Priestly Rants discusses how God chose and favored a liar and a schemer who became a polygamist and played favorites among his children

http://priestlyrant.com/on-ish/2089.html#more-2089

One of the things that Christians like to overlook is that those saints whose names we remember were as famous in their sins as they are now in their sainthood. They are saints in death, to put an overly simple spin on things. They struggled within and through sins, some sins being ones they never entirely overcame. Samson didn't exactly stop being a stupid horndog until his death with the Phillistines and even the most pious imaginative cover-up cannot avoid dealing with the reality that that closing act of genocide was also a suicide.

Yet Samson makes the roster of faith in Hebrews 11 along with Jephthah, who by his rash vow made himself guilty of sacrificing his own daughter. Here was a man who put faith in God's ability to provide a victory and then by the foolishness of his oath immediately put himself in a position where he was stuck offering a human sacrifice. Perhaps even more disturbing is the note that God doesn't intervene to stop that sacrifice. Just as remarkable, the daughter asks that she have a year to bewail her virginity before her life is sacrificed. This is a sadder tale than Christian college dorm residents eluding to "let me bewail my virginity" can even do an injustice to.

And God not only lets it happen in Hebrews the Lord permits the author to discuss Jephthah as one of the heroes of the faith. Peter in his epistles (we'll just skip over the debate about authorship, shall we?) refers to Lot as a hero of the faith who was upset by the rampant immorality of the region. As a certain pastor put it, we just have to take the apostle's word for this because there's no evidence from the text of Genesis that that's even close to how things went down. Which by no coincidence leads me to my next observation.

There are a lot of Christians who believe that God would and should call only those most worthy to accomplish big things for the kingdom of God. This ignores the substantial flaws of Jesus' own followers. It plays well for leadership conferences and training regimes to say we should pick the best and brightest but as many commentaries on the Gospels have pointed out it would often seem as though Jesus hand-picked the worst and dumbest. The best of the worst and dumbest were still doing things like denying they knew Jesus when the chips were down; or petitioning Jesus for the ultimate sidekick roles. The worst by measures of loyalty sold Jesus out to crucifixion but were apparently good at handling money. This may be a "biblical" warning that anyone who is considered a financial guru in your Christian circles is likely to be a betrayer. But never mind that. I am not really here to discuss fraudulent get-rich-quick schemes sold to believers.

Fellow evangelical Protestants like to talk about the scandal of the cross. I like to talk about that, too, but often the scandal of the cross is that it's even more scandalous than I would really like it to be. It's scandalous because out of love Christ bore death to save me from sin and death. But in day to day life the scandal that is brought home is that Jesus did not just die for my sins. That's a covenient thing to forget when I am feeling like I'm sinned against or not getting things I wish I could get because I either feel I deserve them or simply want them. Now for some men and women struggling with resentment against the Lord that withheld thing may be a spouse. In my case I struggle with remembering that just because other people have jobs does not mean the Lord does not provide for me in a loving way (I have much to write about the significance of this at another time).

There are huge themes in scriptural books that can be easily overlooked if we obsess about details. This is most true of prophetic books. Consider all the stupid fantastic notions people will get in interpreting a book like Ezekiel. People will read themselves into a chapter like Ezekiel 8 or 9. They will construe from this that they are like Ezekiel and get to see into the real workings of God's people and God's justice. That's precisely the wrong way to look at it. If you volunteer yourself to have keen insights into hidden workings of the Lord you've joined a legion of nameless and mostly forgotten people known as self-appointed prophets. Most of those prophets didn't even rise to the dubious level of false prophet, still less prophet of the Lord. Most of those people are forgotten in the sands of time, unnamed, unknown, unimportant, and perhaps unconsidered.

God did not pick prophets and priests and kings because they displayed either a competence for that role or qualification for that role. In a time and place where some Christians talk glibly about "kingly gifts" and not so much about "priestly gifts" or "prophetic gifts" this is unsurprising. The idiom "kingly gifts" makes the supposition, it seems, that if one has kingly gifts then one should be a king, or perhaps that because one already is a king of some kind one should have kingly gifts. Not everyone who is a father acts like a good father should, however. Not everyone who is a chief executive officer acts like a good one should. If the Peter principle holds then the idea that people rise as far as their imcompetence will permit them then those who rise to the top are not necessarily those who are fit for the job so much as those who aren't kept from rising to the top because better people for the job simply did not appear--this could have been because they lacked the interest or the opportunity rather than through a lack of skill.

What all of this should lead us to consider is that we, like Israel the man and Israel the nation, were not chosen because we were so very good. We would like to convince ourselves that we got where we are, if we're in a good place, because we did good things and are good people. To deflect this through a less than ideal expression of piety we are not so good at conceding that we are where we are in part because of what would be called dumb luck. The race is not to the swift, nor victory to the strong, nor wealth to the wise but time and chance happen to them all.

The core failing of any kind of prosperity teaching is to deny that time and chance happen to us all and that it can give death and failure to one while conferring success and longevity to the other. The person who has the most kingly gifts may toil away at some lower-level managerial job making things run for the person who runs the show and talks about having kingly gifts he/she doesn't actually have. The world is full of generals who became famous because they delegated and then took credit for the brilliance of their subordinates. The Desert Fox wasn't just some isolated tactical wunderkind, he had a great support team, but it is more convenient for military legends and romanticized notions to imagine Rommel was just this brilliant guy coming up with genius moves on his own.

A Christian, particularly a modern American conservative Protestant, is stuck asking the question of men like Jacob, Jephthah, and David. These are men whose character flaws stuck with them their whole lives. Yet David particularly was permitted to reign for decades when by contemporary evangelical standards he should not have been allowed to even get his job. This is one of the more pervasively disconcerting things I have considered about believers and leadership. It would appear that one of the scandals of the cross is that the Lord lets people carry on in positions of influence--these people are possessed of character flaws they would consider disqualifying in any other person who displayed them to such a degree yet they do not stop holding their positions of power or influence themselves.

No, instead they just keep going on in the certitude that God has appointed them and that this seems to mean not that they should really keep repenting of the things they think disqualify others but that they get to keep on keeping on. That God permits the unfit to accomplish things is easy to understand, but that God permits double standards and hypocrisy to run rampant is troubling, and it is troubling because I can see it in myself even more easily than I could decide to see it in others. Just when "we" as Christians can tell ourselves that we get the scandal of the cross it seems that that is precisely the point at which we probably don't get it.

When you or I operate within the ideas that we have what we have because we have earned God's divine favor we're not operating from a position of gratitude for the Lord's kindness. We are operating within the assumption that because our spiritual ducks are all in a row and that we are not guilty of any sins that disqualify us from being cool that we know about that we are safely in the position to speak up, even if it's only from the generousl sliding of scale of not being as bad as someone else. That God has so conspicuously chosen lying, scheming, manipulative polygamists in the course of founding the family of faith should give us pause.

We find it easy to talk about the wideness of God's mercy when it extends to keeping people in the family of God we want in the family. It becomes a scandal when it extends to people we refuse to even acknowledge place their faith in Christ. It becomes a scandal when God blesses with material wealth and the admiration of others men and women we wish the Lord would smite. Jesus said that God sends rain on the just and unjust alike. Job noticed that the Lord allowed very wicked people to prosper. Koholeth noticed this, too.

Christians in America never tire of talking about how only those who deserve to be in power should be in power. Well, of course, we have a nation with the historical luxury of having defined how we want ourselves to be run by committee. Then we find over time that even our best committees end up leading to people making decisions that doom us. We have no problem invoking covenantal language and analogies to God's people Israel when we are going for Manifest Destiny or going for a mandate to get things we want done. It doesn't even matter if we're talking strictly Protestant or Catholic here since Manifest Destiny was an ideological concept shaped over decades by Christians in America of every stripe. It is too simple to blame the other teams we don't identify with as Christians in imputing crimes to America, if we don't indict our own team where it has failed then we have become Pharisees, able to say we have been enslaved to no one while living in a Palestinian vassal state in the moment of our utterance.

What Jesus and other prophets beneath Him reveal to us is that this has never been true. The role of a prophet is to point to Christ but the role Christ Himself plays as prophet is to remind us, who consider ourselves Israel, who we really are. Not just the idealized child of the promise but the swindling polygamist who plays favorites. We are incapable of realizing what all the flaws we may see in ourselves or, worse yet, in others may yet be in the age to come as the Lord refines and redeems those things within us and others that to our eyes or others' eyes may be considered utterly beyond redemption.

Frank Schaeffer continues to overcompensate for his role in forming the Religious Right

http://frank-schaeffer.blogspot.com/2011/07/christian-terror-in-norway-i-predicted.html

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/07/ho-hum.php

I read Crazy for God and mostly enjoyed as a page turner but since that book got published Frank seems determined to present a story in which he is so different from his old man that he can make a cottage industry out of debunking everything conservative Protestant. Trouble is that some of us actually read the mediocrity that was Addicted to Mediocrity. Schaeffer may have concluded he was some kind of closet case non-evangelical non-Protestant but that doesn't make him less an architect for what we can now broadly call the Religious Right. For folks happy to read whatever he writes about Obama as the last best hope America has in a venue like the Huffington Post what Frank used to do probably isn't as important as what he writes now but the trouble is that for those of us who paid attention to both stages to any degree the snake is still selling snake oil, just for an ostensibly different cause.

One of the things he doesn't clearly articulate in what I have read of him so far (admittedly just a couple of books) is the idea that not just the goals but the methods he has embraced are problematic. He still comes off as a screeching idealogue now who has merely changed formal alliegances. And if by his account he bullied and hectored his old man into making abortion a wedge issue for religious conservatives then why should Frank spend so much time selling himself as different from his old man and reacting to the religious right as a bunch of Muslim terrorists in Christian trappings. Schaeffer himself didn't mind suggesting that actual doctrinal differences could be set aside in the pursuit of political and social goals.

There are those who think that Driscoll is a crazy shill using controversy to sell himself. There seem to be some real teeth in this criticism since when a week elapsed after he pinged requests for stories about effeminate male church musicians he was going on about how he didn't have a platform to talk about his views on social issues. We were being told to believe, despite more than a decade of preaching that included all sorts of remarks about chickafied dudes and social issues, that somehow Driscoll didn't have a proper platform yet for opining on cultural issues and that the solution to this was to set up a website after he and his wife and kids are done vacationing in Europe. There's also a book coming up that deserves promotion, too. So we can all sit tight until Driscoll returns and can tell us what the real issues are again. That's swell. Cause a controversy, redefine the issue around what you say it is instead of what the controversy is about, and then go on vacation to come back and steer discussion again.

Which would seem scandalous and unusual if that hadn't been Frank Schaeffer's shtick before Driscoll ever started a ministry. Schaeffer differs only in the sense that he's officially announced he's changed alliances. He's no longer an architect of the Religious Right. But instead of demonizing the left and making the case that only unfettered capitalism makes the most sense inlight of scripture he's going the other way. Schaeffer is in some senses the less compelling would-be demagogue in a pop culture setting but not because he lacks the will to demonize anyone who disagrees with him. This he does with alacrity regardless of what his actual views may be. He's the lesser public figure because given his mediocrity he is only able to either achieve or sustain this status by dint of the reputation of his old man.

Even my most sympathetic reading of Frank's criticisms of his father leads me to conclude that Frank is a man who has built his whole life managing and directing his father's legacy as a selling point for himself, whether it was bullying Francis into making abortion a wedge issue within the conservative movement when Francis considered it "a Catholic issue", or it was a case of constantly talking about the anti-government violence dear old Dad approved of if abortion could not be legally and non-violently eliminated. Frank finds it easier to take that path than to, it seems, completely deal with the implications of his claims about himself to have fostered in his own way what he now so eagerly calls right wing Christian terrorism.

That he sincerely regrets what he did in the past I grant as a matter of assuming the best. That is not strictly necessary and not, especially given how Frank talks about other people, even what the fellow could be argued to deserve but that's how I'm handling this. The problem in Schaeffer's approach now is precisely that he is the same old hectoring, bullying impugning would-be demagogue sort he came off as twenty years ago when he was trying to be a champion for right wing Christian causes. He's still the same lazy mediocre punk he was before he changed horses. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with being a mediocre punk. Jesus came to save mediocre punks like Schaeffer and jobless losers like me.

It's just too bad that Schaeffer seems to be a man who goes through life continuously buying his own hype, whether that's in his right wing architect mode or his champion of Obama mode. In both cases he still has to build his sales platform on the work his dad gets noticed for. He never had a chance in that respect. It would be as impossible to ask him to not become a coat-tail rider on a parent's legacy as it would be to ask that none of the Lennon boys ever try writing a song; that Jacob Dylan would never take an interest in music; or that the Zappa children wouldn't get involved in entertainment; or that Barrymores would not be in the film industry.

The flip side of some forceful personality building a "legacy" is that legacy becomes the damned thing your children feel they have no choice but to deal with; they have no choice but to endlessly live in the shadow of and within the constraints of the "legacy" you built ultimately for yourself (or, to be fair, for others). If the legacy is big enough, as is that of J. S. Bach you may find centuries later that there are no members of that family name who get listed as professional musicians of any kind. After all, if great-great-great-great-great-grandpa obtained the pinnacle of Western art music what's the point of continuing the family legacy? It's not that it's a bad legacy it's that anything you attempted to add would automatically just count against you. I would suggest that in terms of American evangelicalism Francis Schaeffer gained such a legacy. If anything Frank selling himself as the anti-Francis is the only plausible business move he has with a legacy he can neither live up to nor escape.

So on the one hand I can almost get why Frank seems to act like he constantly needs to exploit or direct attention about his dad. That's all he's got and in that respect he's sort of a tragic figure, doomed to always be within the shadow of a father who whether loved or reviled is always going to be the more important figure. If Roy Baumeister and others have noted that male social circles by definition only have a limited amount of respect to go around and you're the son of one of the biggest alpha males in American Christianity in the 20th century then if you don't choose a path in some way connected to it then you've got nothing.

On the other hand it's taken with such mercenary alacrity it is hard to see as very sympathetic in the end. He may persuade himself that he has worked hard to not be in his dad's shadow but obviously since he can't help connecting himself and his dad in public utterances at length the jig has been up for some time now. It's not possible for me to feel there's any convincing case to be made that Frank Schaeffer would have gone anywhere without his dad's legacy constantly hanging over him. Frank is most persuasive when he mines ambivalence and confusion. Whenever he grasps for certainty, even if it is in the form of protesting certainty, he seems to just falter.

And to tie things up and put a ribbon on it, this gives me another occasion to sound a cautionary note bout neo-Reformed brothers who want a "legacy". Think of the children. No, seriously. Look at Francis Schaeffer's legacy and look at how his kids have lived. Not just the non-annoying kids who aren't even on the radar. Look at Frank specifically. Frank is what you get when a guy who tries to measure up to a family legacy established by a patriarch figures out that it is simultaneously not in him to ever live up to that legacy and yet who also is completely incapable of escaping it. He then spends his life trying to repudiate it in some way and yet can't do it without being beholden to it. It is possibly the ultimate no-win situation in a parent/child relationship. "Legacy" becomes the strait jacket from which even a petulant and uncooperative child cannot possibly break free.

The miserable pathos of Frank is that even when he tries to distance himself from Francis he reveals that he's the same old Frank. Not unlike Driscoll using a controversy he's stirred up to shill an upcoming book, Frank can use a recent terrorist activity as a moment to say "I told you so" about how certain he was far right Christians are tools. He is in his own way a kind of proto-Driscoll. Proof that absurdist vitriol is not confined to either left or right or some kind of center. So maybe Frank predicted Christian rightests fomenting terror. Big deal. Tom Clancy has sold a lot of books about military topics but does that make him a terrorism expert, too? Novelists and entertainers right and left sure are confident that they can pontificate accurately on stuff.

If he were more honest about his own advocacies he'd not just pin the blame on Christian rightists but also concede that as the architect of those ideas and alliances thirty years ago it was part of what he was pushing for. When Paul had his conversion moment he stopped persecuting Christians and started working to bring the message to the Gentiles. Arguably both his message and his methods changed. Frank would have us believe he had something vaguely like a Damascene moment but his methods suggest that the change-up was not nearly as big as he's convinced himself it is.

Per my long-ago citation of Adolf Schlatter, we do not remove our share in evil by condemning evil in others. Frank's legacy as a Christian right wing activist isn't going to go away no matter how many times he spins the Christian right as a bunch of anti-American terrorists because a black man is in the Oval Office. Some people don't care that Obama is black and consider it uselessly moot to debate about whether he's really an American citizen. Some folks can just not like his administration's policy decisions. Frank would rather assume that literally any disapproval of Obama's policies could only be motivated by stupidity from the far right or left. Whatever, dude. Proves the point that Frank is a leopard whose spots have not changed since he changed alliances. A guy who in the wake of a terrorist act can say "I told you so" is not any better than a guy who in the wake of a tsunami can explain how God's sovereign will is to use it as a gentle reminder that we should repent. It's still capitalizing on the deaths of others as a way to prove "I'm totally right". The tragedy may not be that people keep doing this, that's mundane, the tragedy is that someone who thinks he's left that all behind is still playing the game and doesn't seem to realize he's still at it.

an observation from George Oldroyd about putting together fugue expositions

I don't have the page number reference handy but in his book The Technique and Spirit of Fugue George Oldroyd gave a bit of advice that I have found valuable that I think anyone attempting to write a fugue should consider. He wrote that too many students think they have done their work in writing a fugue if they simply have a bunch of melodies that all happen to keep the rules for counterpoint. He said that this is the difference between a merely competent writer of fugues and an actually good one.

His advice is that if you have yourself a subject and two countersubjects then lay them all out in sequence in the order in which they appear in your exposition as a continuous melodic line. Then sing that. If you have written a good fugue exposition then you will yourself happy with that melodic line. If you have ostensibly good counterpoint but you find that your three of our successive tunes don't form a musically pleasing single line then you had probably better go back to the drawing board. Somewhere along the way you wrote a merely perfunctory countersubject or maybe even have some problems in your subject itself. As someone who was steeped in choral music in college and even a bit in high school I find this test prescribec by Oldroyd to be immensely valuable. In fact I would say its value is impossible to overstate.

As a guitarist I feel it's even more important to put the whole issue of developing contrapuntal music in these terms because it can seem as though guitarists, when it comes to counterpoint, can be a bit easily pleased. By that I mean that we have a history of occasionally writing fugues while not working on aspects such as the interchangeable aspect of the voices in the exposition. If we compose expositions with no countersubjects and our middle entries employ long strips of free material then, yes, we've written ourselves some fugues because multiple melodies are moving around but my hope is that we guitarists can, over time, expand our approach to counterpoint as both a discipline and an art to incorporate more than simply having a few melodies going on at the same time that, were we to switch around their relationships, would reveal parlalel fifths and octaves. Our instrument is not a particularly forgiving one, I know! But we can still try.

That said, go get the fugal cycles of Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Rekhin, and Koshkin's (when those get published). When you stop to think about it we guitarists have seen only in the last fifty years the creation of a systematic approach to the art of counterpoint that has been with keyboard literature for centuries. We have reason for cautious optimism. Our instrument's limitations may always remain severe but it is good to know there are guitarists and composers willing to tackle this as yet rarely explored possibility for our instrument. In fact Koshkin is the first guitarist-composer I know of to directly tackle the project. He's the first because he finished his cycle and is getting it published. I may be second or third. We'll see. I still am hunting for a regular job and am not a professional so I have a few different circumstances than Koshkin. I am, however, very much looking forward to studying and listening to his set!

HT: City of God: Girls Gone Mad

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2011/07/the-wild-eyed-lunacy-of-bachmann-palin-pelosi-clinton-etc/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Bagnewsnotes+%28BAGnewsNotes%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

This link I discovered courtesy of Dan over at City of God.

What is interesting to me about the use of photos of wide-eyed or wiled-eyed female politicians is how shamelessly the tactic is employed not only by conservatives on Obama, Clinton, and Pelosi, but also by liberals. What is consistent is a very selective and often double-standardized outrage. "We"can employ the tactic of the hysterical woman politician (with all the implications of madness inherent in the word "hysteria" which suggests a madness deriving from having a womb, as etymology goes). But "you" can't and if you do it is proof of your mental and moral inferiority. What is dirty pool applied to Clinton or Obama or Pelosi should be dirty pool applied to Bachmann, Palin, or Malkin.

Now for the sorts of devoted complementarians who think no women should be fit for public office unless all the males have failed (thus various explanations for how and why Debra and Esther can't count in matters of public discourse if we were "really" a Christian society) all of the above is merely a matter of course. Of course Palin shouldn't be president, of course Hilary Clinton having public office is proof of how degenerate America has become. These sorts of folks probably wish Lincoln hadn't done anything, too, but that is, for the time being, a separate discussion.

a contrarian review of Transformers Dark of the Moon

http://www.slate.com/id/2299346/pagenum/all/#p2


Now a great many bad reviews of Michael Bay's Transformers movie released this year have come out. In light of a recent article in Slate discussing what a book review ought to do I wish to consider that the rules laid out for a book review apply equally well to reviews of films.

A review should say what the movie is about; a review should say what the filmmaker says about the thing the movie is about; the reviewer should then go on to say what he/she thinks about what the filmmaker has said about the thing the movie is about.

Notice that if these are the three rules about how to write a proper book review that the vast majority of film critics did not bother to even discuss the first thing about the Michael Bay movie. They assume the film is about nothing, assume that Bay is incapable of saying anything they care about or agree with about that aforementioned nothing, and then proceed to dismiss the whole affair as beneath discussion but not beneath contempt. Now I would hardly say that Michael Bay is the best film-maker out there but he is not even so lazy as the majority of critics who dismiss his films are. Were I asked to decide who is the more lazy and imcompetent artist within one's chosen field I would be forcecd to say that the majority of critics who have given poor notices (probably in advance) about Transformers Dark of the Moon are lesser critics for this than Bay is a film-maker.

So, if the first rule about a proper review is to say what the film is about then here's a spoiler-laden discussion of what Dark of the Moon is about. It turns out that by the third Transformers movie we are told a story by Optimus Prime. This framing story is important in the set up for two reasons. The first is that it proposes to tell us important history in the Cybertronian war but the second is more important and it is the part that movie reviewers did not generally bother to discuss.

Thematically it is important to note that in each movie the introduction has been narrated by Optimus Prime, the Autobot leader. He describes how the planet Cybertron was once a peaceful place full of robots called Autobots and how the robots calling themselves Decepticons began a war believing conquest was their right and destiny. In the first two Transformers movies Optimus Prime reliably tells us the set-up for the things that are about to transpire in the movie. We find out what the appropriate McGuffins are that will drive the plot along whether the thing is a magical cube called the AllSpark in the first film or a Sun Harvester or a key in Revenge of the Fallen (which is still an utterly terrible film, by the way).

At the start of the third film Prime tells us that there was an Autobot ship called the Ark that fled Cyberton with important Autobot technology that would have changed the course of the war. To keep it out of Decepticon hands, Optimus tells us, the devices were placed on the Ark but as the Ark made its escape from Cybertron it was damaged and the devices were lost along with the ship and crew. The technology was invented by the former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime and would create a space bridge across space and time that would permit transportation of resources to change the course of the war between the Autobots and Decepticons. Being outgunned and outnumbered would no longer be a problem once the Autobots established this multidimensional logistics advantage.

In the present the Autobots are still doing a clean-up operation with humans to wipe out the Decepticons remaining from the battles in Revenge of the Fallen. Apparently there are still a whole bundle of them out there. Investigating reports of alien robots at Chernobyl Optimus Prime discovers a Decepticon named Shockwave. Prime and the Autobots return to the United States and Optimus Prime speaks with humans about how humanity lied about how much they knew about Cybertronians. A human explains that the whole space race in the Cold War was in response to the crash landing of a space ship on the dark side of the moon in the 1960s. Optimus Prime states that the ship was the Ark and goes to retrieve its crew and contents. The crew leader turns out to be Sentinel Prime and the contents the devices for the space bridge.

Meanwhile, Sam Witwicky, who has saved the day twice in the previous films, is done with college. He's living with a supermodel girlfriend (not Mikaela) who is the source of income for both of them. Sam by this point has become a rage baby with a huge chip on his shoulder and a massive sense of entitlement. His girlfriend being the income for the two of them is a point of resentment for him. He also can't manage to line up any work and feels that he isn't doing anything that matters. He thinks he should be working with the Autobots and the government to track down the Decepticons. His girlfriend sets him up with connections to get work. Eventually he gets work but it's bottom-rung work in a firm. His employer tells him that he can tell what kind of job he really wants but that between the job he wants and the reality of his career is another job. The old man (the employer) offers Sam that bottom-level job, which Sam accepts.

Now a good deal has been written to summarize the plot points elsewhere so I don't wish to rehearse every single plot point. It turns out that the man who employs Sam's girlfriend Carly has been part of a family that has made deals for generations with Decepticons. It also turns out that Sentinel Prime made a deal with Megatron. The nature of the deal was that Sentinel Prime and Megatron would meet up on earth where Sentinel's space bridge technology would be used to help revive Cybertron with the natural resources of earth and using humanity as slave labor. Sentinel reveals his betrayal and kills several Autobots in the process.

The Decepticons and Sentinel Prime set up the space bridge and build their base of operations in Chicago, where Sam's girlfriend is held as a hostage/reward to the human bad guy in exchange for his running the human slave project. The Autobots are commanded to leave the planet, which they do on a shuttle. The Autobot shuttle is shot down by Starscream and it appears there are no Autobots left to battle the evil Decepticons. Of course this isn't true and after some time it is revealed the Autobots have stayed behind to plan a way to destroy the Decepticons. Of course in the end they do. Megatron and the other Decepticons are slaughtered after a long battle in Chicago. Humans destroy Shockwave and Starscream. Optimus Prime kills Megatron in battle and then kills Sentinel Prime. Sentinel pleads that he was just doing what was necessary to save the Cybertronian race. Optimus Prime says that Sentinel has betrayed himself and not the Autobots and shoots Sentinel Prime's head off. Sam is reunited with his supermodel girlfriend and all is well.

Now that is what the film is about, broadly. What do Michael Bay and screenwriter Ehrin Kruger attempt to tell us about what the film is about? What do they seem to think Transformers Dark of the Moon is about? This is the stage at which the majority of critics just throw up their hands in disgust and resentment and say there's nothing to discuss. It's just another stupid imcomprehensible Michael Bay movie and the jerk promoting the military and objectifying women can't possibly have anything like a theme and he's just a nasty piece of work. But if an author on Slate can seriously propose that there is a thematic seriousness to the 1986 cinematic travesty Transformers then I can propose that Bay actually has themes in his film.

The theme of "no sacrifice no glory" could not really have been more obvious in the first film. In the second film the battle was between Optimus Prime and the Decepticons, led by the oldest Decepticon of all, the Fallen, who once was one with the original race of robots known as the Primes. The Fallen was willing to use a sun harvester on planets full of life to drain a star which would then revive and power the All-Spark, the life-giving cub McGuffin from the first film. If the first film was about a race to get the magic cube the second film was about the race to get the key to the machine that would rebuild and renew the magic cube. By the end of the second film the magic cube no longer existed. There was no possibility of the All-Spark being used to create new Cybertronians, what was left was to see how the war between Autobots and Decepticons would play out on earth. The fate of Cybertron itself seemed moot.

Except that the fate of Cybertron is ultimately what the war began over. Thematically Bay and company couldn't NOT go back to the fate of Cybertron. Transformers was nothing if not a blunt metaphor for how people in the 1980s were battling over how to make use of Earth's natural resources and what political philosophies were the ones to embrace in deciding the future of humanity. When Megatron in the second film asks Optimus Prime rhetorically, "Is the preservation of our race not worth a single human life?" Optimus Prime replies "You'll never stop at one, Megatron." The Autobots do not want the lives and welfare of other races compromised so that their own planet can be preserved. The Decepticons cheerfully consider humans an inferior race that not only can but must be subjugated so that the superior race, Cybertronians, can regain their lost glory.

By the third film we are presented with a narrative wrinkle. It turns out that with Sentinel Prime's betrayal the previously wise and informed Optimus Prime has been duped. The earnest prologue turns out to be one not of an Optimus Prime who knows everything and reliably tells us what's waht, it is the prologue of an Optimus Prime who is both ignorant and has been deceived. Now there are all kinds of plot continuity problems since the Fallen needed Optimus Prime to be dead to rise while Megatron needed Optimus Prime alive to revive Sentinel Prime.

But we'll just skip that part for now and focus on thematic points in the third film. Optimus Prime turns out to have been profoundly wrong about Sentinel Prime's character and this naivete and ignorance proves costly. In the end he must resort to a ruse and to brute force. Fans of Optimus Prime have said that it was good to see he was the badass warrior he was supposed to be but there's a sense in which Optimus Prime's righteous anger could be seen as compensation for his being made to look the fool. Thematically this is the story where Optimus Prime is brought low for assuming the best about his fellow Autobot and it turns out that Sentinel Prime has been in league with Megatron the whole time.

This is a game-changing reveal about the nature of the war. If Sentinel Prime was the previous Autobot leader then the nature of the war is no longer revealed to be a war in which the Autobots and Decepticons are fighting over Cybertron; it is revealed to be a war between Optimus Prime's party and both Autobots and Decepticons who believe that Cybertronian survival is more important than human welfare. In the past movies Optimus could believe that the war was between Cybertronians about the fate of humanity since Cybertron was lost to them. Now he recognizes that the decision must be about which planet must survive at the expense of the other.

Sam, for his part, begins the film with a whiny, furious sense of entitlement and along the way loses his girlfriend. He also gets into an argument with his parents. Now many viewers said the scene was terrible and Sam's parents are annoying. Of course they are annoying but it is actually in that scene where Sam's character arc happens. Sam gets told by his mother that he managed to lose the hottie girlfriend. Sam assumes this is referring to Mikaela (played by professional coathanger Megan Fox) and not to Carly (played by professional coathanger Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). Sam says of Mikaela "She dumped me and now I've got something better."

But it turns out Sam's mom hasn't been talking about Mikaela at all but about Carly. She tells Sam that he's stupid if he think she'll get a THIRD girl now that Carly has broken things off with him. Reviewers and viewers could choose to ignore this but it is in this scene that Sam is forced to deal with his problem. Carly has broken things off with him because Sam's a jealous boyfriend and a resentful tool. His rage baby sense of entitlement shows up that at this point, after two and a half movies he thinks he's made enough sacrifices that he should be able to bask in glory. Optimus Prime scolds humans for lying about how much they know about Cybertronian history when, ironically, it is what he doesn't know about Cybertronian history and can't tell humanity that will nearly cause the demise of the human race, not the secrets they kept from him. Sam, for his part, is so obsessed with the entitlement to glory he thinks he has earned he nearly loses his girlfriend.

So it would appear that Bay and company have something to say, after all, about the story they have told us. Things that are taken for granted as known and deserved are things that can and will undo us. Megatron takes for granted that he is the best and most powerful of all the Cybertronians but his summary defeat at the hands of Optimus Prime and his sidelined role in Sentinel Prime's plan reveal that he is not the big badass he has imagined himself to be. Megatron's presumption costs him his life. Sentinel Prime's presumption that Cybertron is so worth reviving that humanity can be sacrificed reveals that he is even worse than Megatron because Megatron has made no claims of altruistic motive in subjugating other races for his own glory. Megatron's evil is that of a self-aware thug who craves power, Sentinel Prime's evil is that of a self-deluded idealogue whose pragmatism prevents him from recognizing his own character.

Optimus Prime must finally confront the reality that his decision to never sacrifice humanity means that he has consigned the Cybertronian race and world to its end. There can be no new Cybertronians without the All-Spark and Cybertron will not be revived because hardly anyone is left who could revive its ruins. If Sentinel Prime and Megatron were willing to sacrifice humans to revive their world Optimus Prime has revealed that he is so unwilling to sacrifice anyone that ultimately he is willing to sacrifice the entire planet Cybertron and all Cybertronians willing to sacrifice humans. He is principled, to be sure, but his decisions doom his planet and his race to living in a subordinate role to humanity. This is, paradoxically, what makes him the hero in the films.

Or ... does it? It is at this point that discussing what I think about what Bay says about what the film is about comes in. This is where film critics could go if they weren't so lazy. Bay's stories give as an altruistic, noble, self-sacrificing Optimus Prime who is a righteous robot. Yet thematically the three films together reveal that if the meme of "no sacrifice, no glory" holds steady not all sacrifices lead to glory. Some sacrifices lead to fading away. Some sacrifices are not the kind that can lead to glory. In fact one of Sam's biggest points of resentment is that he got a medal for serving his country that he can't explain to people. And even if he could what exactly is so glorious about running in the desert with a tube sock full of magic pixie dust?

For a lot of critics who are, well, pretty liberal, Michael Bay's films may be offensive for any number of reasons. He objectifies women relentlessly (and having actresses like Megan Fox even attempt to claim that a character like Mikaela is a "strong female character" just reinforces the problem). He is disliked for having blatantly sympathetic depictions of soldiers and even civilian military advisors. He's belittled for indulging in racial stereotypes (though the reality is that ethnic stereotyping was inherent in the two-dimensional characters of the original Transformers cartoon run and toy branding). Bay is seen as the evil Republican mindless horndog super-jock film-maker and there's a sense in which all that can be said to be true.

But Optimus Prime is shown to be touting the idea that freedom is the right of all sentient beings. Optimus Prime is also shown to be the reluctant but ultimately unstoppable bad-ass with a sacrificial motive. Optimus Prime gets described as being like Jesus as a robot. Fanboys have been saying that Spielberg should have directed these films. Fanboys have been calling for a reboot. Critics have assumed the movies have no deeper themes or ideas about the human condition to explore but this has less to do with what the films do than what critics have decided in advance about Michael Bay. Thus most negative reviews of Dark of the Moon reveal a great deal more about the reviewers than about the film itself. Anton Ego's observation still applies, that the average piece of common junk involved more thought and care and work than the review that designates it as such. If this is not axiomatic about bad reviews of Michael Bay movies then I don't know how it could be considered true.

I'm not saying Dark of the Moon is a "good" movie. It's long and the humor is often tedious and overdrawn. The battles still don't seem that organized and characterization is unusually weak for nearly all the robots. The only robot characters that matter are Optimus Prime and Sentinel Prime. Clearly Transformers is thematically a one trick pony where Optimus Prime is the good guy and all the other big gun bigshot leaders suck. There's a sense in which Dark of the Moon is just a variation on Revenge of the Fallen where Optimus Prime must fight an evil Prime, only this time the evil Prime is his predecessor played as evil Spock.

What makes this third film thematically different is that Optimus Prime's character flaws are highlighted. He presumes upon knowledge he does not adequately verify. He trusts people based on reputation rather than established actions (which might explain why he thinks Sam is worth consulting about anything, maybe?). He can get indignant and become as bloodthirsty as Megatron when he is betrayed and humiliated. It's true that he kills all his enemies in battle and has effectively won the war but at the cost of both his race and his homeworld. Where Megatron was willing to sacrifice human lives to revie Cybertron Optimus Prime has been shown willing to ultimately sacrifice the entire Cybertronian world and race to save humanity.

If you think about it Optimus Prime is sort of like a white guy a la Dances with Humans. He's like Jake Sully in Avatar. What appears to be altruistic and sacrificial can still be seen as that but it can also be seen as being so hidebound to a methodology that it sacrifices one's entire race for the sake of an abstract principle. I propose that this relatively unexamined issue in Optimus Prime as a character could be why so many critics who aren't Transformers fans find the character tedious and the conflicts uninspiring and to be fair I think the non-fans have a point. The fans won't see this because they have seen Transformers as a self-contained quasi-religious entity. Messing up Optimus Prime becomes sacrilege even if it's over something as silly as flames on the paint job or the lack of a faceplate. Fans ultimately don't want an Optimus Prime who makes mistakes, dies because of poorly thought-out battles, or displays any of the character flaws that can make a character interesting. They want Jesus as a robot and I have spent plenty of time discussing that problem over at Mockingbird.

But what critics equally fail to grasp is that there is a brand of criticism so inveterately lazy as to presume there is nothing to discuss, that is not only isn't possible for a film-maker like Bay to traffic in themes but that it is insulting to anyone with any intellect to even attempt such a thing. The fanboy desire that a Spielberg would handle Transformers than a Bay can be seen as getting to the heart of this. Critics can, if they bother to pay attention, recognize Optimus Prime as one of those true blood old school 18th to 19th century political liberals but they find it stupid that he is presented on the screen by someone they consider a doyenne of utterly red state politics and aesthetics in popcorn movies. Michael Bay can be described, if a bit polemically, as the red state James Cameron.

But it would appear that the Optimus Prime we're "supposed to" get as fanboys wish it and as Optimus' speeches would seem to suggest, is a totally blue state praxis. If Optimus Prime were a human he'd be a human who would be willing to kill people to make sure that seals and sea otters don't get harmed by humans who don't care if those animals survive in industrial development. Optimus Prime is sort of like a prototype Captain Planet. Attempts to reframe all of the battles on Cybertron shift the focus on political theory and away from environmental subjects.

Cybertronian mythology/psuedo-religion essentially hinges on Cold War political ideas and on American debates about what and how governance should be played out. I could discuss it further but it isn't germane to a discussion of Michael Bay's films except in as much as Transformers fans insist that Bay has not done justice to the mythology. That forces us to ask, if we bother, what the mythology is even attempting to discuss. I say that the would-be mythology of Transformers is not a truly mythological explanation of anything so much as a savvy yet crude exploitation of the monomyth as a marketing device.

Ultimately a battle between Autobots and Decepticons that never reaches earth is a pointless exercise since Cybertron would be a stand-in for earth anyway. But more critically, the whole premise of Transformers lore is that the battle for Cybertron eventually comes here where the Cybertronian conflict is revealed as the McGuffin for the debate about what the fate of humanity and its natural resources should be. Fanboy rage about Transformers films by Bay shows that they are too obsessed with details of the signified to remember the signifier.

Transformers fans who are annoyed that humans are the focus in Bay's movies have failed to realize that a story that is not about the human condition is ultimately not a story worth telling. Just as Sam Witwicky in the third film must recognize that his ideas of his sacrifices do not entitle him to glory, so Optimus Prime must confront the reality that what he assumes to be true at the start of the story about the Cybertonian war is not necessarily what the truth of the situation is. What Sam does not realize is that all those sacrifices he made that ostensibly saved humanity were sacrifices made within the realm of Cybertronians. The reasons his sacrifices don't matter to Carly or humans in the long run is not because they don't matter at all but because Sam does not realize that the greatness he thinks he is entitled to is based on his greatness amongst giant talking robots not on what he does in day to day life among his own race.

Optimus Prime must confront the reality that though he has been a hero in saving humanity he has done this at the expense of what other Cybertronians ranging from Megatron to the Fallen to Sentinel Prime have considered the last best shot at reviving Cybertron. Optimus Prime's heroism has been revealed to be for another race at the expense of doing things that would make him a hero to his own race rather than aliens.

Sam and Optimus Prime may be heroes but they are heroes who have done so by abandoning strict identification with their own group and by melding their individual identities across races. Ironic that, particularly since Transformers trafficks in some of the most tedious and annoying ethnic and racial stereotypes of just about any big budget popcorn blockbuster. Both Sam and Optimus, we may propose, obtain a heroic glory that matters little to their own people because it was obtained in a battle over the fate of another group. Megatron and Sentinel Prime find Optimus Prime's exploits in battle no more relevant nor impressive than humans find Sam's exploits with Autobots even remotely relevant to normal human life.

If we were invited in the first film to go with "no sacrifice, no glory" the films fall short because the sacrifices made have lacked permanence. Yes, Optimus Prime died in the second film but he was revived before the second movie was done. Yes, we can suppose Sam made sacrifices of some sort to work with the Autobots but was his sacrifice really all that huge? So he had knowledge that was planted in his brain through the All-Spark that was important in the second film? Is that a sacrifice? No, not really. It's a special status gained because he is a human who got to touch the All-Spark. He got to wield the Matrix of Leadership supposedly because of his good character but there's not a whole lot of evidence that he was particularly courageous or noble or self-sacrificing since he kept waiting for Mikaela to say she loved him first before he said "I love you" back.

The problem with the Transformers movies as a franchise may be more rudimentary than most critics were willing to pay attention to because they were so incensed at having to watch them at all--the Witwicky motto proposes "no sacrifice, no glory" but Sam spends a good deal of time by the third film wanting glory for sacrifices he thinks he's made and we can see that so far as that goes he hasn't really made any sacrifices at all. His victories are all, ultimately, unearned by anything other than having other people gain those victories for him whether it was Optimus Prime or even his by now ex-girlfriend Mikaela reviving him from near death or his current girlfriend landing him a job through her social connections.

Instead he has been conferred with a special status of uber-boy by simple circumstance and the generosity of others. He is yet another everyman who has greatness and the hot chick foisted upon him by happening to be in a certain place at a certain time. The reason one of the most panned scenes in Dark of the Moon is actually one of the more effective scenes in the film, for anyone who actually paid attention to the earlier films, is that Sam's parents scold him for what is ultimately true--Sam is a whiny brat thinking things should go better for him because of all the stuff he's done when his sense of entitlement is based on unearned victories and his idea of his courage is based not on his own sacrifice but the sacrifice of others.

Props could go to Bay and Kruger for playing with the idea that in the third film Sam is squealing with a raging sense of entitlement over stuff he thinks he did that wasn't that special but it's a little tough to tell if that's a consciously chosen narrative direction. Most critics have been content to just dismiss the franchise with disdain or anger. I don't begrudge them that but if criticism is to be criticism then the three rules of writing a book review can still be followed even in a review of a film like Transformers Dark of the Moon.

Obviously my contrarian review of Dark of the Moon is not to tell you this is a good movie; the contrarian part is attempting to deal with actual themes and character arcs in the Transformers trilogy precisely because most critics are so resentful toward Bay as a filmmaker and the toy line they won't even attempt to think through this film the way they obviously will for, say, a Terrance Malick film or a film by Stanley Kubrick. But film crticisim as an art is not necessarily just about considering the implications of films that would be considered "worthy". There are still things that can be learned and observed about the human condition even in the reception and concepts of popcorn movies.

Another fine little entry from Carl Trueman

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/07/preaching-and-selfreference.php

If somebody spends more time in the pulpit talking about themselves than about the Bible and Christ, then they are preaching themselves and not Christ crucified. If they talk about themselves for twenty minutes and expound the Bible for twenty minutes, that is a twenty minute sermon, not a forty minute one; and it feeds the cult of personality, not the body of Christ.

Here's a little experiment you can do from home or at your church. Go to church with a stopwatch or a stopwatch function on your iPod or iPhone or whatever Mac product you have. Track how long the sermon is from start to finish and along the way time how long your pastor spends directly discussing the biblical text and its application. Time how long your pastor spends sharing anecdotes about his wife or kids or pets or house. Time how long your pastor spends talking about books or movies or TV or politics or anything else. Don't count those as part of the application of a biblical text even if your pastor says that's what he's doing. Time, if possible, how much time in a sermon is spent actually quoting biblical texts.

Then when you're home (or after you've downloaded the sermon from hom) check the ratio. As Trueman puts it, if you've got a sermon with twenty minutes of stories and personal commentary with twenty minutes of discussing a biblical text then what you really got was a twenty minute sermon. The other twenty minutes were filler. They didn't need to be there and they do you, as a church attender, a disservice. Now if your pastor preaches for an entire hour and spends that whole time discussing the biblical text that's fine. I would rather have a twenty minute sermon from a pastor only discussing the significance of a biblical text than a forty minute sermon in which half of the sermon is a series of anecdotes about the pastor's family, jokes, or cultural commentary about things that have nothing properly connected to the biblical text that is supposed to be the subject of the sermon.

To put things another way, if when someone asks you how the sermon was and you say it was good what's the first thing you find yourself remembering in conversations? The text itself? The significance of the text? What about the pastor's anecdotes or funny one-liners? What about the pastor's digression on to this or that cultural subject?

So if the sermon is about spiritual warfare is the most talked about thing the substance of an hour long sermon or seven minutes of digression about a recently released film? A church that caters to the controversial soundbite may not have leaders that are responsible for the dumbing down of the art of preaching as a whole; and their pastor may not automatically be guilty of mere shameless self-promotion; but the technical crew that puts up the seven minute soundbite via video and audio that only focuses on the film commentary and not the substance of the teaching are not doing anyone any favors. If they get upset that the blogosphere explodes with condemnation of the commentary they need to get over themselves and their indignation and repent of their stupid habit of putting soundbites about movies up instead of actually talking about Christ. There's people wrong here and it's not the blogging pundits but the people who think the selling point for a sermon that's supposedly all about Jesus is going to be sold on the basis of comments about movies that don't matter.

There are many sermons I have heard in my life that I thought were good sermons because my interest never flagged but that was often because I did not realize that what was holding my interest was the style rather than the substance of the speaker. Now I'd prefer to hear a blandly preached sermon with an actual discussion of biblical texts than an entertaining hour-long ramble where maybe half the material is directly discussing the biblical text. Different strokes for different folks but the older I get the more I appreciate a comment from a public speaking teacher I had in high school who told me that if a pastor can't make his point in thirty minutes he's feeding his own ego and wasting everyone's time. It's not that I'm unaware of exceptions it's that the more I think about it even those "exceptions" prove the rule.

Carl Trueman: Public Figures and Celebrities

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/07/public-figures-and-celebrities.php

I would argue that being a celebrity, though, involves more than performing public actions, more than being widely known and more than simply being popular. It also carries with it connotations of branding and marketing: just as J-Lo will have her line of perfumes, so certain writers and speakers come to carry the sense of being a brand: hence, study Bibles named after church leaders; popular devotional commentary series at least notionally authored by a specific name so that they can therefore be sold; ghost writers who produce the goods that are then sold under a famous name; ministries and conferences focused on personalities etc. This is not to say that any of these things are necessarily bad (though some may be more questionable than others). As with shoes, ties, computers and washing machines, it is genuinely helpful to the consumer to know that some brands are worthy of trust. It is merely to point out that there is a difference between someone who writes and speaks, even one who is very popular, and someone who has actually achieved a level of popularity combined with particular market appeal and particular marketing mechanisms.

I might add that there is a practical difference between a public figure and a private citizen with respect to libel and slander. The public figure owing to the capacity to publicly influence through actual power or social influence events in society is considered to have a heftier case to mount with respect to a libel or slander case. The public figure makes decisions, especially in government, that can substantially and adversely effect the well-being of citizens who have no direct contact with the person.

This is why political cartoons permit a level of vitriol that would be unthinkable were the same level of vitriol directed at a person who does not hold public office. A public figure who is the manager of a company of some kind can manage a company that makes decisions that can effect the lives of people who use its products. Thus civil class action lawsuits against computer companies and auto companies are warranted and a public figure cannot merely say that he or she or the company is being subjected to libel or slander. The brand, so to speak, is robust enough that a very compelling case has to be made that a person's material well-being and social standing has been substantiallly damaged.

As we've seen from various blogs and spams and email forwards all sorts of falsehoods can and are circulated about politicians but these are not considered grounds for libel or slander in the vast majority of cases because these things, put a bit too crudely, don't matter one way or the other about whether or not a person can do one's job. So whether or not it is actually true that George W. Bush had the election stolen for him and whether or not he and his administration planned 9/11/2001 so as to subjugate the witless American populace there is no way that spreading such ideas in any way impinged upon Bush's capacity to do or not do his job. So that one of the magazines called Pravda made this case is especially irrelevant. What does the POTUS care what an on-line far right Russian publication says about him anyway?

Further, celebrity is often accompanied by a strange familiarity whereby the celebrities are referred to in quite intimate terms by people who have never met them or have only the most passing of connections with them. I do not mean the irritating habit some have, of addressing people by their first names in emails when they have never before had contact of any form with them. That is more a function of the casual erosion of formality, politeness and intimacy which email access has brought in its wake (I'm generally with Lawrence of Arabia on that front: `My name is for my friends'). I mean conversations whereby people really seem to think they know somebody they have never met. For example, after the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Michael Jackson, the television carried many interviews with random members of the public who talked emotionally about what lovely people they had been, even though Di and Jacko would certainly not have had the foggiest idea who these people were. Being the object of such pseudo-familiarity is often a sign of the possession of celebrity status.

This does seem to be a line of demarcation between someone who is merely a public figure and someone who is a celebrity. It is perhaps exemplified by those who can confidently talk about what they are sure a person "really" meant by something having never actually met the person face to face, and certainly having never actually discussed anything of any consequence with the person in person. Let me give a very obvious for instance. I've met lots of people in the last ten years who can very confidently talk about what they think Mark meant by saying this or that.

Yes, that Mark. People who never had dinner with him at a Denny's talking about John Murray or Gordon Fee or N. T. Wright and haven't heard him talk about how surprisingly energetic Fee is given his age; but who think they can talk about what he must have meant by a comment about video games or about Twilight are talking about the celebrity. Now, sure, he's definitely a celebrity but I have since discovered that I had a rare opportunity, there are pastors who have worked (or work) at the place who have never actually had a meal with the man.

Now it is true that with the proliferation of preaching that litters a sermon with anecdotes about domestic misadventures and children it can easily seem as though one knows the celebrity but that is the whole distinction between person and persona. You know the persona but not the person, as is the case with me for the vast majority of celebrity types, too.

The great illusion and temptation is precisely supposing that one knows a person intimately when one knows nothing more than one's confirmation about them. You don't know that celebrity but you convince yourself you do. People do not convince themselves so often they know mere public figures because public figures do not invite this. Even among politicians it is easier to find actors and directors and various people who claim to have had some insight into the mind of "Jack" who would merely say of another politician (Bush 1) that he has no soul. Neither is empirically provable and both can arguably be disproven (as in Oliver Stone can put down the doobies and stop acting like he's got some line on either politician). There, I just demonstrated how one may speak about a public figure speaking about other public figures, one of whom arguably became a celebrity.

But as Bob Dylan put it, John Lennon was killed by one of his fans. The fan confirms his or her own confirmation bias regarding the celebrity. This is one of the primary problems in blogs or public criticism or defense of this or that celebrity--what's going on his virtually nothing to do with a defense or critique of the actual person so much as one's own assumptions, biases, and symbolic associations. As I was saying earlier, this becomes about personas and not the actual individual.

This capacity to speak about those you don't know is pervasive. It is perhaps necessary for public discussion of public figures but in most cases the difference between a public figure and a celebrity can be described as a difference that can be summed up like this:

John Doe said X.

That's how a public figure would be described, give or take a higher or lower degree of detail. A person might ask what X means and what the practical implications are but there would be a discussion about WHAT the person said and why it matters. A public figure is like that.

What John (Doe) said was so spot on! He summed up exactly what I was feeling about this situation

What John (Doe) said was so stupid. He's an idiot!

No, no, what John REALLY meant is .... you're so stupid and judgmental and being a hater.

Bull

Bull corn!

I trust you get the idea, crude though it is. A public figure is a person whose decisions and ideas toward whom we may react without having a particularly personal investment. A celebrity is one with whom we conflate a bit of our identity either in admiration or loathing. This is how megachurch pastors are able to develop such massive followings. It is also how so man Randroids imagine they are thinking for themselves when they are still Randroids. Not to put too fine a point on it, after all, Jesus is a celebrity depending on how we approach Jesus' teaching. We have all sorts of people who are totally confident they know exactly what Jesus would and would not approve of and are willing to correct other people about this and yet what may be happening is they are reading themselves on to Jesus and not necessarily basing what their conclusions are, as followers of Christ, on how Jesus' words might really be taken.

Experimental Theology: Calvin & Hobbes

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2008/11/theology-of-calvin-and-hobbes-table-of.html

And, per the last post, this warrants a link in itself.

HT Mockingbird: Bill Watterson on Wandering Minds, Imaginary Ladders and Happiness

http://www.mbird.com/2011/07/bill-watterson-on-wandering-minds-imaginary-ladders-and-happiness/

Follow the link, it's worth it, especially if you're a Watterson fan and love Calvin & Hobbes.

the quest for chamber ensembles continues

Chamber music for classical guitar is, to put it mildly, a rarified niche in concert music. When once you commit to exploring this part of the guitar's repertoire you begin to see how very small the world is.

The number of guitar duets is so massive it does not warrant an attempt to list them all. I'm not saying that guitar duets are bad by any means but that when I say "chamber music" I mean music in which the guitar is not only not playing alone but is also not playing music with just other guitars.

Now the truth is there are numerous flute and guitar duets, so many I couldn't attempt to list them all. There are a decent number of violin and guitar duets, though Duo 46 seems to be the highest profile and longest-lasting of them. I frequently wish I had a steady job so that I could buy their CDs because I made the mistake of not picking up some of their CDs earlier when I had work.

Once you get past the obvious pairings of the guitar with the flute or violin things shrink.

I think there are probably five oboe and guitar duos active the world over.

the d'Amore Duo
Cordover Karney Duo
Mountain Music Duo
Absolute Duo

There may be a few more but those are the ones I know about

Clarinet and guitar becomes even rarer. There's Duo Guitarinet (I have a couple of their albums) but I'm not sure how many other active clarinet/guitar duets have had a chance to celebrate a 10 year anniversary. I sincerely hope we get a few more dedicated and successfull clarinet/guitar duets. By "successful", obviously, I mean able to keep making music even if you've never heard of them. Success hardly means fame in chamber music for classical guitar, though fame probably can't hurt.

There are a few cello/guitar duets, I think. I've been sidetracked just enough by the quest for work that I don't have nearly as comprehensive a knowledge of what chamber ensembles are active for any given combination of instruments as I would like.

What is encouraging to learn from the research I have managed to do is that there are a number of newly formed ensembles open to what some might call "crossover". In the past various music pundits and critics, perhaps most notably Norman Lebrecht, have been unhappy with the commercial aspects of crossover. I respect Hilary Hahn a great deal for moving from Sony to DG and explaining that she was not interested in tackling crossover when so much great established repertoire is available to be performed. She went on to record Schoenberg's violin concert, no less. I hear she's preparing a CD of the Charles Ives violin sonatas now. So non-crossover artists certainly have my respect but Hahn has crossed over, just not made it an official selling point of her career just now. She's played soundtrack music and played with a non-classical ensemble.

But I digress (and you'd expect that from a Hahn fan). What I mean to say is that the thing about "crossover" is that it assumes a performer or composer exists in an essentially static relationship to either concert or popular music. Crossover implies that one stays predominantly in one style or the other and crosses over. I believe Leo Brouwer was right to say in an interview years ago that the big movement that critics and historians of concert music have failed to take into account is fusion. Fusion is, dare I say, not the same as eclecticism. Penderecki can be very eclectic but he stays firmly on the side of concert music. Messiaen, the same thing. George Rochberg or Luciano Berio, pretty much the same. A musician who is committed to improvised music, whether classical or jazz or avant any of the above, is apparently a crossover artist but is ultimately not crossing over in the core thing that matters, the improv/avant part. But that gets at what the difference between eclecticism and fusion is, it's not crossover if whatever it is that defines you is sticking within the spectrum.

But if specializing in a genre is being at one point in the spectrum and moving around to other colors occasionally, then fusion is recognizing that the entire light spectrum is, at least in principle, available. When Billy Joel tried selling us his classical thing he talked about how he'd always liked the classics and wanted to play classical music and write it. The reason I doubted him was not that I thought he never played the stuff. I could tell from his music that he'd been influenced by some classical stuff (just not necessarily classical composers I like!) I doubted his bona fides more because he spent decades only marketing pop music. Perhaps he was unfairly constrained by his place in time and style. Fair enough (or unfair enough). If people worry that the collapse of the old recording industry standards for music is a disaster and that the star system is falling apart for classical music, particularly for chamber music, this may be the best of all possible worlds.

A star is both defined and confined by the nature of stardom. The brightest stars in the sky become fixed points of navigation for sailors but they are also, so to speak, not situated to move. The earth rotates differently at different points but the stars themselves are so high up there, so to speak, that they are immutable. There may seem to be no advantage to being an obscure musician but obscurity can permit permeability. You are not obligated by some marketing process or studio to restrict yourself to one style.

I do not see it as surprising that in the last ten years with the various falls in the studio system and more conventional music marketing that it has become tougher for musicians to become famous or stars but there has been a corresponding freedom in, say, classical musicians who are not just classical musicians to play whatever they want. They don't have as big a market share but there is an artistic autonomy and freedom that I'm not sure would be worth trading away for bigger sales. Whereas the Emerson string quartet said straight up they can't possibly move enough units to justify to their label recording Paul Hindemith's string quartets less famous string quartets who have the chops and moxy to perform and record the quartets can (and have). So depending on how you define success or failure selling a lot of CDs with a major label but being unable to gamble on more obscure repertoire can be either success or failure, just as being able to gamble on obscure and new repertoire but, say, never winning a Grammy could be considered a success or failure.

I have figured out that one of my overriding passions as a composer and musician is to tackle chamber music for guitar as a composer and even as a performer. In a way I could rhetorically say that any guitarist can aspire to be a soloist and play concertos and play the warhorses of the repertoire. A guitarist-composer can aspire to write solo repertoire and that's cool. I've been writing 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar myself. But what continues to intrigue me is writing to fill in gaps that I feel shouldn't be there. A musician once told me that I've been working to fill a vacuum that doesn't exist.

I think that's the point, that's the fun of the enterprise. That's why I've written a cycle of duo sonatas for guitar and wind instruments, precisely because I have searched through the chamber music options and have discovered along the way that for whatever reason guitarist composers have just never tackled such a project at such a scale. There's Jim Clarke's cycle but I'm afraid I haven't had the opportunity to really get to hear those works. I can still confidently say that Jim's project is a move in the kind of direction I think composers for the guitar should be willing to move, a direction guitarists and other performers should be looking at.

As Matanya Ophee proposed in 1999 if we guitarists want to get and keep the attention of non-guitarist musicians we should create and perform music that earns their attention and respect. The challenge before us is not to impress each other as fellow guitarists but to get the non-guitarists to care that we exist. Ophee proposed that it was chamber music that will make this possible. I happen to agree. Whether or not I am a composer and guitarist capable of contributing to that mission proposed by Ophee I cannot say. I can do my best work but it will ultimately be something that is decided not merely by my work and the promotion of my work but others. In the midst of a music industry where the star and studio system seems to be in a decline it would appear that there are more rather than fewer opportunities for this kind of project to be fruitful.

Carl Trueman compares hacking incidents and explores a UK's paper self-serving double standard

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/07/which-morality-whose-hypocrisy.php

Now, I am not known to be fan of Rupert Murdoch. For me, Fox News is comedy and The Sun is soft porn. But there is an irony that he has been forced to publish an apology in the British newspaper, The Guardian, for his companies' phone hacking activities.

Strange that. I thought the The Grauniad (sic) thought that illegal hacking and publishing private and confidential documents was absolutely vital to free society. After all, Julian Assange, of wikileaks fame, is Hero Numero Uno in The Guardian Hall of Martyrs. This is the man who made his name hacking other people's computers, writing a book to tell others how to do it, and growing famous on precisely the kind of behaviour for which Murdoch is now pilloried (and for which he probably has no personal responsibility).

It is interesting. It has seemed that journalists in big papers can decide that one ethical failure is much more excusable than another if the ethical lapse is convenient enough for them. The Guardian wasn't the only high level media outlet arguing that the ethics of Assange didn't matter so long as the story was important. Thematically this can be connected to something else Trueman notes, a new turn in Donatism. This can go in any number of ways. If secular journalists think Murdoch should take a fall for being in charge of an organization that did things for which others are praised what's the basis for saying that what the one did was wrong while what the other did was right? Is there some kind of sacrament involved in a secular free press? I would sugget that perhaps there is a sacrament of sorts for an ostensibly secular free press-breaking a story.

Long ago when I was, er, a journalism student, my professor touched on the subject of anonymous sources and undercover journalism. She said that both of these things developed a mystique around them thanks to Watergate but that it was not wise for journalists to put too much stock in either anonymous sources or in using undercover work as a way to justify breaking a story. Anonymous sources can appear to be insiders who the inside track but you can't discern that they don't have their own agenda. A person who at first seems like someone breaking a big story on government corruption may be speaking anonymously because they were sacked for personal corruption and are finding a way to get revenge on their former employer. A journalist who goes undercover to "discover the truth" will go through so many activities that amount to fraud it raises the unavoidable question of why you would justify so much lying on your part to "get at the truth".

Speaking on and off the record does depend on being willing to say what the facts are and what the truth is with the understanding that this is important. In other words, the mystique of the anonymous news source and the undercover journalist are ways we can sucker ourselves into endorsingg things that are ultimately at least as unethical as the things about which we were tempted to entertain anonymous leads or doing undercover work. As we have since discovered regarding Watergate, Deep Throat provided information that was available to be studied through on record sources. Deep Throat tied things together, sure, but not necessarily in a way that couldn't have been discerned through more tedious and comprehensive foot work on a news beat. As some editors put it, the humbling discovery about the revelation of Deep Throat's identity is that after all these decades of the free press telling itself it took down the Nixon administration it turned out that it was the Nixon administration that took down the Nixon administration. Thank God for bitter resentful careerists who held grudges against Nixon, eh?

Carl Trueman on the return of the Donatist heresy

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/07/cassandra-says-beware-the-new.php

Of course it's not like heresies such as Donatism ever really went any where but some times some mistakes become more popular again after a brief hiatus in which Christians imagine that those errors were somehow stamped out ... or so we often like to tell ourselves.

The current resurgence of interest in expository preaching and reformed theology (in the broadest sense - forgive me, Gabe) is a great thing; but there is a worrying focus within the various movements associated with this revival of theology on particular strong personalities.

I gotta say that if this pun hidden within this statement isn't intentional then it just becomes an even more brilliant pun. If you didn't spot the pun/reference (intentional or otherwise) I won't go spelling it out for you.

... I have been chided, explicitly and implicitly, by friends and foes for referring to these personalities as celebrities. I think the word is appropriate but I am not going to go to the stake for it, if you will pardon the expression. Whatever word we use, the focus on personalities is undeniable: it is why the same half dozen to a dozen names appear as keynote speakers at the conferences and on the videos which are central to this movement. Call them `leaders' rather than `celebrities' but you still have a personality driven movement. And a movement built on big events which, presumably, have at least to break even, must use big names to sell tickets. To use my favourite classroom phrase, `Certain social and economic conditions must apply.'

Yet the problems this potentially generates are serious. First, it can lead too many to put their trust functionally in the men, not the message. Again, this can be denied; but the passions particular men evoke in their followers would seem to indicate that this is the case. Secondly, it can lead the leaders to take themselves too seriously. I do not necessarily mean that it makes them self-important or pompous or proud. What I mean is that it can perhaps unconsciously lead men to think that the movement depends somehow on their perfection, or near perfection. Paul's qualifications for eldership require not perfection but a high standard of credible public profession of faith, the ability to teach, and a good reputation with those outside the church. No perfection necessary. [emphasis added]

Here I cannot resist adding a centuries old observation by the pastor John Donne referring to some patristic authors, impute a fault to the man and you will refuse to accept his preaching no matter how brilliant it is. This is the flip side of what Donatism was about.

Now I would say that the celebrity driven dynamic in some church settings actually does make some leaders self-important, pompous and proud. It is at this point that a man (and in non-Reformed Protestant circles some women) in a spiritual leadership position must remember that the nature of the organization into which he has been placed by providence is one that, in the grand scheme of things for God's people, does not particularly need him. You should live a life of Christian virtue so as to be as fit as the Lord's mercies permit you to be to serve as you can; but with the realization that the Lord's people do not necessarily need you to be the one to do this.

To tie this back to Roy Baumeister's observation about the paradoxical value of men to societies because of disposability, the pastor is a servant of Christ who is made fit for the work by virtue of a calling and life of self-discipline that makes him the servant of all rather than because he has gifts that the Spirit cannot providentially confer on just about anyone else, including some women (yeah, I went there, what else did you expect?) Ironically an emphasis on the church needing real men is that these "real men" will recognize that their lives will be poured out as drink offerings to the Lord and that they must become less and less as Christ becomes greater. Plenty of people who theoretically get this don't seem to live with celebrity status that directly indicates this realization--then they become celebrities and forget.

Now how might an application of a Donatist view of a preacher work itself out? It probably won't work itself out in any consistently observable fashion because if it did then the error would be much easier to spot. I would suggest that in most cases Christians are only going to think a pastor has done something worthy of getting kicked out of the pulpit not for real sins so much as for sins that eventually attracted public or legal action. The most important thing is if one gets caught by someone else in an infraction.

So for instance, a pastor who gets caught having the affair is considered less fit for ministry than someone who may actually be having one but has successfully kept it a secret. The reasons are obvious. But even at a smaller level you as a pastor will come under, in some ways, more suspicion if you get a traffic ticket you don't pay for whatever reason than if you treat people poorly. If you end up getting traffic tickets for having a busted tail light, for instance, then the fact that a cop wrote you a ticket means you've suddenly become less qualified to be a pastor under a Donatist praxis than if you didn't get caught stealing equipment from your church for the sake of a personal mission.

If you get in trouble by landing in a court hearing then that makes you less qualified to be a pastor than someone systematically stealing things like cable or electrical services in housing compound because you weren't caught. A pastor who fails to keep up with the utility costs of living in his home will be considered unfit for ministry when word gets out about that than a pastor who belittles people and uses his authority as God's appointed lauthority to stamp out even perceived dissent.

And God help you if you somehow spend a night in jail and you're a pastor. You could get considered totally unfit for ministry by the newest form of Donatist, couldn't you?
If spending a night in jail is a priori worse than just ticking off bloggers where a pastor is concerned then, my, I guess we'll just have to say that Martin Luther King was unfit to be a pastor because he ended up writing a letter from a jail in Birmingham. Not everyone who ends up in jail even in the United States does so because of his own moral failures, sometimes a pastor ends up in jail because of the sins of others, others who would rather let that man go to jail than to own up to the sins in their own hearts.

As any number of bloggers have been saying for years, there are some pastors whose false doctrines and greed ought to be imprisonable offenses and in some cases pastors have been guilty, perhaps, of theft and deceit and blackmail and other sins that won't get as much attention because so long as the pastor isn't having sex with someone he isn't married to and is of the opposite sex it's all good, right? Well ... no ... but for a lot of Christians in America things have gotten middling enough that if we have a pastor who isn't sexually immoral and isn't obviously ripping off congregants we don't care what other character flaws he or she might have.

In some ways a return of Donatism may be the flip side of what has happened for decades in which pragmatism and ideological goals have permitted Christians to overlook the flaws and egotism of various Christian leaders. It's not that we didn't know certain preachers said and did crazy things but things like our pre-committments to the culture war would let us overlook this pastor's eschatological madness, and that pastor's love child; this pastor's weirdly racist remarks, and that pastor's conspiratorial views about Jewish bankers; this pastor's paleo-Confederate ideas, and that pastor's stumping for politicians; this pastor's absurdly legalistic ideas about gender roles, and that pastor's obsession with sex.

Of course a Donatist would probably say all the above are infractions for which one shouldn't be allowed to be a pastor, I suppose, but it's still more likely that one will be declared unfit to pastor for things for which one has a public record in legal precedent than for things that one can simply state as having been in the past and as not typical of the present.

Link via meta-link, update on Benny Hinn divorce

http://reformationanglicanism.blogspot.com/2011/05/update-on-benny-hinn-divorce-from.html

It's kind of old (last year) but there's not a ton of stuff written about this subject

Link; Christianity Today--is church growth about having a heart for Christ or a temptation to be an American success story?

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/julyweb-only/mostriskyprofession.html

In all sorts of ways this goes back to revivalism and the Great Awakenings. American Christians and American Christianity have been dealing with the mixed legacy of these movements ever since.

One of the things I have shared with some Christians who are at a megachurch and who are quite happy to be there is that they may be happy because they and that church seem to be on an upward trajectory. Your social capital is rising, you have more friends at the church and the church is growing. I can think of any number of people who once were at a big megachurch whose social trajectories hit a plateau. Then the plateau turned into a slight dip and before long there was a dive into a flatline.

What makes the pastor's job even more spiritually vulnerable is the expectation that he also be the cathartic head of the church—someone with whom members can identify and live through vicariously. Someone who articulates their fears and hopes, someone to whom they can relate—at a distance. This is key, because the pastor has time to relate to very, very few members. Thus it is all the more important that he be able to communicate in public settings the personable, humble, vulnerable, and likable human being he is.

Thus, preaching in the modern church has devolved into the pastor telling stories from his own life. The sermon is still grounded in some biblical text, and there is an attempt to articulate what that text means today. But more and more, pastors begin their sermons and illustrate their points repeatedly from their own lives. Next time you listen to your pastor, count the number of illustrations that come from his life, and you'll see what I mean. The idea is to show how this biblical truth meets daily life, and that the pastor has a daily life. All well and good. But when personal illustrations become as ubiquitous as they have, and when they are crafted with pathos and humor as they so often are, they naturally become the emotional cornerstone of the sermon. The pastor's life, and not the biblical teaching, is what becomes memorable week after week. [emphasis added]


Fascinating, see this is one of the things I have written about here in the past. Pastors such as David Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Donne do not pepper their sermons with stories about the wife and kids or stories about incidents in grocery stores that reveal the meant and potatoes application of some text in the Bible. In media theory this is what has been called a constructed mediated reality. It's not exactly that it's not real it's that it's mediated.

Now Galli suggests this is a habit not because pastors are egotistical but because we expect personal anecdotes from our pastors. Well, personally, I don't and the fewer personal anecdotes that don't directly address the text the better. Get ready for another excerpt with emphasis added bold:

The inadvertent effect of all this is that most pastors have become heads of personality cults. Churches become identified more with the pastor—this is Such-and-Such's church—than with anything larger. When that pastor leaves, or is forced to leave, it's devastating. It feels a like a divorce, or a death in the family, so symbiotic is today's relationship between pastor and people.

No wonder pastors complain about how lonely and isolated they feel. The success and health of a very demanding institution have been put squarely on their shoulders. They love the adrenaline rush of success—who doesn't? But they also live in dread that they may fail. Wise pastors recognize that unique temptations will assault them, and some set up accountability structures to guard their moral and spiritual lives. They try to have people around them who can speak truth to their power. But in reality, since this is an accountability structure that they have set up and whose membership they determine, in the end it can only have limited effectiveness.

And so we have a system in which pride and hypocrisy are inevitable. The situation for the pastor is impossible. He retains his biblical vision, but the system he finds himself in makes him waver between humility and arrogance, hope and cynicism, patience and anger, love and hate. The pastor has to increasingly downplay these tensions or any serious shortcomings, moral or administrative, to play the part that is expected of him. He must learn to doubt his moral instincts, so he starts believing that efficiently running a large, bureaucratic institution is "ministry" or "service" rather than what it often is: mostly managing and controlling people. He and his congregation justify his heavy-handed leadership and his lack of time for individuals—the very antithesis of his title, pastor or shepherd. His sermons are increasingly peppered with himself as much as the gospel, and even his self-deprecating humor turns against him. Now people praise him for his humility, which only goes to his head, as it does for any human being.

The morally serious pastor will be aware of much of this—even if he can't admit it to anyone—and he will strive to keep himself in check. But he will find that his left hand always—always—knows what his right hand is doing. He has become incapable of carrying out his ministry in simple freedom and trust in God's grace. He began running the race of ministry with holy ambition, but he now finds himself on a treadmill of "various expressions of pride."

Yeah, that looks about right. Galli closes with an admonition that when pastors are caught in pride and abusive patterns we should not merely condemn the. That dovetails conveniently with my references this week to Adolf Schlatter's observation that our share in evil is not removed by our condemnation of evil in others. This does not mean we never confront problems in churches or leaders. It does mean that we try as often as the grace of the Lord may avail us as we cooperate with Him that we do not make a case that amounts to "I'm not perfect but I'm still better than you."

And while we're at it, don't feel like the pastor is impersonal for spending more time talking about God's word than sharing stories about the wife and kids and pets and so forth. I know it may take getting used to but there is (I hope) nothing wrong with expressing a desire to hear the scriptures preached in a way that focuses on what we may learn from them and not about the preacher. Many pastors have unknowingly transformed their sermons into stand-up routines and social commentaries that masquerade as expository preaching. My hope is that faux-expository preaching will wane and that the actual stuff happens. That said I think some preachers need to get off their high horse about expository preaching being the big deal because they have unconsciously turned those sermons of theirs into something else. But I digress and at the first sign of digression I feel like taking a little nap.

Two more fugues and one prelude to go

I finished my prelude and fugue in D flat major for solo guitar about a month ago. It took years of testing and rejecting a lot of ideas. It also took years of testing and rejecting countersubjects even after I thought I had found some decent subjects. Eventually I scrapped everything about three or four times before I finally came up with two different subjects that I liked. In fact I liked them both so much I resolved to use them both.

The countersubjects that worked for the subjects were, honestly, not particularly compelling and generally countersubject 2 in either exposition was just sort of there (though CS2 for subject 2 is vaguely winsome). This led me to the conclusion that I might have to write two fugues and rebuild things from scratch.

But then I made a discovery, by modifying just a few notes in the second subject I discovered I could get the four measure subject 2 to work as a counterpart to the three measure subject 1. And thus my problems were solved! I was going to write a double fugue in D flat major with a three-voiced exposition for solo guitar. Don't believe me? Well, it's done. And if you are a guitarist you will not be surprised to read me say the following: if you plan on writing a three-voiced fugue in D flat major for solo guitar staccato is your friend and staccato phrasing is not really cheating if you keep your subject and countersubjects clear.

In fact it's not even cheating, really, to have the countersubjects tethered together so long as they serve as a useful contrast to the subject. This I learned studying the D major fugue from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The ideal of counterpoint is that your two to five melodies all form a wonderful melodic/harmonic confection in which all the flavors can be readily discerned but as with cooking some flavors must inevitably dominate or you get a meal that lacks a truly distinct flavor in trying to be all tastes to one pallete. Many fugue expositions reveal that their subsequent fugues are going to be about as memorable as white noise.

Hate to say it but a lot of Shostakovich fugues fall into this category. He seemed to have a tragically unerring sensibility for going for one voice more than his contrapuntal texture warranted. He had too pianistic an approach to counterpoint. I know that sounds like madness considering the complexity of Bach's keyboard music and yet I'm willing to say it. Beethoven had a very pianistic (duh) approach to counterpoint but in the closing fugue of the Hammerklavier sonata he keeps his textures lean, supple, and vibrant. His Grand Fugue in his B flat major string quartet was "almost" too busy but ultimately not too busy to keep you from absorbing all of the cool ideas and the epic scale is measured in what are eventually discernible movements within movements. Shostakovich, by contrast, tries to shove too many ingredients into the dish without seeming to have considered why those ingredients ought to be there. In forms that derive from the Classic era this approach works brilliantly but not in something as flexibly conceived as a fugue.

I have been learning slowly and steadily that George Oldroyd was right (surprise) and that every fugue must emerge in terms of its form and content from the nature of the subject itself. I find it is best to go for countersubjects as steadily as possible. It's not that one has to have countersubjects it's more that if you go to the trouble of making a true countersubject you have more truly useful material. Free material you throw in during the exposition may sound cool but you may find that it's not so useful in episodes and, believe it or not, the new free material you introduce in middle entries can at times actually distract a listener's attention from your subject. That's just a personal impression I have. I can't rationally back it up. It's just a strong impression I have.

From Bach's works I have also learned that total independence of contrapunal lines is important but not as important as the cumulative effect of the lines together. Whether or not I have successfully learned from decades of studying Bach, Hindemith, Haydn, Durufle, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Bartok, Palestrina, Byrd, Brahms, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Shostakovich remains to be seen, and it even remains to be seen, at several levels, if this even remains to be seen!

Did Dan Savage inadvertantly sound like Mark Driscoll?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/07/14/dan_savage_suggests_marcus_bachmann_is_gay_.html

NO, really, I mean that. June Thomas calls Dan Savage (of The Stranger fame/infamy) for making fun of Marcus Bachmann as having gay mannerisms.

In other words, the man who launched the “It Gets Better Project,” an effort to stop the bullying of gay teens, was acting like a big bully. As Savage always notes, the kind of smear-the-queer taunts that can cause so much pain to young people aren’t aimed only at kids who are gay, they’re often aimed at boys who don’t live up to some mythical standard of masculinity and girls who just aren’t girly enough. I can only imagine how listeners who happen to have the kind of lisping, effeminate speech and affect that Savage was ridiculing felt upon hearing the attack. [emphasis added]

Weird, I was just writing this week about Driscoll pinging the world for stories about effeminate worship leaders and then today I read about June Thomas fisking Dan Savage, of all people, for employing gaydar on Michelle Bachmann's husband! This is trippy. Did Dan Savage inadvertantly take a play from Driscoll this week without planning to? I don't listen to Dan Savage's podcasts and don't read The Stranger with any consistency now that Chris DeLaurenti isn't writing about the concert scene anymore, but there's a surreal irony if what June Thomas wrote is true. It's like everybody in Seattle is trying to figure out who's not macho-manly enough here in the Emerald City. This is a most peculiar week!