https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebwalters
Chief Operating Officer | COO
Mars Hill Church
– Present (4 months)Seattle, WA
Which, for folks who hadn't noticed this, still actually exists as a corporation. The corporate listings of the entities referred to as the legacy churches may be different.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=601677819
MARS HILL CHURCH
UBI Number 601677819
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 12/22/1995
Expiration Date 12/31/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name
CT CORPORATION SYSTEM
Address
505 UNION AVE SE STE120
OLYMPIA WA 98501
Governing Persons
President
Bruskas, David
1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
Secretary
Walters, Caleb
1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
So while journalistic and blogging coverage have seemed to describe Mars Hill Church as if it no longer exists the formal dissolution as a public act isn't necessarily the same as the formal expiration for the concerns of the state of Washington. There's still a Mars Hill Church in corporate terms. The era of Mars Hill Church is not over just yet.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
3-17-15 Sutton Turner blog post revisits his history in ministry, WtH revisits the accounts of Michael Van Skaik and Mark Driscoll about Turner and a Paul Tripp statement
First thing to note, Sutton Turner's got a website up, and the second thing to note is the biography covers a decent amount of material previously available at MH sites and to a lesser extent discussed here at Wenatchee The Hatchet but the key thing is ...
http://investyourgifts.com/#Sutton
Notice Regarding Monetary Gifts:
Turner wants you to give to the local church and after that to support New Covenant Foundation or any other organizations you feel led to give to. Turner's also not going to start a 501(c)3 organization. Why mention that? Oh ... well, somebody is soliciting gifts to be given through an application-pending registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
http://markdriscoll.org/
http://markdriscoll.org/give
Your tax-deductible gift helps us host and distribute Pastor Mark Driscoll’s past and future Bible teaching and resources. Enter any amount below.
You can also send donations via mail to:
Learning for Living is an application-pending registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible in full or in part.
But that person is obviously not Sutton Turner. What the status of Learning for Living's registration is might be useful information to have, and when the corporation known as Mars Hill Church finally expires at the end of 2015 would it not have to designate its assets to another 501(c)3? If that's the case then it seems we know that whatever 501(c)3 gets the assets Mars Hill might have it looks like it won't have Turner's names attached to it.
Now, we get to the recent post from Sutton Turner. On March 17, 2015 former executive elder of Mars Hill Church Sutton Turner posted a post.
http://investyourgifts.com/an-executive-pastor-calling/
...
At one point, one of the pastors asked if I would take a look at the financial books. The church was growing like crazy, attendance was up into the thousands, and everything appeared healthy on the outside. I reviewed the data and, to my absolute shock, discovered that the church was in significant trouble. The staff was huge and we only had sixty days of cash left. Operations were unsustainable, and it was only a matter of time before the church would fail to make payroll.
I had to tell Pastor Joe that he would be up against a huge mess unless somebody made some changes very, very fast. I was completely shocked when Pastor Joe turned to me and said that I was the man for the job.
Turner's story in his own words has seemed fairly consistent, which is why it's interesting that Sutton Turner's words as mediated by the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability presented a bit of a question. Here's how Michael Van Skaik related the resignation of asdf
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/19/sutton-turners-status-at-mars-hill-church-uncertain/
and
https://marshill.com/2014/09/19/the-weekly-9-19-14
UPDATE FROM THE BOAA
Dear Mars Hill,
Earlier this month Pastor Sutton Turner informed our board of his intention to resign from his current staff and elder position. His personal decision is a sober acknowledgement that it would not be financially feasible for him to stay on staff as the church rightsizes itself, and secondly, not emotionally prudent to subject his family to what has been an ongoing season of personal attacks. We want to be clear: there are no disqualifying factors related to his decision.
Sutton put it this way: “Since 2007, Pastor Mark has impacted my life in a significant way. I am thankful to call him my brother, my pastor, and my friend. When I came to Mars Hill in 2011, my plan was to be here for a year, get theologically trained, and focus on the adoption of my son before entering back into the business world. Three and a half years later, I have been able to serve a church that I love as a staff member, but it is now time that I transition off of staff and return to the business world.”
But compare Van Skaik's account to Mark Driscoll's introductions for Sutton Turner.
http://marshill.com/2011/11/23/introducing-pastor-sutton-turner
By: Pastor Mark Driscoll
Posted: Nov 23, 2011
Earlier this year, the Turner family moved around the world just to be a part of Mars Hill Church. They’d been listening to the podcast for many years, and when the opportunity arose to join the ministry, Sutton left a lucrative job in the Middle East to use his gifts to serve the church. [emphasis added]
Pastor Sutton’s experience has already been a huge benefit. He has a degree from Harvard Business School, led multibillion-dollar organizations, and even worked as an executive pastor for a number of years at a large church in Texas. More importantly, he is a godly man with a delightful family.
By God’s grace, Mars Hill Church is in an amazing season of growth. With that comes significantly more complexities, however. We need help and we’ve been searching for a leader of Sutton’s caliber for awhile. God is faithful and brought the right man at the right time.
and from the letters announcing Jamie Munson's resignation
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors
Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott [Thomas] has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king." Sutton is new to staff, but not to ministry. He is a former executive pastor of a large church. Educationally, he is a graduate of Texas A&M, the SMU Cox School of Business, and Harvard Business School. Professionally, he has recently served as the CEO of a company that has nearly 1,600 employees. Prior to that he served as the CEO of another company that under his leadership grew from 0 to 500 employees in the first year. He and his family moved to Seattle sensing a call to serve at Mars Hill, and we believe he is a gift from God to us for our future. He is currently well into the eldership process so be in prayer for that as well as his many duties at the church. [emphasis added]
In the last year some things have come to light, such as the following quote attributed to Paul Tripp in a letter signed by nine Mars Hill elders back in 2014:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/august/nine-current-mars-hill-pastors-tell-mark-driscoll-step-down.html?paging=off
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/08/Concerns-and-Critical-Information-for-the-Elders-of-Mars-Hill-Church.pdf
“Sutton is fundamentally unhelpful for Mark. Sutton plays to all of Mark’s weaknesses and none of Mark’s strengths.” He pleaded with them saying that what Mark needs in an Executive Pastor is a “55 year-old seasoned godly man who watches over Mark’s soul as he administrates the church, and who can pull Mark into a room and say ‘you can’t do that in a meeting’ and you need to call another meeting and ask for forgiveness from the people you just spoke to. He doesn’t need a man who is his trigger man.” He made it clear that Sutton lacks the emotional and spiritual maturity to be where he is at in leadership.
Careful students of the biblical literature will have to bear in mind that a direct calling is not necessarily an indication of permament or pervasive gifting for a particular office. As Mark Driscoll himself used to say, even Jesus picked one bad guy in the dozen. And to stick with the theme of kings a bit, the first king anointed over Israel was Saul, who turned out to be a pretty bad egg. We have to be cautious about the way in which some who describe themselves as leaders toss around the language of being called or having had a divine commission for a particular role.
All that said, Sutton Turner's account of himself throughout the history of Mars Hill has seemed fairly consistent. The same is much less easily said about things said by Michael Van Skaik and Mark Driscoll in connection to Turner's narrative.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/comparing-michael-van-skaiks-quote-of.html
There were some questions here at WtH in the past about whether, in light of the quote attributed to him by Michael Van Skaik, Sutton Turner had actually planned to be an elder at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-narrative-question-when-i-came-to.html
For folks who want an overview of Turner's career before and during Mars Hill:
For the rest of the review:
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 2a Mission Housing Management, LLC January 2004 to December 2006
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 2b Mission Investors I. G. P, Inc.
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 3 CHCC aka Cimmaron Hills Country Club (?) February 2004 to January 2006 things are fuzzier here, readers welcome to contribute
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 4 Celebration Church Austin November 2006 to August 2008
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 5 Khidmah, LLC May 2008 to July 2010
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 6 Waseef. Barwa Real Estate Group June 2010 to May 2011
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 7 Mars Hill Church April 2011 to present
http://investyourgifts.com/#Sutton
Notice Regarding Monetary Gifts:
Sutton Turner is not accepting any personal donations or gifts through this website. Please join Sutton in financially supporting your local church and then over and above your tithe supporting New Covenant Foundation and Compassion International, or any other non-profit organization which the Lord leads you. Turner has not started nor is he starting a 501(c)3 organization.
Turner wants you to give to the local church and after that to support New Covenant Foundation or any other organizations you feel led to give to. Turner's also not going to start a 501(c)3 organization. Why mention that? Oh ... well, somebody is soliciting gifts to be given through an application-pending registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
http://markdriscoll.org/
http://markdriscoll.org/give
Your tax-deductible gift helps us host and distribute Pastor Mark Driscoll’s past and future Bible teaching and resources. Enter any amount below.
You can also send donations via mail to:
Learning For Living
23632 HWY 99 Suite F 517
Edmonds WA 98026
23632 HWY 99 Suite F 517
Edmonds WA 98026
Learning for Living is an application-pending registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible in full or in part.
But that person is obviously not Sutton Turner. What the status of Learning for Living's registration is might be useful information to have, and when the corporation known as Mars Hill Church finally expires at the end of 2015 would it not have to designate its assets to another 501(c)3? If that's the case then it seems we know that whatever 501(c)3 gets the assets Mars Hill might have it looks like it won't have Turner's names attached to it.
Now, we get to the recent post from Sutton Turner. On March 17, 2015 former executive elder of Mars Hill Church Sutton Turner posted a post.
http://investyourgifts.com/an-executive-pastor-calling/
...
At one point, one of the pastors asked if I would take a look at the financial books. The church was growing like crazy, attendance was up into the thousands, and everything appeared healthy on the outside. I reviewed the data and, to my absolute shock, discovered that the church was in significant trouble. The staff was huge and we only had sixty days of cash left. Operations were unsustainable, and it was only a matter of time before the church would fail to make payroll.
I had to tell Pastor Joe that he would be up against a huge mess unless somebody made some changes very, very fast. I was completely shocked when Pastor Joe turned to me and said that I was the man for the job.
Jesus made ruins of the life I had known. He changed my heart, my priorities, my goals, and my direction.The financial bind that threatened my church wasn’t the result of any malicious activity or misappropriation. The guy in charge of operations simply didn’t know how to run a business.
Turner's story in his own words has seemed fairly consistent, which is why it's interesting that Sutton Turner's words as mediated by the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability presented a bit of a question. Here's how Michael Van Skaik related the resignation of asdf
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/19/sutton-turners-status-at-mars-hill-church-uncertain/
and
https://marshill.com/2014/09/19/the-weekly-9-19-14
UPDATE FROM THE BOAA
Dear Mars Hill,
Earlier this month Pastor Sutton Turner informed our board of his intention to resign from his current staff and elder position. His personal decision is a sober acknowledgement that it would not be financially feasible for him to stay on staff as the church rightsizes itself, and secondly, not emotionally prudent to subject his family to what has been an ongoing season of personal attacks. We want to be clear: there are no disqualifying factors related to his decision.
Sutton put it this way: “Since 2007, Pastor Mark has impacted my life in a significant way. I am thankful to call him my brother, my pastor, and my friend. When I came to Mars Hill in 2011, my plan was to be here for a year, get theologically trained, and focus on the adoption of my son before entering back into the business world. Three and a half years later, I have been able to serve a church that I love as a staff member, but it is now time that I transition off of staff and return to the business world.”
But compare Van Skaik's account to Mark Driscoll's introductions for Sutton Turner.
http://marshill.com/2011/11/23/introducing-pastor-sutton-turner
By: Pastor Mark Driscoll
Posted: Nov 23, 2011
Earlier this year, the Turner family moved around the world just to be a part of Mars Hill Church. They’d been listening to the podcast for many years, and when the opportunity arose to join the ministry, Sutton left a lucrative job in the Middle East to use his gifts to serve the church. [emphasis added]
Pastor Sutton’s experience has already been a huge benefit. He has a degree from Harvard Business School, led multibillion-dollar organizations, and even worked as an executive pastor for a number of years at a large church in Texas. More importantly, he is a godly man with a delightful family.
By God’s grace, Mars Hill Church is in an amazing season of growth. With that comes significantly more complexities, however. We need help and we’ve been searching for a leader of Sutton’s caliber for awhile. God is faithful and brought the right man at the right time.
and from the letters announcing Jamie Munson's resignation
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors
Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott [Thomas] has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king." Sutton is new to staff, but not to ministry. He is a former executive pastor of a large church. Educationally, he is a graduate of Texas A&M, the SMU Cox School of Business, and Harvard Business School. Professionally, he has recently served as the CEO of a company that has nearly 1,600 employees. Prior to that he served as the CEO of another company that under his leadership grew from 0 to 500 employees in the first year. He and his family moved to Seattle sensing a call to serve at Mars Hill, and we believe he is a gift from God to us for our future. He is currently well into the eldership process so be in prayer for that as well as his many duties at the church. [emphasis added]
In the last year some things have come to light, such as the following quote attributed to Paul Tripp in a letter signed by nine Mars Hill elders back in 2014:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/august/nine-current-mars-hill-pastors-tell-mark-driscoll-step-down.html?paging=off
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/08/Concerns-and-Critical-Information-for-the-Elders-of-Mars-Hill-Church.pdf
“Sutton is fundamentally unhelpful for Mark. Sutton plays to all of Mark’s weaknesses and none of Mark’s strengths.” He pleaded with them saying that what Mark needs in an Executive Pastor is a “55 year-old seasoned godly man who watches over Mark’s soul as he administrates the church, and who can pull Mark into a room and say ‘you can’t do that in a meeting’ and you need to call another meeting and ask for forgiveness from the people you just spoke to. He doesn’t need a man who is his trigger man.” He made it clear that Sutton lacks the emotional and spiritual maturity to be where he is at in leadership.
Careful students of the biblical literature will have to bear in mind that a direct calling is not necessarily an indication of permament or pervasive gifting for a particular office. As Mark Driscoll himself used to say, even Jesus picked one bad guy in the dozen. And to stick with the theme of kings a bit, the first king anointed over Israel was Saul, who turned out to be a pretty bad egg. We have to be cautious about the way in which some who describe themselves as leaders toss around the language of being called or having had a divine commission for a particular role.
All that said, Sutton Turner's account of himself throughout the history of Mars Hill has seemed fairly consistent. The same is much less easily said about things said by Michael Van Skaik and Mark Driscoll in connection to Turner's narrative.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/comparing-michael-van-skaiks-quote-of.html
There were some questions here at WtH in the past about whether, in light of the quote attributed to him by Michael Van Skaik, Sutton Turner had actually planned to be an elder at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-narrative-question-when-i-came-to.html
For folks who want an overview of Turner's career before and during Mars Hill:
For the rest of the review:
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 2a Mission Housing Management, LLC January 2004 to December 2006
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 2b Mission Investors I. G. P, Inc.
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 3 CHCC aka Cimmaron Hills Country Club (?) February 2004 to January 2006 things are fuzzier here, readers welcome to contribute
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 4 Celebration Church Austin November 2006 to August 2008
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 5 Khidmah, LLC May 2008 to July 2010
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 6 Waseef. Barwa Real Estate Group June 2010 to May 2011
a revisitation of Sutton Turner's career at one time recounted in LinkedIn, part 7 Mars Hill Church April 2011 to present
Friday, March 20, 2015
follow-up on a comment by a Justin Dean here at WtH--Dean alleged The Stranger published an invented conversation. Which one?
Back on March 11, 2015 one Justin Dean commented on a blog post here at Wenatchee The Hatchet. The blog post in question was about David Hayward's comments on Justin Dean's interview with Justin Blaney, for those who want some background. A Justin Dean dropped by with the following comment. Presented for your consideration is an ever so slightly redacted form of the comment that omits a particular way of addressing an author at Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Justin Dean said...
... [formal address omitted], your posts are so long it's hard to even respond to your points. I'll do my best. I would respond to bloggers and journalists all the time, trying our best to be open and communicate well. There were periods of time when we'd not respond at all. That was frustrating at
... [formal address omitted], your posts are so long it's hard to even respond to your points. I'll do my best. I would respond to bloggers and journalists all the time, trying our best to be open and communicate well. There were periods of time when we'd not respond at all. That was frustrating at
times but we were doing our best to try and wade through the storm. The Stranger was just brutal and mean and would twist what I would say so we eventually just ignored them because they were hateful no matter what. They even posted a whole conversation with me once that was completely made up. It never happened. They aren't to be trusted. [emphasis added]
I would reply to Warren Throckmorton as well, only to have him not report my comments or only report one part of my response and not the whole thing. He manipulated his stories how he saw fit. So one sided and we couldn't win.
So I'm not sure what your point is. We tried, but when "reporters" aren't acting with integrity how are you supposed to deal with it?
10:02 PM
10:02 PM
[from 03-11-2015]
A few questions
1. Would Justin Dean confirm whether the person who made the comment here was none other than the former MH PR lead who was interviewed recently by Justin Blaney?
2. Which conversation does the Justin Dean allege The Stranger invented that they posted or published?
3. More specifically, what was the article, the date, the author, the subject, and the context of the alleged fabricated conversation?
4. Was Justin Dean fielding this question on behalf of not only himself but of Mars Hill Church as a corporation? Or was he speaking strictly on his own behalf?
It's a pretty serious allegation to claim that The Stranger invented a conversation that never happened in something they published, apparently dealing with the subject of Mars Hill Church.
Would Justin Blaney be willing to do another video interview with Justin Dean and let The Stranger's Brendan Kiley interact with Dean?
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
local coverage updates on the former MH real estate associated with Sammamish and Downtown
Sammamish council approves $6.1 M purchase of Mars Hill property
This 107-year-old downtown church is about to become a restaurant and ballroom
Because regular readers know Wenatchee the Hatchet does try to keep track of this kind of stuff from time to time.
Per earlier discussions of Downtown's old location back in 2012:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/mars-hill-downtown-to-move-from-old.html
One of the region's newest and fastest-growing churches will soon take up residence in one of Seattle's oldest church buildings.
Mars Hill Church plans to relocate its downtown branch this fall from Belltown to the former First United Methodist Church at Fifth Avenue and Marion Street.
Here's a bit more from the article:
Mars Hill Church, a nondenominational, evangelical Christian congregation, has outgrown its location in the former Tabella nightclub, said Tim Gaydos, lead pastor of the downtown church.
Gaydos said the church holds five weekend services for about 1,500 people and was looking for a larger venue downtown that would allow it to continue its ministries to the homeless and to young women caught in the sex-trafficking trade.
"Our heart has always been not just for a great church but for a great city. Being in this location allows us to serve and love Seattle better," Gaydos said.
The deal almost didn't happen. Mars Hill looked at the First United Methodist Church building a year ago but Daniels didn't want to sell or completely relinquish control, said Tom Graff, commercial president of Ewing & Clark Real Estate. [emphasis added]
Graff said he got Gaydos and Daniels to talk directly, and they agreed on a five-year lease. "With a lot of hard work, the deal came together," Graff said.
Almost didn't happen, eh? Mars Hill started looking at the building a year ago but Daniels didn't want to 1) sell or 2) completely relinquish control of the property. The lease has made the news as of this week.
Not relinquishing all control over the real estate and not selling turn out to have been remarkably prudent policies.
In other news ...
Former Mars Hill Churches Continue Support for Ethiopian Pastors
This 107-year-old downtown church is about to become a restaurant and ballroom
Because regular readers know Wenatchee the Hatchet does try to keep track of this kind of stuff from time to time.
Per earlier discussions of Downtown's old location back in 2012:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/mars-hill-downtown-to-move-from-old.html
One of the region's newest and fastest-growing churches will soon take up residence in one of Seattle's oldest church buildings.
Mars Hill Church plans to relocate its downtown branch this fall from Belltown to the former First United Methodist Church at Fifth Avenue and Marion Street.
Here's a bit more from the article:
Mars Hill Church, a nondenominational, evangelical Christian congregation, has outgrown its location in the former Tabella nightclub, said Tim Gaydos, lead pastor of the downtown church.
Gaydos said the church holds five weekend services for about 1,500 people and was looking for a larger venue downtown that would allow it to continue its ministries to the homeless and to young women caught in the sex-trafficking trade.
"Our heart has always been not just for a great church but for a great city. Being in this location allows us to serve and love Seattle better," Gaydos said.
The deal almost didn't happen. Mars Hill looked at the First United Methodist Church building a year ago but Daniels didn't want to sell or completely relinquish control, said Tom Graff, commercial president of Ewing & Clark Real Estate. [emphasis added]
Graff said he got Gaydos and Daniels to talk directly, and they agreed on a five-year lease. "With a lot of hard work, the deal came together," Graff said.
Almost didn't happen, eh? Mars Hill started looking at the building a year ago but Daniels didn't want to 1) sell or 2) completely relinquish control of the property. The lease has made the news as of this week.
Not relinquishing all control over the real estate and not selling turn out to have been remarkably prudent policies.
In other news ...
Former Mars Hill Churches Continue Support for Ethiopian Pastors
Monday, March 16, 2015
comment at Throckmorton's blog that's interesting, on how the implosion was more gradual than sudden
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/03/05/justin-dean-talks-about-what-went-wrong-at-mars-hill-church/#comment-1903691816
Carson
Mars Hill wasn't "robust" and then imploded in less than a year. There is a useful Rabbinic parable: a man is being slowly lowered into a deep well. At the bottom are poisonous snakes leaping up -- they can leap their body length of 5 feet. Nothing is happening to the man being lowered and the ride is long and pleasant until he is about 5 feet from the bottom when suddenly he is bitten by a whole host of poisonous snakes. Anyone who says of his demise that it was "all of a sudden" meaning "unforeseen" never understood the situation in the first place.
I agree this interview sheds light -- it makes very clear that Dean, having no insight now, never understood the situation 5 or 10 years ago. He is part of the enablement. It isn't like there was no one pointing out the decline years earlier. Listen to Driscoll at SBTS on emergent churches or on his dealing with physical demons blocking his car -- he was a stud back then and these talks are completely about himself and almost none of it true in detail. People looked the other way because it was detail, there was growth, the larger good more than made up for it. People like Dean were part of the MH problem.
What is so numbing about the MH episode is the failure of so many "leaders" who were there to see that hitting the snakes was inevitable and who are now giving snake advice. It's like Typhoid Mary giving talks on how to avoid typhoid.
I'm waiting for Steven Furtick or Perry Noble to explain what happened. One of Furtick's talks at MH included his exuding "there is such a [great] spirit of inappropriateness here." Even Furtick got it -- that's how "sudden" it was..
Wenatchee The Hatchet stopped attending in later 2008, just before Peasant Princess kicked off. WtH also shared on the way out that there were a few concerns about where things had gone. There was a first concern, that the fiscal model implied by the growth paradigm meant MH was adding operational expenses and real estate liabilities much faster than it was cultivating its donor base in a way that could ultimately afford to keep all this stuff running. If there were simply a stop in growth, let alone an actual numeric decline, the entire edifice would collapse under its own dead weight financially.
A second concern was that there seemed to be no clear set of precedents and procedures establishing what the real nature of church discipline was intended to be. Little did Wenatchee The Hatchet know at the time there WAS a disciplinary protocol document in place and it was ... well, anyway ...
A third concern was that disciplinary measures might one day be considered so arbitrary and punitive that someone might actually go so far as to contact the public about a case. Wonder if THAT happened ... like in 2012?
Wenatchee The Hatchet has written in many a post that pretty much every major disaster WtH was afraid was likely to happen at MH if it didn't change course actually came to pass. The concerns were shared back in later 2008 and maybe in 2009, such as memory serves. So as Carson was putting it a few days ago, those who would say the implosion of Mars Hill was sudden were not in a position to have seen how far back the seeds of its decline were sown.
As for the spiritual warfare stuff, the majority of the 2008 warfare teaching session has been transcribed for a reader's consideration. It still seems helpful to propose that that session can be construed as a political manifesto on the part of Mark Driscoll about how leadership was supposed to operate within the church culture.
Now with that said, things are more likely to turn back to technical analyses of guitar works from the early 19th century here, give or take a few days or a week. Maybe. It depends in part on whether or not some folks insist on reviving issues that were often considered dead horses before they got in front of cameras.
Carson
Mars Hill wasn't "robust" and then imploded in less than a year. There is a useful Rabbinic parable: a man is being slowly lowered into a deep well. At the bottom are poisonous snakes leaping up -- they can leap their body length of 5 feet. Nothing is happening to the man being lowered and the ride is long and pleasant until he is about 5 feet from the bottom when suddenly he is bitten by a whole host of poisonous snakes. Anyone who says of his demise that it was "all of a sudden" meaning "unforeseen" never understood the situation in the first place.
I agree this interview sheds light -- it makes very clear that Dean, having no insight now, never understood the situation 5 or 10 years ago. He is part of the enablement. It isn't like there was no one pointing out the decline years earlier. Listen to Driscoll at SBTS on emergent churches or on his dealing with physical demons blocking his car -- he was a stud back then and these talks are completely about himself and almost none of it true in detail. People looked the other way because it was detail, there was growth, the larger good more than made up for it. People like Dean were part of the MH problem.
What is so numbing about the MH episode is the failure of so many "leaders" who were there to see that hitting the snakes was inevitable and who are now giving snake advice. It's like Typhoid Mary giving talks on how to avoid typhoid.
I'm waiting for Steven Furtick or Perry Noble to explain what happened. One of Furtick's talks at MH included his exuding "there is such a [great] spirit of inappropriateness here." Even Furtick got it -- that's how "sudden" it was..
Wenatchee The Hatchet stopped attending in later 2008, just before Peasant Princess kicked off. WtH also shared on the way out that there were a few concerns about where things had gone. There was a first concern, that the fiscal model implied by the growth paradigm meant MH was adding operational expenses and real estate liabilities much faster than it was cultivating its donor base in a way that could ultimately afford to keep all this stuff running. If there were simply a stop in growth, let alone an actual numeric decline, the entire edifice would collapse under its own dead weight financially.
A second concern was that there seemed to be no clear set of precedents and procedures establishing what the real nature of church discipline was intended to be. Little did Wenatchee The Hatchet know at the time there WAS a disciplinary protocol document in place and it was ... well, anyway ...
A third concern was that disciplinary measures might one day be considered so arbitrary and punitive that someone might actually go so far as to contact the public about a case. Wonder if THAT happened ... like in 2012?
Wenatchee The Hatchet has written in many a post that pretty much every major disaster WtH was afraid was likely to happen at MH if it didn't change course actually came to pass. The concerns were shared back in later 2008 and maybe in 2009, such as memory serves. So as Carson was putting it a few days ago, those who would say the implosion of Mars Hill was sudden were not in a position to have seen how far back the seeds of its decline were sown.
As for the spiritual warfare stuff, the majority of the 2008 warfare teaching session has been transcribed for a reader's consideration. It still seems helpful to propose that that session can be construed as a political manifesto on the part of Mark Driscoll about how leadership was supposed to operate within the church culture.
Now with that said, things are more likely to turn back to technical analyses of guitar works from the early 19th century here, give or take a few days or a week. Maybe. It depends in part on whether or not some folks insist on reviving issues that were often considered dead horses before they got in front of cameras.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Atlantic Monthly: "The Downfall of For-profit Colleges"
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/the-downfall-of-for-profit-colleges/385810/
A bit on the older side, obviously, but thematically interesting because for those familiar with more of the deep background of Mars Hill a for-profit college figured in as something founded by a one-time member of the MH BOAA, namely Jon Phelps, founder of Full Sail University, a for-profit college. Whether Phelps is still associated with the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability and whether that organization still exists in the face of the expiration of the corporation known as Mars Hill scheduled for the end of this calendar is not, as yet, confirmed.
For posts in the past that mention Phelps, here's an example:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/jon-phelps-founder-full-sail-university.html
For folks who want to consult all the posts tagged on this subject:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/phelps
Phelps' most notable role in the history of Mars Hill, besides being reportedly a significant donor, would have been as co-creator of what Mark Driscoll referred to as "Reverse-engineering your life". Of that enough has been said to not bore you with details already discussed.
A bit on the older side, obviously, but thematically interesting because for those familiar with more of the deep background of Mars Hill a for-profit college figured in as something founded by a one-time member of the MH BOAA, namely Jon Phelps, founder of Full Sail University, a for-profit college. Whether Phelps is still associated with the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability and whether that organization still exists in the face of the expiration of the corporation known as Mars Hill scheduled for the end of this calendar is not, as yet, confirmed.
For posts in the past that mention Phelps, here's an example:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/jon-phelps-founder-full-sail-university.html
For folks who want to consult all the posts tagged on this subject:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/phelps
Phelps' most notable role in the history of Mars Hill, besides being reportedly a significant donor, would have been as co-creator of what Mark Driscoll referred to as "Reverse-engineering your life". Of that enough has been said to not bore you with details already discussed.
Sor Op 29, 10 (aka etude 22) in E flat major, a brief analysis of Sor's use of sonata allegro form in said etude
and musical analysis of sonata form in early 19th century guitar literature continues ...
A couple of weeks ago we discussed the charming E flat major etude from Sor's Op. 29.
Now we're getting to another etude from the set that can be presented as adhering to some of the basics of sonata form. This one is more a contestable case for reasons you'll get to see, but I think a case can be made that the sonata principle in terms of form and developmental economics would suggest that this Sor etude fits the principle of a sonata form.
A word in advance about this post, it features an extensive musical example (i.e. an entire Sor etude with visual analysis). You're going to want to minimize/collapse all the far right menus on the blog in order to properly read this post. The reference point for this score analysis is Boije 477, which you shouldn't have too much trouble digging up.
Having read Stanley Yates' discussion of sonata forms in Sor in the last month or so I would like to suggest, if Yates hasn't spotted this already, that there's another example of sonata allegro form to discuss in the compositions of Sor.
Yates' overview is helpful as an overview but I think that one of the challenges of discussing Sor's larger-scale works would be the ways in which they deviate from some of the scholastic expectations of sonata form from the time period. Op.22 has an exposition in which theme 2 is abandoned in the recapitulation and none of the themes get any significant development in what would be known as the development section of a sonata form. Op. 25 recapitulates thematic ideas in reverse order, which began to be a thing in Romantic music but which could throw off an unwary musician or student who hasn't had any training to anticipate that.
Where Yates seems to have seen the early Sor sonatas as a bit under-developed or diffuse in structural thinking compared to the later Grand Sonatas I would say the reverse, the fact that Sor's earlier sonatas have themes which all appear in their respective recapitulations and the energy of the Opp. 14 and 15 make them superior works, both because they are more self-contained and because they simply have more pleasing themes. What Yates described as Sor's sophistication in handling of sonata forms sounds to me, as someone who's loved Haydn my whole adult life, like a diffuse ramble.
On the other hand, there is a sonata form in the Op. 29 etudes (etude 10) that is an elegant and brilliant demonstration of sonata form. If anything it's the most concise and compelling use of sonata form in Sor's output, not that anyone's explicitly asking Wenatchee The Hatchet's opinion here about the topic.
For the sake of overview, a sonata form has three sections--an exposition, a development and a recapitulation. The exposition will have musical ideas in two different tonal centers, the development will continue to explore these ideas in various ways, and the recapitulation will re-present the ideas in some fashion within one tonal center, the opening one. As Charles Rosen has pointed out in his book on sonata forms, the important point to emphasize about sonata form is not the contrast between the themes within the exposition but their contrasting tonal centers. It's the tonal architecture which creates the structural and harmonic momentum of the form.
We've discussed in the past how there's a sense in which, once we factor in the convention of repeating the exposition, a sonata "could" be construed as a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus pattern. That would be true, sort of, but the caveat is that the themes or thematic groups have transitions and what can happen in practice is a development may rely less on the formal themes than on transitional materials. This is particularly notable in solo guitar sonatas, which we'll try to explore in posts later.
Or ... we could show that the way a sonata can work out a development can be through tossed off cadential riffs that take on greater harmonic or rhythmic significance in a development section.
Something else to bear in mind is that while in the recapitulation you may have theme 1 coming back with a non-modulating transition and a theme 2 there's no rule against ideas being developed in the recapitulation. There isn't even any strict rule against the introduction of new forms of development within a non-modulating transition. While we could cast about for Haydn works as an example the Sor Op 29, 10 etude will do.
So, let's get to the etude. It opens with a frisky E flat major marching theme that's pretty short. In a mere seven measures we get a parallel periodic structure typical for the era. It's an eight measure theme if you include that closing measure as a point of arrival but, as is common for the beginning of a modulating transition in sonata form the point of arrival is also simultaneously a point of departure.
Conventionally a sonata form starts in a tonic key (in this case E flat) and moves to a dominant key (in this case B flat major). A modulating transition can happen in a variety of ways but if we want to be textbook then we can use Sor's example, and what Sor does is he introduces the leading tone of the dominant key, A natural, pretty early in this modulating transition. It appears as a chromatic ornament to a firmly E flat major riff. We could say these days it's got an anticipation of blues in it but it wouldn't be construed as blues here. The next tone that gets strategically introduced along the way would be the leading tone of the dominant scale degree to the target key. So in this case Sor works in a E natural, the leading tone to F, and F major is the dominant of B flat. You'll be able to see he gets to this quickly enough. For sake of quick visual reference I've highlighted the A naturals in blue and the E naturals in green.
What's interesting about this little sonata is how unified it is in thematic materials. The opening motto is more or less the seed from which the entire plant grows. The semi-bluesy riff at the start of the introduction gets two phrases and then the second half of the transition inverts the riff in the first half of the two-measure phrases, while retaining the contour of the ornamental second half. This would be in system four and in system four we get the high B flat pedal point under which Sor chromatically planes dyads so that by arriving at E flat, which would have been the tonic chord in the first theme, has been presented as the subdominant harmony in the new context.
Since Sor took this new harmony to be too new to just land on, he repeats the entire sequence. Given the degree of chromatic complexity in both harmony and melody for this little exposition leaning so heavily on repeating phrases would be unusual for sonata forms but for the key of E flat major on a single guitar this was a very wise move. Of course we're not going to contest the wisdom of Sor in composing for solo guitar here! :)
So the music continues and half-way through system six we arrive firmly in the key of B flat major and Sor introduces his second theme. We can describe this as a rather freer and more laconic inversion of the opening motto. The tempo hasn't changed and the theme is still chugging along in eighth notes but Sor has done a wonderful job delineating the arrival of the new thematic region with a slower harmonic rhythm. He basically decorated a tonic pedal point with the new melodic idea. He keeps the texture and harmony simple here but he gently ramps up the non-harmonic dissonance in how he adds a lower harmonizing voice to the new tune. After he wraps up the second theme with a firm, final cadence in B flat major we get to the end and we start from the top. This is a classic repeating exposition for a sonata allegro form. It's brevity and efficiency should not throw us off as to what we're hearing and what we're looking at in the score.
Now whereas in the Grand Sonatas Op. 22 and Op. 25 Sor's development sections seem to scarcely be there for any other reason than building momentum to get back to the recapitulation the Op. 29, 10 etude jumps into a development that, however short, develops the ideas introduced in the exposition. We see the opening motto subjected to intervallic change and introduced at the start of the development in a minor key, F minor. This idea is sequenced once and turns into a little riff-bashing moment in which the cadential turn riff at the end of the first theme is made an ostinato under which Sor has dyads chromatically creeping up from B flat in a way that flirts with E flat major but won't commit to it for six measures.
Of course because this is a sonata the first theme arrives triumphantly in E flat as we would expect it to. There are a handful of changes here, though. Instead of the perfect parallel period we had in the exposition Sor changes the cadential wrap-up for theme 1 so that it ends on an unresolved half-cadence. This half-cadence leads to a new idea for the piece, riffing on the cadential turn pattern. It's a very static V-I alternation that ensures we're never leaving the tonic key now that we've arrived at it in the recapitulation. What keeps this new material from being alienating in such a short piece is the economy with which Sor has been alternating between the marching motto on the one hand and his use of the cadential turn riff on the other. If none of this makes sense to you yet, fear not, dear reader. There's a visual analysis being presented at the bottom you can consult that should clear all this up.
This is a wonderful little sonata form and Sor was clearly shrewd enough a guitarist to recognize that even this short a piece in E flat major would have many a guitarist scared off or begging for mercy. Still, if any guitarist would attempt to make a case that the classical guitar lacks the resources to handle a sonata form, Sor has amply demonstrated otherwise. If Sor composed a sonata allegro form in E flat major as part of his Op. 29 etudes then there should be no doubt the guitar, whatever its limitations, is capable of handling complex forms in remote keys in the right hands.
And since the internet age what it is, well, we'll have to leave it to you, dear readers, to go find a video of a performance of this little gem. Consider this more of a primer. I probably haven't exhausted all the things that could be said about this piece, but I hope I've made a successful case for this work being included in a discussion of Sor's use of sonata form. The score with analysis notes is visible after the break
checks and balances, trade-offs and liberties--CPS finds "free range" parents responsible for "neglect" for letting kids walk home unescorted
CPS Finds “Free Range” Parents Responsible for Unsubstantiated Child Neglect. Now What?
Hanna Rosin's piece from March 2, 2015 has had me wondering whether in a post sexual revolutionary age we're possibly witnessing some kind of trade-off. We're more free to opt to have a sexual relationship of whatever kind most meets our respective needs but it sometimes seems as though there's a flip-side, that we live in an era in which the expectations surrounding proper parenting become more heated and less forgiving. Mockingbird has many a post on the Law and parenting or lifestyle, whether helicopter parenting of the purity codes of food consumption.
As a single person it sometimes seems as though the options for who you may pair up with are more wide-ranging in the internet age than ever before but the socially acceptable options for how you actually live paired-up life, let alone raise any resultant children, seem more hotly contested and with a more restricted menu than before. If CPS can decide in one state to do a "write up" for parents who let their kids do what anyone would have thought virtually nothing of thirty years ago it's hard not to wonder if the trade-off for sexual liberty in a culture comes with a price tag, that the culture takes more initiative to formally and informally dictate the methodologies of child-rearing. It's as though some kind of "balance" between individual liberty and social restriction, some kind of meta-cultural equilibrium is being sought. Or people are just weird.
Hanna Rosin's piece from March 2, 2015 has had me wondering whether in a post sexual revolutionary age we're possibly witnessing some kind of trade-off. We're more free to opt to have a sexual relationship of whatever kind most meets our respective needs but it sometimes seems as though there's a flip-side, that we live in an era in which the expectations surrounding proper parenting become more heated and less forgiving. Mockingbird has many a post on the Law and parenting or lifestyle, whether helicopter parenting of the purity codes of food consumption.
As a single person it sometimes seems as though the options for who you may pair up with are more wide-ranging in the internet age than ever before but the socially acceptable options for how you actually live paired-up life, let alone raise any resultant children, seem more hotly contested and with a more restricted menu than before. If CPS can decide in one state to do a "write up" for parents who let their kids do what anyone would have thought virtually nothing of thirty years ago it's hard not to wonder if the trade-off for sexual liberty in a culture comes with a price tag, that the culture takes more initiative to formally and informally dictate the methodologies of child-rearing. It's as though some kind of "balance" between individual liberty and social restriction, some kind of meta-cultural equilibrium is being sought. Or people are just weird.
another overview post is in the works, on some musical stuff--getting to the guitar sonatas of Carulli, matiegka and Molitor
For those who remember this post, there's been a sequel incubating for a number of years. For those who don't reflexively scroll over links, the post in question was, "an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli", published at the end of 2011.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2011/12/overview-of-structural-concerns-in.html
Back then it seemed like the book was closed on blogging anything useful to the public interest on ... other topics, and the idea was to go full bore into some more detailed blogging about the development of sonata form in solo guitar literature.
Well, things happen.
But there's a sequel post slowly taking shape that might be called "an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Carulli, Matiegka and Molitor". Yeah, scintillating, right? It might be worthwhile to do blog posts about each composer eventually and get into analyzing specific pieces but it seems like to get to doing that we need to lay some ground work, an overview so that readers aren't left wondering what's going on when score analysis shows up.
And while we're at it, this new-old direction for blogging will probably take issue with a few things published by Stanley Yates on the subject of sonatas for solo guitar. Yates provided an overview of Sor that could have turned into a monograph and ... well, did it? Is there even a monograph on the sonata form in early 19th century solo guitar literature? It'd be a bit much to ask for a Charles Rosen style study, I suppose, but when guitarists repeat the old canard about how the sonata form is not really suited to the limited resources of the classical guitar I just want to shake them a bit and say, "You couldn't possibly say that if you actually knew the literature!" There's plenty of examples of sonata form in the 20th century literature, even more so than may have been published for solo guitar in the early 19th century by the generally accepted masters.
Thing is you won't lack for people discussing the Ponce sonatas (they're fun, to be sure). Nobody's discussing the Rebay sonata cycle yet but give it time, it's a mighty worthy series of sonatas for guitar and for my time and study they're more fun--then again of the few Romantics I actually like one of them is Brahms ... but time and energy permitting we'll try to blog through the Ferdinand Rebay sonatas here, too.
And, really, since Sor, Giuliani and Diabelli wrote some formidable and worthy music for the guitar we should probably get back to discussing some of their works in more detail. That Yates overviewed Sor's use of sonata form without tackling etudes 17 and 22 from Sor's Op. 29 is disappointing but probably unavoidable. Guitarists who do discuss the literature don't always seem to have the command of the formal/theoretical nomenclature you'll find in the mainstream literature. Whereas non-guitarist musicologists could probably spot the sonata form that is Op. 22 study 22 (aka 10 within Op 29) guitarists don't seem to realize they could explain things more clearly if they cast discussion in terms of sonata form. Ditto Op. 29 study 5 but I think I'll have to make a case for 1) why the Op. 29 etude 5 is best understood as a sonata form and 2) why I think it might be overlooked as being an example of sonata form and why this makes it all the more reason guitarists should study it.
In fact ... if guitarists the world over aren't already doing this using Op. 29, 10 as an introduction to guitarists of sonata form should be considered. It's a brilliant little deployment of the form, in some ways more efficient and remarkable than the usual suspects in Sor's output. Since it's in E flat major, however, the likelihood guitarists will champion its cause seem remote. :(
But we're proposing ideas for coming attractions here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, and that's just for music. There are other things to be written that veer into the similarly esoteric realm of cartoons involving people wearing capes that are still overdue.
Thankfully because the works of Sor and Matiegka and Giuliani are gloriously public domain more detailed analysis will be possible for their works. Rebay's work is only just now getting published and so we'll have to write more roundaboutly. Fortunately for those who love Brahms it WILL be possible to quote the Brahms works (or those of Schubert) Rebay made use of in his sonata cycle. As someone who generally doesn't care for the Romantics but likes Brahms, having a sonata cycle for the guitar inspired chiefly by a Brahmsian idiom can only be a great new addition to the solo guitar literature.
If you want something more firmly 20th century (as in not as conservative as Ponce) Angelo Gilardino has a set of sonatas that are worth checking out. Like I was saying earlier, guitarists who claim the instrument does not lend itself to sonata forms just don't know the literature well enough.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2011/12/overview-of-structural-concerns-in.html
Back then it seemed like the book was closed on blogging anything useful to the public interest on ... other topics, and the idea was to go full bore into some more detailed blogging about the development of sonata form in solo guitar literature.
Well, things happen.
But there's a sequel post slowly taking shape that might be called "an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Carulli, Matiegka and Molitor". Yeah, scintillating, right? It might be worthwhile to do blog posts about each composer eventually and get into analyzing specific pieces but it seems like to get to doing that we need to lay some ground work, an overview so that readers aren't left wondering what's going on when score analysis shows up.
And while we're at it, this new-old direction for blogging will probably take issue with a few things published by Stanley Yates on the subject of sonatas for solo guitar. Yates provided an overview of Sor that could have turned into a monograph and ... well, did it? Is there even a monograph on the sonata form in early 19th century solo guitar literature? It'd be a bit much to ask for a Charles Rosen style study, I suppose, but when guitarists repeat the old canard about how the sonata form is not really suited to the limited resources of the classical guitar I just want to shake them a bit and say, "You couldn't possibly say that if you actually knew the literature!" There's plenty of examples of sonata form in the 20th century literature, even more so than may have been published for solo guitar in the early 19th century by the generally accepted masters.
Thing is you won't lack for people discussing the Ponce sonatas (they're fun, to be sure). Nobody's discussing the Rebay sonata cycle yet but give it time, it's a mighty worthy series of sonatas for guitar and for my time and study they're more fun--then again of the few Romantics I actually like one of them is Brahms ... but time and energy permitting we'll try to blog through the Ferdinand Rebay sonatas here, too.
And, really, since Sor, Giuliani and Diabelli wrote some formidable and worthy music for the guitar we should probably get back to discussing some of their works in more detail. That Yates overviewed Sor's use of sonata form without tackling etudes 17 and 22 from Sor's Op. 29 is disappointing but probably unavoidable. Guitarists who do discuss the literature don't always seem to have the command of the formal/theoretical nomenclature you'll find in the mainstream literature. Whereas non-guitarist musicologists could probably spot the sonata form that is Op. 22 study 22 (aka 10 within Op 29) guitarists don't seem to realize they could explain things more clearly if they cast discussion in terms of sonata form. Ditto Op. 29 study 5 but I think I'll have to make a case for 1) why the Op. 29 etude 5 is best understood as a sonata form and 2) why I think it might be overlooked as being an example of sonata form and why this makes it all the more reason guitarists should study it.
In fact ... if guitarists the world over aren't already doing this using Op. 29, 10 as an introduction to guitarists of sonata form should be considered. It's a brilliant little deployment of the form, in some ways more efficient and remarkable than the usual suspects in Sor's output. Since it's in E flat major, however, the likelihood guitarists will champion its cause seem remote. :(
But we're proposing ideas for coming attractions here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, and that's just for music. There are other things to be written that veer into the similarly esoteric realm of cartoons involving people wearing capes that are still overdue.
Thankfully because the works of Sor and Matiegka and Giuliani are gloriously public domain more detailed analysis will be possible for their works. Rebay's work is only just now getting published and so we'll have to write more roundaboutly. Fortunately for those who love Brahms it WILL be possible to quote the Brahms works (or those of Schubert) Rebay made use of in his sonata cycle. As someone who generally doesn't care for the Romantics but likes Brahms, having a sonata cycle for the guitar inspired chiefly by a Brahmsian idiom can only be a great new addition to the solo guitar literature.
If you want something more firmly 20th century (as in not as conservative as Ponce) Angelo Gilardino has a set of sonatas that are worth checking out. Like I was saying earlier, guitarists who claim the instrument does not lend itself to sonata forms just don't know the literature well enough.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
link for the weekend: 22 songs that sound more similar to each other than Blurred Lines does to Got to Give it Up.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/03/11/22-songs-sound-similar-blurred-lines-got-give
One of the most striking examples is John Fogarty getting sued by his own publishing company because "The Old Man Down the Road" resembled "Run Through The Jungle"
This is a case of being sued for copying YOURSELF. Yes, Fogerty’s former publishing company sued him because “This Old Man Down The Road” and “Run Through The Jungle” (which he released with CCR 15 years prior) sounded so similar.
The tongue-in-cheek summation of the litany is as follows:
The moral of the story is, if you’re going to steal, steal from Tom Petty.
or ...
http://ipbreakdown.com/blog/the-lines-of-copyright-infringement-have-always-been-blurred/
...
The floodgates of copyright litigation aren’t going to suddenly open because of this case,12 for two reasons. First, access, access, access, access, access, access. Access is usually very hard to prove. Remember, most of the proof of access rests with the alleged infringer, who has little incentive to remember any exposure he or she may have had to the underlying work. Usually, people won’t bring a case for copyright infringement unless they feel very confident about proving access. - See more at: http://ipbreakdown.com/blog/the-lines-of-copyright-infringement-have-always-been-blurred/#sthash.pbQjOtI3.dpuf
Kind of gets back (indirectly) to a quote from Dan Deacon featured at this blog about how you either want to be so wealthy you can pay licensing fees upfront to sample something well-known or you go so esoteric with brevity and manipulation of sound samples nobody has any idea who you sampled from.
If someone were to build a song entirely out of samples of pop songs but all the hooks were fiddled into their respective retrograde inversions the hooks would probably lose all their catchiness and since nobody would recognize the hooks for what they were ... maybe somebody could test that out?
Not planning to, personally, just pointing out that there's a long history of appropriation and mutation. T. S. Eliot may have opined that good poets imitate and great poets steal but ,well, it's the weekend so we're not gonna try to get too detailed about that. :)
Besides, had Dean not decided to talk in front of a camera this week was originally slated to be a discussion of sonata form in early 19th century guitar literature. It's too bad, Justin Dean, had you not opted to talk in front of a camera around the anniversary of World Magazine breaking that story about RSI and Driscoll's book ... this blog could have provided a possibly helpful break-down of the use of thematic delineation and development in an early 19th century guitar sonata.
One of the most striking examples is John Fogarty getting sued by his own publishing company because "The Old Man Down the Road" resembled "Run Through The Jungle"
This is a case of being sued for copying YOURSELF. Yes, Fogerty’s former publishing company sued him because “This Old Man Down The Road” and “Run Through The Jungle” (which he released with CCR 15 years prior) sounded so similar.
The tongue-in-cheek summation of the litany is as follows:
The moral of the story is, if you’re going to steal, steal from Tom Petty.
or ...
http://ipbreakdown.com/blog/the-lines-of-copyright-infringement-have-always-been-blurred/
...
The floodgates of copyright litigation aren’t going to suddenly open because of this case,12 for two reasons. First, access, access, access, access, access, access. Access is usually very hard to prove. Remember, most of the proof of access rests with the alleged infringer, who has little incentive to remember any exposure he or she may have had to the underlying work. Usually, people won’t bring a case for copyright infringement unless they feel very confident about proving access. - See more at: http://ipbreakdown.com/blog/the-lines-of-copyright-infringement-have-always-been-blurred/#sthash.pbQjOtI3.dpuf
Kind of gets back (indirectly) to a quote from Dan Deacon featured at this blog about how you either want to be so wealthy you can pay licensing fees upfront to sample something well-known or you go so esoteric with brevity and manipulation of sound samples nobody has any idea who you sampled from.
If someone were to build a song entirely out of samples of pop songs but all the hooks were fiddled into their respective retrograde inversions the hooks would probably lose all their catchiness and since nobody would recognize the hooks for what they were ... maybe somebody could test that out?
Not planning to, personally, just pointing out that there's a long history of appropriation and mutation. T. S. Eliot may have opined that good poets imitate and great poets steal but ,well, it's the weekend so we're not gonna try to get too detailed about that. :)
Besides, had Dean not decided to talk in front of a camera this week was originally slated to be a discussion of sonata form in early 19th century guitar literature. It's too bad, Justin Dean, had you not opted to talk in front of a camera around the anniversary of World Magazine breaking that story about RSI and Driscoll's book ... this blog could have provided a possibly helpful break-down of the use of thematic delineation and development in an early 19th century guitar sonata.
HT Mockingbird: Eve Fairbanks "... we respect failure only if we can interpret it as a stepping-stone to accomplishment."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/03/11/failure-is-beautiful/
...
In contemporary life, we respect failure only if we can interpret it as a stepping-stone to accomplishment. This is the premise of a raft of recent books, from “Failing Forward” to “The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success”. A week ago, a group of young writers asked me what my favorite writing achievement was; I proudly told the story of an essay that was at first rejected by a favorite magazine and then, after much work and rewriting, accepted at another. The tale, presented as a celebration of the necessity of making mistakes, was in fact a sly way of revealing not my fallibility but my tenacity. My reaction to initial failure, I was claiming, is what makes me not fail in the long run.
The real truth, though, is that most of our mistakes cannot really be said to have such obvious redemptive power. Most of the time, we simply lose time. We retrace our steps. We let friends fall away; we hurt our families. We do idiotic things in our work. We make mistakes from which we learn and, more often, mistakes from which we fail to learn. Aware of our errors, but frequently unable to do better, we hang our heads
The failures of a person, if they can be transformed into something through which they can ascend to even higher levels of success, just becomes part of the sales pitch.
Regulars who have read Wenatchee The Hatchet will not be shocked at an observation, that the publication of Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage introduced, as a framing narrative to their various bits of advice, the revelation that their marriage was "functional but not much fun" and that it was beset by problems. Even if the semi-dangling "r" in the title seemed to promise revelations that there were rough edges. The trouble was that the framing narrative of the disappointments and dysfunctions of the Driscoll marriage dismantled the continuity and solidity of the public narrative of the Driscoll marriage Mark had been sharing from the pulpit year after year (notwithstanding very-long-ago sermons in which he might say that in the first few years of the marriage he won all the arguments but ended up sleeping on the couch a lot).
But what if the Driscolls had written and published their book WITHOUT that framing narrative of marital frustration (or even failure)? Without that framing narrative would it have been more than what it turned out to be, a hodgepodge of variously useful would-be bon mots? That acronym "FRIEND" in the "Friends with Benefits" chapter? Strip away that framing narrative and how much of the controversy surrounding the book might have gone with it? Not the Result Source inc controversy, that was neither here nor there regarding the substance of the book itself.
No, it seems as though without that framing narrative the book would be a substantially different book. Leveraging the described failures as the background against which the better-than-ever Driscoll marriage could be part of the sales pitch might be a significant part of the sales pitch for the 2012 book.
It's just that in a variety of fairly conventional Christian interpretations and applications of biblical texts you're supposed to have arrived at that healthier and functional marriage before anyone greenlights you to ministry. If the Driscoll marriage was within acceptably average marriages, however, then the question of who decided Driscoll was married well enough to be in ministry becomes more moot. But the branding of Real Marriage might imply that having a "good enough" marriage wasn't going to be good enough for the marketing campaign that was settled on.
The book could be a case study of Eve Fairbanks' proposal that "we respect failure only if we can interpret it as a stepping-stone to accomplishment." The failures that have come to light in Driscoll's ministry since the 2012 publication of Real Marriage don't exactly seem like the kinds of failures that would lend themselves to being stepping-stones to further accomplishments.
If Driscoll's going to still show up at a Hillsong conference and is willing to get interviewed ...
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/03/12/hillsong-founder-brian-houston-issues-statement-about-mark-driscoll-at-the-hillsong-2015-conference/
if Mark Driscoll's been candid about the mistakes he's made then he's welcome to be candid in even more detail. How about the nature of MH PR response in the wake of Janet Mefferd's on-air confrontation and subsequently produced case for copyright infringement in The Trial study guide? How about the way that MH's public response was to distribute blame to research assistance even though only Mark Driscoll's name was on the introduction? How about the eventually revealed as errant statement that they didn't sell the study guide?
Would Mark and Grace Driscoll be willing to clarify to what degree, if any, William Vanderbloemen was authorized by them to say anything about the reasons for Driscoll's resignation? Would the Driscolls be willing to name names as to who counseled Mark Driscoll to resign? Would Mark Driscoll have anything to share about the short stint in which his daughter Ashley was featured blogging at Pastor Mark TV? Was there a process in which Mark and Grace Driscoll second-guessed that decision?
It might be worth noting that along his rise to his particular brand of stardom Mark Driscoll at one point announced Ashley was going to be blogging. Now it seems only for the best that Driscolls reconsidered that move but it's worth noting here in 2015 that that sort of celebrity pursuit by Mark Driscoll not just for himself but for a short time also for his daughter Ashley, is something to maybe ask about. It would seem implied the Driscolls thought better of Ashley as blogger who by dint of blogging could become a potential limited public figure but, if there's going to be questions, could somebody ask the Driscolls why they for a moment considered it a potentially good idea to feature Ashley at Pastor Mark TV?
It becomes more challenging to take the Mark Driscoll lament about the stories of the risks his family has faced when we keep in mind this was a man who advertised stories about his daughter amidst making cases for his unique take on Esther. It's also impossible to separate Mark Driscoll's stories about the risks he's described his family as facing without bearing in mind his own public testimony about himself.
After all, let's recall that when Driscoll wrote this at "The Hardest Part of Ministry" :
Add to this the safety issues posed by technology. I cannot fathom allowing my two teenagers to be on social media for fear of the venom they would receive. When my kids have to report on current events at school, they’ve learned to ask before they click on to news sites, since I never know who is saying what about me where.
it's as though he momentarily forgot to mention that he announced Ashley would be blogging at Pastor Mark TV at some point. If Driscoll couldn't imagine it in 2013 it's not because he didn't imagine it in 2011. Ashley kind of was a blogger for a little while. Observing a tension between the public plea for sympathy and the public conduct of the man has come up for discussion in the past. A question can be asked of Mark Driscoll, why he has made so much of his public career out of incendiary statements and provocation if he has feared for the welfare of his family. In 2014 he went so far as to declare:
That said, if there's a reason for Driscolls to have second-guessed their teens being on social media, Mark Driscoll's own history of engaging mass media and social media might be a cause for concern. After all, Mark Driscoll boasted in his early book:
Radical Reformission
ISBN 0-310-25659-3Mark DriscollZondervan
copyright 2004 by Mars Hill Church
page 14
... So I married Grace, began studying Scripture with the enthusiasm of a glutton at a buffet, and started preparing myself to become a pastor who does not go to jail for doing something stupid. To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats--which was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life. [emphasis added]
Oka, so how exactly does a guy like Mark Driscoll reconcile his pleas for sympathy for his endangered family with his own history of boasting that he inspired a few bomb threats and that this was wonderful because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life? How can he reconcile his plea for sympathy for his children with the reality that at one point he announced his teen daughter Ashley was going to be blogging at his site?
But if there are going to be questions for Mark Driscoll pending how about these:
1). Which people advised Mark Driscoll to resign, by name? Driscoll mentioned getting godly counsel, so who were they?
2a) Is William Vanderbloemen in a position to speak on behalf of Mark Driscoll to any members of the press?
2b) Is Vanderbloemen authorized by Mark Driscoll to speak to any effect that popular bloggers had any role in Mark Driscoll's resignation?
3) Given how publicly well-documented the Driscolls' 2000-2006 acknowledgment of the work of Dan Allender was, why did neither Mark nor Grace Driscoll nor editors at Thomas Nelson think to include a footnote of acknowledgment in the first print edition of Real Marriage?
4) Why did Death By Love, which by Mark Driscoll's account was mostly complete as of 2006, end up published as a book co-authored with Gerry Breshears?
5) Given the thoroughness with which the scholars Christian Brady, Robert Cargill and Scott Bailey publicly addressed the historical and interpretive errors of Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears' statements about the Targum Neofiti (that it was not advocating any Trinitarian views and that it was a 2nd century CE rather than BCE targum), would Mark Driscoll like to change his public stance on that targum and the interpretation he and/or Gerry Breshears promoted in the 2008 Doctrine series?
6) Is Mark Driscoll still persuaded that T. D. Jakes is an orthodox Trinitarian?
7) How much did Mars Hill executive leadership know about zoning issues in the Orange County situation prior to the eviction?
8) With respect to the International Paper building, Sound Transit has publicly stated that it finalized the purchase before Mars Hill even expressed interest. Why did Mars Hill authorize a website initially indicating the property was taken by way of immanent domain?
9) Is there some explanation for why Jamie Munson resigned? The announcement was given but no actual explanation of the reason for Munson's resignation has ever been given.
That's just a few. If the new story about Mark Driscoll's resignation is that he resigned in response to bloggers that drastically changes the entire framing narrative of why Mark Driscoll would resign. He doesn't have a history of taking bloggers very seriously. Even if it could be established that bloggers had some role in Driscoll deciding to resign that does not address the substance of what was being said by which bloggers that could have informed the decision by Mark Driscoll, or potentially those advising Mark Driscoll, to resign.
Driscoll's story about how and why the 2006-2007 re-org needed to happen significantly changed over the last seven years, so much so that it's a matter that he might find beneficial to clear up for public record. But let's leave that aside, having mentioned it, and returned to a matter from the resignation days.
If Mark Driscoll was persuaded nothing in the investigation or the reportedly proposed restoration plan found him guilty of sins that ultimately disqualified him from ministry then why did he resign? Wouldn't it have made sense and have been positive for Mark Driscoll to have announced that he was complying with whatever the restoration plan was (or reported to be)? That way Driscoll wouldn't have had to resign at all.
But if Driscoll was advised to resign it matters who gave that advice and why.
Let's keep in mind that on October 26, 2013 Driscoll wrote:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_63.html
http://theresurgence.com/2013/10/26/the-hardest-part-of-ministry
...
When people learn that my concern for family safety is the most difficult part of my ministry, I usually get the follow up question: Why don’t you just quit and go do something else or go do ministry somewhere else?
Honestly, I’ve pondered that question myself on the darker days. I love my family. I love Jesus—and so does my family. I love our church—and so does my family. And I love our city—and so does my family. On average, we have seen 100 people get baptized every month for about the last five years. We are seeing lives change, and we find great joy in that. That said, I do all I can to care for my family and protect them, without being paranoid, and the truth is if I were not called to this line of work, I would quit.
Yes, sadly this question is all too easy for me to answer, so your prayers are appreciated. I just turned 43. Lord willing, we have decades of ministry left to go, and honestly if I think about it too much I get depressed and anxious. For those ministering in similar contexts, I’m earnestly praying for you and your families as well
Yet not quite a year later:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/from-rns-pastor-mark-driscolls.html
http://www.religionnews.com/?p=109053
Mark Driscoll resigned.
...
In contemporary life, we respect failure only if we can interpret it as a stepping-stone to accomplishment. This is the premise of a raft of recent books, from “Failing Forward” to “The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success”. A week ago, a group of young writers asked me what my favorite writing achievement was; I proudly told the story of an essay that was at first rejected by a favorite magazine and then, after much work and rewriting, accepted at another. The tale, presented as a celebration of the necessity of making mistakes, was in fact a sly way of revealing not my fallibility but my tenacity. My reaction to initial failure, I was claiming, is what makes me not fail in the long run.
The real truth, though, is that most of our mistakes cannot really be said to have such obvious redemptive power. Most of the time, we simply lose time. We retrace our steps. We let friends fall away; we hurt our families. We do idiotic things in our work. We make mistakes from which we learn and, more often, mistakes from which we fail to learn. Aware of our errors, but frequently unable to do better, we hang our heads
The failures of a person, if they can be transformed into something through which they can ascend to even higher levels of success, just becomes part of the sales pitch.
Regulars who have read Wenatchee The Hatchet will not be shocked at an observation, that the publication of Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage introduced, as a framing narrative to their various bits of advice, the revelation that their marriage was "functional but not much fun" and that it was beset by problems. Even if the semi-dangling "r" in the title seemed to promise revelations that there were rough edges. The trouble was that the framing narrative of the disappointments and dysfunctions of the Driscoll marriage dismantled the continuity and solidity of the public narrative of the Driscoll marriage Mark had been sharing from the pulpit year after year (notwithstanding very-long-ago sermons in which he might say that in the first few years of the marriage he won all the arguments but ended up sleeping on the couch a lot).
But what if the Driscolls had written and published their book WITHOUT that framing narrative of marital frustration (or even failure)? Without that framing narrative would it have been more than what it turned out to be, a hodgepodge of variously useful would-be bon mots? That acronym "FRIEND" in the "Friends with Benefits" chapter? Strip away that framing narrative and how much of the controversy surrounding the book might have gone with it? Not the Result Source inc controversy, that was neither here nor there regarding the substance of the book itself.
No, it seems as though without that framing narrative the book would be a substantially different book. Leveraging the described failures as the background against which the better-than-ever Driscoll marriage could be part of the sales pitch might be a significant part of the sales pitch for the 2012 book.
It's just that in a variety of fairly conventional Christian interpretations and applications of biblical texts you're supposed to have arrived at that healthier and functional marriage before anyone greenlights you to ministry. If the Driscoll marriage was within acceptably average marriages, however, then the question of who decided Driscoll was married well enough to be in ministry becomes more moot. But the branding of Real Marriage might imply that having a "good enough" marriage wasn't going to be good enough for the marketing campaign that was settled on.
The book could be a case study of Eve Fairbanks' proposal that "we respect failure only if we can interpret it as a stepping-stone to accomplishment." The failures that have come to light in Driscoll's ministry since the 2012 publication of Real Marriage don't exactly seem like the kinds of failures that would lend themselves to being stepping-stones to further accomplishments.
If Driscoll's going to still show up at a Hillsong conference and is willing to get interviewed ...
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/03/12/hillsong-founder-brian-houston-issues-statement-about-mark-driscoll-at-the-hillsong-2015-conference/
if Mark Driscoll's been candid about the mistakes he's made then he's welcome to be candid in even more detail. How about the nature of MH PR response in the wake of Janet Mefferd's on-air confrontation and subsequently produced case for copyright infringement in The Trial study guide? How about the way that MH's public response was to distribute blame to research assistance even though only Mark Driscoll's name was on the introduction? How about the eventually revealed as errant statement that they didn't sell the study guide?
Would Mark and Grace Driscoll be willing to clarify to what degree, if any, William Vanderbloemen was authorized by them to say anything about the reasons for Driscoll's resignation? Would the Driscolls be willing to name names as to who counseled Mark Driscoll to resign? Would Mark Driscoll have anything to share about the short stint in which his daughter Ashley was featured blogging at Pastor Mark TV? Was there a process in which Mark and Grace Driscoll second-guessed that decision?
It might be worth noting that along his rise to his particular brand of stardom Mark Driscoll at one point announced Ashley was going to be blogging. Now it seems only for the best that Driscolls reconsidered that move but it's worth noting here in 2015 that that sort of celebrity pursuit by Mark Driscoll not just for himself but for a short time also for his daughter Ashley, is something to maybe ask about. It would seem implied the Driscolls thought better of Ashley as blogger who by dint of blogging could become a potential limited public figure but, if there's going to be questions, could somebody ask the Driscolls why they for a moment considered it a potentially good idea to feature Ashley at Pastor Mark TV?
It becomes more challenging to take the Mark Driscoll lament about the stories of the risks his family has faced when we keep in mind this was a man who advertised stories about his daughter amidst making cases for his unique take on Esther. It's also impossible to separate Mark Driscoll's stories about the risks he's described his family as facing without bearing in mind his own public testimony about himself.
After all, let's recall that when Driscoll wrote this at "The Hardest Part of Ministry" :
Add to this the safety issues posed by technology. I cannot fathom allowing my two teenagers to be on social media for fear of the venom they would receive. When my kids have to report on current events at school, they’ve learned to ask before they click on to news sites, since I never know who is saying what about me where.
it's as though he momentarily forgot to mention that he announced Ashley would be blogging at Pastor Mark TV at some point. If Driscoll couldn't imagine it in 2013 it's not because he didn't imagine it in 2011. Ashley kind of was a blogger for a little while. Observing a tension between the public plea for sympathy and the public conduct of the man has come up for discussion in the past. A question can be asked of Mark Driscoll, why he has made so much of his public career out of incendiary statements and provocation if he has feared for the welfare of his family. In 2014 he went so far as to declare:
That said, if there's a reason for Driscolls to have second-guessed their teens being on social media, Mark Driscoll's own history of engaging mass media and social media might be a cause for concern. After all, Mark Driscoll boasted in his early book:
Radical Reformission
ISBN 0-310-25659-3Mark DriscollZondervan
copyright 2004 by Mars Hill Church
page 14
... So I married Grace, began studying Scripture with the enthusiasm of a glutton at a buffet, and started preparing myself to become a pastor who does not go to jail for doing something stupid. To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats--which was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life. [emphasis added]
Oka, so how exactly does a guy like Mark Driscoll reconcile his pleas for sympathy for his endangered family with his own history of boasting that he inspired a few bomb threats and that this was wonderful because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life? How can he reconcile his plea for sympathy for his children with the reality that at one point he announced his teen daughter Ashley was going to be blogging at his site?
But if there are going to be questions for Mark Driscoll pending how about these:
1). Which people advised Mark Driscoll to resign, by name? Driscoll mentioned getting godly counsel, so who were they?
2a) Is William Vanderbloemen in a position to speak on behalf of Mark Driscoll to any members of the press?
2b) Is Vanderbloemen authorized by Mark Driscoll to speak to any effect that popular bloggers had any role in Mark Driscoll's resignation?
3) Given how publicly well-documented the Driscolls' 2000-2006 acknowledgment of the work of Dan Allender was, why did neither Mark nor Grace Driscoll nor editors at Thomas Nelson think to include a footnote of acknowledgment in the first print edition of Real Marriage?
4) Why did Death By Love, which by Mark Driscoll's account was mostly complete as of 2006, end up published as a book co-authored with Gerry Breshears?
5) Given the thoroughness with which the scholars Christian Brady, Robert Cargill and Scott Bailey publicly addressed the historical and interpretive errors of Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears' statements about the Targum Neofiti (that it was not advocating any Trinitarian views and that it was a 2nd century CE rather than BCE targum), would Mark Driscoll like to change his public stance on that targum and the interpretation he and/or Gerry Breshears promoted in the 2008 Doctrine series?
6) Is Mark Driscoll still persuaded that T. D. Jakes is an orthodox Trinitarian?
7) How much did Mars Hill executive leadership know about zoning issues in the Orange County situation prior to the eviction?
8) With respect to the International Paper building, Sound Transit has publicly stated that it finalized the purchase before Mars Hill even expressed interest. Why did Mars Hill authorize a website initially indicating the property was taken by way of immanent domain?
9) Is there some explanation for why Jamie Munson resigned? The announcement was given but no actual explanation of the reason for Munson's resignation has ever been given.
That's just a few. If the new story about Mark Driscoll's resignation is that he resigned in response to bloggers that drastically changes the entire framing narrative of why Mark Driscoll would resign. He doesn't have a history of taking bloggers very seriously. Even if it could be established that bloggers had some role in Driscoll deciding to resign that does not address the substance of what was being said by which bloggers that could have informed the decision by Mark Driscoll, or potentially those advising Mark Driscoll, to resign.
Driscoll's story about how and why the 2006-2007 re-org needed to happen significantly changed over the last seven years, so much so that it's a matter that he might find beneficial to clear up for public record. But let's leave that aside, having mentioned it, and returned to a matter from the resignation days.
If Mark Driscoll was persuaded nothing in the investigation or the reportedly proposed restoration plan found him guilty of sins that ultimately disqualified him from ministry then why did he resign? Wouldn't it have made sense and have been positive for Mark Driscoll to have announced that he was complying with whatever the restoration plan was (or reported to be)? That way Driscoll wouldn't have had to resign at all.
But if Driscoll was advised to resign it matters who gave that advice and why.
Let's keep in mind that on October 26, 2013 Driscoll wrote:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_63.html
http://theresurgence.com/2013/10/26/the-hardest-part-of-ministry
...
When people learn that my concern for family safety is the most difficult part of my ministry, I usually get the follow up question: Why don’t you just quit and go do something else or go do ministry somewhere else?
Honestly, I’ve pondered that question myself on the darker days. I love my family. I love Jesus—and so does my family. I love our church—and so does my family. And I love our city—and so does my family. On average, we have seen 100 people get baptized every month for about the last five years. We are seeing lives change, and we find great joy in that. That said, I do all I can to care for my family and protect them, without being paranoid, and the truth is if I were not called to this line of work, I would quit.
Yes, sadly this question is all too easy for me to answer, so your prayers are appreciated. I just turned 43. Lord willing, we have decades of ministry left to go, and honestly if I think about it too much I get depressed and anxious. For those ministering in similar contexts, I’m earnestly praying for you and your families as well
Yet not quite a year later:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/from-rns-pastor-mark-driscolls.html
http://www.religionnews.com/?p=109053
Mark Driscoll resigned.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
the blurred lines verdict and some reactions, and some tentative thoughts about the mechanical and internet context in which this verdict happened
So, the verdict was the verdict.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/03/why-the-blurred-lines-verdict-could-be-bad-for-music/387433/
Hip-hop in particular has proudly thrived on borrowed sounds and vibes, and has clashed with the courts over the years because of sampling. In the wake of the ruling, Questlove of The Roots sent (then deleted) a tweet with the hashtag #NiceKnowingYouHipHop. In 2013 he told New York that “If it were a case of melodic plagiarism, I would definitely side with the estate,” but then explained why he thought Thicke and Pharrell were in the clear:
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507
Cope had taken an unconventional approach. Many artificial creativity programs use a more sophisticated version of the method Cope first tried with Bach. It's called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity.
The word on the street now is that the 21st century is the age of entrepreneurship.
Few can remember a time when music wasn’t a tool of self-definition, but until the second half of the twentieth century this was only a small part of a song’s appeal. For most people living in the world, circa 1920, music was embedded into their life, not chosen as a lifestyle accessory. But gradually, over the next several decades, music’s value as a pathway of personal definition came to the forefront of our culture. Sometimes the shift was barely perceptible, but in retrospect we can gauge its profound impact. For example, people in rural America didn’t choose country music during the early decades of the 20th century, but were literally born into its ethos; yet by the ’70s, country music had evolved into a lifestyle choice, a posture adopted by millions who never roped a steer or herded cattle, but still wanted to affiliate themselves with the values espoused by the songs. By the time we arrive at the age of disco and punk rock, the music consciously builds its appeal on lifestyle considerations.
Record label execs and critics never actually announced that they had given up on music as music, but their actions made clear how little faith they retained in its redemptive power, how much they craved the glamour of other fields. They acted as if music were a subset of the fashion or cinema or advertising industries. Songs became vehicles, platforms for something larger than just notes and words. Or—dare I suggest?—something smaller.
What some of the early rap samplers went through when, all of a sudden, their music became illegal in that way.
Exactly. And copyright law's getting more and more strict, but you can exist in two ways: You can either be remarkably wealthy and license whatever you want, or you can be really obscure and no one's gonna care. But if you're anywhere in the middle, collage becomes difficult. So I really like working with microsamples and sounds that are devoid of their original context, but exist just as a timbral element. [emphasis added]
Like a pixel, in a way, of music. And to get around copyright issues, you can just use it if it's that small?
Well, I would consider it fair use — because it's completely recontextualized. A new derivative work is made, and there's no way to tell what it was. [Laughing] We should really not talk about this. I'm expecting the emails that are like, "We've identified the microsamples you were discussing ... "
The shame of it is that there is a trade-off here, we can't fool ourselves about who owns this massive recorded legacy, can we? If the medieval church had some unfair restrictions about what kinds of music it would and wouldn't pay for or endorse; and if 18th century courts were financing the arts to vault their own reputations; corporations have their strengths and weaknesses. We have to take Bieber with the Beatles, basically, and we have to see that that's how the corporation-based patronage system works. And in some sense the verdict we're seeing could be another sign of the times. When mechanical royalties for audio recordings are the basis of a profit for corporations big and small then they're going to police the boundaries in ways that may seem draconian. It's the kind of thing that maybe couldn't even have happened half a century ago when copyrights lasted 20-some years and had to be renewed or your work would become public domain. It's not that great artists can't roll with the punches, Duke Ellington's most explosively brilliant creative phase came in reaction to BMI doing an embargo on the work of ASCAP members. It's just that those of us interested in creating music may have a lot more keeping up to do with legal precedents if we want to stay out of trouble. The recent verdict has not been met with cartwheels of joy, but perhaps we can take a long view and see that artists in various times and places have had to work around rulings and rules that seemed pretty punitive.
AFTERTHOUGHT
Another thing the ruling may tell us about our culture is that in early 21st century American culture, particularly pop culture, we are living in the first century in which basically our entire pop cultural ecology is NOT generally featuring stuff in the public domain. That's another sense in which this kind of court case and associated ruling seems like it couldn't have even been possible a half century ago because copyright laws in the US had not been modified to conform to more international norms.
What may signal the poverty of our pop culture might not be that all the popular songs sound the same but that in an age in which all our pop culture is mediated through mechanisms and legal precedents that have no place for what is construed as public domain some company or some songwriter or publisher can potentially point to anything that isn't classical music these days and build a case for how and why it's probably cribbed from something this or that copyright holder has an interest in.
So in that sense it might be great that classical guitarists keep playing transcriptions of Albeniz and Bach, right? ;)
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/03/why-the-blurred-lines-verdict-could-be-bad-for-music/387433/
Hip-hop in particular has proudly thrived on borrowed sounds and vibes, and has clashed with the courts over the years because of sampling. In the wake of the ruling, Questlove of The Roots sent (then deleted) a tweet with the hashtag #NiceKnowingYouHipHop. In 2013 he told New York that “If it were a case of melodic plagiarism, I would definitely side with the estate,” but then explained why he thought Thicke and Pharrell were in the clear:
Look, technically it’s not plagiarized. It’s not the same chord progression. It’s a feeling. Because there’s a cowbell in it and a fender Rhodes as the main instrumentation — that still doesn’t make it plagiarized. We all know it’s derivative. That’s how Pharrell works. Everything that Pharrell produces is derivative of another song — but it’s an homage.Borrowed sounds and vibes permeate every style of music. Let's consider some old coverage of David Cope, who developed programs to compose music:
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507
Cope had taken an unconventional approach. Many artificial creativity programs use a more sophisticated version of the method Cope first tried with Bach. It's called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity.
In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.
...
Cope thinks the old cliché of beauty in the eye of the beholder explains the situation well: "The dots and lines on paper are merely triggers that set things off in our mind, do all the wonderful things that give us excitement and love of the music, and we falsely believe that somewhere in that music is the thing we're feeling," he says. "I don't know what the hell 'soul' is. I don't know that we have any of it. I'm looking to get off on life. And music gets me off a lot of the time. I really, really, really am moved by it. I don't care who wrote it."
...
Eleanor Selfridge-Field, senior researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, likens Cope's discoveries to the findings from molecular biology that altered the field of biology.
"He has revealed a lot of essential elements of musical style, and the definition of musical works, and of individual contributions to the evolution of music, that simply haven't been made evident by any other process," she says. "That really is an important contribution to our understanding of music, revealing some things that are really worth knowing."
One of the worries that burbles up to the surface is that pop music seems to be flattening out and homogenizing.
Why? Well, one working theory is that corporations don't take risks on music that's very new or very different on the one hand. On the other hand, more in the direction of Cope's ideas, humans were never that inherently inventive or creative to begin with and the era of mass computation and cross-cultural analysis and recording have enabled us to better quantify how many kinds of ruts we've written ourselves into as a race and how deep those ruts go.
Coming at this as someone who listens to and composes what is colloquially known as classical music it's interesting to see writers and musicians fret about the decline of the popularity of their favorite musical idioms.
IS the crisis a loss of real musical appreciation? Maybe not, maybe there's something else going on.
The Medieval church. The 18th-century court. The 20th-century university.
Artists have to eat, and the ways they have found to put food on the table throughout the ages have provided equivalent fodder for their inspirations. Whether their goal is to elevate a divine entity, a royal personage or scientific inquiry, these arts patrons have dictated, either directly or through habituation, the artistic emphases of their eras.
Artists have to eat, and the ways they have found to put food on the table throughout the ages have provided equivalent fodder for their inspirations. Whether their goal is to elevate a divine entity, a royal personage or scientific inquiry, these arts patrons have dictated, either directly or through habituation, the artistic emphases of their eras.
The word on the street now is that the 21st century is the age of entrepreneurship.
It could be the crisis is within what may be loosely called the patronage system. In classical music composers could take somebody else's ideas and fiddle with them and things were okay. Brahms could compose a set of variations on a theme by Haydn and it would go over fine. Haydn could compose a theme and someone like Thomas Wenzel Matiegka could take one of Haydn's lieder and compose a sweet set of variations on it for solo guitar. The point here is Haydn didn't necessarily care that his work was getting copied outright or made the basis of derivative works because he was already paid by his patron. The patron ensured he could make a living and through that could dictate, more or less, some parameters about what sorts of music Haydn composed.
If in the medieval era the Church funded the arts; if in the 18th century courts funded the arts; and in the 20th century universities gave artists things to do, it may not be that the 21st century is really the age of the entrepreneur, not when we look at the styles of music people actually listen to.
http://s0.thejazzline.com/tjl/uploads/2015/03/nielsen-2014-year-end-music-report-us.pdf
http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/
http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/
No, it seems that the patronage system in the 21st century "could" be an entrepreneurship model but it's more likely to make sense if we describe it as a corporate model, where corporations finance and promote artists they believe in. Though it may be crude to put it this way, The Beatles are the apotheosis of corporation sponsored popular culture. While rock and pop critics may bemoan the middlebrow pop culture frequently IS the middlebrow. There's nothing in Revolver that gets even a fifth as trippy as choral music by Xenakis. Bartok's string quartets were violently psychedelic before Jimi Hendrix was born.
But as Kyle Gann has put it, the distinction between "classical" and pop can be construed as a difference between philosophies about timbre:
...
In short, the pop record has turned its fans into cognoscenti of precise timbres. One reads constantly how proud they are of being able to recognize a tune or album from the first split second of a single note. There are possibly classical music mavens so familiar with recordings of the Brahms symphonies that they can recognize which orchestra is playing from the first note; but what does that have to do with Brahms's intentions? Most instruments are neutral, and can be easily dissociated from the music they are associated with. We can hear a piano without being disappointed that it isn't Chopin or Horowitz or Bud Powell, we hear an oboe without thinking of Mozart or Strauss, even an accordion without necessarily thinking of polkas. But trap sets and electric guitars, at this stage of the game, are not neutral, and cannot be bent to any compositional use the composer imagines. They make musicians want and expect to hear a certain kind of energy and virtuosity, and no music that fails in that comparison will be well received.
In short, the pop record has turned its fans into cognoscenti of precise timbres. One reads constantly how proud they are of being able to recognize a tune or album from the first split second of a single note. There are possibly classical music mavens so familiar with recordings of the Brahms symphonies that they can recognize which orchestra is playing from the first note; but what does that have to do with Brahms's intentions? Most instruments are neutral, and can be easily dissociated from the music they are associated with. We can hear a piano without being disappointed that it isn't Chopin or Horowitz or Bud Powell, we hear an oboe without thinking of Mozart or Strauss, even an accordion without necessarily thinking of polkas. But trap sets and electric guitars, at this stage of the game, are not neutral, and cannot be bent to any compositional use the composer imagines. They make musicians want and expect to hear a certain kind of energy and virtuosity, and no music that fails in that comparison will be well received.
As has been noted here before, more than a century ago John Philip Sousa was willing to admit to being an alarmist about machines being used to broadcast and record music.
John Philip Sousa,
The Menace of Mechanical Music
Originally published in Appleton's Magazine, Vol. 8 (1906), pp. 278-284.
The Menace of Mechanical Music
Originally published in Appleton's Magazine, Vol. 8 (1906), pp. 278-284.
Under such conditions the tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises, so important a factor in the curriculum of physical culture, will be out of vogue!
Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?
When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?
Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression? Congregational singing will suffer also, which, though crude at times, at least improves the respiration of many a weary sinner and softens the voices of those who live amid tumult and noise.
He would have probably found the era of the iPod hugely troubling and offensive. He would find that a majority of American citizens hear the majority of their music mediated by machines with menus rather than through hearing live performance, let alone performing the music themselves, troubling. The trouble would probably be exaggerated but it could be understandable. It's interesting that the thrust of Sousa's worry is that the amateurs would dwindle.
A complaint that may be worth registering now is that when people talk about music it's often not really even about the music. From a piece by Ted Gioia
Record label execs and critics never actually announced that they had given up on music as music, but their actions made clear how little faith they retained in its redemptive power, how much they craved the glamour of other fields. They acted as if music were a subset of the fashion or cinema or advertising industries. Songs became vehicles, platforms for something larger than just notes and words. Or—dare I suggest?—something smaller.
I.e. music criticism that is about lifestyle or identity politics is in some sense not necessarily really about the music as music. Stevie Wonder could sing that music is a world within itself with a language we all understand, but that could only be sung convincingly within a shared musical language. What if we're switching from the 12-tone equally-tempered chromatic scale and its diatonic offshoots to a seven-tone Thai scale in which the seven tones within the octave are all equidistant? Suddenly that music that's a world within itself turns out to be a part of an underexplored solar system. I guess for that there's the heliocentric worlds of Sun Ra ... .
The difficulty that authors have been trying to articulate about the recent verdict is that the problem with it is a precedent it sets in light of our increasing knowledge as a species of how wildly uncreative we actually are, how relentlessly and even unexpectedly recombinant even our most inventive and revolutionary works of art have turned out to be. Perhaps it could be likened to some lovestruck teenagers who fall in love and have sex and think this is the most amazing thing to ever happen to two human beings and that their respective parents couldn't understand how this all feels ... except for the part where if their respective parents hadn't felt that way the teenagers wouldn't have been born.
And it seems as though the problem is not necessarily, in itself, the intellectual property, just as some libertarians might somewhere propose that by itself fiat currency might not be a disastrous idea. Couple fiat currency with fractional reserve banking and a series of manipulations of interest rates and the economy could become some giant and unsustainable bubble, maybe? Well, by remarkably rough analogy, intellectual property in an era before machines and virtually globally indexed search engines with access to nearly every preserved epoch and region of human culture wasn't exactly a problem. But trying to retain some sense of what IP is for (and what it's for contains the contradictory impulses of preserving the monetary interest of creators while also providing a way for inspiring further work and additions to the shared culture) in light of the changes of the last three decades is messy. So we get this at Slate:
So in the wake of “Blurred Lines,” musicians face a daunting task. They not only have to fear unintentionally copying three notes. They also have to fear that some other, maybe older or even dead musician, will challenge their great new song on copyright grounds just for incorporating some similar—and maybe very familiar—musical elements.
So how could musicians interact with or react to this verdict? Probably much as some have already. Take Dan Deacon in interview ... :
Exactly. And copyright law's getting more and more strict, but you can exist in two ways: You can either be remarkably wealthy and license whatever you want, or you can be really obscure and no one's gonna care. But if you're anywhere in the middle, collage becomes difficult. So I really like working with microsamples and sounds that are devoid of their original context, but exist just as a timbral element. [emphasis added]
Like a pixel, in a way, of music. And to get around copyright issues, you can just use it if it's that small?
Well, I would consider it fair use — because it's completely recontextualized. A new derivative work is made, and there's no way to tell what it was. [Laughing] We should really not talk about this. I'm expecting the emails that are like, "We've identified the microsamples you were discussing ... "
Having contributed in a small way to the observation that some local author who had sold quite a few books had not quite adequately given credit to those whose ideas he had benefited from, we live in an era of unprecedented access to information and of unprecedented access to citation.
We also live in an era in which so much of our culture and our capacity to interact with culture is curated by corporations and governments and, perhaps even more crucially, so thoroughly mediated by machines that there's a real risk of artistically living and dying by the kinds of samples and sounds you pick when it comes to having an artistic life.
I think Sousa was at most partly right and that what he missed was that whatever dearth there would eventually be in the amateur musical life of a community, there would be a trade-off, a trade-off some of us consider to ultimately have been worth some of the trouble--we have access via recordings to every recordable epoch and region of human history. A lot has been lost to the sands of time but a lot has been preserved. It may be that every age will tend to have people liking whatever is already most popular in their time and place (which is fine) but we have an opportunity to have musical horizons that encompass the entire global across space and time, within very obvious limits.
The shame of it is that there is a trade-off here, we can't fool ourselves about who owns this massive recorded legacy, can we? If the medieval church had some unfair restrictions about what kinds of music it would and wouldn't pay for or endorse; and if 18th century courts were financing the arts to vault their own reputations; corporations have their strengths and weaknesses. We have to take Bieber with the Beatles, basically, and we have to see that that's how the corporation-based patronage system works. And in some sense the verdict we're seeing could be another sign of the times. When mechanical royalties for audio recordings are the basis of a profit for corporations big and small then they're going to police the boundaries in ways that may seem draconian. It's the kind of thing that maybe couldn't even have happened half a century ago when copyrights lasted 20-some years and had to be renewed or your work would become public domain. It's not that great artists can't roll with the punches, Duke Ellington's most explosively brilliant creative phase came in reaction to BMI doing an embargo on the work of ASCAP members. It's just that those of us interested in creating music may have a lot more keeping up to do with legal precedents if we want to stay out of trouble. The recent verdict has not been met with cartwheels of joy, but perhaps we can take a long view and see that artists in various times and places have had to work around rulings and rules that seemed pretty punitive.
AFTERTHOUGHT
Another thing the ruling may tell us about our culture is that in early 21st century American culture, particularly pop culture, we are living in the first century in which basically our entire pop cultural ecology is NOT generally featuring stuff in the public domain. That's another sense in which this kind of court case and associated ruling seems like it couldn't have even been possible a half century ago because copyright laws in the US had not been modified to conform to more international norms.
What may signal the poverty of our pop culture might not be that all the popular songs sound the same but that in an age in which all our pop culture is mediated through mechanisms and legal precedents that have no place for what is construed as public domain some company or some songwriter or publisher can potentially point to anything that isn't classical music these days and build a case for how and why it's probably cribbed from something this or that copyright holder has an interest in.
So in that sense it might be great that classical guitarists keep playing transcriptions of Albeniz and Bach, right? ;)
links and such
While the MoMa exhibit dedicated to her career is getting the verdict of being an unsatisfying mess, Alex Ross' feature in The Guardian earlier this year is still fun reading for those who may be into at least some of her work.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/15/bjork-delta-archives-alex-ross
The last non-classical albums I can remember getting were Bjork's Vespertine which is amazing), Portishead's 3rd and Johnny Cash's posthumous album. Maybe Weezer's Maladroit, after which I stopped paying attention to them. So the new millennium has offered some fun pop music but when that's not exactly what you're composing all the time and you have other things going on you don't always keep up. Didn't much care for Medulla, but still open to at least checking out some of Bjork's stuff.
In the "bad news for jazz fans", jazz and classical bottom out the charts, basically
http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/
http://s0.thejazzline.com/tjl/uploads/2015/03/nielsen-2014-year-end-music-report-us.pdf
Or at least they do if you don't count childrens' music, which is dead last. Some styles of music just don't get a lot of traction. It seems worth mentioning that as albums for kids go They Might Be Giants has done some great work. Vowels are important letters ... and so on. You might not expect Wenatchee The Hatchet to have necessarily paid attention to childrens' music but TMBG has done some nice stuff in the idiom. Meanwhile, back to the low numbers for jazz and classical, jazz actually declined in sales whereas classical had some increase.
Jazz has reached a point where it's considered art music and that might be part of its crisis. It can be considered to "establishment" and too demanding. Still, the decline of jazz might be oversold. Some folks could quickly point out the fury of Bieber fans when Esperanza Spaulding got a Grammy for, was it best new artist, and Bieber didn't. Setting aside that "best new artist" could be the kiss of death depending on how you look at things, what I've had a chance to hear of Spaulding's work left no doubt she does some fun stuff, whereas Bieber ... can't condone Cartman's reaction to Bieber or his fans, as such, but not a Belieber.
oh, another, Jim West is stoked that Jacob Wright's book on David, Caleb and Judahite war memorials won an award.
https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/congratulations-to-jacob-wright-2/
Since Wenatchee The Hatchet owns and read the book and found it fascinating there's going to be blog posts about it eventually but for the fact that it's currently lent out to a friend. Kind of hard to blog about Wright's book if it's not in hand.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/15/bjork-delta-archives-alex-ross
The last non-classical albums I can remember getting were Bjork's Vespertine which is amazing), Portishead's 3rd and Johnny Cash's posthumous album. Maybe Weezer's Maladroit, after which I stopped paying attention to them. So the new millennium has offered some fun pop music but when that's not exactly what you're composing all the time and you have other things going on you don't always keep up. Didn't much care for Medulla, but still open to at least checking out some of Bjork's stuff.
In the "bad news for jazz fans", jazz and classical bottom out the charts, basically
http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/
http://s0.thejazzline.com/tjl/uploads/2015/03/nielsen-2014-year-end-music-report-us.pdf
Or at least they do if you don't count childrens' music, which is dead last. Some styles of music just don't get a lot of traction. It seems worth mentioning that as albums for kids go They Might Be Giants has done some great work. Vowels are important letters ... and so on. You might not expect Wenatchee The Hatchet to have necessarily paid attention to childrens' music but TMBG has done some nice stuff in the idiom. Meanwhile, back to the low numbers for jazz and classical, jazz actually declined in sales whereas classical had some increase.
Jazz has reached a point where it's considered art music and that might be part of its crisis. It can be considered to "establishment" and too demanding. Still, the decline of jazz might be oversold. Some folks could quickly point out the fury of Bieber fans when Esperanza Spaulding got a Grammy for, was it best new artist, and Bieber didn't. Setting aside that "best new artist" could be the kiss of death depending on how you look at things, what I've had a chance to hear of Spaulding's work left no doubt she does some fun stuff, whereas Bieber ... can't condone Cartman's reaction to Bieber or his fans, as such, but not a Belieber.
oh, another, Jim West is stoked that Jacob Wright's book on David, Caleb and Judahite war memorials won an award.
https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/congratulations-to-jacob-wright-2/
Since Wenatchee The Hatchet owns and read the book and found it fascinating there's going to be blog posts about it eventually but for the fact that it's currently lent out to a friend. Kind of hard to blog about Wright's book if it's not in hand.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Naked Pastor on the Justin Dean Interview--WtH considers a question of whether or not MH PR responded to journalists and bloggers in the past
http://www.nakedpastor.com/2015/03/bullies-and-blindness-an-analysis-of-the-interview-between-justin-blaney-and-justin-dean/
It has been very strange to recall that back around 2012 when Mark Driscoll weighed in on the "kerfuffle" of Liberty University, it didn't seem as though Driscoll took bloggers very seriously.
That was then, and now in 2015 we're in some kind of pre-emptive post-mortem year where people sound off on what the causes of decline were, even though the corporation doesn't actually expire until the end of 2015 so far as the state of Washington is concerned.
Even so, we get stuff like ... :
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/faults-our-stars
Driscoll’s resignation is unusual, Vanderbloemen says, as it was not prompted by serious misappropriation of funds or an inappropriate sexual relationship, but rather by a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers, some of whom lived nowhere near Seattle.
It's almost as though the Relevant article goes from start to finish without referencing Janet Mefferd's confrontation with Driscoll on the air regarding intellectual property infringement on the one hand, or the World Magazine coverage of the Result Source agreement to secure a place on the NYT bestseller list for Real Marriage on the other. How does a feature article of such length manage to go so long without mentioning the details of those controversies?
On what basis does William Vanderbloemen know that Mark Driscoll resigned in response to a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers? If there is one statement presented as a declaration of fact that has yet to be verified by Mark Driscoll himself this would be the big one.
Driscoll's resignation letter mentioned godly counsel but did that godly counsel ever suggest that bloggers had any role in providing an impetus for Mark Driscoll to resign?
Blaney and Dean seem persuaded that bloggers are not interested in the truth or that they are misguided. Hayward records the following:
Blaney says:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/19/mark-driscoll-addresses-mars-hill-church-about-one-of-the-deepest-learning-seasons-of-his-life/
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/b1dd5d1b6b3a14b6e7f3/raw/6c9dfc093dda78bb1a6b7ae29a9909045ad2a9e3/MHMW20140718
7-18-2014
...They have that same freedom, and so, and so others are free to, to say things as well. And being a bit of a public figure I don't have the same, try to get this right, protection sometimes as a private citizen, because I've made myself a public figure. So that's just sort of a blessing and the complexity of the great opportunity that God has given me as a Bible teacher and a pastor, especially in an age of technology, which I praise God for.
In other words, Driscoll had made himself the kind of public figure who can be the subject of discussion and scrutiny. While Driscoll expressed gratitude for being able to have such a role, it isn't so clear that Justin Dean or Justin Blaney seem as reconciled to the idea that being a public figure at some level opens a person up to public critique on the things the person gained a reputation in. Had Driscoll not sought celebrity the criticism would not have been possible. It could almost seem as though people like Blaney and Dean could be construed as having a double standard in which the benefits of celebrity for megachurch pastors shouldn't be construed as having with that any attendant responsibilities or risks? A little tough to be sure. But to go by Mark Driscoll's own words from mid-2014 it seems as though Driscoll had a clearer understanding of the risks involved in his being a type of public figure than seems reflected in the recent statements of Justin Dean or Justin Blaney.
Hayward quotes Dean's later statement within the interview as follows:
A little later, Dean responds:
Well, about that, it doesn't seem like it would be that tough for Justin Dean to have noticed that Wenatchee The Hatchet has never monetized the blog. There's no ad revenue here and there isn't really a plan at this point to monetize the blog. Long, long ago in college Wenatchee The Hatchet recalled a professor saying that in the field of journalism the greatest threat that would spike a story that needed to get published for the public good was generally not going to be from a hostile source; it was not going to be from an editor; it often even wasn't going to be from a squeamish publisher; it was going to tend to be from advertisers and sponsors who didn't like the impact a story might have on their bottom lines or their public reputations. If there is a relative silence within the Christian media industries about the significance of the plagiarism controversy and the sales-rigging agreement that were at the center of the most high profile and thoroughly documented issues in connection to Mark Driscoll the question could be why those haven't stayed at the forefront of a discussion of how and why Mark Driscoll's star declined.
As far as hits go, the traffic to the blog these days is a tenth what it was half a year ago, if it's even that big. There are posts incubating for detailed discussions by case study of the evolution of sonata form in solo guitar literature in the early 19th century. That'll inspire a lot of hits and ad revenue, right? The trouble with the clickbait canard is that if we consider the old age in which Driscoll's podcasts were popular the traffic was considered a sign of the power of the ministry. The problem with Dean's frame of reference is that one person's sincere effort being another person's cynical clickbait could go the other way. Who's to say Mark Driscoll's various instagram and facebook controversies weren't at least potentially ginned up to get traffic, too? Golden Rule the assertion and apply it to yourself and see how it plays out. If Justin Dean aims to have any business in public relations he may want to keep in mind that the practice of self-promotion is kind of, by definition, in his vocation. There's some axiom about how those living in glass houses should avoid throwing stones. People whose professions involve developing clickbait need to be cautious about how they impute the motive of clickbait to people who may not even be in the field of public relations.
Even if we set aside altogether the problem that ascribing Mark Driscoll's resignation to a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers is a William Vanderbloemen summary without a direct quote; even if we set aside that such a summary flies in the face of Mark Driscoll's public statements about what he considered to be the reliability and credibility of blogs and bloggers in general; there's still this other problem, what were blogs distributing that could have been construed as in any way making anything difficult for Mars Hill in general or Mark Driscoll in particular?
Let's be clear, the Janet Mefferd and World Magazine moments were vastly more significant in terms of media events. When members of the formal press had moments like that the contributions of bloggers could be considered negligible because in many ways there were. Wenatchee The Hatchet is willing to say that about Wenatchee The Hatchet. All that happened here was rather basically preserving and discussing primary source statements from Mars Hill leaders about its history and people for long enough that when members of the mainstream and Christian press got around to doing further investigation there were references that were possible to materials that, at least in 2014, had a perplexing capacity to disappear.
So whether Dean and Blaney would wish to address the topic of Wenatchee The Hatchet, a question could be raised as to whether Wenatchee The Hatchet had inaccurate information. Considering the great lengths Wenatchee The Hatchet went to in order to establish there were factual inaccuracies in Valerie Tarico's initial April 2014 coverage, and considering that a Valerie Tarico came by to offer thanks for the corrections, and clarify that the article had been updated, any attempt at a blanket statement to the effect that blogs and bloggers had misinformation about Driscoll and Mars Hill seems sketchy.
Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't really a watchblog, it never has been. Blogs can have a valuable role in keeping a light on stories and issues that are under-reported in mainstream or even independent media and so that's a value in blogging, but it cannot be construed as a substitute for the formal press covering things. There are strengths and weaknesses to blogging and conventional journalism. The strength of conventional journalism is that it emerges with an establishment, a culture in which the narrative is accepted as part of the public record. The difficulty, however, is that the sources which are relied upon to establish that public narrative can and do lie and if the establishment sources that are accepted as viable sources turn out to be misinformed or even deceptive, then the press become dupes for agendas they may not be able to see through. This would, not coincidentally, be why Wenatchee The Hatchet does not really endorse the libertarian theory of the press.
On the other hand, while the strength of a blog is not being tethered to the institutions that can spike or spin stories, what blogs do not have is the kind of credibility and clout to be treated as seriously as a magazine like Time or a newspaper like The Guardian would be. Bloggers don't have copy editors, fact-checkers, staff or people and resources to ensure things have been accurately sourced. And bloggers can often be woefully ignorant (to their own peril) of what constitutes a defensible journalistic line of enquiry and what is likely to end up becoming the basis for a defamation suit. This seems to be where folks like Justin Dean might be most eager to camp on, especially when the word "evil" gets brought up, though Dean seems to have granted that bloggers think they are aiming for the right thing. This, too, is the kind of diagnosis that could boomerang. After all, didn't Mars Hill leadership consider Result Source a good idea at one point, a strategy that would help get the message out to the most people? Dean's sincerity or insincerity is moot here, what's interesting is that the lines of reasoning he proposes about bloggers end up being critiques that can be applied as equally to his former employer and even to himself as to "bloggers".
Golden Rule it, if you would be willing to cheerfully grant that someone say about you what you're willing to say about them and concede that it could be accurate, proceed. If you're going to suggest that bloggers are motivated by clickbait and grudges can you concede that that's part of your motivation?
Wenatchee The Hatchet does not suggest this to actually provide any interpretation of the motives of Dean or others but to propose that if you're going to wade into a public discussion about media theory and media motivations you have to think through what philosophies motivate people in a way that opens yourself up to the same criticism you might subject others to. If a person wants to suggest that nobody wants to write anything that's untrue, except for bloggers, what about Mark Driscoll's blog? At the peak of Mark Driscoll's celebrity around 2012 he had that "A Blog Post for the Brits", didn't he? Well, it was up for a while but it's down and not exactly archived. A bit of the post can be read as preserved by WtH over here. What was striking about the blog post for the Brits was that Mark Driscoll published in advance of his full interview with Justin Brierley being made available to the public, if memory serves. If a Justin Dean were to argue that blogs and bloggers might be willing to write things that don't turn out to be true, what could be said about Mark Driscoll's blog post for the Brits? Did it seem like a pre-emptive strike of some kind with respect to Brierley? Could it be possible that by the measure of Justin Dean's own arguments against the ethics of bloggers Mark Driscoll could have had a few missteps?
If Mars Hill advocates believe that Wenatchee The Hatchet has misunderstood or misquoted anyone in the history of Mars Hill it's not like they can't say anything in settings where comments are available. By and large nobody's commented here and Wenatchee won't deny discouraging comments. The aim here was to document things and to also prevent people from venting things about former members and staff that could be construed as even potentially defamatory. If you aren't willing to swear to it in court don't say it as a comment in a blog, basically.
To the extent that bloggers are not really journalists and the internet has opened up new risks and opportunities it's not unfair for someone like Dean or Blaney to express reservations about the power that social media has, even as they could have gone a bit further to concede that the majority of Mark Driscoll's public role hinged precisely on his use of social and broadcast media. If Jesus once said "he who lives by the sword will by die by the sword", today's parlance might be that those who live by twitter will die by it. Thank God humans do not live by twitter alone.
The thing Hayward "may" have missed is that Justin Dean suggested to Matthew Paul Turner that he listen to the 2008 Spiritual Warfare series. Dean mentioned that "I would talk to these bloggers." Really? Because why would anyone imagine that Justin Dean and MH publicity WEREN'T talking to at least one blogger?
http://matthewpaulturner.com/2012/06/20/jesus-needs-new-prexorcism-at-mars-hill-one-womans-story/
...
**UPDATE**According to Mars Hill, Mark performed a “Spiritual Warfare Trial” (a definition and instructions for a Spiritual Warfare Trial can be found here, toward the bottom of the page). They also deny using the word “exorcism”.**
...
**Late yesterday, I notified Mars Hill Church’s publicity department that I was running this story and offered them an opportunity to comment along with a few questions. Initially, they were going to issue a statement, but later said they would wait to comment until they read the story. They also directed me to this sermon series by Mark Driscoll.
So SOMEBODY on the MH PR side got in touch with Matthew Paul Turner and even recommended he consult the spiritual warfare teaching. That material has been removed but should you want to ever review it for yourself the sixty-five part majority transcription with commentary series is available for reading here.
So MH PR seems to have contacted or responded to a blogger. So what would be different?
Justin Dean may have been unfamiliar with the history of MH leadership interacting with bloggers about their blogs
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/publicly-dismiss-bloggers-in-general.html
The other puzzle about Dean's comment that he would talk to bloggers and journalists is that it sure seems like he did. Why as recently as March 6, 2015 Brendan Kiley wrote:
http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/03/06/21839028/mars-hill-sells-ballard-building-makes-42-million-profit
A few years ago, Dean used to answer e-mails from The Stranger, even if we were asking inflammatory questions—but last spring and summer, when things started to really unravel, he went silent.
Around the same time, former Mars Hill members wrote me to report that Dean had been trying to join Facebook discussion groups for ex-Mars Hill members and current members who were thinking about leaving.
"It caused a bit of an uproar," one ex-member wrote, "as he could not convince the members that he was doing anything other than gathering info to use against us. He's the PR guy, he's in charge of the spin that has continually tried to publicly invalidate people's experiences."
When I asked why he thought Dean had stopped answering questions, the ex-member wrote that a friend who worked at the church had recently said that the go-to Bible verse during controversies at Mars Hill was Proverbs 26:20: "For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases."
A veil of silence doesn't sound like the best approach to massive controversy—but what do I know?
So it turns out that The Stranger can confirm that there was a time when Justin Dean was happy to respond to questions from the press, even deliberately inflammatory ones, but by the spring and summer of 2014 Dean was unresponsive.
So precisely what Justin Dean could mean by having said: "I would talk to these bloggers, I would talk to these journalists, who were kind of coming after us… " is a bit vague. There seems to be at least some evidence he WAS talking to bloggers and journalists for a while, at least until the spring and summer of 2014. One can only make a guess or two as to what happened in the spring of 2014 that may have changed things.
It has been very strange to recall that back around 2012 when Mark Driscoll weighed in on the "kerfuffle" of Liberty University, it didn't seem as though Driscoll took bloggers very seriously.
That was then, and now in 2015 we're in some kind of pre-emptive post-mortem year where people sound off on what the causes of decline were, even though the corporation doesn't actually expire until the end of 2015 so far as the state of Washington is concerned.
Even so, we get stuff like ... :
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/faults-our-stars
Driscoll’s resignation is unusual, Vanderbloemen says, as it was not prompted by serious misappropriation of funds or an inappropriate sexual relationship, but rather by a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers, some of whom lived nowhere near Seattle.
It's almost as though the Relevant article goes from start to finish without referencing Janet Mefferd's confrontation with Driscoll on the air regarding intellectual property infringement on the one hand, or the World Magazine coverage of the Result Source agreement to secure a place on the NYT bestseller list for Real Marriage on the other. How does a feature article of such length manage to go so long without mentioning the details of those controversies?
On what basis does William Vanderbloemen know that Mark Driscoll resigned in response to a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers? If there is one statement presented as a declaration of fact that has yet to be verified by Mark Driscoll himself this would be the big one.
Driscoll's resignation letter mentioned godly counsel but did that godly counsel ever suggest that bloggers had any role in providing an impetus for Mark Driscoll to resign?
Blaney and Dean seem persuaded that bloggers are not interested in the truth or that they are misguided. Hayward records the following:
Blaney says:
”Sometimes it’s hard to win when you have a lot of people looking for traffic… they’re looking for eyeballs on their blogs, on their newspapers, on their websites… that’s why people, any famous person has a difficult relationship with the media… Because it’s that love hate… sure we’ll promote you here, but as soon as we get a chance we’re gonna put a knife in your back because it’s going to help me get me a few more readers. I think that was definitely… I think there were so many people that were hoping to get a little bit of traffic, get a little bit of attention, to their blogs, to their newspapers, and, you know, Mark was a great target for that.”The shortcoming in this line of reasoning is that as Mark Driscoll put it himself
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/07/19/mark-driscoll-addresses-mars-hill-church-about-one-of-the-deepest-learning-seasons-of-his-life/
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/b1dd5d1b6b3a14b6e7f3/raw/6c9dfc093dda78bb1a6b7ae29a9909045ad2a9e3/MHMW20140718
7-18-2014
...They have that same freedom, and so, and so others are free to, to say things as well. And being a bit of a public figure I don't have the same, try to get this right, protection sometimes as a private citizen, because I've made myself a public figure. So that's just sort of a blessing and the complexity of the great opportunity that God has given me as a Bible teacher and a pastor, especially in an age of technology, which I praise God for.
In other words, Driscoll had made himself the kind of public figure who can be the subject of discussion and scrutiny. While Driscoll expressed gratitude for being able to have such a role, it isn't so clear that Justin Dean or Justin Blaney seem as reconciled to the idea that being a public figure at some level opens a person up to public critique on the things the person gained a reputation in. Had Driscoll not sought celebrity the criticism would not have been possible. It could almost seem as though people like Blaney and Dean could be construed as having a double standard in which the benefits of celebrity for megachurch pastors shouldn't be construed as having with that any attendant responsibilities or risks? A little tough to be sure. But to go by Mark Driscoll's own words from mid-2014 it seems as though Driscoll had a clearer understanding of the risks involved in his being a type of public figure than seems reflected in the recent statements of Justin Dean or Justin Blaney.
Hayward quotes Dean's later statement within the interview as follows:
A little later, Dean responds:
”I would talk to these bloggers, I would talk to these journalists, who were kind of coming after us… it would seem sometimes that they were just trying to build their own platform, trying to, you know, make ad revenue, whatever… They’re going after something that’s intriguing and they know that they’re going to get a lot of hits for it. But I think for a lot of them it was something more. I think they believed that they were trying to do good. They really thought that we were wolves and that (announce) that to the world and protect Christians.”
Well, about that, it doesn't seem like it would be that tough for Justin Dean to have noticed that Wenatchee The Hatchet has never monetized the blog. There's no ad revenue here and there isn't really a plan at this point to monetize the blog. Long, long ago in college Wenatchee The Hatchet recalled a professor saying that in the field of journalism the greatest threat that would spike a story that needed to get published for the public good was generally not going to be from a hostile source; it was not going to be from an editor; it often even wasn't going to be from a squeamish publisher; it was going to tend to be from advertisers and sponsors who didn't like the impact a story might have on their bottom lines or their public reputations. If there is a relative silence within the Christian media industries about the significance of the plagiarism controversy and the sales-rigging agreement that were at the center of the most high profile and thoroughly documented issues in connection to Mark Driscoll the question could be why those haven't stayed at the forefront of a discussion of how and why Mark Driscoll's star declined.
As far as hits go, the traffic to the blog these days is a tenth what it was half a year ago, if it's even that big. There are posts incubating for detailed discussions by case study of the evolution of sonata form in solo guitar literature in the early 19th century. That'll inspire a lot of hits and ad revenue, right? The trouble with the clickbait canard is that if we consider the old age in which Driscoll's podcasts were popular the traffic was considered a sign of the power of the ministry. The problem with Dean's frame of reference is that one person's sincere effort being another person's cynical clickbait could go the other way. Who's to say Mark Driscoll's various instagram and facebook controversies weren't at least potentially ginned up to get traffic, too? Golden Rule the assertion and apply it to yourself and see how it plays out. If Justin Dean aims to have any business in public relations he may want to keep in mind that the practice of self-promotion is kind of, by definition, in his vocation. There's some axiom about how those living in glass houses should avoid throwing stones. People whose professions involve developing clickbait need to be cautious about how they impute the motive of clickbait to people who may not even be in the field of public relations.
Even if we set aside altogether the problem that ascribing Mark Driscoll's resignation to a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers is a William Vanderbloemen summary without a direct quote; even if we set aside that such a summary flies in the face of Mark Driscoll's public statements about what he considered to be the reliability and credibility of blogs and bloggers in general; there's still this other problem, what were blogs distributing that could have been construed as in any way making anything difficult for Mars Hill in general or Mark Driscoll in particular?
Let's be clear, the Janet Mefferd and World Magazine moments were vastly more significant in terms of media events. When members of the formal press had moments like that the contributions of bloggers could be considered negligible because in many ways there were. Wenatchee The Hatchet is willing to say that about Wenatchee The Hatchet. All that happened here was rather basically preserving and discussing primary source statements from Mars Hill leaders about its history and people for long enough that when members of the mainstream and Christian press got around to doing further investigation there were references that were possible to materials that, at least in 2014, had a perplexing capacity to disappear.
So whether Dean and Blaney would wish to address the topic of Wenatchee The Hatchet, a question could be raised as to whether Wenatchee The Hatchet had inaccurate information. Considering the great lengths Wenatchee The Hatchet went to in order to establish there were factual inaccuracies in Valerie Tarico's initial April 2014 coverage, and considering that a Valerie Tarico came by to offer thanks for the corrections, and clarify that the article had been updated, any attempt at a blanket statement to the effect that blogs and bloggers had misinformation about Driscoll and Mars Hill seems sketchy.
Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't really a watchblog, it never has been. Blogs can have a valuable role in keeping a light on stories and issues that are under-reported in mainstream or even independent media and so that's a value in blogging, but it cannot be construed as a substitute for the formal press covering things. There are strengths and weaknesses to blogging and conventional journalism. The strength of conventional journalism is that it emerges with an establishment, a culture in which the narrative is accepted as part of the public record. The difficulty, however, is that the sources which are relied upon to establish that public narrative can and do lie and if the establishment sources that are accepted as viable sources turn out to be misinformed or even deceptive, then the press become dupes for agendas they may not be able to see through. This would, not coincidentally, be why Wenatchee The Hatchet does not really endorse the libertarian theory of the press.
On the other hand, while the strength of a blog is not being tethered to the institutions that can spike or spin stories, what blogs do not have is the kind of credibility and clout to be treated as seriously as a magazine like Time or a newspaper like The Guardian would be. Bloggers don't have copy editors, fact-checkers, staff or people and resources to ensure things have been accurately sourced. And bloggers can often be woefully ignorant (to their own peril) of what constitutes a defensible journalistic line of enquiry and what is likely to end up becoming the basis for a defamation suit. This seems to be where folks like Justin Dean might be most eager to camp on, especially when the word "evil" gets brought up, though Dean seems to have granted that bloggers think they are aiming for the right thing. This, too, is the kind of diagnosis that could boomerang. After all, didn't Mars Hill leadership consider Result Source a good idea at one point, a strategy that would help get the message out to the most people? Dean's sincerity or insincerity is moot here, what's interesting is that the lines of reasoning he proposes about bloggers end up being critiques that can be applied as equally to his former employer and even to himself as to "bloggers".
Golden Rule it, if you would be willing to cheerfully grant that someone say about you what you're willing to say about them and concede that it could be accurate, proceed. If you're going to suggest that bloggers are motivated by clickbait and grudges can you concede that that's part of your motivation?
Wenatchee The Hatchet does not suggest this to actually provide any interpretation of the motives of Dean or others but to propose that if you're going to wade into a public discussion about media theory and media motivations you have to think through what philosophies motivate people in a way that opens yourself up to the same criticism you might subject others to. If a person wants to suggest that nobody wants to write anything that's untrue, except for bloggers, what about Mark Driscoll's blog? At the peak of Mark Driscoll's celebrity around 2012 he had that "A Blog Post for the Brits", didn't he? Well, it was up for a while but it's down and not exactly archived. A bit of the post can be read as preserved by WtH over here. What was striking about the blog post for the Brits was that Mark Driscoll published in advance of his full interview with Justin Brierley being made available to the public, if memory serves. If a Justin Dean were to argue that blogs and bloggers might be willing to write things that don't turn out to be true, what could be said about Mark Driscoll's blog post for the Brits? Did it seem like a pre-emptive strike of some kind with respect to Brierley? Could it be possible that by the measure of Justin Dean's own arguments against the ethics of bloggers Mark Driscoll could have had a few missteps?
If Mars Hill advocates believe that Wenatchee The Hatchet has misunderstood or misquoted anyone in the history of Mars Hill it's not like they can't say anything in settings where comments are available. By and large nobody's commented here and Wenatchee won't deny discouraging comments. The aim here was to document things and to also prevent people from venting things about former members and staff that could be construed as even potentially defamatory. If you aren't willing to swear to it in court don't say it as a comment in a blog, basically.
To the extent that bloggers are not really journalists and the internet has opened up new risks and opportunities it's not unfair for someone like Dean or Blaney to express reservations about the power that social media has, even as they could have gone a bit further to concede that the majority of Mark Driscoll's public role hinged precisely on his use of social and broadcast media. If Jesus once said "he who lives by the sword will by die by the sword", today's parlance might be that those who live by twitter will die by it. Thank God humans do not live by twitter alone.
The thing Hayward "may" have missed is that Justin Dean suggested to Matthew Paul Turner that he listen to the 2008 Spiritual Warfare series. Dean mentioned that "I would talk to these bloggers." Really? Because why would anyone imagine that Justin Dean and MH publicity WEREN'T talking to at least one blogger?
http://matthewpaulturner.com/2012/06/20/jesus-needs-new-prexorcism-at-mars-hill-one-womans-story/
...
**UPDATE**According to Mars Hill, Mark performed a “Spiritual Warfare Trial” (a definition and instructions for a Spiritual Warfare Trial can be found here, toward the bottom of the page). They also deny using the word “exorcism”.**
...
**Late yesterday, I notified Mars Hill Church’s publicity department that I was running this story and offered them an opportunity to comment along with a few questions. Initially, they were going to issue a statement, but later said they would wait to comment until they read the story. They also directed me to this sermon series by Mark Driscoll.
So SOMEBODY on the MH PR side got in touch with Matthew Paul Turner and even recommended he consult the spiritual warfare teaching. That material has been removed but should you want to ever review it for yourself the sixty-five part majority transcription with commentary series is available for reading here.
So MH PR seems to have contacted or responded to a blogger. So what would be different?
Justin Dean may have been unfamiliar with the history of MH leadership interacting with bloggers about their blogs
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/publicly-dismiss-bloggers-in-general.html
The other puzzle about Dean's comment that he would talk to bloggers and journalists is that it sure seems like he did. Why as recently as March 6, 2015 Brendan Kiley wrote:
http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/03/06/21839028/mars-hill-sells-ballard-building-makes-42-million-profit
A few years ago, Dean used to answer e-mails from The Stranger, even if we were asking inflammatory questions—but last spring and summer, when things started to really unravel, he went silent.
Around the same time, former Mars Hill members wrote me to report that Dean had been trying to join Facebook discussion groups for ex-Mars Hill members and current members who were thinking about leaving.
"It caused a bit of an uproar," one ex-member wrote, "as he could not convince the members that he was doing anything other than gathering info to use against us. He's the PR guy, he's in charge of the spin that has continually tried to publicly invalidate people's experiences."
When I asked why he thought Dean had stopped answering questions, the ex-member wrote that a friend who worked at the church had recently said that the go-to Bible verse during controversies at Mars Hill was Proverbs 26:20: "For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases."
A veil of silence doesn't sound like the best approach to massive controversy—but what do I know?
So it turns out that The Stranger can confirm that there was a time when Justin Dean was happy to respond to questions from the press, even deliberately inflammatory ones, but by the spring and summer of 2014 Dean was unresponsive.
So precisely what Justin Dean could mean by having said: "I would talk to these bloggers, I would talk to these journalists, who were kind of coming after us… " is a bit vague. There seems to be at least some evidence he WAS talking to bloggers and journalists for a while, at least until the spring and summer of 2014. One can only make a guess or two as to what happened in the spring of 2014 that may have changed things.
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