Just listened to: Midnight Of A Good Culture (2025) by Sho Baraka. Fortysomething 116er delivers 57 minutes of mannered, Christian yet doubt-laden, occasionally 80s/90s retro, occasionally obnoxious, yet masterful conscious hip-hop. RE: “Christian”: Despite this—and it is charmingly unabashed—this album ought to have a Parental Advisory sticker on it. It’s certainly the first Christian album I’ve heard with “n——” in the lyrics. RE: “mannered” and “occasionally obnoxious”: When the recording artist describes himself as a polymath and wears his love for André 3000 and Kanye on his sleeve, what else should I expect?
Lord, may I happily forget myself today in love for You and for those around me.
Every surface an ad
Every space a hotel ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just re-listened to: The Ballad of Dood & Juanita (2021) by Sturgill Simpson. Like the art on its cover, dramatically it’s just a sketch (or a series of sketches in a single narrative line). A hackneyed one at that. But country, bluegrass, and old-time music trade in hackney almost by definition. And if this is the kind of affectionate craft (and vocals!) you put into your seven-plus teetering-on-corny vignettes, I’ll take seven more, please. A top-ten EP for me.
“I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them.”
— Fred Rogers
Just listened to: Audio Vertigo (2024) by Elbow. Hey hey, my my—rock and roll (of the Peter Gabriel and In Rainbows variety) is still alive. Amidst middle-aged men in Manchester, anyway. (Props to them for pushing themselves as fiftysomethings.) How does a band like this count fewer than a million monthly Spotify listeners? The music is inventive, skillful, mostly happy, frequently groovy, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. It isn’t petulant, mean, lascivious, repetitive, or harmonically simplistic. Oh, wait.
Just re-listened to: Semper Femina (2017) by Laura Marling while on a foggy walk at dawn. I enjoy her stuff most when it’s paired with alternative tunings and/or uptempo drumming (especially hand drums). I hear little of that here, which, despite the Tom Waits feint opener, results in a more MOR offering, like some slightly fey (that might’ve been the fog), ivory, female Amos Lee record. Not that I’m complaining.
Just listened to: Don’t Shy Away (2020) by Loma. Arrangement and composition are equal artistic partners in this trip-hoppy, art-rocky, twilit, encouraging, other-oriented dream pop.
Two’s a crowd ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just listened to: venter på noen som venter på noen (“waiting for someone as waiting for someone”) (2025) by Valkyrien Allstars. More Norwegian prog folk rock, occasionally sonically reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac. Not as shimmering as their 2020 outing, and I miss the bit of vocal variety brought by Erik Sollid taking half a song’s worth of lead on that one. Still, even though I’m not Norwegian, these feel like some of my native sonic-musical textures.
Worrying about better sleep has made me a worse sleeper.
Just re-watched: The Truman Show (1998) written by Andrew Niccol and directed by Peter Weir. Film studies classes and media studies classes could (and hopefully do) have field days with this movie that would benefit humanity. I, for lack of time to sit, think, and write well along those lines, will offer this single intertextual connection along a more theological-anthropological line: “…so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death…and free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives“ (Hebrews 2:14-15).
I’ll throw in a sociological intertext, too: “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must…” (Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring).
Bonus: I knew Philip Glass scored some of the movie. But I hadn’t noticed until this viewing is the first time I noticed he’s in it!
The most important theological question after “Is God real?” and “What is God like?” is this: “What does God want?”
Actually, the third is probably more important than the second.
I am deeply, intrinsically inclined to be subject to nothing and to no one. I wish to be in my own driver’s seat as much as possible. Yet, as Burkemann writes, there is a direct relationship between individual sovereignty and loneliness. I do not wish to be subject to loneliness. Moreover, I am, by dint of my creaturehood, unavoidably subject to the Lord of all. That’s true whether I’m acting so or not. Hence, trying to live my life by exercising unalloyed individual sovereignty is both maladaptive and false. What’s more, the Lord of all actually explicitly commands me to subject myself to others and even says that unless I die, I will be alone.
Yet a clear pattern has emerged in my own life: I do not initiate much social activity and decline much of it that is offered to me. I do this largely because I have used my considerable, insistent autonomy as a waymaker for productivity, energy preservation, and, to some degree, spatial and other kinds of order in our household. As a result...
// read full article →OK, society, please repeat after me: Mental health ≠ happiness.
I’m aware this may sound silly to a public audience, but a very aspirational nickname for myself occurred to me today while in the DiamondBack second-floor kitchenette: T.S. Lovejoy. The “T” stands for “thankful” and “thoughtful.” I want to be T.S. Lovejoy. (I am motivated by words. How much more motivating will I find an epithet?)
“The Choice” by William Butler Yeats
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
(h/t Graeme Wood)
Just listened to: Our Gilded Veins by Rory Macdonald conducting The Royal Scottish National Orchestra on Outhere Music / Linn (2024). Bracing, pictorial, alternately elegiac and cathartic Scottish and English classical music, all of it written within the last forty-five years, most of it this century. Hubert Culot has written a more detailed review on MusicWeb International that renders much further comment from me superfluous, but I should like to note that the flautist Katherine Bryan’s performance in the title piece qualifies her as an endurance athlete.
I’ve only ever heard linguistic relativity (the idea, called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when I was in school, that language influences worldview and cognition) discussed with an eye on perceivables, such as colors and “snow.” (This may be a function of my non-erudition.) I’m told the hypothesis is still merely a hypothesis and very much in dispute.
But if you apply the hypothesis as a lens to help understand our grasp of abstractions, such as what we talk about and think about in ethics, then my study of forgiveness, the confusion surrounding it, and its supposed pitfalls suggests to me that a version of the hypothesis focused on definitions of words representing abstractions is indisputable: If you say forgiveness is required, it matters very much to your worldview and thinking—not to mention your moral performance—how you define forgiveness. Same with love.
Just re-listened to: Ratatat (2004) by Ratatat. Because laptops were instruments even back then—and instruments capable of contributing to the creation of bittersweet instrumental vibes, at that, albeit indietronica vibes best suited for, say, an indie Sega Genesis game in which the characters mostly wander city streets. I admit I’m often not entirely sure which sounds are the synths and which are the guitars. Anyway, this is an album my whole family can agree on. Good for close listening or for background music, but admittedly slightly better for the latter.
Just listened to: I quit (2025) by HAIM. My bias in favor of bands with three or more lead vocalists has a sibling: A bias in favor of bands comprising siblings.
A biblical understanding of the work of the Cross of Christ starts with this: Jesus willingly went to His death to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. Everything good the Crucifixion accomplishes by itself—and there’s a lot—flows from that fact. However, if the Law and the Prophets make no sense to you, that’s OK (and join a big club): Taking a page from Acts, I’ll tell you that Jesus wasn’t just crucified—He was also resurrected, validating Him as “both lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36) and thereby warranting your followership even if the import of what came two or three days prior escapes you.
We are slaves of freedom ✏️ 🎤 🎵
If I didn’t time myself at work, I’d be apt to spend less than forty hours a week working for DiamondBack, not more. And that’s no sleight to DiamondBack, who are doing good things; instead, it’s an indication that I’m interested in everything and am easily distracted.
“It’s weird that we’d rather sit through another podcast episode about the loneliness epidemic than just call somebody unscheduled” (Aaron).