Readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet probably already know that this isn't a blog that avoids a long-form discussion of a topic. So we'll warn you up front that there's going to be a lot of quotes. One of the signal weaknesses of internet reading habits is a failure to maintain an ulta-long form sense of history and argument. Not everyone's bad at this, some are even quite good at it. It's just that the kind of internet attention spans that frequent the net can be susceptible to forgetting how things play out. So in order to get some sense of the recent retraction of A Justice Primer it might be helpful to consider the ease with which its co-author promoted it until certain things were brought to light.
https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/the-high-mountain-air-of-public-calumny.html
Monday, September 7, 2015
Those who believe themselves to be hep to my tricksy ways might have surmised that I orchestrated this entire recent flap about Steven Sitler because Randy Booth and I recently put out a book entitled A Justice Primer. But whether you are disposed to believe me or not, that was a total coincidence. In this book we address biblical principles for evaluating charges that are brought against someone, anyone. The book is, I believe, quite a necessary resource for good-hearted Christians everywhere — who regularly see defamatory information scrolling by in their Facebook feed. There is even a chapter entitled “Trial by Internet,” which concludes with this sage advice: “Never get into a braying contest with donkeys” (p. 160).
Sarcasm noted. The sage advice as identified by Wilson does not seem so sage. It would be sage if it didn't seem Wilson was eager to ignore the spirit and the letter of that advice by continuing to write the sorts of things in which he proclaims Christian girls are prettier, for instance, and then marveling at being proverbially led to the gallows that even fellow Christians wouldn't affirm all the proclamations made by Wilson along the way.
A couple of weeks on ...
https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/click-to-convict.html
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
...
If there is one thing that Christians need to learn more about in this “click to convict” era, it is the importance of due process, presumption of innocence, hearing both sides argued, and so on. Those interested can learn more about it in A Justice Primer, a book I wrote together with Randy Booth.
...
Now there's a plug for one's product. :) And then something happened, somebody did a detailed overview of the book.
https://adaughterofthereformation.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/a-justice-primer-what-is-the-purpose/
...
What’s my point with all of this? Well, the book is based on blog posts that were written to defend and protect certain men against perceived injustices by church courts and by those who were discussing the cases on the Internet. With that context, the purpose of the book becomes clearer, and we can then decide if the book’s advice is as useful as it claims to be.
As Wilson and Booth write in the book, “Persons bring charges. Persons have motivations. Those motivations need to be evaluated, just like the charges do.” (92) Persons also write books and have motivations that need to be evaluated.
It wasn't too long before Wilson, as he often does, had thoughts to share with the public on the matter. The gist was that while his work in the book did not come up guilty of plagiarism, the writing of his co-author sure did.
https://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/110015.html
Saturday, December 12, 2015
...
On Thursday, Rachel Miller revealed that significant portions of A Justice Primer, coauthored by Randy Booth and me, had been plagiarized. The same day Canon Press discontinued the book, posted their own statement about it, as well as separate statements from Randy and from me. They can be found here. In addition, a second statement from Aaron Rench, CEO of Canon, has now been posted here.
Rachel Miller and I have clashed in the past, but on this issue I owe her my heartfelt thanks. Better this revelation now, and a resultant mess, than to have years of calm if such calm were to be purchased by means of undetected plagiarism. I am grateful to God for sending this revelation, and grateful to Rachel Miller for bringing it.
...
Justin Taylor made some helpful comments about publishers and plagiarism here. Canon is already in the process of contacting the authors who were plagiarized in order to apologize to them. But yesterday Canon Press took the additional step of purchasing some plagiarism software which, as Justin indicated, is not yet industry standard, but is likely to become so. They intend to incorporate that software into their editorial processes. The first thing they did with it is run my contribution to A Justice Primer through it, which came out clean.
Nevertheless, all that said, there are some significant areas where I need to take the responsibility. Let me first make a few general statements, and then follow it up with a few specifics.
I continue to affirm the principles I laid down on this same subject in my discussion of Mark Driscoll and the charge of plagiarism against him. The particularly relevant sections are #4-6. The cash quote is here: “I am nevertheless responsible for it. My name is on the cover.” ...
The mention of Mark Driscoll's name is a reminder that Doug Wilson has not, in fact, clarified if he has any new perspective about Mark Driscoll's situation and decline in status beyond his "revenge of the beta male" narrative offered in the wake of Mark Driscoll's resignation in October 2014.
To date neither Mark nor Grace Driscoll have addressed the question of why so much content in the first printing of Real Marriage lacked citation credits for works they demonstrably drew from. So as that goes, Doug Wilson and Randy Booth, once caught, admitted the book they published had plagiarism in it and the book has even since been retracted. The irony of a book that seems to have addressed the frequent injustice of bloggers discussing in public things that some in ministry would prefer not be publicly discussed has since been retracted because a blogger highlighted plagiarism in the work is almost beyond words. Doug Wilson seems to have cultivated a robust sense of humor, though, so at least he, perhaps, can see how this could come across as really quite funny.
It's the kind of dry irony that would "probably" not be lost on Carl Trueman, at least:
...
http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/the-millers-tale#.VqQa7jbSmUl
http://www.donotlink.com/framed?837490
who links to Rachel Miller's recent statement, of which we'll quote just a small part.
https://adaughterofthereformation.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/a-justice-primer-the-investigation/
...
It was no secret that I read A Justice Primer with the intention of critiquing it. I said so in my original post. It is absolutely true that I disagree with Doug Wilson on many theological matters. That doesn’t change the facts that I presented in my article. I was very careful in my discussion of the plagiarism not to speculate who had done the plagiarizing. Canon seems to think that I knew Booth was responsible and didn’t say so so that I could implicate Wilson. That is not true. ...
Now that we've done that, let's go back and revisiting a fairly glowing review of A Justice Primer from The Gospel Coalition's Kevin DeYoung.
http://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/kevindeyoung/2015/11/05/book-briefs-21/
Kevin DeYoung
November 5, 2015
Douglas Wilson and Randy Booth, A Justice Primer (Canon Press, 2015). I thought this was a book on social justice, economics, and big picture politics. It’s actually a book about how the Bible would have us judge each other (or not) in the mad, mad world of blog warriors and internet vigilantes. This book is full of refreshing wisdom. I hope it reaches a wide audience. And if you already know that Doug Wilson is a good-for-nothing scoundrel (and I don’t know him personally and do strongly disagree with him at times), then that’s an indication that you really need this book. [UPDATE: It seems that portions of the book were plagiarized, which, while not changing the nature of the content, cannot help but affect one’s opinion of the book. I hope Wilson and Booth will respond to the evidence presented in the link above. NEXT UPDATE: The book has been discontinued by Canon Press because of “negligence and gross incompetence” resulting in plagiarism and improper citation.]
Did Kevin DeYoung get a galley proof copy of Real Marriage? If Canon Press discontinued the book it sure seems like someone at Canon Press thought that this revelation changed the nature of the content of the book in some fashion!
Now there is a point I stop to make here about the nature of what some call watchblogging, it's worth noting, as Alastair Roberts has over at his blog, that the biblical authors are (compared to modern authors) serenely unconcerned with highlighting the psychological or emotional motivations of figures in biblical narratives. The general concern is what did X say and what did X do.
A watchblog does not need to traffic in speculations as to the motives of parties at work. The temptation may be there but generally the heart knows its own sorrow and no other shares its grief. And as Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth that just as no one knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him, so only God knows the thoughts of God. So, with a couple of simple verses revisited we can safely say that a watchblogger has no real obligation to speculate as to the motives of someone. It can be enough to document what a person said and did. As far as humanly possible that's what I've tried to do at Wenatchee The Hatchet regarding the history of the people and institution known as Mars Hill. It's not ultimately of any journalistic value or historical help to people to do too much speculating as to motives. But methods and results can certainly be discussed.
So ... back to the situation at hand.
It's hard not to imagine that were he alive today to observe such a situation play out that Jacques Ellul would say that A Justice Primer was propaganda that became counter-propaganda against its authors' own cause when the plagiarism was discovered. For longtime readers, yes, that's a sentence of foreshadowing there. We're going to get to Ellul's work and its potential relevance to the history of Mars Hill and the public ministry of Mark Driscoll later this year, time and providence permitting. Since along the way in fielding a plagiarism controversy about one of his books it seems providential Doug Wilson should have felt obliged to highlight a plagiarism controversy that was connected to Mark Driscoll. Given the intellectual mentor dynamic the younger has spoken of about the older this ties things together thematically quite well.
Wilson and Booth at least they had the stones to do what Mark and Grace Driscoll have not done and may never do, admit the scope of citation errors in a first print edition of a book they co-authored and then have principle enough to both address the problem publicly and even retract the book. What Team Driscoll did in the wake of their plagiarism controversy was have books retroactively fixed while staying scrupulously silent about the whole thing. If Mark Driscoll still considers Doug Wilson's books to be useful for instruction on manliness it can seem as though some lessons were not learned here. It's not as though Doug Wilson has not been at the center of other controversies connected to plagiarism in books with his name on them and he's still at the same church doing what he's done. If anything the Wilson/Booth plagiarism controversy and their handling of it highlights how drastically different the plagiarism controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll was. It seems you can weather a plagiarism controversy here and there without feeling any need to resign from your pastorate. Just look at the case history of Doug Wilson.
But Wilson does have a credibility problem here now. Now that a blogger has demonstrated that a book with Wilson's name on it had plagiarism of the sort that inspired Canon Press to retract the book, a book that seems on various accounts to have been discussing how to deal with the injustice of bloggers blogging about stuff you wish they wouldn't blog about, the book A Justice Primer could now stand as a paradoxical case study in the value and perhaps even the necessity of blogs playing an observational role in the activities of public ministries and associated publications. Wilson looked perfectly content to promote his book in the months before Miller and her help compiled evidence of problems in the book.
After all has been said and done it seems that now that both sides have been argued Canon Press has conceded plagiarism happened and the book has been retracted.
Saturday, January 23, 2016
a linkathon with a theme, what people say people shouldn't have or shouldn't do across time and space, master narratives, and things some choose to overlook
http://www.booksandculture.
Noah Berlatsky, who was pretty sure that Episode 7 was going to be lame, nonetheless reliably points out that if Rey is a Mary Sue it's just because she's introduced into the franchise by someone not Lucas; he also highlights that if we compare Rey to the ultra-powered white male protagonists who have been pulp heroes of yore she isn't even all that mighty.
http://randomnerds.com/
...Before criticizing the nonsensical unlikelihood of awesome Mary Sues like Rey, then, it’s worth remembering how pulp heroes used to be rationalized. Paul Atreides (and Tarzan, and Flash Gordon) were genetically engineered white male gods; their power was naturalized through the inevitable logic of masculine and racial superiority.
If Mary Sue’s connection to the force is less visible, well, so much the better. Maybe the gratuitousness of her power is a small step towards acknowledging that there is no one natural heroic genetic code.
The Mary Sue is a promise that anyone can be at the center of the universe, and of their own story.
The question isn't even rhetorical here, if white male pulp heroes get to be perfect across the board at the start of their respective franchises is it that bad that Rey seems too perfect to some people in Episode 7? Lucas pretty well explained he made the Star Wars films with boys in mind. It's not necessarily a problem if Disney, in the interest of sustaining what was always the best kind of mass market quasi-corporate hack work, decides that a woman can do the same kinds of things Luke did.
And I happened to enjoy Episode 7. First time I've enjoyed a Star Wars film while watching it in the theater and didn't regret watching it days later (or while I was watching it in theaters) since 1983.
Meanwhile ... someone over at New Republic decided banning all guns all across the board needs to be a conceptual option. There are those that consider a ban on all abortions all across the board to be necessary, too. There are people on the left and the right who don't seem to care about what's actually in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or what precedents there may be in judicial rulings.
https://newrepublic.com/article/125498/its-time-ban-guns-yes-them
Decades ago I had a political history teacher who joked that conservatives wish the first amendment didn't exist while progressives wish the second amendment didn't exist, which might be reason enough we keep both of them.
We live in an era of master narratives describing the other team's motives and means. Slate featured a piece on how Prohibition of alcohol fomented the rise of the contemporary right.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/12/prohibition_history_how_the_ban_on_booze_produced_the_modern_american_right.single.html
It might seem like another just so story for a couple of reasons but it's not as though conservatives haven't had their versions. Much as I was impressed as a teenager by Francis Schaeffer's trilogy it seems like a just-so story about the decline of the arts in the West that doesn't really square with a more detailed and nuanced history of the arts. We may have a LOT more to say about that somewhere down the road but that's one incubating project among many.
Something the article could have done a bit more with was point out how a progressive and even radical change in law and government could be motivated by what was ultimately a very socially conservative goal (domestic tranquility and reducing physical abuse).
Anyone who happens to have read Friedersdorf knows that his work has had a theme on speech and campuses in the last year.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/what-student-activists-can-learn-from-bygone-free-speech-fights/419178/
Another piece at The New Republic on the popularity of exorcisms these days.
https://newrepublic.com/article/126607/exorcisms-popular-ever
...
Historian of religion David Frankfurter notes that conspiracy theories involving evil entities like demons and witches tend to flare up when local religious communities are confronted with outside forces such as globalization and modernity.
Attributing misfortune and social change to hidden evil forces, Frankfurter suggests, is a natural human reaction; the demonic provides a context that can make sense of unfamiliar or complex problems.
While Europeans practiced exorcism during the Middle Ages, the “golden age” of demonic paranoia took place in the early modern period. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands were killed in witch hunts and there were spectacular cases of possession, including entire convents of nuns.
A 1788 painting by Francisco Goya depicts Saint Francis performing an exorcism.Wikimedia Commons
The Protestant Reformation was a key contributor to these events. The resulting wars of religion devastated Europe’s population, creating a sense of apocalyptic anxiety. At the same time, exorcism became a way for the Catholic Church, and even some Protestant denominations, to demonstrate that their clergy wielded supernatural power over demons – something that their rivals lacked. In some cases, possessed people would even testify that rival churches were aligned with Satan.
...
People have historically used evil spirits to explain any number of misfortunes, whether its a physical illness or routine bad luck. But today, demons are frequently used to interpret contemporary political issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Since the 1970s, Protestant deliverance ministries have offered to “cure” gay teenagers by casting out demons. This practice now has corollaries in Islam—and even in Chinese holistic healing methods. When the state of Illinois legalized gay marriage in 2013, Bishop Thomas Paprocki held a public exorcism in protest. Politically, the bishop’s ritual served to frame changing social mores as a manifestation of demonic evil.
For those who don't subscribe formally to the existence of demons the preferred secularist alternative could be the rise of this or that rightwing political activity. Art Spiegelmann once declared that he didn't go in much for superhero comics because those are the power fantasies of children and he had adult power fantasies. Right. The older I Ge the less convinced I am that the difference between an adult's power fantasy and a child's power fantasy is one of any substance or ultimate distinction. It seems easier and easier to reach this gloomy conclusion reading what people print in election cycles. No, it seems that the difference between a child's power fantasy and adult's power fantasy is primarily that the kid knows the kid is a kid. Adults, by contrast, not believing they have any juvenile capacities, and having acclimated themselves to social dynamics that let them wield various forms of social influence (power) see someone or something they want and decide they get to have it.
For instance ... mangers and rock stars who feel they get to have sex with ... well, it's not that difficult to guess from the link titles
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/heathcliff-berru-music-publicity-sexual-assault-speaking-out/424869/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/17/david-bowie-and-rock-n-roll-s-statutory-rape-problem.html
For all those folks who were dismissed as being too concerned that the rock and roll lifestyle was degenerate and nasty, could we throw those people a bone as story after story emerges showing that rock stars and managers take what they want even when the thing they want involved minors? Thing is, people want heroes even if the heroes can turn out to have bad, bad qualities in their history. It wasn't out of mere abstraction somebody wrote a little poem that said heroes are monsters whose use for their cause outweighs their well-known vice. It seems that you can pick a hero and he or she will stil have something monstrous about them. Bowie is a lately assed musical hero but it doesn't mean there aren't skeletons in the closet.
Christians who would say their respective heroes at least don't cheat on their wives may miss the point, which is that some Christian celebrities of varying levels of popularity can turn out to be responsible for plagiarism. To go by how some Christians on the net react to that kind of thing, the reaction of saying plagiarism isn't "that" bad could be taken as a sign that where for worshippers of rock stars sex isn't that bad for worshippers of Christian celebrity authors taking credit for work you didn't do isn't that bad. It seems that for each "tribe" there are sins that can't be forgiven and sins that can't be taken seriously as sins to begin with.
And on a somewhat spacier note ...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-falsification-free-will/?wt.mc=SA_Twitter-Share
...
There are a substantial number of passages written over a period of many years that explicitly say that Christians must not and/or do not kill or join the military. Nine different Christian writers in 16 different treatises explicitly say that killing is wrong. Four writers in 5 treatises clearly argue that Christians do not and should not join the military. In addition, four writers in eight different works strongly imply that Christians should not join the military. At least eight times, five different authors apply the messianic prophecy about swords being beaten into ploughshares (Isa. 2:4) to Christ and his teaching. Ten different authors in at least 28 different places cite or allude to Jesus' teaching to love enemies, and, in at least nine of these places, they connect that teaching to some statement about Christians being peaceful, ignorant of war, opposed to attacking others, and so forth. All of this represents a considerable consensus.
Indeed, there is very little basis in the texts for describing the early Christian view as "divided and ambiguous." There are no authors who argue that killing or joining the military is permissible for Christians. On these questions, every writer who mentions the subject takes essentially the same position. Some pre-Constantinian Christian writers say more about these topics than others. Some do not discuss them at all. But to conclude from this relative silence or paucity of some surviving texts that other writers disagreed with the extant texts would be sheer speculation. The texts we have do not reflect any substantial disagreement. Every extant Christian statement on killing and war up until the time of Constantine says Christians must not kill, even in war.
That a growing number of Christians, especially in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, acted contrary to that teaching is also clear. That in doing so they were following other Christian teachers and leaders who justified their conduct, we cannot deny with absolute certainty. But we have no evidence to support the suggestion that such teachers ever existed until the time of Constantine.
Noah Berlatsky, who was pretty sure that Episode 7 was going to be lame, nonetheless reliably points out that if Rey is a Mary Sue it's just because she's introduced into the franchise by someone not Lucas; he also highlights that if we compare Rey to the ultra-powered white male protagonists who have been pulp heroes of yore she isn't even all that mighty.
http://randomnerds.com/
...Before criticizing the nonsensical unlikelihood of awesome Mary Sues like Rey, then, it’s worth remembering how pulp heroes used to be rationalized. Paul Atreides (and Tarzan, and Flash Gordon) were genetically engineered white male gods; their power was naturalized through the inevitable logic of masculine and racial superiority.
If Mary Sue’s connection to the force is less visible, well, so much the better. Maybe the gratuitousness of her power is a small step towards acknowledging that there is no one natural heroic genetic code.
The Mary Sue is a promise that anyone can be at the center of the universe, and of their own story.
The question isn't even rhetorical here, if white male pulp heroes get to be perfect across the board at the start of their respective franchises is it that bad that Rey seems too perfect to some people in Episode 7? Lucas pretty well explained he made the Star Wars films with boys in mind. It's not necessarily a problem if Disney, in the interest of sustaining what was always the best kind of mass market quasi-corporate hack work, decides that a woman can do the same kinds of things Luke did.
And I happened to enjoy Episode 7. First time I've enjoyed a Star Wars film while watching it in the theater and didn't regret watching it days later (or while I was watching it in theaters) since 1983.
Meanwhile ... someone over at New Republic decided banning all guns all across the board needs to be a conceptual option. There are those that consider a ban on all abortions all across the board to be necessary, too. There are people on the left and the right who don't seem to care about what's actually in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or what precedents there may be in judicial rulings.
https://newrepublic.com/article/125498/its-time-ban-guns-yes-them
Decades ago I had a political history teacher who joked that conservatives wish the first amendment didn't exist while progressives wish the second amendment didn't exist, which might be reason enough we keep both of them.
We live in an era of master narratives describing the other team's motives and means. Slate featured a piece on how Prohibition of alcohol fomented the rise of the contemporary right.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/12/prohibition_history_how_the_ban_on_booze_produced_the_modern_american_right.single.html
It might seem like another just so story for a couple of reasons but it's not as though conservatives haven't had their versions. Much as I was impressed as a teenager by Francis Schaeffer's trilogy it seems like a just-so story about the decline of the arts in the West that doesn't really square with a more detailed and nuanced history of the arts. We may have a LOT more to say about that somewhere down the road but that's one incubating project among many.
Something the article could have done a bit more with was point out how a progressive and even radical change in law and government could be motivated by what was ultimately a very socially conservative goal (domestic tranquility and reducing physical abuse).
Anyone who happens to have read Friedersdorf knows that his work has had a theme on speech and campuses in the last year.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/what-student-activists-can-learn-from-bygone-free-speech-fights/419178/
Another piece at The New Republic on the popularity of exorcisms these days.
https://newrepublic.com/article/126607/exorcisms-popular-ever
...
Historian of religion David Frankfurter notes that conspiracy theories involving evil entities like demons and witches tend to flare up when local religious communities are confronted with outside forces such as globalization and modernity.
Attributing misfortune and social change to hidden evil forces, Frankfurter suggests, is a natural human reaction; the demonic provides a context that can make sense of unfamiliar or complex problems.
While Europeans practiced exorcism during the Middle Ages, the “golden age” of demonic paranoia took place in the early modern period. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands were killed in witch hunts and there were spectacular cases of possession, including entire convents of nuns.
A 1788 painting by Francisco Goya depicts Saint Francis performing an exorcism.Wikimedia Commons
The Protestant Reformation was a key contributor to these events. The resulting wars of religion devastated Europe’s population, creating a sense of apocalyptic anxiety. At the same time, exorcism became a way for the Catholic Church, and even some Protestant denominations, to demonstrate that their clergy wielded supernatural power over demons – something that their rivals lacked. In some cases, possessed people would even testify that rival churches were aligned with Satan.
...
People have historically used evil spirits to explain any number of misfortunes, whether its a physical illness or routine bad luck. But today, demons are frequently used to interpret contemporary political issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Since the 1970s, Protestant deliverance ministries have offered to “cure” gay teenagers by casting out demons. This practice now has corollaries in Islam—and even in Chinese holistic healing methods. When the state of Illinois legalized gay marriage in 2013, Bishop Thomas Paprocki held a public exorcism in protest. Politically, the bishop’s ritual served to frame changing social mores as a manifestation of demonic evil.
For those who don't subscribe formally to the existence of demons the preferred secularist alternative could be the rise of this or that rightwing political activity. Art Spiegelmann once declared that he didn't go in much for superhero comics because those are the power fantasies of children and he had adult power fantasies. Right. The older I Ge the less convinced I am that the difference between an adult's power fantasy and a child's power fantasy is one of any substance or ultimate distinction. It seems easier and easier to reach this gloomy conclusion reading what people print in election cycles. No, it seems that the difference between a child's power fantasy and adult's power fantasy is primarily that the kid knows the kid is a kid. Adults, by contrast, not believing they have any juvenile capacities, and having acclimated themselves to social dynamics that let them wield various forms of social influence (power) see someone or something they want and decide they get to have it.
For instance ... mangers and rock stars who feel they get to have sex with ... well, it's not that difficult to guess from the link titles
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/heathcliff-berru-music-publicity-sexual-assault-speaking-out/424869/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/17/david-bowie-and-rock-n-roll-s-statutory-rape-problem.html
For all those folks who were dismissed as being too concerned that the rock and roll lifestyle was degenerate and nasty, could we throw those people a bone as story after story emerges showing that rock stars and managers take what they want even when the thing they want involved minors? Thing is, people want heroes even if the heroes can turn out to have bad, bad qualities in their history. It wasn't out of mere abstraction somebody wrote a little poem that said heroes are monsters whose use for their cause outweighs their well-known vice. It seems that you can pick a hero and he or she will stil have something monstrous about them. Bowie is a lately assed musical hero but it doesn't mean there aren't skeletons in the closet.
Christians who would say their respective heroes at least don't cheat on their wives may miss the point, which is that some Christian celebrities of varying levels of popularity can turn out to be responsible for plagiarism. To go by how some Christians on the net react to that kind of thing, the reaction of saying plagiarism isn't "that" bad could be taken as a sign that where for worshippers of rock stars sex isn't that bad for worshippers of Christian celebrity authors taking credit for work you didn't do isn't that bad. It seems that for each "tribe" there are sins that can't be forgiven and sins that can't be taken seriously as sins to begin with.
And on a somewhat spacier note ...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-falsification-free-will/?wt.mc=SA_Twitter-Share
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Roger Scruton on teaching judgment and some comments about classical vs pop music and his surprise at learning he had more in common with metal fans than he would have anticipated
http://www.futuresymphony.org/teaching-judgement/
http://www.futuresymphony.org/why-musicians-need-philosophy/
Scruton's passion for music would be easier to admire if he didn't seem so condescending toward pop music. I like some pop music and dislike some other pop music but I find Wagner's music detestable and Wagner to be not so admirable as a person to boot. On the other hand, I adore the music of Haydn and I adore the music of Stevie Wonder.
Scruton observing that the voice leading in U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" is a mess reminds me that it's a category mistake to measure a pop song that's a power ballad on the basis of any kind of polyphonic writing. Sure, perpetual motion riffs aided by reverb and delay pedals over a relentless bass might seem like bad voice-leading ... but ... perpetual motion over a steady ground isn't unheard of in classical music. Sometimes that gets known by the jargon "passacaglia" or "chaconne" and involves oblique motion. Oblique motion's an approach to voice leading where most voices stay put and just one voice shifts in a way that transforms the harmony. U2 does that, a lot of pop music does that. It's a way to get as much harmonic mileage as possible from having very limited technique. It's not necessarily a sign of being a bad musician, though.
I feel obliged to point out Scruton mistakes classical music for not trafficking in endless sets of variations on an unchanging theme as a contrast to pop music. That's obviously not true. Not even the most ardent Led Zeppelin fan would try to subject "Black Dog" to as many iterations of its core theme as Bach did with the double theme in the Goldberg variations. The Diabelli variations are another case in point of an epic cycle of variations on a single theme. Yes, classical music doesn't approach development and variation in necessarily the same way as pop music but it's not altogether accurate to say classical music "does" stuff in contras tto variation. Let's remember that many of Haydn's sonata forms are monothematic forms. Was Haydn an artistic failure for having single themed sonata forms? No. What it might help to remember, as Charles Rosen put it, is that in Haydn's era the distance between a popular style and a scholarly style, at least in Haydn's case, was not so great.
It's not surprising the metal fans were quickest to appreciate some of the ideas Scruton wanted to convey. This isn't surprising because once you factor out timbre there's a lot about metal that is pretty easily traced to "classical" traditions and folkloric influences. Besides, as Richard Taruskin has quoted a famous Russian opera singer as saying, the whole of opera can be described as "educated screaming".
Surely we could propose that for theatricality in musical presentation and educated screaming metal "could" be carrying on the traditions of a Wagnerian opera. :)
For a decade or so there's been talk of problems in classical music, a crisis in aging audiences and a lack of interest. Some of the lack of interest is a lack of interest in hearing the same things over and over again. Some of it may be that the same stuff we hear over and over again we can hear a lot more cheaply by buying a recording or listening to music online than dropping fifty bucks on a concert.
But I'm not as sure that a "solution" will necessarily be in trying to save the symphony. The symphony doesn't seem like it's necessarily going away but its placemen tmay change. We're more likely to have non-classical fans hearing symphonic music in the context of a film score than a concert. People may be more likely to know John Williams by his Star Wars scores than know Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra.
But it can seem that the alarms can forget the troubled history of written-down music. It wasn't always easy, obviously, but let's remember that the Thirty Years War did a number on a ton o fpeople and the arts were effected. Heinrich Schutz had to scale back, drastically, the kinds of musical forces and resources he could realistically compose for. If we're seeing a drop in music for the symphony or the opera composers may want to cast about for cheaper and more accessible alternatives. Being a guitarist I'm hugely biased in favor of the guitar for what should be obvious reasons.
But we guitarists, the classical guitarists, can often bring our own trouble. I have read and heard guitarists say the classical guitar isn't really all that suited to all major and minor keys and that thigns like sonata or fugue aren't really truly possible on the instrument. Why? Because the guitar has a collosal decay rate? It does ... but that doesn't mean counterpoint isn't possible or that a sonata form can't be written for the guitar in a remote key. If we aspire to preserve the classical musical traditions that does not preclude adapting to the resources available. If more and more people are taking up the guitar than the piano or the clarinet we can write for the guitar. Guitarists like to say, after all, that the instrument is like a little orchestra.
But the guitar has been at the margins of the academic musical world. Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music basically treats the guitar as not even functionally in the literate musical tradition. Now if he heard the guitar sonatas of Matiegka, Sor, Giuliani, Carulli or Diabelli he might conclude they weren't worth mentioning in a history of literate music ... but for we guitarists there's plenty of evidence the guitar has been part o fthe literate music tradition for centuries now. But, at Matanya Ophee put it years ago in his lecture on repertoire issues, the guitar has often been treated as an outsider or as a second or third-rate member of formal music.
Given the crisis many have been saying classical music has been in for audiences (and a comparable low sales rate seems to apply for jazz) maybe not being in the mainstream has an advantage.
There are some who look down on popular styles as bad or shallow and art music/classical music as deep and good. I prefer a good chunk of classical music to a good chunk of pop music but that's not necessarily because I think one tradition is better than the other. What I would suggest we can see in at least some composers, whether Haydn or Villa-Lobos, is that there have been composers in any given age that demonstrate an appreciation of the high and low, so to speak; an appreciation of the refined and the common. If in the last century classical and popular music have diverged it may have been to the detriment of both traditions. Now this is just a personal musing but it seems that the pre-World War II blues and country idioms were not always as distinct from each other as they would later become. You had urban and rural music but that might matter more than "blues" and "country".
Blues is almost a century old and there's no reason you can't have a sonata allegro form in which the first theme you get actually is just a 12-bar blues. There are people at Yale who may decide not to teach jazz or blues as part of the Western canon but the vastness of that mistake should speak for itself even if people won't see it.
I've been thinking for a while that we should not abject one tradition over against another in music. Scruton's welcome to love the music of Wagner and Schubert and I'm welcome to find them both rather boring or interminably maudlin. Wagner's Ring cycle, in the 21st century, has been supplanted not just by Tolkien for popular appeal but by the ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe.
At one point Taruskin was writing his Oxford history with the idea that what he's called the literate music tradition was essentially ending. That was years ago, now he's not sure that's the case. The tradition is changing and the kinds of patronage dynamics that were taken for granted half a century ago no longer apply. I would suggest that the patronage dynamic we have now is not necessarily foundations or academies as corporations that promote pop music. A lot of it may sound alike but then if we are willing to be a little jaded about the high art of the Baroque era might a lot of it be self-aggrandizing bling presentations for autocrats proving how enlightened they were? There may never be an era in the history of humanity in which those who financially backed skilled artists didnt' have some self-promotion afoot. What's stuck with me for years since Miyazaki's last film, The Wind Risess, is his gloomy observation made through Caproni about art, would we choose to live in a world with or without the pyramids? The pyramids are feats of engineering and works of art but in a sense Miyazaki was throwing out for our consideration a possible idea, the idea that all art is in some sense a reflection of the anxieties and aspirations of an empire, whatever that empire may be. Some of us may be adep tat convincing ourselves we just want to make something beautiful but that doesn't entirely exonerate us, does it? Or does it?
http://www.futuresymphony.org/why-musicians-need-philosophy/
Scruton's passion for music would be easier to admire if he didn't seem so condescending toward pop music. I like some pop music and dislike some other pop music but I find Wagner's music detestable and Wagner to be not so admirable as a person to boot. On the other hand, I adore the music of Haydn and I adore the music of Stevie Wonder.
Scruton observing that the voice leading in U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" is a mess reminds me that it's a category mistake to measure a pop song that's a power ballad on the basis of any kind of polyphonic writing. Sure, perpetual motion riffs aided by reverb and delay pedals over a relentless bass might seem like bad voice-leading ... but ... perpetual motion over a steady ground isn't unheard of in classical music. Sometimes that gets known by the jargon "passacaglia" or "chaconne" and involves oblique motion. Oblique motion's an approach to voice leading where most voices stay put and just one voice shifts in a way that transforms the harmony. U2 does that, a lot of pop music does that. It's a way to get as much harmonic mileage as possible from having very limited technique. It's not necessarily a sign of being a bad musician, though.
I feel obliged to point out Scruton mistakes classical music for not trafficking in endless sets of variations on an unchanging theme as a contrast to pop music. That's obviously not true. Not even the most ardent Led Zeppelin fan would try to subject "Black Dog" to as many iterations of its core theme as Bach did with the double theme in the Goldberg variations. The Diabelli variations are another case in point of an epic cycle of variations on a single theme. Yes, classical music doesn't approach development and variation in necessarily the same way as pop music but it's not altogether accurate to say classical music "does" stuff in contras tto variation. Let's remember that many of Haydn's sonata forms are monothematic forms. Was Haydn an artistic failure for having single themed sonata forms? No. What it might help to remember, as Charles Rosen put it, is that in Haydn's era the distance between a popular style and a scholarly style, at least in Haydn's case, was not so great.
It's not surprising the metal fans were quickest to appreciate some of the ideas Scruton wanted to convey. This isn't surprising because once you factor out timbre there's a lot about metal that is pretty easily traced to "classical" traditions and folkloric influences. Besides, as Richard Taruskin has quoted a famous Russian opera singer as saying, the whole of opera can be described as "educated screaming".
Surely we could propose that for theatricality in musical presentation and educated screaming metal "could" be carrying on the traditions of a Wagnerian opera. :)
For a decade or so there's been talk of problems in classical music, a crisis in aging audiences and a lack of interest. Some of the lack of interest is a lack of interest in hearing the same things over and over again. Some of it may be that the same stuff we hear over and over again we can hear a lot more cheaply by buying a recording or listening to music online than dropping fifty bucks on a concert.
But I'm not as sure that a "solution" will necessarily be in trying to save the symphony. The symphony doesn't seem like it's necessarily going away but its placemen tmay change. We're more likely to have non-classical fans hearing symphonic music in the context of a film score than a concert. People may be more likely to know John Williams by his Star Wars scores than know Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra.
But it can seem that the alarms can forget the troubled history of written-down music. It wasn't always easy, obviously, but let's remember that the Thirty Years War did a number on a ton o fpeople and the arts were effected. Heinrich Schutz had to scale back, drastically, the kinds of musical forces and resources he could realistically compose for. If we're seeing a drop in music for the symphony or the opera composers may want to cast about for cheaper and more accessible alternatives. Being a guitarist I'm hugely biased in favor of the guitar for what should be obvious reasons.
But we guitarists, the classical guitarists, can often bring our own trouble. I have read and heard guitarists say the classical guitar isn't really all that suited to all major and minor keys and that thigns like sonata or fugue aren't really truly possible on the instrument. Why? Because the guitar has a collosal decay rate? It does ... but that doesn't mean counterpoint isn't possible or that a sonata form can't be written for the guitar in a remote key. If we aspire to preserve the classical musical traditions that does not preclude adapting to the resources available. If more and more people are taking up the guitar than the piano or the clarinet we can write for the guitar. Guitarists like to say, after all, that the instrument is like a little orchestra.
But the guitar has been at the margins of the academic musical world. Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music basically treats the guitar as not even functionally in the literate musical tradition. Now if he heard the guitar sonatas of Matiegka, Sor, Giuliani, Carulli or Diabelli he might conclude they weren't worth mentioning in a history of literate music ... but for we guitarists there's plenty of evidence the guitar has been part o fthe literate music tradition for centuries now. But, at Matanya Ophee put it years ago in his lecture on repertoire issues, the guitar has often been treated as an outsider or as a second or third-rate member of formal music.
Given the crisis many have been saying classical music has been in for audiences (and a comparable low sales rate seems to apply for jazz) maybe not being in the mainstream has an advantage.
There are some who look down on popular styles as bad or shallow and art music/classical music as deep and good. I prefer a good chunk of classical music to a good chunk of pop music but that's not necessarily because I think one tradition is better than the other. What I would suggest we can see in at least some composers, whether Haydn or Villa-Lobos, is that there have been composers in any given age that demonstrate an appreciation of the high and low, so to speak; an appreciation of the refined and the common. If in the last century classical and popular music have diverged it may have been to the detriment of both traditions. Now this is just a personal musing but it seems that the pre-World War II blues and country idioms were not always as distinct from each other as they would later become. You had urban and rural music but that might matter more than "blues" and "country".
Blues is almost a century old and there's no reason you can't have a sonata allegro form in which the first theme you get actually is just a 12-bar blues. There are people at Yale who may decide not to teach jazz or blues as part of the Western canon but the vastness of that mistake should speak for itself even if people won't see it.
I've been thinking for a while that we should not abject one tradition over against another in music. Scruton's welcome to love the music of Wagner and Schubert and I'm welcome to find them both rather boring or interminably maudlin. Wagner's Ring cycle, in the 21st century, has been supplanted not just by Tolkien for popular appeal but by the ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe.
At one point Taruskin was writing his Oxford history with the idea that what he's called the literate music tradition was essentially ending. That was years ago, now he's not sure that's the case. The tradition is changing and the kinds of patronage dynamics that were taken for granted half a century ago no longer apply. I would suggest that the patronage dynamic we have now is not necessarily foundations or academies as corporations that promote pop music. A lot of it may sound alike but then if we are willing to be a little jaded about the high art of the Baroque era might a lot of it be self-aggrandizing bling presentations for autocrats proving how enlightened they were? There may never be an era in the history of humanity in which those who financially backed skilled artists didnt' have some self-promotion afoot. What's stuck with me for years since Miyazaki's last film, The Wind Risess, is his gloomy observation made through Caproni about art, would we choose to live in a world with or without the pyramids? The pyramids are feats of engineering and works of art but in a sense Miyazaki was throwing out for our consideration a possible idea, the idea that all art is in some sense a reflection of the anxieties and aspirations of an empire, whatever that empire may be. Some of us may be adep tat convincing ourselves we just want to make something beautiful but that doesn't entirely exonerate us, does it? Or does it?
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Throckmorton: Garrison guest piece shows the mailbox that is Mark Driscoll's lately founded corporation that includes the word "church"
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/01/18/mark-driscolls-new-church-in-a-p-o-box/
The box in the UPS store is small, but there is, some may hope, room for aggressive expansion.
Certainly if churches move forward with this mailbox variety of multi-site operating expenses will probably stay lean. Let's not forgot the membership covenant Mars Hill members were expected to comply with the month Mark Driscoll quit being pastor at Mars Hill Church.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140701095716/http://marshill.com/membership/covenant
I will not function in leadership or as a member in another church family (Heb. 13:17).
I covenant to submit to discipline by God through his Holy Spirit, to follow biblical procedures for church discipline in my relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ, to submit to righteous discipline when approached biblically by brothers and sisters in Christ, and to submit to discipline by church leadership if the need should ever arise (Ps. 141:5; Matt. 18:15–17; 1 Cor. 5:1–5; 2 Cor. 2:5–8; Gal. 6:1–5, 8; 1 Tim. 5:20; 2 Tim. 2:25; Titus 1:9; 3:10–11; Heb. 12:5–11; Rev. 2:5–7, 14–25).
Earlier in the covenant document there's an explanation that while parties make covenant with each other the covenant is primarily a promise made by an individual to God. Based on the Driscoll stories from 2015 it would appear that if you say God told you it was okay to quit being a member even while having agreed to submit to a restoration plan that it's all good. And you can not only dothat you can go on and start a new ministry or two along the way, hit the conference circuit, and share stories about how God told you it was okay to quit that you didn't share with the congregation in any confirmed documentation available from the year of resignation.
Assuming that Mark Driscoll actually did sign one of those membership covenants it would appear there's a top dog proviso that let him quit regardless of having agreed to submit to a restorative/disciplinary plan proposed by the board of Mars Hill.
For those who might still say after all this time, "hasn't he been through enough?" Well, if you go through struggles because wrongdoing has happened then that's just because wrongdoing got discovered, or some apostle who wrote some epistle wrote that. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But since some are red-letter readers of the Bible ...
Matthew 23:1-4 (NIV)
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
What has Mark Driscoll continued to claim to do if not to be a teacher and preacher of the scriptures? He spent years admonishing members to submit to spiritual authority and then, in 2014 when presented with an opportunity to lead by example, declined to do so and went so far as to invoke in 2015 stories of how he was given special permission by God to not follow the rules of conduct he had laid down as instruction for others for a decade and a half-ish previously.
If Driscoll were content to live a life of obscurity working with his hands to provide for his family and submitted to the kind of spiritual care and direction he told others to live by things would be different. If Driscoll had shown himself willing to live by example what he taught others and had stayed at Mars Hill he'd have a way to keep teaching and not look like a Pharisee. But he didn't do that. He quit. He not only quit, he later shared tales of how God said he could out on the conference circuit and on taped interview time. That looks at least a little bit like a guy who ties up heavy cumbersome loads and puts them on the shoulders of other people without so much as lifting one finger himself to handle such a burden himself. Having spent so many years warning people against the teaching and examples of Pharisees, a case could be made that Driscoll is becoming a champion Pharisee of the kind he used to warn about.
That mailbox is presumably not the end game Driscoll and company have in mind, but it may be that there's more to this church than a couple of officers, articles of incorporation and a mailbox. But for now, in terms of what can be documented, that's all we see of Mark Driscoll's new "church".
The box in the UPS store is small, but there is, some may hope, room for aggressive expansion.
Certainly if churches move forward with this mailbox variety of multi-site operating expenses will probably stay lean. Let's not forgot the membership covenant Mars Hill members were expected to comply with the month Mark Driscoll quit being pastor at Mars Hill Church.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140701095716/http://marshill.com/membership/covenant
Earlier in the covenant document there's an explanation that while parties make covenant with each other the covenant is primarily a promise made by an individual to God. Based on the Driscoll stories from 2015 it would appear that if you say God told you it was okay to quit being a member even while having agreed to submit to a restoration plan that it's all good. And you can not only dothat you can go on and start a new ministry or two along the way, hit the conference circuit, and share stories about how God told you it was okay to quit that you didn't share with the congregation in any confirmed documentation available from the year of resignation.
Assuming that Mark Driscoll actually did sign one of those membership covenants it would appear there's a top dog proviso that let him quit regardless of having agreed to submit to a restorative/disciplinary plan proposed by the board of Mars Hill.
For those who might still say after all this time, "hasn't he been through enough?" Well, if you go through struggles because wrongdoing has happened then that's just because wrongdoing got discovered, or some apostle who wrote some epistle wrote that. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But since some are red-letter readers of the Bible ...
Matthew 23:1-4 (NIV)
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
What has Mark Driscoll continued to claim to do if not to be a teacher and preacher of the scriptures? He spent years admonishing members to submit to spiritual authority and then, in 2014 when presented with an opportunity to lead by example, declined to do so and went so far as to invoke in 2015 stories of how he was given special permission by God to not follow the rules of conduct he had laid down as instruction for others for a decade and a half-ish previously.
If Driscoll were content to live a life of obscurity working with his hands to provide for his family and submitted to the kind of spiritual care and direction he told others to live by things would be different. If Driscoll had shown himself willing to live by example what he taught others and had stayed at Mars Hill he'd have a way to keep teaching and not look like a Pharisee. But he didn't do that. He quit. He not only quit, he later shared tales of how God said he could out on the conference circuit and on taped interview time. That looks at least a little bit like a guy who ties up heavy cumbersome loads and puts them on the shoulders of other people without so much as lifting one finger himself to handle such a burden himself. Having spent so many years warning people against the teaching and examples of Pharisees, a case could be made that Driscoll is becoming a champion Pharisee of the kind he used to warn about.
That mailbox is presumably not the end game Driscoll and company have in mind, but it may be that there's more to this church than a couple of officers, articles of incorporation and a mailbox. But for now, in terms of what can be documented, that's all we see of Mark Driscoll's new "church".
over at Mortification of Spin Todd Pruitt proposes "The Reformed(ish) Industrial Complex is too insular and self-protective" and that John Piper's complementarianism can't be squared with showing up at events where Christine Caine is also a featured teacher.
A rather long excerpt coming up here.
http://www.
Posted on Monday, January 4, 2016 by Todd Pruitt on 1517
Not long ago my MOS compadres received criticism (some of it rather harsh) for their critique of statements made by John Piper about the roles of women in society. There is no need to rehash that particular debate now. However, it is important to remind that we here at MOS share with John Piper and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) the belief that preachers and office-bearers in the church are to be men. That is clear in Scripture. How exactly or even whether those roles of headship and submission translate into spheres outside the family and church is a worthy debate. Dr. Piper has long advocated that male headship transcends church and family and is to be reflected in civil society as well. I point that out simply to underline the fact that Piper holds to a more sweeping understanding of complementarianism than do many of us who nevertheless fully affirm what the Bible teaches about roles within the family and the church.
That is why I was so disappointed to see that at Passion 2016 John Piper shared the preaching duties once again with a woman preacher. This time it was Christine Caine (in the past it has been Beth Moore). Incidentally Caine preaches many of the troubling errors of Word/Faith and Prosperity theology. She also claims Joyce Meyer as a mentor and promotes her ministry.
As I have written at other times, this sort of partnership by a man of great influence like John Piper with someone whose doctrine is quite troubling places local pastors in a difficult position as we seek to guard our churches from false and divisive doctrines. This was a major concern that many of us had with Piper’s embrace and promotion of Mark Driscoll. Something that he recently said he did not regret.
As I have already stated: I agree with what Piper and CBMW and the Danvers Statement all affirm about the roles of men and women within the church. How is it that John Piper, who has spoken and written so copiously on male headship, would appear with a woman preacher (and do so numerous times)? Is this not terribly inconsistent?
I know that asking inconvenient questions of any of the stars in the reformed(ish) firmament renders one irrelevant and invisible. I understand that one just does not publically disagree with the heroes. Yes, we in the reformed(ish) world do have our Popes.
...
I wonder if any of the men who took Byrd and Trueman to task for holding what they believed to be an under-developed doctrine of gender roles will now seek answers from John Piper. I certainly will not hold my breath. One simply does not do that and keep his or her seat at the table. The phone will stop ringing. The email loop will have one fewer participant. The invitations will disappear. The blog will become irrelevant.
I know that sounds cynical. But I have been an observer of these things for too long to believe otherwise. The Reformed(ish) Industrial Complex is too insular and self-protective. It is too sensitive to anything that sounds like critique. It is too committed to its own promotion. Early on I suppose I was too sanguine about the rise of the YRR movement. I assumed that holding to reformed doctrine would guard us from unwise practice and the celebrity culture that was so much a feature of broader evangelicalism. I was wrong. [emphasis added]
Pruitt's comments could apply to the entirety of mainstream American Christian publishing, perhaps? After all, the likes of Mark Driscolls and Rachel Held Evans seem to be okay with shooting fish in barrels by writing about the foibles of other teams. But internal critique does not come easily to any of us, whatever our team may be. Ten years ago I was pretty happily a member of Mars Hill and was confident the leadership would self-correct away from egregious wrongs. Well, I was wrong. It can happen to all of us, as I'm sure Pruitt appreciates.
Setting aside as distinct the matter of complementarian and egalitarian ecclesiology, it would still be a puzzle why Piper formulates a stance that is not implemented in actual practice, and not being familiar with Caine myself, there's still the open-ended question of whether Word Faith stuff would be advisable even if there were other agreements. It's not as though we don't live in a world where someone could be a complementarian and a Word Faither, too.
Now I've written in the past about how for John Piper to think that Driscoll's decline was actually a defeat for Reformed theology suggests the man has an insular understanding of what Reformed theological thought is and what the Reformed scene is. Somebody dissented from that assessment, and people get to do that. But Pruitt raises a question about Pipers stance not just in terms of Caine but as someone who expressed having no regrets about backing Driscoll. With the disclosure of the Driscoll promotional plan for Real Marriage this matter is worth revisiting.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-blast-from-past-mark-grace-driscoll.html
Free Copies & Book Reviews
The following friends would be good to include on the pre-release list to help ensure an online buzz
...
2. Galley Proofs - Desiring God with John Piper, Purpose Driven Network with Rick Warren, Life Church with Craig Groeschel, Perry Noble, James MacDonald who runs Walk in the Word Radio and Harvest Bible Chapel, Justin Taylor and Kevin Deyong of the Gospel Coalition, Mark Dever of 9 Marks, CJ Mahaney and Joshua Harris of Sovereign Grace, Dennis Rainey of FamilY LIfe Today, Tim Lane of the Christian Counseling Educational Forum, David Platt, Francischan, Ed Stetzer, blogger Tim Challies, each of the Senior Pastors who will be hosting the tour events.
Did Desiring God get galley proofs? If so then that would have been an occasion for people at DG to have spotted and prevented the citation errors that Warren Thorckmorton and others found iN Real Marriage. This didn't happen, it seems, either because DG never got galley proofs or because if anyone at DG did get galley proofs the citation problems were not spotted in time for the first printing. There was a second printing in early 2013 and as Throckmorton has noted, citation problems did get solved. But could it not be construed as a failure on the part of the YRR publishing world and community that those problems in RM were never pre-emptively spotted and dealt with if, in fact, people in the YRR movement did get galley proofs?
Pruitt's concerns about the insularity of the young, restless Reformed seem worth keeping in mind. asdf
http://www.
Posted on Monday, January 4, 2016 by Todd Pruitt on 1517
Not long ago my MOS compadres received criticism (some of it rather harsh) for their critique of statements made by John Piper about the roles of women in society. There is no need to rehash that particular debate now. However, it is important to remind that we here at MOS share with John Piper and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) the belief that preachers and office-bearers in the church are to be men. That is clear in Scripture. How exactly or even whether those roles of headship and submission translate into spheres outside the family and church is a worthy debate. Dr. Piper has long advocated that male headship transcends church and family and is to be reflected in civil society as well. I point that out simply to underline the fact that Piper holds to a more sweeping understanding of complementarianism than do many of us who nevertheless fully affirm what the Bible teaches about roles within the family and the church.
That is why I was so disappointed to see that at Passion 2016 John Piper shared the preaching duties once again with a woman preacher. This time it was Christine Caine (in the past it has been Beth Moore). Incidentally Caine preaches many of the troubling errors of Word/Faith and Prosperity theology. She also claims Joyce Meyer as a mentor and promotes her ministry.
As I have written at other times, this sort of partnership by a man of great influence like John Piper with someone whose doctrine is quite troubling places local pastors in a difficult position as we seek to guard our churches from false and divisive doctrines. This was a major concern that many of us had with Piper’s embrace and promotion of Mark Driscoll. Something that he recently said he did not regret.
As I have already stated: I agree with what Piper and CBMW and the Danvers Statement all affirm about the roles of men and women within the church. How is it that John Piper, who has spoken and written so copiously on male headship, would appear with a woman preacher (and do so numerous times)? Is this not terribly inconsistent?
I know that asking inconvenient questions of any of the stars in the reformed(ish) firmament renders one irrelevant and invisible. I understand that one just does not publically disagree with the heroes. Yes, we in the reformed(ish) world do have our Popes.
...
I wonder if any of the men who took Byrd and Trueman to task for holding what they believed to be an under-developed doctrine of gender roles will now seek answers from John Piper. I certainly will not hold my breath. One simply does not do that and keep his or her seat at the table. The phone will stop ringing. The email loop will have one fewer participant. The invitations will disappear. The blog will become irrelevant.
I know that sounds cynical. But I have been an observer of these things for too long to believe otherwise. The Reformed(ish) Industrial Complex is too insular and self-protective. It is too sensitive to anything that sounds like critique. It is too committed to its own promotion. Early on I suppose I was too sanguine about the rise of the YRR movement. I assumed that holding to reformed doctrine would guard us from unwise practice and the celebrity culture that was so much a feature of broader evangelicalism. I was wrong. [emphasis added]
Pruitt's comments could apply to the entirety of mainstream American Christian publishing, perhaps? After all, the likes of Mark Driscolls and Rachel Held Evans seem to be okay with shooting fish in barrels by writing about the foibles of other teams. But internal critique does not come easily to any of us, whatever our team may be. Ten years ago I was pretty happily a member of Mars Hill and was confident the leadership would self-correct away from egregious wrongs. Well, I was wrong. It can happen to all of us, as I'm sure Pruitt appreciates.
Setting aside as distinct the matter of complementarian and egalitarian ecclesiology, it would still be a puzzle why Piper formulates a stance that is not implemented in actual practice, and not being familiar with Caine myself, there's still the open-ended question of whether Word Faith stuff would be advisable even if there were other agreements. It's not as though we don't live in a world where someone could be a complementarian and a Word Faither, too.
Now I've written in the past about how for John Piper to think that Driscoll's decline was actually a defeat for Reformed theology suggests the man has an insular understanding of what Reformed theological thought is and what the Reformed scene is. Somebody dissented from that assessment, and people get to do that. But Pruitt raises a question about Pipers stance not just in terms of Caine but as someone who expressed having no regrets about backing Driscoll. With the disclosure of the Driscoll promotional plan for Real Marriage this matter is worth revisiting.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-blast-from-past-mark-grace-driscoll.html
Free Copies & Book Reviews
The following friends would be good to include on the pre-release list to help ensure an online buzz
...
2. Galley Proofs - Desiring God with John Piper, Purpose Driven Network with Rick Warren, Life Church with Craig Groeschel, Perry Noble, James MacDonald who runs Walk in the Word Radio and Harvest Bible Chapel, Justin Taylor and Kevin Deyong of the Gospel Coalition, Mark Dever of 9 Marks, CJ Mahaney and Joshua Harris of Sovereign Grace, Dennis Rainey of FamilY LIfe Today, Tim Lane of the Christian Counseling Educational Forum, David Platt, Francischan, Ed Stetzer, blogger Tim Challies, each of the Senior Pastors who will be hosting the tour events.
Did Desiring God get galley proofs? If so then that would have been an occasion for people at DG to have spotted and prevented the citation errors that Warren Thorckmorton and others found iN Real Marriage. This didn't happen, it seems, either because DG never got galley proofs or because if anyone at DG did get galley proofs the citation problems were not spotted in time for the first printing. There was a second printing in early 2013 and as Throckmorton has noted, citation problems did get solved. But could it not be construed as a failure on the part of the YRR publishing world and community that those problems in RM were never pre-emptively spotted and dealt with if, in fact, people in the YRR movement did get galley proofs?
Pruitt's concerns about the insularity of the young, restless Reformed seem worth keeping in mind. asdf
a few links from here and there
a plea to stop calling Donald Trump a fascist, however foolish you may consider his public persona and statements to be:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/donald-trump-fascist/424449/
But it wouldn't be American political discourse without comparing Trump to fascists, would it?
...
Trump, too, is benefitting from voter discontent. Polls show that many Trump supporters come from the white middle- and working-class, a group whose status and salaries have stagnated for decades; these voters are evidently looking for a leader ready to dignify, if not solve, their problems.
...
Trump has no clear plan of any kind. He is not about to dissolve the Democratic Party and banish the Clintons, Obama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jimmy Fallon to exile on Randall’s Island. Americans will not goose-step down Broadway; no screaming squadraccia of middle-aged Trump fans will occupy Grand Central; Amazon will not be nationalized as a “strategic state asset.” Trump is simply an opportunist, perfectly willing to change course (from, for example, saying America has to accept refugees to insisting he would “send them back” within the span of a month) and say anything (Hillary Clinton, who in 2008 he said would make a “great” president, “got schlonged” in the end). ...
Over at Slate, a long-form discussion of slavery in the United States, but not of blacks, of Native Americans.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/01/native_american_slavery_historians_uncover_a_chilling_chapter_in_u_s_history.single.html
It discusses the enslavement of Native American tribes and includes a short summary of a number of tribes and their approaches to slavery. The topic is not as literally or figuratively black and white as other discussions of slavery have at times been.
There were slavery practices by Native Americans in the Northwest of the United States ... although it might be worth mentioning that the state of Oregon had its roots in utopian aims of white settlers.
http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040
Another long-form piece.
...
The question of whether Oregon should allow slavery dates back to at least the 1840s. The majority of Oregonians (which is to say the territory’s new white residents who were systematically and sometimes violently oppressing its Native peoples) opposed slavery. But they also didn’t want to live anywhere near anyone who wasn’t white.
...
http://www.upa.pdx.edu/IMS/currentprojects/TAHv3/Curricula/2006_Units/OR%20Racial%20Timeline/Timeline%20Data%20Files/OR%201857%20Constitution%20Exclusion%20Clauses.pdf
Opposed to slavery ... but also didn't white non-whites in the state if it could be helped, it seems.
On a different note ...
http://pitchfork.com/news/63015-david-bowie-turned-down-a-coldplay-collaboration-saying-its-not-a-very-good-song/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/donald-trump-fascist/424449/
But it wouldn't be American political discourse without comparing Trump to fascists, would it?
...
Trump, too, is benefitting from voter discontent. Polls show that many Trump supporters come from the white middle- and working-class, a group whose status and salaries have stagnated for decades; these voters are evidently looking for a leader ready to dignify, if not solve, their problems.
...
Trump has no clear plan of any kind. He is not about to dissolve the Democratic Party and banish the Clintons, Obama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jimmy Fallon to exile on Randall’s Island. Americans will not goose-step down Broadway; no screaming squadraccia of middle-aged Trump fans will occupy Grand Central; Amazon will not be nationalized as a “strategic state asset.” Trump is simply an opportunist, perfectly willing to change course (from, for example, saying America has to accept refugees to insisting he would “send them back” within the span of a month) and say anything (Hillary Clinton, who in 2008 he said would make a “great” president, “got schlonged” in the end). ...
Over at Slate, a long-form discussion of slavery in the United States, but not of blacks, of Native Americans.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/01/native_american_slavery_historians_uncover_a_chilling_chapter_in_u_s_history.single.html
It discusses the enslavement of Native American tribes and includes a short summary of a number of tribes and their approaches to slavery. The topic is not as literally or figuratively black and white as other discussions of slavery have at times been.
There were slavery practices by Native Americans in the Northwest of the United States ... although it might be worth mentioning that the state of Oregon had its roots in utopian aims of white settlers.
http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040
Another long-form piece.
...
The question of whether Oregon should allow slavery dates back to at least the 1840s. The majority of Oregonians (which is to say the territory’s new white residents who were systematically and sometimes violently oppressing its Native peoples) opposed slavery. But they also didn’t want to live anywhere near anyone who wasn’t white.
...
http://www.upa.pdx.edu/IMS/currentprojects/TAHv3/Curricula/2006_Units/OR%20Racial%20Timeline/Timeline%20Data%20Files/OR%201857%20Constitution%20Exclusion%20Clauses.pdf
Opposed to slavery ... but also didn't white non-whites in the state if it could be helped, it seems.
On a different note ...
http://pitchfork.com/news/63015-david-bowie-turned-down-a-coldplay-collaboration-saying-its-not-a-very-good-song/
Sunday, January 17, 2016
it's a bit much to suggest America's favorite pasttime is making things tough for quality animation ... but
The lament that Studio Ghibli is going to stop making feature length films is understandable.
...
America’s favorite pastime is making sure that its culture is as inhospitable to quality animation as possible, and 2015 was another nail in a coffin that’s already more metal than wood. Unsurprisingly, the year’s best animated feature was Studio Ghibli’s wistfully bittersweet When Marnie Was There, and unsurprisingly it earned a whopping $561,085 at the U.S. box office because it never played in more than 57 theaters. American audiences have never appreciated the inimitable magic of Ghibli’s films, and now that world’s greatest animation studio has retired from the feature business, we’ve officially blown it once and for all. May your kids be too busy obsessing over Frozen to recognize the profound extent to which you’ve failed them.
Of course the free-wheeling adaptation of the Snow Queen that transformed the villain into a sympathetic hero was going to win the Oscar over The Wind Rises. If the snow princess gets the catchiest song and that inspires people to completely reconceive the plot in light of that then, well, that's America.
But Aardman hasn't closed shop yet, in spite of having that devastating fire a few years ago. Song of the Sea was a solid film. The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack are returning, though whether they rise to their levels of previous glory remains to be seen. Sure, The Simpsons and Family Guy are unfortunately both still on the air but there's probably no helping that.
a joke over at Ribbon Farm about mid-life crisis as an opportunity some may take to rewrite the history of the world to revolve around themselves a little more
...
If you are reasonable and very bright, a midlife crisis is an opportunity to rewrite your own personal history a little more thoughtfully and coherently. You might sublimate the envy and stoke the passion evoked by your favorite Big History. You might develop a humbler, more realistic perspective on life, informed by the various Little Histories in the zeitgeist.
This is of course, a game for brilliant idiots.
If you are unreasonable and hopefully not too bright, a midlife crisis is an opportunity to rewrite the history of the world to revolve around yourself a little more. This is not anthropocentrism (that is something you can find in both the Big History and Little History sections of Walmart), it is egocentrism
This is of course, a game for brilliant idiots.
If you are unreasonable and hopefully not too bright, a midlife crisis is an opportunity to rewrite the history of the world to revolve around yourself a little more. This is not anthropocentrism (that is something you can find in both the Big History and Little History sections of Walmart), it is egocentrism
Those italics are original.
Not that we've ever met anyone who has ever seemed to pick option 2, right?
flash over substance might not be "just" a problem in popular publishing, some are concerned that metrics obsession is harmful within academia HT Jim West
https://www.academia.edu/9349528/Academic_sell-out_how_an_obsession_with_metrics_and_rankings_is_damaging_academia
While gaming systems to get on to a NYT best seller list happens in popular publications the reality that things can be done to game prestige listings in academic publishing need not be overlooked. It has become evident in the last decade that paper mills can sell services to people in nursing and some of the sciences. It might be prudent to not assume any realm of academics is immune to gaming systems and human corruption.
As West has been doing for a while now, linking to author here and there, there are writers he mentions who have sounded off on how the reality in academics is that there's a prestige racket, an honor/shame dynamic going on.
http://thepatrologist.com/2015/08/20/academia-as-an-honourshame-society/
Those, it seems, most determined to convince themselves and others that there's a social dynamic "beyond high school" may be wrong. The status games of school years don't go away, they just get better disguised from those who have convinced themselves that we humans don't play by those rules once we've decided we've "grown up". If anything the rules seem to be easier to game and to have more informal and formal options for gaming than they did back in public schools where you either had that status or you didn't.
While gaming systems to get on to a NYT best seller list happens in popular publications the reality that things can be done to game prestige listings in academic publishing need not be overlooked. It has become evident in the last decade that paper mills can sell services to people in nursing and some of the sciences. It might be prudent to not assume any realm of academics is immune to gaming systems and human corruption.
As West has been doing for a while now, linking to author here and there, there are writers he mentions who have sounded off on how the reality in academics is that there's a prestige racket, an honor/shame dynamic going on.
http://thepatrologist.com/2015/08/20/academia-as-an-honourshame-society/
Those, it seems, most determined to convince themselves and others that there's a social dynamic "beyond high school" may be wrong. The status games of school years don't go away, they just get better disguised from those who have convinced themselves that we humans don't play by those rules once we've decided we've "grown up". If anything the rules seem to be easier to game and to have more informal and formal options for gaming than they did back in public schools where you either had that status or you didn't.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
some links for the weekend and a few rambles on nostalgia and genre, the line between "art" and "propaganda" may just be the degree to which 1) you can/can't impute your own ideals to something you just observed and 2) whether you liked it.
Noah Berlatsky makes the paradoxical case that the Bechdel test can lead to the rejection of a lot of womens' literature
... But if a movie for women, with female stars, about female friendships and the evils of male infidelity can’t pass the test, maybe the problem isn’t with the film, but with Bechdel’s
He's also got an amusing riff on the irony of George Lucas' complaints about artistic integrity and liberty in commercial cinema contexts in contrast to the Soviet Union. Never a particularly historically informed sort (how else to explain Lucas' insanely stupid belief that the Vietnam conflict demonstrated that more "primitive" societies could defeat more "modern" societies), Lucas' success has depend on his capacity to regurgitate and process the ideas of others.
...
You could argue that Lucas cheapens everything he touches—and sure, he does. But that cheapening is part of the joy of the film. The big themes of conventionally better filmmakers are robbed of their emotional content and their difficulty, and turned into bite-sized adventurous fun. Star Wars really is a movie that seems based on its toy line, rather than the other way around. Lucas has no original ideas. He has a talent for commercialization—for chopping up other people's thoughts and gluing them together in the least challenging, shiniest, most incredibly salable way possible.
In fairness, Lucas does have another talent—collaboration. A huge part of the greatness of Star Wars is due to the puppeteers, and the designers' creation of a grimy, soiled, tangibly run-down future. The best film in the series, The Empire Strikes Back, owes much of its unexpected bleakness to director Irvin Kirshner. When Lucas seizes more control and tries to put his own individual vision across, you get atrocities like the added CGI effects in the digital rereleases of his films. Without others "ruining" his vision, Lucas has no vision—except for the bits where he's ruining someone else's.
To go by interviews and commentaries it can seem as though one of George Lucas' signal talents has been a penchant for self-mythologizing. Whatever could be said about Joseph Campbell's monomyth in the mouth of Lucas the monomyth seems to apply less and less to the Star Wars franchise itself and more and more to George Lucas' various accounts and explanations for how he (as opposed to dozens of others with him) envisioned what we're supposed to have seen.
Over at Mockingbird Matt Schneider revisited the topic of Thomas Kinkade.
http://www.mbird.com/2014/06/
http://www.mbird.com/2015/01/
http://www.mbird.com/2016/01/critical-thoughts-on-the-evangelical-embrace-of-thomas-kinkades-escapist-art/
There were some dissenting comments. I saw some dissenting opinions in response to another recent Mbird piece proposing that the core theological paradigm in the Star Wars franchise can be considered Pelagian.
http://www.mbird.com/2015/12/paths-to-glory-light-and-dark-star-wars-recovers-its-pelagian-heart/
We live in a time where franchises are rebooted and refurbished and it seems as though among critics whose job it is to write about this stuff there's little imagination that's observably going into WHY people keep buying stuff. "It makes money" is both too obvious and uninformative. People buy things for reasons and if economic theories propose any level of rational agency we might want to ask what people may be buying and for what reasons.
I've proposed that the nostalgia Americans have for sci-fi franchises can be seen to cluster around the franchises that peaked in the LBJ and Reagan periods of blue state and red state nostalgia. Whether we nuke the world or save it there's no fate but what we make, we being Americans. Seeing the trailer for Star Trek Beyond raises once again for me some doubts as to whether there's any reason to keep Star Trek around in a post-Cold War moment. We're so far removed from the end of the Cold War and people left and right have doubts about the perfection and purity of the American exceptionalist vision that there's a sense in which Roddenberry's optimistic vision seems ridiculous.
If half a century ago we had an America in which Star Trek could be imagined we now live in a different century, one in which there's a cartoon called The Venture Bros systematically skewering the generational optimism of the generation that gave us Star Trek half a century ago. Just because the optimistic patriotism of Star Trek has historically had more blue-state futurist utopianism doesn't mean it hasn't been jingoistic along the way. Star Trek can be seen as much as a work of institutionally funded propaganda for liberal secularism as Veggie Tales can be seen as moralistic propaganda for evangelicals.
The question of art may in some sense be irrelevant by misunderstanding as fixed the notion that art for the sake of art is even a given. Something can be treated as if it's art to the extent that you can impute your values to it and if you find there's no values of your own (as you perceive them) that you'd impute to something it may just be that that delineates the difference between "art" and "propaganda". If you like Star Trek, regardless of how red state Christian you might be, you'll come up with a reason to keep watching Star Trek in spite of everything you may have read Roddenberry say about this ideals and hopes for the franchise. If enough evangelicals in America like Star Wars they will retroactively impute soteriological parables on to the films whether or not those had anything to do with Lucas' thought process.
But then the fun thing about art is that the gap between intent and "reception history" gives room for that kind of thing. Stravinsky had the luxury of being able to sympathize with fascists (literally) in the 1930s before changing his mind. Liberals in the United States had the luxury of being sympathetic to Stalin before they found out how many people he had killed.
The cultural undercurrent of skepticism at Cold War idealism as contrasted with Cold War era applied ethics in a post-Cold War society seems to be, well, more an explicit current of thought in American cartoons. But that's a fancy to play with for some other occasion, if I ever get around to riffing on that at the blog.
... But if a movie for women, with female stars, about female friendships and the evils of male infidelity can’t pass the test, maybe the problem isn’t with the film, but with Bechdel’s
He's also got an amusing riff on the irony of George Lucas' complaints about artistic integrity and liberty in commercial cinema contexts in contrast to the Soviet Union. Never a particularly historically informed sort (how else to explain Lucas' insanely stupid belief that the Vietnam conflict demonstrated that more "primitive" societies could defeat more "modern" societies), Lucas' success has depend on his capacity to regurgitate and process the ideas of others.
...
You could argue that Lucas cheapens everything he touches—and sure, he does. But that cheapening is part of the joy of the film. The big themes of conventionally better filmmakers are robbed of their emotional content and their difficulty, and turned into bite-sized adventurous fun. Star Wars really is a movie that seems based on its toy line, rather than the other way around. Lucas has no original ideas. He has a talent for commercialization—for chopping up other people's thoughts and gluing them together in the least challenging, shiniest, most incredibly salable way possible.
In fairness, Lucas does have another talent—collaboration. A huge part of the greatness of Star Wars is due to the puppeteers, and the designers' creation of a grimy, soiled, tangibly run-down future. The best film in the series, The Empire Strikes Back, owes much of its unexpected bleakness to director Irvin Kirshner. When Lucas seizes more control and tries to put his own individual vision across, you get atrocities like the added CGI effects in the digital rereleases of his films. Without others "ruining" his vision, Lucas has no vision—except for the bits where he's ruining someone else's.
To go by interviews and commentaries it can seem as though one of George Lucas' signal talents has been a penchant for self-mythologizing. Whatever could be said about Joseph Campbell's monomyth in the mouth of Lucas the monomyth seems to apply less and less to the Star Wars franchise itself and more and more to George Lucas' various accounts and explanations for how he (as opposed to dozens of others with him) envisioned what we're supposed to have seen.
Over at Mockingbird Matt Schneider revisited the topic of Thomas Kinkade.
http://www.mbird.com/2014/06/
http://www.mbird.com/2015/01/
http://www.mbird.com/2016/01/critical-thoughts-on-the-evangelical-embrace-of-thomas-kinkades-escapist-art/
There were some dissenting comments. I saw some dissenting opinions in response to another recent Mbird piece proposing that the core theological paradigm in the Star Wars franchise can be considered Pelagian.
http://www.mbird.com/2015/12/paths-to-glory-light-and-dark-star-wars-recovers-its-pelagian-heart/
We live in a time where franchises are rebooted and refurbished and it seems as though among critics whose job it is to write about this stuff there's little imagination that's observably going into WHY people keep buying stuff. "It makes money" is both too obvious and uninformative. People buy things for reasons and if economic theories propose any level of rational agency we might want to ask what people may be buying and for what reasons.
I've proposed that the nostalgia Americans have for sci-fi franchises can be seen to cluster around the franchises that peaked in the LBJ and Reagan periods of blue state and red state nostalgia. Whether we nuke the world or save it there's no fate but what we make, we being Americans. Seeing the trailer for Star Trek Beyond raises once again for me some doubts as to whether there's any reason to keep Star Trek around in a post-Cold War moment. We're so far removed from the end of the Cold War and people left and right have doubts about the perfection and purity of the American exceptionalist vision that there's a sense in which Roddenberry's optimistic vision seems ridiculous.
If half a century ago we had an America in which Star Trek could be imagined we now live in a different century, one in which there's a cartoon called The Venture Bros systematically skewering the generational optimism of the generation that gave us Star Trek half a century ago. Just because the optimistic patriotism of Star Trek has historically had more blue-state futurist utopianism doesn't mean it hasn't been jingoistic along the way. Star Trek can be seen as much as a work of institutionally funded propaganda for liberal secularism as Veggie Tales can be seen as moralistic propaganda for evangelicals.
The question of art may in some sense be irrelevant by misunderstanding as fixed the notion that art for the sake of art is even a given. Something can be treated as if it's art to the extent that you can impute your values to it and if you find there's no values of your own (as you perceive them) that you'd impute to something it may just be that that delineates the difference between "art" and "propaganda". If you like Star Trek, regardless of how red state Christian you might be, you'll come up with a reason to keep watching Star Trek in spite of everything you may have read Roddenberry say about this ideals and hopes for the franchise. If enough evangelicals in America like Star Wars they will retroactively impute soteriological parables on to the films whether or not those had anything to do with Lucas' thought process.
But then the fun thing about art is that the gap between intent and "reception history" gives room for that kind of thing. Stravinsky had the luxury of being able to sympathize with fascists (literally) in the 1930s before changing his mind. Liberals in the United States had the luxury of being sympathetic to Stalin before they found out how many people he had killed.
The cultural undercurrent of skepticism at Cold War idealism as contrasted with Cold War era applied ethics in a post-Cold War society seems to be, well, more an explicit current of thought in American cartoons. But that's a fancy to play with for some other occasion, if I ever get around to riffing on that at the blog.
Adam Gopnik spirals off point in an article titled "Why we Remember the Beatles and Forgot So Much Else", which seems to forget to make its stated point
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-we-remember-the-beatles-and-forget-so-much-else?intcid=mod-most-popular
This was a strange article in that it had a title that signaled a point that was never really made. That can happen if you write a piece and an editor assigns a title to your piece that doesn't have any bearing on what you wrote, or maybe a title that reflected upon correspondence between author and editor that didn't make it into a published draft. These things can happen.
But to call the piece something that asks why we remember the Beatles and forgot so much else should have made more of an evident effort to answer the question, if the question was inherent to the piece.
When we talk about the influence of Beethoven, or the mythology of what Beethoven's music is said to mean to those into his work, we can talk about Beethoven's formal innovation of received forms and idioms on the one hand, and on the other the social or political significance imputed to our reception history of his work on the other. Taruskin and countless others have discussed the mythology of Beethoven but Taruskin has been succinct in discussing how Beethoven's reception history and mythology have two components, the artistic innovation component and the social significance component. Others have written about how the patronage class that backed Beethoven had something to gain in the process and that might be for some other time.
The short and sweeping thing to be said about Beethoven was he introduced innovations in musical art that were considered revolutionary and what his music was taken to mean was to represent, in some sense, the highest and most widely loved ideals about social and political liberty as it was conceived at the time.
They may have covered a song called "Roll Over Beethoven" but the Beatles are in the 20th century a counterpart or successor to Beethoven. You see fans talking about and writing about the Beatles and the personal and social significance of their work as defining an era in a way that's not dissimilar form the ways that admirers of Beethoven in the 19th century described the impact of his work.
But the Beatles were in many respects basically just a better than average boy band that transcended the limitations and expectations of their idiom. They were also the product of a massive corporate empire that marshalled a variety of skill sets and creative interests. The Beatles are the distillation of corporate rock but a distillation of what it could become when everything within the pop music industry of an age synergistically worked toward shared ideals. We're able to impute to this boy band that trafficked in formulaic pop songs a great deal of our ideals. And why not, it's the case, isn' tit?
What the Beatles managed to do more cogently than other bands from around he same time was embody a variety of popular styles from a variety of regions. Earlier in the week I wrote about how if Stravinsky was the chameleon who dominated the first half of the 20th century then David Bowie could be considered the chameleon of the second half of the 20th century. But there have been plenty of chameleons and in several ways the Beatles, a band, and a band with a spectacular corporate backing and aid, did the chameleon thing earliest and most successfully in pop musical terms. The Beatles could be taken as a symbolically being a kind of melting pot or amalgamation in music that many contemporary Westerners still aspire to.
Now we could say that was emblematic of cultural appropriation and colonialist cultural privilege and all that but that's not how people into the music tend to bracket the Fab Four. It's usually more the working class background and not the waning imperialist context in which those guys were born. We feel more comfortable about the ideals of an empire if they can be imputed to all of humanity than if we look at them as the ideals of a specific empire, especially when we live in a global media network that can reveal to us with relatively little effort how we live in a world in which there are other empires besides the ones we live in and how they don't share the same ideals we do.
The Beatles are symbolically useful to us as we discuss ourselves in a way comparable to the way Beethoven's music was symbolically useful to those who discussed Beethoven's music in their time. If anything the romantic idealism associated with affection for Beethoven's music was simply transferred to the Beatles without necessarily changing all that much. The patronage systems changed and we went from enlightened autocrats to corporate sponsorship. We'd certainly prefer to tell ourselves that our patronage system is friendlier to the arts and can speak with some confidence of a more egalitarian impulse but patronage cycles can show that a spirit of adventure can coalesce into a spirit of conservation and inertia. When we stop to consider that the commercial music industry is nearing a centennial and that recorded music was seen by Sousa as a threat to the vitality of local musical cultures more than a century ago it may be that what was a vital and bracing musical thing half ac entury ago can become through veneration and journalistic/critical circulation the hoary status quo in just a generation or so. For my grandparents' generation the Beatles were as often as not, maybe more often than not, annoying in a way that my parents' generation or mine found New Kids on the Block insipid and irritating.
It seems that most of the time when I read people writing about the Beatles it's about the four guys and the significance of their musical activities. Fair enough, they wrote some fun songs, but what about the corporate behemoth that helped them become what they became? When people complain about corporate pop and how bland and lame it sound or how it all just sounds like the metronomic ringing of a cash register the shortfall in this kind of jeremiad isn't just that it tends to make people sound old-fashioned (which it can often be and isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself), it's that invites a question, the question of whether or not we have sacralized the pop culture that inspired us in our innocent youth as being purer and better than the corporate pop that may be inspiring new younger generations.
Besides, when people who are in their 20s now find inspiration in a band like the Beatles the longevity and broadness of the appeal of such a band may be instructive and inspiring. There are people who have mourned the passing of David Bowie who weren't even born yet when he began his musical career.
While jazz musicians and fans of classical music will certainly continue to lament the decline of the popularity of these idioms the popularity of The Beatles or of David Bowie may be a chance for us to remember the potentially obvious point that people, when they hear music, often like to hear the human voice. If the 19th century was an era in which instrumental music in Western culture was regarded as a supremely transcendental art aspiring to personalized ideals of beauty and truth the 20th century may have restored or revived a different ideal, that people like to hear songs. It's not such a big surprise that a band like th Beatles excelled at writing songs and excelled at writing songs across the surface details of timbre and formalities of expected styles. To bring back a Meyer term, the Beatles managed to be formalists. Whatever stylistics shifts and pivots they did their voices remained steady and their control of the song as an idiom for personal yet mass appeal was, half a century later, fairly easily agreed upon. Or so it would seem. We remember the Beatles, obviously, because we want to. It's a nostalgia like others but in an era where nostalgia can lead to franchise extension we might do well to stop and consider that nostalgia and the desire to buy more time for a franchise will depend on having some idea what it was or is we've been buying.
This was a strange article in that it had a title that signaled a point that was never really made. That can happen if you write a piece and an editor assigns a title to your piece that doesn't have any bearing on what you wrote, or maybe a title that reflected upon correspondence between author and editor that didn't make it into a published draft. These things can happen.
But to call the piece something that asks why we remember the Beatles and forgot so much else should have made more of an evident effort to answer the question, if the question was inherent to the piece.
When we talk about the influence of Beethoven, or the mythology of what Beethoven's music is said to mean to those into his work, we can talk about Beethoven's formal innovation of received forms and idioms on the one hand, and on the other the social or political significance imputed to our reception history of his work on the other. Taruskin and countless others have discussed the mythology of Beethoven but Taruskin has been succinct in discussing how Beethoven's reception history and mythology have two components, the artistic innovation component and the social significance component. Others have written about how the patronage class that backed Beethoven had something to gain in the process and that might be for some other time.
The short and sweeping thing to be said about Beethoven was he introduced innovations in musical art that were considered revolutionary and what his music was taken to mean was to represent, in some sense, the highest and most widely loved ideals about social and political liberty as it was conceived at the time.
They may have covered a song called "Roll Over Beethoven" but the Beatles are in the 20th century a counterpart or successor to Beethoven. You see fans talking about and writing about the Beatles and the personal and social significance of their work as defining an era in a way that's not dissimilar form the ways that admirers of Beethoven in the 19th century described the impact of his work.
But the Beatles were in many respects basically just a better than average boy band that transcended the limitations and expectations of their idiom. They were also the product of a massive corporate empire that marshalled a variety of skill sets and creative interests. The Beatles are the distillation of corporate rock but a distillation of what it could become when everything within the pop music industry of an age synergistically worked toward shared ideals. We're able to impute to this boy band that trafficked in formulaic pop songs a great deal of our ideals. And why not, it's the case, isn' tit?
What the Beatles managed to do more cogently than other bands from around he same time was embody a variety of popular styles from a variety of regions. Earlier in the week I wrote about how if Stravinsky was the chameleon who dominated the first half of the 20th century then David Bowie could be considered the chameleon of the second half of the 20th century. But there have been plenty of chameleons and in several ways the Beatles, a band, and a band with a spectacular corporate backing and aid, did the chameleon thing earliest and most successfully in pop musical terms. The Beatles could be taken as a symbolically being a kind of melting pot or amalgamation in music that many contemporary Westerners still aspire to.
Now we could say that was emblematic of cultural appropriation and colonialist cultural privilege and all that but that's not how people into the music tend to bracket the Fab Four. It's usually more the working class background and not the waning imperialist context in which those guys were born. We feel more comfortable about the ideals of an empire if they can be imputed to all of humanity than if we look at them as the ideals of a specific empire, especially when we live in a global media network that can reveal to us with relatively little effort how we live in a world in which there are other empires besides the ones we live in and how they don't share the same ideals we do.
The Beatles are symbolically useful to us as we discuss ourselves in a way comparable to the way Beethoven's music was symbolically useful to those who discussed Beethoven's music in their time. If anything the romantic idealism associated with affection for Beethoven's music was simply transferred to the Beatles without necessarily changing all that much. The patronage systems changed and we went from enlightened autocrats to corporate sponsorship. We'd certainly prefer to tell ourselves that our patronage system is friendlier to the arts and can speak with some confidence of a more egalitarian impulse but patronage cycles can show that a spirit of adventure can coalesce into a spirit of conservation and inertia. When we stop to consider that the commercial music industry is nearing a centennial and that recorded music was seen by Sousa as a threat to the vitality of local musical cultures more than a century ago it may be that what was a vital and bracing musical thing half ac entury ago can become through veneration and journalistic/critical circulation the hoary status quo in just a generation or so. For my grandparents' generation the Beatles were as often as not, maybe more often than not, annoying in a way that my parents' generation or mine found New Kids on the Block insipid and irritating.
It seems that most of the time when I read people writing about the Beatles it's about the four guys and the significance of their musical activities. Fair enough, they wrote some fun songs, but what about the corporate behemoth that helped them become what they became? When people complain about corporate pop and how bland and lame it sound or how it all just sounds like the metronomic ringing of a cash register the shortfall in this kind of jeremiad isn't just that it tends to make people sound old-fashioned (which it can often be and isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself), it's that invites a question, the question of whether or not we have sacralized the pop culture that inspired us in our innocent youth as being purer and better than the corporate pop that may be inspiring new younger generations.
Besides, when people who are in their 20s now find inspiration in a band like the Beatles the longevity and broadness of the appeal of such a band may be instructive and inspiring. There are people who have mourned the passing of David Bowie who weren't even born yet when he began his musical career.
While jazz musicians and fans of classical music will certainly continue to lament the decline of the popularity of these idioms the popularity of The Beatles or of David Bowie may be a chance for us to remember the potentially obvious point that people, when they hear music, often like to hear the human voice. If the 19th century was an era in which instrumental music in Western culture was regarded as a supremely transcendental art aspiring to personalized ideals of beauty and truth the 20th century may have restored or revived a different ideal, that people like to hear songs. It's not such a big surprise that a band like th Beatles excelled at writing songs and excelled at writing songs across the surface details of timbre and formalities of expected styles. To bring back a Meyer term, the Beatles managed to be formalists. Whatever stylistics shifts and pivots they did their voices remained steady and their control of the song as an idiom for personal yet mass appeal was, half a century later, fairly easily agreed upon. Or so it would seem. We remember the Beatles, obviously, because we want to. It's a nostalgia like others but in an era where nostalgia can lead to franchise extension we might do well to stop and consider that nostalgia and the desire to buy more time for a franchise will depend on having some idea what it was or is we've been buying.
New Music Box--An Atheist Composer on Choral Music--highlighting a predicament in a genre what do you do in choral music when it's not meant to be venerating something or someone?
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/an-atheist-composer-on-choral-music/
...
Ever since high school, I have adored choral music. Like many young musicians, I idolized the composers and decided I wanted to compose choral music, too. Indeed, new choral music has a big market!
But, as an atheist in a field often inextricably connected to a religious community, there is an element of cognitive dissonance that’s a running theme in my career. When I tell someone that I sing in professional choirs and compose “mostly” choral music, it is uncomfortable, even alienating, when they make the assumption that I do so for spiritual reasons, that I am a “believer,” that the music that I compose is for worship, and that it has been sung by choirs, in the strictest sense, not choruses.
Why do so many people assume “sacred choral” music when I say just “choral” music? Religion, like music and especially choral music, at its best brings people together for a common good. That is the reason I sing in choirs.
...
That's a reasonable question, not a rhetorical one. Why do so many people assume choral music is sacred? Well, the answer that maybe all music is sacred doesn't quite get at the peculiarity of a secularist in the realm of choral music specifically, or maybe even vocal music in general.
Even though since the time of Beethoven instrumental music has been held by some to be the transcendental music that expresses universal values this has hardly been the case in reality. To put it another way, the thing is that we don't tend to sing about things we're indifferent to. We sing about loves and hatreds. More to a practical point, when you get a dozen or more people to sing about the same thing at the same time this tends to only happen, it seems, as an act of veneration. The conundrum of being a secularist in the realm of choral music is that more than any other musical idiom in the history of humanity choral music as a performance tradition affiliated with veneration and if the veneration isn't explicitly religious it will tend to ALSO be or alternatively be collective, which is to say political. It will be in praise of something more often than not, even if that praise is in some place you wouldn't normally think about.
For the person who never sets foot in a church and was raised with no religious background what's the most unavoidable point of contact for hearing a group of people singing together in praise of something?
Advertising.
Let's step back and think a bit. Even in a film or a TV show you may not hear any choral music but you will at some point have heard a bunch of people singing a jingle for a promoted product on a radio ad or a television ad. There are plenty of other ways a person can be exposed to choral singing in life that don't involve advertisements but humor me for a bit. It seems that if you're trying to explore a tradition of choral music that is completely secular and not tied to any kind of religious belief, personal or civic; but if you're also trying to avoid anything overtly or implicitly political or nationalist in a neo-nationalist variety then what have you got left? Well, basically, advertising jingles.
There could be a proposal at this point that composing choral music that isn't dependent on a text could be a path to take. Sure, but this gets to the question of whether or not people will be on board singing about music that doesn't commit to being about anything and whether, further, people will shell out money to pay to hear choral music performed that does not commit to anything other than music as an ideal unto itself. I mean, there could be some truly fantastic choral music based on neutral vowel tones that doesn't depend on any text painting or textual enhancement ... but at this point we do have to raise the reasonable and emotionally compelling question of why people who are in search for that musical ideal would be choosing a choral work with no textual concerns when they could be listening to instrumental music.
The conundrum of being a secularist in the tradition of choral music may be most acute and feel weirdest because it's in choral music that we are most unavoidably confronted with a tradition that is founded on the human history of veneration of a god or a ruler or a state or a political ideology that establishes a social identity. In Ted Gioia's book on the history of the long song he paraphrased a quip that said that while 90 percent of all the songs in the history of rock and roll were love songs 90 percent of rock criticism as a literary tradition disproportionally focused on the ten percent of the rock songs that weren't love songs. Take out the element of love and veneration in the vocal music tradition and you're left with ten percent, so to speak, even for music written for a soloist. Take out the element of love and veneration in the choral music tradition and, well, what if all we're left with that we can remember off the top of our heads is a set of product endorsing choral jingles? It seems that choral music more than other forms of music traffics in adoration and worship of stuff. I'm not saying there isn't a tradition of secularist choral music. Xenakis has written some pretty killer choral music, for instance. It's not stuff everyone will thrill to listen to, but I'm just pointing out one case among many for choral music composed by atheists. It's out there, it's just that it's such a recent development in the history of choral music the body of work is taking shape.
...
Ever since high school, I have adored choral music. Like many young musicians, I idolized the composers and decided I wanted to compose choral music, too. Indeed, new choral music has a big market!
But, as an atheist in a field often inextricably connected to a religious community, there is an element of cognitive dissonance that’s a running theme in my career. When I tell someone that I sing in professional choirs and compose “mostly” choral music, it is uncomfortable, even alienating, when they make the assumption that I do so for spiritual reasons, that I am a “believer,” that the music that I compose is for worship, and that it has been sung by choirs, in the strictest sense, not choruses.
Why do so many people assume “sacred choral” music when I say just “choral” music? Religion, like music and especially choral music, at its best brings people together for a common good. That is the reason I sing in choirs.
...
That's a reasonable question, not a rhetorical one. Why do so many people assume choral music is sacred? Well, the answer that maybe all music is sacred doesn't quite get at the peculiarity of a secularist in the realm of choral music specifically, or maybe even vocal music in general.
Even though since the time of Beethoven instrumental music has been held by some to be the transcendental music that expresses universal values this has hardly been the case in reality. To put it another way, the thing is that we don't tend to sing about things we're indifferent to. We sing about loves and hatreds. More to a practical point, when you get a dozen or more people to sing about the same thing at the same time this tends to only happen, it seems, as an act of veneration. The conundrum of being a secularist in the realm of choral music is that more than any other musical idiom in the history of humanity choral music as a performance tradition affiliated with veneration and if the veneration isn't explicitly religious it will tend to ALSO be or alternatively be collective, which is to say political. It will be in praise of something more often than not, even if that praise is in some place you wouldn't normally think about.
For the person who never sets foot in a church and was raised with no religious background what's the most unavoidable point of contact for hearing a group of people singing together in praise of something?
Advertising.
Let's step back and think a bit. Even in a film or a TV show you may not hear any choral music but you will at some point have heard a bunch of people singing a jingle for a promoted product on a radio ad or a television ad. There are plenty of other ways a person can be exposed to choral singing in life that don't involve advertisements but humor me for a bit. It seems that if you're trying to explore a tradition of choral music that is completely secular and not tied to any kind of religious belief, personal or civic; but if you're also trying to avoid anything overtly or implicitly political or nationalist in a neo-nationalist variety then what have you got left? Well, basically, advertising jingles.
There could be a proposal at this point that composing choral music that isn't dependent on a text could be a path to take. Sure, but this gets to the question of whether or not people will be on board singing about music that doesn't commit to being about anything and whether, further, people will shell out money to pay to hear choral music performed that does not commit to anything other than music as an ideal unto itself. I mean, there could be some truly fantastic choral music based on neutral vowel tones that doesn't depend on any text painting or textual enhancement ... but at this point we do have to raise the reasonable and emotionally compelling question of why people who are in search for that musical ideal would be choosing a choral work with no textual concerns when they could be listening to instrumental music.
The conundrum of being a secularist in the tradition of choral music may be most acute and feel weirdest because it's in choral music that we are most unavoidably confronted with a tradition that is founded on the human history of veneration of a god or a ruler or a state or a political ideology that establishes a social identity. In Ted Gioia's book on the history of the long song he paraphrased a quip that said that while 90 percent of all the songs in the history of rock and roll were love songs 90 percent of rock criticism as a literary tradition disproportionally focused on the ten percent of the rock songs that weren't love songs. Take out the element of love and veneration in the vocal music tradition and you're left with ten percent, so to speak, even for music written for a soloist. Take out the element of love and veneration in the choral music tradition and, well, what if all we're left with that we can remember off the top of our heads is a set of product endorsing choral jingles? It seems that choral music more than other forms of music traffics in adoration and worship of stuff. I'm not saying there isn't a tradition of secularist choral music. Xenakis has written some pretty killer choral music, for instance. It's not stuff everyone will thrill to listen to, but I'm just pointing out one case among many for choral music composed by atheists. It's out there, it's just that it's such a recent development in the history of choral music the body of work is taking shape.
Monday, January 11, 2016
a few thoughts on the passing of David Bowie and Pierre Boulez--how pop music heroes became chameleons while academic music heroes doubled down on principles
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/postscript-david-bowie-1947-2016
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/%e2%80%aathe-beautiful-meaninglessness-of-david-bowie?intcid=mod-latest
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/11/obituary-david-bowie
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/david-bowie-perfect-farewell-rip-death-69-tony-visconti-blackstar/423516/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/arts/music/david-bowie-dies-at-69.html?_r=1
There was a time when I imagined that Michael Jackson would outlive Stevie Wonder. That certainly turned out to be wrong. There was a point at which I imagined David Bowie would outlive Keith Richards. That, too, has turned out to be wrong.
The passing of Bowie is not a heavy personal burden for me, though I know people who adore his music. I like at least some of it, even if I have more Pinkfloyd and Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder albums, by far.
But Bowie's passing has given journalists and musicians an opportunity to highlight Bowies versatility and the way he reinvented himself as a public persona, taking up one persona and then another.
David Bowie's shifts in persona might be likened to Igor Stravinsky's shifts in style. Both were able to shrewdly adapt to their respective times. Both had a chameleon like aspect to them.
Long ago in Music, the Arts and Ideas Leonard B. Meyer proposed that the new era we saw before us was one in which "the Renaissance is over". There was no more avant garde and could not be an avant garde because having abandoned a teleological conception of history that would be inherent in Christian thought (or Marxist thought, for that matter) the ever present would be a dynamic steady state of all musical styles and artistic and literary genres co-existing in a stasis. There might be traditionalists and there might be transcendental quests for the ever-new but Meyer proposed that this new era belonged to the formalists, those artists, writers and musicians who could and would shift from one style to another and display clever ways of crossing styles less out of some obligation to say the Big Things as to demonstrate mastery of technique and to play with what it even meant to be in one style or another.
And if that doesn't sound like David Bowie I don't know what does.
Of course Meyer was certainly not writing with David Bowie specifically in mind in 1967. David Bowie was just showing up at that point and Meyer was writing more about Babbitt and Stockhausen. But for those familiar with Meyer's description of formalism as a tendency in the arts and the formalist as the artist or musician adept at shifting styles and combining them, David Bowie is the latest of a litany of musicians we have lost in the last twenty-five years who was able to leap from style to style.
Whether we're talking about Roy Orbison or the Beatles or Bob Dylan (that switch from "folk" to "rock") or Frank Zappa or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles or David Bowie something that some musical heroes of the last half century have displayed is an ability to work within a category but to shift into another style. In classical music terms this has been called "cross over" and it has not gone over well for many a critic and many a listener. But crossover isn't a bad thing if the shift has been made in the context of a life in which the styles are shared. Bowie could go from cabaret to glam rock and it made sense. Dylan switching from folk to rock made sense. McCartney or Joel trying out classical music after decades of pop didn't make sense. A lot of us could not believe that these guys had spent their lives steeped within those traditions as performers. Is that unfair? Yeah, maybe, but the success of a David Bowie in shifting sounds may testify to a collective desire that even if we all get that persona is a put-on the finesse and technique and craft have to be legit.
Some of us admire the musical chameleons because they make music in a way that illustrates through their lives that the conceptual boundaries between styles of music are permeable. Theodore Gracyk coined a term years ago for modes of grasping music, ontologically thick and ontologically thin. The former is appreciating music, for want of a finer way to put it, through recordings. An ontologically thick mode of experiencing music is thorugh listening to recordings or live performance and it would tend to involve replicating that particular sound you hear on a recording, that specific Marshall amp and that particular Gibson or Fender. The sounds as sounds have to be disovered and replicated. Ontologically thin music is closer to notes on the page. Substitutions can be made for a flute or an oboe, there's a sense in ontologically thin music (Bach, for instance) that the music doesn't depend so much on THIS sound being played iN THIS way on THAT instrument by THOSE people.
So Bowie appreciation could be either of these. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that for a musician like Bowie part of the fun is that his work shows an appreciation of an ontologically thick finished product but a songwriting approach that could be potentially described as aware of ontological thinness in the Gracyk variety.
It's easier to shift from style to style when you don't let yourself get hung up on the exactitude of timbre. The timbres can be wonderfully when you select them but a whole lot of what passes for "ontologically thick" understandings of music is fixating on timbre. Sometimes you can focus on the concrete sound at the expense of realizing that across a blues son; a country song; a hip-hop song; a string quartet the same set of chords and hooks may be able to appear.
If in the first half of the 20th century musical styles and conceptions began to fragment and academics began to burrow into their schools of thought, something Leo Brouwer has said academics have failed to catch up with is the second half of the 20th century--this was an era, as Brouwer saw it, in which pop music began to have a lot of people exploring fusion. While academic musicology had its Babbitts and while Boulez had intoned that Schoenberg was dead and that those who had not felt the necessity for the 12-tone system were, not quite useful ... in pop music, whether we're talking Bowie or Miles Davis in jazz, experiments toward fusion and in style change were already under way.
When Meyer was writing about formalists it's not clear he would have had anyone like Bowie in mind, but we can propose that Bowie was one of the great formalists of pop music in the West in the last sixty years.
Some may say Pierre Boulez, who died about a week ago, will be best remembered for his music compositions ... that remains to be seen. I remember him for his fantastic conducting of works by Stravinsky and Berg and Bartok, personally, and never got much into his music. If it were a choice between only being able to listen to the musical works of Boulez or Bowie for the rest of my life then Bowie takes this in a landslide.
I'm not sure how many people know who Boulez is compared to those who know who Bowie is. Sure, both may have had stars on the wane but both were brilliant and capable musicians in their different ways. It's just that it hardly seems in doubt that Bowie is the better-known name even if Boulez fans might wish that Boulez was the more household name.
There's a passage blogged by composer and teacher Kyle Gann from last week that comes to mind.
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2016/01/boulez-est-mort.html
...
In grad school I analyzed every note of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, which I had never heard – and I knew it so well that when I finally listened to the recording, I cried. Today I wouldn’t recognize the piece in a blindfold test. I was astonished when Alex Ross reported that, late in life, Boulez admitted in an interview that, back in the serialist years, “We didn’t pay enough attention to how people listen.” It reminded me of a Morton Feldman quote, which I will paraphrase from memory: “Only in Europe do you have these revolutionaries who guillotine anyone and everyone who disagrees with them, and then change their minds.” All the same, I will listen to Pli selon pli this afternoon, and tonight I will drink to all of the great European masters of my youth, and to having outlived them.
...
Not everyone digs the music of either Boulez or Bowie ... but it seems David Jones did pay attention to how people listen.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/%e2%80%aathe-beautiful-meaninglessness-of-david-bowie?intcid=mod-latest
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/11/obituary-david-bowie
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/david-bowie-perfect-farewell-rip-death-69-tony-visconti-blackstar/423516/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/arts/music/david-bowie-dies-at-69.html?_r=1
There was a time when I imagined that Michael Jackson would outlive Stevie Wonder. That certainly turned out to be wrong. There was a point at which I imagined David Bowie would outlive Keith Richards. That, too, has turned out to be wrong.
The passing of Bowie is not a heavy personal burden for me, though I know people who adore his music. I like at least some of it, even if I have more Pinkfloyd and Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder albums, by far.
But Bowie's passing has given journalists and musicians an opportunity to highlight Bowies versatility and the way he reinvented himself as a public persona, taking up one persona and then another.
David Bowie's shifts in persona might be likened to Igor Stravinsky's shifts in style. Both were able to shrewdly adapt to their respective times. Both had a chameleon like aspect to them.
Long ago in Music, the Arts and Ideas Leonard B. Meyer proposed that the new era we saw before us was one in which "the Renaissance is over". There was no more avant garde and could not be an avant garde because having abandoned a teleological conception of history that would be inherent in Christian thought (or Marxist thought, for that matter) the ever present would be a dynamic steady state of all musical styles and artistic and literary genres co-existing in a stasis. There might be traditionalists and there might be transcendental quests for the ever-new but Meyer proposed that this new era belonged to the formalists, those artists, writers and musicians who could and would shift from one style to another and display clever ways of crossing styles less out of some obligation to say the Big Things as to demonstrate mastery of technique and to play with what it even meant to be in one style or another.
And if that doesn't sound like David Bowie I don't know what does.
Of course Meyer was certainly not writing with David Bowie specifically in mind in 1967. David Bowie was just showing up at that point and Meyer was writing more about Babbitt and Stockhausen. But for those familiar with Meyer's description of formalism as a tendency in the arts and the formalist as the artist or musician adept at shifting styles and combining them, David Bowie is the latest of a litany of musicians we have lost in the last twenty-five years who was able to leap from style to style.
Whether we're talking about Roy Orbison or the Beatles or Bob Dylan (that switch from "folk" to "rock") or Frank Zappa or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles or David Bowie something that some musical heroes of the last half century have displayed is an ability to work within a category but to shift into another style. In classical music terms this has been called "cross over" and it has not gone over well for many a critic and many a listener. But crossover isn't a bad thing if the shift has been made in the context of a life in which the styles are shared. Bowie could go from cabaret to glam rock and it made sense. Dylan switching from folk to rock made sense. McCartney or Joel trying out classical music after decades of pop didn't make sense. A lot of us could not believe that these guys had spent their lives steeped within those traditions as performers. Is that unfair? Yeah, maybe, but the success of a David Bowie in shifting sounds may testify to a collective desire that even if we all get that persona is a put-on the finesse and technique and craft have to be legit.
Some of us admire the musical chameleons because they make music in a way that illustrates through their lives that the conceptual boundaries between styles of music are permeable. Theodore Gracyk coined a term years ago for modes of grasping music, ontologically thick and ontologically thin. The former is appreciating music, for want of a finer way to put it, through recordings. An ontologically thick mode of experiencing music is thorugh listening to recordings or live performance and it would tend to involve replicating that particular sound you hear on a recording, that specific Marshall amp and that particular Gibson or Fender. The sounds as sounds have to be disovered and replicated. Ontologically thin music is closer to notes on the page. Substitutions can be made for a flute or an oboe, there's a sense in ontologically thin music (Bach, for instance) that the music doesn't depend so much on THIS sound being played iN THIS way on THAT instrument by THOSE people.
So Bowie appreciation could be either of these. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that for a musician like Bowie part of the fun is that his work shows an appreciation of an ontologically thick finished product but a songwriting approach that could be potentially described as aware of ontological thinness in the Gracyk variety.
It's easier to shift from style to style when you don't let yourself get hung up on the exactitude of timbre. The timbres can be wonderfully when you select them but a whole lot of what passes for "ontologically thick" understandings of music is fixating on timbre. Sometimes you can focus on the concrete sound at the expense of realizing that across a blues son; a country song; a hip-hop song; a string quartet the same set of chords and hooks may be able to appear.
If in the first half of the 20th century musical styles and conceptions began to fragment and academics began to burrow into their schools of thought, something Leo Brouwer has said academics have failed to catch up with is the second half of the 20th century--this was an era, as Brouwer saw it, in which pop music began to have a lot of people exploring fusion. While academic musicology had its Babbitts and while Boulez had intoned that Schoenberg was dead and that those who had not felt the necessity for the 12-tone system were, not quite useful ... in pop music, whether we're talking Bowie or Miles Davis in jazz, experiments toward fusion and in style change were already under way.
When Meyer was writing about formalists it's not clear he would have had anyone like Bowie in mind, but we can propose that Bowie was one of the great formalists of pop music in the West in the last sixty years.
Some may say Pierre Boulez, who died about a week ago, will be best remembered for his music compositions ... that remains to be seen. I remember him for his fantastic conducting of works by Stravinsky and Berg and Bartok, personally, and never got much into his music. If it were a choice between only being able to listen to the musical works of Boulez or Bowie for the rest of my life then Bowie takes this in a landslide.
I'm not sure how many people know who Boulez is compared to those who know who Bowie is. Sure, both may have had stars on the wane but both were brilliant and capable musicians in their different ways. It's just that it hardly seems in doubt that Bowie is the better-known name even if Boulez fans might wish that Boulez was the more household name.
There's a passage blogged by composer and teacher Kyle Gann from last week that comes to mind.
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2016/01/boulez-est-mort.html
...
In grad school I analyzed every note of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, which I had never heard – and I knew it so well that when I finally listened to the recording, I cried. Today I wouldn’t recognize the piece in a blindfold test. I was astonished when Alex Ross reported that, late in life, Boulez admitted in an interview that, back in the serialist years, “We didn’t pay enough attention to how people listen.” It reminded me of a Morton Feldman quote, which I will paraphrase from memory: “Only in Europe do you have these revolutionaries who guillotine anyone and everyone who disagrees with them, and then change their minds.” All the same, I will listen to Pli selon pli this afternoon, and tonight I will drink to all of the great European masters of my youth, and to having outlived them.
...
Not everyone digs the music of either Boulez or Bowie ... but it seems David Jones did pay attention to how people listen.
Saturday, January 09, 2016
okay, so let's see if 2016 can be the year to get back to blogging about Ferdinand Rebay again
There's been a number of recordings released of Rebay's music for guitar in the last year that will be worth mention. Also overdue would be discussing the solo guitar sonatas. There's commercially available recordings of two of the seven but not, as yet, of the whole set.
Wednesday, January 06, 2016
so Jimmy Witcher shared a story about helicopters and the press at the Driscoll house. Driscoll himself never mentioned multiple helicopters and Russ Bowen was told on air "wrong address". Link to KOMO coverage
some of Jimmy Witcher's account of the last year or so to do with Mark Driscoll.
The "internal things" ... was that the conversation on air in 2013 Mark Driscoll had with Janet Mefferd in which the term "plagiarism" came up? Was it "internal things" that World Magazine reported that Mars Hill used Result Source to secure a place on the New York Times bestseller list for Real Marriage? As Driscoll's been making the rounds he's at times shared that there was this conflict, see, and it didn't really come to the public knowledge until the last year of Mars Hill ... but Paul Petry published content at Joyful Exiles starting in March 2012, more than an entire year before the Mefferd interview in 2013. Now some internal correspondence got leaked, to be sure, something kind of like former BoAA member named Tripp describing Mars Hill as one of the most abusive ministry cultures he'd ever seen. But Tripp's resignation from the BoAA was public, too. The idea that there were "internal things" seems to reflect a profound ignorance (deliberate or otherwise) of what was going on.
But enough of those general observations.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/01/06/mars-hill-churchs-demise-referred-to-as-some-internal-things-in-mark-driscolls-intro-at-zion-2016/
...
And you know, many of us go through hard times in our life, but not all of us have to do it very publicly. And Pastor Mark had to go through a very difficult, kind of almost a public trial, uh, with the media on his front lawn, helicopters flying overhead, his every move being discussed in blogs and on social media. And you know, as often is the case, you know, with the media, and I know they, they sometimes try, uh, but they get about a third of the information right, you know. And so he and his family were living in this, in this difficult time of making this decision, and he had resigned.
And it was literally just within days, probably a couple of weeks later that I got to meet him at a pastor’s conference. And Pastor Mark had known it was time for him to step down, and he knew that God was calling him to move on and go into another season, but he knew that he needed to get some things “in his quiver,” if you will. He needed to, to learn some things, and develop some characteristics, and some things in himself that he hadn’t had before. And one of the things that he knew he needed, is he needed some spiritual fathers. He needed folks that would come in and speak fatherhood to him.
... a third?
So how could the media be on the front lawn when the house was behind a gate and some gravel and some road?
Since when was there more than one helicopter? Mark Driscoll told stories about there being ONE helicopter that I can recall documented. Never any mention of helicopters in the plural.
Driscoll by the time Russ Bowen came calling had withdrawn from the public eye and wasn't preaching. The notion that blogs and social media were watching his every move seems virtually impossible to substantiate.
Let's not forget that according to Robert Morris' Gateway account it was he who advised Driscoll to step away from ministry for a while.
So far it seems that if Jimmy's trying to say bloggers and the media get about a third of the facts right his account can be shown to not even be a third accurate based on statements made by none other than Mark Driscoll himself and video footage from coverage in 2014.
Helicopters? Plural? Based on what? The Woodway house was kind of gated. Russ Bowen went up and rang the intercom up.
Someone had a question over at Throckmorton's blog.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/01/06/mars-hill-churchs-demise-referred-to-as-some-internal-things-in-mark-driscolls-intro-at-zion-2016/#comment-2443234556
The closest thing I ever saw to media on Driscoll's front lawn was that hapless KOMO TV news reporter who parked his car near a huge wall and spoke to a voice through an intercom. The voice sounded just like Mark, but told him he had the wrong house. Sadly that video isn't out there anymore.
Well, we all knew a new narrative of Mark's life would be spun, and now we see it coming together. Father Mark, the dad you never had.
Go to this link, start playing the video, it starts at about 0:54
http://komonews.com/news/local/mars-hill-pastor-let-go-after-criticizing-church-leader
As we've discussed at some length here, for Mark Driscoll to concede a helicopter flew by and that the press was outside the house he's basically got no choice but that his 2015 testimony to that effect showed that whoever that dude was who said "wrong address" was lying to Russ Bowen while camera rolled.
Now by 2014 the house in Woodway had been gifted to Melanie Thompson but then in that case, was it even an entirely accurate story to share that it was Mark Driscoll's house the press was visiting if it had been gifted to Melanie Thompson back in 2013? That's the thing about the stories, it's tough to eat your cake and then have it, too.
The word about how things from the past will come forward into the future? Well, okay, there might be something to that, seeing as there's a publishing agreement from the past available to read in the present and by extension the future. That bit had already come to pass as of January 4, 2016, depending on how you take this
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/01/an-agreement-from-february-28-2011.html
At the moment it appears that who Mark Driscoll "is" is a guy who's still recycling all the content back from the "who he was" years. He had a sermon here and there warning people against those kinds of guys.
Then there's this bit about how Driscoll needed spiritual fathers? Because back in the early days Doug Busby wasn't good enough? Or Ken Hutcherson? Or David Nicholas? Or Driscoll's own father-in-law Gib Martin?
The "internal things" ... was that the conversation on air in 2013 Mark Driscoll had with Janet Mefferd in which the term "plagiarism" came up? Was it "internal things" that World Magazine reported that Mars Hill used Result Source to secure a place on the New York Times bestseller list for Real Marriage? As Driscoll's been making the rounds he's at times shared that there was this conflict, see, and it didn't really come to the public knowledge until the last year of Mars Hill ... but Paul Petry published content at Joyful Exiles starting in March 2012, more than an entire year before the Mefferd interview in 2013. Now some internal correspondence got leaked, to be sure, something kind of like former BoAA member named Tripp describing Mars Hill as one of the most abusive ministry cultures he'd ever seen. But Tripp's resignation from the BoAA was public, too. The idea that there were "internal things" seems to reflect a profound ignorance (deliberate or otherwise) of what was going on.
But enough of those general observations.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/01/06/mars-hill-churchs-demise-referred-to-as-some-internal-things-in-mark-driscolls-intro-at-zion-2016/
...
And you know, many of us go through hard times in our life, but not all of us have to do it very publicly. And Pastor Mark had to go through a very difficult, kind of almost a public trial, uh, with the media on his front lawn, helicopters flying overhead, his every move being discussed in blogs and on social media. And you know, as often is the case, you know, with the media, and I know they, they sometimes try, uh, but they get about a third of the information right, you know. And so he and his family were living in this, in this difficult time of making this decision, and he had resigned.
And it was literally just within days, probably a couple of weeks later that I got to meet him at a pastor’s conference. And Pastor Mark had known it was time for him to step down, and he knew that God was calling him to move on and go into another season, but he knew that he needed to get some things “in his quiver,” if you will. He needed to, to learn some things, and develop some characteristics, and some things in himself that he hadn’t had before. And one of the things that he knew he needed, is he needed some spiritual fathers. He needed folks that would come in and speak fatherhood to him.
... a third?
So how could the media be on the front lawn when the house was behind a gate and some gravel and some road?
Since when was there more than one helicopter? Mark Driscoll told stories about there being ONE helicopter that I can recall documented. Never any mention of helicopters in the plural.
Driscoll by the time Russ Bowen came calling had withdrawn from the public eye and wasn't preaching. The notion that blogs and social media were watching his every move seems virtually impossible to substantiate.
Let's not forget that according to Robert Morris' Gateway account it was he who advised Driscoll to step away from ministry for a while.
So far it seems that if Jimmy's trying to say bloggers and the media get about a third of the facts right his account can be shown to not even be a third accurate based on statements made by none other than Mark Driscoll himself and video footage from coverage in 2014.
Helicopters? Plural? Based on what? The Woodway house was kind of gated. Russ Bowen went up and rang the intercom up.
Someone had a question over at Throckmorton's blog.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/01/06/mars-hill-churchs-demise-referred-to-as-some-internal-things-in-mark-driscolls-intro-at-zion-2016/#comment-2443234556
The closest thing I ever saw to media on Driscoll's front lawn was that hapless KOMO TV news reporter who parked his car near a huge wall and spoke to a voice through an intercom. The voice sounded just like Mark, but told him he had the wrong house. Sadly that video isn't out there anymore.
Well, we all knew a new narrative of Mark's life would be spun, and now we see it coming together. Father Mark, the dad you never had.
Go to this link, start playing the video, it starts at about 0:54
http://komonews.com/news/local/mars-hill-pastor-let-go-after-criticizing-church-leader
As we've discussed at some length here, for Mark Driscoll to concede a helicopter flew by and that the press was outside the house he's basically got no choice but that his 2015 testimony to that effect showed that whoever that dude was who said "wrong address" was lying to Russ Bowen while camera rolled.
Now by 2014 the house in Woodway had been gifted to Melanie Thompson but then in that case, was it even an entirely accurate story to share that it was Mark Driscoll's house the press was visiting if it had been gifted to Melanie Thompson back in 2013? That's the thing about the stories, it's tough to eat your cake and then have it, too.
The word about how things from the past will come forward into the future? Well, okay, there might be something to that, seeing as there's a publishing agreement from the past available to read in the present and by extension the future. That bit had already come to pass as of January 4, 2016, depending on how you take this
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/01/an-agreement-from-february-28-2011.html
At the moment it appears that who Mark Driscoll "is" is a guy who's still recycling all the content back from the "who he was" years. He had a sermon here and there warning people against those kinds of guys.
Then there's this bit about how Driscoll needed spiritual fathers? Because back in the early days Doug Busby wasn't good enough? Or Ken Hutcherson? Or David Nicholas? Or Driscoll's own father-in-law Gib Martin?
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