs, cats, raccoons, monkeys, lizards, rats, etc. On a previous visit to Guangzhou province in south China, I had walked down a meat market with skinned, glistening dog carcasses hanging on both sides of the street. Chinese food may well be the most popular ethnic cuisine in the world but none of the above stuff is commonly available in Main St restaurants in the West. Conversely, Western staples like kung pao and sweet-and-sour chicken are hard to find in China.

On a Beijing street last week, I encountered another gastronomical spectacle not far from the Forbidden City -- a fast-food market with some very unusual items, deep fried on skewers while you wait. Choices included scorpions, snakes, silkworms, beetles, centipedes, emu, starfish, eel, octopus, and grasshoppers. Though this isn't everyday food, the locals were chomping it down. Foreigners took pictures; a brave one would try something on a dare, or for bragging rights to friends back home (reactions vary of course; a haggis eating Scot might flinch less; likewise an American eater of warm pig brain in gravy, or an Italian eater of pig eye balls or testicles, etc.). I wondered: Is it really true that the Chinese will eat any part of just about anything that moves? How did they turn out this way? What might this reveal about human nature?

 

 

 

Three linked explanations occurred to me: a) the Chinese, in times of famine, were forced to seek out alternate sources of nutrition, which later weren't abandoned (but others have suffered famines too); b) traditional Chinese ethical-moral injunctions (particularly of Confucianism) did not extend to non-human beings or dietary restrictions; c) the "innate" revulsion we feel for eating certain species or body parts is simply a matter of nurture; theirs is an acquired taste, like mine for Bengali style fish. The human child, unlike a tiger cub, is not by constitution carnivorous; as an omnivore, his approach to both veggies and meat is conditioned by his environment. What we have here is a striking illustration of the virtually limitless malleability of the human mind. In the right (wrong?) cultural milieu, are we not capable of just about anything?

Deep Six Code 10?

All professions have their own jargon. While on the job, soldiers, sailors, tinkers and tailors may speak a lingo that only those in the trade can decipher easily. Aviators, lawyers, sports casters, weathermen, needle workers, vintners, librarians and chefs have their own vocabulary. Some insider language can be mind numbingly unintelligible to those not interested in the subject. (My eyes glaze over when I hear stock market chatter involving hedge funds, put and call, options etc. while my husband takes an animated interest in such terminology.) Others use mysterious sounding words and acronyms just to feel self important. But often code words and cryptic languages develop in professions where quick and clear communication is crucial - sometimes involving life and death. Perhaps that is why we pay special attention to medical and police jargon. The rapid fire talk of medics and crime stoppers are made even more impressive by TV shows and movies involving hospital and police procedures.

We are quite familiar with common cop-shop words and phrases like perp walk, mug shot and DWI. But we have all heard policemen speak on their radios in numerical codes that sound mysterious as well as urgent and which most of us don't understand. This system of police communication is called Code 10 where each code is prefixed by the number 10.  "10-4" which means "message received" or "okay" is perhaps the best known Code 10 phrase. Cops have a coded language system to describe real life situations ranging from "cattle blocking the road" to "murder."

Code 10 was developed in simpler times (in the 1930s) when police forces operated in limited territories within a state or county. Also in those less technologically endowed days, police radios had just one frequency assigned to them and policemen had to communicate quickly and concisely in order to not jam up the signal with verbosity. Since terrorists entered the American crime scene on 9/11/2001, the scope of police work has expanded beyond regional law and order situations. In light of this new development, the venerable Code 10 may soon become history. Why? Because while some 10 codes are common to all police forces in North America, not all two hundred or so codes mean the same thing to different police units (I was surprised to learn this). For example, Code 10-40 can mean one of the following:

• run silent (no lights & siren)
• false alarm, no activity, premises appears secure
• please tune to channel ___
• expedite
• advise if available
• suspicious person
• dead animal
• mental patient
• lunch

If this is not confusing enough, the FBI has its own Code 10 which the ordinary policeman doesn't understand. On 9/11, when the terrorists' plane flew into the Pentagon, police forces from Washington D.C, Montgomery County in Maryland and Arlington, Virginia were called in to help, along with the FBI. The result was a Tower of Babel type of situation with each group speaking in its own "tongue" causing confusion during an extreme emergency.  The situation caught the attention of police higer ups and some are taking steps to solve the problem. The solution?  Speak plain English!  But not all policemen are happy with the prospect of seeing their secret insider language disappear.