Today Marvel Comics released Fantastic Four #587 which continued the story that began some 50 years ago with four people whose life was changed forever by a gamma radiation blast in space which changed them into the comic book heroes known as The Fantastic Four. Yet issue #587 is a game changer of sorts. Over two years in the making, the storyline for the Fantastic Four has come to an end with the death of Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), the brother of Sue Storm (The Invisible Girl) and brother-in-law of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and BFF of Ben Grimm (The Thing). Death is something that is not uncommon in the world of comic book superheroes, even the most overtly messianic superhero Kal El – better known as Superman – has died. Yet death in pop culture is rarely death as we who live in the so-called real world experience it. In an interview on CNN, Marvel Editor-in-chief Tom Brevoort didn’t even deny that the possibility of rebirth stands over the newly deceased Human Torch:
“It’s very easy to develop cynicism about the stories we tell,” Brevoort added. “The only way to combat and conquer it is to have a story that touches on the humanness of people that has emotional resonance and truth to it. The fact of death is something every human being can relate to. I would argue that a well-told story of a character’s demise is not necessarily undone by them coming back later.”
In pop culture there is always this playfulness with the life cycle given the fantastical way in which life can be expanded beyond the limits of mere mortality – people change into superheroes, learn to become wizards, transport through time and space, and meet talking animals on the other sides of wardrobes. So battles occur, people die, and death takes for some but not all and not for all time. We cheer when our hero leaps up and saves the day in the darkest hour as we munch our popcorn. Then we blink at the light of day as we leave the movie theater and get into our car and have to face a world that is seemingly random, often painful, and rarely just in regard to who dies and who lives. And when people die… they stay dead. But life does go on, and we remember those who have passed from this mortal coil, living from our memories and continuing their life as a legacy of our own.
So will the Human Torch appear again in some distant new comic book?
It is pretty likely.
Does the knowledge of this cheapen the death scene in issue #587?
Yup.
Don’t get me wrong – I love comic books, anime, manga and think that, along with the character Elijah Price/Mr. Glass from M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable, that they are indeed telling stories – albeit fantastical – that are more ‘true’ than we care to realize. But the comic nature of death is not something that I can believe in anymore. Yes, as a Christian I belief in a life that extends beyond the temporal but this everlasting-ness of life is also rooted in the death and life around us everyday. Death is a very serious thing and an ugly thing. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. It is indeed a release from pain and suffering, but it is also a loss of life pure and simple – it is a loss of loved ones, of beauty we behold everyday, the stillness of water on a clear lake, the sound of children’s laughter and the feel of morning sun on your face. It is as Hamlet mused ‘the final frontier’.
So… what do you think?
Does the promise of rebirth in comics help us expect a rebirth as well and therefore take away ‘death’s sting?’ Or does this pop culture cheapening of death distract us from the reality of death?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So wrote Charles Dickens in the opening line to The Tale of Two Cities. And yet this is only the beginning. As the rest of the sentence continues:
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
Written in 1859, Dickens’ novel is set in the midst of the French Revolution as it is breaking out and the story chronicles the hopes and fears of a generation watching this seismic shift occur in Europe from both London and Paris. Many people recognize his infamous opening words – it is a wonderful, paradoxical summary of the human condition and many of us can state without blinking that our lives are summed up as ‘the best of times and the worst of times.’ Yet as the sentence continues beyond what we have become so familiar with. To be sure there is a lot more going on than merely ‘the best of times and the worst of times.’ What makes this age – let alone any epoch of human history – the challenging age that it is and that it is an intermingling of belief, foolishness, wisdom, incredulity, despair and hope as well as the best and worst of times. In the end, we live in and amidst change that is occurring so fast and so furious that we just can’t keep up with it. This is one of the many reasons we turn to music – to give us the sonic height, breadth, depth and simple space to stop, reflect and acknowledge what it means to be human amidst an ever-changing culture.
2010 was a year like many years in pop music – some great releases (the best of times) and some recordings so vile (the worst of times) that the fact that they were actually recorded, some producer gave a thumbs up from the sound booth, and now exists in perpetuity on a server somewhere is a haunting reminder that this is truly a fallen world. But there were albums that rose to the top – ones that offered a way of listening to a world spinning fast and furious with a renewed sense of place and purpose. Also, it is important to note these are ‘top’ albums and not necessarily the ‘best’ albums of the year. Like the tide hitting the shore after a massive storm, not everything that rises to the top is necessarily the best – what hits the shore is just that… ‘hits’. These ‘hits’ are in some respects the flotsam and jetsam of the year. Some of the albums I choose this year reminded me of where I came from and others showed me – perhaps with both horror and wonder – where we are headed. Some were deeply nostalgic and others knocked me off my feet and still have me feeling like the first time I saw a platypus… like some weird alien life-form appearing without being announced. Some of the albums were confessional and others prophetic. Some were just simply great albums to listen to when driving on a warm summer day on Highway 20 near Winthrop and others fit well with the feeling of my favorite coffee shop as twilight falls on a rain night on Capitol Hill in Seattle. So try as you might to find some common thread between them akin to Pandora trying to create some perfect radio station for me, there simply isn’t one. In the words of that great music critic Donald Rumsfeld… it is what it is.
In compiling my top ten albums for the year, I am following the pattern I have had for the past decade on this blog of limiting my number of choices to the year into the decade – top 8 for 2008, top 9 last year for 2009, and this year I get to round out the number with a top ten.
Again, as for the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these choices, like most things in life you can try to distill it down to a number of competing factors but as I have written elsewhere I am more of the belief that music finds us and grabs a hold of us more than we reason and force a feeling for. I have had a lot of music recommended to me – some of it sticks and a lot of it doesn’t. In my younger more idealistic years I would to try and embrace the hipster choices, rush to the hottest indie acts, grab the least hot track from iTunes. Perhaps it is due to age, crankiness, staring down the barrel of 50, or plain old stubbornness but I have found that if it doesn’t connect in the first few listens… then the song and I need to part ways and I need to free up space on the iPod. So what follows are a series of first dates that just kept going – albums that I fell into and keep falling into this year. I don’t think all the tracks are stellar on the albums I chose, but there is enough of a consistent thread joining the project together to consider it a winner. Lastly, I realize that we are increasingly living into an age of the digital single (or ‘dingal’ if you will) where albums really are a thing of the past. I am still a strong believer that artists can do profound work in miniature as well as large canvas. I have a number of singles/dingles that populate playlists and mix tapes that stand apart from albums and that is a great thing, but the album is a special event. As the name recognizes, it is a movement of images akin to a photo album that while offering a collection of distinct images that are distinct can come together in the hands of a musician and be a tapestry showing a story that situates each single/dingle in a context or family. Sometimes only 30 minutes and sometimes over an hour but the album does something that the single/dingle will never do – it gives us a community of meaning-making that both enlarges the single/dingle and humbles it at the same time. Like life, we make sense more as a part of an album rather than as one-hit wonders.
So… onto my 2010 top ten albums:
10 – Glee Cast / Journey to Regionals
Before you go screaming into the comments box, hear me out: no television show has done more for pop music in the last five years than Glee. Seriously. Taking past pop staples and doing mash ups with current acts seemed like a one trip pony at first, but as the show has continued, the way in which Glee is situating the context of teen coming-of-age in the midst of a continuous musical number has more truth than fiction. Most every teenager is essentially a walking soundtrack: rhythms and beats punching through their Mp3 players in the hallways, at the bus stops, walking in the mall or waiting for their girlfriend afterschool, music is identity. Whether it is Fame, Grease, Footloose or Glee, the truth is that we may roll our eyes at such a shameless money machine as this Fox comedy (each single/dingle they sing goes to the top of iTunes sales for the week – the royalty checks for the members of Journey alone much be making for a happy Christmas this year) but the fact remains… the musical numbers are actually really good. Whether the show holds it together beyond this second season remains to be seen (after the ‘Grilled Cheeses’ episode it seems to be losing its luster a bit IMHO) but their first run to regionals and the season finale was as good as it gets. The release “Journey to Regionals” is just an amazing, fist- pumping anthem to idealistic teendom. Yes, these are impossible dance numbers to imagine for a public high school in Ohio. Yes, there is no way these kids could have all appeared in the same school and been called ‘losers’. Yes, Journey songs get a bit tiring and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was done better in the ‘Wayne’s World’ movie. But as an album of optimism that literally (here it comes) twinkles with possibilities… it doesn’t get much better than this:
9 – Kayne West/ My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
What is there to say about Kanye West that over the past couple of years hasn’t already been said? Few people hold the place in pop culture that Kanye does – whether he was the most hated man in America for usurping Taylor Swift’s MTV acceptance speech or now the source of George W. Bush’s *only* disappointment in his entire presidency as noted in his recent interview with Matt Lauer on NBC and in his memoir Decision Points – the man certainly galvanizes opinions. When his latest album was released I had some low expectations but this is a release that is one of the best hip-hop CDs in years. Taking all the celebrity and power issues that were beginning to show up in his 2004 release The College Dropout (some would argue still Kayne’s best album to date) Kanye has pulled together an anthem for the new millennium. Going back to the R&B and Soul sampling that made him the go-to guy for Jay Z, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy lives up to its title by sounding otherworldly and timeless yet so fresh at the same time. With Hip Hop royalty like Rhianna and Jay Z on board as well as serious indie cred by sampling Bon Iver, Kanye West is proving what many critics have argued and record sales show: Hip Hop is the last truly innovative pop music genre alive today. As a genre that can sample the past with dignity (rather than either parody or shameful disrespect as in many current slouching so-called indie bands), bridge every musical genre effortlessly, and move between racial and economic classes yet still remain distinct, it is the last musical superpower on the planet. True, Kanye West is a middle class kid from Chicago and doesn’t have the gansta narrative of Tupac, but he knows his limits and draws into his records the talent and depth of the future as well as the past. As a art performance piece, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is really a wonder. True, he drops the F-bomb like rain in Glasgow in November, but he pulls together pop culture and high culture deftly as seen in his promo video for the single “Power”:
Many people will be putting My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as their number one release for the year for good reason and as a hip hop release is stands toe-to-toe with the best of them.
8 – Florence + The Machine/ Lungs
I only listen to two radio stations with any regularity anymore: KEXP 90.3 and KPLU 88.5. When I lived in Scotland I would stream them to my office computer in Number 4, The Square at the University of Glasgow and get my fill of great jazz and NPR (KPLU) and some of the best indie playlists on the planet (KEXP). I say this to note that radio stations are going the way of the dodo bird and it is getting harder to get exposure to new music from good sources. One example is Florence + the Machine which is a band I haven’t heard too many people talk about but thanks to both an NPR spotlight and hearing a couple tracks on KEXP encouraged me to check them out. Lead singer and songwriter Florence Welch is the daughter of a professor of Renaissance Art at University of London and this influence shows throughout the album. At once blending heavy drums, harpsichord, hand clap loops, Irish Harp, and choirs with at times a jazz time signature and at others a straight 4/4 pop riff, Florence + the Machine really brought a unique sound in their release Lungs that is both instantly singable (try not joining in on “Dog Days are Over” while driving in your car), rhythmically full and pushes us toward triumphant love (“Cosmic Love” has already appeared in numerous TV shows at critical ‘first kiss’ moments for humans falling for aliens (“V”), vampires (“The Vampire Dairies”), or superheroes (“Smallville”). At times the band swerves into Tom Waits territory (which is a good thing BTW) and at others just a simple pop ballad. Overall a really fun album that I doubt will make many top ten lists this year but deserves some respect. This video of “Cosmic Love” is fairly goofy, so I recommend just turning off your monitor and just listen to the track… sometimes (as the Buggles told us so many years ago) video really does kill the radio star…
7 – Bruce Springsteen/ The Promise
OK, OK… the songs were recorded in 1978 and only remastered and released in 2010, but give me a freakin’ break… this is the Boss! To be honest I didn’t take to his last studio release in 2009 “Working on a Dream” all that much (with the exception of ‘The Wrestler” which is classic Boss) and hearing that he was releasing some ‘lost tracks’ that were recorded around the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town was intriguing yet seemed like a Hail Mary throw to get some quick cash at Christmas. But as a hard core Boss fan I caved and picked up The Promise and was simply blown away at two things: (1) that songs he essentially gave away to other artists (“Fire”, “Because the Night”) just sound amazing and fresh now that the Boss has taken them back, and (2) the songs that he wrote during the Darkness on the Edge of Town season of his career were in some ways more mature than he was and that time and they need to marinade these past decades so that the Boss was ready to sing them. Granted, the songs he ‘gave away’ like ‘Fire’ and ‘Because the Night’ are fairly standard, but listening to the title track – ‘The Promise’ – is to be immersed into a world that is haunting and current in 2010: unemployment and underemployment crush the life out of youth and their ideals, hopes for lasting relationships seem to disappear and only the hope of escape is left. Sure, writing a song in your twenties can fill the song with power and anger, but with the Boss now in his 60’s there is now a wisdom and hopefulness in his voice and performance amidst the doubt and despair that is something few grown-ups today seem to offer the next generation. Having the Boss share these gems thirty years after they were first penned is to be introduced to long time friends who can at once remember the pain of youth and yet have lived through it into a sobriety and solidity that comes from weathering life’s storms well.
This performance of ‘Because the Night’ was taped during Bruce’s appearance on the Jimmy Fallon Show last month and he is backed by the Roots who, for my money, take the song to another level:
6 – The Black Keys/ Brothers
Whether you are a fan of Quentin Tarantino as a director and auteur, he certainly gave pop culture a reminder that 70’s soul and funk deserves to be canonized – if radio stations have forgotten about it, then his soundtracks were going to raise the funk from the grave. One of the things you feel very quickly with The Black Keys is both the homage to 70’s funk acts and the seamless sense of immediacy in the tracks – like this is a first take and the raw energy is front and center – that only Jack White has seems to pull off. Dan Auerbach (on guitar and vocals) and Patrick Carney (on drums) who make up The Black Keys had a strong outing with their Danger Mouse produced 2008 release Attack and Release. In the Pitchfork review of Brothers earlier this year, they noted that while Danger Mouse only produced one track on the album, his fingerprints are still all over Brothers – the quasi-dirge vibes riffing a deep scratchy Delta blues sound blended with Parliament-era falsetto funk vocals from Auerbach and then brought to a froth with some funky, quirky blended bass lines and rhythm grooves from Carney is just amazing. You so want to be in a nice venue when these guys crank it up and the album captures some of that lightening.
5 – Gil Scott-Heron/I’m New Here; Roky Erickson/True Love Cast Out All Evil
I suppose I am cheating a bit by putting two albums under one as tied, but part of my indecision is the similarity in their relative authoritative distinctiveness [translation: you just can’t say “No” to either of these guys]. Of all the albums that came out this year that spoke of redemption and rebirth just by virtue of coming into existence, these two releases – Roky Erickson’s True Love Cast Out All Evil and Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here – both have equal claim. Both Roky Erickson and Gil Scott – Heron are legends whose careers have influenced generations yet careened off the road after falling headlong into LSD, Heroin, Booze and everything in-between. Erickson is credited with coining the phrase “psychedelic rock” during his time with the 13th Floor Elevators; Scott – Heron was a formative spoken word performer in the 1970’s that many consider to be the Godfather of Rap and cited alongside Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson as one of the most important figures in modern R & B and Hip-Hop. Both essentially disappeared from recording for the past two decades with only the occasional release or track sample but this year saw both not only returning with a full length treatment of their work, but releasing one of the best records of either of their career. In the case of Roky Erickson, his producer Will Sheff worked through over 60 songs that Erickson had written in the past 20 years and boiled down the tracks into a 14 song compilation of southern gothic and folk rock that, while under 60 minutes, is truly gripping. The proper artist designation should have Erickson coupled with Okkervil River on the record label since they are the backing band on every track and give all the songs control and depth. But Roky Erickson is the preacher of the day in these songs and when he sings “God is Everywhere” you believe him. Gil Scott – Heron’s I’m Not Here is a similar testimonial to endurance and coming through the ravages of prison and drug abuse without any fanfare or triumphalism but with a voice that is a cracked, smoky baritone with tread marks and battle scars, he sings with a conviction and humility that breaks your heart even while you are grooving to the beats. Lonliness and anxiety fill songs like “Where Did the Night Go” where sleeplessness only adds insult to injury with the fact that, as a poet, he can no longer verbalize his love in a way his lover can understand. It is as if he has awoken like Rip Van Winkle into a world that no longer speaks his language nor understands what it is to be human. This is brilliantly done on the amazing track “New York Is Killing Me” where he laments that he lives in a city of “eight million people, and I didn’t have a single friend.” Of the stunning tracks on I’m New Here, his electronica-addled cover of blues pioneer Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” is the stuff of Grammys. This is a song of wrestling with the demons that haunt so many but few have the courage to face let alone acknowledge as companions in this journey through life. Gil Scott-Heron’s cover speaks with the authority of one who not only looks the Devil in the eye, but also holds his head high and swears by a God that is larger and more profound than simple answers and easy redemption – the ending spoken word response at the end of his cover of “Me and the Devil” is chilling and hopeful at the same time. If more churches preached the way Gil Scott- Heron or Roky Erickson embrace their shadows for the sake of the light… then perhaps they wouldn’t be so empty.
4 – Neil Young/ Le Noise
Neil Young + X + Daniel Lanois + a lone Gibson guitar = ? It is like a math problem where the X factor could lead you into despair, angst or greatness depending on what divine intervention moves into play. Rather than go back to either his Crazy Horse days, Grunge grandfather or folky balladeer stance, Lanois introduced Neil Young to his inner Jack White and stripped him down to a fuzzed out Gibson guitar and wailing voice left alone in a noir-era LA mansion. The result could have been a car crash… but the X factor tilted toward the sublime and Le Noise is a force to be reckoned with. With the polished anger of a wild man who has wandered the labyrinth of his mind for a bit too long, Le Noise comes off as John the Baptist kicking over his amp and declaring ‘Behold, here comes the music that will take away the sins of the world!’ Lanois is a genius producer – his work with Bob Dylan, U2 and others gives a sense of his ability to work with huge egos and bring out the best in them. Le Noise is a short outing at just under 40 minutes but that is also its strength – it doesn’t overstay its welcome and leaves you restless for more.
3 – The Hold Steady/ Heaven Is Whenever
As Craig Finn stated in relation to the band’s 2005 album Separation Sunday, much of their music is about real people finding real redemption. In a world where religion promises a life to be found beyond this one and humanitarians and politicians alike can spend a lot of time and energy blaming everyone for the ills of society yet never get beyond the rhetoric, Finn believes that rock and roll may be the last chance for kids today to find not only a reason to live, but the force to do it. In an NPR ‘All Things Considered’interview, Finn called many of his songs “a prodigal-daughter story… it is about a girl who grew up in a religious background and goes off to try to find something bigger, better, or something she’s missing. And [she] has a lot of experiences and ends up coming back, not only to her family and to her town, but to her church.” Heaven is Whenever continues this narrative and picks up many of the battered and bruised characters Finn has acquainted us with in the past Hold Steady releases. True, Heaven is Whenever is a bit more polished in comparison to their last album Stay Positive or Boys and Girls in America, but make no mistake… the Hold Steady are still the best bar band you are going to encounter. With all the swagger of a honky tonk and the guilt of Catholic school gone bad, The Hold Steady play simple tunes with sing along choruses that play well for the working guy ordering domestic beer and nachos yet draws characters, images and metaphors from such deep wells as Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, the Rise and Fall of The Roman Empire and most of the Torah and Pastoral Epistles. Craig Finn looks like just another CPA, but he sings with the wisdom of disappointment that never stops looking for light in the darkness and the literacy of a Don DeLillo/George Eliot mash up. Heaven is Whenever is not their best album, but is still buries a lot of what was released this past year. Take the single ‘The Weekenders’ for a spin and see what I am mean:
2 – Mumford and Sons/ Sigh No More
When your parents are John and Ele Mumford, the leaders of the UK Vineyard Church, you would think that such a child would either end up as a drug addict, some raging atheist given over to free market capitalism, or a safe church leader following in a parents footsteps. What doesn’t often come to mind is the vocation of “It Guy” in the alt-folk-rock scene and moving millions of units with a debut album that name checks not only God but Shakespeare and Steinbeck as well. Marcus Mumford has certainly defied labels and the band’s debut album is a wonder. Sure, he is in line with Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, and other neo-folkies and as such Mumford and Sons can be seen as merely riffing on an already fading trend. But just listen to Sigh No More and you will quickly realize that this is something more. The lyrical depth is truly amazing, the arrangements are both quaint and surprising, and Marcus’ voice offers the dust bowl scrap and grind of Grapes of Wrath with the whimsy of an public school head boy sneaking out for fish and chips and seeing the dirty streets at 3am for the first time.
This version of “Awake My Soul” was recorded live on tour and is a fitting celtic-tinged affirmation of the need for a soul to be wide awake in the world of wonder:
1 – The National/ High Violet
Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, has a voice and writes songs that get compared to a lot of other artists – Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits to name a few. What I have yet to hear is the comparison to artists found on John Hughes movie soundtracks. Take just about every cut on the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack could be covered by The National and I would venture to guess that Berninger spent a good portion of his adolescence with many of the misfits that populate the Hughes teen film canon. As demonstrated in their last release The Boxer and this years High Violet, The National is a band concerned with coming-of-age
On High Violet, you could also argue that the effect of Tim LeHay’s Left Behind series and millennial fever is part of the back story given the apocalyptic images of floods, bee swarms, and even brain-eating zombies. Most of what this conjures up for the listener though is the strange effect loving something more than yourself means in a world that is falling apart at every turn. Given that Matt Berninger became a father during the recording of High Violet speaks to this anxiety of now having to provide and protect a life other than your own. to express the fear of a man who now must put a wife and young child ahead of himself. “Afraid Of Everyone” is what encapsulates this anxiety to perfection. As Berninger sings of being afraid ‘of everyone’ you honestly believe him. And yet the movement of the album doesn’t live in the paranoia of Radiohead nor the burn-the- world-down-and-start-again anthem that is found in Nine Inch Nails. No, with songs like “England” and “Bloodbuzz Ohio” The National sing of being fearful for others and the love that breaks their heart over and over and over again. In short, it is just a stunning album filled with complexity, brooding, wonder and at times quick wit and one of the lasting releases that I can imagine playing again and again.
So… that is my list for 2010. In case you are wondering, I do realize that Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire and many, many other favs are not on the list. I am certain that they will find space on other lists and I doubt their lack of mention here will hurt their fan base or their year end sales. As I said in the beginning, these are ‘top’ by virtue of floating up on my shoreline… and I am so glad they did.
I would love your thoughts and comments and even hear your top albums of the year.
Due to my mad schedule of late with too many meetings, writing deadlines and seemingly endless crises to deal with, I haven’t been able to sleep well and finding myself needing to get up and work. As such, I am reliving the days of having an infant in the house where waking up every hour leaves you in a state where lack of sleep renders the line between dream, nightmare and waking pretty dang blurry. This is the space of liminality – a place between places as the conscious and unconscious crash together like waves in a storm without a shoreline to settle the feud. One of the great thinkers – if not THE greatest thinker – on the topic of this liminality of conscious and unconscious is Sigmund Freud.
In a letter dated September 21, 1897, we have one of the most famous letters of Sigmund Freud written to his friend Fliess. Here we read an example of Freud’s notion of a dreamscape in this account:
I received a communication from the town council of my birthplace concerning the fees due for someone’s maintenance in the hospital in the year 1851, which had been necessitated by an attack he had had in my house. I was amused by this since, in the first place, I was not yet alive in 1851 and, in the second place, my father, to whom it might have related, was already dead. I went to him in the next room, where he was lying in his bed, and told him about it. To my surprise, he recollected that in 1851 he had once got drunk and had had to be locked up or detained. It was at a time at which he had been working for the firm of T____.’ So you used to drink as well?’ I asked; ‘did you get married soon after that?’ I calculated that, of course, I was born in1856, which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 1900: 436).
Now this dream appears in chapter 5 of The Interpretation of Dreams; where it is a part of a collection of dreams that Freud labels “absurd” dreams – dreams that negate fact – in this case the possibility of carrying on a conversation with one’s deceased male parent. A set of dreams that, as are often true of the sets of dreams that Freud presents in The Interpretation of Dreams, need to be read as a whole. They all concern fathers and the issue of a father’s death, and there’s at least a strong possibility that one of the other dreams which is not presented as a dream Freud’s own, may in fact be so.
Freud offers here a dream in which a ghost speaks, a type of dream he cites repeatedly. These dreams – all concerned with murderous sibling rivalry and/or the father’s downfall – share unconscious contents making their interpretations mutually relevant. Curiously enough, given this rich body of content and its reference to fathers and so on, the place at which Freud decides to take up the meaning of this dream is the number “five.” The exciting cause of the dream, Freud said – the “day-residue,” in his jargon – was his reaction to having heard the night before he had the dream that “a senior colleague of mine whose judgment was regarded as beyond criticism had given voice to disapproval and surprise that the fact that the psychoanalytic treatment of one of my patients had already entered its fifth year.”
At this point Freud begins to welcome the seemingly random and often bizarre as building blocks of our conscious life – fiction and imagination are welcomed players as much (at times even more so) than systematic facts. In short, Freud is welcoming the consult of Oedipus and Hamlet and the interpretation of art and literature into the supposed pure scientific realm. He is now less caught up in narrow, crass desires like solving the patient’s problems in a systematic manner, and instead he opens up the exploration of a new kind of relationship.
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams could be argued, as some have done, as being the first modern autobiography. But an autobiography that is willing to blur the lines of fact and fiction – for maybe we need *both* in order to make any sense of life in the end.
When you read through The Interpretation of Dreams, you do not encounter a systematic and orthodox psychoanalytic text nor can you argue that the work represents a scientific document. The title itself is misleading in that throughout the entire work there is not a single fully interpreted dream. In a similar fashion to watching television where people surf in and out of programming when the action just gets going, all the interesting interpretations break off when they’re starting to get good, only to emerge a hundred pages later to be cross-referenced with another dream. This is certainly not a systematic treatise in any way. Rather The Interpretation of Dreams is the recounting of the process by which Freud achieves his uniqueness as Freud, the creation of a persona and the creation of a process of writing life at its unconscious and conscious levels at once. This process is ultimately a process that has something to do with Freud’s own neurosis after the death of his father. Furthermore, the dream work allows him to recapture powerful memories of his own past and to do something with them that, aside from rendering them less troubling, makes literature of them, allows him to speak in a powerful way of the things that really concern him: family romance, mythic history, fantasy.
There is always the question even after a century of reading and re-reading The Interpretation of Dreams whether the products of Freud’s mature genius belong with Science or with Art, with fact or with fiction but the subtle reading of psychodynamics which begins with The Interpretation of Dreams continues to provide the hermeneutic or interpretive ground for much of modern thought. The implications of his changed thinking about traumatic etiology point toward a recurrent issue in the dream book – personality structure is not so much discovered as created by analysis and the prototypical analysis is of the self as something known as much by construction as deconstruction. Looking back at his own history, while Freud had several models to display his views on the true nature of the human subject, it is in the form of the dream that Freud finds the paradigmatic vehicle for interpretation, as each image leads to others, stratified by epochal moments of emotional growth.
Is this not something to take on board as we consider how theology is construed in relation to how people live their fractured and seemingly disconnected lives? When a life is put under systematic rigidity and asked to conform, we rarely (if ever) can succeed with any integrity. However, the mash-up of selfhood that Freud offers: life as the stuff dreams are made of, blending and swirling in and out of consciousness and build upon fantasy, fiction, imagination and wonder as much as certainty, linear progression and will power. Perhaps it is no accident that the Bible calls us back to dream time and time again – whether Joesph is interpreting dreams for the salvation of his people or whether the mark of the Church in Acts 2 is a place where, akin to the prophet Joel, dreams will be in tandem with visions for a new life and people. Perhaps we are in an age seeking a ‘dream theology’ after all… a rendering of God and the implications of the Divine framed not by conscious reason but by the not-quite-waking wonder of dreams within dreams that grow and deepen beyond the limits of our wakeful reason. To dream anew, to bear dreams of the future and live them into today… this is the task at hand.
Perhaps we do need to read Freud with our Barth… and our Margaret Wise Brown…
Goodnight nobody… goodnight mush… goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush”…
One of the most difficult things about being a pastor is death. No… strike that.
One of realities of being human is death.
No… strike that as well.
Here, let me try this: one of the hardest things about being ANY human is knowing what to say and think about death.
Better… we will go with that and move on.
Today I officiated a memorial service for a 30 year women who died of a drug overdose. Her life was difficult in numerous ways but as testified to by family and friends, she always wanted to become more than her circumstances. She had two children – a 16 year old and a 4 year old. Her parents were divorced and remarried. Her husband speaks very little English. All of this came pouring into the meeting room at the church as we planned for this memorial service. They had been recommended to our church through a series of connections. As we sat and discussed the service, her father pushed a stack of CDs over to me with track numbers. “These are songs that she liked – ones that remind us of her and that she loved to sit and listen to,” he said. I looked them over: Sarah McLachlan, Mariah Carey, and… Metallica. “Have you heard of them?” he asked. One of the tracks he choose was “Nothing Else Matters” from Metallica’s 1981 “Black” album. “These are going to be great,” I said “these will be… awesome.”
“Nothing Else Matters” is a slow burner to be sure. Written as a goth ballad, Metallica’s lead singer James Hetfield wrote this song with only one hand strumming an Em chord while he was on the phone with his girlfriend. Since he held the phone with one hand (remember, this is 1991 and no bluetooth and cell phones were still the size of minivans but at least down from the monster trucks of the 80’s), he plucked the four open strings of a standard Em chord with the other, which eventually made up the first two bars of the song. It is a song of separation and a deep desire to get closer written with one hand holding onto the connection to what keeps him alive in this life and using the other to grasp at whatever will turn our longing, our hope, our love into an anthem large enough to fill stadiums. It is a song written so as to not forget what it means to be alive, and to give that gift of life to others through love and faith. The song is about longing for something more and seemed to fit perfectly for this memorial service. As the family and friends came into the fairly standard church sanctuary, more than a couple or eyebrows were raised as the Metallica tune filled the pews and spilled across floor under the alter and to the foot of the cross that hung on the wall. Tears started to flow as “Nothing Else Matters” became more than a metal ballad but a song of anger, promise and release wound up in chords and bars and rhythm. The open casket with this young women’s body lay there as the song continued on:
Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don’t just say
and nothing else matters
Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us, something new
Open mind for a different view
and nothing else matters
never cared for what they say
never cared for games they play
never cared for what they do
never cared for what they know
and I know
So close, no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No, nothing else matters
As the song ran its course, arms covered with more ink than a stack of comic books were rubbing their eyes and waiting for something beyond James Hetfiled’s simple tune as we looked toward the cross that hung over that casket. “Nothing else matters” opened the way for “something else” must matter amidst all this sorrow.
When people ask me what pop music has to do theology, it is in moments like these I wish I could bottle up and hand to the cynics. People get married, celebrate graduations, drive across the country and bury their family members to simple pop songs. People continue to seek after something that surrounds and empowers their lvies and for this reason I don’t believe in the post-Christian jargon some are used to evoking – I have yet to see that era truly in full bloom. However, the notion of the ‘after-Church’ world is certainly true. Granted, the ‘after-Church’ folks could truly benefit from the deep traditions and meaning found in the ancient church made new in their midst. But when death comes screaming into your world people will act like a proverbial drowning man at sea and will grab the most stable and recognizable thing found floating by.
For millions of folks it won’t necessarily be the hymnal in church pews but the song on their iPod that reminds them of hope, faith and love. These crazy songs make sense out of the chaos of life in ways so many other things shoveled at people never does.
I have a picture in my mind of this young women listening to “Nothing Else Matters” as we gathered there and perhaps wishing that as her family and friends gathered in this place they would write one more verse of that song with their very lives – that verse being lives lived in remembering her laughter, her love of the sunshine, her passion for music, and what it means to live out this love with others and in the presense of God who lives with us now.
As the service continued I read aloud of Psalm 23 and Romans 6: 3-9 and spoke of Paul’s promise that death dies and life will truly live at the end of all things and do hope that these words of promise got a grip on folks as they sat there. But I can bet that an old 1991 metal ballad is finding new life tonight for folks and hopefully there is a new verse being written in the lives of this family in deep mourning. That “something else” does matter, that we can reach out not with one hand restrained but embrace each other with both hands fully and experience an even stronger embrace of God’s grace and mercy.
Some would say that Metallica came to church today. But I think the gathered were ‘churched’ by James Hetfield and the band in ways we have yet to see the fruit of.
I have the honor of being appointed to the Board of Directors for IMAGE journal – a quarterly literary journal the seeks the intersection of faith and the arts. Quite a gift to be part of this amazing and deeply thoughtful journal. While housed at Seattle Pacific, IMAGE is an independent literary journal that has published work from writers and artists such as Anne Lamott, Wim Wenders, Luci Shaw, Kathleen Norris, Annie Dillard and Ron Hansen to mention a few. Greg Wolfe, the editor of IMAGE and chair of the MFA program at SPU, asked me to write a letter to the Board as a means of stating why I am excited about being part of this community of faithful artists – here is some of that letter:
I am grateful to be asked to participate in the work of IMAGE and so look forward to finding continued ways of supporting this important journal and vital community of artists who contribute and are supported by its work. The intersection of faith and the arts is something I take very seriously both personally and professionally. I suppose I see a similar thread in my story to that which Pablo Neruda evokes in the opening stanza of ‘Poetry’:
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
The limits of what has been deemed ‘faith’ by many theologians of the Church has been a source of concern and at times deep pain for me. Where friends of mine in seminary would find solace in systemic and doctrinal theology, I would turn to Flannery O’Conner, Cormac McCarthy, WB Yeats, Jim Crace, and other literature to find what George Eliot called “the Mystery beneath the processes” of our faith. Prior to coming to teach in the School of Theology at SPU in 2005, I was a Lecturer in Practical Theology and Ethics at the University of Glasgow, Scotland and served as Director of the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts. This was a place to find the nexus between my theological and pastoral training at Fuller Seminary and my PhD work was in Victorian Literature and Theology (I wrote my dissertation on George Eliot’s early translation work of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Strauss’ The Life of Jesus and its influence on her early fiction – Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss). I continue to serve on the editorial board of the Oxford University Press journal Literature and Theology and am an active member of the Society of Religion, Literature and Culture which holds its bi-annual meetings in Oxford.
Perhaps more than any verse, Jesus’ command to the gathered disciples at the institution of the Eucharist in Luke 22: 19 frames why I am excited and humbled by the work of IMAGE. As Jesus presents himself in the elements of poured wine and broken bread he proclaims the injunction to “do this in remembrance of me” which has been emblazoned on the front of alters, etched into glassworks and pottery, and sewn into liturgical cloth for generations. For some, this statement has become a license to merely preserve, fence in and ultimately fortress a way of life by taking Jesus’ command as a call to arms against the winds of change. During my six years in Scotland while in the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, I also served as Associate Minister at the Glasgow Cathedral. As ‘high liturgical Presbyterians’ (yes, there are some) the serving of the Eucharist included the traditional ‘fencing of the table’ and view from the ruling Elders that the Eucharist must be presented in a ‘decent and orderly’ fashion. To evoke theologian Paul Tillich, form had taken such a priority over content and meaning to the point of almost silencing the luminescent reality of the Host in our midst. Is this what Jesus had in mind? Digging deeper into the passage, we find that St. Luke records Jesus’ words as “τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰς ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν” in the Greek and chooses “ποιεῖτε” or “poieite” as the action to be taken in remembrance of Christ’s life and ministry. Poieite is a potent call – the call of poiesis is our cognate for poetry in English and not a term that is something to be fenced in. “Make poetry in remembrance of me” could be argued as Jesus’ command as he deconstructed the elements before the disciples whose feet had only moments ago been washed clean preparing them to walk anew into the world.
It is this call to ‘make poetry in remembrance of me’ that remains a clarion voice for my work as a theologian committed to the Arts and something I have seen through the pages of IMAGE. I believe that IMAGE and the community which is supported and enlivened by its work is a voice and presence that is needed now more than ever as we continue to live in a time that seems to want only pragmatics (how we live) at the expense of beauty (why life is worth living)
Blessings and peace and continue to ‘make poetry in remembrance of Christ’
Like most people I both love and detest “best of” lists – I often gawk at what people choose (I mean, do the Oscars EVER get it right?) but at the same time can’t keep myself from pouring over them. With that, I culled through my downloads and streaming for the year and akin to past Theology Kung Fu lists, have let the year set the number. So here are my nine recordings to consider for download and streaming (you will see why I make this designation as you look at the list) before singing Auld Lang Syne at your New Years party:
9. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse with David Lynch, Dark Night of the Soul
One of the marks of this decade was the move of artists to (in the words of the Flobots) ‘fight with tools’ such as Garage Band, Facebook and MySpace to subvert the industrial strangehold on music distribution to varying degrees of success. In the vain of Radiohead releasing ‘In Rainbows’ for ‘donation only’ via the web, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse teamed up with a bevy of artists to record an amazing album true to its Carmelite title – a homage to St. John of the Cross’ passive purgation into the ‘dark night of the soul.’ Filmmaker and auteur David Lynch (he of Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead fame) joined in to create filmic versions of the project as well as producing a photo journal. The entire project was slated to be released with EMI this Fall but the project was pulled. But if the move to the ‘computing cloud’ has taught us anything it is that no power on heaven or earth can stop the world wide web. The album can be heard in its entirety via NPR’s First Listen site here.
My favorite track: Suzanne Vega on “The Man who would play God” and Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals on “Just War”
8. Fanfarlo, Reservoir
Lovers of Hey Marseilles, Arcade Fire, Beirut will find a home with Fanfarlo’s bookishly twee graduate student aesthetics. Similar to the Decemberist’s Victorian revisionism, the London sextet took their name from, of all places, from a book by the 19th century French critic Charles Baudelaire. As lead singer Simon Balthazar said in an interview on NPR “I was reading French symbolists at the time, and I sort of just reached out on the table and there was this book [by Baudelaire].” Keeping with Baudelaire’s romantic sensibilities, Fanfarlo blend cello, violin, trumpet and mandolin into literate reflective flow that feels both at home at the circus and the critical theory post grad seminar.
7. The Flaming Lips/Stardust – “Borderline” off the Covered: A Revolution in Sound compilation
It probably isn’t fair to put just one song… let alone a cover song… let alone a cover of a Madonna hit from the 1980’s… in a list of “best of” releases at the end of the 21st century, but what can I say? Wayne Cody, frontman for The Flaming Lips teamed up with Stardeath and White Dwarfs (which is fronted by his nephew Dennis Cody) to record this freaking AMAZING revisioning of this Madonna chestnut of yore. Like Madonna – while the songs made for great fun on the dance floor, it was the visuals with the dawn of MTV that grafted music to image for all time and this isn’t missed by the Lips. As with all things Flaming Lips, there is the tinge of spaceman irony in their aesthetic – to hear them is to see them as it were with the big bunny suits and huge plastic beachballs. As the Lips toured this year they threw this cover into the mix to roaring acclaim and you can see why in the video of the song. As the song builds, watch Wayne Cody in the background with his Emo puffy coat banging the large gong while his nephew in the argyle vest throws his hair around like Kurt Cobain at prep school and think “I bet Thanksgiving is a riot at their place…”
(btw – the Covered compilation that has this track also has a cover of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” by… wait for it… Adam Sandler. Yes… THAT Adam Sandler. He sings it straight up and it isnt that bad…)
6. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
When Fox Confessor Brings the Flood came out, the days of Neko Case being the secret crush of KEXP and NPR listeners was over. With that CD, the sometime-singer in The New Pornographers whose pure voice channeling Patsy Cline, swirling lyricism of a bookworm, and non-sequitur arrangements forged by someone who spent too much time on craigslist (she bought up 100 pianos on craigslist and stored them in her barn… go figure) came to roost. While the 2009 release of Middle Cyclone wasn’t quite the level of genius that was Fox Confessor, it still stood head and shoulders over many of the releases this past year. Her cover of “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Nature” stands in the middle of the playlist as a tent pole for the eco-centric themes running throughout – whether it is the fact that Killer Whales get their name for a reason in “People Got a Lot of Nerve” to the 30 minute plus (yes… 30 minute plus) ending track “Marais la nuit” which is just the sounds of her backyard at twilight (I wonder how many people just download that single…) it is really a tour d’force.
5. The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come
I first came across the Mountain Goats (the band fronted by John Darnielle) with their release “The Sunset Trees” a few years back and especially the single “This Year” which is a rousing singalong that I usually play every year now on my birthday and love the “maybe this year in Jerusalem!”
There is a level of irony that so-called Christian bands will try to reach their audience by making their songs as abstracted and removed from biblical references as possible with not so much as a fish symbol on their CD cover art, yet a deeply ‘secular’ band like the Mountain Goats will release an album of songs whose titles are all direct biblical citations. To read the linear notes and track listing in “The Life of the World to Come” is to get more engagement with the Bible than a year of Sundays in half the rock band churches popping up in warehouses everywhere.
Yet rather than either dismiss the project as the work of a cynic or disregard the songs as having no hermeneutic relation to the texts cited in the title, take a moment and just listen to the stories that Darnielle spins forth in each track with a Bible in your lap.
“Matthew 25:21” takes the parable of the Sheep and the Goats into the room of Darnielle’s mother-in-law as she is dying of cancer. When you think of his chosen text as a rendering of promise for the “good and faithful servant to go into the joy of the Lord” it puts irony out in the hallway. For U2 fans, Psalm 40 is considered almost untouchable since the definitive version anchored their “War” LP in 1983. That said, the Mountain Goats take in “Psalms 40:2” is a kicker with a pulsing bass line fronted with Darnielle’s charistmatically frantic voice proclaiming “He has fixed his sign in the sky / He has raised me from the pit and set me high” that he is seeming to dare God to save him. In “Genesis 30:3,” Darnielle sits at an old beaten piano singing about a kind of love few songwriters have the courage to reflect on let alone sing aloud. Here Rachel, the beloved of Jacob, offers her maidservant Bilhah to her husband so that they can bear a child: “I will do what you ask me to do / Because of how I feel about you” sings Darnielle with a weight to his voice that speaks of love, understanding and pain in ways that much of what is called CCM could learn from.
I will upload my top 4 downloads tomorrow… any guesses what will make the number 1 spot? 🙂
With the end of a decade comes the flood of lists – best movies, best CDs, biggest changes of the decade, man and women of the decade. etc. Pundits are racing to label this first decade of the 21st century – depending on whether you are a glass half empty person or glass half full, you could say that this has been the decade (00) of the ‘naughts’ or the ‘oughts’ (as in ‘ought 5’, ‘ought 6’). While those who have read my musings both here and elsewhere would say that I lean toward the cynic repose, I will say that the past 10 years deserve to be seen as the decade of the ‘ought’: whether framed by the stunning political upheavals in the Presidential race with the election of Barak Obama – a relative unknown at the beginning of the new century who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as Commander and Chief today, or the economic upheavals of the end of this decade where people are scrambling to make sense of a consumer culture without the means to sustain consumerism resulting in not only a loss of jobs, homes, and lifestyle – but a serious crisis of identity as well (“if I can’t spend… who am I?”). One of the greatest shifts of this decade has been the full-on embrace of what has been termed as “The Long Tail” phenomena. The term was framed in the middle of the decade by Chris Anderson, an editor at Wired magazine, who essentially argued that where much of consumer choice was framed by access to goods found in traditional ‘brick and mortar’ shops which were limited to inventory and therefore shops were driven only to stock items that were deemed the most popular and generally appealing – the ‘oughts’ have fully realized the shift to online retailers such as Amazon and iTunes and as such have essentially endless ‘shelf space’ (a phrase that will quaint to my children in the years to come). Anderson puts it this way in his 2004 Wired article cited above:
You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There’s the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to ’80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don’t have the distribution clout to get into Tower [Records] at all.
There is perhaps no greater example of this revolution in economics and seismic lifestyle shift during the ‘oughts’ than the rise of the iPod and iPhone driven by iTunes. Akin to the Facebook explosion where people began reconnecting with people they barely spoke to in high school and now share status update quips with on a daily basis, now with the advent of the digital music player, the ubiquity of laptops and now netbooks, and the move away from server mentality to ‘cloud computing‘, the flow of music and video is no longer restricted by shelf space at the corner Tower Records (R.I.P) or big box Walmart. While iTunes still operates on a purchase model – you buy the 99 cent download and therefore ‘own’ the song on your music device – services like Zune and Rhapsody have a pure ‘cloud’ model where you merely pay a subscription to their library and while you never ‘own’ the music you are listening to, you can listen to it as long as you wish and trade it out when Lady GaGa (who I have to admit frames the mantra of the ‘oughts’ – “I want your everything as long as its free” – in her zeitgeisty song/video “Bad Romance” which will stick in your head for days… so just be warned before listening/viewing 🙂 gets irritating or simply embarrassing to have on your playlist.
What this essentially signals is the end of the CD era as we turn the page on this decade in a matter of weeks and rush face first into 2010. Having lived thus far through rise and fall (and rising again) of various media delivery modes – whether it be vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD and now digital download and streaming – what is apparent as we enter the next decade is that while we will continue to listen to music, it will be with our head in the proverbial and yet very real ‘cloud’ as much as with our feet on the dance floor.
Stay tuned – Theology Kung Fu will be posting our ‘oughts’ wrap up posting in a couple days…
I am a bit late to the game in picking up Alex Ross’ Pulitzer Prize winning “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” and can’t say enough good things about it. Ross is the chief Music Critic and an Editor for the New Yorker magazine and has pulled together a seminal primer for ‘reading’ the evolution of culture in the 20th century through the music that formed our lives and times. Ross stakes a claim early in the introduction that “twentieth-century classical composition…sounds like noise to many…yet these sounds are hardly alien. Atonal chords crop up in jazz, avant-grade sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Sometimes the music resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it by design. Sometimes, as with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and dissonance. Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it.”
I love this description and the way Ross is so spirited in his call for us to move from being passive listeners toward an engagement as full participants in the music that fills our iPods and cascades out of the windows and doorways of dorm rooms and bars, concert halls and the church sanctuary. As I wrote in a recent theological review of U2’s recent album “No Line on the Horizon”, music is something that shapes and ultimately frames not merely marking the memories *of* experiences we partake in, but literally *are* the experiences themselves. For many of us, music is as vital to what it means to be alive as anything else. We return to the songs that give us hope, provide companionship in the midst of lament, carve out space for reflection and lay out a map for our journey both in recovering our past and forging into the hope of a redeemed future. “We are born of sound” muses Bono in the song “Breathe” off “No Line on the Horizon” and I believe he is absolutely correct. To read The Rest is Noise to realize just how profound the birth of the twentieth century is and the genius that is found in the music we have been midwifed by into the life we now hold so dear.
Los Angeles – arguably one of the most “American” cities you will ever visit. Flash and image swirl around you in the reflections of 100 foot video billboards, half the television shows in the past twenty years are shot in a 10 mile radius of Wilshire and Figueroa in downtown where I am currently writing this blog at the pool side of an old 50’s faux Moroccan hotel: everything feels like a canceled TV show on Nick at Nite down to the extras walking across the street.
I am in LA this time at the National Youth Workers Convention. This is the Superbowl of youth leader events if the Superbowl was only the halftime show and there was no game and held in a strip mall. And perhaps that is my worry as I watch over 1,000 youth workers running around with the latest messenger bag with hip flare pins on the strap: has youth ministry become only the halftime show and no game? The Big Room events capture this perfectly: huge expensive stage show with set musicians cranking out great covers of Stevie Wonder while the MC throws plastic frisbees probably made in a sweat shop in China to the cheering crowd who have spend the day grabbing as many free pens, T-Shirts, and funky USB drives from the booths as they could get their hands on… ‘consumerism sanctified’ to be sure.
Just outside the Convention Center where this is all taking place another gathering of the faithful has assembled: hundreds of Michael Jackson fans have gathered around the Staples Center awaiting the premiere of the posthumous concert film of their dead hero. For days they have been gathering, sitting in lawn chairs, dressed like MJ and iPod docking stations blasting out his back catalog for all on Figueroa to hear. Votive candles have been lit and flowers left under a huge wall of messages written in memorium.
Both groups have gathered because someone died. Both groups seek to honor their hero. Both are also driven and defined by the products and merchandise that is being sold to give form to their faithfulness: CDs, T-Shirts, concerts, DVDs, books, hats, etc.
Question: if we switched the groups, traded the faithful at each gathering and televised it to the world, would the masses be able to tell the difference? Could someone just watching behavior see which “King” is being lauded and worshiped?
I suppose like MJ I am wondering who IS the man in the mirror after all?
(Update five minutes later – Right after posting this, I walked into the Big Room session and caught the end of the talk. I was feeling like perhaps I had been too pointed in my reflections. Then the speaker handed the microphone to a singer who launched into “a song to have in our heads as we think about change…” The song? Yup… MJ’s “Man in the Mirror” Oh sigh… )
I recently published an article entitled “The Beatific Quest as Faith Formation in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Direction, Release and Integration” in the recent Aesthetics Issue of The Other Journal: Journal of Theology and Culture (issue #15, ISSN 1933-7957). The article reflects on Lewis’s use of the Grail quest genre as exemplified in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur as a typology for deep faith exploration that takes seriously both personal introspection and poetic imagination. A version of the article is available here: http://theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=841
some 50 years ago with four people whose life was changed forever by a gamma radiation blast in space which changed them into the comic book heroes known as The Fantastic Four. Yet issue #587 is a game changer of sorts. Over two years in the making, the storyline for the Fantastic Four has come to an end with the death of Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), the brother of Sue Storm (The Invisible Girl) and brother-in-law of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and BFF of Ben Grimm (The Thing). Death is something that is not uncommon in the world of comic book superheroes, even the most overtly messianic superhero Kal El – better known as Superman – has died. Yet death in pop culture is rarely death as we who live in the so-called real world experience it. In an interview on CNN, Marvel Editor-in-chief Tom Brevoort didn’t even deny that the possibility of rebirth stands over the newly deceased Human Torch:
Ross stakes a claim early in the introduction that “twentieth-century classical composition…sounds like noise to many…yet these sounds are hardly alien. Atonal chords crop up in jazz, avant-grade sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Sometimes the music resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it by design. Sometimes, as with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and dissonance. Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it.”
Theology and Culture: a theoblog for creativity, pop culture and God stuff 
You must be logged in to post a comment.