Addiction | Mockingbird

Another Week Ends: AKB48, More Super Bowl, Seeing Cézanne, Failed Rehab, Humanity According to 30 Rock, Presumption vs Grace, and Creepy Lance Armstrong

by WB on Feb 1, 2013 • 1 Comment

1. In the “mea culpa” world this past week, Minami Minegishi of the hit Japanese band AKB48 was publicly lambasted and forced to apologize on YouTube, where people have watched her tearful confession roughly 5 million times, for the crime of staying a night with her boyfriend. No one’s ever done a fantastic job with managing celebrity expectations, but this takes the cake, ht AOC:

“As a senior member of the group, it is my responsibility to be a role model for younger members,” she said, before ending the four-minute mea culpa with a deep, lingering bow.

The most striking thing about her apology,…

Addiction / Art / Books / Comics / Film / Identity / Law / Reviews / Sports / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Erratic Anxiety, Lucrative Law, Backwards Self-Help, More Grace in Addiction, State of Lin-dependence, and the Flight from Control

by WB on Nov 16, 2012 • 5 Comments

1. A brilliant article by Eve Tushnet at The American Conservative examines narratives of moral progress in American culture – “Hedonist, Disciple, or Bourgeois?” She critiques the dichotomy between hedonism/moral license, on the one hand, and discipleship/moral progress, on the other, claiming that it misses a crucial third option: the bourgeois ethos that permeates much of American culture. I’ll let it speak for itself, and it’s well worth a full read (it’s mercifully short):

…of course there’s a third option, the life of bourgeois stability. The life of building up a reasonable income, getting married to somebody your parents approve of, doing well and…

Film / Reviews / Theology

Wrecking Ralph: Extinguishing the Quest for Glory

by Bryan J. on Nov 14, 2012 • 3 Comments

Score one for this year’s winter film season! With a half-dozen movies premiering on Mockingbird’s *must* see list (including The Hobbit, Les Mis, James Bond, Django Unchained…), Wreck-It-Ralph kicks off the winter with a pixelated parable of judgment, love, and identity so potent, you half-expected to see Martin Luther listed as a guest-writer in the credits. Okay, so perhaps I’m a bit over-enthusiastic in my praise of Disney’s newest in-house release, but when movie critics call Wreck-It Ralph “pixar-esque,” well, we’ve kind of got to take notice.

Perhaps there’s no better world to play out the drama of law-trapped characters than the unforgiving…

Addiction / Conferences / Poetry / Suffering

My Heart Would Poison You, But God Wants My Poison Heart

by Matt Schneider on Apr 26, 2012 • 2 Comments

Yitzhak Zuckerman

I just came across this quote from Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was a Jewish resistance movement leader in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II:

If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

Wow! You see, although a hero of the resistance movement, plagued by survivor guilt, he became an uncontrollable alcoholic later in life. So despite rightly being celebrated for his wartime heroism, Zuckerman was in touch with the darkest parts of himself. (This quote, by the way, is originally from the French documentary Shoah, which—full disclosure—I have not seen.)

While allowing Zuckerman’s words to stew in my…