https://mbird.com/2020/09/introducing-avatar-east-meets-west/
Being the animation fan that I am, I've considered writing about The Last Airbender for years. For the US-made adventure animated series I'd say the three touchstones of the last thirty some years in American cartoons for me would be: Batman: the animated series (fold the rest of the DCAU in if you want); Samurai Jack, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Skip Legend of Korra, though. Legend of Korra is to The Last Airbender what Star Wars Episodes I-III are to the original trilogy. Pass it by in favor of Miraculous (aka Ladybug and Cat Noir) which is a blast if you watch it with the original French voice ensemble. I haven't seen Spider-man stories capture the old Lee/Ditko vibe of the original run as well as the French language superhero cartoon has. Still have to get to seeing season 3, though.
In keeping with an Mbird-connected theme, it was through Michael Spenser's Internet Monk I learned about Mockingbird to begin with, and Chaplain Mike has announced that come 2021 iMonk will cease publication as a daily blog and live on as an archive.
https://internetmonk.com/archive/93885
I confess that for me iMonk was never the same after Spenser died and it was like, well, post-Lee/Ditko Spider-man comics, there's some great stuff there but the uniqueness of Spenser's thoughts and perspective couldn't be replicated, nor was it necessary for the Mikes who came after Michael to really try to do that.
Some folks I know IRL are tackling Cynical Theories as a read and I haven't gotten around to it. There's a review at Times Literary Supplement.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/cynical-theories-helen-pluckrose-james-lindsay-book-review/
Tending to be skeptical of popular level conservative appraisals of "cultural Marxism" I haven't gotten around to Pluckrose and Lindsay because I've had my own disagreements with Adorno that I preferred to articulate more directly by arguing against his ideas after having actually read them. But along the way I have noticed something that conservatives don't seem able or willing to notice, which is that when they brand "the left" as anyone to the left of, basically, Trump, then they don't notice that there are substantial distinctions that show up across left, progressive, liberal and centrist Democratic wings. It's actually been in musicology and music history that I've had a chance to see a difference between old leftist and new progressive ideas, such as John Halle's semi-consistent blogging about the dangers he sees in the newer left, neoliberalism in its DNC form as giving "gifts to the right". He's blogged recently about how the 1619 Project has probably turned out to do more to animate the Trump base than its authors and editors may have intended..
https://johnhalle.com/leo-panitch-and-steven-colatrella-on-neoliberalism-race-and-solidarity/
Even though I'm moderately conservative I have long been tired of the cult of Beethoven, so I can read stuff related to Ewell's presentation with interest, and things on shifts in musicology more generally. That was a field I was at one point considering.
https://www.wqxr.org/story/ethnomusicology-12-scholars-respond-field-undergoing-key-change/
By way of passing observation, part of why Robert Schumann might be "unsexy" now could connect, possibly, to writing such as Dana Gooley's describing Schumann's role in the rejection of in-concert improvisation as a practice in classical music. If you wanted to find a litany of dead white males to blame for a demise in classical concert improvisation, there's a case to be made that Schumann is your man.
When Ellington biographers have noted which, if any, classical composers Ellington said he liked Delius came up, and Debussy.
One of the key reasons I'm glad I never got into musicology or music history as academic fields is I love reading about the past and existing musical legacies but the way academics have debated those realms within the necessarily canon-forming enterprises of academia tend to look like turf wars, none of which necessarily lends itself to composing new music. Then again, as various critiques of neoliberalism in the last thirty years have had it, the market itself may be the biggest obstacle to solving the musical problems that musicians across race and gender and other social boundaries might want solved.
Over at Christianity Today there's a piece on how despite manly men manfully mandating that manliness matter more in `Merican churches, the history of Christianity in the West has often been matrilineal or received patronage from women.
...
The conversion of women to Christianity was so prominent that in A.D. 370, the Emperor Valentinian had to order the pope to cut it out and stop sending missionaries to knock on the doors of pagan women. Historians are in virtually uniform agreement that converts to early Christianity were disproportionately upper-class women (and, separately, slaves and ethnic minorities).
There were many reasons for this, but the religious historian Rodney Stark has compiled an impressively large collection of historic data showing that one major reason may have simply been that Christianity treated women better, not least because Christians placed less pressure on women to speedily remarry if their husbands died. They also placed less pressure on young girls to marry.
...
Anthony Bradley wrote a piece at Mere Orthodoxy arguing that American evangelicalism isn't feminized, it's matrilineal. However patriarchal the formal seats of power can be, even in patriarchal-on-the-surface systems can be matrilineal in how the values of that system are transmitted.
There can be conversations, such as the one at the Theopolis Institute, on masculinity and church culture, and Paul Maxwell can point out that the manosphere will be forgotten in ten years but the sociological problems of incels will no doubt remain.
Pertinent to Maxwell's piece, there's this passage from the CT article:
...
The controversial implication of the “crisis of men” narrative is that supposedly, when there aren’t enough men in the pews, the church will eventually shrink. Insufficiently “masculine” churches are presumed to invite their own demise.
This claim is testable, and it happens to be completely false. The graph below plots the female share of church attendance across each Christian denomination in Pew’s 2007 Religious Landscape Survey against each group’s growth or decline as a percentage of U.S. population between Pew’s 2007 and 2014 surveys.
So if the crisis in contemporary American Christian isn't about the role of men in proportional relationship to the role of women, and "the end of men" is not a problem as advertised, what is "the problem" or is there a problem? Paul Maxwell proposes:
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-measure-of-a-man/
The real measure of a man is the man in his life who loves him best—he will function as his measure both in the sense that the younger man will strive to be like him, and yet, he also shows him how to be a measured man who, upon hearing what he believes is the church’s disdain for him, simply doesn’t care. To a man, the man who credibly loves him is his measure, for good or ill.
But couldn't feminist writers propose that the unearned privilege and power inherent in patriarchy based on socio-economic caste distinctions harms men as much as women? Some feminists have, in fact, been arguing just that for years now.
The old Christian saying that he cannot call God his father who does not consider the Church his mother was in many ways true at the most literally maternal level.
If Maxwell's argument holds water than a potential consequence might be to consider the ways in which "practical" American teaching in churches and particularly in evangelicalism, cycle around marriage and childrearing as manly concerns, even if nearly all of the actual, literally day-to-day work of those enterprises are done by women, expected to be done by women, and are very often not done by the men who are admonished to be concerned about those things.
But as the reference to the incels inevitably came along, contemporary American evangelicalism doesn't seem to have a lot of interest in "practical teaching" for people who would, in a phrase Roy Baumeister has used, have a sexual market value at or near zero, however that gets defined. Even questions as to what it means to be a man who is divorced and lost custody of the kids presupposes that said man got married and had sex. Even among liberal and progressive wings the middle aged white guy who can't get laid to save his life can be seen as more than a merely symbolic threat to social order since the angry white incel can go grab firearms and become an active shooter.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are folks who believe that there is a potential surge in a "religious left" that could face down the religious right.
But if, as Get Religion has discussed over the years, the Protestant mainlines have been in a generations-long death spiral why should someone like Nadia Bolz-Weber imagine there's going to be a religious left that can be a force to be reckoned with? That seems at least as dubious as right-wing Pentecostal revival-mongers prophesying a great epic revival that will transform America. For Christians who regard both forms of Christian nationalism to be a form of civic religion that should be regarded as anathema the would-be-nascent "religious left" is probably just a bunch of mainliners who are trying to recapture the glory days of influence-peddling that was possible during the Manifest Destiny era on through the later Cold War. It has seemed to me that the Religious Right merely took up the dominionist sense of entitlement that had been perfected by the mainlines and ran with that set of theologies and ideologies to the right rather than the left or center.
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