I don’t feel sad like I did in 2016. I just feel angry and perplexed that the majority of American voters selected a unabashed narcissist, mythomaniac, sexual predator, and otherwise very well-established heel as their leader.
L’État, c’est lui ?
Just watched: La Haine (1995) written & directed by Matthieu Kassovitz. A memorably stylized, scalding French portrait of three young fictional residents of the Parisian projects. A perfect film. In conversation with Do The Right Thing (1989). A borderline must-see for the sake of humanity. Borderline and not a shoe-in probably because I’m classist and racist. 🍿
Just listened to: Young Liars by TV on the Radio. For as much as I prize chordal playfulness and generosity as the prime musical virtue, I can really get into your endless chordal repetition if your vocals, fuzzy walls of sound, and/or rhythmic loops are striking enough. Which they are on all five slightly post-apocalyptic tracks here. Easily takes its place with Chronic Town, Kindred, and Magical Mystery Tour as one of my favorite EPs ever.
Holy smokes. Beloved is not remotely a Christ figure. Claiming as much amounts to literary malpractice.
So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.
“I just don’t picture myself as a secretary.”
— Carla, substitutes and budget secretary at Delta, to Heather, other secretary at Delta, standing in the Delta office considering a recent College Township job opening for a secretary
Name a movie in which there’s a disagreement between child and parents and the parents turn out to have been unequivocally right.
I’ll wait.
The difficulty in answering this question is representative of a major cultural problem. Filial piety is miles better than whatever it is we’re doing now (just-try-to-keep-the-kids-safe-and-happy-ism?), but it stands zero chance of ever working if it gets zero support from culture machines.
Crucifixes > crosses.
Idea for a novel: Upon His arrest, Jesus goes ahead and does appeal to the Father to send twelve legions of angels. Then what happens?
In response to Brad East, Tyler Hummel, and a baptism I attended today, I feel compelled to say that I, for one, currently detect zero indication—in scripture as well as in observation—that there is magic at work in baptism and the Eucharist. That is precisely why they need to be attended by high ceremony.
O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.
Surely, Psalm twenty and three shall follow me all the days of my life. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just re-listened to: Glo (2000) by Delirious? The technicolor final feather in the caps of this Sussaxon anthemic rock worship band whose early records, more than those of DC Talk or Jars, served as the heart of my enjoyment of CCM from 1994–2002. Delirious? released four more studio albums after this, but none of those hit the spot for me, which implies that my continued enjoyment of their early records may be a matter of nostalgia. But on Glo there’s a combination of the Muse-like sonic pleasures of their stellar 1999 outing Mezzamorphis with the get-really-into-it instrumental worship jams—which, as far as I was concerned, these guys invented—of 1996’s Live & In the Can that made and probably still makes Glo a favorite of mine.
My clipping will be lost on the round trip to Tiny ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just re-listened to: Like A Rose (2013) by Ashley Monroe. A throwback country-pop gem, alternating well between touching and funny.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Hope is:
- an imagined, desired future that you feel could come to pass and which prompts you to act accordingly,
- the supposed bringer of that future, or
- the feeling that accompanies imagining that future
Fear is the undesired version of the same.
I see colors in the dark ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Revive us, O Lord.
But this time, do it right. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just listened to: Leonardo da Vinci: La musique secrète (2019) performed by Doulce Mémoire under the direction of Denis Raisin Dadre. Seventy-eight minutes of exquisite Renaissance chamber music selected as an expression of Raisin Dadre’s musicological reflection on ten paintings of Leonardo.
I especially like me the sound of some lira da braccio, an instrument which sounds like a slightly more primordial Italian take on the Swedish nyckelharpa. When nobility is built into the very timbre of the instrument, it’s hard to go wrong.
Bonus points for to whoever decided to allow little to no gap between the tracks on this album, a decision that in my limited experience listening to classical recordings is an interest-propelling rarity.
Karl Barth and Warren Buffet look like fraternal twins and they were/are both polyamorous? It’s all too much.
Just re-listened to: I Want To See Pulaski At Night (2013) by Andrew Bird. Pretty. Mostly just layers of strings loops surrounding the one song in the middle. Thus I’m not sure it’d stand up well to fully attentive listening. But still, quite pretty.
Just watched: A Fish Called Wanda (1988), written and directed by Charles Crichton and John Cleese. It took some time for me to warm up to the humor (or maybe it was the humor itself that took some time to warm up). But once warm, the (admittedly rather broad) comedy came in buckets. All three leads whose lines were written for laughs do it excellently: Cleese does sympathetic pathetic very believably. Kline played a “live-action Daffy Duck”: Annoying at first, then annoying and hilarious. And he won an Oscar for it. Palin manages to play a severe stutterer without, as it seemed to me anyway, playing the stutter itself for laughs. (The stutter does serve as a small plot device sometimes, and it does enable at least one very funny scene in which it is a miracle Cleese and Palin don’t bust out laughing. But mostly it serves to develop sympathy for the character. If the stutter is ever the butt of a joke, it’s a mean joke told by another character and makes you like Palin’s character...
// read full article →Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.