Musical Retrospect

Holiday activities have already turned this blog into a temporary waste land. Once the proverbial twelve days of feasting is complete (and my belly has another fifteen pounds distributed in appropriate places), I’m certain more posting will resume. For now, I’ll follow Ben Myers’ example and post some musical favorites of the past year, hoping to approach his admirable retro-Indie taste.

Top Five Fav Albums of 2008   (* – sample track) 

#1 — Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (*)
#2 — Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
#3 — For Emma, Forever Ago – Bon Iver (*)
#4 — Heretic Pride – The Mountain Goats (*)
#5 — Consolers of the Lonely – The Raconteurs

Runner-up: The Midnight Organ Fight – Frightened Rabbit (*)

If I could suggest only one album worthy of a listen-through in one sitting, it would be the Fleet Foxes’ eponymous release. I could easily run out of suitable adjectives if I chose to write a full review (beginning with breath-taking and intricate, and other such hyperventilation). Check it out. Each of the other five albums stands on its own merits, regardless of personal taste. Vampire Weekend is breezily confident, witty, and impossible to dislike. For Emma and Heretic Pride may require a bit more attention, depending on one’s normal musical diet, but provide moments of excellent lyrical and musical satisfaction. And Consolers of the Lonely is just fun, even if you find Jack White to be an insufferable eccentric. I hesitated to mention Midnight Organ on account of the sometimes shocking (though not gratuitous) obscenities contained in the lyrics. But if you can stomach the stark verbal repulsiveness of some of the songs (I warned you), it’s an amazing album. I’m going to hazard the suggestion that this band writes songs straight out of Camus or Hemmingway, full of atheistic regret and Nietzschean compulsion to find some meaning in life. They would make excellent Christians. If only.

Peter Leithart on the Church Calendar

My pastor and former professor, Peter Leithart, preached a great sermon yesterday on the theology (and cosmology) of the church calendar. Make sure to read the sequence: post 1, post 2, and post 3 (#1 is the most substantial).

Excerpt:

With the coming of the new covenant, the old time keepers are overthrown, and somehow a new governors of time, new dividers of day and night, new clocks come into being. But what is the new clock? What replaces the sun and moon and stars as signs, governors, and keepers of time?

The New Testament’s answer is: Jesus, and in Jesus, us. In the original creation, Yahweh delegated the government of days and nights to the sun and the moon.But now, He gives the authority to govern the day and night to the sun of righteousness, Jesus, the bright morning star.

Beyond that, though, He gives that authority to human beings. We are the children of Abraham, and that means we are stars in the heavens – that’s how Abram was taught to consider his “seed.” Jesus is exalted into the heavenly places, Paul says in Ephesians, and in the next breath he says that we’re also in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Jesus has ascended to the right hand of the Father, and He takes us there with Him. This means many things, but one of the things it means is that we now have authority to divide light and darkness and to govern the day and night.

Melville’s Army of Shadows

I’ve been revisiting the Criterion selection at the local movie rental store of late. I have a difficult relationship with foreign art house films, one in which I am continually reminded of my own American sensibilities when it comes to narrative and character arc. However, I have to say that the French can do existential drama better than anyone (the closest American cinema has come to genuine philosophy is old school film noir, in my opinion).

Last week, I saw Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, and then last night, Jean-Pierre Melville’s long-lost Army of Shadows, which was finally released in the US in 2006. While the former has some exquisite moments of pathos, it sometimes relies too heavily on Important Philosophical Ideas. Meviille’s film, on the other hand, manages truly to break your heart. Army of Shadows is about several members of the Resistance during the dark middle years of the Second World War. The opening shot is of a long column of German soldiers, devoid of personality or human feeling, marching through the Arc de Triomphe. In fact, all the German nemeses in the film are similarly unhuman — lacking in feeling, compassion, faith, and personality. This is not the result of poor scriptwriting; this is at the heart of the film. The title refers to the French Underground, who all adopt fake names and maintain a high level of secrecy, even with each other. Two brothers who both work in the Underground, often in close proximity, never realize that they are each fighting for the same cause, and therefore lose any true kinship they may have shared in the inconsequential past. There is a great deal of distance in this movie. And there is a corresponding emphasis on human trust (or lack thereof).

Continue reading…

Baseball as Economic Byword

Any personal doubts about the capitalist system find their origin in my love for baseball. The economic history of The Game is a tragic one, originating with local, player-owned “clubs,” but now ruled by an ugly symbiotic oligarchy of fat cat owners and the world’s only pro-capitalist labor union. Unlike almost every other major sport (which have their own problems, admittedly), baseball has no salary cap. And precious little revenue-sharing. Which is why a 290 pound man can make $160 million over the next 7 years. But there are still vestiges of the old game which give Austrian School libertarians headaches. So there is still hope.

Not that revenue-sharing, in se, would fix everything—not in baseball, nor in less important things, like national politics. But I think the problem can be associated with the rich men (owners and players alike) who prevent salary caps and revenue sharing, and demand an ever-increasing income flow which relies on endless commercialization of the former gentleman sport.

Says Hank Steinbrenner, son of The Boss himself, of revenue-sharing: “That’s a system I don’t particularly like. It’s a socialist system, and I don’t agree with it. Does it work? It depends on your point of view. But is it right? Is it even American? I’d argue no on both of those points.” So the ownership of the two richest franchises (the Yankees and Red Sox) are in cahoots with the Player’s Association to prevent the equalization of profits.

As Chesterton said, the problem isn’t about having too many capitalists, but too few.

Personally, I’d like to see Wendell Berry as the next MLB commish.

Random Political Notes

I admit, I have a morbid fascination with the politics of my home state. Today’s headlines announce that the Illinois governor was arrested by the FBI on various charges of fraud. Finally. We’ve got the best of the criminal class: Daley, Rostenkowski, Ryan, and now Blagojevich.

The really staggering part of this story for me is the fact that Blagojevich is not charged with any of the infamous acts of fraud and bribery that he’s committed over the past 4-6 years. He’s being charged with putting a “for sale” sign on the open Senate seat created by Obama’s presidential victory. This is incredible! Blagojevich has been under the most minute scrutiny for the past three years (thanks to the remarkable Patrick Fitzgerald), and he still has the audacity to try and profit financially from the Senate appointment.

And speaking of old school autocratic politics…

Ross Douthat posts about the royalist tendencies of young conservatives. Can’t say I blame them. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Stuart dynasty.

[Update] The Chicago Daily Observer has a piece on the fascinating role that Patrick Fitzgerald has played in Illinois and national politics. Despite his GOP appointment, Fitzgerald has a history of prosecuting corruption in both parties (targets include: Scooter Libby, former IL Governor Ryan, Conrad Black, and the Daley machine). If the Obama administration retaliates against Fitzgerald (who happens to be one of Rahm Emanuel’s old adversaries), the luster of Obama’s reform image might be irreparably tarnished.

Modernity for Children

The Telegraph reports that the new edition of the Oxford children’s dictionary has removed a significant number of entries related to Christianity, the countryside, and pre-modern British heritage. Among the out-going entries are: dwarf, elf, goblin, bishop, chapel, empire, and monarch. Among the new entries: blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, chatroom, celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, EU, biodegradable, and Euro.

Vineeta Gupta, the head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said: “We are limited by how big the dictionary can be – little hands must be able to handle it – but we produce 17 children’s dictionaries with different selections and numbers of words.

“When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don’t go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as “Pentecost” or “Whitsun” would have been in 20 years ago but not now.”

HT: Ross Douthat.

Conservative Anglican Split-Off

I somehow missed this piece of news when it came out a couple weeks ago: conservative Anglicans have approved the constitution for a new “third province” of North American Anglicanism.

(See MSNBC’s report.)

Thoughts on Derrida’s Pharmakon

In Solomon Among the Postmoderns, Peter Leithart writes:

We can no more bring the world under our complete control than we can guide the wind into a paddock for the night. We can no more give permanent form to the world than we can sculpt the evening breeze into solid shapes. Our projects are not sandcastles on the beach. That image, for Solomon, would suggest something far too solid and permanent. Our projects are cloud castles on a windy day.

Solomon asks, “Who knows the interpretation of a word?” and the modern believes the question not to be rhetorical. A word can be known. A word can be analyzed, parsed, spread out like a patient etherized on the grammarian’s table. The word, the basic building block in language, can be used to build to truth if—in its foundation—it is “perfectly known and incapable of being doubted,” as Descartes put it. Peace and unity can only be won if humankind can begin from these objective foundations of truthful language and build up an entire structure of Truth. Modernity lacked the advantage of those at Shinar; moderns live post-Babel, with many tongues. So modernity had to construct a new story of the language of Reason, the tongue which all men possess.

In his discussion of pharmakon, Derrida famously makes the distinction between speech and writing. He argues that speech was viewed as the “original” form of language by Plato and the Western tradition. Writing is a latter development which, because it involves using “signs” and letters, is one step farther removed from the truth. As with Plato’s forms, or the emanations of Plotinus, the true form of a thing is contain in a spiritual, non-material, world. We, who are accustomed to using signs and material to craft our language, are in a cave, (or in neo-Platonism, several steps away from the emanation of truth). And so, writing to Plato is viewed as untrustworthy, what Derrida recognizes as an act of violence. As Nietzsche argued, to force a thing into a category is to do violence to both the thing and to language. You participate in a lie. Plato and modernity recognize this aspect of language, and therefore try to set up some sort of “rational” language, which transcends all the violence of material language.

Continue reading…

Augustine and Iron & Wine

Ben Myers pulls off a feat I’ve long wished I could do myself: engaging the theology of my favorite band, Iron & Wine. On their song, “Upward Over the Mountain”:

The song is an achingly beautiful depiction of the relationship between a son and his mother. The son is united to his mother through the gift of life and through the history they have shared. He recalls that fragile, fleeting moment after birth, “the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body.” But while acknowledging this connection, he also reminds his mother of the painful distance which adulthood opens up between them. He has outgrown the faith she once gave him: “Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given.” He asks her – impossibly – to “forget me, now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to.”

And yet he remains haunted by their bond, by the fact that his entire life – with all its griefs and freedoms – remains an unfathomable gift. In one of the song’s most poignant lines, he pleads: “Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you.” This line could serve as an exquisite parable of the whole relationship between child and mother: even when he gives her a gift, there is a tragic incommensurability between what he gives her and all that he has already received from her. Any gift to the mother is at best a mere trinket, at worst a kind of theft in which the very possibility of giving is painfully wrested from her.

Barth on Legitimacy

David Haddorff points out that Karl Barth’s dialectical theology manifests itself in his political theology via his stance for politics and against ideology. That is, while he affirms the need for active participation in works of justice and law-keeping, Barth opposes any mindset which would ascribe a salvific character to any such movement, no matter how worthy or “just.”

In his later writings, Barth includes the civil realm within the outer bounds of the Kingdom, opposing Yoder and Hauerwas’ more ecclesio-centric moral vision. However, in his early essay, “Gospel and Law,” Barth makes the point that any institution or movement (civil or otherwise) is legitimate only insofar as it finds its source in the “Law of Christ.” And, at least in this essay, the State seems excluded from the same (qualitative as well as quantitative) benefits of the Kingdom which the Church enjoys.

This alone can also be the meaning and content of the authority with which the Church confronts its members and the world. We are always concerned with faith in Jesus Christ, who is crucified and risen. Thus there can never be claims anbd demands which would have legal validity from another source of in themselves: there can only be witnesses. And these witnesses will always be concerned with the grace of God, which has accomplisghed everything for us and whose end must this accomplishment…. Our works, great and small, internal and external, are accepted if they take place as works of this faith—and they are rejected if they do not (emphasis original).