Having written about sonata form in guitar literature it will surprise no one I've got opinions about it. I've written about sonata form as used by Sor, Giuliani and Diabelli and so you won't be shocked that I've paid attention to whether or not anyone's bothered to record Diabelli's sonatas. Anthony Glise's recording is excellent and, sadly, out of print. At the end of this month, however, there's a new recording that's going to be available. Here is the disc that will be coming out from Brilliant Classics, in case you're interested.
As I've written before of the three Diabelli's sonatas, as explorations of sonata form, are the most compelling overall. While Sor and Giuliani provide brilliant early explorations of the form their later works get bogged down in, literally, the grandness of the scope they were going for. Not all guitarist composers who have attempted large-scale sonata form failed. In fact Matiegka's two Grand Sonatas for solo guitar (the first of which is recorded by David Leisner) are compelling explorations of large form. Arguably Matiegka's handling of sonata form is better than that of Sor, Giuliani or even Diabelli.
But that's a pretty bold assertion to make and it depends on being able to mount some definition and defense of what a good sonata form actually is. Charles Rosen has amply established that sonata form itself is more slippery than imagined by scholastic musicologists. Do you think a sonata has two groups? It may have three. Do you propose that the two groups must be of contrasting character? What about all those monothematic sonata forms Haydn wrote? Wasn't Haydn considered the pioneer of what we now consider sonata form?
If you were to ask the average classical guitarist what the best set of sonatas for solo guitar are the answer would probably not be Sor, Giuliani, Diabelli or (sadly) Matiegka (and in Matiegka's case we haven't had a chance to hear commercial recordings of his eleven sonatas yet). While the jury may be out in the long-haul a lot of people like the guitar sonatas of Ponce. I happen to like them, too, even though I actually can't stand the variations and fugue on La Folia and would even agree with Matanya Ophee that Ponce was ultimately a composer of second rank. Second rank is still pretty impressive, though.
Now "if" we grant that Ponce's guitar sonatas represent the great achievement in terms of their being played a whole lot we could ask what is characteristic of them. I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that it's simple, Ponce's guitar sonatas work because they demonstrate a clear grasp of development as a principle in sonata form but, just as crucially, Ponce's sonatas for guitar show a clear grasp of structural differentiation within and across segments of the form.
When guitarist-composers tackle sonata form what can often happen is that, frankly, the themes in the exposition don't always seem different enough for their observable differences to matter. Unless you're a scholar whose job it is to know where the modulations occur within the exposition and recapitulation what are the odds you could hum the tunes in the structural key-points of any given guitar sonata? Can you do that for Giuliani's lovely Op. 15? That's good because that's one of the ones where you can do that. How about Sor's brilliant Op. 14? Yep, there as well.
Now what about those grand sonatas? Not quite so much.
But with Ponce you can practically see how schematic everything is and in the best possible way. Ponce could crank out some solid tunes with solid differences across the form. Ponce's guitar sonatas are fine examples of sonata form for our instrument precisely because they're so conservative, even scholastic in bearing. There's no mistaking where theme 1 and theme 2 are even when he builds from the same essential building blocks as he does in his "Romantic" sonata. How does that work? Bear with me, I'm doing this all from memory.
To get at this let's diverge way back into Haydn. Haydn wrote plenty of monothematic sonata forms and so we can't say that what differentiates a theme in one segment or another is some simple principle of contrast. There are, however, ways of contrasting forms of a single theme. If we look at the "fifths" string quartet (Op 76, 2) we'll see that having a theme in one mode and then another provides a contrast. Contrasting textural accompaniment is also useful. Haydn might have a homophonic realization of a theme in block chords in one section and subject the same thematic idea to a contrapuntal ornamentation in the second group as well as having the theme in major rather than minor.
In Haydn's C sharp minor piano sonata we can see that the opening gesture is presented in bold octaves and followed up with delicate figuration that is an augmentation of a fragment of the initial gesture. This idea is later brought back in the second group of the exposition and embellished with sequence and altered harmonic rhythm. But the most significant contrast between "theme 1" and "theme 2" is that an idea bluntly stated in C sharp minor is presented in sequence in E major and with a rapidly descending bass line before expanding on the sequential ideas that appeared in the first theme. The C sharp minor piano sonata has an exposition that consists of a handful of gestures that are developed in contrasting ways without adding any completely new material.
What Charles Rosen observed about Haydn's innovations in sonata form was that Haydn was able to compose accompaniment figures in first themes that were able to be developed into ideas with thematic significance later within the same musical form. An idea in violin 2 in the opening sonata form of a string quartet could become thematic material for violin 1 to play later within the same exposition. If we were to be very sloppy and attempt to put this in contrapuntal terms, a countersubject to a subject might become its own subject replete with exposition later in a double fugue and so it was, arguably, with Haydn's approach to sonata form.
If the fugue could be considered the form through which composers expressed profound thoughts and feelings in the Baroque period that form became sonata form in the Classic period. That Beethoven flirted with fusions of the two forms in his late works would help encourage this impression even if one did not agree that the fugue and the sonata form are the forms in their respective epochs through which a set of complementary yet contrasted ideas could be explored and developed. While perhaps a composer today would find both fugue and sonata form antiquated it is possible to compose a type of monothematic sonata form in which theme 1 is taken as a subject and a theme 2 is composed as its countersubject, yet the two themes are presented with independent harmonic realizations in a sonata exposition and are recapitulated simultaneously as subject with countersubject in the recapitulation of a sonata form. That may sound scholastic and I suppose it is but it's also fun. Wenatchee has done it. The more thoroughly a musician studies sonata form and fugue the more readily the two forms can be seen as companions dedicated to the exploration of ideas at the most abstract level.
Now all this is rather general for the reason that Ponce's sonatas are under copyright and we've no wish to breach that. But if you've heard all of Ponce's sonatas let alone those of the early masters of classical guitar, you may already hear in your mind what I'm getting at, that there is a clarity of form in the best guitar sonatas that amplifies their emotional appeal. Sor and Giuliani in later works paint on a canvas that seems too large for the kind of paintings they make. Their use of cadential formula for flourishing technical displays can devour any ability to easily remember what their thematic ideas actually were.
What arguably doesn't happen in guitar sonatas is a whole lot of what Rosen observed in the sonatas of Haydn, transforming little gestures in themes into thematic ideas later on. Anyone who can show how this happens in guitar sonatas is welcome to discuss it, because the aim of this piece is not strictly polemical but to encourage a discussion of sonata forms for solo guitar. We guitarists simply don't have the same level of contrapuntal liberties pianists or string quartets have so, naturally, it'd be difficult to develop sonata form in quite the same way Haydn did.
But as Ponce's sonatas show, it is possible to establish structural differentiation in expositions and recapitulations to the point where each tune gets its moment to shine. So how does Ponce and other composers do that?
At the risk of still being vague we can discuss ways in which a "theme" is marked out. There may be two to three essential gestures in a theme and they may have contrasting potential within themselves. Or as with Haydn's C sharp minor piano sonata the apparently single idea may have within itself fragments that are amenable to development at levels the untrained won't perceive. An idea that sounds fine going forward in theme 1 may become the basis for theme 2 by being fragmented, transposed and sequenced. However many fragments make up the initial phrase the composer's imagination will be able to discern their boundaries of developmental travel.
If you wanted to compose a monothematic sonata form keep in mind there's no rule that says the thing ever has to be the same thing twice. You could go from block chord accompaniment in "theme 1" to alberti bass in "theme 2" while retaining the essential shape of the melody. Haydn does this in a couple of his piano sonatas. There's the obvious move of choosing contrasting modes.
Less obvious ideas are to alter the harmonic rhythm of the theme. You may have an opening theme with a brisk harmonic rhythm where the chords change every two beats and as a way to contrast "theme 1" from "theme 2" (even in this monothematic sonata form we're hypothetically dealing with) the harmonic rhythm in "theme 2" may be significantly slower. Of course the mode could be different and be parallel minor or major or you might have a theme "1" with a pure mode that in theme "2" is subject to rapid modal mutation. You might even have theme 2 have a certain set of modal mutations in the exposition that are inverted in the recapitulation but so long as the gestural integrity and syntax of your initial ideas is preserved a listener will still hear that it's the same set of ideas you had in your sonata earlier.
The number of phrases in a theme become important. If in theme 1 you have a square theme with four phrases that are four measures each then in your theme 2, even if you're using the same set of ideas as before, you might want to use three phrases of three measures each, perhaps in triple meter or 5/4. The idea would be that you have several realms of contrast despite sharing gestures in common. You can employ the contrast in the number of phrases and the length of the phrases. You can contrast mode, you can contrast a sequential development of a single idea with a call-and-response development of having your idea met with a new and complementary or subsidiary idea.
To put this in somewhat trite terms if you have a theme you like it will consist of a variety of fragments and ideas that you can break down. Break them out into all the fragments you can easily recognize and do this for any accompaniment patterns you enjoy. Figure out everything you can do with all of them and then once you've done that then go tackle the form itself. In forms as abstract and esoteric as sonata and fugue "inspiration" is a worth ethic and a methodology--you toil until you find the inspired and what is most inspired among the possibilities--rather than some emotionally driven and riven spur of the moment. Great musicians are able to create and perform music in a way that conveys spontaneity even if every single note has been meticulously planned from start to finish. There's no essential conflict between care for every single note at a formal level and musical expression. It's never "just notes" if you're serious about it and if it is "just notes" then you may not be entirely serious about it regardless of musical style.
While it's good to talk about the feeling inherent within music there's a risk to it. There's no truly "inhuman" music but there are many types of music and musical works that fail to lodge in the heart. This is, just to be argumentative about it, a problem of memory. Musical form relies on the power of associative memory. For our brains to grasp the emotional content of any given musical moment we have to have enough associative memory at hand to grasp the grammar and syntax and language we're being presented. If Haydn gives us an exposition in the C sharp minor piano sonata where an idea is thoroughly developed then if he abandons developing the idea in his recapitulation this surprises us but does not shock us because Haydn adheres to a concept of balance within and across forms.
The ideas that he develops in the C sharp minor piano sonata first movement in the recapitulation were ideas that did not get as much development in the exposition or even the development. The principle of developmental extension within the form gave Haydn room to develop the previously undeveloped phrases to pleasing conclusions. To someone bent on the idea that sonata forms have to have recapitulations without development, or committed to the idea that what happened in the exposition has to come back the same way Haydn reveals that it doesn't have to be that way. As previously said, Haydn's commitment to development across the sonata form gives him freedom to both surprise us by not recapitulating in the scholastic way we would have been told to expect in a musicology class but to satisfy us by developing the phrases in the recapitulation in the structural order in which they appeared in the exposition. The larger point of structural differentiation within and across the parts of the sonata form have still been preserved.
As balancing the artistic imperative to both surprise and satisfy Haydn was obviously a master. That no guitarist-composer has ever approached Haydn's level of mastery is not really a surprise given the significant limitations of our instrument and yet it's possible to say that just because we live in the 21st century does not mean there's nothing more to be done with fusty old sonata form or fugue, still less does it mean that a single guitar played by a guitarist somehow can't do much with these challenging forms just because the average guitarist isn't interested in the conceptual and physical demands sonata and fugue obviously make on the mind and body. The violin literature is full of music that at some point or another was declared unplayable or unmusical. The guitar is at a stage now where idiomatic possibility is almost moot given the feats virtuosi are capable of now. Why not begin to explore the older forms like sonata and fugue for solo guitar precisely so that we can, as it were "catch up" to what has been available in keyboard literature for centuries? And, while we're at it, there's obviously more old music that has sat in near oblivion for decades by composers like Rebay and Matiegka. We don't have to only make new stuff and not appreciate the old.
For those guitarist composers who are interested in sonata form and what is possible for a person to do with a single guitar in that form, here's at least some ideas for consideration, such as they are. A great fugue and a great sonata have their own thematic and development economic efficiency, for want of a more "artistic" set of terms, and if that seems too mechanistic let's not forget that in earlier eras of music that preceded the Enlightenment medieval scholastics could still group music, for instance, with a set of applied sciences like astronomy and geometry. Similar thought was found in the Greeks. Music was seen as expressing kind of telos for the cosmosbut we should abandon any pretense that any one culture necessarily arrived at the same set of ideas. But this blog post isn't about a defense or attack on tonal music in the West in common practice. It's just a rambling rumination on a specific form in the common practice style and what we guitarists may be able to do with it given what we hear in sonatas of old.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Friday, June 14, 2013
New series at Mockingbird on Justice League/Justice League Unlimited
There's been a big gap between the last series on the DCAU for Mockingbird and this one so it seemed like this post might be a way to get readers up to speed and get some sense of where the newly launched series comes from and what it builds on.
Back in 2010 DZ at Mockingbird and I briefly discussed the possibility of Wenatchee The Hatchet writing an overview of the DC animated universe (aka Timm-verse). The idea sounded fun and the prototype for what was in mind was something like the Onion AV club overview of the animated shows.
In early 2011 Wenatchee wrote a few thousand words about Superman: the animated series. Then in the summer of 2011 with Michael Bay's third Transformers film released still more thousands of words were written explaining how and why the old Transformers cartoons were actually kinda lame as they were slaved to shilling toys. Only in the fall of 2011 did essays about Batman: the animated series take shape and the series Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire wrapped up roughly in time for the 20th anniversary of the classic cartoon. In case you've never read any of that stuff here's a comprehensive table of contents.
In case you might be interested in reading what Wenatchee The Hatchet had to say about the Toy Story trilogy, here you go.
http://www.mbird.com/2010/08/toy-story-as-trilogy-of-heroic/
http://www.mbird.com/2010/08/toy-story-as-trilogy-of-heroic_12/
http://www.mbird.com/2010/08/toy-story-as-trilogy-of-heroic_19/
For a discussion of social identity in Ratatouille and Pixar films in general.
For a discussion of last year's Pixar film Brave.
For a discussion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, there's "A Path Through Three Prisons"
Finally, because you probably knew this was likely, we're kicking off a new and probably more-intermittent-than-ideal series on Justice League/Justice League Unlimited. Given the weird and annoying gaps and erratic scheduling the series had during it's run readers who enjoyed the show may simply sigh and note that there were intermittent annoying gaps in the air dates of episodes for the show itself. We're only human here, after all. But rest assured the first essay in Justice Has Its Price: The Orphans and Exiles of the Justice League has officially gone up today, just in time for the release of Man of Steel. Yes, we did plan for that and at least pulled that off. :) No, there's no way we're waiting to publish the Green Lantern film in association with another Green Lantern movie.
So, here you go..
http://www.mbird.com/2013/06/
.
Back in 2010 DZ at Mockingbird and I briefly discussed the possibility of Wenatchee The Hatchet writing an overview of the DC animated universe (aka Timm-verse). The idea sounded fun and the prototype for what was in mind was something like the Onion AV club overview of the animated shows.
In early 2011 Wenatchee wrote a few thousand words about Superman: the animated series. Then in the summer of 2011 with Michael Bay's third Transformers film released still more thousands of words were written explaining how and why the old Transformers cartoons were actually kinda lame as they were slaved to shilling toys. Only in the fall of 2011 did essays about Batman: the animated series take shape and the series Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire wrapped up roughly in time for the 20th anniversary of the classic cartoon. In case you've never read any of that stuff here's a comprehensive table of contents.
In case you might be interested in reading what Wenatchee The Hatchet had to say about the Toy Story trilogy, here you go.
http://www.mbird.com/2010/08/toy-story-as-trilogy-of-heroic/
http://www.mbird.com/2010/08/toy-story-as-trilogy-of-heroic_12/
http://www.mbird.com/2010/08/toy-story-as-trilogy-of-heroic_19/
For a discussion of social identity in Ratatouille and Pixar films in general.
For a discussion of last year's Pixar film Brave.
For a discussion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, there's "A Path Through Three Prisons"
Finally, because you probably knew this was likely, we're kicking off a new and probably more-intermittent-than-ideal series on Justice League/Justice League Unlimited. Given the weird and annoying gaps and erratic scheduling the series had during it's run readers who enjoyed the show may simply sigh and note that there were intermittent annoying gaps in the air dates of episodes for the show itself. We're only human here, after all. But rest assured the first essay in Justice Has Its Price: The Orphans and Exiles of the Justice League has officially gone up today, just in time for the release of Man of Steel. Yes, we did plan for that and at least pulled that off. :) No, there's no way we're waiting to publish the Green Lantern film in association with another Green Lantern movie.
So, here you go..
http://www.mbird.com/2013/06/
.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
in the near future hope to get back to some musical stuff
But that will take some time and amidst writing there is such a thing as living, we trust. Wenatchee The Hatchet plans to get to Matiegka and Carulli sonatas in comparison to works by Haydn but anyone who knows those works will get why it's taken time.
And there are some writing and musical projects that have been pending for a while.
And there are some writing and musical projects that have been pending for a while.
another sorta linkathon
Two different ways of tackling what is called scientism in two unsurprisingly contrasting settings. Slate and The Weekly Standard. Inevitable trolling comments about how people who think science can't every question should use things like leeches ensue at Slate because that's what the fray has become over the last decade.
Also in The Weekly Standard, an interesting kernel of thought about Solomon and apostasy for those who may want to run with that idea further.
Also in The Weekly Standard, an interesting kernel of thought about Solomon and apostasy for those who may want to run with that idea further.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
Weitzman explores why someone so wise could violate such an obvious prohibition: It is not in spite of his wisdom, but because of his wisdom, that Solomon is led astray, Weitzman suggests. Perhaps Solomon believed himself wise enough to accumulate a surfeit of wives while still avoiding temptation. “Whatever it is that Solomon understood about the world or God or the biblical text,” writes Weitzman, “might even be what got him into trouble by removing the limits that normally constrain where the mind can go.”
This concept pervades Judaic thought. The rabbis conceived of gezeirah, alternatively known as building a fence around the Torah. One places certain restrictions on lifestyle in order to (in Rabban Gamliel’s words) “keep a man far from transgression.” Orthodox Jews do not carry money on the Sabbath, not because it is a grave sin against God but because it will prevent them from being in a position to buy something, an action associated with work, which is expressly forbidden. Solomon reasoned away the fence. Since Solomon knew the explanation for the prohibition against many wives—to avoid idolatry—he thought he could concentrate on this larger purpose rather than worry about avoiding lots of foreign women. In other words, if we understand the secrets of why we do certain things or why certain laws exist, we remove the barriers that prevent us from breaking more serious laws.
A lament that with the latest plot twist revelations Don Draper's story in Mad Men is like a bad comic book. The very form of television itself has always been the soap opera or a made-for-TV movie in essence. We can discuss and debate how low, middle and high the knitted brow may be but ... .
Weitzman explores why someone so wise could violate such an obvious prohibition: It is not in spite of his wisdom, but because of his wisdom, that Solomon is led astray, Weitzman suggests. Perhaps Solomon believed himself wise enough to accumulate a surfeit of wives while still avoiding temptation. “Whatever it is that Solomon understood about the world or God or the biblical text,” writes Weitzman, “might even be what got him into trouble by removing the limits that normally constrain where the mind can go.”
This concept pervades Judaic thought. The rabbis conceived of gezeirah, alternatively known as building a fence around the Torah. One places certain restrictions on lifestyle in order to (in Rabban Gamliel’s words) “keep a man far from transgression.” Orthodox Jews do not carry money on the Sabbath, not because it is a grave sin against God but because it will prevent them from being in a position to buy something, an action associated with work, which is expressly forbidden. Solomon reasoned away the fence. Since Solomon knew the explanation for the prohibition against many wives—to avoid idolatry—he thought he could concentrate on this larger purpose rather than worry about avoiding lots of foreign women. In other words, if we understand the secrets of why we do certain things or why certain laws exist, we remove the barriers that prevent us from breaking more serious laws.
A lament that with the latest plot twist revelations Don Draper's story in Mad Men is like a bad comic book. The very form of television itself has always been the soap opera or a made-for-TV movie in essence. We can discuss and debate how low, middle and high the knitted brow may be but ... .
Sunday, June 09, 2013
Mark Driscoll appeals to Mars Hill Church members to give more money as end of fiscal year approaches.
There are links buried all over this one but Wenatchee's not in the mood to go re-underline them. Feel free to scroll-over as you read to spot the links to other content. Otherwise, this post will largely explain itself. And so ...
http://marshill.com/2013/06/03/good-news-bad-news-and-good-fruit
Well, it appears the good news, bad news cycle of growth keeps happening and nobody's giving enough has continued at Mars Hill despite the fact that they've switched to a weekly budgeting approach. There's been some observations from Driscoll about Mars HIll having faced a fiscal cliff in the past (as in recent). Last year there was a financial update in which Driscoll mentioned that all the Mars Hill campuses had been running systemic deficits. Switching from annual to weekly budgeting was introduced as a way to avert some problems. Somehow despite the admission of systemic deficits the year end report for FY2012 was another best-year-ever. Sure, Driscoll could admit the economic model that had guided Mars Hill up until last year was not sustainable for the long-term future ... but nobody sinned in any way when mass layoffs happened.
The start of 2013 was quite a year. Bill Clem left Mars Hill after years in ministry. Alex Early replaced Clem. Tim Gaydos left Mars Hill Downtown shortly after a grand opening at a new campus. And this year Driscoll rallied members of Mars Hill with an observation of "we're not a wealthy church" even though the annual report of Mars Hill for FY2012 strongly indicates Mars Hill was doing better than, say, the Salvation Army or the Union Gospel Mission lately. You can read about that here.
Well, how are things lately? It would appear that Mark Driscoll has notified Mars Hill in the last week or so that, once again, giving isn't where it needs to be. Driscoll explains the good news/bad situation, it seems, as follows:
So ... once again Mars Hill is not quite at the giving goals desired. Chris Rosebrough, if you happen to read this, there may be some more vision-casting coming up.
http://marshill.com/2013/06/03/good-news-bad-news-and-good-fruit
Well, it appears the good news, bad news cycle of growth keeps happening and nobody's giving enough has continued at Mars Hill despite the fact that they've switched to a weekly budgeting approach. There's been some observations from Driscoll about Mars HIll having faced a fiscal cliff in the past (as in recent). Last year there was a financial update in which Driscoll mentioned that all the Mars Hill campuses had been running systemic deficits. Switching from annual to weekly budgeting was introduced as a way to avert some problems. Somehow despite the admission of systemic deficits the year end report for FY2012 was another best-year-ever. Sure, Driscoll could admit the economic model that had guided Mars Hill up until last year was not sustainable for the long-term future ... but nobody sinned in any way when mass layoffs happened.
The start of 2013 was quite a year. Bill Clem left Mars Hill after years in ministry. Alex Early replaced Clem. Tim Gaydos left Mars Hill Downtown shortly after a grand opening at a new campus. And this year Driscoll rallied members of Mars Hill with an observation of "we're not a wealthy church" even though the annual report of Mars Hill for FY2012 strongly indicates Mars Hill was doing better than, say, the Salvation Army or the Union Gospel Mission lately. You can read about that here.
Well, how are things lately? It would appear that Mark Driscoll has notified Mars Hill in the last week or so that, once again, giving isn't where it needs to be. Driscoll explains the good news/bad situation, it seems, as follows:
From Pastor Mark Driscoll:
Mars Hill Family,
I love you and I praise God for you. I’ve
got the best job on the world.
On a recent day out running errands I had
dozens of people come up to say they became a Christian at Mars Hill, got
their life turned around at Mars Hill, and/or met their spouse at Mars Hill.
This happens all the time. I have an amazing seat to watch the Holy Spirit
work in and through our church family. After 17 years on the job, I’m more
thankful, hopeful, and grateful than ever for Jesus and our people.
With the summer coming, I wanted to catch
you up to speed on a few things. We’ve got our big summer sermon series coming up after a few months in Acts,
but before that we have our financial year end fast approaching at the end of
June. Since the summer is usually a bit flat, as people are on vacation, it
is very important for us to end our fiscal year strong.
Good news
For the third year in a row, over 1,000
people were baptized at Mars Hill Church during the past 12 months. Students
ministry, women’s ministry, and Mars Hill Music all got off to very strong
starts this year. Easter weekend was our biggest ever. We have multiple
churches on the cusp of moving into long-term homes, Everett and Tacoma.
This big picture view is tremendously
encouraging, and it gets even more beautiful when you consider the countless ways God is at work in the lives of our church.
Bad news
Giving at Mars Hill Church is behind where
we had planned to be at this point in the year. We have some significant
ground to make up between now and June 30 in order to achieve our expected
income for the year.
The shortfall is concerning, but thankfully,
we’ve kept expenses down and continue to live within our means. We are also
members of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, adhering to
the highest standards of nonprofit stewardship. Yes, we are a church asking
you to give, because we know that worshiping
with your money is better than worshiping your money.
In our various churches, about a third of
the people who attend give anything. Please give. And please pray. For those who do, thank
you! Over the next few weeks, we’ll provide regular updates to keep the
church up to speed on progress.
Go to marshill.com/give
to give toward this year’s budget and set an annual pledge to help us plan
for next year.
Love and fruit
This month we’ll also be talking a lot about
vision. As we’ve learned in the Acts series so far, Jesus has already given us a mission: to
be his witnesses (Acts 1:8).
As your pastor, part of my job is to prayerfully consider how this mission
plays out through the life and work of Mars Hill Church.
I love to dream big, and I’ve got no
shortage of vision for Mars Hill. At full maturity, I am asking Jesus to
allow us to be a church of 50,000 people. We want to plant more churches in
urban locations—old urban, like Seattle and Portland, and new urban, like
Bellevue and Orange County—and we want to develop these churches into
regional hubs that can plant more churches in the surrounding areas.
But honestly, health matters to me more than
growth. If we are healthy, God will grow us. We want to make it clear that
Mars Hill Church cares about faces, not just numbers. A church can be large and
healthy. But if we overemphasize the large, we risk the healthy. If we focus
on healthy, large will take care of itself, according to God’s will. As Jesus
said, “Every healthy tree bears good fruit” (Matt. 7:17).
Here’s what’s on my heart, in particular for
the next year of Mars Hill Church: I want us to be a healthy tree. What does
that look like? Love. I want us to love Jesus, love our family, love our
church family, love our neighbor, love lost people, and love our enemies.
Jesus has loved us well and invited us to be witnesses of his by loving with
his love. In closing, I’m asking three things:
1.
Please pray for our
church to always be growing in our love and unity.
2.
Please love your
Community Group, and if you don’t have one, join one.
3.
Please give as an act of
love.
Whatever God has for us next, as long as we
love one another we’ll be ready for it.
|
Saturday, June 08, 2013
Jim West: What you need to know about the SBC
http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-sbc/
1- It meets this week in Houston.
2- Its decisions (resolutions) are non-binding. Churches are free to ignore them or embrace them.
3- Its main purpose is to adopt a budget. Why it takes three days to do that is a grand mystery.
...
heh, "a grand mystery". Each group of people probably has a grand mystery all its own. accountability
1- It meets this week in Houston.
2- Its decisions (resolutions) are non-binding. Churches are free to ignore them or embrace them.
3- Its main purpose is to adopt a budget. Why it takes three days to do that is a grand mystery.
...
heh, "a grand mystery". Each group of people probably has a grand mystery all its own. accountability
Friday, June 07, 2013
some thoughts on what some call watchblogging
Earlier this year Wenatchee The Hatchet wrote a guest piece for Internet Monk. The very recently linked article in Slate on how most people don't read all of or all the way through articles on-line reminded me of how it seemed a lot of people read about a lot to do with a certain gigachurch.
The more years go by the more Wenatchee The Hatchet has pondered the possibility that WTH was trained in writing in an era before the internet was available for civilian and commercial use. If you grow up in a setting in which you voluntarily read the unabridged Moby Dick and love Dostoevsky you're not dealing with a type of reading that fits the internet we have now, at least in some ways.
Reading reactions to the guest piece impressed upon me that people felt the writing was of poor quality. It was in the sense that a first draft went up without expected rewrites. So it went. But other comments involved either a belief that a certain public figure who blogs about how lame bloggers are had to be behind everything. Driscoll ultimately had to be the big guy behind Andrew Lamb's situation ven though when Lamb's situation became a headline Driscoll was selling Real Marriage (more on the book later in some other posts). Driscoll was preparing to shake hands and make friends with T. D. Jakes. Driscoll was touring to promote his book and taking pre-emptive strike action toward Justin Brierley. Yet for some reason people who already didn't like Driscoll insisted that Driscoll had to somehow know about Andrew Lamb's situation and somehow be directly involved in it. Anyone who thought that was not in a position to have read Joyful Exiles (which, of course, didn't go up until months after Lamb's story made headlines).
But it appeared that even those who read Joyful Exiles didn't exactly read Joyful Exiles. Piecing together the role Scott Thomas played as head of the EIT is clear enough if you know what you're looking at but not everyone knew what they were looking at. Not long after the site went up correspondence was added in which Thomas stated that "a conciliatory process" had been completed and stated this days before, as head of the EIT, Scott Thomas would affirm that Munson's charges against Meyer and Petry were legit. So what conciliatory process was that? Hmm ... .
But you'd have to search far and wide to find any other blogs, let alone any journalistic coverage, that even discussed the roles of Scott Thomas or Jamie Munson in the controversial firings of 2007 at Mars Hill Church. Munson's got his own domain and a book on authority out now, so maybe he'll be happy to field questions about those topics. Yes, there's mention of Moleskins for those who are curious about whether he'll fit the New Calvinist demographics. :)
But a majority of readers who click on a link in any way discussing Mars Hill want the topic to be Driscoll, not executive elders who were involved in firings six years ago or more. They want things to be about Mark, even though Mark is in a sense just a brand, an icon who has his own domain name. That Andrew Lamb got put through some kind of bureaucratic disciplinary meat-grinder didn't make Lamb a completely innocent person anymore than it made Kaitlyn Noriega a completely innocent person. It took two to tango but for those against Mars Hill none of that mattered, and for those for Mars Hill none of that mattered, either.
Unsurprisingly comments asking Wenatchee The Hatchet to bottom-line things confirmed precisely the problem the guest post was written to address. The for and against teams were (and still are) so eager to just get to the point they don't care whether or not there are other things to consider. It didn't matter what the confluence of situations was because everyone had their minds made up.
It's not practical to find out how many people who wanted to know if Andrew's story checked out actually bothered to read the more than 15,000 words in "A Confluence of Situations" to find out whether the story checked out. In the age of the internet readers want you to bottom-line it and research it for them so they simply don't have to. There may not have been much traffic for A Context for A Call for Reconcilaition, either. Dostoevsky once wrote that a young man will gladly die for a cause he cares about but ask him to devote five years of his incendiary youth to a cause and you'll find how swiftly his ardor cools! So it is with readers and bloggers who think they have thoroughly investigated a matter. No, you probably haven't, I'm afraid. At least on the subject of a certain megachurch that Driscoll now calls a gigachurch Wenatchee The Hatchet can at least hope to provide some example of how to improve on what is written here.
But you see, dear reader, the goal here is not precisely partisan. The goal is not exactly to "win". There's a difference between advocacy journalism and educational blogging. It is Wenatchee's biased opinion that the majority of the very best people in the history of Mars Hill Church have come and gone. There are still wonderful people inside the church but the church is in tens of thousands now and most of those people wouldn't know the name Brad Currah if their life depended on it. They probably don't even know who Mike Gunn and Lief Moi are. They also probably don't care. Wenatchee cares, quite a bit, obviously, and one of the aims of this blog (besides pontificating later this year about why Wenzaslaus Matiegka's guitar sonatas are better than Sor's) is to find a way to share the stories of people who stepped off the bus, got thrown off the bus, or got thrown under the bus while the bus turns out to be some kind of triple-changer that turns into an airplane. If that means that in some sense Mars Hill shifting from bus to plane makes the place seem like a Decepticon triple-changer you could do worse than Astrotrain.
And bloggers who have set Mars Hill in their sights could do better about not fixating on Driscoll. There's a little bit of history on how Mars Hill has acquired its current real estate, for instance. There are questions that can be asked about how a convicted felon on his second marriage and a relatively new Christian faith got fast-tracked into leadership in Mars Hill as quickly as he did and how and why he got vanished from leadership as swiftly. But defenders of Mars Hill were eager to say "We're not perfect, just better than Andrew" and detractors only cared about Andrew largely, it seems, as a suitable icon for a prejudice against Mars HIll, a thing that could only play into the hands of a leadership culture that already found it easy to present itself as embattled over problems that were in several cases self-fulfilling prophecies or self-inflicted dramas. If there had been an appeals process in place by which Andrew Lamb could have made a case that his discipline seemed retaliatory given that he was having sex with a pastor's kid maybe none of that situation would have made headlines at all. Had Mars Hill not posted things to The City due to "unclear communication" Andrew wouldn't have known what was going on for a while.
In fact one of the things that may be worth emphasizing in light of, say, the NSA headlines we're seeing lately, is that we must remember what a startling amount of information we often dump on to the internet. Mars Hill leaders had blogged and tweeted so much that, as "A Confluence of Situations" established in exhaustive detail, the privacy of parties involved was dead in the water before Andrew Lamb was even beginning to get put through the disciplinary machinery. If Bill Watterson is as much as a net-luddite as we may speculate he is then he's got nothing to worry about. But for bloggers and for Mars Hill folks who tweet and blog about stories of redemption about how they didn't quite get expelled because a father-figure stepped up for them after they'd lied about having sex to bolster their school rep, well, even dead links can tell stories. Andrew's girlfriend and Andrew himself were not exactly making shrewd decisions along the way and it's not to the credit of partisans to transform either of them into icons of virtue or vice. Their young people with hormones and emotions they didn't have complete grips on and they said and did things together and to each other that, one surmises, they regret by now.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has gotten unhappy comments from fans and detractors of Mars Hill alike over the years. In Driscollian parlance that would mean that if Wenatchee The Hatchet has ticked off the people who love Mars Hill and hate Mars Hill then, well, Wenatchee The Hatchet is doing a good job. Those are the sorts of rhetorical flourishes through which Driscoll can constantly position himself as the center around which everyone else he doesn't consider important becomes a left and right that can be dismissed. Well, maybe it is so for Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Let's play with an idea, that a substantial critique of Mars Hill as a culture is not likely to emerge from the theological left or right of where ever Driscoll's fidgeting near. Anyone he deems to the doctrinal left doesn't really love Jesus or believe the Bible is true and is therefore at best an unwitting instrument in the hands of Satan. Anyone he deems to the doctrinal right is a legalist who doesn't know how to have fun and no one is in the center except whomever is "friend" material for the time being. It wasn't long after Don Carson politely indicated that maybe Driscoll was an ignorant troll on British evangelicalism that Driscoll decided to leave. Driscoll has made much about how it's vital to support in public and criticize in private ... at least where he's concerned. When it's Driscoll himself speaking of others he can say whatever he wants to or about Justin Brierley (go look it up) and he can cheerfully saying that picking on people is his love language (buried amid much other discussion about four points that Chris Rosebrough has discussed here).
To date Mars Hill fans have not really addressed the content at Joyful Exiles in any fashion. Driscoll has not directly referred to it in any way that Wenatchee is aware of, though there's this. When any form of criticism can be subsumed into attacks from the Devil Driscoll defines the in team as essentially who is for him and for him in a way that doesn't involve public criticism in any fashion, and he gets to share jokes about people as his love language.
But the thing here, for those few of you who may have read this far (see the Slate reference above), Wenatchee The Hatchet does not see Mars Hill as some kind of enemy. Wenatchee The Hatchet can admittedly make a distinction between Mars Hill the people (many of whom are lovely and are friends to Wenatchee The Hatchet whom Wenatchee would help in any practical way possible) and Mars Hill the principality (let the reader understand). Wenatchee The Hatchet has Mars Hill members as not only friends but also neighbors and Wenatchee The Hatchet has been given work by people who call Mars Hill home. It's not a hugely difficult task to find out who Wenatchee The Hatchet is, though the odds of being stonewalled by Wenatchee in a unilateral request for contact are very, very high! Either you know you're in the loop by now already or you can guess that Wenatchee's not going to be hugely responsive. Don't take it personally.
What that means is that when Jesus teaches about what it means to love your neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan that means that Mars Hill people are your neighbors, especially if you should somehow hate them. Wenatchee doesn't and so it's all the more true that loving your neighbor as yourself means not being merely a cantankerous troll even when many at Mars Hill might be so themselves. It also means not simply assuming any old horror story about Mars Hill has to have been told by someone who's an innocent little lamb. Some of the people who left Mars Hill were treated terribly and ostracized for standing on principle. Some of the people who left Mars Hill were straight-up egotistical assholes who probably to this day think they were victims when they remorselessly threw their weight around to belittle people they disliked. Some people voluntarily didn't renew when 2007 rolled along and were dismayed at the lack of fiscally sound policy in real estate expansion. Surely by now you can guess where on this spectrum Wenatchee The Hatchet is. Those 40-some posts on real estate didn't just appear out of nowhere.
But this is the internet and on the internet people don't want there to be ambivalence. People don't want there to be some reality in which Mars Hill members would give Wenatchee The Hatchet a job, for instance, or in which Wenatchee The Hatchet would accept such work. People don't want to imagine that there are plenty of people at Mars Hill Church who voted for Obama (Wenatchee knows some of them and promises not to name names).
So for those who come to this blog wanting to read about Mars Hill, okay, that's clearly the most popular line of enquiry that leads people to this blog. A decade inside the institution and meeting all the founding elders has given Wenatchee an unusual opportunity to share history that seems to just not quite make it into the official narrative lately. But this is not to say that Wenatchee has any mad skillz that some other person couldn't bring to a situation. The goal here is, as said before, not necessarily to change your mind (which is probably already made up by the time you got here) but to educate you. There's a lot of history that isn't exactly swept under the rug but that is hidden in plain sight, that isn't attended to because nobody's thinking to look for it or at it. That's where this blog can sometimes, perhaps, be of help to people. There's very little here that doesn't rely on primary sources. You don't need to contact me personally, dear reader, because the stuff Wenatchee knows is stuff made available through sources that are linked to and quoted sufficiently that you can make use of that primary source material as you see fit.
None of this means Wenatchee The Hatchet is absolved from loving Mars Hill people as neighbors, seeing as Jesus' teaching properly understood makes that clear. It also doesn't mean there's any obligation to avoid presenting some frankly ugly history about a place that Wenatchee used to attend, either. But what you won't necessarily find here is a tone of moral outrage that has characterized a lot of writing about the subjects at hand. It's not that Wenatchee the Hatchet hasn't felt outrage. Waited at least a month for the blood to stop boiling before writing this series. Driscoll managed to subtextually transform Esther into a not-so-good-girl who was used for God's perfect plan--which, of course, couldn't be interpreted at a meta level as Mars Hill being embattled in a godless setting and doing their best despite critics, right? Mark keeps joking that he doesn't write the mail he just delivers it. If that were so then it looks like he appends a few sticky notes on to the envelop that ostensibly got mailed to you from someone else.
It's easy to blog about what Jesus was supposedly really on about but if you forget that even these Mars HIll people are neighbors to love if you take Jesus' ethical teaching seriously (not that all of you do, of course) then you're no better than you think they are. You may even be worse. There are not necessarily good guys and bad guys without blemish in the real world but the real world is not necessarily what the blogosphere wants.
The more years go by the more Wenatchee The Hatchet has pondered the possibility that WTH was trained in writing in an era before the internet was available for civilian and commercial use. If you grow up in a setting in which you voluntarily read the unabridged Moby Dick and love Dostoevsky you're not dealing with a type of reading that fits the internet we have now, at least in some ways.
Reading reactions to the guest piece impressed upon me that people felt the writing was of poor quality. It was in the sense that a first draft went up without expected rewrites. So it went. But other comments involved either a belief that a certain public figure who blogs about how lame bloggers are had to be behind everything. Driscoll ultimately had to be the big guy behind Andrew Lamb's situation ven though when Lamb's situation became a headline Driscoll was selling Real Marriage (more on the book later in some other posts). Driscoll was preparing to shake hands and make friends with T. D. Jakes. Driscoll was touring to promote his book and taking pre-emptive strike action toward Justin Brierley. Yet for some reason people who already didn't like Driscoll insisted that Driscoll had to somehow know about Andrew Lamb's situation and somehow be directly involved in it. Anyone who thought that was not in a position to have read Joyful Exiles (which, of course, didn't go up until months after Lamb's story made headlines).
But it appeared that even those who read Joyful Exiles didn't exactly read Joyful Exiles. Piecing together the role Scott Thomas played as head of the EIT is clear enough if you know what you're looking at but not everyone knew what they were looking at. Not long after the site went up correspondence was added in which Thomas stated that "a conciliatory process" had been completed and stated this days before, as head of the EIT, Scott Thomas would affirm that Munson's charges against Meyer and Petry were legit. So what conciliatory process was that? Hmm ... .
But you'd have to search far and wide to find any other blogs, let alone any journalistic coverage, that even discussed the roles of Scott Thomas or Jamie Munson in the controversial firings of 2007 at Mars Hill Church. Munson's got his own domain and a book on authority out now, so maybe he'll be happy to field questions about those topics. Yes, there's mention of Moleskins for those who are curious about whether he'll fit the New Calvinist demographics. :)
But a majority of readers who click on a link in any way discussing Mars Hill want the topic to be Driscoll, not executive elders who were involved in firings six years ago or more. They want things to be about Mark, even though Mark is in a sense just a brand, an icon who has his own domain name. That Andrew Lamb got put through some kind of bureaucratic disciplinary meat-grinder didn't make Lamb a completely innocent person anymore than it made Kaitlyn Noriega a completely innocent person. It took two to tango but for those against Mars Hill none of that mattered, and for those for Mars Hill none of that mattered, either.
Unsurprisingly comments asking Wenatchee The Hatchet to bottom-line things confirmed precisely the problem the guest post was written to address. The for and against teams were (and still are) so eager to just get to the point they don't care whether or not there are other things to consider. It didn't matter what the confluence of situations was because everyone had their minds made up.
It's not practical to find out how many people who wanted to know if Andrew's story checked out actually bothered to read the more than 15,000 words in "A Confluence of Situations" to find out whether the story checked out. In the age of the internet readers want you to bottom-line it and research it for them so they simply don't have to. There may not have been much traffic for A Context for A Call for Reconcilaition, either. Dostoevsky once wrote that a young man will gladly die for a cause he cares about but ask him to devote five years of his incendiary youth to a cause and you'll find how swiftly his ardor cools! So it is with readers and bloggers who think they have thoroughly investigated a matter. No, you probably haven't, I'm afraid. At least on the subject of a certain megachurch that Driscoll now calls a gigachurch Wenatchee The Hatchet can at least hope to provide some example of how to improve on what is written here.
But you see, dear reader, the goal here is not precisely partisan. The goal is not exactly to "win". There's a difference between advocacy journalism and educational blogging. It is Wenatchee's biased opinion that the majority of the very best people in the history of Mars Hill Church have come and gone. There are still wonderful people inside the church but the church is in tens of thousands now and most of those people wouldn't know the name Brad Currah if their life depended on it. They probably don't even know who Mike Gunn and Lief Moi are. They also probably don't care. Wenatchee cares, quite a bit, obviously, and one of the aims of this blog (besides pontificating later this year about why Wenzaslaus Matiegka's guitar sonatas are better than Sor's) is to find a way to share the stories of people who stepped off the bus, got thrown off the bus, or got thrown under the bus while the bus turns out to be some kind of triple-changer that turns into an airplane. If that means that in some sense Mars Hill shifting from bus to plane makes the place seem like a Decepticon triple-changer you could do worse than Astrotrain.
And bloggers who have set Mars Hill in their sights could do better about not fixating on Driscoll. There's a little bit of history on how Mars Hill has acquired its current real estate, for instance. There are questions that can be asked about how a convicted felon on his second marriage and a relatively new Christian faith got fast-tracked into leadership in Mars Hill as quickly as he did and how and why he got vanished from leadership as swiftly. But defenders of Mars Hill were eager to say "We're not perfect, just better than Andrew" and detractors only cared about Andrew largely, it seems, as a suitable icon for a prejudice against Mars HIll, a thing that could only play into the hands of a leadership culture that already found it easy to present itself as embattled over problems that were in several cases self-fulfilling prophecies or self-inflicted dramas. If there had been an appeals process in place by which Andrew Lamb could have made a case that his discipline seemed retaliatory given that he was having sex with a pastor's kid maybe none of that situation would have made headlines at all. Had Mars Hill not posted things to The City due to "unclear communication" Andrew wouldn't have known what was going on for a while.
In fact one of the things that may be worth emphasizing in light of, say, the NSA headlines we're seeing lately, is that we must remember what a startling amount of information we often dump on to the internet. Mars Hill leaders had blogged and tweeted so much that, as "A Confluence of Situations" established in exhaustive detail, the privacy of parties involved was dead in the water before Andrew Lamb was even beginning to get put through the disciplinary machinery. If Bill Watterson is as much as a net-luddite as we may speculate he is then he's got nothing to worry about. But for bloggers and for Mars Hill folks who tweet and blog about stories of redemption about how they didn't quite get expelled because a father-figure stepped up for them after they'd lied about having sex to bolster their school rep, well, even dead links can tell stories. Andrew's girlfriend and Andrew himself were not exactly making shrewd decisions along the way and it's not to the credit of partisans to transform either of them into icons of virtue or vice. Their young people with hormones and emotions they didn't have complete grips on and they said and did things together and to each other that, one surmises, they regret by now.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has gotten unhappy comments from fans and detractors of Mars Hill alike over the years. In Driscollian parlance that would mean that if Wenatchee The Hatchet has ticked off the people who love Mars Hill and hate Mars Hill then, well, Wenatchee The Hatchet is doing a good job. Those are the sorts of rhetorical flourishes through which Driscoll can constantly position himself as the center around which everyone else he doesn't consider important becomes a left and right that can be dismissed. Well, maybe it is so for Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Let's play with an idea, that a substantial critique of Mars Hill as a culture is not likely to emerge from the theological left or right of where ever Driscoll's fidgeting near. Anyone he deems to the doctrinal left doesn't really love Jesus or believe the Bible is true and is therefore at best an unwitting instrument in the hands of Satan. Anyone he deems to the doctrinal right is a legalist who doesn't know how to have fun and no one is in the center except whomever is "friend" material for the time being. It wasn't long after Don Carson politely indicated that maybe Driscoll was an ignorant troll on British evangelicalism that Driscoll decided to leave. Driscoll has made much about how it's vital to support in public and criticize in private ... at least where he's concerned. When it's Driscoll himself speaking of others he can say whatever he wants to or about Justin Brierley (go look it up) and he can cheerfully saying that picking on people is his love language (buried amid much other discussion about four points that Chris Rosebrough has discussed here).
To date Mars Hill fans have not really addressed the content at Joyful Exiles in any fashion. Driscoll has not directly referred to it in any way that Wenatchee is aware of, though there's this. When any form of criticism can be subsumed into attacks from the Devil Driscoll defines the in team as essentially who is for him and for him in a way that doesn't involve public criticism in any fashion, and he gets to share jokes about people as his love language.
But the thing here, for those few of you who may have read this far (see the Slate reference above), Wenatchee The Hatchet does not see Mars Hill as some kind of enemy. Wenatchee The Hatchet can admittedly make a distinction between Mars Hill the people (many of whom are lovely and are friends to Wenatchee The Hatchet whom Wenatchee would help in any practical way possible) and Mars Hill the principality (let the reader understand). Wenatchee The Hatchet has Mars Hill members as not only friends but also neighbors and Wenatchee The Hatchet has been given work by people who call Mars Hill home. It's not a hugely difficult task to find out who Wenatchee The Hatchet is, though the odds of being stonewalled by Wenatchee in a unilateral request for contact are very, very high! Either you know you're in the loop by now already or you can guess that Wenatchee's not going to be hugely responsive. Don't take it personally.
What that means is that when Jesus teaches about what it means to love your neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan that means that Mars Hill people are your neighbors, especially if you should somehow hate them. Wenatchee doesn't and so it's all the more true that loving your neighbor as yourself means not being merely a cantankerous troll even when many at Mars Hill might be so themselves. It also means not simply assuming any old horror story about Mars Hill has to have been told by someone who's an innocent little lamb. Some of the people who left Mars Hill were treated terribly and ostracized for standing on principle. Some of the people who left Mars Hill were straight-up egotistical assholes who probably to this day think they were victims when they remorselessly threw their weight around to belittle people they disliked. Some people voluntarily didn't renew when 2007 rolled along and were dismayed at the lack of fiscally sound policy in real estate expansion. Surely by now you can guess where on this spectrum Wenatchee The Hatchet is. Those 40-some posts on real estate didn't just appear out of nowhere.
But this is the internet and on the internet people don't want there to be ambivalence. People don't want there to be some reality in which Mars Hill members would give Wenatchee The Hatchet a job, for instance, or in which Wenatchee The Hatchet would accept such work. People don't want to imagine that there are plenty of people at Mars Hill Church who voted for Obama (Wenatchee knows some of them and promises not to name names).
So for those who come to this blog wanting to read about Mars Hill, okay, that's clearly the most popular line of enquiry that leads people to this blog. A decade inside the institution and meeting all the founding elders has given Wenatchee an unusual opportunity to share history that seems to just not quite make it into the official narrative lately. But this is not to say that Wenatchee has any mad skillz that some other person couldn't bring to a situation. The goal here is, as said before, not necessarily to change your mind (which is probably already made up by the time you got here) but to educate you. There's a lot of history that isn't exactly swept under the rug but that is hidden in plain sight, that isn't attended to because nobody's thinking to look for it or at it. That's where this blog can sometimes, perhaps, be of help to people. There's very little here that doesn't rely on primary sources. You don't need to contact me personally, dear reader, because the stuff Wenatchee knows is stuff made available through sources that are linked to and quoted sufficiently that you can make use of that primary source material as you see fit.
None of this means Wenatchee The Hatchet is absolved from loving Mars Hill people as neighbors, seeing as Jesus' teaching properly understood makes that clear. It also doesn't mean there's any obligation to avoid presenting some frankly ugly history about a place that Wenatchee used to attend, either. But what you won't necessarily find here is a tone of moral outrage that has characterized a lot of writing about the subjects at hand. It's not that Wenatchee the Hatchet hasn't felt outrage. Waited at least a month for the blood to stop boiling before writing this series. Driscoll managed to subtextually transform Esther into a not-so-good-girl who was used for God's perfect plan--which, of course, couldn't be interpreted at a meta level as Mars Hill being embattled in a godless setting and doing their best despite critics, right? Mark keeps joking that he doesn't write the mail he just delivers it. If that were so then it looks like he appends a few sticky notes on to the envelop that ostensibly got mailed to you from someone else.
It's easy to blog about what Jesus was supposedly really on about but if you forget that even these Mars HIll people are neighbors to love if you take Jesus' ethical teaching seriously (not that all of you do, of course) then you're no better than you think they are. You may even be worse. There are not necessarily good guys and bad guys without blemish in the real world but the real world is not necessarily what the blogosphere wants.
Slate: How people [don't] read online--why you won't finish this article
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/how_people_read_online_why_you_won_t_finish_this_article.single.html
Wenatchee The Hatchet has a propensity to write things longer than even the aforementioned article. It's not like there aren't tagged series of posts sprawling the length of 15,000 words anywhere at this blog, after all.
It can often seem as though the internet has played a role in catalyzing a shift in attention and reading. To be sure there are bloviating sorts who say the same fifteen different ways when they could say something once and move on but those sorts predate the emergence of the internet. Mojo Jojos existed before Mojo Jojo even if their triplespeak was never so glorious as his.
Be that as it may there can be many a case in which someone wants an author to just get to the point and boil things down when the point is precisely that things are not so readily boiled down as that. Things are not so get-to-the-point as people will insist things need to be. It's common enough that a person who says we should be making a difference and not a point is simply making a point and not a difference by trying to get to the point and win the point rather than make a real difference. It was ever thus.
So in an uncharacteristic way that's all Wenatchee The Hatchet has to say on this for the time being.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has a propensity to write things longer than even the aforementioned article. It's not like there aren't tagged series of posts sprawling the length of 15,000 words anywhere at this blog, after all.
It can often seem as though the internet has played a role in catalyzing a shift in attention and reading. To be sure there are bloviating sorts who say the same fifteen different ways when they could say something once and move on but those sorts predate the emergence of the internet. Mojo Jojos existed before Mojo Jojo even if their triplespeak was never so glorious as his.
Be that as it may there can be many a case in which someone wants an author to just get to the point and boil things down when the point is precisely that things are not so readily boiled down as that. Things are not so get-to-the-point as people will insist things need to be. It's common enough that a person who says we should be making a difference and not a point is simply making a point and not a difference by trying to get to the point and win the point rather than make a real difference. It was ever thus.
So in an uncharacteristic way that's all Wenatchee The Hatchet has to say on this for the time being.
Thursday, June 06, 2013
Krystian Zimerman walks out of concert in protest at being filmed during performance
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10098301/Pianist-Krystian-Zimerman-storms-out-of-concert-in-protest-at-being-filmed-on-phone.html
Hadn't heard of anyone stating they lost a record deal because there was a bunch of stuff already on Youtube, but there's a little piece in The Telegraph about it.
Hadn't heard of anyone stating they lost a record deal because there was a bunch of stuff already on Youtube, but there's a little piece in The Telegraph about it.
before sunrise, before sunset, before midnight ... art as iconography and narcissism of choice
Apparently 30-somethings of a certain sort view Richard Linklater's trilogy as some kind of touchstone for their own romantic lives and the passage of time. Not Wenatchee The Hatchet. While Julie Delpy was most assuredly memorable in the Kieslowski film White, Wenatchee The Hatchet has never much cared for Ethan Hawke or even Richard Linklater generally. Never seen any of the films with "Before" in the title. A friend of mine couldn't finish the first one.
Apparently not everyone's sold on the trilogy. Take Richard Brody.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/before-midnight-after-birth.html
What happens to Linklater, one of the better American filmmakers, when he takes on this couple whose lives seem so close to his heart? His best films (including last year’s “Bernie”) are ones in which the subject itself is inquiry, in which deception and reality are themselves at stake in the action; in which mirror games of performance are built into the drama, in which he devises a method that poses questions. In the “Before” trilogy, he films in a way that delivers the answers in advance. He has run up against the bedrock of his character, the part of himself that isn’t up for questioning—his secular faith in an idealized vision of love. His essential repudiation of his own art in the face of this faith makes the movies curious and even touching. It’s rare for filmmakers to reveal so much of themselves in movies that reveal so little. It doesn’t make the watching of them any more satisfying or substantial to watch, but it certainly renders their dullness more interesting to consider afterward. [emphasis mine]
And why might Linklater not question this part of himself? Slate dutifully reports.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/30/before_sunrise_inspiration_before_midnight_is_dedicated_to_amy_lehrhaupt.html?wpisrc=flyouts
Apparently not everyone's sold on the trilogy. Take Richard Brody.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/before-midnight-after-birth.html
What happens to Linklater, one of the better American filmmakers, when he takes on this couple whose lives seem so close to his heart? His best films (including last year’s “Bernie”) are ones in which the subject itself is inquiry, in which deception and reality are themselves at stake in the action; in which mirror games of performance are built into the drama, in which he devises a method that poses questions. In the “Before” trilogy, he films in a way that delivers the answers in advance. He has run up against the bedrock of his character, the part of himself that isn’t up for questioning—his secular faith in an idealized vision of love. His essential repudiation of his own art in the face of this faith makes the movies curious and even touching. It’s rare for filmmakers to reveal so much of themselves in movies that reveal so little. It doesn’t make the watching of them any more satisfying or substantial to watch, but it certainly renders their dullness more interesting to consider afterward. [emphasis mine]
And why might Linklater not question this part of himself? Slate dutifully reports.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/30/before_sunrise_inspiration_before_midnight_is_dedicated_to_amy_lehrhaupt.html?wpisrc=flyouts
Now some folks get the idea that characters who function as icons of ideals or times or cultural values are lame if the iconography involves spandex.
Despite Berlatsky's interesting observations about Jane Austen and avowed work on a pending Wonder Woman book the invocation of Klosterman doesn't establish that the rebooted franchises are without empathy. In fact the Klosterman quote can be wielded as a double-edged blade. After all.
Fiction connects you to other people—or as Chuck Klosterman said, "Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
Who says this has to be an act or process of empathy rather than narcissism? If memory serves when Joss Whedon was asked what made superhero films and stories unique he said that there's no pretense or necessity for subtext of the sort you'd have in some other genre that has a story discussing or presenting ideas about the nature of humanity and human societies. You can just get the competing ideals out in the open.
When you put it that way the problem with the superhero genre is that it has already turned Republicans into red-headed skull-faced monsters, right? :) People will continue to lament the shift through which Superman stopped being a champion of populist leftist ideas but to this one can propose that perhaps populist and leftist (and rightist) do not have to be the same thing. Grant Morrison has articulated well enough that the plebian/patrician divide between the working class Clark Kent and the billionaire Bruce Wayne was bridged by their respective reluctance to kill (and in both cases that's a later editorial accretion, it's worth noting that the old-school Supes who was more a working-class hero could show quite a bit less remorse about adversaries dying).
We live in an era in which the pop culture mythologies we embrace are frequently affiliated with other ideological commitments and one of many side-effects is that if there's something we don't enjoy or dislike we tend to have identity politics and cultural indicators serve as stand-ins, as shorthands for why we don't like something that we may dislike for less rational and more visceral reasons than we may be able to articulate. I could say I dislike romantic comedies because of Matthew McConaughy (sic) but that wouldn't be true. I love Pride & Prejudice but I also enjoy Batman Begins. When the Nolan film came out Ebert said it was nice to finally see a Batman movie that was actually about Batman. Even Charles Mudede spoke up in favor of Nolan's film as a blockbuster in which a billionaire was thinking about what role he and his family's legacy could play in making a better society. Dislike the movie if you want but to find it wanting compared to actual political theory when Nolan's made a popcorn movie is moving the goalposts. Mudede's an ardent enough Marxist that for him to say such things was saying something. :)
But in a political climate in which "one percent" is invoked as an indictment the idea that Batman has always existed as a kind of folklore for what Americans think would be the ideal "one percenter" will get translated into "no empathy" by someone. We live in a time in which Star Trek fans who were watching the original show in the 1960s could complain that the new Star Trek has no heart even though we know there were no Eugenics Wars in the 1990s and that Khan never existed. The utopia of Trek will never happen but as optimism goes the dystopia of the Eugenics wars and the War to End Tyranny (ha) didn't happen. Nuclear Armageddon didn't overtake us as so many feared it would. There's a sense in which the pop culture franchises that can seem fusty now (whether Star Trek or James Bond) are franchises that retain their iconic and, yes, emotional appeal, but which have labored under a kind of survivor's guilt having gone so many decades beyond the Cold War milieu in which the franchises were initially conceived.
Except for Batman and Superman. Those two comics titans developed in the pre-World War II period.
While some film critics may not like the rebooted franchises or the iconography some of us don't see the point in watching films by Linklater that can be so readily read through as a great what-if built on a one-night stand that happened decades ago. Capturing that feeling may have been a laudable goal for somebody but it's not necessarily more "real" in emotional range. Art is not necessarily about seeing yourself in something that's not you, after all, it can be about you investing yourself into something or someone that's not you. It may be that all entertainment is, in that sense, capable of being middle-brow narcissistic self-affirmation in the guise of "art".
Which is why in film Wenatchee's got no problem admitting to an appreciation of pulpier stuff.
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
Slate--Carl Wilson vents considerable spleen against "Crescendo Rock"
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2013/05/the_national_s_trouble_will_find_me_reviewed_too_many_crescendos.single.html
Beneath the surface, the National’s work is full of moves like that. But I still dislike the surface. I dislike the traces of a British accent in Berninger’s rich baritone (he’s from Cincinnati). I dislike the midrange restraint of most of the melodies and the sleepy midtempo pace, making it artificially thrilling when things pick up at all—as when drummer Bryan Devendorf kicks the march beat into double-time, two-thirds through the new album’s first single, “Sea of Love,” though Berninger carries on the same oh-so-stately procession. Most of all, I dislike the way many of the songs milk themselves, doubling down on their repetitions by getting denser and louder in later sections.
This is a common trait of many popular and acclaimed bands that turn me off. I call it Crescendo Rock—I’ve had similar misgivings about U2 and Radiohead, though I’ve aired them less because their fans go way more apoplectic. To me, the bands each sound like a group of guys who feel they’ve got something to say and demonstrate their significance by saying it over and over, getting louder and louder.
In the "classical" tradition this sort of extensive expansion on a single, simple musical idea is often thought of as variation. More particularly, we could speak of the chaconne or the passacaglia. There's some foundational musical idea that gets built upon in increasing complexity until it reaches whatever climax the composer(s) settle on and then the music reaches some kind of conclusion (or in pop music the big fade-out).
Unlike sectional variation forms a chaconne or passacaglia is a continuous set of variations. In other words the bass line never stops moving along to the next variation. There's no abrupt resolution to each variation the way we would hear in the Goldberg Variations of Bach or the Diabelli variations of Beethoven. Nope, just a continuing surge toward the next iteration of the idea. Shostakovich wrote some solid passacaglias in his string quartets if you're curious to hear a 20th century version of an old, old idea. If you want to hear a pop passacaglia then U2's "With or Without You" is probably the best example, right down to the Pachelbel re-heating of the big FOUR CHORDS. (See Chords for Heroes and its follow-up here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, if you like).
Still trying to muster up the resolve and research to discuss Matiegka's approach to sonata form in his Grand Sonatas for solo guitar. :( In lieu of that discussing, briefly, how formulaic certain brands of "crescendo rock" are might be a useful detour.
Beneath the surface, the National’s work is full of moves like that. But I still dislike the surface. I dislike the traces of a British accent in Berninger’s rich baritone (he’s from Cincinnati). I dislike the midrange restraint of most of the melodies and the sleepy midtempo pace, making it artificially thrilling when things pick up at all—as when drummer Bryan Devendorf kicks the march beat into double-time, two-thirds through the new album’s first single, “Sea of Love,” though Berninger carries on the same oh-so-stately procession. Most of all, I dislike the way many of the songs milk themselves, doubling down on their repetitions by getting denser and louder in later sections.
This is a common trait of many popular and acclaimed bands that turn me off. I call it Crescendo Rock—I’ve had similar misgivings about U2 and Radiohead, though I’ve aired them less because their fans go way more apoplectic. To me, the bands each sound like a group of guys who feel they’ve got something to say and demonstrate their significance by saying it over and over, getting louder and louder.
In the "classical" tradition this sort of extensive expansion on a single, simple musical idea is often thought of as variation. More particularly, we could speak of the chaconne or the passacaglia. There's some foundational musical idea that gets built upon in increasing complexity until it reaches whatever climax the composer(s) settle on and then the music reaches some kind of conclusion (or in pop music the big fade-out).
Unlike sectional variation forms a chaconne or passacaglia is a continuous set of variations. In other words the bass line never stops moving along to the next variation. There's no abrupt resolution to each variation the way we would hear in the Goldberg Variations of Bach or the Diabelli variations of Beethoven. Nope, just a continuing surge toward the next iteration of the idea. Shostakovich wrote some solid passacaglias in his string quartets if you're curious to hear a 20th century version of an old, old idea. If you want to hear a pop passacaglia then U2's "With or Without You" is probably the best example, right down to the Pachelbel re-heating of the big FOUR CHORDS. (See Chords for Heroes and its follow-up here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, if you like).
Still trying to muster up the resolve and research to discuss Matiegka's approach to sonata form in his Grand Sonatas for solo guitar. :( In lieu of that discussing, briefly, how formulaic certain brands of "crescendo rock" are might be a useful detour.
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Cinemagogue has something about the new Star Trek film
After a bit of a hiatus in the wake of the Iron Man 3 release last month Cinemagogue is back with a little piece on Star Trek Into Darkness and the reactions of some Trek fans to the newer franchise. It's called "New Kirks Judged by Old Khans".
More linky stuff
Why even in the future lie detection technology will probably keep failing. It's an interesting overview of how many false positives come up in detection processes, something that didn't keep Nixon from advocating the use of polygraphs to scare up dissenters.
Daft Punk has a new album out (not that I really listen to them, though. Here's a little piece declaring that Daft Punk saved pop music and doomed us all (whomever "us" refers to). Along the way there's reference made to a cranky take-down on techno in the late 1990s as an enemy of all things true and soulful and conducive to proper humanism. Not that Wenatchee makes a point of listening to much techno in general, either, but the seeds of techno in minimalists like Reich and Riley and Glass seems so easy to establish it's a puzzle why their music wasn't mentioned in the acrimony. Oh well. Stuff that's interesting to read all the same.
Perhaps to prove that Slate writers have less to blog about these days or that Game of Thrones is really popular there's a set of posts on economic theories as they apply to the storylines.
Daft Punk has a new album out (not that I really listen to them, though. Here's a little piece declaring that Daft Punk saved pop music and doomed us all (whomever "us" refers to). Along the way there's reference made to a cranky take-down on techno in the late 1990s as an enemy of all things true and soulful and conducive to proper humanism. Not that Wenatchee makes a point of listening to much techno in general, either, but the seeds of techno in minimalists like Reich and Riley and Glass seems so easy to establish it's a puzzle why their music wasn't mentioned in the acrimony. Oh well. Stuff that's interesting to read all the same.
Perhaps to prove that Slate writers have less to blog about these days or that Game of Thrones is really popular there's a set of posts on economic theories as they apply to the storylines.
Ever heard of the Wesleyan quadrilateral? It's pretty sweet, actually, and the gimmick may be awesome enough that Mark Driscoll subconsciously cribbed it for his "four points" ramble. Chris Rosebrough at Fighting for the Faith is pretty singularly negatively impressed by it. While a stand-out line is Driscoll joking that picking on people is his love language Rosebrough deals with the substance of the four points/quadrants. There's Calvinism/Arminianism (which in Driscollian parlance is not synergism proper but Pelagianism). There's complementarian/egalitarian (which, according to Carl Trueman, is something new Calvinists seem to think is a bigger deal than even sacraments instituted by Jesus according to the Evangelists). Then there's charismatic/cessationist thought in the third quadrant, though even by this point no mention is made of things like atonement theories. Finally, Driscoll proposes that missional/fundamental is the fourth grid.
Rosebrough discusses the audio at some length so there's little to add except to note that Driscoll fans are very likely to presuppose that Driscoll is discussing people who are considered "in" on the basis of traditional orthodoxy. They are likely to hold this idea despite the fact that if Driscoll really has defined Arminianism in Pelagian rather than traditionally synergistic terms that a "tribe" he could potentially learn from could include a Pelagian egalitarian and that there'd be some bishops in the Episcopal church he could learn from. At least if Driscoll was serious about the learning from all the tribes he'd go there but when he closes with the necessity of confronting people about sexual sin it sounds like he's not really claiming that liberal Episcopalians who back gay marriage are a tribe he considers he could learn from. Rosebrough's critique is still worth noting but perhaps Driscoll's rhetoric is ever so slightly more pragmatic and cynical than Rosebrough may have considered. Just proposing that as an idea for consideration.
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