Category: Uncategorized

I have for a long time wanted to do some work on retrospective review of popular culture — the sorts of work that usually receive immediate reviews in the popular press, receive annual awards (or don’t), and then give way to the next, latest release. How often do entertainment-industry flacks anoint someone as the next Bob Dylan, or assert the monumental importance of this or that movie, when a few years afterward those overinflated award-winning works of genius crowd cut-out bins and used-video sale shelves?

I’m starting with 1980 because it’s twenty-five years ago, a very good round number, and because I was still listening to enough music that my opinions warrant more than derisive attention. We can branch out from there to other years, and to movies (of which I watch relatively few). I’ll base many music observations on my iTunes database, which is subject to misleading labels and outright errors — but gives me a starting point, anyway. (More dangerously, for my reputation, I’ll overlook some albums that I own but haven’t ripped yet, especially risky since those will be the more-often-played CDs by more prominent artists.) Then I’ll sum up by proposing awards that seem fitting to me, in quantities and categories that suit my whimsy.

In 1980, the Grammys lauded the Doobie Brothers (“What a Fool Believes”) and Billy Joel for (Phil “Wanted” Ramone-produced) 52nd Street. Ricki Lee Jones was their Best New Artist. Muddy Waters got an award for Muddy Mississsippi Waters Live, and Irakere got a Grammy for their eponymous album. Donna Summer won Best Female Rock Performance for “Hot Stuff”; Bob Dylan, Male, for “Gotta Serve Somebody”; the Eagles, Group, for “Heartache Tonight”; and Paul McCartney and Wings, Instrumental, for “Rockestra Theme” (I appreciate fundraisers as much as many people, but you’ve got to be kidding). The R&B selections: Dionne Warwick for “D?©j?† vu”; Michael Jackson for “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough”; Earth, Wind & Fire for “After the Love Has Gone”; and Earth, Wind & Fire for “Boogie Wonderland.”

Jazz: Oscar Peterson for Jousts; Chick Corea & Gary Burton for Duet; Duke Ellington for Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940 Live; Weather Report for 8:30; and Ella Fitzgerald for Fine and Mellow.

(Grammy reports courtesy of the Wikipedia.)

Ummm, yes; something was happening, but they didn’t know what it was, did they?

1980 was a monster year for music in my iTunes collection: I’ll just throw out the following terrific albums for starters: Elvis Costello, Get Happy!!; David Bowie’s Scary Monsters; the Pretenders’ first album; Peter Gabriel’s third solo album named Peter Gabriel; X, Los Angeles; Dire Straits, Making Movies; Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; Jim Carroll Band, Catholic Boy; Bruce Springsteen, The River; XTC, Black Sea; Roxy Music, Flesh + Blood. Friends, that’s a very good year.

On the R&B front, Prince’s Dirty Mind album was released, and Kurtis Blow released “The Breaks.”

I see a handful of “not quite” albums. The Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It (ooh, now that I take a closer look, that album leaps in my estimation); the B-52’s, Wild Planet; the Specials, More Specials (though their reappropriation of “Maggie’s Farm” came out that year, I think, winning them bonus points for taste and political pertinence); Squeeze, Argybargy. Blondie’s Autoamerican catches them way past their best work, and Devo’s Freedom of Choice likewise seems a sign of falling-off (sad that “Whip It!” captured the public imagination rather than the title cut — can someone re-release or remix that in honor of the present condition of U.S. politics?). The Stones’ Emotional Rescue is just sad.

OK, here are some AKMA awards for the year 1980, subject to correction and amplification when others point out stuff I missed:

1980’s Album Lingering in My Consciousness: Making Movies.

Unfairly Overshadowed Album: (Well, “unfairly overshadowed movie,” with album in tow) Rockers, the amiable reggae potpourri film that will never emerge from the shadow of The Harder They Come.

Great Covers: “Soul Kitchen,” by X; “Stop Your Sobbing,” the Pretenders (I love her a capella intro); “Eight Miles High,” Roxy Music.

Too Late Reintroduction: Professor Longhair got some posthumous press for Crawfish Fiesta, from listeners who should have been paying attention all along. The Muddy Waters album was pretty good, too; I guess the Grammys can’t get everything wrong (though if I were a folk artist, I might be grouchy about the blues taking this award, though if I were a blues artist, I’d respond that at least “folk” had a category of its own. OK, enough bickering).

Best Single: Not the Romantics’ insidiously catchy “What I Like About You,” nor “ ‘Antmusic!’ ” by Adam and the Ants, the prescient “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, but the especially deserving “That’s Entertainment” from the Jam’s Sound Affects.

Best Debut: The Pretenders.

Best Album: Top to bottom, I suppose I have to go for The River.

That’s how I see it, anyway; but I’m probably forgetting something, 1980 being so long ago and all.

Have you ever seen someone fill in the periods for the abbreviation “RSS”? I hadn’t wither, until I saw this article from the New York Times (registration required). The main emphasis falls on the protocol’s possibilities for advertising, so we may overlook the author’s silence on the contribution of various developers to the history of RSS (actually, that silence is what caught Margaret’s attention, and she pointed me to the article) — they do, however, weigh in in favor of Dave Winer, that RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (rather than “Rich Site Summary”). Money quotation: “We need to preserve all of the things that are good about R.S.S. feeds right now and also introduce the opportunity for publishers to monetize those feeds,” according to Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder.

I’m no fan of monetizing anything, though I’m more sympathetic than Wonderchicken to the idea of scrounging bloggers picking up some paper and iron for blogs they’d be writing anyway. But the corporate sound of the whole article reminded me of the ways that our conversation has changed since I first learned what I’d been missing online. And it would be willfully foolish of me to suppose, under the circumstances, that money hasn8’t changed anything.

I have to develop my capacity to photograph art, I guess; my casual pictures of Pippa’s canvases falls radically short of the power of the images themselves. The photographs miss the texture and richness of the oils; I think Pip likes oil paint in part because she can mix colors without entirely blending them — an effect it’s hard to capture with just an offhand photo. Lighting and color balance affect the presentation, too.

Once I almost had a job doing art photography as a work-study position in college. It seemed so direly tedious, though: line up the page on the stand, check the lighting, snap the shutter, again, again, again. No composition; no decisive moment. Now I look back on that relatively automated set-up and grumble that I have a hard time reproducing the correct circumstances time after time.

Anyway, two more Pippa canvases today, with several watercolors to come soon (I can scan those — oh, joy!).

Umair scores a bunch of direct hits in this argument that proponents of DRM are dealing with the digital transition all wrong, basing his claims on the economic effects of DRM imposition.

One more time, with feeling: whatever turns out to be the appropriate way to distribute revenues in the world of digital media, that new model will work based on the characteristics of digital media, not by forcing digital media to emulate characteristics of physical-media distribution.

I might be working on Sunday’s sermon, for which I do have the germ of an idea — but instead, I’m sketching the preface to the published version of the Winslow lectures and ruminating about my presentation to the Ekklesia Project in a couple of weeks.

Relative to the latter, I find myself (that’s for Debra and the Seabury writing group) musing about the ideological implications of the first three commandments. For those who don’t have them memorized, those go roughly as follows:

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage.
You shall have no other gods but me.

You shall not make for yourself any idol.

You shall not invoke with malice the Name of the Lord your God. (BCP)

or

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. (NRSV Ex 20:2-7; cf. also Dt 5:6-11)

I’m working on the notion that the first commandment asserts God’s unique priority over all other considerations; in the context of a resurgent sense of Empire, that unique priority refuses all compromise with any nation’s claims to historic, or economic, or theological privilege. (I’m intrigued that at this point, God does not claim unique existence — “As for all the gods of the nations, they are but idols” (BCP, Ps 96:5); rather, the First Commandment simply insists that all other rivals be subordinated to God’s authority.) The Second Commandment then insists on God’s aniconicity, the extent to which God’s people must not affix their allegiance to any specific (tangible, visible) representation of God. That which is sacred can’t be figured in a way that captures the divine nature (so that our representations themselves can never be objects of worship). And the Third Commandment warns that we may not use God; whereas one might plausibly reason that knowledge of the Divine Name gave us a kind of leverage, a power-with God if not a power-over God, the commandment stipulates that we invoke God at our own peril. Even God’s name, the uniquely fitting alphabetic/phonetic representation of God, comes to us not as a tool to be used, but only as a means of recognizing that greater truth, greater promise, by which we order our sublunary efforts to orient ourselves toward the sole source and end of all that is, and of all that should be.

For about forty minutes. That’s what I’m thinking right now.

This story about a “mysterious plume of water vapor” warns “ships should avoid the area.”

I hope Chris is on top of this — taken with the first sign of the apocalypse, it may portend the kinds of paranormal events that only a prophet such as he can duly diagnose.

I’m thinking about portable digital audio recording. Not the “sneak-it-into-a-Stones-concert kind,” nor the voice-memo kind, but the kind suitable for recording a lecture, or an interview, or a chapter of a Creative-Commons-licensed book. I would have thought that such devices were relatively inexpensive and common, but my cursory overview of the market suggests an abysmal gap between utterly casual memo machines (I can’t see one of them without thinking of Michael Keaton in Night Shift) and semi-pro music-recording devices.

The most appealing in-between choice would be a MiniDisc recorder, but it looks as though Sony has made it so difficult to transfer data back and forth that it’s not worth the expense of the MiniDisc technology. Am I missing something here?

Congratulations to Anna and Clifton Healy on the birth of their new daughter Delaina (on the anniversary of Anna’s late brother Delane’s birth). Three cheers to Delaina, Anna, and Clifton — and a special extra cheer for big sister Sofie.

Congratulations also to dear friend Susie, on her ordination to the priesthood. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but I hear you were surrounded by friends and supporters. Prayers for you and your ministry, and for your clergy spouse Luke!

From the treeware media, three columns called to my attention. First, Kevin called my attention to a column in the Telegraph, one that might have been titled “No Theology Please, We’re Anglicans.” Even though I’m a vocational theologian who winces at the author’s suggestion that he daydreams past “the concern for Jesus, for the Church’s mission, the affirmation of doctrine,“ and that he likes his religion privatized, I think the columnist hits something just right. A large part of church-going, of caring about the church, lies in this: people are drawn to the church’s inchoate expression of something shared, something deep and true, something so powerfully right that it need not bluster and threaten to make its point. That truth comes explicit in the language of familiar hymns and traditional liturgy — such that well-intentioned efforts to spruce up those timeworn formulas risk losing exactly that which attracts many people to church in the first place. That’s not simply hidebound narrow-minded conservatism; rather, it’s a genuine affirmation of a faith less ephemeral, less topical, less contemporaneous than the liturgical or musical catch of the day. Yes, absolutely, I advocate liturgical change (there’s no need, really, since liturgical change will happen whether anyone likes the idea or not); but yes, absolutely, it’s a much more delicate operation than most sponsors of liturgical change admit — in part, I suspect, because there are more people who want to write new liturgies (in their own words!) than there are people with the gifts to revise respectfully, elegantly, and inconspicuously.

Anyway, if church leaders were to begin by appreciating and encouraging people’s inclination to come to church out of loyalty and happy habit, and work from there to help them see the deeper dimensions of their words and actions, I would expect a stronger practice of evangelism. Indeed, this points, I suspect, to the tragic flaw of the strong “traditionalist” current in Anglicanism. Whereas their great strength lies in exactly their concern to preserve the precious liturgical and theological endangered species of church life, they endeavor so to do with a forcefulness that’s out-of-keeping with the spiritual calm that the tradition’s liturgies bespeak (whereas the church modernizers affect the tradition’s serenity even if they’re promulgating prosaic, didactic petitions to a Liberal Democrat of a deity).

Speaking of Democrats, Bob Wyatt asks what I think of an op-ed in the Sun-Times that points out how unlikely it is for Democrats to prosper in the rhetorical economy that rewards Karl “Frog March?” Rove for ascribing manifestly false motives to Sen. Durbin and his comrades, whereas Sen. Durbin speculated (manifestly soundly) that most of his listeners would not readily believe that U.S. interrogators were capable of the inhumanity exemplified in Guantanamo. What do I think? I think that the present partisan environment pits the fearful (led by the duplicitous) against the cautious (led by the compromised). For the time being, I anticipate only the rival demagogueries of toadies and equivocators, a disheartening spectacle all around. (I should say that the interview with Sen. Hagel in today’s NYT Magazine, registration required, sorry, suggested a bracing alternative on the Republican side of this set-to.)

Finally, I appreciated a motif latent in Judith Maltby’s column in the Guardian. Maltby laments the Church of England’s unwillingness to call women to the episcopacy; she asks, “Can anyone reasonably believe that if the selection of bishops was based purely on ability, we would, at present, have an all-male college of bishops, or that only men would sit as spiritual peers in the House of Lords?” Now, the traditional argument includes a premise that Maltby conceals, namely that the “ability” in question constitutively includes gender as a qualification — so indeed (the argument runs), the present bishops possess an ability that able ordained women lack. I don’t assent to that premise, of course, but it’s an element of the case.

But the point that especially caught my eye was Maltby’s next paragraph: “the Christian must always be ill at ease with arguments based on ‘merit’ in this way. At the end of the day, ordained ministry is not about how qualified or able a person is, though that is no excuse for slipshod practices in the professional work of the clergy.” Though this is not the main point of her column, she strikes a glancing blow at the neuralgic funnybone of the church’s predicament. In the name of inclusiveness and grace, the church has developed a lingering indifference to excellence. Until the church learns how to encourage excellence without reinforcing elitism, we can look forward mostly to a painfully protracted series of task forces, committee meetings, partisan salvos, huffy defensivenesses, and overall tawdry decline. One doubts that this is a mark of the indwelling Spirit.

Joey can add this frame from Calvin and Hobbes, July 3 1994, to his collection of prescient comics that deploy the word “blog” before the advent of weblogging. . . .

Doc’s pages in memorial to Susan Camusi offer a compelling witness to why we might wish we had known Susan and how we would miss her; to the Web’s capacities for memoriousness (I keep telling churches that they need to pick up this particular clue phone); and to Doc’s gentle, affectionate heart. Doc illustrates what it might have meant to have a friend such as Susan, and that in turn shows us what a blessing it would be to have such a friend as he.

I encourage everyone to rush and download ArtRage, the free natural-media paint program from Ambient Design. One never knows how long a generous company will prolong its generosity, and ArtRage offers a variety of top-notch tools for the unbeatable price of naught. (I was hoping Pippa would like it as much as it turns out that she does!)

My only desideratum would be a slight tweak of the trace tool (which Pippa used in painting this portrait of my beloved). In its present iteration, the trace tool reproduces across its whole width and stroke the color it finds at its starting point. It would be truly niftily handy if one could use the paint tools to apply stroke and paper texture, but have the color change with the color of the underlying photo (I believe Painter does this, or used to). But zowie, this is a very slick tool.