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Fallout, feedback, and Furbies.
So, the big news first... I'm moving. Sick of our current high rents, my friend Damian and I are getting a two-bedroom in North Pas together. It'll be weird having a roommate again after two years living alone, but we have our own rooms, and he has a big TV, so it's alright. The best thing about this new place is that it's pet-friendly... meaning that I can get a cat! I think I'll name it... Spot? (Five points to the first person outside my immediate family who gets this and comments accordingly. Ten points will be deducted, however, from the account of anyone who uses this occasion to mention how much of a dork I was in high school. Fifty points deducted for the obvious comeback to the previous sentence.)
I guess there really isn't any other news. As to my last post and the wonderful controversy it raised, I think my main problem with Christian music in particular is that it generally spends far too much of its energy on being Christian and not enough on being music. Most Christian art in general is derivative, imitations of the popular things in the "secular" world. I think God's calling us to be creative, not imitative; God's calling us to serve God by the deepening of our faith in the real and deep Christ, not serve consumerism by the shallowing of our wallets for the next gospel of a meaningless and trite Christ.
And while I'm on my soapbox, let me say a little something about GWB and his proposal of a marriage amendment, and that is that I'm really glad that he's paying attention to the important things in this country. Millions are out of work, we have a huge budget deficit, Greenspan says we're going to have to cut Social Security benefits (in part because GWB's raiding the trust fund to pay for his dishonest war in Iraq), American jobs are moving overseas daily, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, 40 million Americans don't have health care, but all that's meaningless if we let homosexuals marry one another, which will destroy Marriage As We Know It and lead to the breakdown of the Traditional Family (as if widespread divorce hasn't already done that), and without the Traditional Family, can Western civilization truly stand?
Again, can anyone show me one actual hetero marriage that will fail because gays are allowed to marry?*
* Marriages in which one or both partners comes out as a homosexual and leave don't count, for obvious reasons.
posted by jimmy at 21:26 -
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God: The Gift ShopTM
Ladies and gentlemen:
I give you God: The Gift ShopTM.
Loved your Sunday service at our seeker-sensitive, impersonal, meaningless church? Visit God: The Gift ShopTM, just down the road, and pick up your very own copy of The Purpose-Driven Life, which will be the subject of our sermons for the next several months. While you're there, make sure to get the t-shirt, so everyone knows you've been to church this Sunday!
Tired of all that secular music and film, with all its emphasis on "technical excellence," "honest expression," and "making good art?" Come down to God: The Gift ShopTM, and get your very own Christian rock music and videos, which will be refreshingly free from engagement in the real world, so you can occupy the fantasy world of Christianity as a folk religion and the myth of Christ as a panacea for all your life's problems, rather than that messy and sometimes "unrewarding" and "unfulfilling" task of joining with Christ in engaging the very real world you live in! Wheeeeeeee!
I know, I know, it says "Christian bookstore" on the sign in front of the store, but rest assured, we don't have any of those troubling, faith-disturbing books your kids might read if you sent them to a godless state university. God: The Gift ShopTM stocks only the most pleasing, reassuring books. You don't need reading to challenge your faith and expand and deepen your mind; our authors have already done this, and are willing to tell you about what they found out, as long as it doesn't clock in at over 200 pages in big typeface. And we even keep these books at the back of the store, away from all the other souvenirs, so you don't have to see 'em if you don't want to. Just one more way God: The Gift ShopTM is looking out for you.
Looking for a Bible? Find one here at God: The Gift ShopTM, as long as it's the NIV, NASV, or NLT. Don't go looking for any of those fancy-schmancy Oxford Bibles, with the Apocrypha, footnotes, or atmospheric commentary! The Bible's simple: what it says is what it means, despite the fact that the newest parts of it were written 2000 years ago in a prescientific and highly-superstitious society. You don't have to apply your brain to the Bible; that would be like school, and Pastor's already studied this stuff precisely so you don't have to! Just go along with what he says. He's got all that book-learnin'.
Oh, and did you see The Passion of the Christ? Want to make sure all your friends know you saw it? Then buy God: The Gift ShopTM's Passion souvenirs! Nail necklaces, Passion-themed Bibles, even a Bible study kit! Do everything you can to make sure that your friends, who could take a number of conclusions out of the movie, take out the right one - after all, those moving pictures could be confusing without a bunch of words to go with 'em, and could take some time to sink in, and you wouldn't want your friends leaving the movie and not being immediately converted on the spot, would you? Of course not! We're even working on a portable baptismal pool so you can dunk 'em in the movie theatre lobby!*
So c'mon down to God: The Gift ShopTM after church next week for all your Christian souvenir needs. Know Jesus? Get the T-shirt, bracelet, nail necklace, and brooch! God: The Gift ShopTM, serving all your Christian souvenir needs!
* No, they aren't actually working on a portable baptismal pool, so far as I know... but it wouldn't surprise me.
posted by jimmy at 11:34 -
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Disagreements between myself and my car.
It turns out my car didn't like me after all.
Yesterday, I woke up intending to go up to the mountains and spend the day hiking. When I looked out my window, however, I saw clouds - not right outside my window, but up in the sky where they should be - and little droplets of water falling from them, and sadly admitted that taking a nice long walk was not in the cards.
How wrong I was.
I decided to go to Target to get some supplies - paper towels, new sheets for my bed, and some Scotch(tm) tape. I went there and got them. As I was starting my car to go home, however, I noticed something strange - namely, that the car wasn't starting. When I did get the engine to finally turn, I didn't have power steering and there was an odd noise coming from under the hood. Clearly there was something wrong. So I went back in and called a tow truck, and the guy came and towed my car - and me (well, he didn't so much tow me as let me ride in the cab) - back to the service garage up at Orange Grove and Lake, which for the record is about a mile away from my apartment (that fact will become important later).
The people there said that my serpentine belt had come off, and that they were going to have to look inside to see why. (Turns out it's $250 worth of some other thingamajig that actually broke.) And so there I was - a mile away from my house, without a car, with my laptop and a Bag O' Target, on one of the rainiest days I've seen yet here in LA.
So I walked. The whole way.
Then I walked to the bank - another 1/2 mile - and back, because I needed to deposit some checks.
And here I thought I wasn't going to go hiking.
Hmm.
(Interesting side note: Everybody in the entire LA area seems to have some grasp of atmospheric ecology... as I was riding in the tow truck, the driver commented about how the rain would clear up the air for four or five days following. It's weird how everyone here has an understanding of how clean and dirty air works... which is either the result of a successful mass education/awareness program, or simply part of the conversational atmosphere, like "how's the weather." I'd imagine that if one asked Joe Average in the Bowling Green area what effect, if any, rain had on air pollution, they wouldn't know.)
Tomorrow: Commentary and rant on Passion God-Kitsch. See L.O.T.D. from today for background.
posted by jimmy at 15:33 -
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Small correction...
...the Cubbies don't play the Yankees at all this season. At least until we sweep them in the World Series.
Here's hoping.
posted by jimmy at 16:36 -
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Talkin' baseball...
So. The Yankees got A-Rod, the Rangers got Soriano. This should be interesting, if only to watch with bated breath to see if the Yankees can fail to buy another championship.
Surprisingly enough, this is excellent news for the Cubs. We only have to play three games against the Yanks this year before we sweep them in the World Series, and none against the Rangers. Plus, Steinbrenner's blowing an exorbitant amount of money on A-Rod, who won't even play his usual position of shortstop, because Jeter's there, despite the fact that A-Rod's been called the "greatest shortstop of all time" (I wonder how Honus Wagner would feel about that?) The ridiculous amounts of cash the Yanks spent on A-Rod took them out of the running for four-time Cy Young winner Greg Maddux, who is returning to the Friendly Confines to lead an excellent pitching staff on a Cubs team that is now the favorite in the NL. The favorite! And this despite the Astros' picking up the Rocket and Pettitte.
And even better for me is that over Spring Break, Alisa and I are going to Mesa, Arizona, to catch a Cubbies spring training game. This doesn't take the place of my hajj to Wrigley Field, but still, it's cool.
So that's baseball.
posted by jimmy at 10:41 -
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Gay Marriage and other fun topics
Okay, it's been three months since I threw down the gauntlet, and still nobody has given me a single example of a heterosexual marriage that would end because of gay marriage. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? (It seems to me that hetero marriage is more threatened by the 50% divorce rate than by allowing gays to marry.)
I feel compelled to write on this subject because it's my state - California - that is quickly becoming the heated center of this debate, as we usually are. For me, it boils down to a purely legal issue... morality has no place in it. And it seems to me that legally, there can be only two solutions: For the government to recognize all marriages, gay and straight, or for government to recognize no marriages at all, and simply recognize everything as "civil unions." There can be no legal middle ground, where men and women are married but men and men are simply in a civil union.
What is a marriage, legally? It's a contract, an agreement, between two consenting parties. The two parties agree to act as next-of-kin, to be able to make decisions for one another in situations of debilitation, to share financial burdens, to jointly raise children. From a legal standpoint, that's all there is. Now the government can restrict certain kinds of contracts, but under the Fourteenth Amendment is legally not permitted to restrict the same kind of contract from certain kinds of people based simply on who they are, outside of violations of criminal codes (like not permitting convicted felons to buy handguns or forcing DWI offenders to have breathalyzers in their cars). The government can't say that women can only sell their homes to men, or that men can only buy Big Macs from women and not from other men. Essentially, we have the same argument here: gay people, who wish to enter into marriage contracts with one another, are not permitted to in many states. This is illegal, and the Supreme Court of the United States should recognize it as such. The Supreme Court in Massachussets already has. This has nothing to do with marriage as a family institution. The only thing that exists at the governmental and legal level is the civil union. Whether it's called marriage or just a "civil union," it has to be the same thing for gays and straights, and it has to be consistent, and it has to be equal.
And that's my social issue soapbox of the day. Equal rights for all.
My family was over here from Michigan this past weekend. They enjoyed the weather. I was chilly, because I'm acclimated. We did all the "touristy" things I don't usually do. We sat in a cramped Ford Taurus - five of us - for hours on end. We ate together. We saw dolphins. It was cool to have my whole family over here, but it's also quite nice to get back to my regular life, where I don't have to be up at 8am with all the Eastern Time folks.
I'm also very busy, with all the various things going on and schoolwork loads increasing as the quarter starts to wear down. Not that schoolwork is hard, but it does take time sometimes, and that's a pain. But I'm learning, and I'm hopefully going to get to teach before too long, so it's all good.
And both Kerry and Edwards are leading GWB by double-digits. Life is good.
posted by jimmy at 14:46 -
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Clarification on many fronts
First, to clarify my rant against evangelicals and The Passion... it isn't that I'm anti-evangelical, in fact far from it. Some of the most deeply spiritual and committed people I know are evangelicals, and I respect what the tradition has brought to Christianity even as I recognize that it's time to move somewhere beyond it. My concern, though, is that the intense amount of interest from evangelicals in The Passion as not only a great film but also as a witnessing tool is going to ghettoize the film as "Christian" art, and unchurched people my age are going to think of it on the same level as something like Omega Code or anything Willie Aames has done since Charles in Charge. I'm also worried that many Christians are going to look at this film as so much of a "tool" that they're going to miss viewing it and engaging with it on an aesthetic level... in other words, that they're going to look so hard for a spiritual experience that they're going to not see the great film I hear it is. Besides, Mel thinks all those Protestant Evangelicals are going to Hell anyway. So that's kind of a downer.
Second, what's going on with that whole "my future" thing is starting to crystallize as well. On Tuesday, I met with Clay Schmidt (the academic director of the Brehm Center) and we talked about what I was going to do with my life, and I think I'm going to go for a Ph.D out here in Theology and the Arts... which means, in the short term, that I've changed the degree program I'm in from an MA in Worship, Theology, and the Arts to an MAT (the T is for "terrific") in Theology and the Arts, a much more academic degree which sends me headlong into the smart-people Ph.D classes in couple of years and into being a 28-year-old doctor of some variety, which is a laudable life goal of sorts.
Third, the more I listen to the Sigur Ros CD, and the more I read about them, the more cool they are and the more cool this CD is. If you haven't checked out Sigur Ros's ( ), and you like the Radiohead/proggish genre, you really should, because it's just so cool and ambient and emotional and experimental. Some view them as pretentious, but in my typically postmodern location I view them more as making a comment on pretentiousness. But that's just me.
Fourth, Alisa is pretty and cool and pretty cool. Yeah.
The T really stands for "Theology".....
posted by jimmy at 10:05 -
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Ah, that sweet ambient music...
Right now I'm listening to - or, more properly, absorbing (since it's what Barry Taylor calls "musical wallpaper") - the Sigur Ros CD, "( )". (You read right. Two parentheses. The quotation marks aren't part of the title.) Every track of this album is untitled and not a word of it is in an intelligible language (the band made up their own language just for this album). There aren't any liner notes - just a book of translucent photos of underbrush. In other words, there isn't an actual word anywhere on the album. I like this band a lot.
And all this is the fault of stinkin' Craig Detweiler, my Theology and Pop Culture professor, who introduced us to a whole bunch of bands last week on popular music. He's a cool guy, but could he possibly not introduce me to new music? I'm trying to live on a budget here, and it's hard when I'm hearing about cool bands I'd never heard before. Darn him. Bless him.
My family is coming out to LA on Thursday. This is a good thing, because it'll be cool to see them, but also a bad thing, because I need to clean my apartment rather thoroughly. Alas.
So, the Boobgate fallout continues... it seems that NBC briefly was going to have a shot of an elderly cancer patient's breast on ER, but fortunately, the reaction to the Janet Jackson incident and Michael Powell's newfound penchant for policing the airwaves convinced NBC to pull that softcore pornography off the air, lest people think it's Janet all over again. Thank God America's children are now safe from seeing the breast of an elderly woman on a late-night television drama. Artistic purpose be damned... if our children see anything we deem "bad" on TV, the terrorists have already won. Unless it involves gun violence, fighting, hate, or martial arts. Then our kids can watch it. We need to train them to be good soldiers for the American Empire, after all.
Am I too cynical?
Not much else to say...
posted by jimmy at 20:01 -
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Why do the evangelicals have to ruin everything?
It was only a matter of time.
Article: "Gibson Film (The Passion) Gets Huge Marketing Effort"
Pardon me while I yell in frustration: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!
Was it too much to hope for that there just be a really good popular movie dealing with Christ and his crucifixion without the God-Kitsch industry coming in and ruining it? Was it too much to hope for that this honest expression of Christ be free from association with the evangelical movement? Was it too much to hope for that the Christian community would let what appears to be a great film sit on its own, rather than adding a "come to our church" message at the end? Do those evangelicals have to hijack everything in mass media that even tangentially has anything to do with Christ?
Because what's the end result of the evangelical hijacking of The Passion? They're going to add commercials to the beginning of the movie - as they have already in some places - urging people to come to their conservative evangelical churches. They're going to have people standing outside the exit at every showing handing out pamphlets and tracts. They're going to rent out whole theatres and bus their people in. And ultimately, they're going to scare off everyone but Christians with their proselytizing, which is a darn shame, because everybody I know who's seen this film (and I know quite a few, being here in SoCal) has said it's one of the most incredible films they've ever seen. They're going to make this movie a grand instance of Mel preaching to the choir.
Please, I beg the evangelicals... go home. Please go home, shut up, and sit on your hands. Don't ruin this for the rest of us. Don't ruin an incredible actual experience of Christ in the theatre with an incredibly dismal and obnoxious experience of the worst of Christ's followers as they walk out the door. Let this film stand on its own two remarkable feet, and don't try to use it to pull people into your church. Let them do with the message what they will. Please, please, please don't do what I know you're going to do, and thereby drive everyone who would otherwise be edified by this movie away from the theatre with your meaningless and senseless drivel. Go home.
Jesus, save me from Your followers.
posted by jimmy at 23:55 -
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Hegelian dialectic
Thesis: Christian television is quite possibly the best comedy available in this country.
Antithesis: To the unchurched, this is the only contact they have with Christianity. They think we're all like that.
So... Christian television: Funny, or scary?
Or both...?
posted by jimmy at 22:20 -
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Thoughts on justice.....
First, some good news: I got a job, working for the Chapel Office. I'm going to be doing what I was doing before, only I'm getting paid for it, meaning that I can take the time now to do it a lot better. It's not much - certainly not nearly enough to cover all my expenses - but it's more income than I had coming in before. Every little thing counts, says that Janus Stark song I heard once and for some reason have not forgotten.
I know I don't often go Scriptural, but the Chapel speaker used this verse to illustrate God's demands for social justice. The Scripture passage follows, with my own expoundings in brackets."Is not this the kind of fasting [or act of worship] I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter - when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear." Isaiah 58:6-8 (NIV, ugh)
I was struck by the plain exclamation: we worship God by helping the oppressed. God desires that more than any stupid praise song or sermon. Perhaps our churches should be spending more of their time - and their members more of their money and resources - to worship God by bringing justice to the world, than by building fancy new buildings. Perhaps our preachers should urge their members from the pulpit to forgo that new SUV or that new house or that plasma TV and instead give the money to help the poor and oppressed. Perhaps it's time for the church to take the lead not in demanding charity - which, while important and necessary, only treats the symptoms - but in demanding justice, the lack of which is the true disease in our world.
Just a thought.
Nothing interesting to put down here today...
posted by jimmy at 17:40 -
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I went back to Ohio... was my city gone?
I visited Ohio this weekend, and as the plane landed in Akron and the pilot announced that the outside temperature was 7 degrees, I realized just how lucky I am to live in Southern California, where a 50-degree day is considered "freezing." What a cold, cold state, filled with a whole bunch of white people. Seriously... the one thing I always notice when I go back to Ohio is how accustomed I am, even in these few months, to seeing all sorts of skin tones and hearing all sorts of languages around me all the time. It's weird being in a place where everyone I see is white.
I did get to see Alisa, though. She's pretty. I also got to meet more of her friends, some of whom apparently think I'm cute. Even as humble as I am (hah!), compliments on my looks are always welcome and enjoyed, even if they're from Alisa's male friends as well as her female ones...
Also: the Super Bowl. I missed Boobgate because Alisa and I were switching between the SB and "Queer Eye" on NBC, and had no interest in the halftime show since I don't listen to any of the people in it. So let me get this straight... it's not okay for CBS to play a moveon.org advertisement because it's too political (despite their running of anti-smoking and anti-drug ads which were every bit as political) and can't have U2 on the halftime show because they wanted to talk about AIDS in Africa, but it's okay to have a halftime show that features Kid Rock wearing an American flag as a poncho, cheerleaders wearing clothing with the approximate surface area of a postage stamp, and even the unintentional (but high-rated) exposed breast of Janet Jackson, who wasn't incredibly covered up to begin with? That raises the big question: Is television stupid because the American people are stupid, or are the American people stupid because what's on television is so stupid?
Yesterday was 40 hours long. I had to get to the Akron/Canton airport at 4am, so instead of sleeping through the alarm I decided not to go to bed at all. So I was a wee bit exhausted yesterday. I got to bed last night relatively early - midnight - but this morning, at 9am, I was awoken by a knock on the door. It was the plumbers - the ones repiping our building, presumably so that I can get another temperature from the shower than "third-degree-burn-hot" and "blue-skin-cold" - and they needed to work all day in my kitchen. So I had to get up - still incredibly tired because those nine hours of sleep were working two days for me - and went to work out. But that was irritating, and a little unnerving because people I didn't know were in my apartment.
If anything's gone, though, at least I know who to blame...
posted by jimmy at 17:30 -
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Log
Archives:
After
2.9.2003
9.23.2002-2.6.2003
6.1.2002-8.21.2002
