incubations

things have been more laconic or dormant here at Wenatchee The Hatchet lately.  There's plenty to write about but it's not getting written just yet.  My friend Wendy's been writing about some stuff I hope to get around to addressing but it may take some time to get to that.  There's a small hill of background reading I'm doing revisiting prophecy and divination as political speech in ancient near eastern contexts and what might not seem to be a related survey of the way the magisterial Reformers defined prophecy in the 1520s and 1530s. Then there's also reading I'm doing in the Bible itself here and there as to what prophecy is described as being in the Bible itself. What I'm finding from a few too many people is that they seem eager to hinge a set of arguments on things said about the Bible rather than by the Bible itself and that this nexus of second-hand cases taken as coming from primary sources has revolved around things like what "prophecy" is and whether what is now known as an elder or pastor fits into that rubric. 

As I've written in the past, I do not consider myself either an egalitarian or a complementarian. These seem less like sincerely held Christian precepts to me than American political ideologies interpolated on to biblical texts to settle disputs about who should have access to what levels of institutional power within American Christian non-profit networks.  I am leaning toward the belief that because the nature of those power structures has been misinterpreted or misrepresented as to what the biblical texts say about the authority roles invoked that neither side is necessarily doing more than having a pissing contest about who can appropriate (and impose upon) biblical texts to rationalize a contemporary concern.

This is, in a way, what people from the New Perspective proposed must be borne in mind about the Reformers themselves.  The concerns of the Reformers may not have been the concerns of the biblical authors whose literary works were subject to such heated sixteenth century debate.

That gets at two, sort of, projects.  A third that may draw on the reading done for the first two may be what actually gets written.  On the whole I have not seen those who have taken up the activity known as watchblogging writing about watchblogging in a way that seems to make a case for its legitimacy on scriptural, historical or literary grounds.  It's not that such a case cannot be made.  I am certain that it is possible to take the sum of the scriptures, work from the magisterial Reformers, a brief overview of theories of the press, and a few other things to formulate a defense of the legitimacy of watchblogging with some necessary caveats as to the strengths and weaknesses of the enterprise inherent to its nature.  But that will take time. 

To the extent that Mark Driscoll bailed on Mars Hill and restorative discipline and has gone off to do his thing in Phoenix he has, paradoxically, given me a great deal more time to do more analysis of what happened (i.e. this year's series of posts using Ellul's writing on propagandists and propaganda to highlight how Mark Driscoll is not a pastor but a propagandist) and to get around (I hope) to formulating a case for the legitimacy of watchblogging with the benefit of no longer feeling quite so urgently obliged to chronicle things now that the twenty years of Mars Hill draws more definitively to a close. Because we seem to be in an era in which there could be more rather than less watchblogging and because Michael Spencer and Frank Turk's debate from 2009 ultimately, I believe, centered on a debate about the basis for any legitimacy of what is now called watchblogging, I feel some obligation as a former member of Mars Hill and as a reader/sometime contributor to Internet Monk to see what I can do to potentially illuminate this set of topics.  So, all that's to say that by deciding to quit when he did the way he did, Mark Driscoll did Wenatchee The Hatchet a favor.

Because as alert regular readers will know, I've been fairly happy to get back to writing about the kinds of stuff I was writing about before things went watchblog.  Music, cartoons, comics, stuff like that.  There's still posts I've been meaning to write about the music of Ferdinand Rebay, for instance.  There's stuff I've been wanting to write about regarding Leonard B. Meyer on romanticism and cross referencing that with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow.

There's also a slow-incubating project in which I mean to consider Meyer's work in tandem with Francis Schaeffer's work on cultural decline and artistic directions.  I appreciated Schaeffer's work when I was a teen and in my twenties.  Now that I'm, er, more middle-aged I think that evangelicals who have relied upon Schaeffer as a kind of shortcut substitute to their own engagement with the arts need to find ways to move past his work.  Schaeffer has some useful things to share about the limits of the arts but there's a lot about the arts and their history he got spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong. As a stick-in-the-mud Presbyterian sort I think that in some sense this will be more gently and easily done "in house" within a Reformed context because when the fiftieth anniversary of a certain trilogy comes along the awkwardly obvious legend of WASP decline in Schaeffer's trilogy will not get soft-pedaled by progressives, least of all Frank Schaeffer.  I sometimes feel that the completely un-nuanced and confrontationally binary approach of the father has been carried on by the son.  Yes, there's valuable ideas and concerns in there ... but ... well ... we'll get to that later.  That's another project in the incubation process. 

Mark DeMoss off board of Liberty U. in wake of public disagreement with Falwell Jr's Trump endorsement, revisiting the irony of DeMoss being concerned about Trump's bullying but not quite Driscoll's

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/05/05/mark-demoss-criticism-of-jerry-falwell-jrs-trump-endorsement/
... in late April, according to DeMoss, the executive committee of the Liberty University Board of Trustees voted to ask DeMoss to resign from the Board’s executive committee. For many years, DeMoss chaired that same committee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/01/jerry-falwell-jr-s-trump-endorsement-draws-objections-from-his-late-fathers-confidant/
...
"Donald Trump is the only candidate who has dealt almost exclusively in the politics of personal insult,” DeMoss said. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ. That’s what’s disturbing to so many people. It’s not Christ-like behavior that Liberty has spent 40 years promoting with its students.”

It appears that DeMoss is off the board at Liberty University. 

We noted the irony a few months ago about Mark DeMoss having sounded off on Trump while being listed (even today) as a prayer supporter of Driscoll.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/irony-alert-mark-demoss-sounds-note-of.html
http://thetrinitychurch.com/support/

DeMoss is listed as a supporter of Mark "there is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus" Driscoll.  Now even if someone were to say that William Wallace II was all an act, a parallel between Trump and Driscoll isn't implausible.  Both men built careers as public figures sounding off on various topics via screens with a week or so for editing as an interval.  Anyone recall that in the earliest coverage of Driscoll he was willing to joke that he was to the right of Pat Buchanan on politics?  And we should note that even if we assume Mark Driscoll really apologized for the substance of what he said as William Wallace II in his 2006 book (which he didn't) Driscoll's never addressed the "pile of dead bodies" statement from 2007 that was made public by Chris Rosebrough around 2012.

Nor, for that matter, has Paul Tripp's comment that Mars Hill was the most abusive ministry culture he'd seen been addressed by either Mark Driscoll or Mark DeMoss.

http://religionnews.com/2014/08/28/mars-hill-pastors-letter-mark-driscoll-step-down-ministry-leadership/

 "This is without a doubt, the most abusive, coercive ministry culture I’ve ever been involved with,” former Mars Hill pastor Paul Tripp said.
If Mark DeMoss's objections about Trump's use of the politics of personal insults were to have any weight, it might help if he'd clarified that the politics of personal insults as practiced by Mark Driscoll was objectionable, too, or that we might have some evidence that Driscoll was really changed.

But ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/04/throckmorton-driscoll-provides-update.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/21/mars-hill-s-controversial-pastor-mark-driscoll-is-back-with-a-new-megachurch-in-phoenix.html
02.20.16 9:01 PM ET
...
Driscoll’s new website lists more than two dozen church leaders who are “praying for The Trinity Church.” Among them is Mark DeMoss, owner of a Christian public relations firm who worked for Mars Hill in 2014 during the church’s many crises. DeMoss is not working for The Trinity Church, but said he’s just trying to “be a friend,” and offered insight into what he says are Driscoll’s plans.

“I think he’s very realistic and he realizes that he might launch a church speaking to 100 people. I don’t think he’s under any big idea that he’s going to open the doors and have a megachurch immediately. But, I think he has the potential to do that again.” [emphasis added]

Although DeMoss wouldn’t name anyone in particular, he says Driscoll “spent a considerable amount of time reaching out to people that he knew or thought he had offended or hurt in some way and did whatever he could do to right those relationships. He’s had some success with that, but there have been some people who were not receptive to a restored relationship.”

So according to DeMoss, Driscoll was being realistic and realized he might launch a church speaking to 100 people and wasn't under any big idea he would open doors and have a megachurch immediately.

Right, so ... .

http://thetrinitychurch.com/the-trinity-church-welcomes-you-to-our-easter-open-house-2/
...
Pastor Mark and his family moved to the Phoenix valley last year. After spending months praying specifically for a church building with 1,000+ seats along the 101 Freeway, Pastor Mark believes that God has supernaturally provided. [emphasis added] Like most older church buildings, this one needs some service projects and financial investment to make it a good home, but we are excited about its potential.

We know that God has gone before us, preparing an opportunity to minister. This building provides a wonderful opportunity for our mission: Why? So that lives and legacies are transformed!
We've noted this before, too, that it would seem that if Mark Driscoll's turned over a new leaf that holding out for a 1,000+ seat venue able to host multiple services before formally launching a church doesn't look like turning over that new a leaf.  Twenty years ago Mark Driscoll, notoriously, was okay with maybe a dozen-ish people at a Bible study that was sort of a church plant.  Now he's hoping for an Airstream and talking about how if your dream isn't so big that only God could get it to work then it's not ... big enough?  Driscoll, by his own account ten years ago, was shooting for the moon and plotting world domination. There is no evidence, based on his recent vodcast statements about having a vision so big that without God it can't work, that Driscoll's doing much more than recycling his old vision-casting approach and recycling his old sermons and wanting a vastly bigger launch for this new church than the one he started twenty years ago.

POSTSCRIPT/UPDATE 5-6-2016

in a "the title pretty much says it, it seems" Throckmorton has reported that ...
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/05/06/liberty-university-says-there-were-other-reasons-board-members-were-upset-with-mark-demoss/

new contributions at Mockingbird, getting back to cartoons and superheroes, a few thoughts on film criticism in an era of sympathy for the devils

Certain semi-notorious topics withstanding, this blog has never been dedicated to any one set of topics.  And I've never stopped taking time here and there to write about the DCAU.  Actually ... I've written a lot of stuff about the DCAU and the DC inspired films for Mockingbird over the years.

Here's a long-form piece of criticism about my not enjoying Batman vs Superman, why I didn't much enjoy it, and why I've found that in some ways negative reviews of the film have also been disappointing.

http://www.mbird.com/2016/05/toiling-to-make-film-life-from-comic-death-batman-v-superman-invokes-and-bungles-two-canons/

It's not surprising that film critics might find the religious images invoked by Batman vs Superman hamfisted without even being able to explain why.  It sometimes seemed as if literacy were at a low ebb on the topic of religion and comics alike for film critics.  But then ... let's take a quick look at what film critics had to say about The Witch earlier this year.
http://artsfuse.org/141076/fuse-film-review-the-witch-mother-natures-a-bitch-and-so-am-i/

If you’re asking me, I find this film to be a passionate paean to the feminine. The forest and the farm at its edge are metaphors we’d all do well to contemplate, but human aggression delivers the most crushing blows here. I’d like to think that, for thoughtful viewers, The Witch may crystallize, then fossilize, and then transcend centuries of abuse, mistrust, and fear. But make no mistake: there is also arrogance here, and cruelty, and selfishness. I am woman, watch me burn. And hang. And drown. And fly through the moonlit night.

Not everyone got the same impression about the film, which has gotten praise for thinking outside of one box while studiously thinking inside another.

https://newrepublic.com/article/130182/witch-suffer-little-children


By Will Leitch
February 19, 2016

The Witch is the sort of horror movie that gets a ton of praise for its dogged resistance to conventional scary movie tropes. An indie hit out of Sundance last year, The Witch is the type of film that’s a success at film festivals but tends to evaporate once released into the wild; what works in the relentless hustle of a festival can feel airless when introduced to the elements of regular human audiences. The Witch is wrapped up in its own views of religion, of sin, of feminine power, but more than anything else, it is wrapped up in itself.
 ...

Which other box?  The way the film has been parsed as an ode to female empowerment has been interesting to read this year, particularly with commentary like this:
 http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/02/22/a24_s_new_horror_film_the_witch_has_enchanted_critics_but_mainstream_audiences.html

Normally, the fall of the main character in the final scene of a horror movie would be a director’s gloomy or gleeful surrender to evil. But The Witch presents Thomasin’s conversion as a victory for her: Embracing Satan allows her to escape from the physical hardship, moral hypocrisy, and gendered violence that’s tortured her thus far. (Given how few people in the Calvinist universe actually belong to the divine elect, hedging your bets by becoming a cursed, uberpowerful immortal is just good sense.) I can’t overstate just how shocking this moment feels, when you realize that the movie has up until now perpetrated a fundamental deception about its own point of view. All along, Eggers has stood on the Devil’s side; the triumph of the forces he’s trained us to dread and fear actually constitutes a happy ending. This hugely daring reversal could read as a middle finger to viewers, who’ve spent the past hour and change sympathizing with the pilgrims and rooting against the dark hosts. But don’t have such a limiting, orthodox view of what a horror movie ought to accomplish! Let the film’s ending serve as a reminder—as a certain goat might say—how delicious heresy can be. 

So when film critics leap at the chance to propose that a young women who decides to join a coven after her family is killed off has gained agency by more or less dealing with witches that comes off as, well, one commenter at ArtsFuse put it this way:
http://artsfuse.org/141076/fuse-film-review-the-witch-mother-natures-a-bitch-and-so-am-i/#comment-433021
Another positive review for a movie that I despise more and more with every positive review I see. The only way I can stand this movie is to see it the way that @Mirasalena01 over at The Wild Hunt sees it — as a pogrom against extremism. Otherwise this is just a depressing fairy tale with the message “If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.” Eggers could’ve saved the energy and money he wasted on period costume and dialogue and filmed this in the modern day as the story of an abused girl giving up and joining a murderous drug gang. But then it wouldn’t have been given rave reviews and been praised as a “passionate paean to the feminine.” Argh!

and then there's the observation that joining the team of evil hardly seems like much of a choice ...

https://killscreen.com/articles/the-witch-isnt-an-empowerment-narrative-and-thats-why-its-great/

There are works of art that are praised by critics because, in a phrase, those critics can read themselves and their agendas on to the work.  When a character who succumbs to a case of Stockholm syndrome is presented as gaining agency for that reaction it may be worth asking whether the odes to girl power would have been the same had the end of the film shown Thomasin joining the Klan or the Republican party or some other organization not normally high on the list of groups that get praised by progressive arts journals in Boston. 

So in a larger cinematic context in which these kinds of conversations happen, it could be argued that the sloppy invocations of God and the devil made by Batman vs Superman aren't just ragged and incompetent at the surface level, they might be symptomatic of an entertainment industry sufficiently lacking literacy in both the comics its adapting and the biblical/historical tropes it attempts to invoke. If Blake claimed Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, these days a whole lot of folks know they're of the devil's party and consider it the only real path to freedom.

In such a moment having Lex Luthor flip around between saying devils come down from the heavens and then saying one of those devils is God could have been coherent if Baudelaire were invoked.  But in the film we got?  It's more colloquially likely to get known as mixing metaphors.

Put Luthor's speeches together and we get a motive that is a mixed metaphor, which might sum up the problems with the script.  We're not given any insight into the screenwriters having a clear sense that they KNOW Luthor's motivation is expressed in a cumulatively mixed metaphor.  If you stick to the same metaphor from start to finish, like The Witch, for instance, you have a coherent story, at least, even if it can seem to be a blank slate on which film critics write what they wish. Batman vs Superman is the sort of film that won't let you, the viewer, decide what's going on, but it's too incoherent in its deployment of the canons of either DC comics or the Judeo-Christian literature to come across as knowing what it's doing.

oh, postscript

http://www.mbird.com/2016/04/wonder-woman-maid-of-honor-in-a-dishonorable-world/

http://www.mbird.com/2016/04/fists-of-justice-love-at-arms-length-the-dark-knight-can-do-anything-but-give-you-his-heart/

looking back on the prophet/priest/king thing at Mars Hill, Deuteronomy warned not to appoint a king who was an outsider, which gets us to the question of why Turner was brought on

Since Mark Driscoll and Sutton Turner have been named as plaintiffs in a complaint this year it might be worth revisiting everything that was said about Sutton Turner as the "king" of Mars Hill.  Even if we set aside concerns that the prophet/priest/king taxonomy formulated within Mars Hill seemed like little more than a Myers & Briggs Type Indicator but for church leaders ... there's something else to consider.  Anybody remember what the Old Testament had to say about the appointment of kings in Israel?  No?  Shame on you for not reading Deuteronomy for the joy of it ...


https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+17&version=ESV
Deuteronomy 17:14-15
14 “When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ 15 you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother.

That would seem clear enough, whoever the appointed king is, he should not be a foreigner but one chosen from among the people.  Even if some of us had ... to put it VERY NICELY, severe doubts about Munson's fitness to be the formal president of Mars Hill ... he did at least the homeboy qualification.  Turner?  He was brought in from literally another country.

What's kind of breath-taking is how obvious it was Sutton Turner was literally a fly-in from overseas.  If Mars Hill was going to use the language of "king" and "kingly" gifts and insist that there was a scripturally defensible basis for there being a "king" the least they could have done was attempt consistency with their own jargon by sticking to leaders cultivated from within.  A work night does not necessarily permit an exhaustive survey of what "could" be quoted ... but it's interesting how defensive Sutton Turner and Justin Dean turned out to be about Tripp's comments ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-changing-tune-mars-hill-leaders.html

as documented above when, if they'd just read the Bible and considered the prohibition against kings appointed from outside the people neither of these guys should have been entirely shocked that their respective tenures within Mars Hill ended as Mars Hill spiraled into death.  Let's review, shall we, what got said about the challenges Turner faced assimilating into Mars Hill and the preparatory praise he got.

http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource1/
....
In April 2011, I joined Mars Hill as the General Manager and reported to the Executive Pastor. I had enjoyed the teaching via podcast from overseas since 2007. My family and I looked forward to attending and serving in the church that we had enjoyed from afar, a church that loved Jesus and preached the gospel. I looked forward to using my gifts and experience to further the mission of Jesus through the local church.
When I arrived at Mars Hill, the financial books were a mess. During my first week, I asked the finance director to bring me the financials. He said he could provide me with September 2010 because they were about to close out the books for October. Financial reporting was six months behind. I thought, “How do they know how they’re doing financially?!” The finance team handed me a bank statement. (If you are in finance or accounting, you just cringed as you read the last sentence.)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/19/sutton-turners-status-at-mars-hill-church-uncertain/
and
https://marshill.com/2014/09/19/the-weekly-9-19-14

UPDATE FROM THE BOAA
Dear Mars Hill,
Earlier this month Pastor Sutton Turner informed our board of his intention to resign from his current staff and elder position. His personal decision is a sober acknowledgement that it would not be financially feasible for him to stay on staff as the church rightsizes itself, and secondly, not emotionally prudent to subject his family to what has been an ongoing season of personal attacks. We want to be clear: there are no disqualifying factors related to his decision.

Sutton put it this way: “Since 2007, Pastor Mark has impacted my life in a significant way. I am thankful to call him my brother, my pastor, and my friend. When I came to Mars Hill in 2011, my plan was to be here for a year, get theologically trained, and focus on the adoption of my son before entering back into the business world. Three and a half years later, I have been able to serve a church that I love as a staff member, but it is now time that I transition off of staff and return to the business world.”
In other words, in the BoAA account Turner was quoted as saying the plan was to show up, train for a bit in theology and then go back into the business world.  Really?  This was kind of second-hand although Turner may well have said precisely what he was quoted as saying.  It's just that that account makes it seem as though Sutton Turner himself did not imagine he was going to end up being a "king".

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf

Executive Elders
Current Financial Situation
Saturday, March 17, 2012...
After being at Mars Hill for 10 months and in my current role for 3 months, I now have a picture of a very broken and fundamentally financially unsustainable organization. I am sorry that I have not been able to really see the financial picture of the organization until just this week. So many distractions with A29, Real Marriage, GWOW, distractions with Churches, my Eldership, and a very incompetent staff when I arrived has kept me from not seeing the picture. But now I see the organization very clearly and we have some difficult decisions to make.

"GWOW" is most likely a shorthand for God's Work, Our Witness. 

One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.

Of course ... if you think about it all in light of Deuteronomy 17 why WOULD he have had any credibility? He was a complete outsider who was brought in as a hired hand rather than appointed from among the people. 

Now  compare Van Skaik's account of Turner describing his path to Mars Hill from earlier to Mark Driscoll's introductions for Sutton Turner.

http://marshill.com/2011/11/23/introducing-pastor-sutton-turner
 By: Pastor Mark Driscoll
 Posted: Nov 23, 2011
Earlier this year, the Turner family moved around the world just to be a part of Mars Hill Church. They’d been listening to the podcast for many years, and when the opportunity arose to join the ministry, Sutton left a lucrative job in the Middle East to use his gifts to serve the church. [emphasis added]

Pastor Sutton’s experience has already been a huge benefit. He has a degree from Harvard Business School, led multibillion-dollar organizations, and even worked as an executive pastor for a number of years at a large church in Texas. More importantly, he is a godly man with a delightful family.

By God’s grace, Mars Hill Church is in an amazing season of growth. With that comes significantly more complexities, however. We need help and we’ve been searching for a leader of Sutton’s caliber for awhile. God is faithful and brought the right man at the right time.

and from the letters announcing Jamie Munson's resignation
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors
Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott [Thomas] has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king." Sutton is new to staff, but not to ministry. He is a former executive pastor of a large church. Educationally, he is a graduate of Texas A&M, the SMU Cox School of Business, and Harvard Business School. Professionally, he has recently served as the CEO of a company that has nearly 1,600 employees. Prior to that he served as the CEO of another company that under his leadership grew from 0 to 500 employees in the first year. He and his family moved to Seattle sensing a call to serve at Mars Hill, and we believe he is a gift from God to us for our future. He is currently well into the eldership process so be in prayer for that as well as his many duties at the church. [emphasis added]
So it would seem that while Turner was promoted with gusto by the top dogs at Mars Hill at his arrival subsequent documents reveal that he was not very warmly received and he found his role as #1 King to be problematic in terms of relating to people already in the culture.  We know now that there was a practically catastrophic "season" of terminations and layoffs in the year and ahalf after Turner joined.

 As we now know, Tripp ended up articulating a concern that Turner was not helpful for Driscoll:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/august/nine-current-mars-hill-pastors-tell-mark-driscoll-step-down.html?paging=off
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/08/Concerns-and-Critical-Information-for-the-Elders-of-Mars-Hill-Church.pdf

“Sutton is fundamentally unhelpful for Mark. Sutton plays to all of Mark’s weaknesses and none of Mark’s strengths.” He pleaded with them saying that what Mark needs in an Executive Pastor is a “55 year-old seasoned godly man who watches over Mark’s soul as he administrates the church, and who can pull Mark into a room and say ‘you can’t do that in a meeting’ and you need to call another meeting and ask for forgiveness from the people you just spoke to. He doesn’t need a man who is his trigger man.” He made it clear that Sutton lacks the emotional and spiritual maturity to be where he is at in leadership.

So it would seem, in sum, that when mars Hill leadership was promoting its new "king" in Sutton Turner the leaders had managed to invoke a patina of plausibility for three types of leaders without having bothered to conduct themselves in the appointment of those leaders in a way that could be squared with the most basic instructions about how to NOT appoint them.

Sure, there were those in Mars HIll who believed that appointing leaders from inside led to conflicts of interest and problems ... but the irony we've noted here at Wenatchee The Hatchet was that as Turner redesigned the governance of Mars Hill it led to a Board that had a number of the same guys who played key advisory roles in the formulation of the 2007-era governance that Turner came to view as so problematic.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/04/sutton-turner-post-good-decisions-made_21.html

What neither Sutton Turner nor Justin Dean seemed able to realize ... perhaps because they were outsiders brought in to a culture they didn't understand, was that the guys who ended up on the BoAA became a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" kind of board. Larry and Michael were still around and still ended up in advisory roles.  So, ironically perhaps, Turner's redesigned board came to embody a board that Tripp said, by its very nature of being just outsiders who weren't part of the church Mars Hill itself any longer, could not do its job.

So ... well it might be said that not only was Turner an outsider who was made "king" over Mars Hill but that the board of advisors and accountability could be described as kings who ruled from a distance. 

believe it or not, Washington state Secretary of State website says that Mark and Grace Driscoll's Lasting Legacy, LLC isn't inactive ... just yet

http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603199549

Technically it's expiration date was the end of April and it would have seemed moot had the company not gotten an extra extension of some kind, apparently, in the year after Driscoll resigned.


LASTING LEGACY LLC
UBI Number 603199549
Category LLC
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 04/17/2012
Expiration Date 04/30/2016
Inactive Date 
Duration Perpetual
Governing Persons

Title
Name
Address
Member,Manager
 DRISCOLL , MARK
23632 HIGHWAY 99 STE F441
EDMONDS , WA 98026 

Member
DRISCOLL , GRACE
23632 HIGHWAY 99 STE F441
EDMONDS , WA 980269211

As we saw with Mars Hill Church, it can take a few months for a corporation to get listed as inactive from an expiration date.

On Mission, LLC is finally listed as inactive

http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603258287
ON MISSION, LLC
UBI Number 603258287
Category LLC
Active/Inactive Inactive
State Of Incorporation CO
WA Filing Date 12/06/2012
Expiration Date 12/31/2015
Inactive Date 04/01/2016
Duration Perpetual

The Mars Hill Foundation for Planting Churches is still active. Mark Driscoll and Dave Bruskas are still listed as President and Secretary for the organization.


http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603349072
MARS HILL FOUNDATION FOR PLANTING CHURCHES
UBI Number 603349072
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 10/30/2013
Expiration Date 10/31/2016
Inactive Date 
Duration Perpetual
President DRISCOLL, MARK 1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
Secretary BRUSKAS, DAVID 1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
While it's reported Driscoll has big, big, big plans for a future church in the Phoenix area ..

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/04/29/mark-driscolls-vision-for-the-trinity-church-is-big-big-big/

it would be interesting to find out what the Mars Hill Foundation for Planting Churches actually does, and what churches it's currently funding for planting.

DG Hart asks what it is the New Calvinists really think they've got reasons to be optimistic about with scandal after scandal

https://oldlife.org/2016/05/02/new-calvinist-exceptionalism/
After the recent controversies surrounding Darrin Patrick, C. J. Mahaney, and James MacDonald, I was surprised to see Jeff Jue be so positive about the New Calvinism

When asked to clear up what the reference to MacDonald was, Hart provided this link:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/februaryweb-only/james-macdonald-resignation.html

Hart just stuck with the departure of JM from The Gospel Coalition in the wake of Elephant Room 2.  There have been other concerns such as piles of debt connected to real estate and a controversy about something to do with MacDonald and gambling.
https://theelephantsdebt.com/the-authors/

The Darrin Patrick situation has been a reminder that he was one of the guys who signed off publicly announcing Mark Driscoll should step away from ministry for a while and that Mars Hill was out of Acts 29.  Then that announcement vanished and next year Acts 29 board member Eric Mason and Mark Driscoll are scheduled to speak at the Stronger Man conference.

Of course Hart wasn't even counting former Gospel Coalition participant Mark Driscoll here but add him into the mix and it would seem that between Darrin Patrick, C.J. Mahaney, James MacDonald and Mark Driscoll there's a lot to NOT be positive about with the New Calvinist movement and I say that as a Calvinist. I've been making this point here and there for a few years but I've suggested that over the course of a decade we were going to see some fracturing of the image that Calvinists in the North American scene are a monolith. The old Calvinists and "new Calvinists" have not agreed on that many things in a couple of important areas ... even if non-Calvinists or anti-Calvinists have at times proven, alas, too lazy and ill-informed to keep track of these different "tribes" as a Driscoll would call them.

It might be easier for some of these guys to fixate on complementarian/egalitarian debates rather than look at other stuff. And the zeal with which some have insisted upon a Gospel of properly using your penis hardly seems to have been restricted to Mark Driscoll.

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/desperate-theologizing-or-desperate-machismozing#.VygKKDaTWUm

and ...

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/truly-biblical-complementarianism#.VygRBjaTWUk

These days I'm inclined to cast a skeptical eye on both complementarian and egalitarian ideologies, which seem fixated on controlling or seizing access to institutional power within the American church without necessarily stepping back to ask if this kind of power is worth having and if it doesn't by its nature within the United States have a corrupting influence.  The reasons for that have something to do with megachurches being propaganda machines in the sense that propaganda was defined by Jacques Ellul but let's not bore you with that here. There's plenty of posts on Ellul as an author whose work can provide possible insights into Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill ... and possibly the higher profile celebrities of any stripe in celebrity Christianity.

a brief excerpt from Noah Berlatsky on Prince

To be plain, I was never exactly a huge fan of Prince.  He wrote some songs I can't forget, though, and I respect that.  And unlike pretty much the entire grunge scene of the 1990s Prince wrote songs I haven't spent the last fifteen years wishing I hadn't heard and wishing I could forget.  So, I dunno, call it a kind of paradoxical apophatic appreciation for Prince.  If I never exactly dug his music I never loathed it. 

In the outpouring of thoughts and feelings about the passing of Prince this little set of sentences has stuck with me:

 http://qz.com/667940/rock-music-has-always-been-black-music-and-prince-proved-it/
...
Part of Prince’s genius was that he made it so obvious that the line between “white music” and “black music” was meaningless. Listening to a Prince album, even the dullest rock critic couldn’t help notice that nothing went in the box it was supposed to.
 
A bit too predictably Berlatsky went on to stick with the proposal that rock and roll has always been black music.  He's more persuasive, paradoxically, when he's not trying so hard to be persuasive.  The Thin White Duke was still the Thin White Duke, right? 

But in that quoted sentence there's a kernel. I've been writing about how the musical heroes of our era seem to be the musicians who aspire to and at some level achieve what some musicologists and composers have called "fusion". A lot of fusion stinks and a lot of fusion, even successful fusion, fails in some way or another to convince people it has done justly by the styles fused. In an era of not-jazz-at-Yale in the academic world we're getting another case study in what music historian Richard Taruskin has elsewhere and in another context called the chasm between the academic canon and the repertoire canon, between the kinds of music scholars say we should be talking about and the kind f music the rest of us pay money to hear. The Cuban guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer has said that fusion is something academics have tended to ignore but that it is one of the central experiments in popular music of the last half century.  Why?  Why has fusion been such a recurring experiment and aspiration in popular music?  Berlatsky touches on what I think it generally turns out to be in many cases.

And how obviously do we have to say this?  Fusions, whether they succeed or fail, seem to crop up among people who think that a music that reflects a peaceful coexistence of different racial groups with their associated musical legacies is worth pursuing. Those of us who believe in the possibility of musical fusion could, at the risk of a Berlatskian level of overstatement, hope that another kind of fusion is possible. Anyone who is the child of an inter-racial marriage has plenty of personal reasons to believe that fusion isn't just something that's only "musically" possible.

Blues is at least a century old, after all. There's no reason it shouldn't be considered part of the Western canon globally and it seems vital to recognize it as a foundation in the canon of music in the United States of America in the last century.

Which may be why when a musician like Prince pulls off the fusion against all expected odds we celebrate that musician.  Whether we're talking the lately departed Prince or Bowie, it seems the musical heroes of our era were successful chameleons, successful at fusions.  We go through life wanting something that's predictable enough to please but to please by way of a surprise.  That's simple to say but exceptionally hard to achieve.  To express familiar longings in a way that leaves room for surprise could be a way to describe the core aspiration of the arts.  Whether or not he's at the top of your list of favorite musicians, Prince pulled off this feat in a way that few others have in our time.

If 2016 keeps on this track of famous musicians and artists dying we've got to wonder if we couldn't lose Stevie Wonder or Bob Dylan or Judi Dench this year. :(

a survey of riffs on Hamilton as a reflection of competing ideals on the social purpose of art, shared aspirational ideals? or vicarious living that represents who we are? Two threads of tension in Western ideologies about the aim of the arts as politics or art-as-religion

From "Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" author Mr. Jarrell ...
http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2016/04/almanac-randall-jarrell-on-criticism.html

“Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself—and, sometimes, doing so—is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.”
Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism”

To piggyback on discussions from the past about A. O. Scott's film criticism, perhaps we live in an era in which criticism is felt to be in decline because critics may not want to look like total fools for supporting an artist or a cause.  Clement Greenberg backed Pollack and could look like a doofus for having done so if you're not into that style (I'm not, personally) but Greenberg took a stand.  Mencken backed Joseph Conrad (hooray!). 

So ... we have critics here and there who are talking a bit about this musical called Hamilton, which I might bother to get around to listening to in spite of my history of ambivalence about the genre.  I own Fiddler on the Roof and Singing in the Rain and South Park (yes) and I enjoy all those musicals. But generally the idiom hasn't been my first preference.  But whether Miranda and company's experiments in fusion can work intrigues me and it's been interesting that so much of the critical back and forth about the musical has been about race and politics and power.  That's what I'd expect ... although discussions of how well (or if) the musical works as a genre fusion and what that may suggest to us about fusion as an experimental process in contemporary music doesn't seem to be quite as high up the ladder of things to talk about. 

It's been about race, basically, and politics. 

From Noah Berlatsky, on the unsurprising question from the progressive side as to whether Hamilton is racist.http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2016/04/is-hamilton-racist/

Historian Lyra Monteiro makes the case for thinking so. She argues that casting back actors in the role of the white founding fathers is a way to erase said founding fathers racism, as well as the narratives of actual black people who lived at the time.  ...

I don’t know if the musical talks about this, and Monteiro doesn’t, but Hamilton was racialized himself, at least sometimes. We don’t really know who his father was, and given his childhood in the Caribbean, there’s a non-negligible chance that he was part black. His enemies certainly made much of the fact that he might be part black; he was referred to as a Creole on more than one occasion, and attacked as a foreigner, which I think then (as now) had some racial overtones.

So you could see Hamilton’s story as being about the possibility of black assimilation, which is in part what it sounds like the musical’s about too—black people claiming the Founding Father’s story as their own. The problem is that of course black people haven’t been allowed to assimilate, really, and that Hamilton’s assimilation is contingent on him not having been black (he certainly didn’t live as a black man in America.) And similarly the assimilation of the cast to the Hamilton story means losing blackness as a historical phenomenon, at least to some great degree.

So…the politics of it sort of depend on the politics of assimilation, which seem like they’re fairly complicated. On the one hand, racism in the US is in large part about black people not being allowed to assimilate. On the other hand, assimilating to whiteness means identifying with the oppressor, which is arguably also racist. The alternative would be telling a story about the oppressed—but of course many black commenters have talked about how sick they are of seeing black people only in the role of the oppressed, because it’s dreary and disempowering to constantly be portrayed as dreary and disempowered.

To me, overall, it seems like Hamilton the musical offers a kind of representation that isn’t often seen in the media—that is, black performers explicitly playing white people, rather than playing roles in which their blackness isn’t supposed to be recognized or acknowledged (which happens quite often.) Monteiro makes a good case that this representation isn’t perfect, but no one representation is going to be perfect, and more representations, more kinds of representations, and more jobs for black actors all seem like good things. -

Then over at Slate ...

 http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/04/a_hamilton_critic_on_why_the_musical_isn_t_so_revolutionary.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/04/17/historians_are_criticizing_hamilton_and_fans_should_be_thrilled.html
...What’s remarkable about the criticism of Hamilton—and basically unique in the history of American theater—is that even the most vocal critics of Hamilton share with its fans a love for the show. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who wrote that “[t]he genius of black music and black performance styles is used [by Hamilton] to sell a picture of the founding era that has been largely rejected in history books,” also told the Times she listens to the soundtrack every day. Loving a work of art involves advocacy and championship, but it also demands of us that we question it, interrogate it, work to see it for what it is honestly and with clear eyes. Dismissing this line of inquiry entirely and demanding that Hamilton be uncritically celebrated is against what Hamilton itself is doing and what it asks of all of us. Hamilton is a great play. It’s time to treat it like one.

 As a hip-hop/Broadway fusion it might be unavoidable that any attempt at a fusion of two styles that could seem as different as hip hop and Broadway would be pre-emptively doomed to failure in satisfying purists from either category.  It could end up seeming a hopeless compromise to purists for hip hop or purists for Broadway. That there are debates about the history and politics of the stage work might not be assurance that it's "a great play".  Bad art can inspire great discussions ... but I don't want to assume the worst about Hamilton at this point.

So we get to Terry Teachout commenting on progressive critiques of Hamilton.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/rapping-the-legend-1461191230
By
Terry Teachout
April 20, 2016 6:27 p.m. ET
Everybody loves “Hamilton.” It’s the hottest hit on Broadway, sold out so far into the future that forged tickets have reportedly been going for as much as $300 a pop on Craigslist. (No, they won’t get you into the show. Don’t even try.) Now that it’s been anointed with a Pulitzer Prize for drama, none can doubt its greatness. Right?

Way wrong.

The New York Times recently published a piece by Jennifer Schuessler called “‘Hamilton’ and History: Are They in Sync?” in which a gaggle of academic historians declared Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multiethnic hip-hop musical about the man on the $10 bill to be politically incorrect. While some of them claimed to like the music, they bristled at the rest of the show, and one dismissed it as “Founders Chic.”

Mr. Miranda, it seems, is too easy on Alexander Hamilton to suit progressive tastes. The Hamilton of “Hamilton” is a flawed but nonetheless incontestably heroic figure, an illegitimate Caribbean-born immigrant whose greatness is insufficiently acknowledged: “Another immigrant, comin’ up from the bottom / His enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him.” But to left-wing scholars, the real Hamilton was an elitist who, in the words of Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, was “more a man for the 1% than the 99%,” and for Mr. Miranda to have portrayed him as “an up-from-under hero. . . seems dissonant amidst the politics of 2016.”

I’ve been waiting for just such a reaction to “Hamilton” ever since it opened last year. Why? Because, as I wrote in my review of the original off-Broadway production, the show “is at bottom as optimistic about America as ‘1776.’ American exceptionalism meets hip-hop: That’s ‘Hamilton.’” Whether Mr. Miranda knew it or not—and he surely knows by now—such a point of view is by definition anathema to those who see America as a country so tainted with the original sin of class privilege as to be irredeemable. To such folk, the fact that the founders were rich white men is reason enough to sneer at the underlying optimism of “Hamilton.”

Although Ms. Schuessler doesn’t say so in her piece, it’s no less noteworthy that “Hamilton” received near-universal praise from right-of-center critics who responded wholeheartedly to its thumbs-up perspective on the founding. Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, John Podhoretz: All found the show to be, in Mr. Podhoretz’s words, “nothing less than the most stirring patriotic pageant of our time or any time.” That alone should have triggered a left-wing backlash.

Responses to Ms. Schuessler’s piece have ranged widely. The fanboys and fangirls of Broadway were outraged that anybody would dare to say anything bad about their favorite show. Isaac Butler, by contrast, offered a far more reasoned perspective in Slate, writing as a progressive theater critic who likes and admires “Hamilton” but doesn’t swallow it whole: “Loving a work of art involves advocacy and championship, but it also demands of us that we question it, interrogate it, work to see it for what it is honestly and with clear eyes. . . . ‘Hamilton’ is a great play. It’s time to treat it like one.”

I’m with Mr. Butler, albeit for somewhat different reasons. To criticize “Hamilton” because it simplifies and fictionalizes Alexander Hamilton’s life and achievements is to miss the point of the show—something that literal-minded historians too often do when grappling with historical fiction. Not that “Hamilton” gets anything really important wrong. “It is surprising, and heartening, how detailed and generally accurate ‘Hamilton’ is,” says Mr. Brookhiser, whose own biographies include “Alexander Hamilton: American.” But it is fiction nonetheless, as much a work of the imagination as Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” or Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” and to
treat it otherwise is to fail to grasp what Mr. Miranda is trying to do.

For my part, I think “Hamilton” is best understood as an exercise in historical mythmaking, the same kind of thing that John Ford was doing when he made such films as “My Darling Clementine,” “They Were Expendable” and “Young Mr. Lincoln.” Ford’s purpose was to pass American history through the prism of popular art, in the process creating semi-fictional American heroes whose stirring lives would inspire young viewers to do great deeds of their own. Of course he knew perfectly well that his cinematic tales of historical derring-do were far from literally true, but he also understood the pivotal role played by idealism in the formation of character. That’s what the newspaper editor in Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” meant when he told Jimmy Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And that’s what Mr. Miranda has done in “Hamilton”: He’s created a modern-day legend of his very own, a rainbow-colored Hamilton who might just inspire a new generation of hip-hop-loving youngsters to emulate the greatness of the men who made America. Long may he wave.

That arts critics left, right and center mostly seem to enjoy the work might suggest that it's worth giving at least some kind of shot.  Might get around to listening to the whole thing. 

The idea that Hamilton shouldn't be mythologized seems a bit too pat.  Let's turn this idea around and ask why Martin Luther King Jr. should be mythologized.  Did he deserve it more than Alexander Hamilton?  King's earlier plagiarism is not exactly up for debate, is it?  But people left, right and center seek to co-opt King into their respective political mythologies.  David Bowie getting praise from Jacobin seems to prove the point in another way, if an artist or a public figure is popular enough Americans of any political stripe will find some way, even a desperate way, to assimilate them into identity politics.  We haven't stopped living in an age where Cold War era political binaries about whether something is even art or not based on the publicly observable political alliances of artists is a way to decide whether "it" is even art or not. 

It can seem like there are two categorical ideals about the nature of art that are in conflict with reactions to Hamilton among critics.  The first could be said to be the camp that considers the aim of art to articulate a vision of shared ideals, whatever those ideals might be.  If Hamilton is in this first category then to find it wanting from the second category doesn't mean it hasn't faltered in measuring up to the ideals of the second category.  But neither does it mean that it should be considered a failure for not setting out to do what someone else thinks art should do.  To recall an old debate on Batman Begins, local writer Charles Mudede asserted that it's ridiculous to compare Nolan's Batman film from 2005 to something by Godard.  If you set out to assess whether a movie works on the basis of the goals set out for itself, Nolan's film worked. 



To put it another way, in the history of the arts an artist can be loathed and loved for the same set of traits.  The reasons some people love Hemmingway are the reasons I can't stand him, just as the reasons I love Jane Austen are the reasons some people can't stand her work.  Berlioz found J. S. Bach tedious.  People who did like Bach may have found Berlioz' approach to counterpoint incompetent.  You probably get the idea here.  So, on to that second category, a category of thought about the arts that seems to be more and more dominant in our era, perhaps in reaction to fallacious claims of the universal appeal of the arts from earlier eras.



The second category of thought about the aim of the arts  could be called the impulse to recognize within the arts vicarious living.  It's not about the lives some of us think we SHOULD live but ruminations about the lives we DO live. Those for whom the aim of the arts is vicarious living and representation may have more of a voice in arts criticism and commentary now not for what they do see but for what they don't see.  Whether we're talking about OscarsSoWhite or concerns about Scarlett Johansson playing the Major from Ghost in the Shell, this concern crops up in an impulse to regard the arts as a form of vicarious living--when certain lives seem curiously or even systematically under-represented in the realm of vicarious living (i.e. the arts) people get concerned.  When appeals are made by those in category 1 to people in category 2 that the shared ideals might be enough, the folks in category 2 might disagree. 



Regarding these categories for art it would seem that it is good to hold on to one thing without letting go of the other and as Ecclesiastes advised, the one who fears God will come forth with both of them.

Louis Menand on Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg and the dawn of polemics against the middle-brow

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/browbeaten
...Movies were always an interest of Macdonald’s. His father, a lawyer, had served on the boards of several film companies, and had once lectured at Yale on the movie business. In the nineteen-twenties, some of the most innovative films in the world came out of the Soviet Union. “One went to the ‘little’ movie houses which showed Russian films as one might visit a celebrated cathedral or museum,” as Macdonald described it. “In the darkened auditorium of the theatre, one came into a deep and dynamic contact with twentieth century life.” By the late nineteen-thirties, though, the cinema avant-garde in Russia had been killed off by official demands for a doctrinaire product and official hostility to experimentation. Soviet film under Stalin, Macdonald wrote, had become “something that more and more closely approaches the output of Hollywood,” which he thought was similarly committed to uncritical, generic entertainment, and his articles analyzed the causes of this decline. In response, the magazine received a letter to the editor from a thirty-year-old aspiring poet and literary critic, Clement Greenberg.

 

Macdonald had been introduced to Greenberg in 1938 by two Partisan Review contributors, Harold Rosenberg and Lionel Abel. Greenberg’s letter took issue with a few of Macdonald’s points, and Macdonald, delighted to have stimulated an antagonist, encouraged him to expand it into an essay, which he edited. The essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” was to some extent a collaboration. (Macdonald later claimed that he “invented” Clement Greenberg.) It appeared in the Fall, 1939, issue of Partisan Review, and became one of the most influential essays of the century. It was only the second piece of criticism Greenberg had published.

 

Except for an important twist, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is an orthodox Marxist analysis. Greenberg explained that both avant-garde art and kitsch (that is, popular, or commercial, culture) were by-products of the industrial revolution. Art became avant-garde when serious artists turned inward, away from a society they felt alienated from. In the case of painting, artists moved from representation to abstraction, from attention to the world to attention to the paint. Kitsch—the word means trash, or, as Greenberg put it in his letter to Macdonald, crap—was a consequence of the fact that the industrial revolution had made universal literacy possible, and the new technology of mechanical reproduction permitted an ersatz culture to be manufactured cheaply for an audience looking for entertainment and diversion. This manufactured culture killed off folk art, which was a genuine popular culture.

 

A Marxist ordinarily went on to condemn both avant-garde art (solipsistic and escapist) and kitsch (a mass opiate), but this is where Greenberg introduced his twist. He didn’t denounce abstract painting and modernist poetry; he justified and defended them. They were what genuine culture had to become under the conditions of capitalism. [emphasis added] “By no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order,” Greenberg claimed. The people at Partisan loved “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and no wonder: it elegantly squared the magazine’s apparently asymmetrical allegiances to Marxism and modernism

 

But, of course, last century's avant garde could be and was easily assimilated into the mainstream in a variety of ways.

 

Menand went on to write that Macdonald's argument was that there wasn't any point in condemning the masses liking pulp fiction or mass art.  If they like it and you don't, fine.  What Macdonald objected to was what he called masscult and midcult and what Woolf called middlebrow. Think pulp with pretense and the pedestrian as profound.  So a solid Marxist/leftist would say that both Terrance Malick and Christopher Nolan would utterly fit into this category.

 

From the old line of thought, anyway.  But by the 1960s pop music had become sufficiently sophisticated that the New Left and Old Left couldn't see eye to eye about the illegitimacy of popular culture.  How many people tonight are more bothered by the recent death of Prince than by Pierre Boulez? Some may have found both deaths equally sad with respect to the wealth of musical culture available in our era ... but it might be that number of people equally appreciative of Boulez and Prince is something less than a sea of people .... ?

some musical links for the weekend, some concerti by Atanas Ourkouzonov

Easily one of my favorite living guitarist composers, I hope one day Atanas is able to come and perform in the Seattle area!  Here are links to videos of performances of two of his concertos for guitar and chamber ensembles.

Ourkouzonov Concerto Infini for guitar and orchestra, I. Prologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrvSJPc4qHk
II. Monologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkXtEu8xGWs
III. Epilogue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWHHWW-65sg

Ourkouzounov - Concerto da camera (2002) - I. Scherzando
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOKI7Trf_g
Ourkouzounov - Concerto da camera (2002) - II.Parlando
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpJiEoO9qMk
Ourkouzounov - Concerto da camera (2002) - III.Cadenza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIqksc6E4PY
Ourkouzounov - Concerto da camera (2002) - IV.Toccata
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mXd2QS43q8

some links for the weekend with a theme, UC Davis scrubbing the internet of its pepper spraying moment

One of the things that comes up in the age of the internet is how institutions and brands find it in their interest to scrub away the things that could be on the internet that make them look terrible.  It won't take huge imaginative leaps to wonder why this might seem like a pertinent topic to mention here.  It's not as though in the course of 2014 we didn't see mountains of material that was formerly available for all and sundry to hear from Mark Driscoll abrupt taken down.  As Mark Driscoll Ministries starts bringing back the hits from a decade ago ...

 

http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/paying-your-pastors/
34.08

http://download.marshill.se/files/2006/06/04/20060604_paying-your-pastors_sd_audio.mp3
1.02.16

 

You get to compare how a sermon you can stream at Driscoll's site today is about half the length it was ten years ago. 

 

Or take UC Davis ... Moving along and pretending that something you said or did that was embarrassing never happened and taking some kind of measure to keep the internet from remembering it is not merely the domain of formerly megachurch-leading celebrities.

 

 http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/streisand-effect-scrub-this-uc-davis/478413/

 

http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article71659992.html

UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.

tp://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article71659992.html#storyli

 

http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article71674767.html

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/20/why-uc-daviss-campaign-manipulate-search-results-backfired

April 20, 2016 

By

Ellen Wexler

Google “University of California, Davis.” What do you see? Who controls what you see?
Until last week, here’s what you wouldn’t see: images of a police officer, back in 2011, pepper spraying a group of student protesters. The students are assembled peacefully, sitting in a line on the ground, heads ducked.
...

 

Nobody can change Google’s search results -- not directly -- but anyone can try to game the algorithm. In its proposal, Nevins & Associates, one of the companies UC Davis hired, promised to create a “surge of content with positive sentiment and off-topic subject matter.”

The goal was to flood the Internet: as more content about a particular subject appears online, any negative content will -- hopefully -- get lost in the mix.

“Communicating the value of UC Davis is an essential element of our campus’s education, research and larger public service mission,” the university wrote in a statement after The Sacramento Bee’s investigation broke. “Increased investment in social media and communications strategy has heightened the profile of the university to good effect.” In a video message Monday, Katehi said that the contracts’ language misrepresented her intentions, and that she had never wanted to erase the pepper spray incident from the university’s history.

For its supporters, UC Davis was just engaging in another kind of PR. After a crisis, they argue, doesn’t it make sense to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative?

Elizabeth Johnson, CEO of market research firm Simpson Scarborough, says the Internet is the primary way people get information about UC Davis -- and if the university’s marketing department wasn’t working on its search engine results, it wouldn’t be following best practices.

“When people search on ‘General Motors,’ General Motors does not want them to land on a page about recalls,” she said. “And when people search ‘UC Davis,’ UC Davis does not want them to land on a page about pepper spray.”

 

 

excerpt from Henry Threadgill in conversation with Ethan Iverson, a salty surmise on how the teaching of music should be like medicine, general first, specialize later at your own inspiration

http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-henry-threadgill-3.html

Henry Threadgill on music education:
...
I think they should invest in really teaching people music, just like the way medicine is done.  You learn generally.  You have to be a general practitioner, then you specialize.  You want to be a podiatrist, you want to be an ear doctor, you want to be a neurologist, but first you've got to be a general practitioner.  I sit up in front of some kids at a jazz school and start talking about music, and I say, "So how much Bach did you have to play and what other instruments did you have to study?"  I was a viola player, you know.  I said, "You know you're supposed to learn about music. You want to play rock and roll or whatever the fuck you want to do, but you're supposed to know the general."  As much general Western and now, world music.

 

Among the, well, many complaints Hindemith had about American educational culture it was that there was this notion that you could teach every kid he or she could be the next Beethoven or the next Heifitz when that was not possible.  The American exceptionalist attitude was something that, it seems, grated on Hindemith's nerves.  The idea was to have a broad musical understanding and not just be a specialist at one instrument and focusing on its solo literature.

 

Now you can obviously specialize as much as you like.  But my experience has been things are more fun if you don't box yourself into a genre or style even if you find yourself continually drawn to certain things. 

 

Iverson's written about jazz not being taught at Yale as part of the Western canon and it seems there's mixed feelings about that among those of us who think that's a mistake.  On the one hand, it seems obscene to not regard the music of brilliant black American musicians as part of the Western canon.  Blues is a hundred years old by now.  Jazz is an essential part of vernacular music in the United States.  And yet, as Threadgill pointed out elsewhere in the interview quoted above, when everyone has the same diet of an institutionally prescribed set of jazz staple food everyone craps out the same crap.  This problem of pabulum was anticipated by the old lefty Dwight Macdonald half a century ago ... but we can get to him in another post.  There are endless battles that could be fought about whether jazz can/should be/is assimilate(d) in current culture.  Threadgill's advice might be more that you don't call it by some genre so much.  We need to think of the musical canon of the human race as an entirety, not as a series of delineated bunkers and subcultures that somehow can't have interaction.

 

If so I basically agree.  The boundaries between styles are more permeable than a lot of people want to believe and there's more continuity possible between ostensibly contrasting styles than some people would like to concede.

some more riffs on Roberts at Mere Orthodoxy on "strong female characters", there are plenty of progressive arguments against the SFC as an embodiement of Hollywood's tentpole fetish for solutions via violence

http://mereorthodoxy.com/why-we-should-jettison-the-strong-female-character/

One of the ironies of Alastair Roberts' case against the "strong female character" is resident in reactions, objections to his case against the "strong female character" as plausible in terms of the use of force.  The biological differences are one thing to discuss, but what hasn't been suggested (yet) in the comments over there is something Noah Berlatsky recently mentioned and it can be seen as a progressive mirror to Roberts' comments on the use of violence to solve a conflict.  
 

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2016/04/cinderella-passive/

 

In his review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Roger Ebert complained that the film ended with a pointless action sequence. “Time after time I complain when a film develops an intriguing story and then dissolves it in routine and boring action,” he says wearily. “We’ve seen every conceivable battle sequence, every duel, all carnage, countless showdowns and all-too-long fights to the finish.” Can’t anyone think of an end other than violence? Ebert didn’t live to see the 2015 Cinderella live action reboot, but if he did, he would have at least been pleased on one count: it doesn’t end with a fight.

...

Roger Ebert asked why films have to end with violence; Cinderella, inadvertently, explains. Films have to end with violence because violence is the only way that these big-budget Hollywood films can express strength, agency, or even really action. Either you’re swinging a sword and decapitating the Jabberwock, like Alice in Burton’s film, or else you’re letting you’re step mother put her boot on your face because you just don’t have the gumption to do anything about it. You’re empowered and awesome or disempowered and pure. There doesn’t seem to be any middle-ground.

the middle-ground is, of course the place where most people live most of their lives. In most conflicts, in most lives, you aren’t fully empowered to beat the crap out of your enemy and have them cringe at your feet. Neither are you completely bereft of agency, waiting for a prince to save you. Instead, you’re somewhere in a difficult, grey middle, with some ability to make some choices, and push back against some power, if you’re cunning, and lucky,and don’t misjudge. Heroism comes not in using superpowers to blast all before you, nor in staying pure souled and above the fray, but in figuring out how to make the best of difficult situations, using what power you have, and what kindness you can muster.

This is the kind of overstatement Berlatsky traffics in from time to time, like arguing that Marston's origin for Wonder Woman is perfect. But the point is worth noting because when progressives and conservatives alike raise objections to the basic plausibility of the "strong female character" what we might want to resist doing is a reflexive defense of the trope by saying "should women characters be weak?"  Well, if we want to grant that there need to be more unstoppable killing machine female characters in mainstream cinema who get two-dimensional objectified trophies ... well, we could say so. But as someone put it at Overthinking It, that's not necessarily what some feminists had in mind asking for strong female characters. 

 

a few riffs considering Alastair Roberts' belated plea to drop the "strong female character", revisiting Shan Mlawski's plea for weak female characters

http://mereorthodoxy.com/why-we-should-jettison-the-strong-female-character/
...
Popular culture is the focus of some of the most determined attempts to shift attitudes on a host of issues within society at large, and such forms of representation are an important dimension of this. While popular media and the various ‘messages’ within it may often appear innocuous, they are frequently anything but. Behind them lie concerted efforts to change the public’s thinking and perception on key matters and some carefully calculated agendas. The supposed shallowness of pop culture is deceptive: It is a realm where brilliant and talented people go to try to shape minds at their most unguarded and impressionable. It is on the ground of entertainment media that the so-called culture wars have largely been lost.

There's quite a bit more that could be said about the subject of the "strong female character" and whether she is as "strong" or even a "character" as is sometimes debated.  One of the more memorable pleas to get rid of "strong female characters" came from an author at Overthinking It.

For those who fall for Roberts' title as being an argument that women need to be weak,  that's a failure of imagination. Shana Mlawski made a more cogent and elegant argument against "strong female characters" a few years ago and argued explicitly for "weak" female characters with an important clarifying point:

https://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/08/18/why-strong-female-characters-are-bad-for-women/

...
I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.

So feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.” We should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning “flawed.”

Good characters, male or female, have goals, and they have flaws. Any character without flaws will be a cardboard cutout. Perhaps a sexy cardboard cutout, but two-dimensional nonetheless. And no, “Always goes for douchebags instead of the Nice Guy” (the flaw of Megan Fox’s character in Transformers) is not a real flaw. Men think women have that flaw, but most women avoid “Nice Guys” because they just aren’t that nice. So that doesn’t count.

So what flaws can female characters have?  How about the same flaws a male character would have? This is especially important in comedies, because many male writers are so clueless about writing funny women that female characters in sitcoms, sitcomish-movies, and comics tend to be the Smart, Gorgeous Snarky Voice of Reason in an unreasonable world. In other words, Not Flawed and Not Funny.
I’m sick of it. Let’s see more female characters

• who fall down hilariously (like Lucille Ball)

• who are arrogant (like Zhang Yiyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

• who are realistic or exuberant villains (like Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton or Atia from Rome)

• who are neurotic (like Elliott from Scrubs)

• who are just mean (like Elaine from Seinfeld)

• who are vengeful (like The Bride from Kill Bill)

• who are forgetful (like Dory from Finding Nemo)

• who say the wrong things (like C.J. in The West Wing, or, again, Elliott from Scrubs)

• who are emotionally repressed (like Marge from The Simpsons)

• who are nerdy and awkward (like Belle from Beauty and the Beast)

• who are just messed up (like everyone, male or female, from Neon Genesis Evangelion)

• who are insufferable know-it-alls (like Hermione or Lisa Simpson)

• who are depressed (I can’t think of one, which is interesting, since women are more likely to be depressed in real life. Who’s the female equivalent of Hamlet? Is there one?)

For that last one Sadness may well have gotten us there in Inside Out.

Something I would suggest more mature writers will grasp is that the flaw a character may have will often be an extension of their virtues.  I'll use an example from a cartoon series I love, The Last Airbender. Let's take Katara, the fantastic character whose story frames the entire series.  She is unfailingly loyal and loving toward her friends but that is mirrored by her capacity to hold very bitter, irrational grudges.  She goes much of the series loathing Prince Zuko to a degree comparable to her love for her brother Sokka and her friend Aang.  Why?  Well, we could get into that some other time but I'm proposing here that a character's strength can frequently be a weakness. 

Let's take Marge Simpson. She's repressed a lot of her failings out of a realization that the males in her life will probably, on the whole, never become especially more reasonable and avoid the kinds of actions that cause trouble for the family.  Repression isn't a healthy reaction to us and yet within Marge's world it makes a certain amount of sense.  It takes a lot for her to stop repressing her feelings and share how she feels.  The other people in her life can then take it that when she stops repressing and starts expressing it's because she feels something is too important to not share, such as when she tells Lisa that while her mother has repressed she would urge Lisa to not make the same mistake herself. 

Arrogance is a trait that's given to Wonder Woman in the animated series Justice League and it's what made her a great character.  Wonder Woman is regarded as stuck up by other characters in the series, particularly Hawkgirl, and it's because Wonder Woman IS better than most of the other people who show up in the series.  She's elitist and arrogant but this in itself doesn't make her a villain.  What it means is that in a boy's club like the Justice League often is Wonder Woman gets along better with Batman who, also being an elitist, is able to relate to her a bit.  And she likes Wally because basically everybody likes Wally because his first concern is whether everyone is okay.  Heroes will disagree on a lot, but not on that.  Over time Wonder Woman learns to overcome her arrogance, which makes her a fun character. 

The trouble is that for some Wonder Woman fans she has to e perfect and come from a perfect society.  That's another topic for another time, but there's a way in which the problems of making Wonder Woman "work" in the 21st century get at a problem that applies not only to "strong female characters" but to action heroes more generally.

For instance, in light of the recent Batman vs Superman one of the basic mistakes that keeps getting made is thinking that Superman can only be challenged by either throwing brute force/Kryptonite at him or "emotionally hurting him".  Superman's invulnerability has been so given that too few storytellers (save in Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's version) have arrived at the insight that the best way to challenge such a character is not to invent some villain so powerful as to be able to kill him (since the world's doomed in that scenario) but to test Superman's moral compass.  This is why the great villain for Superman isn't really Darkseid or Metallo or even Brainiac but Lex Luthor.  Because Superman isn't a Christ type at all, he's a depiction of what we want America to be while Lex Luthor is a depiction of what America unfortunately all too often is.  That Lois can believe in the idea (i.e. loves Superman) but is cavalier about Clark suggests that Lois represents another element here, another America-as-it-is: the tension between her regard for Superman and disregard for Clark is absent in Snyder's franchise and the films hurt a bit for it. Lois is, in a sense, blind to power that doesn't make itself overtly known.

A shortcoming in the "strong female character" is that she can reveal how bland her male counterpoint is by being as bland.  Frankly Optimus Prime has never been a particularly interesting character to me compared to, say, Starscream. 

But getting back to the quoted segment of Roberts' piece, what's interesting to consider as someone who's been a lifelong fan of animation as an art form is that many subtle but profound shifts have happened in an art form that many "grown ups" can't even regard as really art.  It's possible that some of the subtle yet revolutionary shifts in pop culture happened at the level of kids' shows, the kind of thing that wasn't on the radar of anyone paying attention to officially "adult" arts.

Something Roberts didn't touch on that seems worth mentioning is that the reboot of the Powerpuff Girls has gotten some gentle pushback from authors at Slate.  When contributors to Double X feel something has been lost in transforming the girl power theme of PPG from subtext to text it might be that we don't have to make this about complementarianism/egalitarianism in the echo chambers of the Christian blogosphere.  I love the original Powerpuff Girls series and own every episode.  McCracken has said many times that he wanted to make sure that the first thing he did was make a show "everyone" could have fun watching and that the thematic stuff could and should be secondary.  At best a strong female character gambit can be a form of tokenism and at worst, per Mlawski's arguments, it turns out the "strong female character" isn't a character so much as a fetish for males. 

I thought Roberts could have done more to discuss Miyazaki's heroines and antagonists.  The badass warrior woman has some representation in Lady Eboshi and Princess Kushana and neither is presented as uniformly evil.  They make fine antagonists because what they want is understandable, even admirable, but that how they aim to get what they want causes more long-term harm than they recognize.  Even here it could be argued that the effective badass warriors, whether male or female, become memorable and effective because at some level we're able to believe this is not what they want their default mode to be.  Take Fury Road, whether it's Mad Max or Imperator Furiosa, we get enough clues in the narrative that being the badass warrior was not what either of these wanted for themselves that makes their taking up of arms sympathetic.  They can be coaxed into fighting for others but would like to be left alone.  It's George Miller so it's not exactly delving depths but it's a point worth noting.

If there's a trouble or a risk with Rey moving forward it's that she's such an obvious audience surrogate.  That's not necessarily bad.  She gets to be the Skywalker character. But audience surrogate characters can risk being blank slates.  It's possible for an actor or an actress to play audience surrogate characters for decades.  Jimmy Stewart had this kind of role down.  Women tend to be written as, well, trophies so an everywoman role is harder to find.  Perhaps we could play with the idea that Meg Ryan was an audience surrogate for women ... it could explain, possibly, why men tend to only seem to watch Ryan films on account of women they know in my observation.  If it's a choice between watching a film with Dench or Blanchett on the one hand and Meg Ryan on the other, Meg Ryan's always going to lose that contest for me.  if it's a choice between films with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey and, I dunno, Fassbender, I'll gamble on the Fassbender film.  Sandler and carrey have milked a sort of entitled everydude role for decades that I've found annoying. 

If the "strong female character" can spark a discussion about how audience surrogate characters male and female can slip into the lazy storytelling of unexamined privilege and entitlement then so much the better.