Paul O'Connor's Blog, page 15

Hindu god Shiva given seat on Kashi-Mahakal Express

Hindu god Shiva given seat on Kashi-Mahakal Express:

This is one of those stories that just keeps on giving. We learn how a compartment has been set aside for the Hindu deity Shiva on a train service that transports many pilgrims. However, it isn’t a full carriage designated to the god, and more interestingly the assigned space, or berth, is located in the 2nd Class compartment.

Should gods travel first class? Or are they beyond that? I would like to think there is something more holy in the more modest priced 2nd Class. Then the article ends with a note about how posters of other Hindu deities have been helpful in keeping public areas clean. Wit this in mind who wouldn’t want more gods on public transport and city streets?

If you have any interest in tackling the idea of what a...

Rod Stewart Concert 1994 - Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


Kumbh Mela 2013

If you have any interest in tackling the idea of what a pilgrimage is, this infographic helps deal with the sheer size of recorded human gatherings around the world. By far the largest is Kumbh Mela pilgrimage celebrated every 12 years. Take a look at this Patrik Wallner skateboarding pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela too. 

Significantly the other entries are all, in some way related to religious events with two exceptions. The first ranking in at the 8th largest gathering of people was a Rod Stewart concert in Brazil in 1994. Only a handful of concerts have come close to this number. The other entry at number 10 is a giant anti-war protest in 2003 in Rome, significantly these protests broke out worldwide and are interconnected as mass gatherings for the same purpose.

Funerals rank high, but then the issue of death is central to many pilgrimage sites.

More than anything else these mass gatherings highlights that there needs to be some remarkable motivation, and unity, to bring such numbers together.

"There’s a magic world that opens up when you are a skateboarder. You look at the world in a..."

“There’s a magic world that opens up when you are a skateboarder. You look at the world in a different kind of way, we don’t see stairs and benches when we walk trough the streets. We see obstacles to skate, spots, possibilities. My friends in the states call people who don’t skate ‘muggles’. Muggles can’t see the magical world we live in. That’s why I try to explain how it is to live in this skate world I live in.”

- Candy Jacobs

‘You have to face the darkness within you’: meet the real-life Jedi knights

‘You have to face the darkness within you’: meet the real-life Jedi knights:

More on Jediism and its compatibility with other religions. Also curious to see people coming to the philosophy without being Star Wars fans!

Virtual Worlds as Family MementosSix years ago I began building...

Virtual Worlds as Family Mementos

Six years ago I began building a Minecraft world with my sons. It was basically a response to their passion for the game and my desire to join in. I would open my world to LAN and we would all hang out in the world together for a couple of hours, my wife included. Needless to say the world grew and grew with a main city, a beach resort, snow cabins in the mountains and an incredibly long railway joining distant lands together. We eventually rigged a teleport system to cut down on the time taken to get to some of the more remote locations.

I named the world KG-16 which was a throwback to a childhood world I dreamt up in response to watching the Sci-Fi fantasy Krull at around the age of 8. Like the original KG-16, this new world was entirely make-believe. But slowly it began to take on more relevance as actual real world occurrences took place there. Eventually our visits there would become more seldom. I eventually uploaded the world onto Minecraft Realms so my sons could play on it independently of me and in any location. Over the last 18months I have hardly visited it at all, as writing and research overtook pretty much everything else.

My return to the world this week was far more poignant than I could have imagined. I was able to see a whole array of new buildings and activities that had been constructed. More surprisingly though, I realised that there was a significant emotional investment in the world. With my youngest son we visited one of the first houses he built back in 2014 when he was just 5 years old. My memory of him building the bizarre passages and booby traps came alive. I realised that the world told the story of my kids growing up in a way I could never have foreseen.

As I moved around KG-16 it was like visiting an haunt. Much was the same, but there were new things too. I made sure that I performed a mini-pilgrimage to the gravesite of all the family pets that have died over the years. This is adjacent to a love garden where one of my sons has a collection of signposts with the names of the all the people and pets that he loves. Then there was a visit to the multi-storey prison that I had seen being constructed months ago but never actually visited.

In some ways this is all part of the synchronicity of my current dabbling in forms of pilgrimage. But it is also a tale of parenthood and our sometimes limiting ideas of what mementos really are. It isn’t a radical idea to now say that virtual places are real places. In its own way KG-16 has become a sacred place, full of memories and still a place to play with my kids as they grow ever older.

Pilgrim TalesHow do you end a story? This is undoubtedly a...

Pilgrim Tales

How do you end a story? This is undoubtedly a challenge as whatever narrative we construct can merely be a signpost, a way to divert attention to a phenomenon. I knew that I would face this problem in probing the connection between skateboarding and religion. My book hasn’t provided a definitive treatment of the topic inasmuch simply kicked down a door and shown that the issue there. Every week I get multiple new threads to add to the skateboarding and religion story.

The very best thing about having written the book and it being out and circulating for consumption, is the responses that I get from skateboarders. Occasionally I receive a message about how some arcane religious connection that skateboarders have. But more often than not I am the very grateful recipient of pilgrim tales. The notion of skateboard pilgrimage has resonated with plenty of folk, far and wide. As I have always had a fascination for pilgrimage I am endlessly delighted to hear these stories, and anecdotes. I do hope that they continue for years to come. The most recent of which I share below…

I’m sure you have heard many such accounts but it reminded me of my first trip to Albuquerque to skate ditches. I arrived on my own, went to the cheapest hotel I could find online near the Indian School ditch. The Hotel was I think fair to say ‘worn’, I flopped down on the bed, tired from the travel, wondering what I was doing there and feeling lonely, almost immediately I noticed a small Indy sticker in the very top corner of the window ( I wish it had been some other brand but never mind ) and instantly felt better, some other skater must have made the same journey and chose the hotel for the same reason.

This pilgrim tale comes just as I begin to teach a course on Modern Pilgrimage at Charles university. Beyond skateboarding I have been surveying a whole host of research ranging from dark tourism to virtual pilgrimages. I realised along the way that I have been doing my own forms of virtual skateboard pilgrimages via Google maps. A similar theme was recently addressed in a Jenkem video where Google maps provided a neat spot-hunting tool. In 2015 The Atlantic also reported on the D.C. Downhill Club and their use of satellite imagery to find old pools to skate. It is an increasingly common practice, a great rainy day activity, and a bond between technology and older forms of skate culture.

At the end of 2019 I found myself hunting down spots in the Blips Cover Version video. Specifically Harry Lintell’s ender with a ridiculous tre-flip into a gnarly bank. It took a bit of sleuthing but I was able to locate the spot and saved it to my Google maps library for a future visit. All good virtual pilgrimages contain the possibility of a future physical visit. 

Hoping to hear more pilgrim tales which I will continue to share.

Millennium Falcon as a site of pilgrimage?I saw this post on...

Millennium Falcon as a site of pilgrimage?

I saw this post on Reddit and was struck by the title. The recent appearance of the new attractions of a full sized Millennium Falcons at Disneyland Anaheim and Orlando has caused quite a stir amongst fans. Star Wars is already a franchise richly contoured with religious imagery. In a recent interview Daisy Ridley spoke about the religious identification with the film, and the new Mandalorian TV series similarly leverages a considerable amount of religious content both tacit and overt.

Of ever greater relevance is the numerous folk who identify with Jediism as the religion of Star Wars. This has gone from a sometimes superficial joke, to a serious new religious movement for some people.

However, the new Millennium Falcons appear to be imbued with sacred meaning for some visitors who make the pilgrimage to the Disneyland sites. And why not? I feel quite convinced that for many this transcends a tourist attraction. It comes as little surprise that many would associate deep emotional ties to this vehicle from a Science Fiction film series. Pilgrimages are sites of spiritual magnetism and it seems quite plausible that the Falcon, perhaps more correctly an artefact, can also be considered a place.

Scrolling through the comments to the Reddit post is also worth a few minutes of your time. The joy of the fans who have made the pilgrimage in palpable in the stories they recount.

When a Virus Goes ViralI’ve spent a good part of this evening scrolling through social media looking...

When a Virus Goes Viral

I’ve spent a good part of this evening scrolling through social media looking at hashtags related to Wuhan and the outbreak of the Coronavirus. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the story since the end of December and the escalation in cases, deaths, and media coverage in the last 24 hours has come as a shock.

I lived through SARS in Hong Kong in 2003 and the sense of alarm and fear I witnessed back then was chilling. Hong Kong basically became quiet. People were scared to take public transport and arguments would break out if someone coughed or sneezed near you. At the time I worked in a school and students simply stopped coming to class until finally the government cancelled classes until the virus was under control. We left Hong Kong for the heat of 3 weeks in Boracay. Everyone on the flight wore a mask.

That was all before social media. Now we have got full scale viral virus posts happening. We also have a much more mobile population in China. So what have I observed? Lots of factual observations about the spread of the virus, countries that have been effected and the efforts of the PRC to shut down cities and build a temp hospital in Wuhan.

There are lots of posts of crowded hospitals in Wuhan and increasingly videos of people collapsing in random places. Some tweets say ‘collapse’ others say ‘dropped dead.’ It is immediately notable how alarmist a few choice words in an unverified retweet can be. But eerily the images look a little like the intro to a zombie/apocalypse movie.

In with all of these posts are numerous videos of Chinese people eating bats in soup, live mice, and live frogs. These are curious because they all seem to be apportioning blame. Many of the videos are of spurious origin. But it is only a handful of videos and they seem to be gathering a fair amount of attention. They are also causing a stir as they impute a very crude stereotype about Chinese eating habits. Sensationalism and blame coalesce.

Then of course there are the memes. Already plenty deftly nodding to other pop culture elements. Some amusing, others straight up bad tastes, racist, and disrespectful to all those already in some way touched by the tragedy of the virus. Yet, the memes seem a good cultural barometer of how serious something is, or simply how viral it has become.

Lastly there are numerous conspiracy theorists out there. From the largely benign blame about exotic eating as the harbingner of the end of days, to PRC chemical warfare. Either of which help in any constructive way to mange and prepare for what is sure to be testing weeks ahead.

Let’s see how thing a progress both the virus and the viral.

Observations on the Hong Kong Protests in Early December

Observations on the Hong Kong Protests in Early December:

This is an interesting blog post from a colleague of mine. After teaching in Hong Kong for twenty years he relocated to the USA a few years ago. This post tells the story of his December visit back, and more importantly, perceptions of the protests.