multivalent terror and guilt in Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One rocks.  I'm going to write about it with no regard for whether or not this spoils things for you.  That's how Wenatchee The Hatchet writes about films.  If you don't want spoilers and have been thinking of maybe seeing this one go see it!  This is the Godzilla movie to watch if you've never watched a Godzilla movie before in your life.  

This is the kind of Godzilla movie Americans couldn't make if our lives depended on it.

So off to a spoiler-laden discussion of the film.

Godzilla Minus One rocks

There are benefits to living in the Emerald City, such as being able to catch a great Godzilla movie.  Will write about it later but for the time being gonna bask in the fun of having watched the newest one.  :)  

Alan Jacobs on the blogosphere "bring back the blog". Some of us never stopped blogging

https://blog.ayjay.org/bring-back-the-blog/

Anyone who has read this blog for a year knows that comments hardly ever get made here.  In some cases it was because I published posts and did not allow comments (and if you saw those posts you would know why).

What blogs lack in institutional vetting in most cases they can at least potentially make up for by being chronicles of events at the time those events happened.  In an age in which everything on the internet was never "eternal" and could be purged and redacted rapidly one of the unintentional providential quirks of Wenatchee The Hatchet was chronicling the scope and extent of Mars Hill Church leadership purging and redacting materials as different controversial elements, statements and policies came up.  But more pointedly for me, since I used to attend Mars Hill Church for years, was that I ended up documenting the "season" of chronic resignations and firings that may have made it impossible for Mars Hill public relations to spin the fact that the men who were leaving Mars Hill leadership weren't flakes or firebrands but men who had faithfully served for years with no controversy.

This early 2013 post comes to mind.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/announcement-from-mark-driscoll-that.html

That one got 6,500 views or so since publication. If memory serves (and it may not a decade later) what probably got people's attention was breaking the news the day it was announced.  Thanks to a network of sources with access to The City I got the news and ran with it the week it was announced.  Eventually Team Driscoll presented the assertion that they got hacked but Wenatchee The Hatchet doesn't hack.  There was at least one private meeting associates got dragged into where Mars Hill leadership expressed an interest that they get me to stop blogging about Mars Hill or give up sources.  The associates, I understand, let it be known that that wasn't going to happen.

Citizen journalism has its limits but it has its values and for all their constraints (and they are considerable) blogging can fulfil citizen journalism well provided you have built trust with a network of sources and, crucially, make sure to document things for the record.  In my case it was documenting things for the record before things got purged that turned out to be valuable.  Alan Jacobs' points are noted but the benefit of the sheer tonnage of information published in blogs, and also sometimes in comments, is that people can cumulatively chronicle things before the people who can pull the strings on websites decide to do mass redaction or pull material completely.

you know ... I "could" write about a few somewhat usual topics per this blog

No Quarter November has come and gone and I have had some thoughts on that kind of stuff.  Philip Ewell has a conversation in Current Affairs that I might have to link to later.  I wouldn't trust either Philip Ewell or John McWhorter on the topic of Christianity like I would Esther Acolatse (ordained Presbyterian that she is and her book on the reception history of Ephesians 6 interpretation from the apostolic era up through Walter Wink and Clinton Arnold is fantastic).  

Because I'm threading music theoretical speculations about time and space across medieval theological treatises on Trinitarian dogmatics by Aquinas and John of Damascus I might be an unusually harsh reader for anything Ewell might have to say about Christianity if I'm drawing on Syrian Christian theology as a corrective to post-Schleiermacherian Germanophile art mysticism.  Some of the most robust cases I've seen in theological aesthetics published in the last fifty or so years of scholarship have come from Catholic and Dutch Reformed/neo-Calvinist circles.  But reading Ewell at Current Affairs I pretty much worked out he hasn't read a single sentence from either Frank Burch Brown or Nicholas Wolterstorff.  And Philip E Stoltzfus' analysis of the Orpheus and Pythagorean schools in Hellenistic philosophy as a false dualism that ignores other approaches to music?  

Pretty sure Ewell hasn't read it.  Pretty likely Ted Gioia hasn't read it either but I'll get to Stolfzfus' analyses of Schleiermacher as Orpheus cheerleader and Barth as neo-Pythagorean after I finish the dense but intriguing book.  The short version is that a theologian has proposed the contrast between Orphic/Pythagorean ideals of music is a false binary because both views have severe weaknesses and are simply not representative of not-Greek approaches to music in theological terms.  I do think Ewell would appreciate that point, though. :)  

I have meant to blog about William T Dargan's great book on the lining hymn tradition in black American churches but the music director at my church still has it and there's been some logistical issues with office pivots.  But I hope in 2024 to get to blogging about Dargan's wonderful book, and it's exciting that Hans Rookmaaker's work is back in print in English because Dargan's account, though he regarded it as speculative, is a speculation mirrored in key ways by Rookmaaker on how it was the low church Calvinist strands of Anglicanism and incipient Methodism that seemed to give room for the lining out of metrical psalmody to evolve as it did in primitive Baptist and Methodist churches in African American communities.  So I do hope to finally blog about the Dargan book but call that a resolution for 2024 blogging.

I have been thinking about writing a supplementary chapter to Ragtime and Sonata Forms dealing with practical approaches to ragtime/sonata fusions for months.  I might have to take a stab at that.  Some of the comments by Ewell and Jason Yust on how Schenkerianism botches the reality that musical repetitions have to be considered truly structural really applies to attempts to adapt ragtime to what would probably have to be called 18th century approaches to form and musical timespace.  

Also ... Hayao Miyazaki has a new movie coming out!  Woo-hoo!  Also ... word of mouth from friends is that Godzilla Minus One is pretty good and not just "pretty good ... for a Godzilla movie".  

I have not done any friendly writing about either Death Note or Spy x Family yet, both lovely anime I've belatedly discovered this year.  

So while part of me wants to get around to some thoughts on some stuff related to Wilson's influence on a Richard Nixon of megachurch preachers and historical influence I'd rather do something more fun, and I hear fun stuff about the new Godzilla movie.  

In other words, some showboating in Moscow, Idaho "could" still be a topic for blogging but ... you've seen there are so many more fun and productive things I could be writing about.  I almost wrote some stuff this last weekend on some of that stuff but thought better of it.  

Also, Matiegka's Grand Sonata I really does need some heavy-duty blogging at some point but I've resigned myself to the fact that the Matiegka blogging project is going to have to roll into 2024 and maybe even 2025 if I'm going to keep the musical analyses at the level I want them to stay at. 

PS for that one reader who commended it, I did try getting into Outlaw Star but the art style just bugged me for reasons I can't really explain.