The American voice

On December 12, 1915 Francis Albert Sinatra was forcibly wrenched from the womb. The forceps permanently disfigured the left ear and cheek of the child that would grow up to possess one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century. The story goes that baby Sinatra wasn't breathing when he emerged and was given up for dead by the doctor, but his quick-thinking grandmother held him under cold water until he started breathing. Quite the beginning. I don't listen to Sinatra as much as I used to. His essential subject was loneliness, specifically male loneliness, thus his recordings don't resonate in the same way as they did when I was younger and solitary. I suppose great art speaks to us more, or less, depending on the season of life we're in.

Shortly after Sinatra's death in 1998 newspaperman Pete Hamill wrote a wonderful little book called Why Sinatra Matters. I pulled it off the shelf a few nights ago. Hamill explains that the reason Sinatra matters is the same reason Mozart and Charlie Parker still matter. Different generations and cultures will listen differently, but "the music remains" and "every day, in cities and towns all over the planet, someone discovers them for the first time and finds in their art that mysterious quality that makes the listener more human. In their work all great artists help transcend the solitude of individuals..." (pp. 8-9)

Though not a conventional biography, Why Sinatra Matters effectively traces the impact that Sinatra's hardscrabble Hoboken, New Jersey upbringing and Italian heritage played in his life and career. It was a source of pride and also something to transcend. "'Of course, it meant something to me to be the son of immigrants,' Sinatra said to me once. 'How could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at - what? five? six? - I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea...That's why years later, when Harry [James] wanted me to change my name, I said no way, baby. The name is Sinatra.'" (pp. 37-38) Yet as the first and only child of immigrant parents Frank was a trailblazer, the first American of his family. Back in the neighborhood he spoke the "argot of the street. He could be profane, even vulgar. The word them could become dem, and those could become dose. It depended on the company." (p. 94) But as anyone who's listened to the songs knows, Sinatra's diction was impeccable. Young Frank would go to the movies and imitate how he heard Cary Grant and Clark Gable speak. "Alone in my room, I'd keep practicing the other kind of English." (p. 94) Frank Sinatra was a powerful symbol of the great American melting pot and a hero to scores of Italian Americans. In many ways his story is the American story. Ultimately though, his enduring legacy, the reason "Sinatra matters," rests on one thing. The main thing.

His finest accomplishment, of course, was the sound. The voice itself would evolve over the years from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle register and dark bottom tones. But it was a combination of voice, diction, attitude, and taste in music that produced the Sinatra sound. It remains unique. Sinatra created something that was not there before he arrived: an urban American voice. It was the voice of the sons of the immigrants in northern cities - not simply the Italian Americans, but the children of all those immigrants who had arrived on the great tide at the turn of the century. That's why Irish and Jewish Americans listened to him in New York. That's why the children of Poles in Chicago, along with all those other people in cities around the nation, listened to him. If they did not exactly sound like him, they wanted to sound like him. Frank Sinatra was the voice of the twentieth-century American city. (pp. 93-94)

One of Frank's signature songs was the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer standard "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)". Sinatra recorded it several times, including a definitive interpretation on the 1958 album for Columbia aptly called Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. This is the whiskey-voiced Sinatra, somewhere between a viola and cello. Accompanied by piano and only the sparest Nelson Riddle orchestration, it's an almost painfully intimate thing to listen to. To me, and I think to a lot of fans, "One for My Baby" is the quintessential Sinatra closer -- not the cheesy "My Way." I believe it when he sings "it's quarter to three, there's no one in the place 'cept you and me." Fifty-plus years on I'm reminded why he's still THE American popular singer, the Babe Ruth of American song. "So thanks for the cheer, I hope you didn't mind my bending your ear." We didn't mind, Frank. We didn't mind at all.

Good words on worship

The Presbyterian church where I serve as an elder is in the middle of a spirited conversation on worship. Issues include how long the service should be, what style of music to have, and how often we celebrate Holy Communion. Emotions often run high when discussing worship, and they should, for it's the most important thing a Christian participates in. Worship is our eternal destiny!

Here are two excellent articles I've come across recently that address two essential aspects of biblical worship -- singing and the sacraments.

From Baptist minister Brian Hedges "Growing Your Appetite for the Lord's Supper"

and

Here is N.T. Wright's call to "Save the Best Worship Songs".

What are the best worship songs? You'll have to read it to find out.

Electronic Wendell Berry

Someone had the idea of combining Wendell Berry reading his poem "The Man Born to Farming" with a chilly piece of Electronica. Check it out.
 

George Jones (1931 - 2013)

If I ranked my favorite genres of music country would be near the bottom, but there are certain artists that transcend genre and exude greatness that has universal appeal. Country music legend George Jones was one such artist. I saw Jones live years ago at our local fair. He was an hour late (of course) but once he took the stage under the tent-lights all was forgiven.

Jones died earlier today at the age of 81. The tributes are coming in, including this one from Baptist minister Russell Moore: "George Jones: Troubador of the Christ-Haunted Bible Belt". Moore touches on the paradoxical genius of a musician with one foot in the honky-tonk and the other in the church-house.

Some may see hypocrisy in the fact that Jones sang gospel songs. The same emotion with which he sang of drunkenness and honky-tonking, he turned to sing of “Just a Little Talk with Jesus Makes Things Right.” He often in concerts led the crowd in old gospel favorites, such as “Amazing Grace” or “I’ll Fly Away.” But I don’t think this is hypocrisy. This is not a man branding himself with two different and contradictory impulses. This was a man who sang of the horrors of sin, with a longing for a gospel he had heard and, it seemed, he hoped could deliver him. In Jones’ songs, you hear the old Baptist and Pentecostal fear that maybe, horrifically, one has passed over into the stage of Esau who, as the Bible puts it, “could not find repentance though he sought it with tears.”

For me and for many others Jones' 1980 hit "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is the archetypical country music song, and arguably one of the great American songs of all time. It's representative of a kind of music that grew organically from the stories and soil of this great land, just as jazz and blues did. A song like this will never die. Sit back and enjoy.

A celebration instead of an argument

Today on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade there will be lots of arguing. Online forums will be buzzing with recycled arguments and sloganeering -- little of which will change anybody's mind. Largely from reading this book I've come to see the limits of intellectual argument in everything from stimulating robust Christian discipleship in the local church to convincing opponents on hot button issues like abortion. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the path to change and formation is primarily through the heart. This isn't to embrace some form of anti-intellectualism, but it is to recognize that much of what we come to embrace with our head has already been percolating around in that pre-cognitive pre-rational part of ourselves we call the heart.

So instead of offering another pro-life argument I refer you to my friend Matt Becklo's appeal to the heart thru song: 40 Years, 40 Songs: Music Celebrating New Life. Embedded within the post are links to powerful arguments and testimonials against abortion, but Matt believes, as I do, that the most effective way to combat a culture of death is to joyfully and faithfully celebrate life.

Three cheers for Thanksgiving

And I could see you comin home after work late
You're in the kitchen tryin to fix us a hot plate
Ya just workin with the scraps you was given
And mama made miracles every Thanksgivin
- Tupac Shakur

It's testimony to the universal appeal of Thanksgiving that a personality about as far away from a Norman Rockwellesque white-bread conception of American culture as one could get, the deceased rapper Tupac Shakur, could rhyme affectingly about gratitude to his mama ("a poor single mother on welfare/tell me how ya did it/there's no way I can pay you back") and include a great line about Thanksgiving.

We've just come through an incredibly polarizing presidential election season, yet tomorrow blue state Obama voters and red state Romney voters will be united around a common table loaded with all-American fare. Soccer moms and welfare mamas, NASCAR dads and metrosexuals, fans of Tupac and fans of Michael Bublé, liberals and conservatives, secular and religious, rich and poor and everyone in between -- all will plunge wholeheartedly into rituals remarkable for their sameness.

I've heard it said, and I agree, that Thanksgiving is the most simple, genuine and least commercialized of the major American holidays (of course it's followed by Black Friday where our baser instincts come out). When it comes to Turkey Day Americans of every stripe are "all in." Why? Are there lessons to be learned? Can the spirit of the Thanksgiving table begin to heal our national divisions?

It seems that, for one day at least, gratitude brings us together. I'll eat and drink to that. Happy Thanksgiving!


Tupac's "Dear Mama" via By Way of Beauty

Hentoff on Dizzy

"Nat Hentoff is a legend" states the blurb on the back cover of The Nat Hentoff Reader (a book I picked up on a whim at our church's annual book sale). I won't argue with that assessment. I've long been a fan of iconoclastic voices like his that challenge and provoke, that don't fit comfortably into the usual paradigms, and resist easy labeling. Hentoff is probably best known for his dogged defense of the First Amendment. I admire his consistency in flaying censors of every stripe (one of his earlier books has as its title Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other). Both campus leftists burning conservative student newspapers and religious conservatives trying to get books banned from the local library are targets of Hentoff's rhetorical blows, and he's that rare man of the left that believes unborn children have civil liberties worth fighting for.

But where Nat Hentoff shines most brightly is when he's writing about a subject he loves as much as the U.S. Constitution -- jazz. He's penned countless reviews and liner notes, hung out with the greats, and even recorded some of them. In a piece included here called "Jazz: Music Beyond Time and Nations" the author recalls his jazz epiphany as an eleven-year-old walking down a Boston street. Upon hearing a strange sound coming out of a record store (Artie Shaw as it turned out) this middle-class Jewish youngster let out a shout of exhilaration. A life-long love affair was born. Hentoff writes that if forced to choose between losing his sight or hearing, he'd choose blindness because of a deep hunger that only music fills.

One of the jazz legends that Hentoff had the privilege of knowing intimately was one John Birks Gillespie. The Nat Hentoff Reader contains a two-part 1995 profile of the remarkable human being known simply as Dizzy. He writes:

I knew Dizzy for some forty years, and he did evolve into a spiritual person. That's a phrase I almost never use because many of the people who call themselves spiritual would kill for their faith. But Dizzy reached an inner strength and discipline that total pacifists call "soul force."

He always had a vivid presence. Like they used to say of Fats Waller, whenever Dizzy came into a room, he filled it. He made people feel good, and he was the sound of surprise, even when his horn was in its case.

But in later years there was also a peaceableness in Dizzy. There was nothing passive about it. It was his soul force that resolved tensions.

For example, in the 1980s, there was to be a concert at Lincoln Center honoring Dizzy. He and a big band were, of course, to be at the center of the celebration. A few days before, I went to a rehearsal. Everyone was there but Dizzy.

No music was being played. The only sounds were a bitter argument between Max Roach and Gerry Mulligan. Each had some compositions on the program, and at the start the argument was about who was to have more of his pieces played. Then it became very personal and poisonous.

As tensions rose in the room Hentoff describes the embarrassment of the other musicians, until Dizzy appeared from the back of the auditorium where he'd been quietly listening. Without a word he stepped to the podium and cued the band to play "I'll Always Be in Love With You." As the bad vibes blew out the door Max and Gerry forgot what they were arguing about.

Hentoff adds that Dizzy "filled the room with reasonableness without getting involved in the battle. Most of the leaders I've known through the years would have scolded the antagonists for wasting valuable rehearsal time and acting like children. But Dizzy, by his very presence, had broken the tension."

If you're a fan of jazz, free speech, or just plain good writing, I think you'll enjoy this collection.


Quotes from The Nat Hentoff Reader (Da Capo, 2001), pp. 118-9

In this world of sin the blood of Jesus brings ukuthula (peace)

"Ukuthula" performed by the Pro Cantu Youth Choir of South Africa

The gospel according to Handel

My pastor has been preaching a series of Advent sermons on texts used by G.F. Handel and Charles Jennens in the magnificent oratorio Messiah. You probably know that the words are all straight from the Bible, and arranged in such a masterful way to help us see afresh the grand scope of God's unfolding plan of salvation culminating in Christ. One critic has rightly called it "the revelation of Jesus Christ set to music." And what glorious music it is!

Another great work of art associated with this time of year is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Like Handel, Dickens was a believer in Jesus and one can see a Christian ethic throughout his much-loved tale of Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the rest. Blogger Tony Reinke has written an interesting comparison of Messiah and A Christmas Carol. While appreciating the Christmas message of A Christmas Carol, Reinke concludes that Handel's version of Christmas gospel hope is superior. I agree.

Here's an excerpt.

I don’t know much about the life of Dickens, but clearly he was no mere deist. He pressed his children to see the importance of Christ’s incarnation, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, and even the persecution of the early church. He seems to have a high regard for Scripture, and for this I am thankful. But it also seems that he boils down the meaning of Christmas to say little more than that Christ is our moral pattern to help us live Christianly.

By contrast, for Handel, the birth of the Savior marks the beginning of the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. As that eternal plan begins to unfold on earth, Christ must be born, he must die a bloody death, and he must defeat the grave because we are desperate and helpless sinners. The entire salvific purposes of God begin to unfold in the Incarnation, in the birth of Christ.

For Dickens, Christmas is a reminder that we are all Scrooges, self-centered ungrateful nobs who yet have some hope of appeasing God through our personal reform.

For Handel, Christmas reminds us that we are all sinners, we are “in Adam,” and for that we are helpless to stop God’s righteous judgment towards our sin. Yet there is One who has paid the price to quench God’s wrath on our behalf.

In both A Christmas Carol and Messiah, all our warm and tranquil Hallmark Christmas sentimentality gets blasted by cold reality. Death is coming for us all, and the grave is approaching quickly.

Dickens wants people to die in peace.

Handel wants people raised from the dead.

Dickens’ hope is rooted in the future — in the finished work of moral reform necessary in our lives.

Handel’s hope is rooted in the past — the full and complete work of Christ on our behalf.

Dickens’ message is “do.”

Handel’s message is “done.”

Click through to read the whole thing.

Feeling time

Here's an excerpt from a fascinating piece (the first in a series) by Astrophysicist Adam Frank on how the invention of "modern" time is killing us. He posts this in honor of the Autumnal Equinox. Did you know it was today?

Let me start by asking you a simple question: What time is it right now?

To answer this query you probably looked at the clock on your computer or on your cell phone. It told you something like 9:12 a.m. or 11:22 a.m. or 1:37 p.m. But what is 1:37 p.m.? What is the meaning of such an exact metering of minutes?

Mechanical clocks for measuring hours did not appear until the fourteenth century. Minute hands on those clocks did not come into existence until 400 years later. Before these inventions the vast majority of human beings had no access to any form of timekeeping device. Sundials, water clocks and sandglasses did exist. But their daily use was confined to an elite minority.

In ancient Rome, for example, noon was called out by someone watching to see when the sun climbed between two buildings. That was how exact it got for most people. Asked what time it was back then, the best you could have answered — the best you needed to answer — would have been "after lunch."

So did 1:37 p.m. even exist a thousand years ago for peasants living in the Dark Ages of Europe, Song Dynasty China or the central Persian Empire? Was there such a thing as 1:37 p.m. across the millennia that comprise the vast bulk of human experience?

The short answer is "no."

But 1:37 exists for you. As a citizen of a technologically advanced culture, replete with omnipresent time-metering technologies, you have felt 1:37 in more ways then you probably want to think about. Waiting for a 1:30 train into the city you feel the minutes crawl by when the train is late. The same viscous experience of these minutes (and seconds) oozes into your life each time you wait for the microwave to cycle through its 2-minute and 30-second cooking program.

You feel minutes in a way that virtually none of your ancestors did. You feel them pass and you feel them drag on with all the frustration, boredom, anxiety and anger that can entail. For you, those minutes are real.

Click through to read Frank's thoughts on what this tyranny of modern time is doing to us. I'm reminded of some lines from Pink Floyd.

You run and you run
To catch up with the sun
But it's sinking
Racing around
To come up behind you again

What's the point of beauty?

Jonah Lehrer speculates:

But why does beauty exist? What’s the point of marveling at a Rembrandt self portrait or a Bach fugue? To paraphrase Auden, beauty makes nothing happen. Unlike our more primal indulgences, the pleasure of perceiving beauty doesn’t ensure that we consume calories or procreate. Rather, the only thing beauty guarantees is that we’ll stare for too long at some lovely looking thing. Museums are not exactly adaptive.

Here’s my (extremely speculative) theory: Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. It’s a learning signal urging us to keep on paying attention, an emotional reminder that there’s something here worth figuring out. Art hijacks this ancient instinct: If we’re looking at a Rothko, that twinge of beauty in the mOFC is telling us that this painting isn’t just a blob of color; if we’re listening to a Beethoven symphony, the feeling of beauty keeps us fixated on the notes, trying to find the underlying pattern; if we’re reading a poem, a particularly beautiful line slows down our reading, so that we might pause and figure out what the line actually means. Put another way, beauty is a motivational force that helps modulate conscious awareness. The problem beauty solves is the problem of trying to figure out which sensations are worth making sense of and which ones can be easily ignored.

. . . .

I see beauty as a form of curiosity that exists in response to sensation, and not just information. It’s what happens when we see something and, even though we can’t explain why, want to see more. But here’s the interesting bit: the hook of beauty, like the hook of curiosity, is a response to an incompleteness. It’s what happens when we sense something missing, when there’s a unresolved gap, when a pattern is almost there, but not quite. I’m thinking here of that wise Leonard Cohen line: “There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.” Well, a beautiful thing has been cracked in just the right way.

Lehrer, always worth reading, is on to something. His musings lead me to ask: What is the missing 'something'? Where is the resolution? Where does completeness lie? And jumping off from Leonard Cohen -- Where does that light come from? All this gives me an excuse to quote C.S. Lewis (and I don't need much of an excuse to do that!).

"The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life)

So. What then is the point of beauty?

U2 360° in Miami

Last night Shannon and I attended the U2 show at Dolphins Stadium. We'd originally bought tickets 2 1/2 years ago for the original date in July 2010 which had to be cancelled when frontman Bono injured his back. As he noted last night -- some of us in attendance were two years younger when we bought our tickets, and in our case, had two less kids. Well, I'm glad we held onto our tickets all this time. It was worth it, despite the ordeal that attending an event with 70,000 of your closest friends entails. Suffice to say we didn't get home til 2am.

The most striking thing about this tour is the massive stage set-up dubbed "The Claw". It's design was inspired by the Theme Building at LAX.




It's a clever concept because it allows the typical apparatus of stadium shows (sound gear, lighting, video screens) to be suspended in the air above the stage thus affording unobstructed views from any vantage point. Band members have said that when they're on the stage the giant edifice above and around them is virtually invisible. The sheer geography of the thing is quite amazing. It evoked for me the image of the mother ship from Close Encounters. One almost expected the thing to lift off. Last night they played to this imagery by taking the stage to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" -- Ground control to Major Tom/Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. The show also features a message from space from Commander Mark Kelly of the International Space Station which introduces "Beautiful Day".

Shannon -- who's actually the biggest U2 fan at our house and I told her she should write her own review -- hit the nail on the head when she said during the ride home that the show was less about music and setlists than it was about the total experience. Once U2 took the stage it was like getting on a train with Bono as the conductor. You just sit back and enjoy the ride. All that's been said about this band's ability to make a stadium seem intimate is true. One can see the huge amount of planning that goes into a U2 stadium show, while still leaving room for Bono's spontaneity and eagerness to take chances on stage. For more on that see the article I linked to a while back: Mega-church Services: Like Going to a U2 Concert?

As one would expect the audience was very diverse. In our section there were parents with children, folks old enough to be grandparents -- and everything in between. The Spanish-speaking contingent was in the majority and Bono played to that throughout the evening. Indeed Miami is the crossroads of North and South America and the Caribbean. I'm sure most of the 70,000+ came to experience a great rock and roll show, have fun, and maybe take home some inspiration. If so, they weren't disappointed. For those with ears to hear there was a greater message embedded in the pop star atmospherics and the calls for peace, love and understanding. It came in the form of visual symbolism that was impossible to miss, and lyrics like these.

Last time we met was a low-lit room
We were as close together as a bride and groom
We ate the food, we drank the wine
Everybody having a good time
Except you
You were talking about the end of the world

In the garden I was playing the tart
I kissed your lips and broke your heart
You were acting like it was the end of the world

I reached out for the one I tried to destroy
You said you'd wait till the end of the world. . .


You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for. . .
It would be nice to think that the throngs leaving Dolphin Stadium last night will reflect on that message when the euphoria of spending two hours with the biggest band in the world wears off.

Eno not emo

Brian Eno - pour it out (taken from Drums Between The Bells) by Warp Records

Something to make your ears smile

If you enjoy eclectic music check out this mix from Colin Greenwood of Radiohead, here presenting some of his favorite records on FM 87.7 London.

LISTEN HERE

Will be back

U2 in church

I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

- Bono

Our pastor has been preaching a sermon series using the music of those Irish lads known as U2 to help illuminate the truth of God's word. Sunday before last he juxtaposed Psalm 123 with the U2 song "When I Look at the World" and last Sunday he used "When Love Comes to Town" -- the song U2 did with B.B. King on Rattle and Hum -- as commentary on Jesus's teaching on love in John 15. This might seem like a desperate ploy to make our very traditional congregation appear hip, except that Pastor Randy really is a huge U2 fan and gets their appeal as unique pop culture messengers of hope. While I can't see into U2 frontman Bono's heart it's pretty clear that he gets the Christian gospel better than some Christians who wouldn't be caught dead wearing leather or wrap-around sunglasses. For evidence see his Grace over Karma interview.

Sunday I was struck anew by his evocative lyrics. They reminded me of the disruptive nature of Jesus' love and grace. Listen. . .

I was a sailor, I was lost at sea
I was under the waves
Before love rescued me
I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread
Now I stand accused of the things I've said

When love comes to town I'm gonna jump that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice when they pierced his side
But I've seen love conquer the great divide

Love has been cheapened and sentimentalized to the point where we can hardly recognize it. When Jesus came to town he came with love that turned everything upside down. He said he came bringing a sword to divide sons from fathers and sisters from brothers. He said that anyone that didn't love him more than their own father or mother wasn't worthy to be his disciple. He said: "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit."

The lyrics of "When Love Comes to Town" effectively picture the hopelessness of our predicament until Christ's love apprehended us. Jesus is the Hound of Heaven who pursues us. He's the father who welcomes home the prodigal and invites the Pharisee to join the party. In C.S. Lewis's memorable turn of phrase he is the "Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape." (Surprised by Joy) Contrary to the popular altar call disclaimer -- Jesus isn't a gentleman. He doesn't politely knock on the door, he kicks it in, with the fervor of B.B. King's guitar solo.

I ran into a juke joint when I heard a guitar scream
The notes were turning blue, I was dazing in a dream
As the music played I saw my life turn around
That was the day before love came to town

Still on the subject of U2 I came across this fascinating article: Mega-Church Services: Like Going to a U2 Concert? Readers of this blog probably know that I've criticized the mega-church seeker-sensitive model, and I think it's a wave that's already crested. Nevertheless the success of the Willow Creek-type churches, and of U2, in reaching large numbers of people and remaining culturally relevant (a loaded term I know) might have something to say to all churches regardless of size or worship style.

"Organizations, to stay in a healthy place, have to have a balance of self-control and flexibility," Workman believes. "Sometimes you have to act more controlled because you're in danger of losing your core values; sometimes you get so stuck that there's no new life. You need to balance the teeter-totter.

"I think churches have to figure out how to do that. Too many churches are too stuck in maintaining control. They lose their cultural relevance. It's been fun to see U2 preserve core values and reinvent themselves."

It is interesting to hear this perspective on U2 from Workman, especially after taking part in many fan conversations about whether U2 has allowed itself to become too corporate, or whether something integral to the band/fan relationship has been strained (which is a "core values" question). Keep in mind, though, that much depends on one's point of view, and Workman has the perspective of working behind the scenes in church but has not been in on the conversations carried out on U2 fan message boards.

Workman's reflections end with an acknowledgement that ages and stages in life affect how one can reach the masses, even as he talks about the importance of churches engaging with the culture (what U2 has termed their "relevance," and the reason they still strive for the hit single). "[Christians] have to think like missionaries ... Good missionaries go as deep into the culture as they can without compromising their values. Too many churches have relinquished their cultural awareness. The culture, for the messenger, is a tool. And it has to be wielded wisely. People know when you are truly hip; at some point you have to be smart enough to know 'This is beyond me!' There's nothing worse than a 50-year-old guy talking about his 'posse.'"

What does this mean for someone like Bono, now that he's about to turn 51? "Bono has to be either close enough to the language [of the culture] to use it with authenticity -- or he has to create new language."

U2's been doing this for years, and that's what churches have been doing for many more years before them. "That's the church -- creating new language for a timeless message."

Next month, God willing and Bono doesn't hurt his back again, my wife and I will experience a U2 live show for the first time. I know it will be awesome. Come the following Sunday, though, I won't be interested in attending a worship service that approximates that experience -- except in this respect. A message of hope, delivered with integrity and authenticity, in a way that connects with a diverse audience? You bet! In that way I hope my church is like a U2 concert every Sunday.

It's feeling like a Wilco Wednesday

This is purty. . .


Ashes of American Flags (dir. Brendan Canty & Christoph Green, 2009)

An epic beginning (some thoughts on The New World)

I've been revisiting The New World, director Terrence Malick's 2005 impressionistic retelling of the John Smith/Pocahontas story. More specifically I've been watching the nearly 3-hour extended cut on Blu-ray. This is the way to see this film! Malick explores some of the same themes explored in the smash hit Avatar, but without the heavy-handedness of James Cameron. I don't see The New World as a masterpiece in the same way that Malick's first three features are, primarily because the casting of Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith never quite clicks. He just looks too much the part of what he actually is, which is an A-list Hollywood bad boy, and one of the sexiest men in the world (so I've been told). I wonder if the part would have been better served by a lesser-known actor? For instance, someone like Ben Chaplin or Jim Caviezel, both of whom were terrific in Malick's previous film The Thin Red Line. In my opinion the picture gets better once Farrell exits the stage about two thirds of the way through.

The last hour is perfect. Once Smith is sent off on other adventures we're introduced to another model of maleness in the compassionate John Rolfe, played effectively by Christian Bale. If Malick casts Smith and Pocahontas as Adam and Eve, the love story between Rolfe and the now-Christianized Powhatan princess "Rebecca" is more like Boaz and Ruth. Malick knows his Old Testament so I doubt the allusions are accidental. Upon her acceptance of his proposal for marriage he promises: "You do not love me now. Someday, you will." Though lacking the dash and romance of Smith, he proves to be the more enduring lover. Eventually he'll take her to England to see the King.

The New World begins with as stirring an opening as any movie has ever had. The choice of a piece by Richard Wagner (the Prelude from Das Rheingold) as the accompaniment to the English landing beautifully evokes the epic nature of this initial meeting of civilizations. In one sense it's like a discovery of Eden, in another it's paradise lost. Turn up your speakers for this one.

Danny Boy

Scene from Brassed Off (dir. Mark Herman, 1996)

Hallelujah's at Macy's

Watch as these surprised shoppers experience something grander than the consumer goods surrounding them. Surely an echo of the heavenly chorus.




via Justin Taylor