Stover's piece, with a suitably contentious and controversial title that bespeaks clickbait, has a nonetheless interesting introduction. The case is that there has not merely been some "crisis" in the liberal arts, the liberal arts are very nearly dead on arrival right now. Rather than attempt to blame one scapegoat class like conservative politicians or identitarian politics advocates on the newer left, Stover proposes that all of "that" fighting has been done in the wake of a more basic crisis of why anyone would be studying those subjects to begin with. Another point made along the way in Stover's introduction is to point out that neither from the left nor the right are things as clear as op ed pieces make the subject--the left may have cogent defenses of the "need" for otherwise useless fields of academic enquiry ... and yet it's arguably been religious traditionalists and conservatives who have done the most to develop the traditional humanities in schools (Western civilization, et al) despite the fact that conservative politicians tend to want to cut arts funding. Thus ... :
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/no-case-humanities/
The humanities are not just dying. By some measures, they are almost dead. In Scotland, the ancient Chairs in Humanity (which is to say, Latin) have almost disappeared in the last few decades: abolished, left vacant, or merged into chairs of classics. So too in the same period, the University of Oxford revised its famed Literae Humaniores course, “Greats,” into something resembling a technical classics degree. Both of these were long survivors, throwbacks to an era in which Latin in particular played the central, organizing role in the constellation of disciplines that we call the humanities. The loss of these “vestigial structures” reveals a long and slow realignment, in which the humanities have become a loosely defined collection of technical disciplines, with some genealogical connection to the old arts curriculum and the humanistic curriculum of the new universities of the Renaissance.
The result of this is deep conceptual confusion about what the humanities are and the reason for studying them in the first place. I do not intend to address the former question here, nor the related question about whether there can indeed by any coherent description of the humanities without Literae Humaniores, nor the question about which specific current academic disciplines are included. After all, most of us know the humanities when we see them.
Instead I wish to address the other question: the reason for studying them in the first place. That question has assumed a paramount importance in the current academic context—in which university officials, deans, provosts, and presidents all are far more likely to know how to construct an HBS case study than to parse a Greek verb, more familiar with flowcharts than syllogisms, more conversant in management speak than the riches of the English language. Hence, the oft-repeated call “to make the case for the humanities.”
Such an endeavor is fraught with ambiguities and contraindications. There is certainly some connection with current political divides, but it is not quite so simple as its critics often allege. Vulgar conservative critiques of the humanities are usually given the greatest exposure, and yet at the same time, it is often political (and religious) conservatives who have labored the most mightily to foster traditional humanistic disciplines in schools. Left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic enquiry—“Western civ and all that”—as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. So the humanities have both Left and Right defenders, Left and Right critics. The Left defenders of the humanities are notoriously bad at coming up with a coherent defense which might actually have some effective purchase, but they have been far more consistent in defending the “useless” disciplines against politically (and economically) charged attacks. The Right defenders of the humanities have sometimes put forward a strong and cogent defense of their value, but they have had very little sway when it comes to confronting actual attacks on the humanities by Republican and conservative politicians. The sad truth is that instead of forging some kind of trans-ideological apology for humanistic pursuits, this ambiguity has led to the disciplines being squeezed on both sides.
Indeed, both sides enable the humanities’ adversaries. Conservatives who seek to use the coercive and financial power of the state to correct what they see as ideological abuses within the professoriate are complicit in the destruction of the old-fashioned and timeless scholarship they supposedly are defending. It is self-defeating to make common cause with corporate interests looking to co-opt the university and its public subsidy to outsource their job training and research, just for the sake of punishing the political sins of liberal professors. Progressives who want to turn the humanities into a laboratory for social change, a catalyst for cultural revolution, a training camp for activists, are guilty of the same instrumentalization. When they impose de facto ideological litmus tests for scholars working in every field, they betray their conviction that the humanities exist only to serve a contemporary political and social end. ...
Stover moves along through a few standard criticisms of the contemporary university. The counter-proposal is that the university, since its inception in the West, has always been a place in which absurdly arcane scholarly projects led to an overabundance of publishing works that nobody generally reads and that nobody will be reading, and that the university was never really intended to be what we would now consider the bastion of teaching for the sake of teaching rather than teaching as a side effect of scholarly study and debate.
Stover boils things down in this paragrah:
The cure proposed for the crisis of the humanities is worse than the disease: it seeks to save the humanities by destroying the conditions under which they thrive. If scholars in the humanities stopped researching arcane topics, stopped publishing them in obscure journals nobody reads, and spent all their time teaching instead, the university itself would cease to exist. We would just have high schools, perhaps good high schools, but high schools nonetheless.
As these long-form arguments go Stover takes some time, but gets at a proposal that seems pretty straightforward, that defending the university and the scholars who work in it is a defense of a class first and foremost, though defenses of all that stuff academics study shows up secondarily by dint of defending the value of the class. Along the way there's a sidelong comment about how we can't really expect a university education to be necessary for artists or those working in the arts because there wasn't anything intrinsic to the study of classical Latin or Greek that would make a sculptor a more competent sculptor, just as neither classical Latin nor Greek would automatically confer on, say, an English poet a capacity to write "better" poetry. Stover frontloads the class distinction of distinguished scholars:
We cannot attribute the present decline to some change in historical circumstance. Writing a commentary on Virgil is just as useless now as it was in the year 450. The reality is that the humanities have always been about courtoisie, a constellation of interests, tastes, and prejudices which marks one as a member of a particular class. That class does not have to be crudely imagined solely in economic terms. Indeed, the humanities have sometimes done a good job of producing a class with some socioeconomic diversity. But it is a class nonetheless. Roman boys (of a certain social background) labored under the grammaticus’s rod because their parents wanted to initiate them into the wide community of Virgil readers—a community which spanned much of the vast Roman world, and which gave the bureaucratic class a certain cohesion it otherwise lacked. [bold emphasis added, italis original] So too in the Middle Ages: it is no accident that what we might think of as the scholastic and the courtly are so often linked. Reading Virgil, commenting on Aristotle, participating in quaestiones disputatae, writing chansons de geste and romances—these made scholars, bachelors, masters, and doctors alike, set apart as an international community embedded in but separate from the international community of the Church, the religious orders, and the waxing national powers.
So too the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth century—the ones who helped ease us away from the arts to the studia humanitatis. They formed a certain class marked by a certain set of tastes and interests, entangled with church and state, but notionally with some sense of identity as being part of something else as well. So too the Republic of Letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which put into practice (not always successfully) the idea that membership in this transnational class could even cut across confessional lines.
It remains true today. Deep down, what most humanists value about the humanities is that it gives them participation in a community in which they can share similar tastes in reading, art, food, travel, music, media, and yes, politics. We might talk about academic diversity, but the academy is a tribe, and one with relatively predictable tastes. [emphasis added] It does not take a particularly sharp observer to guess whether a given humanist might be fond of some new book reviewed favorably in the LRB or some new music discussed enthusiastically on NPR. The guess might not always be right, but if even odds are offered our observer could get away with a tidy sum. If the bet were on political affiliation, the payoff would be almost guaranteed.
As teachers, what humanists want most of all is to initiate their students into that class. Despite occasional conservative paranoia, there is not some sinister academic plot to brainwash students with liberal dogma. Instead, humanists are doing what they have always done, trying to bring students into a class loosely defined around a broad constellation of judgments and tastes. This constellation might include political judgments, but is never reducible to politics. It is also very susceptible to change. [emphasis added] For two hundred years or more, European universities were deeply enmeshed in the pernicious stupidity of Ramism, with Ramist professors installed across Europe in any number of the humanistic disciplines. Eventually the fad dissipated, and today, the celebrated method of Petrus Ramus holds little more than antiquarian interest. We should not assume that the current modes and fashions of the academic class are permanent. But if they are to change, that change will come from the inside.
The mere existence of a class is, however, not a case for its existence in society as a whole. Professors as a class would hardly be the most popular members of society, particularly among some demographics. Telling the state and the people that they should continue to support higher education in order to turn out more people like the professorial class is rather unlikely to generate any enthusiasm. But it goes further: justifying the tastes and prejudices of that class without reference to the internal logic of the arts themselves is impossible. The justification for the humanities only makes sense within a humanistic framework. Outside of it, there is simply no case. [emphases added]
Whatever administrators and legislators might think, the fact that there is no case for the humanities is irrelevant. The humanities do not need to make a case within the university because the humanities are the heart of the university. Golfers do not need to justify the rationale for hitting little white balls to their golf clubs; philatelists do not need to explain what makes them excited about vintage postage at their local stamp collecting society. Lawyers (usually) do not have to make a case for the Constitution when arguing before the Supreme Court, because the Court is an institution established to protect the Constitution. So too humanists: we need to tell deans and legislators—even if they will not listen—that the university can be many things, but without us, a university it will not be.
The conclusion is a bit weak, that scholars should keep being scholars because that's what scholars do. I mean, sure, people who love to study should keep doing what they love but in the context of a perceived crisis in the humanities and the nature of the university the earlier zinger about how if we all got what education reformers wanted we'd be getting amazing high schools rather than universities.
Which, come to think of it, why shouldn't the conversation be about how to come up with fantastic high schools across the board? I'm not even going to contest that the university caste system exists to perpetuate its own caste. One of the things that infuriated me as an undergraduate was that having spent years in public school having to comply with that jack-or-jill-of-all-trades well-rounded education regime I had to spend at least half of my college years getting all those general education requirements. Why couldn't I skip all that junk and go straight into studying the stuff I was going into debt for to actually study, like journalism or biblical studies or music? Why did I have to take a statistics class? It's not that I can't think of a general and genial reason why you have to study that stuff, it's that I was upset to discover that at least half of college was basically just something that felt like two extra years of high school, precisely the kind of they choose your adventure for you approach to learning I was hoping I'd finally be done with.
But I think I differ with the author on how nobody wants to admit that the contemporary university culture generates a kind of aristocracy of the mind, which is another way of saying it generates and sustains an aristocracy. Everyone who has vented their spleen about how stupid Trump voters are has admitted to being part of that collegiate aristocracy in the last year, whether they want to admit that that spleen-venting indicates their membership in an aristocracy of the mind or not. I didn't vote for the guy so I understand why people wouldn't want to vote for the guy, but on the other hand, I have written a lot in the last year and a half about how college students don't get to exempt themselves from being part of a cultural elite just because they know who Walter Benjamin is. Not that you can't benefit in some way from reading The Arcades Project, just to be clear. :) Ditto for reading Edmund Burke's address on the American colonies and taxation.
But something Stover wrote seems pertinent enough to quote, the proposal that in a sense the crisis in the humanities isn't really what the crisis is about, in the end.
... The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve. Perhaps we only demand a case for the humanities because we cannot fathom having to make a case for anything else. [emphasis added]
In other words, the crisis in the humanities is merely a symptom of a more general crisis in the legitimacy and longevity of the Western intellectual world in which those studies have traditionally signified class membership.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Monday, January 08, 2018
Saturday, January 06, 2018
follow up on The Gospel Coalition 2017 article on Acts 29 surviving end of Mars Hill, a cross reference to a Ray Ortlund 2011 post that confirms Scott Thomas (not Driscoll) was president of Acts 29 in the year before Chandler took the reins of A29 presidency
Remember that Gospel Coalition piece about how Acts 29 survived the end of Mars Hill from 2017?
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-acts-29-survived-and-thrived-after-the-collapse-of-mars-hill/
...
The trouble with the wild west is, it’s wild.
“There was a kind of looseness that led to some real frustrations that needed to be fixed,” Chandler said. The focus had begun to slip; the “young bucks were more apt to gather around and argue about definitive atonement than they were to plant churches.”
Finances were also loose. Mars Hill didn’t ask for money, instead saying that planters could give when they could. But church planters aren’t raking in cash; given the option, they’ll spend their funding elsewhere. That left Mars Hill footing the bill and feeling frustrated.
And authority ran a little like a rubber band, loosening and tightening in seemingly random ways. “There was a lot of mistrust, even when I became president,” Chandler said. “There was a massive amount of skepticism about what was going to be true.”
Driscoll saw the weaknesses, and knew he wasn’t the person to fix them, Chandler said. Driscoll was also starting to attract more controversy, drawing regular fire over his impulsive language and attitude toward women, and apologizing again and again.
So in the spring of 2012, Driscoll met with Chandler and Acts 29 vice president Darrin Patrick. Patrick had his hands full with health concerns and his growing church, but Chandler was splitting lead pastor responsibilities with a team of two other men, and could add the responsibility. So Driscoll handed the network over to Chandler.
“I was anxious about taking it because I thought it would lead to conflict between Mark and I,” Chandler said. “But Mark was adamant that he was for me, that he was supportive of me, and that he would come behind me. And to his credit, he did that every step of the way.”
...
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is nothing less than a miracle that Acts 29 did not go down with Mars Hill,” said Acts 29 CEO Steve Timmis.
Driscoll was not only instrumental in “but also the personality of Acts 29,” Kwon said. So when Driscoll’s controversies started piling up, the board “publicly and internally tried to support and give [Driscoll] the benefit of the doubt,” they stated in 2014.
But “based on the totality of the circumstances, we are now asking you to please step down from ministry for an extended time and seek help,” they wrote. “Consequently, we also feel that we have no alternative but to remove you and Mars Hill from membership in Acts 29.”
The Acts 29 brotherhood was hurt and confused, some by Driscoll’s actions, some by the board’s rejection of him. So leaders opened up town hall meetings, telling the people to ask anything they wanted.
Ah, yes, we had a few things to say about that over at the following blog post
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/12/recent-gospel-coalition-piece-discusses.html
One of the most striking things about the Gospel Coalition piece about Acts 29 surviving and thriving after the collapse of Mars Hill was skimming over how Mark Driscoll wasn't even president for most of the 2007-2012 period of Acts 29 leadership. Who was? Well, back in November 2011 Ray Ortlund told the world exactly who was president of Acts 29, Scott Thomas. Despite the above-quoted article in which sources stated that Mark Driscoll's personality defined Acts 29, even within the context of The Gospel Coalition website itself we know perfectly well that Mark Driscoll may have defined Acts 29 by force of personality but neither was he necessarily officially president most of the time between 2007-2012.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/ray-ortlund/i-honor-scott-thomas/
I honor Scott Thomas
November 11, 2011 | Ray Ortlund
Scott is President of Acts 29 and my coach. There are many reasons to honor him. But for starters, here is one.
It is clear to me that the church planters in Acts 29 are not cannon fodder for someone else’s war. To Scott, every man matters. Scott works hard to make sure our network is healthy and sustainable. Church planting is costly. I personally think it is the hardest of all pastoral ministries. As Mark Driscoll has said, “The body count is high.” Fully aware of the price these young men are paying to spread the gospel, Scott works tirelessly to care for them. No one understands the burden he bears. But I have become somewhat aware of his sacrificial labors on behalf of the A29 planters. For this, and much more, I honor Scott.
I think of Acts 29 as the bikers of evangelicalism. Or better, a band of brothers. I honor all these magnificent young men, and their heroic wives, for giving their lives to advance the gospel in our time and beyond. It’s a privilege to be among them.
But in early 2012 ..
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/phoenix-preacher-matt-chandler-to-take.html
On February 6, 2012 Driscoll explained that Scott Thomas urged him to resume presidency of Acts29
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/dear-acts-29-members/
Dear Acts 29 Members,
This letter is intended to provide some clarity about where we are, and Lord willing, where we are going. I hope you find it encouraging, compelling, and unifying.
Under the leadership of Pastor Scott Thomas we just completed our most amazing year of God’s grace yet. In the US alone we are now over 400 churches! This is a wonderful gift of God. I want to sincerely and personally thank Pastor Scott for juggling so many duties so graciously.
...
With Pastor Scott’s encouragement and the board approval, this means I am resuming the presidency of Acts 29. I want to invest every resource and relationship at my disposal to serve our church planters. Consider this primarily the “Prophet” board. This board is not closed and other men may join it in years to come. This board will be meeting soon in California, long before our annual retreat, so that we have a clear battle plan for the next season of Acts 29.
Regarding Scott Thomas:
Scott Thomas is taking this transition as a chance to pursue other opportunities he has before him and will not be making the move to Dallas. Scott and I are on very good terms and had dinner just this past weekend, where he informed me of his deep love for you and the network but felt like God has released him from leading Acts 29. He is excited about what God has next for him.
As for Scott Thomas being president, with help from The Wayback Machine we established that he was at least listed president from the 2010 to 2011 period.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/chandler-on-mars-hill-a29-was-so-kind.html
Back when I was a journalism student my journalism professor said that often the most important stories are not the ones that 'everyone" is talking about but the ones that "nobody" is talking about for which there are enough leads to write a story. One of the non-stories in coverage of Mars Hill over the last decade was the abrupt disappearance of Scott Thomas from leadership at both Mars Hill and Acts 29 in a mere two or three month period in early 2012--for those who were at Mars Hill for any number of years it might raise questions about what has happened since, and such as can be documented for the time being. There were announcements, to be sure, but actual explanations were not so clear. Much like the 2005 leadership transition in which David Nicholas stopped getting mentioned as a founder of Acts 29 or a board member the disappearance of Scott Thomas is comparably under-explained. Something happened, obviously, because presidents or founders don't just vanish into the blue for no reason at all, but that the reasons for the change have not even been discussed in an article such as the one that appeared at The Gospel Coalition is just weird. In a way somewhat comparable to an absence of mention of Scott Thomas the TGC article also doesn't mention Darrin Patrick's removal from Acts 29 or why that happened.
Scott Thomas' role in the EIT and the trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry have been so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere there's not much need to do more than tag associations with the content. Joyful Exiles has a detailed timeline of documents and correspondence related to the Mars Hill trial of Paul Petry, for instance.
The memo associated with then executive elder Sutton Turner about the financial condition of Mars Hill in earlier 2012 might be the only document shedding any light on behind-the-scenes leadership issues within Mars Hill that might shed more light on what may have been going on. The Gospel Coalition article did indicate there was some resentment on the part of Mars Hill leadership as a whole that they were footing the bill for Acts 29 to function without necessarily seeing member churches kicking in to help fund organizational activity and overhead.
Now for those who don't already know, Scott Thomas was one of the men who signed a letter apologizing to Paul Petry and Bent Meyer for the trial/termination proceedings they were subjected to in 2007. About how that trial could be understood as having an educational role within what was becoming an increasingly authoritarian culture you can read stuff I've written elsewhere at this blog
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
Unfortunately that website is down. But with help from The Wayback Machine you can read the letter.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141107012719/http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry
which has also been preserved here
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/for-archival-purposes-letter-of.html
Scott Thomas' role in the EIT and the trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry have been so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere there's not much need to do more than tag associations with the content. Joyful Exiles has a detailed timeline of documents and correspondence related to the Mars Hill trial of Paul Petry, for instance.
The memo associated with then executive elder Sutton Turner about the financial condition of Mars Hill in earlier 2012 might be the only document shedding any light on behind-the-scenes leadership issues within Mars Hill that might shed more light on what may have been going on. The Gospel Coalition article did indicate there was some resentment on the part of Mars Hill leadership as a whole that they were footing the bill for Acts 29 to function without necessarily seeing member churches kicking in to help fund organizational activity and overhead.
While at one level I get how everyone would want to forget the past, "move on", and get back to business as usual I would persist in saying that the nature of business as usual was still how we got to the catastrophic meltdown of Mars Hill when, by dint of journalistic and blogging coverage, some things were uncovered that exposed the nature of what "business as usual" entailed. Recall that when the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability made a defense of the Result Source Contract gambit to secure a No.1 place on the NYT best seller list for Real Marriage the mea culpa was that it was not unethical or illegal but it was unwise. Blogging done by Warren Throckmorton later showed that not only Team Driscoll made use of RSI but that other Christian writers used it, too. Then after a year or so of controversy the hubbub died down and things were back to normal, whatever normal might be. But it was hard to shake an impression that it was easier for Mark Driscoll to go down for having been caught doing what other celebrity Christians seem to have been able to do before and since Mark Driscoll's own celebrity was at its peak. To that extent that Anglo-American evangelicalism attempts to treat the Driscoll case as an outlier or exception so as to not regard his rise and fall as potentially emblematic of the nature of the Christian media industries there may be no opportunity to learn any "lessons" about how "we" in evangelicalism got "there" back in 2014.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-acts-29-survived-and-thrived-after-the-collapse-of-mars-hill/
...
The trouble with the wild west is, it’s wild.
“There was a kind of looseness that led to some real frustrations that needed to be fixed,” Chandler said. The focus had begun to slip; the “young bucks were more apt to gather around and argue about definitive atonement than they were to plant churches.”
Finances were also loose. Mars Hill didn’t ask for money, instead saying that planters could give when they could. But church planters aren’t raking in cash; given the option, they’ll spend their funding elsewhere. That left Mars Hill footing the bill and feeling frustrated.
And authority ran a little like a rubber band, loosening and tightening in seemingly random ways. “There was a lot of mistrust, even when I became president,” Chandler said. “There was a massive amount of skepticism about what was going to be true.”
Driscoll saw the weaknesses, and knew he wasn’t the person to fix them, Chandler said. Driscoll was also starting to attract more controversy, drawing regular fire over his impulsive language and attitude toward women, and apologizing again and again.
So in the spring of 2012, Driscoll met with Chandler and Acts 29 vice president Darrin Patrick. Patrick had his hands full with health concerns and his growing church, but Chandler was splitting lead pastor responsibilities with a team of two other men, and could add the responsibility. So Driscoll handed the network over to Chandler.
“I was anxious about taking it because I thought it would lead to conflict between Mark and I,” Chandler said. “But Mark was adamant that he was for me, that he was supportive of me, and that he would come behind me. And to his credit, he did that every step of the way.”
...
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is nothing less than a miracle that Acts 29 did not go down with Mars Hill,” said Acts 29 CEO Steve Timmis.
Driscoll was not only instrumental in “but also the personality of Acts 29,” Kwon said. So when Driscoll’s controversies started piling up, the board “publicly and internally tried to support and give [Driscoll] the benefit of the doubt,” they stated in 2014.
But “based on the totality of the circumstances, we are now asking you to please step down from ministry for an extended time and seek help,” they wrote. “Consequently, we also feel that we have no alternative but to remove you and Mars Hill from membership in Acts 29.”
The Acts 29 brotherhood was hurt and confused, some by Driscoll’s actions, some by the board’s rejection of him. So leaders opened up town hall meetings, telling the people to ask anything they wanted.
Ah, yes, we had a few things to say about that over at the following blog post
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/12/recent-gospel-coalition-piece-discusses.html
One of the most striking things about the Gospel Coalition piece about Acts 29 surviving and thriving after the collapse of Mars Hill was skimming over how Mark Driscoll wasn't even president for most of the 2007-2012 period of Acts 29 leadership. Who was? Well, back in November 2011 Ray Ortlund told the world exactly who was president of Acts 29, Scott Thomas. Despite the above-quoted article in which sources stated that Mark Driscoll's personality defined Acts 29, even within the context of The Gospel Coalition website itself we know perfectly well that Mark Driscoll may have defined Acts 29 by force of personality but neither was he necessarily officially president most of the time between 2007-2012.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/ray-ortlund/i-honor-scott-thomas/
I honor Scott Thomas
November 11, 2011 | Ray Ortlund
Scott is President of Acts 29 and my coach. There are many reasons to honor him. But for starters, here is one.
It is clear to me that the church planters in Acts 29 are not cannon fodder for someone else’s war. To Scott, every man matters. Scott works hard to make sure our network is healthy and sustainable. Church planting is costly. I personally think it is the hardest of all pastoral ministries. As Mark Driscoll has said, “The body count is high.” Fully aware of the price these young men are paying to spread the gospel, Scott works tirelessly to care for them. No one understands the burden he bears. But I have become somewhat aware of his sacrificial labors on behalf of the A29 planters. For this, and much more, I honor Scott.
I think of Acts 29 as the bikers of evangelicalism. Or better, a band of brothers. I honor all these magnificent young men, and their heroic wives, for giving their lives to advance the gospel in our time and beyond. It’s a privilege to be among them.
But in early 2012 ..
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/phoenix-preacher-matt-chandler-to-take.html
On February 6, 2012 Driscoll explained that Scott Thomas urged him to resume presidency of Acts29
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/dear-acts-29-members/
Dear Acts 29 Members,
This letter is intended to provide some clarity about where we are, and Lord willing, where we are going. I hope you find it encouraging, compelling, and unifying.
Under the leadership of Pastor Scott Thomas we just completed our most amazing year of God’s grace yet. In the US alone we are now over 400 churches! This is a wonderful gift of God. I want to sincerely and personally thank Pastor Scott for juggling so many duties so graciously.
...
With Pastor Scott’s encouragement and the board approval, this means I am resuming the presidency of Acts 29. I want to invest every resource and relationship at my disposal to serve our church planters. Consider this primarily the “Prophet” board. This board is not closed and other men may join it in years to come. This board will be meeting soon in California, long before our annual retreat, so that we have a clear battle plan for the next season of Acts 29.
Regarding Scott Thomas:
Scott Thomas is taking this transition as a chance to pursue other opportunities he has before him and will not be making the move to Dallas. Scott and I are on very good terms and had dinner just this past weekend, where he informed me of his deep love for you and the network but felt like God has released him from leading Acts 29. He is excited about what God has next for him.
As for Scott Thomas being president, with help from The Wayback Machine we established that he was at least listed president from the 2010 to 2011 period.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/chandler-on-mars-hill-a29-was-so-kind.html
Back when I was a journalism student my journalism professor said that often the most important stories are not the ones that 'everyone" is talking about but the ones that "nobody" is talking about for which there are enough leads to write a story. One of the non-stories in coverage of Mars Hill over the last decade was the abrupt disappearance of Scott Thomas from leadership at both Mars Hill and Acts 29 in a mere two or three month period in early 2012--for those who were at Mars Hill for any number of years it might raise questions about what has happened since, and such as can be documented for the time being. There were announcements, to be sure, but actual explanations were not so clear. Much like the 2005 leadership transition in which David Nicholas stopped getting mentioned as a founder of Acts 29 or a board member the disappearance of Scott Thomas is comparably under-explained. Something happened, obviously, because presidents or founders don't just vanish into the blue for no reason at all, but that the reasons for the change have not even been discussed in an article such as the one that appeared at The Gospel Coalition is just weird. In a way somewhat comparable to an absence of mention of Scott Thomas the TGC article also doesn't mention Darrin Patrick's removal from Acts 29 or why that happened.
Scott Thomas' role in the EIT and the trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry have been so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere there's not much need to do more than tag associations with the content. Joyful Exiles has a detailed timeline of documents and correspondence related to the Mars Hill trial of Paul Petry, for instance.
The memo associated with then executive elder Sutton Turner about the financial condition of Mars Hill in earlier 2012 might be the only document shedding any light on behind-the-scenes leadership issues within Mars Hill that might shed more light on what may have been going on. The Gospel Coalition article did indicate there was some resentment on the part of Mars Hill leadership as a whole that they were footing the bill for Acts 29 to function without necessarily seeing member churches kicking in to help fund organizational activity and overhead.
Now for those who don't already know, Scott Thomas was one of the men who signed a letter apologizing to Paul Petry and Bent Meyer for the trial/termination proceedings they were subjected to in 2007. About how that trial could be understood as having an educational role within what was becoming an increasingly authoritarian culture you can read stuff I've written elsewhere at this blog
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
Unfortunately that website is down. But with help from The Wayback Machine you can read the letter.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141107012719/http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry
which has also been preserved here
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/for-archival-purposes-letter-of.html
Scott Thomas' role in the EIT and the trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry have been so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere there's not much need to do more than tag associations with the content. Joyful Exiles has a detailed timeline of documents and correspondence related to the Mars Hill trial of Paul Petry, for instance.
The memo associated with then executive elder Sutton Turner about the financial condition of Mars Hill in earlier 2012 might be the only document shedding any light on behind-the-scenes leadership issues within Mars Hill that might shed more light on what may have been going on. The Gospel Coalition article did indicate there was some resentment on the part of Mars Hill leadership as a whole that they were footing the bill for Acts 29 to function without necessarily seeing member churches kicking in to help fund organizational activity and overhead.
While at one level I get how everyone would want to forget the past, "move on", and get back to business as usual I would persist in saying that the nature of business as usual was still how we got to the catastrophic meltdown of Mars Hill when, by dint of journalistic and blogging coverage, some things were uncovered that exposed the nature of what "business as usual" entailed. Recall that when the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability made a defense of the Result Source Contract gambit to secure a No.1 place on the NYT best seller list for Real Marriage the mea culpa was that it was not unethical or illegal but it was unwise. Blogging done by Warren Throckmorton later showed that not only Team Driscoll made use of RSI but that other Christian writers used it, too. Then after a year or so of controversy the hubbub died down and things were back to normal, whatever normal might be. But it was hard to shake an impression that it was easier for Mark Driscoll to go down for having been caught doing what other celebrity Christians seem to have been able to do before and since Mark Driscoll's own celebrity was at its peak. To that extent that Anglo-American evangelicalism attempts to treat the Driscoll case as an outlier or exception so as to not regard his rise and fall as potentially emblematic of the nature of the Christian media industries there may be no opportunity to learn any "lessons" about how "we" in evangelicalism got "there" back in 2014.
a piece at The New Criterion not from 2018 but from 1988--The Critis as Hero--a proposal that what we call the first-person industrial complex saturated academic arts criticism 30 years ago before it could manifest at a more popular/populist level online
2018 can get off to a laconic start. This is going to be the twelfth year of blogging here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, particularly coming up on January 21. We've looked at a lot of stuff at this blog over the years and it's finally gotten around to arts and music stuff of the sort I had originally planned to blog about. But there's still stuff I haven't gotten to that I meant to when I started, like discussing Nikita Koshkin's Sonata for flute and guitar or his first large-scale solo guitar sonata. Maybe we'll get to those this year. We'll see.
Actually ... this post is probably going to get shunted in to the blogging year 2017 rather than 2018, but so it goes.
One of the topics regular readers will notice has been a focus of attention for a few years here has been the arts and educational culture and arts criticism. These domains overlap so often it's a bit difficult to keep them distinguished. As reports of declining enrollment rates and concerns about a crisis in fine arts funding continues, alongside concerns about the blame neoliberalism should get for this stuff, there's less discussion about the nature of criticism in the last thirty years having a place in this. Not that it has no place or that anyone doubts it has a place, really. What I'm trying to say on a weekend is that we're living in a period where A. O. Scott actually called one of his books Better Living Through Criticism. Scott Timberg can lament that arts critics at newspapers keep losing their jobs.
As someone who never even broke into that job market where someone like Timberg has kept losing and getting and losing positions part of me is slightly envious and part of me thinks Timberg doesn't quite appreciate the possibility that in the era of the blog and in an era in which skepticism about the polarized nature of media coverage may be at a high ebb, criticism is reaching a crisis point not unlike what Adorno said art had in Aesthetic Theory as he was writing it out half a century ago, that if art won its autonomy from religious dogmas and cultic rites it did so at the expensive of gaining a wholesale crisis regarding the legitimacy and necessity of its very being. Adorno wrote a lot, and a lot of it I disagree with or only partly agree with, but one of his axioms was that it is the nature of the philistine to regard or disregard art solely on the basis of whether or not he could or could not read himself and his interests into the characters and plot points of a narrative work. Translated into contemporary art-critical idioms, those most focused on representation may be the most philistine of arts critics. Not that people are whistling Schoenberg quartet riffs on the streets these days ... like I said, I've got more than a few issues with Adorno's ideas but this blog post isn't the place where I plan to unpack those.
What I can still appreciate about what he tried to do is to highlight that in a post-Romantic era we can't forget that there's a left brain to the right brain of artistic creation and interpretation; there's also something to be said about the warning that what often passes for art criticism is not engaging the content of the artwork itself so much as a subjectivist process of projection onto an artwork that is passed off as interpreting the work itself. One of Adorno's complaints about where criticism had descended to in his era was that sort of trend. So, reading Aesthetic Theory it's possible to imagine that when people lament the narcissistic tendencies of the first-person industrial complex or the confessionalist industry that these trends go back in Western letters quite a way.
A while back I was writing about the problems of the first-person narrative piece and its connection, as some journalists were discussing it, to last year's election. The quick and dirty conclusion that was reached by me and others was that the basic failing of the first-person industrial narrative was not so much the first-person part, it was the failure of those pieces to be actual journalism.
I couldn't find enough willpower in myself to finish A. O. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism. The title had already put me off the inspiration to read the entire book. I'm more sympathetic to the idea espoused by Alex Ross that critics must remember that arts criticism is still ultimately some form of journalism.
I'm sort of sympathetic to Noah Berlatsky's proposal that criticism makes art art to begin with, if only as a necessary antidote to an art for the sake of art art-religion that posits that great art somehow "inherently" demands attention. If that were true no Anglo-American musicologists or music journalists would have ventured that sonata forms and fugues are "obsolete" based on a global survey of the explosion of polyphonic cycles in 20th century keyboard literature. None of that is to say all those cycles are "good music", just to note that Berlatsky's polemic has in its favor an insistence that criticism is in some sense a first-draft of art history. I'm less sympathetic to the idea of interpreting the 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell as a parable of Jewish assimilation because Scarlett was in it. I don't think the worst problems in the ill-advised remake were even about her playing the Major but I am low-energy in the writing department compared to where I was even three or four years ago.
My blogging approach, in its aspiration, is in most respects antithetical to a "hot take" approach. If it is admittedly a bit clinical and hypercognitive that's partly by disposition and partly by choice. My feelings are for friends and family while my thoughts, some of them, are for posts at this blog.
Having seen over the last decade how professional Christian media figures have had their numerous issues with "bloggers" while themselves insisting on blogging I've had plenty of years to think about what on earth is up with the sort of person who uses his or her public blogging platform to denounce bloggers who don't have the same level of institutional or branded leverage. A guy like Mark Driscoll could blog about a lack of platform or opportunity to address social issues in spite of being a megachurch pastor as an opportunity to introduce what was in 2011 known as Pastor Mark TV. A Samuel D. James could vent spleen at Patheos about Christian bloggers blogging about people. Doug Wilson could blog about people losing it over stuff he regarded as simple observation as part of the publicity stunt train going from station to station to keep his base animated. On the one hand I get that when you open a channel of mass media, as Driscoll put it around 2013, you feel a sense of obligation to keep doing something with it. On the other hand, when a Joe Carter blogged about "pseudo-events" as if it weren't the business and advertising norm for not just the Christian industrial establishment but everything in the contemporary Western world, that seemed specious.
Yet at length it seems to me that it's too easy to blame "everyone" for doing what has probably been a production trend in Anglo-American and particularly American writing for generations now. I don't know if I'm going to get far into Mark McGurl's The Program Era before I have to return it but we've had so many generations of the axioms "show don't tell", "find your voice" and "express your view" that we may not stop to think about how deeply our literary/cultural ethos has been manufactured by the educational culture we have in place. Particularly in a Trump era the temptation on the part of academics and those with higher education is to imagine that "we" can be part of the solution. In the post-Mars Hill years as I've returned to reading arts criticism and arts history and getting back to music and film stuff I've begun to have a lot of doubts as to whether or not we who have been in the arts scene are just as much a symptom as partisan hacks and spin-masters.
There are points at which in order to express an idea you have to share a story, and here's the point at which I do so. When I left Mars Hill in the 2008-2009 period one of the things I shared with a friend that I concluded that the sins people said I had issues with in how I treated people didn't seem to be the sorts of sins I could really effectively repent of if I stayed at a place like Mars Hill. I said that I needed to observe my social and spiritual life in a way that did not simply scapegoat Mars Hill for my own problems in how I related to people. To put it another way, I was not interested in diagnosing a spiritual or social or intellectual disease within the community of Mars Hill of which I myself was not a primary symptom. My concern with people who had left Mars Hill and had become ardently activist against it was that I was convinced that they were symptoms of the problems in the spiritual and social dynamics of that community without recognizing they were perpetuating its vices. My perspective on this has not only not changed, it has been confirmed over the years. People who left Mars Hill because they felt they needed to confront problems of who they were could leave Mars Hill and critique it with an understanding that they helped to create that empire. People who left Mars Hill out of a sense of personal betrayal and who did not step back and consider that they may have embodied its vices themselves tended to double down on a new allegiance without significantly changing much of anything about how they handled things.
The troubles with a Better Living Through Criticism approach to criticism are roughly as follows: firstly, criticism is predicated on consumption and consumption is predicated on surplus. The sorts of people who believe that better living comes through cultural consumption is that they can believe that the toys they purchase are indicative of their moral fibre. They probably don't usually say this out loud but they are apt to believe it in their heartsand out of that overflow we get film criticism, for instance. But I am cynical enough at this point to not assume that someone is a better person for geeking out about the Three Colors trilogy instead of a Michael Bay Transformers film. Why? Claire Dederer wrote a charmingly cynical observation that Three Colors goes down pretty easily when the headliners are Julliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob. Julie Delpy could just show up and showing up is half the battle. Dederer's joke was that the highbrow hotties are still cinematic eye candy of the first order, regardless of the arthouse cred they might have.
Last year James Cameron could declare that his character Sarah Connor was more of a strong female character than Wonder Woman ever was. Right, because someone who gets Stockholm Syndrome and decides to have sex with and gets impregnated by her crazed from-the-future kidnapper who says she will birth a son who saves humanity from the machines is at every level a stronger female character than a beauty queen playing a character given superpowers who goes to do battle against Ares. Cameron doesn't seem to get how wildly retrograde the entire narrative arc of Sarah Connor is when you put it on the page. Her whole life amounts to becoming pregnant with a son she is promised will save humanity. But then one of the uses of criticism can be comparative study. There are clearly people from Cameron's generation (not just Cameron) who think that Sarah Connor's story arc somehow constitutes an empowered female character when everything about the mechanics of her narrative is a surrender to a foretold fate. "There's no fate but what we make" is merely an ideological declaration of what the audience is supposed to take out of every plot point and relationship dynamic that hammers away at "destiny!" even more ostentatiously than the often misinterpreted first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey may be bunk as comparative folklore but what if, just to be impudent on a weekend, there's a highbrow correspondence to that monomyth? It's easy to make fun of the self-importance of a lowbrow "no fate but what we make" bromide, but that's because it makes its point too obvious. When Dwight Macdonald lambasted Our Town he mentioned that there was an axiom, that deep down there is something divine inside of every human being. Macdonald remarked that if you stated those eleven words as a creed he could agree with every word but that as a journalist and arts critic he would fight to his death against the right of a playwright to express that specific point of view in that bluntly literal and direct way. Thus, Masscult and Midcult.
And if artists, poets, and playwrights and musicians got to the point in the last century where they saw themselves as the seers and prophets and visionaries whose ideals could be the foundation of a new society, well, why couldn't critics join that club?
Thus in our meta-critical meditation we finally prepare the way for an old review of a book, one that Bradley Bloch was complaining about decades ago in "The Critic as Hero", featured among a few links and things at The New Criterion this year.
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1988/3/the-critic-as-hero
I suppose I should mention, seeing as it may be inevitable in our time and place that criticism has some personal element, that I have been frustrated by how frequently criticism is inextricable from personal narrative. I appreciate that if you love or hate something in the arts there are always going to be personal reasons for it, but we live in an era in which it's possible to formulate interaction with artworks chiefly and primarily through the prism of personal narrative. Dana Stevens writing about her process of no longer liking Louis C. K. in light of his admission that allegations were true comes to mind. Stevens' piece did not do what Claire Dederer did in admitting her affection for films by Polanski and Allen, which was to admit that she liked films made by guys who she regarded as moral monsters, with some dry joking about how she worried alternately that she was not monstrous enough to e a great artist on the one hand and on the other worried that maybe she wasn't monstrous enough to be a writer of any significance.
What elevated that musing above mere, if you will, personal narrative, was the humor with which she deployed the mythology of the art monster in critical and popular imagination and played it out as a joke about identity crisis predicated on wanting to find the Goldilocks level of monster to be a significant "artist" but someone her husband and kids could still somehow live with. If the idea of a joke about what the "Goldilocks" level of monstrosity is to be both a serious writer/artist and a live-with-able human being doesn't sound funny to you in any way then Claire Dederer isn't going to be a writer you'll enjoy.
Which, maybe just to be a little bit of a punk this weekend, we could say in 2018 a few years after the demise of Mars Hill that for all the shtick, Mark Driscoll had a B.A. in Communications from WSU and a Master's in Exegetical Theology. As powerfully popular as it will be for a certain strata of liberal to disown the very idea that Mark Driscoll could reflect the molding influences of our educational-industrial establishment he was not some uneducated rube. Sometimes the creepy discoveries we can make are that those we would wish to define as inherently "not like us" are like us. The Unabomber turned out to have manifestos and ideas that were not as far afield of conventional Romantic bromides against industrialization and modernity as we might have preferred. It didn't stop him from being a threat to public safety, obviously, but the more salient point is that sometimes the people who are most creepy mirror back to us the most frighteningly distilled and unmediated excesses inherent in our formally held ideals.
Richard Taruskin proposed that what made John Cage so creepy was not his formal rejection of Beethoven but that the ideals his music represented was more Beethoven than Beethoven, with the artist as philosopher, seer and challenger of the known. In a faintly parallel way, a Mark Driscoll could be a symptom of what the education industry of the United States has been capable of producing. If, as I've been proposing over the last two years, Mark Driscoll is better thought of as a propagandist than as a pastor, he participating in a higher educational system that trained him to be the kind of propagandist he became. Given the trajectories of workshop creative writing regimes a Mark Driscoll may be a symptom there, too.
One writer, such as Bloch, is one writer. Still the observations from 1988 were interesting because it has seemed more and more to me in the last five years that it is useful to notice the extent to which the first-person industrial complex, as some call it, traffics in a set of intellectual vices that rely on narrative to emotionally manipulate when a presentation of ideas might fail. But I'm also at a point where just blaming the masses also seems wildly insufficient and probably incorrect. We may want too quickly to blame the cadets for simply doing what their drill instructors trained them to do, and if that could be so then who were those drill instructors? Bloch's admonition was that the critical establishment might benefit from arriving at a "lesson" about things that was more self-implicating than to merely scapegoat "society". So, unsurprisingly, as I've written a few times about Mars Hill and its decline, if the great "lessons" you have to share about it are self-exonerating lessons you didn't learn anything, you've just got something you want to sell us.
Among the coterie of vocational arts critics it's a lofty and sacred discipline but even as a cub reporter for a mere college-based student newspaper I got to find out in the proverbial trenches what people thought about coverage of arts events, free advertising. That didn't mean I didn't enjoy covering arts events, I loved the arts beat. I still do, basically, as you can probably tell from all the years of blogging about arts stuff. But it's possible for arts criticism to be a cultish devotion and also free advertising.
It's also possible when we survey the weaknesses of the "first-person industrial complex" to regard all those writers as emblematic of a generational narcissism rather than considering that by and large they are also all probably just doing the kind of writing they were explicitly and implicitly taught to write.
asgasdgfa
Actually ... this post is probably going to get shunted in to the blogging year 2017 rather than 2018, but so it goes.
One of the topics regular readers will notice has been a focus of attention for a few years here has been the arts and educational culture and arts criticism. These domains overlap so often it's a bit difficult to keep them distinguished. As reports of declining enrollment rates and concerns about a crisis in fine arts funding continues, alongside concerns about the blame neoliberalism should get for this stuff, there's less discussion about the nature of criticism in the last thirty years having a place in this. Not that it has no place or that anyone doubts it has a place, really. What I'm trying to say on a weekend is that we're living in a period where A. O. Scott actually called one of his books Better Living Through Criticism. Scott Timberg can lament that arts critics at newspapers keep losing their jobs.
As someone who never even broke into that job market where someone like Timberg has kept losing and getting and losing positions part of me is slightly envious and part of me thinks Timberg doesn't quite appreciate the possibility that in the era of the blog and in an era in which skepticism about the polarized nature of media coverage may be at a high ebb, criticism is reaching a crisis point not unlike what Adorno said art had in Aesthetic Theory as he was writing it out half a century ago, that if art won its autonomy from religious dogmas and cultic rites it did so at the expensive of gaining a wholesale crisis regarding the legitimacy and necessity of its very being. Adorno wrote a lot, and a lot of it I disagree with or only partly agree with, but one of his axioms was that it is the nature of the philistine to regard or disregard art solely on the basis of whether or not he could or could not read himself and his interests into the characters and plot points of a narrative work. Translated into contemporary art-critical idioms, those most focused on representation may be the most philistine of arts critics. Not that people are whistling Schoenberg quartet riffs on the streets these days ... like I said, I've got more than a few issues with Adorno's ideas but this blog post isn't the place where I plan to unpack those.
What I can still appreciate about what he tried to do is to highlight that in a post-Romantic era we can't forget that there's a left brain to the right brain of artistic creation and interpretation; there's also something to be said about the warning that what often passes for art criticism is not engaging the content of the artwork itself so much as a subjectivist process of projection onto an artwork that is passed off as interpreting the work itself. One of Adorno's complaints about where criticism had descended to in his era was that sort of trend. So, reading Aesthetic Theory it's possible to imagine that when people lament the narcissistic tendencies of the first-person industrial complex or the confessionalist industry that these trends go back in Western letters quite a way.
A while back I was writing about the problems of the first-person narrative piece and its connection, as some journalists were discussing it, to last year's election. The quick and dirty conclusion that was reached by me and others was that the basic failing of the first-person industrial narrative was not so much the first-person part, it was the failure of those pieces to be actual journalism.
I couldn't find enough willpower in myself to finish A. O. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism. The title had already put me off the inspiration to read the entire book. I'm more sympathetic to the idea espoused by Alex Ross that critics must remember that arts criticism is still ultimately some form of journalism.
I'm sort of sympathetic to Noah Berlatsky's proposal that criticism makes art art to begin with, if only as a necessary antidote to an art for the sake of art art-religion that posits that great art somehow "inherently" demands attention. If that were true no Anglo-American musicologists or music journalists would have ventured that sonata forms and fugues are "obsolete" based on a global survey of the explosion of polyphonic cycles in 20th century keyboard literature. None of that is to say all those cycles are "good music", just to note that Berlatsky's polemic has in its favor an insistence that criticism is in some sense a first-draft of art history. I'm less sympathetic to the idea of interpreting the 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell as a parable of Jewish assimilation because Scarlett was in it. I don't think the worst problems in the ill-advised remake were even about her playing the Major but I am low-energy in the writing department compared to where I was even three or four years ago.
My blogging approach, in its aspiration, is in most respects antithetical to a "hot take" approach. If it is admittedly a bit clinical and hypercognitive that's partly by disposition and partly by choice. My feelings are for friends and family while my thoughts, some of them, are for posts at this blog.
Having seen over the last decade how professional Christian media figures have had their numerous issues with "bloggers" while themselves insisting on blogging I've had plenty of years to think about what on earth is up with the sort of person who uses his or her public blogging platform to denounce bloggers who don't have the same level of institutional or branded leverage. A guy like Mark Driscoll could blog about a lack of platform or opportunity to address social issues in spite of being a megachurch pastor as an opportunity to introduce what was in 2011 known as Pastor Mark TV. A Samuel D. James could vent spleen at Patheos about Christian bloggers blogging about people. Doug Wilson could blog about people losing it over stuff he regarded as simple observation as part of the publicity stunt train going from station to station to keep his base animated. On the one hand I get that when you open a channel of mass media, as Driscoll put it around 2013, you feel a sense of obligation to keep doing something with it. On the other hand, when a Joe Carter blogged about "pseudo-events" as if it weren't the business and advertising norm for not just the Christian industrial establishment but everything in the contemporary Western world, that seemed specious.
Yet at length it seems to me that it's too easy to blame "everyone" for doing what has probably been a production trend in Anglo-American and particularly American writing for generations now. I don't know if I'm going to get far into Mark McGurl's The Program Era before I have to return it but we've had so many generations of the axioms "show don't tell", "find your voice" and "express your view" that we may not stop to think about how deeply our literary/cultural ethos has been manufactured by the educational culture we have in place. Particularly in a Trump era the temptation on the part of academics and those with higher education is to imagine that "we" can be part of the solution. In the post-Mars Hill years as I've returned to reading arts criticism and arts history and getting back to music and film stuff I've begun to have a lot of doubts as to whether or not we who have been in the arts scene are just as much a symptom as partisan hacks and spin-masters.
There are points at which in order to express an idea you have to share a story, and here's the point at which I do so. When I left Mars Hill in the 2008-2009 period one of the things I shared with a friend that I concluded that the sins people said I had issues with in how I treated people didn't seem to be the sorts of sins I could really effectively repent of if I stayed at a place like Mars Hill. I said that I needed to observe my social and spiritual life in a way that did not simply scapegoat Mars Hill for my own problems in how I related to people. To put it another way, I was not interested in diagnosing a spiritual or social or intellectual disease within the community of Mars Hill of which I myself was not a primary symptom. My concern with people who had left Mars Hill and had become ardently activist against it was that I was convinced that they were symptoms of the problems in the spiritual and social dynamics of that community without recognizing they were perpetuating its vices. My perspective on this has not only not changed, it has been confirmed over the years. People who left Mars Hill because they felt they needed to confront problems of who they were could leave Mars Hill and critique it with an understanding that they helped to create that empire. People who left Mars Hill out of a sense of personal betrayal and who did not step back and consider that they may have embodied its vices themselves tended to double down on a new allegiance without significantly changing much of anything about how they handled things.
The troubles with a Better Living Through Criticism approach to criticism are roughly as follows: firstly, criticism is predicated on consumption and consumption is predicated on surplus. The sorts of people who believe that better living comes through cultural consumption is that they can believe that the toys they purchase are indicative of their moral fibre. They probably don't usually say this out loud but they are apt to believe it in their heartsand out of that overflow we get film criticism, for instance. But I am cynical enough at this point to not assume that someone is a better person for geeking out about the Three Colors trilogy instead of a Michael Bay Transformers film. Why? Claire Dederer wrote a charmingly cynical observation that Three Colors goes down pretty easily when the headliners are Julliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob. Julie Delpy could just show up and showing up is half the battle. Dederer's joke was that the highbrow hotties are still cinematic eye candy of the first order, regardless of the arthouse cred they might have.
Last year James Cameron could declare that his character Sarah Connor was more of a strong female character than Wonder Woman ever was. Right, because someone who gets Stockholm Syndrome and decides to have sex with and gets impregnated by her crazed from-the-future kidnapper who says she will birth a son who saves humanity from the machines is at every level a stronger female character than a beauty queen playing a character given superpowers who goes to do battle against Ares. Cameron doesn't seem to get how wildly retrograde the entire narrative arc of Sarah Connor is when you put it on the page. Her whole life amounts to becoming pregnant with a son she is promised will save humanity. But then one of the uses of criticism can be comparative study. There are clearly people from Cameron's generation (not just Cameron) who think that Sarah Connor's story arc somehow constitutes an empowered female character when everything about the mechanics of her narrative is a surrender to a foretold fate. "There's no fate but what we make" is merely an ideological declaration of what the audience is supposed to take out of every plot point and relationship dynamic that hammers away at "destiny!" even more ostentatiously than the often misinterpreted first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey may be bunk as comparative folklore but what if, just to be impudent on a weekend, there's a highbrow correspondence to that monomyth? It's easy to make fun of the self-importance of a lowbrow "no fate but what we make" bromide, but that's because it makes its point too obvious. When Dwight Macdonald lambasted Our Town he mentioned that there was an axiom, that deep down there is something divine inside of every human being. Macdonald remarked that if you stated those eleven words as a creed he could agree with every word but that as a journalist and arts critic he would fight to his death against the right of a playwright to express that specific point of view in that bluntly literal and direct way. Thus, Masscult and Midcult.
And if artists, poets, and playwrights and musicians got to the point in the last century where they saw themselves as the seers and prophets and visionaries whose ideals could be the foundation of a new society, well, why couldn't critics join that club?
Thus in our meta-critical meditation we finally prepare the way for an old review of a book, one that Bradley Bloch was complaining about decades ago in "The Critic as Hero", featured among a few links and things at The New Criterion this year.
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1988/3/the-critic-as-hero
As we all know, criticism has undergone a crucial transformation since the advent of structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism. Oddly, although these methodologies might have been expected to reduce criticism to a purely impersonal, even scientific, exercise, they have had the opposite effect of turning a generation of critics into cult figures. The reason is not hard to find. If, as Harold Bloom proudly claims, literary criticism today “has the same status as lyric poetry or narrative writing,” then the critic has the same status as the poet or novelist—at least in the eyes of other critics. For the generation that has followed Bloom’s, such thinking has given rise to a new creature: the critic as hero. [emphasis added]
The extent to which this view has taken hold is illustrated by Criticism in Society, a book of interviews with literary critics conducted by Imre Salusinszky, a tutor in English at the University of Melbourne. His subjects include many of the stars of the literary-critical firmament: Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller. Although there is much that is interesting—and horrifying—in the comments of the nine critics interviewed, the true cautionary tale of Criticism in Society is to be found in the questions posed, and not posed, by Salusinszky. For it is the outlook of Salusinszky and his peers, now making their way out of graduate school and onto university faculties, that will set the tone for literary discussion in the years to come.
In an earlier day, the critic felt it was his responsibility to illuminate the work, and sometimes the life, of the artist, not of himself. Edmund Wilson, among other things a critic with far more lasting significance than most of those now practicing the craft, had a pre-printed postcard declining requests for interviews. Times have clearly changed; now that the critic occupies center stage, the life the critic studies most closely is his own. [emphases added] Salusinszky came of age in this environment, and in his interviews no personal detail is too inconsequential to be discussed. Frank Lentricchia, a critical theorist at Duke University, goes on for pages about how his grandparents’ lives in Southern Italy affect the way he reads literature, while Harold Bloom relates how a mid-life crisis, followed by five years of intermittent analysis, may or may not have helped lay the foundation for The Anxiety of Influence. Barbara Johnson illustrates the relation between Bloom and Paul de Man by telling a story about Bloom’s guess that her dog’s name was “Nietzsche.”
...
The vicious circle of critical self-reference which pervades Criticism in Society was encouraged by the strategy of allowing the subject of each interview to read the transcripts of the earlier interviews in the series, so that each critic might be “invited to insert his or her own voice into dialogue with [the others].” The purpose of this, stated on the book’s jacket, is to reveal “criticism with a human face.”
In light of the result, one must ask if it might be better for criticism to be a bit more anonymous. Such a remedy seems unlikely, however, in the face of the celebrity status which critics now enjoy. In his last question to Derrida, Salusinszky asks how Derrida’s “great fame” has affected his work: “I suppose,” Salusinszky says, “this is partly a voyeuristic question, but I ask it on behalf of all those who will read this interview: do you think your work is affected by the reality of going about everywhere and seeing your work, your name, in discussion?” A far more pertinent question is the effect of Derrida’s fame on the work of Salusinszky and his contemporaries, now in their first years in the literary-critical field. Visions of fame were once the luxury of writers and artists—the sort of people critics used to study; now they can be seriously entertained by critics themselves. [emphasis added]
While fame is not possible in every calling, when it does become so, the environment of that pursuit is irrevocably altered. Debates over principles and issues begin giving way to talk of colleagues receiving media coverage; one thinks less about the advancement of ideas than simple advancement. Northrop Frye, commenting on the quality of contemporary critical essays, says, “One feels that the reason for their existence is simply to get [the author] on a dean’s list, and that the notion of the pursuit of a structure, or of knowledge, so that it gets clearer in the mind, is just something you haven’t the time for.” In his reply, Salusinszky lays the blame on society, which “cuts back funding to the universities.” Although it might be more painful, the critical establishment would be better off looking to itself in order to understand how this predicament came about. [emphases added]
I suppose I should mention, seeing as it may be inevitable in our time and place that criticism has some personal element, that I have been frustrated by how frequently criticism is inextricable from personal narrative. I appreciate that if you love or hate something in the arts there are always going to be personal reasons for it, but we live in an era in which it's possible to formulate interaction with artworks chiefly and primarily through the prism of personal narrative. Dana Stevens writing about her process of no longer liking Louis C. K. in light of his admission that allegations were true comes to mind. Stevens' piece did not do what Claire Dederer did in admitting her affection for films by Polanski and Allen, which was to admit that she liked films made by guys who she regarded as moral monsters, with some dry joking about how she worried alternately that she was not monstrous enough to e a great artist on the one hand and on the other worried that maybe she wasn't monstrous enough to be a writer of any significance.
What elevated that musing above mere, if you will, personal narrative, was the humor with which she deployed the mythology of the art monster in critical and popular imagination and played it out as a joke about identity crisis predicated on wanting to find the Goldilocks level of monster to be a significant "artist" but someone her husband and kids could still somehow live with. If the idea of a joke about what the "Goldilocks" level of monstrosity is to be both a serious writer/artist and a live-with-able human being doesn't sound funny to you in any way then Claire Dederer isn't going to be a writer you'll enjoy.
Which, maybe just to be a little bit of a punk this weekend, we could say in 2018 a few years after the demise of Mars Hill that for all the shtick, Mark Driscoll had a B.A. in Communications from WSU and a Master's in Exegetical Theology. As powerfully popular as it will be for a certain strata of liberal to disown the very idea that Mark Driscoll could reflect the molding influences of our educational-industrial establishment he was not some uneducated rube. Sometimes the creepy discoveries we can make are that those we would wish to define as inherently "not like us" are like us. The Unabomber turned out to have manifestos and ideas that were not as far afield of conventional Romantic bromides against industrialization and modernity as we might have preferred. It didn't stop him from being a threat to public safety, obviously, but the more salient point is that sometimes the people who are most creepy mirror back to us the most frighteningly distilled and unmediated excesses inherent in our formally held ideals.
Richard Taruskin proposed that what made John Cage so creepy was not his formal rejection of Beethoven but that the ideals his music represented was more Beethoven than Beethoven, with the artist as philosopher, seer and challenger of the known. In a faintly parallel way, a Mark Driscoll could be a symptom of what the education industry of the United States has been capable of producing. If, as I've been proposing over the last two years, Mark Driscoll is better thought of as a propagandist than as a pastor, he participating in a higher educational system that trained him to be the kind of propagandist he became. Given the trajectories of workshop creative writing regimes a Mark Driscoll may be a symptom there, too.
One writer, such as Bloch, is one writer. Still the observations from 1988 were interesting because it has seemed more and more to me in the last five years that it is useful to notice the extent to which the first-person industrial complex, as some call it, traffics in a set of intellectual vices that rely on narrative to emotionally manipulate when a presentation of ideas might fail. But I'm also at a point where just blaming the masses also seems wildly insufficient and probably incorrect. We may want too quickly to blame the cadets for simply doing what their drill instructors trained them to do, and if that could be so then who were those drill instructors? Bloch's admonition was that the critical establishment might benefit from arriving at a "lesson" about things that was more self-implicating than to merely scapegoat "society". So, unsurprisingly, as I've written a few times about Mars Hill and its decline, if the great "lessons" you have to share about it are self-exonerating lessons you didn't learn anything, you've just got something you want to sell us.
Among the coterie of vocational arts critics it's a lofty and sacred discipline but even as a cub reporter for a mere college-based student newspaper I got to find out in the proverbial trenches what people thought about coverage of arts events, free advertising. That didn't mean I didn't enjoy covering arts events, I loved the arts beat. I still do, basically, as you can probably tell from all the years of blogging about arts stuff. But it's possible for arts criticism to be a cultish devotion and also free advertising.
It's also possible when we survey the weaknesses of the "first-person industrial complex" to regard all those writers as emblematic of a generational narcissism rather than considering that by and large they are also all probably just doing the kind of writing they were explicitly and implicitly taught to write.
asgasdgfa
Thursday, December 28, 2017
stuff that, perhaps, we can get to in 2018
It's the end of a long year here at Wenatchee The Hatchet. The incentive to blog is low ... for me. I don't really want to get into all the reasons for that but I suppose what probably needs to be said is that low-volume blogging for Wenatchee the Hatchet probably has to be graded on some kind of curve. Low volume blogging year for me in the history of the blog was still 71 posts.
This is kind of an early New Year's resolution of stuff I hope, Lord willing that I have both the time and willpower to do the stuff, to blog about in 2018.
1. Discuss Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar, published by Edition Margaux.
2. Discuss German Dzhaparidze's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar, recorded by Esteban Colucci
3. Discuss three of the four numbered published guitar sonatas of Dusan Bogdanovic, because they're all fantastic
4. Discuss the Matiegka complete edition after I spend some time going through it
5. Discuss at least some of the solo guitar sonatas of Angelo Gilardino, probably will only manage the three that can be ordered online these days
That's the musical stuff. For animation I'd like to see if I can tackle writing about the following:
6. finally finish the Justice League essays, though I confess this probably won't happen quickly
Then there's more bookish stuff
7. discuss the new bad Ghost in the Shell remake with the old overhyped Ghost in the Shell. Those who venerate the old Oshii film will ... probably not like what I have to say about it.
I want to review John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution but though the book is very short the recommended secondary reading is pretty big. In fairness to the fact that I think several of the books in Borstlap's recommended reading list at the end of his book look fantastic I want to also read those, too. I have my differences with Borstlap about a few topics but I think what he's trying to do deserves an informed and considered review. I won't get into that stuff for now but if you read my references to Elements of Sonata Theory, the writing of George Rochberg, etc then you might have a guess what one of my concerns about the 2nd edition is.
Of course this blog being what it is I want to tackle a book or two as the basis for blogging and reviewing here.
7. I do want to write something about Justin Dean's book PR Matters. What I hope to do is to situate the book and Dean's career at Mars Hill in the context of the maelstrom of public relations issues that were already emerging as he took the reins. That takes some time, and more motivation than I have at the end of the year so, here's hoping for 2018.
Also ...
8. Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire
Jessica Johnson's monograph comes out in May of 2018.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/biblical-porn
I do plan to get a copy of the book and review it. Being the sort of moderately conservative semi-stick in the mud Presbyterian I am I don't doubt that Johnson and I differ on a few topics. But this blog has been committed to maintaining as ecumenical and scholarly approach as possible. I don't doubt that Johnson's book is going to be a more interesting read on the subject of Mars Hill than Dale Soden's mentions of Mars Hill in Outsiders in a Promised Land, which I discussed a while back.
I have had friends suggest that yours truly write a book about Mars Hill but I would need to recharge some batteries for a while before doing such a thing. I also regard popular Christian publishing to be one of the bad guys in the twenty year history of Mars Hill. If someone were to gift me a Thomas Nelson book these days my first temptation would be to burn the thing on general principle. But I am willing to consider discussing things with scholars if they get in touch at this point. Which is to say there's a decent possibility some of my blogging will get referenced in Johnson's book. The work of scholarly investigation into the history and dynamics of Mars Hill could and should in some sense only be just getting started but I have a feeling that what the Christian industrial complex would like to do is "move on" and proceed as though whatever happened at Mars Hill was just some aberration that couldn't tell us something about the very nature of the industries. Not sure I will write such a book because I don't feel like a writer of books so much as a writer of essays, but I won't rule it out altogether. It's also getting to the point where if a scholar or two wanted to get in touch I'd be open to being a resource for scholarly work on the topic of MHC. To the point, I'm okay with being quoted in a certain forthcoming monograph.
One of the biggest projects I hope to tackle, however, is addressing the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Francis Schaeffer's The God Who is There and Escape From Reason as the first two parts of his trilogy. I think it would be impossible to overstate the influence Schaeffer has had on conservative American evangelicals and that Schaeffer can be thought of as a kind of American evangelical equivalent of Theodor Adorno. That comparison is intended to be provocative because both men wrote sweeping accounts of Western art that can be read as a legend of WASP decline and white flight; both men wrote in the later 1960s and had connections to respectively right and left political movements.
Schaeffer's arts history is particularly bad, especially on the subject of music, which is a topic dear to my heart. For the fiftieth anniversary what I'm hoping to write isn't exactly going to be as harsh as a take-down but, though I was a fan of Schaeffer's work in my teens and early twenties, I now believe that if Anglo-American evangelicalism is going to make anything interesting in the arts that dismantling Schaeffer's master narrative of WASP decline is obligatory. Schaeffer, I intend to argue, had the same problem Adorno had but from a different direction. Both men venerated earlier bourgeois Western European art. When they perceived a radical break in history they reacted differently. Adorno wanted the break to be total and forward-moving (thus Schoenberg and Beckett), but did not altogether grasp how he was trapped ideologically within the Romantic era. There's three books by David P Roberts that unpack that a bit I might reference there. Schaeffer was a nostalgic who lamented the loss of Western culture without grasping that his narrative of decline couldn't even be squared with some basic points about Western history. Around the same time he was writing Leonard Meyer came up with a more interesting counterproposal about the eruption of progress and the avant garde. So ... stuff like that. I am glad Schaeffer didn't attempt to survey Western music history because it would have been a trainwreck. But in a way I almost have to discuss the 20th century musical changes in order to show how wildly wrong Francis Schaeffer was about stuff.
But ... this gets me to what I think is confining about the likes of Roger Scruton and John Borstlap, there's a sense in older guys, regardless of their place in the spectrum, that the high arts culture of Western Europe is on a decline. Well, yeah, of course, because the empires are fading away and why shouldn't they? My difference of conviction from people like Scruton or Borstlap has nothing to do with a lack of love for classical music. I adore the music of Haydn. But the collapse of the long 19th century's ars perfecta isn't a bad thing, it's just a thing that happened. We don't need some "renaissance" of a late Romantic idiom that has survived by way of the American song book and popular music and film scores just fine. The Renaissance itself was a culmination of centuries of experimentation throughout the medieval period and its renaissance (because what we were taught was the Renaissance was just the big R renaissance not unlike the Romantic era was a big R stand in for that movement). If we're in some kind of rhyming cycle of epochs of history we're not in a Renaissance, we're in a kind of new early or middle Baroque era, in which a panoply of forms and styles erupted with idioms based on improvisation over established formulas and tons of strophic structures. But I'm rambling again.
As usual, probably, what I hope to write about will probably be more than I manage to write about. They say it's good to set goals, so here are some goals.
This is kind of an early New Year's resolution of stuff I hope, Lord willing that I have both the time and willpower to do the stuff, to blog about in 2018.
1. Discuss Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar, published by Edition Margaux.
2. Discuss German Dzhaparidze's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar, recorded by Esteban Colucci
3. Discuss three of the four numbered published guitar sonatas of Dusan Bogdanovic, because they're all fantastic
4. Discuss the Matiegka complete edition after I spend some time going through it
5. Discuss at least some of the solo guitar sonatas of Angelo Gilardino, probably will only manage the three that can be ordered online these days
That's the musical stuff. For animation I'd like to see if I can tackle writing about the following:
6. finally finish the Justice League essays, though I confess this probably won't happen quickly
Then there's more bookish stuff
7. discuss the new bad Ghost in the Shell remake with the old overhyped Ghost in the Shell. Those who venerate the old Oshii film will ... probably not like what I have to say about it.
I want to review John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution but though the book is very short the recommended secondary reading is pretty big. In fairness to the fact that I think several of the books in Borstlap's recommended reading list at the end of his book look fantastic I want to also read those, too. I have my differences with Borstlap about a few topics but I think what he's trying to do deserves an informed and considered review. I won't get into that stuff for now but if you read my references to Elements of Sonata Theory, the writing of George Rochberg, etc then you might have a guess what one of my concerns about the 2nd edition is.
Of course this blog being what it is I want to tackle a book or two as the basis for blogging and reviewing here.
7. I do want to write something about Justin Dean's book PR Matters. What I hope to do is to situate the book and Dean's career at Mars Hill in the context of the maelstrom of public relations issues that were already emerging as he took the reins. That takes some time, and more motivation than I have at the end of the year so, here's hoping for 2018.
Also ...
8. Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire
Jessica Johnson's monograph comes out in May of 2018.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/biblical-porn
I do plan to get a copy of the book and review it. Being the sort of moderately conservative semi-stick in the mud Presbyterian I am I don't doubt that Johnson and I differ on a few topics. But this blog has been committed to maintaining as ecumenical and scholarly approach as possible. I don't doubt that Johnson's book is going to be a more interesting read on the subject of Mars Hill than Dale Soden's mentions of Mars Hill in Outsiders in a Promised Land, which I discussed a while back.
I have had friends suggest that yours truly write a book about Mars Hill but I would need to recharge some batteries for a while before doing such a thing. I also regard popular Christian publishing to be one of the bad guys in the twenty year history of Mars Hill. If someone were to gift me a Thomas Nelson book these days my first temptation would be to burn the thing on general principle. But I am willing to consider discussing things with scholars if they get in touch at this point. Which is to say there's a decent possibility some of my blogging will get referenced in Johnson's book. The work of scholarly investigation into the history and dynamics of Mars Hill could and should in some sense only be just getting started but I have a feeling that what the Christian industrial complex would like to do is "move on" and proceed as though whatever happened at Mars Hill was just some aberration that couldn't tell us something about the very nature of the industries. Not sure I will write such a book because I don't feel like a writer of books so much as a writer of essays, but I won't rule it out altogether. It's also getting to the point where if a scholar or two wanted to get in touch I'd be open to being a resource for scholarly work on the topic of MHC. To the point, I'm okay with being quoted in a certain forthcoming monograph.
One of the biggest projects I hope to tackle, however, is addressing the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Francis Schaeffer's The God Who is There and Escape From Reason as the first two parts of his trilogy. I think it would be impossible to overstate the influence Schaeffer has had on conservative American evangelicals and that Schaeffer can be thought of as a kind of American evangelical equivalent of Theodor Adorno. That comparison is intended to be provocative because both men wrote sweeping accounts of Western art that can be read as a legend of WASP decline and white flight; both men wrote in the later 1960s and had connections to respectively right and left political movements.
Schaeffer's arts history is particularly bad, especially on the subject of music, which is a topic dear to my heart. For the fiftieth anniversary what I'm hoping to write isn't exactly going to be as harsh as a take-down but, though I was a fan of Schaeffer's work in my teens and early twenties, I now believe that if Anglo-American evangelicalism is going to make anything interesting in the arts that dismantling Schaeffer's master narrative of WASP decline is obligatory. Schaeffer, I intend to argue, had the same problem Adorno had but from a different direction. Both men venerated earlier bourgeois Western European art. When they perceived a radical break in history they reacted differently. Adorno wanted the break to be total and forward-moving (thus Schoenberg and Beckett), but did not altogether grasp how he was trapped ideologically within the Romantic era. There's three books by David P Roberts that unpack that a bit I might reference there. Schaeffer was a nostalgic who lamented the loss of Western culture without grasping that his narrative of decline couldn't even be squared with some basic points about Western history. Around the same time he was writing Leonard Meyer came up with a more interesting counterproposal about the eruption of progress and the avant garde. So ... stuff like that. I am glad Schaeffer didn't attempt to survey Western music history because it would have been a trainwreck. But in a way I almost have to discuss the 20th century musical changes in order to show how wildly wrong Francis Schaeffer was about stuff.
But ... this gets me to what I think is confining about the likes of Roger Scruton and John Borstlap, there's a sense in older guys, regardless of their place in the spectrum, that the high arts culture of Western Europe is on a decline. Well, yeah, of course, because the empires are fading away and why shouldn't they? My difference of conviction from people like Scruton or Borstlap has nothing to do with a lack of love for classical music. I adore the music of Haydn. But the collapse of the long 19th century's ars perfecta isn't a bad thing, it's just a thing that happened. We don't need some "renaissance" of a late Romantic idiom that has survived by way of the American song book and popular music and film scores just fine. The Renaissance itself was a culmination of centuries of experimentation throughout the medieval period and its renaissance (because what we were taught was the Renaissance was just the big R renaissance not unlike the Romantic era was a big R stand in for that movement). If we're in some kind of rhyming cycle of epochs of history we're not in a Renaissance, we're in a kind of new early or middle Baroque era, in which a panoply of forms and styles erupted with idioms based on improvisation over established formulas and tons of strophic structures. But I'm rambling again.
As usual, probably, what I hope to write about will probably be more than I manage to write about. They say it's good to set goals, so here are some goals.
a lookback on 2017, a relatively fallow time for the blog--the professional Christian media caste and its issues with amateurs, sociological propaganda as cultural norm, a MH thought or two, handful of favorites that were fun to write
I know there's no getting around the fact that this blog, to the extent that it's known about at all, is usually for one general topic, the life and times of Mars Hill but particularly its leadership culture. People who've already read this blog over the last ten years probably know the drill but I was at Mars Hill early enough in its history to have met not just Mark Driscoll but also Mike Gunn and Lief Moi. I also got to know a variety of people from that church community over the last ... wow ... it's actually approaching twenty years now ...
that can make a person feel old.
We're nearing the 20th anniversary of that Mars Hill feature in Mother Jones magazine where Mark said he was a very confrontational guy, not some pansy-ass therapist. A lot has changed and these days he's more about "father wound" and more or less lightly treading the subject of the only church prior to The Trinity Church that anyone would have any reason to know him for.
He said it was all about Jesus and for a time many of us thought that's what he meant, and maybe he even meant it for a time. Over time, particularly over the course of two decades, it may be proposed that what Mark Driscoll is about is legacy. For those who would call the church a cult from start to finish I'm not interested in contesting that, I'm more interested in posing a question that former members may have already settled for themselves but that those attempting to wrestle with the sea of information connected to the former church may benefit from reading about--if Mars Hill was a cult it couldn't sell a person what they weren't willing to buy, so what did they think they were investing into when they joined?
If you can't honestly answer for yourself what you were looking for when you signed on you won't honestly be able to tell yourself what a better alternative to that may be. To put things another way, if you were part of a cult and came to realize you were part of a cult that's just a point of arrival. What that point of arrival won't accomplish for you is making you less susceptible to operant conditioning. To put it still another way, just because you think you've stopped drinking the proverbial kool-aid doesn't mean you won't start drinking even more kool-aid based entirely on a different food coloring for the beverage that doesn't change the nature of what it is you've committed to as defined by how you commit to it.
As I see things, the alternative to a Mark Driscoll message can't be a Dan Savage message because in the end those two guys are the same kind of person. If you were a Twitter warrior for Mars Hill four or five years ago becoming a Twitter warrior on behalf of whatever cause you think is "opposite" Mark Driscoll is a mistake. I probably don't need to highlight too much just how much blogging I did inspired by Jacques Ellul's Propaganda over the last couple of years in connection to Mars Hill beyond a tag label. Not merely in passing, Ellul's book primarily addressed the topic of propaganda in political and educational contexts, yet his proposals about the nature and effectiveness of propagandistic techniques are so relevant to contemporary megachurch cultural dynamics I would propose that every Christian who is or has been part of a megachurch culture should consider reading Ellul's book.
I don't think it can be emphasized enough that what many Americans consider to be the activity of a megachurch pastor, or the activity of a social media savvy Christian in general, needs to be understood as a form of propagandistic activity. Most of the analyses I've seen attempted at highlighting the problems in the outrage cycle and how Christians in particular use social media and online networks to stump for these or those social or political causes fixate on the psychological dynamics they are afraid are being cultivated; some of those analyses even fret about the nature of the media usage but I don't think I've seen Christian bloggers say that the danger of using a blog or a Twitter handle or a Facebook platform to stump for this or that cause is that, if you're not explicitly marketing something, you're very likely participating in social media as a propagandist.
I've had more than a few criticisms of Mark Driscoll's approach to interpreting the Bible, and all sorts of other things but when I say I think that Mark Driscoll should be thought of not as a pastor but as a propagandist I grant that he's refined a formidable set of skills in the service of being a propagandist who is disguised as a pastor. He's been so upfront through his internal talks with Mars Hill leadership as documented here and elsewhere about the nature of his media use and philosophy of media use that what separates him from other megachurch pastors and celebrity Christians is that he has, whether you love him or not, made the nature of the media use so transparent he lampshades it. Driscoll is not so much unusual as a propagandist figure for simply being one but by highlighting this in his career at so many levels that if he were a television character he's broken the fourth wall about how he does what he's done.
And, frankly, for that I'm sincerely grateful. Read through the tagged posts on Ellul and Mars Hill, read those statements Driscoll made about social media channel usage and compare that to Ellul's definition of a propagandist and I'd say that I didn't even really have to make a case that Driscoll was a propagandist rather than a pastor because Driscoll described his media usage in essentially propagandistic terms.
One of the upshots of Ellul's book was to warn that in technological societies such as ours propaganda was not even optional and that if the Church embraced it then it would stop being the Church and serve whatever ideologies were dominant in the propagandistic era.
Another way to unpack that proposal is to say that Ellul was in some sense warning us about the emergence of what some in the Christian blogging and media sphere call the Christian industrial complex. In this complex, however, opposites are not necessarily based on a Matthew Paul Turner vs a Mark Driscoll or a Rachel Held Evans vs a Mark Driscoll or John Piper. No, these oppositions that appear to hold on paper are more apparent than actual in terms of what role these people play in the Christian media establishment.
Look, I'll put it this way, when Rachel Held Evans had her "Mark Driscoll is a bully, stand up to him" I was cynical about the sincerity of the ploy not because I don't believe she considers Driscoll to be a bully. No, my cynicism was about how it seemed that Evans only made a public relations point of standing in opposition to Driscoll when it was time for one of her books to hit the market. The substance of her engagement with Mark Driscoll's ideas was ... well ... kind of insubstantial. It was not Rachel Held Evans but Janet Mefferd who confronted Mark Driscoll on air with allegations of plagiarism.
And for those who remember the 2011 online "incident" that catalyzed Rachel Held Evans' outcry, something to do with fishing for anecdotes about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leaders in church services, Driscoll revealed he was trying to "start a conversation" and that somehow he didn't have the platform he needed to do that in spite of being a megachurch pastor with a blog and podcasts and things like that. So ... he was going to address the big issues at Pastor Mark TV and in a forthcoming book about marriage called .... Real Marriage.
Here in 2017 I look back on 2011 and it seems like Mark Driscoll and Rachel Held Evans found it convenient to use their outrage cycles to promote their books. Something that Christian pundits who decry the outrage cycle keep skating over when they condemn the lack of charity is a seeming refusal to admit that these kind of stoking the fires for the willing market is the whole damned point in media production and promotional terms. Take Mark and Grace Driscoll's book on Real Marriage, there's a river of marriage books out there already. If by the grace of God you somehow benefited from reading that book I don't want to take that way from you and, obviously, I can't. But if the Gospel Coalition crew really cared about promoting the writings of the Reformers wouldn't they spend that money on, I dunno, translating and distributing the works of Bullinger and some of the continental Reformers whose works are not yet translated into English? As the Driscoll plagiarism controversy unfurled for us who were ... well ... involved in documenting that, a lot of what passed for insight in Driscoll's books was recycling and re-presenting ideas from other, better books spanning the last ten to twenty odd years. If what passes for popular level Christian book writing and selling in Anglo American contexts turned out to be cannibalizing old stuff in the hopes that people won't notice or that people will buy the old stuff can't any new Calvinist just go to monergism.org or even archive.org and just download a bunch of Richard Sibbes? The Bruised Reed really is great.
I got the feeling in the last few years in the post Mars Hill meltdown that the Christian media industry peanut gallery pretended that the problem was unaccountable bloggers and pundits when I don't think that's ultimately a particularly important issue compared to the conduct of the Christian publishing industry and associated systems. The outrage cycle is business as usual. Seeing how Driscoll and Evans played each other as catalysts for mobilizing their own respective fan bases by way of a lather, rinse and repeat cycle of online outrage was illuminating to consider over the last six years, but illuminating in mostly a bad way.
I'm not talking about scholars arguing in a scholarly way, that's been going on for as long as there have been scholars. I get that, I really do.
I'm talking about something else. If you're a Christian complaining about the liberal or conservative media while hashtagging on Twitter you might want to ask yourself why you're complaining about the paid professionals who are doing professionally what you're voluntarily doing at your own expense. The irony of a celebrity Christian blogger like Mark Driscoll venting frustration at Christian bloggers being uncharitable was an irony so rich that if it were a cake you'd have to have a one eighth inch slice so as to not overwhelm your taste buds. Almost no church in the last twenty years was more famous than Mars Hill was for social media savvy and yet Driscoll would inveigh against bloggers. Justin Dean's book features some frustration with bloggers yet he, too, has done blogging and podcasting. Apparently all this stuff is just fine as long as it's being done by guys (preferably guys) and gals who are already working in the Christian media and publishing industries. It's maybe just tolerable for Joe or Jane Christian if you know where they live, in church terms, but that's less than ideal.
At this point I would mention that I've been part of a PCA church for the last six years or so, so if at any point Mars Hill leadership tried to indicate that I wasn't in submission to spiritual authority or wasn't a member of a church it wouldn't be hard to invite friends to visit me at the church I attend to catch up on stuff. The laundry list of reasons a celebrity Christian blogger of a neo-Calvinist stripe would say you shouldn't trust this blog didn't apply. The MH leaders couldn't say I wasn't Reformed enough or didn't have solid enough theology (I was recruited to the Theology Response Team to answer questions on behalf of the MH elders by a deacon and an elder more than a decade ago). They also couldn't say I wasn't part of a local church. They couldn't say I was bitter because I was denied this or that leadership role in the church because I've never wanted to actually be in formal ministry at any level. This conventional list of complaints about Christian bloggers that neo-Calvinists tend to trot out on the internet wasn't applicable to me and the hundreds if not thousands of people from Mars Hill who had any idea who I was could work this out for themselves, I didn't even need to tell them.
I've got maybe not even a tenth of the blog traffic this year that I had back in 2014 and that's great. I love that the blog isn't mainly about the Mars Hill scene. Of course I plan to leave everything I've ever blogged about Mars Hill over the last decade up for consultation. I've been happy to get back to blogging about the stuff I wanted to blog about before I felt obliged to chronicle things about Mars Hill. Nobody could make a compelling case that "all" this blog has ever been about was attacking Mars Hill or Mark Driscoll. The paradox is that in many cases the Christian bloggers who lament the kinds of glib analyses they see being promulgated online, who are worried about the "hot take" culture, are often ... heh ...
Blogger activists and anti-blogger blogging activists are using the same range of tools to make their respective points but in many a case these Christian bloggers and anti-bloggers don't realize how similar their spiritual fruit and range of polemical styles overlap. The most tedious bromide from conservative Christian bloggers and pundits I've heard and seen over the last fifteen years is that immersion in this or that pop culture product or social media system keeps people from being grown up.
For those who were part of Mars Hill and have left it the last thing you might want to be doing is taking up a cause to fight for on the internet if, a mere three to five years ago the cause you were constantly advocating for was Mars Hill and your investment of yourself in it. What happens in a society like ours is that when people stop drinking one kind of kool-aid they don't really stop drinking kool-aid, they just change the color of the kool-aid to some other cause. As Ellul put it, when people change teams they don't stop absorbing propaganda, they simply start absorbing propaganda for a different cause. So a person who was a complementarian at Mars Hill might become a feminist, the problem is that if you reduce Mars Hill to an ideological checklist and that's that you have completely failed to understand how profoundly a culture like that shapes who you are. It's never just "what" it's the mind-shaping immersion of the "how".
Think of it this way, former Mars Hill member, if you haven't in some sense detoxified a mass-media fueled, social media participating activist conception of public righteousness that defines who you are then it doesn't matter whether you're throwing yourself into a blue state civic religion or a red state civic religion you'll be serving an antichrist worse than whatever it was you served within the confines of Mars Hill. It doesn't matter if you wanted to make America great again or affirm "I'm with her". Driscoll's propagandistic method was small time by comparison.
Let me see if I can try to approach this indirectly by way of a reflection on what's known as the "hot take" approach to social issues in social media. It could be applicable to the first person industrial complex/personal essay approach as well.
The Christian "hot take" blog or podcast needs to be understood as part and parcel of a cultural system of content generation and content promotion. You know ... in a way I gotta give Justin Dean credit for spelling this out in his book about PR. What makes Mars Hill a special church culture in 21st century American terms is how explicitly is leadership culture kept publishing content about how and why they're propagandists and how and why, if you want your church to thrive, you should totally be one, too, or hire someone who is. But, ahem ...
In evangelical terms there's basically one of two paths at work:
1) a Christian with a modicum of celebrity is inveighing on a topic to agitate a base
2) a Christian with a modicum of celebrity is talking to another Christian about a product on sale or a cause to invest in
That's ... pretty much it, right there.
When Jesus said to take care you don't do your righteous deeds for acclaim the warning can apply to social media use, even though it's arguable that in making use of social media you're never doing anything except advertising something. That's it. That's what social media is remarkably useful for, promoting stuff if not outright selling stuff. Every time you use social media of any kind ask yourself "Why am I willing to sell this?" Because selling is what you're doing. It's fine if you believe in the cause but, and this is the point I've been hammering away at here, you need to also ask yourself if you being a propagandist is the best way to use your time. Ellul wrote half a century ago that there was this thing called sociological propaganda and that it was immensely difficult to produce and distribute at a state controlled top down level. Well, that was half a century ago. Ellul was not in a position to anticipate that the majority of what goes on in the blogosphere and social media usage, as I'm seeing it in the Christian media industry scene but even more so in political activity, is sociological propaganda.
Sociological propaganda is what you let the rabid fans of the brand do on your behalf and all you hae to do in a gatekeeping capacity is to say a few things that provide them with an incentive to do their own thing. Mars Hill members who plugged into social media got fantastic at creating sociological propaganda whether they knew that was what they were doing or not. If your righteousness is demonstrated by what you post on social media feeds first and foremost then, hey, you're like Mark Driscoll! Sweet. You're like Rachel Held Evans! You're like any celebrity Christian who can use social media to sell something and you're doing it at your own time and expense. Maybe it's for a great cause addressing social inequality or the decline of Christian doctrine. My warning is that if you don't abandon this "how" of being a social media advocate online even if you've left Mars Hill then at a social, emotional and spiritual level you're still acting like a Mars Hill member even if you think you've repudiated the official platform of ideas you picked up there.
Which is another way of warning that if you're a former Mars Hill member you could still manifest the training of that culture in how you use social media and relate to people through it, reflecting the cultural training you got inside Mars Hill. The longer you were there and the more immersed you were in that leadership culture the worse you're likely still going to be unless you step back long enough to understand what being a lay or vocational propagandist in a social media context might mean.
Last year Joe Carter wrote about "pseudo-events". It's possible to read a pseudo-event as a publicity stunt, which, of course, it is, but pseudo events probably constitute a more virtual stunt. No, I think I take that back, I hesitate to call pseudo-events publicity stunts because I think that a pseudo-event is ... well, you can read Carter first.
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/are-evangelicals-addicted-to-pseudo-events-and-social-media-outrage
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/12/ht-phoenix-preacher-joe-carter-writes.html
The Christian media complex isn't addicted to pseudo-events, pseudo-events are simply the new norm for marketing. You see that two option summary of what goes on in Christian punditry earlier? Well, anything that isn't a front and center explicit sales pitch for a product is going to be the outrage machine that drums up demand for a sales pitch for a product that addresses the topic that is most often brought up in the pseudo-event, often a person and the person as a representation or distillation of a set of ideas or behaviors. Mark Driscoll is a bully! Stand up to him ... by buying my book! I don't have a set of platforms that can adequately give me an occasion to pontificate on marriage above and beyond my pulpit and blogs and twitter and Facebook and Instagram and ... anyway ... in order to really talk about important issues a guy needs a dedicated web page and also to promote this book.
When people who are the movers and shakers within the Christian media industry itself get indignant about amateurs using the same tools they use in the professional scene to similar ends, but particularly when the amateurs raise objections to the lather, rinse and repeat cycle of production promotion passing itself off as spiritual life, the outrage may be more that there are Christians who object to the idea of the constant rebel sell itself. Don't prove to me your a Christian by how you're willing to sell me something on social media that might be a cause you really, seriously believe in. Show that you're a Christian by how you treat people.
When the guys at the Gospel Coalition so often embody the very sales pitch methods and pseudo-events they find frustrating in others it's impossible to take them seriously, just as its impossible to take a Rachel Held Evans seriously or even Matthew Paul Turner. The longer I spend time blogging and reading blogs and considering what celebrity Christians who use social media have to say about it when the shoe is on the other foot the harder I find it to believe they can say a lot in good faith. Frequently the people most upset about how other people seem to be misusing or misshaped by social media activity are themselves symptomatic of the problems they see in others.
Now, obviously, I am absolutely all in and all for Christians using blogs and social media with a social responsibility paradigm of serving the public good and loving neighbor. Clearly I believe that's an important thing Christians should do. But that is not the same thing as being in sales mode or stirring up anger so that the angry base can then be sold on a product they've been primed to want to buy.
So part of my scaling back of blogging activity is that I don't feel like I need to blog as much this year, I don't feel like blogging as much because it takes away time from reading and composing, and because I'm not eager to be part of what I now regard as the Christian blogosphere's fixation on outrage production and sales promotion. I guess I' m saying that I believe blogging can and should be used in the promotion of education and the public good and not just a blunt instrument for sociological propaganda of the sort that is the aim of red state and blue state civic religions that masquerade as the Christian faith.
You also can't really blog as fast if you're doing the kind of musical analysis I've been doing or getting back into writing about films now and then.
The last year or so has not been particularly pleasant or encouraging and there have been some things in the offline world that came up that made the prospect of writing as much as I used to less appealing.
Nevertheless, obviously I blogged a couple hundred posts this year. Fittingly enough, we kicked off the year 2017 at Wenatchee The Hatchet looking back at Frank Turk's quitting blogging at Pyromanics.
Frank Turk at Pyromaniacs on calling it a day on blogging, which inspires some more thoughts on what some call watchblogging
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/01/frank-turk-at-pyromaniacs-on-calling-it.html
For those who aren't already familiar with what I mean by talking about red state and blue state civic religions there's this piece:
revisiting the "Deadlock of American civic religions" ide, Americans de-churching from the institutional church doesn't mean for a moment they'll be rejecting the red or blue state civic religions
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/revisiting-deadlock-of-american-civic.html
Whereas 20 years ago I really enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer my interest in the series cooled steadily and even quickly after the end of season 3. I explained a bit of that and why I've come to believe that Joss Whedon is kind of an overhyped one-trick pony over at the following post.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer at year 20
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/buffy-vampire-slayer-at-year-20.html
Now one of my favorite blog posts from 2017, easily, would also have to be the least user-friendly post for anyone who doesn't have fun reading musicology books at a grad school level.
On the possibilities of spatial-temporal correspondence between the syntactics of ragtime and sonata forms
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/04/on-possibilities-of-spatial-temporal.html
One of my projects in the last few years has been working to formulate a fusion of the syntactic procedures of sonata forms with the style of ragtime, blues, and country. There's a lot of theoretical reflection and compositional work that has to go into a project like that. It's been one of the things I've been slowly working at accomplishing in the last twenty years. It was the kind of thing I meant to start writing about seriously in 2011 but, as anyone who's read the blog between 2011 and 2015 knows, a bunch of stuff at Mars Hill happened. But this year and last I've managed to get more into blogging in a serious way about music and the arts more generally.
Of course ... seeing as somebody still insists on a media presence and has a legacy that has been ... interpreted a bit post-resignation, it was necessary to provide a long-form analysis of the interview Mark Driscoll did with Sheila Walsh. The video went down quickly after initial release and it's only accessible via Driscoll's platform last I saw, but there's an extensive analysis with links (which may or may not work now) in this series of tagged post.
on the Walsh/Robison interview with Mark Driscoll
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/walsh%20Robison%20interview
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/06/alex-ross-on-occult-roots-of-modernism.html
Since this year was also the 25th anniversary of Batman: the animated series, it seemed good to run with all the content I wrote for Mockingbird for the 20th anniversary years ago. If memory serves (and it might not) the versions at this blog are the longer, less edited-down versions of what Mbird ran years ago. I remember the end of the Clayface essay was truncated at Mbird in a way that I hoped wouldn't happen. If you want to read all the originally published works at Mockingbird that whole set of essays is called Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/BTAS
Not that anyone exactly asked me but if someone were to ask me what I had the most fun writing in all of my time as a blogger I'd have to say it was writing about Batman: the animated series for Mockingbird. I had a blast writing it, even though it was actually ... pretty difficult. One of my college buddies read the series years ago and told me he thought it was funny that I wrote about Batman cartoons just as seriously as I would write about Dostoevsky. Well, yeah! I love Dostoevsky, too! I even think that for all its warts here and there that Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy is the closest thing to an adaptation in spirit we'll get for a Dostoevsky story. The more time goes by I can appreciate BTAS even with its shortcomings of clunkily written episodes and some takes on characters I didn't always warm up to. You can't understand the last twenty years of American animation on television without getting a sense of how much BTAS and The Simpsons opened the floodgates to a new approach to animation. I take Dini and Timm's series seriously as art because they made it clear that what they wanted to do with the series was treat it as a work of art and not just something to distract the kids in the afternoon. It shows and the show has held up for decades since it came out.
Another less charming anniversary came this year.
regarding the 10th anniversary of Mark Driscoll's "Fathers and Fighting"; two firings and their context; and Driscoll's explication of powers and providences published or presented in 2008 in the vein of "I see things" and how distrust of his executive elder team was wrong
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/09/regarding-10th-anniversary-of-mark.html
There were a few deaths this year. Nat Hentoff passed but for classical guitarists the most noteworthy passing was more recent, the death of Matanya Ophee. Ophee's lecture "Repertoire Issues" was something I read in transcript at G.A.L.I. on Ophee's website way, way back in 1999 and it changed my life.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/11/rip-matanya-ophee.html
I started composing a cycle of chamber sonatas for the guitar with woodwinds, strings and brass. It's supposed to have about twenty-four duo sonatas in it by the time I'm finished. Ophee's admonition to guitarists was that we have no inferiority complex about what our instrument and its literature has to offer. I started getting an idea to write 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar over the years and eventually finished that cycle, and arranged it for guitar duet. I've been working on creating another cycle of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar since 2015. Knowing that a lot of people just don't like fugues I know the stuff won't be to everyone's liking and it's an esoteric niche, but I've managed to conclude to my own satisfaction, if no one else's necessarily, that fully convertible counterpoint on solo guitar in every major and minor key is absolutely possible and even practical.
I really, really wanted to write about Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar which were published this year. They deserve to be written about and they deserve to be heard, but this was, sadly, not the year to have things together enough to blog in that way, not the way I would like to write about the cycle.
Nor did I write about John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution as I'd intended.
There's no review of PR Matters by Justin Dean, that may as well wait for 2018, too.
I also meant to write about a few other things but those things are incubating.
I did a little bit of writing over at Mbird this year, though.
We kicked off contribution to Mockingbird by being unimpressed with The Red Turtle. The film was pretty but vacant, an uninspired entry in what I'd now probably describe as a mollifying art religion for what a bohemian bourgeois. Yeah ... that might be a harsh way of putting it but the film was a real disappointment.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/03/the-red-turtle-beautiful-but-not-sublime/
If you want to see a film that manages to be visually gorgeous and surreal and riffs on connection and spirituality in a way that's vastly more interesting than The Red Turtle go rent Your Name. The subject of incompetent Western remakes of anime classics real or merely cult is going to be something I hope to tackle in 2018 because, man, that Ghost in the Shell remake was lame but in many respects no lamer than the original. But I might be able to demonstrate by example that a film like Oshii's original Ghost in the Shell is a cult classic because of the stream of ideas that film critics can write about the film that the new film shuts off. I've written a lot in bits and pieces about how the art religion envisioned by 19th century artists has mutated into a kind of meta-art religion of arts criticism and I'd unpack more of what I think that means but it's easier to do that as part of another project I've been incubating. It's probably going to make its way into what would be considered an unpardonable sin in the art religion of arts criticism Decalogue of writing about the Michael Bay Transformers franchise. Yeah, they're terrible movies but they're terrible in a very special way that film critics don't want to understand.
Meant to tackle that this year but ... well ... see ... I'm not going to get at my attempts to read Gadamer's Truth and Method as part of that project so let's just move on.
I actually really liked the new Wonder Woman movie, though--yet it was fascinating to read film critics and social commentators find Diana wanting in light of her perceived debt to real feminists and real feminism and some went so far as to say it was Americanist propaganda ... as if that problem in Marston's creation was somehow not emblazoned in the costume. But I digress.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/06/defeat-even-in-victory-wonder-woman-critical-response-and-modes-of-low-anthropology/
Another superhero film I saw and thought was ... okay ... was the new Spiderman film. The cake was tasty and yet it has a strange aftertaste which was the subject of this essay.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming-with-frosting-so-good-you-can-forget-theres-something-off-about-the-cake/
I guess now that I've written all this out even a "fallow" year for me involves a lot of writing.
that can make a person feel old.
We're nearing the 20th anniversary of that Mars Hill feature in Mother Jones magazine where Mark said he was a very confrontational guy, not some pansy-ass therapist. A lot has changed and these days he's more about "father wound" and more or less lightly treading the subject of the only church prior to The Trinity Church that anyone would have any reason to know him for.
He said it was all about Jesus and for a time many of us thought that's what he meant, and maybe he even meant it for a time. Over time, particularly over the course of two decades, it may be proposed that what Mark Driscoll is about is legacy. For those who would call the church a cult from start to finish I'm not interested in contesting that, I'm more interested in posing a question that former members may have already settled for themselves but that those attempting to wrestle with the sea of information connected to the former church may benefit from reading about--if Mars Hill was a cult it couldn't sell a person what they weren't willing to buy, so what did they think they were investing into when they joined?
If you can't honestly answer for yourself what you were looking for when you signed on you won't honestly be able to tell yourself what a better alternative to that may be. To put things another way, if you were part of a cult and came to realize you were part of a cult that's just a point of arrival. What that point of arrival won't accomplish for you is making you less susceptible to operant conditioning. To put it still another way, just because you think you've stopped drinking the proverbial kool-aid doesn't mean you won't start drinking even more kool-aid based entirely on a different food coloring for the beverage that doesn't change the nature of what it is you've committed to as defined by how you commit to it.
As I see things, the alternative to a Mark Driscoll message can't be a Dan Savage message because in the end those two guys are the same kind of person. If you were a Twitter warrior for Mars Hill four or five years ago becoming a Twitter warrior on behalf of whatever cause you think is "opposite" Mark Driscoll is a mistake. I probably don't need to highlight too much just how much blogging I did inspired by Jacques Ellul's Propaganda over the last couple of years in connection to Mars Hill beyond a tag label. Not merely in passing, Ellul's book primarily addressed the topic of propaganda in political and educational contexts, yet his proposals about the nature and effectiveness of propagandistic techniques are so relevant to contemporary megachurch cultural dynamics I would propose that every Christian who is or has been part of a megachurch culture should consider reading Ellul's book.
I don't think it can be emphasized enough that what many Americans consider to be the activity of a megachurch pastor, or the activity of a social media savvy Christian in general, needs to be understood as a form of propagandistic activity. Most of the analyses I've seen attempted at highlighting the problems in the outrage cycle and how Christians in particular use social media and online networks to stump for these or those social or political causes fixate on the psychological dynamics they are afraid are being cultivated; some of those analyses even fret about the nature of the media usage but I don't think I've seen Christian bloggers say that the danger of using a blog or a Twitter handle or a Facebook platform to stump for this or that cause is that, if you're not explicitly marketing something, you're very likely participating in social media as a propagandist.
I've had more than a few criticisms of Mark Driscoll's approach to interpreting the Bible, and all sorts of other things but when I say I think that Mark Driscoll should be thought of not as a pastor but as a propagandist I grant that he's refined a formidable set of skills in the service of being a propagandist who is disguised as a pastor. He's been so upfront through his internal talks with Mars Hill leadership as documented here and elsewhere about the nature of his media use and philosophy of media use that what separates him from other megachurch pastors and celebrity Christians is that he has, whether you love him or not, made the nature of the media use so transparent he lampshades it. Driscoll is not so much unusual as a propagandist figure for simply being one but by highlighting this in his career at so many levels that if he were a television character he's broken the fourth wall about how he does what he's done.
And, frankly, for that I'm sincerely grateful. Read through the tagged posts on Ellul and Mars Hill, read those statements Driscoll made about social media channel usage and compare that to Ellul's definition of a propagandist and I'd say that I didn't even really have to make a case that Driscoll was a propagandist rather than a pastor because Driscoll described his media usage in essentially propagandistic terms.
One of the upshots of Ellul's book was to warn that in technological societies such as ours propaganda was not even optional and that if the Church embraced it then it would stop being the Church and serve whatever ideologies were dominant in the propagandistic era.
Another way to unpack that proposal is to say that Ellul was in some sense warning us about the emergence of what some in the Christian blogging and media sphere call the Christian industrial complex. In this complex, however, opposites are not necessarily based on a Matthew Paul Turner vs a Mark Driscoll or a Rachel Held Evans vs a Mark Driscoll or John Piper. No, these oppositions that appear to hold on paper are more apparent than actual in terms of what role these people play in the Christian media establishment.
Look, I'll put it this way, when Rachel Held Evans had her "Mark Driscoll is a bully, stand up to him" I was cynical about the sincerity of the ploy not because I don't believe she considers Driscoll to be a bully. No, my cynicism was about how it seemed that Evans only made a public relations point of standing in opposition to Driscoll when it was time for one of her books to hit the market. The substance of her engagement with Mark Driscoll's ideas was ... well ... kind of insubstantial. It was not Rachel Held Evans but Janet Mefferd who confronted Mark Driscoll on air with allegations of plagiarism.
And for those who remember the 2011 online "incident" that catalyzed Rachel Held Evans' outcry, something to do with fishing for anecdotes about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leaders in church services, Driscoll revealed he was trying to "start a conversation" and that somehow he didn't have the platform he needed to do that in spite of being a megachurch pastor with a blog and podcasts and things like that. So ... he was going to address the big issues at Pastor Mark TV and in a forthcoming book about marriage called .... Real Marriage.
Here in 2017 I look back on 2011 and it seems like Mark Driscoll and Rachel Held Evans found it convenient to use their outrage cycles to promote their books. Something that Christian pundits who decry the outrage cycle keep skating over when they condemn the lack of charity is a seeming refusal to admit that these kind of stoking the fires for the willing market is the whole damned point in media production and promotional terms. Take Mark and Grace Driscoll's book on Real Marriage, there's a river of marriage books out there already. If by the grace of God you somehow benefited from reading that book I don't want to take that way from you and, obviously, I can't. But if the Gospel Coalition crew really cared about promoting the writings of the Reformers wouldn't they spend that money on, I dunno, translating and distributing the works of Bullinger and some of the continental Reformers whose works are not yet translated into English? As the Driscoll plagiarism controversy unfurled for us who were ... well ... involved in documenting that, a lot of what passed for insight in Driscoll's books was recycling and re-presenting ideas from other, better books spanning the last ten to twenty odd years. If what passes for popular level Christian book writing and selling in Anglo American contexts turned out to be cannibalizing old stuff in the hopes that people won't notice or that people will buy the old stuff can't any new Calvinist just go to monergism.org or even archive.org and just download a bunch of Richard Sibbes? The Bruised Reed really is great.
I got the feeling in the last few years in the post Mars Hill meltdown that the Christian media industry peanut gallery pretended that the problem was unaccountable bloggers and pundits when I don't think that's ultimately a particularly important issue compared to the conduct of the Christian publishing industry and associated systems. The outrage cycle is business as usual. Seeing how Driscoll and Evans played each other as catalysts for mobilizing their own respective fan bases by way of a lather, rinse and repeat cycle of online outrage was illuminating to consider over the last six years, but illuminating in mostly a bad way.
I'm not talking about scholars arguing in a scholarly way, that's been going on for as long as there have been scholars. I get that, I really do.
I'm talking about something else. If you're a Christian complaining about the liberal or conservative media while hashtagging on Twitter you might want to ask yourself why you're complaining about the paid professionals who are doing professionally what you're voluntarily doing at your own expense. The irony of a celebrity Christian blogger like Mark Driscoll venting frustration at Christian bloggers being uncharitable was an irony so rich that if it were a cake you'd have to have a one eighth inch slice so as to not overwhelm your taste buds. Almost no church in the last twenty years was more famous than Mars Hill was for social media savvy and yet Driscoll would inveigh against bloggers. Justin Dean's book features some frustration with bloggers yet he, too, has done blogging and podcasting. Apparently all this stuff is just fine as long as it's being done by guys (preferably guys) and gals who are already working in the Christian media and publishing industries. It's maybe just tolerable for Joe or Jane Christian if you know where they live, in church terms, but that's less than ideal.
At this point I would mention that I've been part of a PCA church for the last six years or so, so if at any point Mars Hill leadership tried to indicate that I wasn't in submission to spiritual authority or wasn't a member of a church it wouldn't be hard to invite friends to visit me at the church I attend to catch up on stuff. The laundry list of reasons a celebrity Christian blogger of a neo-Calvinist stripe would say you shouldn't trust this blog didn't apply. The MH leaders couldn't say I wasn't Reformed enough or didn't have solid enough theology (I was recruited to the Theology Response Team to answer questions on behalf of the MH elders by a deacon and an elder more than a decade ago). They also couldn't say I wasn't part of a local church. They couldn't say I was bitter because I was denied this or that leadership role in the church because I've never wanted to actually be in formal ministry at any level. This conventional list of complaints about Christian bloggers that neo-Calvinists tend to trot out on the internet wasn't applicable to me and the hundreds if not thousands of people from Mars Hill who had any idea who I was could work this out for themselves, I didn't even need to tell them.
I've got maybe not even a tenth of the blog traffic this year that I had back in 2014 and that's great. I love that the blog isn't mainly about the Mars Hill scene. Of course I plan to leave everything I've ever blogged about Mars Hill over the last decade up for consultation. I've been happy to get back to blogging about the stuff I wanted to blog about before I felt obliged to chronicle things about Mars Hill. Nobody could make a compelling case that "all" this blog has ever been about was attacking Mars Hill or Mark Driscoll. The paradox is that in many cases the Christian bloggers who lament the kinds of glib analyses they see being promulgated online, who are worried about the "hot take" culture, are often ... heh ...
Blogger activists and anti-blogger blogging activists are using the same range of tools to make their respective points but in many a case these Christian bloggers and anti-bloggers don't realize how similar their spiritual fruit and range of polemical styles overlap. The most tedious bromide from conservative Christian bloggers and pundits I've heard and seen over the last fifteen years is that immersion in this or that pop culture product or social media system keeps people from being grown up.
For those who were part of Mars Hill and have left it the last thing you might want to be doing is taking up a cause to fight for on the internet if, a mere three to five years ago the cause you were constantly advocating for was Mars Hill and your investment of yourself in it. What happens in a society like ours is that when people stop drinking one kind of kool-aid they don't really stop drinking kool-aid, they just change the color of the kool-aid to some other cause. As Ellul put it, when people change teams they don't stop absorbing propaganda, they simply start absorbing propaganda for a different cause. So a person who was a complementarian at Mars Hill might become a feminist, the problem is that if you reduce Mars Hill to an ideological checklist and that's that you have completely failed to understand how profoundly a culture like that shapes who you are. It's never just "what" it's the mind-shaping immersion of the "how".
Think of it this way, former Mars Hill member, if you haven't in some sense detoxified a mass-media fueled, social media participating activist conception of public righteousness that defines who you are then it doesn't matter whether you're throwing yourself into a blue state civic religion or a red state civic religion you'll be serving an antichrist worse than whatever it was you served within the confines of Mars Hill. It doesn't matter if you wanted to make America great again or affirm "I'm with her". Driscoll's propagandistic method was small time by comparison.
Let me see if I can try to approach this indirectly by way of a reflection on what's known as the "hot take" approach to social issues in social media. It could be applicable to the first person industrial complex/personal essay approach as well.
The Christian "hot take" blog or podcast needs to be understood as part and parcel of a cultural system of content generation and content promotion. You know ... in a way I gotta give Justin Dean credit for spelling this out in his book about PR. What makes Mars Hill a special church culture in 21st century American terms is how explicitly is leadership culture kept publishing content about how and why they're propagandists and how and why, if you want your church to thrive, you should totally be one, too, or hire someone who is. But, ahem ...
In evangelical terms there's basically one of two paths at work:
1) a Christian with a modicum of celebrity is inveighing on a topic to agitate a base
2) a Christian with a modicum of celebrity is talking to another Christian about a product on sale or a cause to invest in
That's ... pretty much it, right there.
When Jesus said to take care you don't do your righteous deeds for acclaim the warning can apply to social media use, even though it's arguable that in making use of social media you're never doing anything except advertising something. That's it. That's what social media is remarkably useful for, promoting stuff if not outright selling stuff. Every time you use social media of any kind ask yourself "Why am I willing to sell this?" Because selling is what you're doing. It's fine if you believe in the cause but, and this is the point I've been hammering away at here, you need to also ask yourself if you being a propagandist is the best way to use your time. Ellul wrote half a century ago that there was this thing called sociological propaganda and that it was immensely difficult to produce and distribute at a state controlled top down level. Well, that was half a century ago. Ellul was not in a position to anticipate that the majority of what goes on in the blogosphere and social media usage, as I'm seeing it in the Christian media industry scene but even more so in political activity, is sociological propaganda.
Sociological propaganda is what you let the rabid fans of the brand do on your behalf and all you hae to do in a gatekeeping capacity is to say a few things that provide them with an incentive to do their own thing. Mars Hill members who plugged into social media got fantastic at creating sociological propaganda whether they knew that was what they were doing or not. If your righteousness is demonstrated by what you post on social media feeds first and foremost then, hey, you're like Mark Driscoll! Sweet. You're like Rachel Held Evans! You're like any celebrity Christian who can use social media to sell something and you're doing it at your own time and expense. Maybe it's for a great cause addressing social inequality or the decline of Christian doctrine. My warning is that if you don't abandon this "how" of being a social media advocate online even if you've left Mars Hill then at a social, emotional and spiritual level you're still acting like a Mars Hill member even if you think you've repudiated the official platform of ideas you picked up there.
Which is another way of warning that if you're a former Mars Hill member you could still manifest the training of that culture in how you use social media and relate to people through it, reflecting the cultural training you got inside Mars Hill. The longer you were there and the more immersed you were in that leadership culture the worse you're likely still going to be unless you step back long enough to understand what being a lay or vocational propagandist in a social media context might mean.
Last year Joe Carter wrote about "pseudo-events". It's possible to read a pseudo-event as a publicity stunt, which, of course, it is, but pseudo events probably constitute a more virtual stunt. No, I think I take that back, I hesitate to call pseudo-events publicity stunts because I think that a pseudo-event is ... well, you can read Carter first.
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/are-evangelicals-addicted-to-pseudo-events-and-social-media-outrage
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/12/ht-phoenix-preacher-joe-carter-writes.html
The Christian media complex isn't addicted to pseudo-events, pseudo-events are simply the new norm for marketing. You see that two option summary of what goes on in Christian punditry earlier? Well, anything that isn't a front and center explicit sales pitch for a product is going to be the outrage machine that drums up demand for a sales pitch for a product that addresses the topic that is most often brought up in the pseudo-event, often a person and the person as a representation or distillation of a set of ideas or behaviors. Mark Driscoll is a bully! Stand up to him ... by buying my book! I don't have a set of platforms that can adequately give me an occasion to pontificate on marriage above and beyond my pulpit and blogs and twitter and Facebook and Instagram and ... anyway ... in order to really talk about important issues a guy needs a dedicated web page and also to promote this book.
When people who are the movers and shakers within the Christian media industry itself get indignant about amateurs using the same tools they use in the professional scene to similar ends, but particularly when the amateurs raise objections to the lather, rinse and repeat cycle of production promotion passing itself off as spiritual life, the outrage may be more that there are Christians who object to the idea of the constant rebel sell itself. Don't prove to me your a Christian by how you're willing to sell me something on social media that might be a cause you really, seriously believe in. Show that you're a Christian by how you treat people.
When the guys at the Gospel Coalition so often embody the very sales pitch methods and pseudo-events they find frustrating in others it's impossible to take them seriously, just as its impossible to take a Rachel Held Evans seriously or even Matthew Paul Turner. The longer I spend time blogging and reading blogs and considering what celebrity Christians who use social media have to say about it when the shoe is on the other foot the harder I find it to believe they can say a lot in good faith. Frequently the people most upset about how other people seem to be misusing or misshaped by social media activity are themselves symptomatic of the problems they see in others.
Now, obviously, I am absolutely all in and all for Christians using blogs and social media with a social responsibility paradigm of serving the public good and loving neighbor. Clearly I believe that's an important thing Christians should do. But that is not the same thing as being in sales mode or stirring up anger so that the angry base can then be sold on a product they've been primed to want to buy.
So part of my scaling back of blogging activity is that I don't feel like I need to blog as much this year, I don't feel like blogging as much because it takes away time from reading and composing, and because I'm not eager to be part of what I now regard as the Christian blogosphere's fixation on outrage production and sales promotion. I guess I' m saying that I believe blogging can and should be used in the promotion of education and the public good and not just a blunt instrument for sociological propaganda of the sort that is the aim of red state and blue state civic religions that masquerade as the Christian faith.
You also can't really blog as fast if you're doing the kind of musical analysis I've been doing or getting back into writing about films now and then.
The last year or so has not been particularly pleasant or encouraging and there have been some things in the offline world that came up that made the prospect of writing as much as I used to less appealing.
Nevertheless, obviously I blogged a couple hundred posts this year. Fittingly enough, we kicked off the year 2017 at Wenatchee The Hatchet looking back at Frank Turk's quitting blogging at Pyromanics.
Frank Turk at Pyromaniacs on calling it a day on blogging, which inspires some more thoughts on what some call watchblogging
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/01/frank-turk-at-pyromaniacs-on-calling-it.html
For those who aren't already familiar with what I mean by talking about red state and blue state civic religions there's this piece:
revisiting the "Deadlock of American civic religions" ide, Americans de-churching from the institutional church doesn't mean for a moment they'll be rejecting the red or blue state civic religions
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/revisiting-deadlock-of-american-civic.html
Whereas 20 years ago I really enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer my interest in the series cooled steadily and even quickly after the end of season 3. I explained a bit of that and why I've come to believe that Joss Whedon is kind of an overhyped one-trick pony over at the following post.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer at year 20
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/buffy-vampire-slayer-at-year-20.html
Now one of my favorite blog posts from 2017, easily, would also have to be the least user-friendly post for anyone who doesn't have fun reading musicology books at a grad school level.
On the possibilities of spatial-temporal correspondence between the syntactics of ragtime and sonata forms
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/04/on-possibilities-of-spatial-temporal.html
One of my projects in the last few years has been working to formulate a fusion of the syntactic procedures of sonata forms with the style of ragtime, blues, and country. There's a lot of theoretical reflection and compositional work that has to go into a project like that. It's been one of the things I've been slowly working at accomplishing in the last twenty years. It was the kind of thing I meant to start writing about seriously in 2011 but, as anyone who's read the blog between 2011 and 2015 knows, a bunch of stuff at Mars Hill happened. But this year and last I've managed to get more into blogging in a serious way about music and the arts more generally.
Of course ... seeing as somebody still insists on a media presence and has a legacy that has been ... interpreted a bit post-resignation, it was necessary to provide a long-form analysis of the interview Mark Driscoll did with Sheila Walsh. The video went down quickly after initial release and it's only accessible via Driscoll's platform last I saw, but there's an extensive analysis with links (which may or may not work now) in this series of tagged post.
on the Walsh/Robison interview with Mark Driscoll
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/walsh%20Robison%20interview
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/06/alex-ross-on-occult-roots-of-modernism.html
Since this year was also the 25th anniversary of Batman: the animated series, it seemed good to run with all the content I wrote for Mockingbird for the 20th anniversary years ago. If memory serves (and it might not) the versions at this blog are the longer, less edited-down versions of what Mbird ran years ago. I remember the end of the Clayface essay was truncated at Mbird in a way that I hoped wouldn't happen. If you want to read all the originally published works at Mockingbird that whole set of essays is called Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/BTAS
Not that anyone exactly asked me but if someone were to ask me what I had the most fun writing in all of my time as a blogger I'd have to say it was writing about Batman: the animated series for Mockingbird. I had a blast writing it, even though it was actually ... pretty difficult. One of my college buddies read the series years ago and told me he thought it was funny that I wrote about Batman cartoons just as seriously as I would write about Dostoevsky. Well, yeah! I love Dostoevsky, too! I even think that for all its warts here and there that Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy is the closest thing to an adaptation in spirit we'll get for a Dostoevsky story. The more time goes by I can appreciate BTAS even with its shortcomings of clunkily written episodes and some takes on characters I didn't always warm up to. You can't understand the last twenty years of American animation on television without getting a sense of how much BTAS and The Simpsons opened the floodgates to a new approach to animation. I take Dini and Timm's series seriously as art because they made it clear that what they wanted to do with the series was treat it as a work of art and not just something to distract the kids in the afternoon. It shows and the show has held up for decades since it came out.
Another less charming anniversary came this year.
regarding the 10th anniversary of Mark Driscoll's "Fathers and Fighting"; two firings and their context; and Driscoll's explication of powers and providences published or presented in 2008 in the vein of "I see things" and how distrust of his executive elder team was wrong
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/09/regarding-10th-anniversary-of-mark.html
There were a few deaths this year. Nat Hentoff passed but for classical guitarists the most noteworthy passing was more recent, the death of Matanya Ophee. Ophee's lecture "Repertoire Issues" was something I read in transcript at G.A.L.I. on Ophee's website way, way back in 1999 and it changed my life.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/11/rip-matanya-ophee.html
I started composing a cycle of chamber sonatas for the guitar with woodwinds, strings and brass. It's supposed to have about twenty-four duo sonatas in it by the time I'm finished. Ophee's admonition to guitarists was that we have no inferiority complex about what our instrument and its literature has to offer. I started getting an idea to write 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar over the years and eventually finished that cycle, and arranged it for guitar duet. I've been working on creating another cycle of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar since 2015. Knowing that a lot of people just don't like fugues I know the stuff won't be to everyone's liking and it's an esoteric niche, but I've managed to conclude to my own satisfaction, if no one else's necessarily, that fully convertible counterpoint on solo guitar in every major and minor key is absolutely possible and even practical.
I really, really wanted to write about Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar which were published this year. They deserve to be written about and they deserve to be heard, but this was, sadly, not the year to have things together enough to blog in that way, not the way I would like to write about the cycle.
Nor did I write about John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution as I'd intended.
There's no review of PR Matters by Justin Dean, that may as well wait for 2018, too.
I also meant to write about a few other things but those things are incubating.
I did a little bit of writing over at Mbird this year, though.
We kicked off contribution to Mockingbird by being unimpressed with The Red Turtle. The film was pretty but vacant, an uninspired entry in what I'd now probably describe as a mollifying art religion for what a bohemian bourgeois. Yeah ... that might be a harsh way of putting it but the film was a real disappointment.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/03/the-red-turtle-beautiful-but-not-sublime/
If you want to see a film that manages to be visually gorgeous and surreal and riffs on connection and spirituality in a way that's vastly more interesting than The Red Turtle go rent Your Name. The subject of incompetent Western remakes of anime classics real or merely cult is going to be something I hope to tackle in 2018 because, man, that Ghost in the Shell remake was lame but in many respects no lamer than the original. But I might be able to demonstrate by example that a film like Oshii's original Ghost in the Shell is a cult classic because of the stream of ideas that film critics can write about the film that the new film shuts off. I've written a lot in bits and pieces about how the art religion envisioned by 19th century artists has mutated into a kind of meta-art religion of arts criticism and I'd unpack more of what I think that means but it's easier to do that as part of another project I've been incubating. It's probably going to make its way into what would be considered an unpardonable sin in the art religion of arts criticism Decalogue of writing about the Michael Bay Transformers franchise. Yeah, they're terrible movies but they're terrible in a very special way that film critics don't want to understand.
Meant to tackle that this year but ... well ... see ... I'm not going to get at my attempts to read Gadamer's Truth and Method as part of that project so let's just move on.
I actually really liked the new Wonder Woman movie, though--yet it was fascinating to read film critics and social commentators find Diana wanting in light of her perceived debt to real feminists and real feminism and some went so far as to say it was Americanist propaganda ... as if that problem in Marston's creation was somehow not emblazoned in the costume. But I digress.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/06/defeat-even-in-victory-wonder-woman-critical-response-and-modes-of-low-anthropology/
Another superhero film I saw and thought was ... okay ... was the new Spiderman film. The cake was tasty and yet it has a strange aftertaste which was the subject of this essay.
http://www.mbird.com/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming-with-frosting-so-good-you-can-forget-theres-something-off-about-the-cake/
I guess now that I've written all this out even a "fallow" year for me involves a lot of writing.
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