As of this past Saturday, July 3rd, I have completed my first teaching assignment. This job was not one where I lead discussion groups on modal logic or an Introduction to Philosophy class filled with indifferent and frequently absentee freshmen, rather, it was a summer class filled with 19 rising 14-16 year-olds. These kids are also the top 25% of the top 1% of PSAT takers. In other words, these kids are crazy smart. If I were to ask for a better group of students to begin my teaching career with, I suggest that I could not find anyone else. Even now, after an exhausting 3 weeks of living off of too little sleep, too much caffeine, and ample amounts of sun, I miss them a lot and wish I got to see them next term.
I have often thought of the life of teaching as something one is called to and rarely, on my better days, I've thought of it as a gift. Every day I woke up here in Durham I was reminded that getting to share in the lives of students is one of the highest of blessings and that it should be treated as such. I was reminded at every turn that this shared life of the mind is not a right; it is a privilege. I get the privilege of discussing some of the most interesting and important ideas in the history of the world with some of the brightest and funniest people I have ever met. It is a gift, always a gift, and should be treated as such.
Shedding such sentimental thoughts for a while, I figure I ought to talk about how much these kids and this experience has transformed the way I think about education and about philosophy as a whole. The first thing I should say is that they love to re-name things. For example, we philosophers refer to Plato's ideal world as the intelligible world. My students, however, took to referring to it as "the ness world", as in "where chairness lives". They also became obsessed with two meme-like things. First, they loved to make the whale noises from the beginning of the Carl Sagan youtube song "A Still More Glorious Dawn". When the class would get quiet I could always count on somebody to throw in a "whoop!, uhhhh". Secondly, they loved loved loved Kant puns. I took to writing their names on a quasi-fictional "no-no list" for excessive Kant puns. I also took to having them bribe my exceptionally awesome TA Peter and me with epically awesome imagined things. Such bribes included a snowblower powerful enough to move the island from Lost to a different location and Immanuel Kant brought to the future and forced to wear Peter's ever-present teal running shorts and carrying crumbly cookies from our dinning commons (the very reward I promised to those kids who won games we played).
On a more serious note, these students drew from so many more sources than I had ever thought high school kids would know. I had one student who made a connection between the Heraclitean idea of time and Einstein's special and general Relativity. This same student wrote a fantastic paper on the way that synaesthesia effects human perception and in particular our conceptions of temporality. I had another student write a paper that would get an A in a college philosophy class and she was only 16. They were exceptionally bright kids, and I can't gush over how wonderful they were enough.
After about a week of working with them I began thinking about two things. First, how do I get back to such a great environment as the Duke East TIP campus? This environment is one where I had great bosses, great colleagues, and exceptional students. Who wouldn't want to work in such an environment? Secondly, how do I get to the kind of school where I can teach these kids in college? That's the harder question to work through than the first one because it entails rethinking my ideas concerning higher education. Do I enter the gates of the walled city in order to get to teach them? How much of their exceptional qualities are the result of economic advantages? What about those kids who can't afford to come to TIP but are still just as exceptional? It also might entail thinking how "East Jesus Nowhere" becomes a place for the best and brightest and what such a reimagining of higher ed might mean.
Finally, I'd like to say a word about a subtle reminder of the deficiencies of the academy in light of this amazing experience. At both BC and SIUC, the Philosophy Department seems cut off from other areas of the academy. It is very easy to get so wrapped up in my own discipline that it becomes the only think I can talk about. Yet here, amongst a sea of English and Literature grad students, I was reminded about what it means to collaborate with others. I was reminded that, just as was the case with Socrates, knowing myself and my discipline meant knowing my limits be they personal or philosophic. I got to talk with medievalist who discussed time and eternity in Augustine and Aquinas, modernists who talked about eschatology in popular culture, and played a lot of Tetris against some truly formidable English, Music, History, Economics, and Computer Science guys. Its very hard being an introvert and also being in an insular discipline. Not that philosophy is the only insular discipline, nor that the academy as a whole isn't insular. What I am trying to say is that a defensive stance is not always the best stance to take regarding other disciplines. In a wonderful conversation I had with a TA from UNC, we discussed how we look for different things in the great texts of Heidegger, Derrida, and Sartre. We talked about how hard it is to be taken seriously and to take others seriously in the graduate environment. We also agreed that such closed-off stances are foolish. Collaboration and experimentation was pushed here at TIP and I hope to bring such an attitude to my other environments be they academic or otherwise.
The life philosophic as well as the life academic is a gift and it ought to be treated as such. After just a single month, this is the best summer I've had in years and I'm so thankful for the opportunity to be a participant in such a great program. I told my kids that this is not a summer-survival job but this is a dream fulfillment job. I rarely say truer things than that.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Niche Culture, Niche Values or 1001 words on being misunderstood
What happens when niche-culture becomes the herald for niche-values? Don’t get me wrong, in many ways niche-culture—that transformation of the ways in which popular culture disseminates amongst various peoples allowing more obscure and previously overlooked elements to be given attention—has done wonderful things and represents something great. The fact that I am no longer bound culturally to my own geographic location is the kind of freedom lovers of art in all its forms have longed for. It used to be that if you lived in a town where the DJs sucked, your cultural choices were, as it were, screwed. But the internet (amongst other innovations) allowed us—we, the viewers, observers, hearers, and patrons—to explore the oddest, weirdest stuff we wanted. And some of us do. But something else ends up happening.
We human beings have, what I like to call, a tendency towards sedimentation. In other words, we take something that is new or odd or different and over time we transform it into something familiar, understandable, and limited. Its not that this process is good or bad either, it simply happens. What’s more is that we still think that it is innovative (and niche’s still might be but on a smaller scale) when in reality, what has happened is that rules have been established, parameters marked off, and horizons set in place. What is possible creatively, what is determined as legitimate, what determines legitimacy, all of this takes place within the rules of the niche. So there are limits to what is possible to be done in any given niche even though we don’t want to admit to those limits because, for the most part, admitting that there are limits is forbidden in a great number of (I say this with some irony) dominant niches.
What I find more interesting than the way that niche-culture has transformed popular culture is the ways in which it has transformed our social spaces. We have become participants in a multitude of different conversations each with their own rules. Its not that we weren’t participating in conversations before—no, it’s that the number of conversations has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the amount of information that is distributed amongst these conversations has become so plentiful that the overlap between conversations becomes difficult. And oftentimes, we confuse the conversations.
Confusing the conversation has less to do with confusing information, as it has to do with confusing the value of that information. As I said earlier, each niche has its own conversation rules or logic internal to it. And these conversation logics are based not entirely on reason so much as they are based on values. Specifically, each logic might be said to have a value or number of values that are esteemed more important than others. So people can be conversing with one another regarding the same information but, because of different niches or logics, they can never be talking about the same thing.
Moreover, we are able to participate in multiple conversations. This means that we can be participants in cultural niches whose values are in conflict with one another and not even realize it. It’s often an enigma as to how people can behave one way in a certain social setting and drastically different in another. One way of explaining this might be to say that they are participants in conversations that are operating under completely different sets of values. Such difference in behavior makes sense within the specific context because the logic aligned to the context demands behaviors that, from another perspective, are contradictory.
There’s a tendency amongst graduate students to feel disconnected from their peers who are not toiling away in libraries or cramped offices. You become so accustomed to specific conversation logics that you can have a hard time talking about things that you care a great deal about with people who are not within your specific niche. This happens even between people in different departments. Just ask my friend Kate how hard it is for the two of us, both graduate students in the humanities, to be on the same page about anything concerning our academic interests. It is perhaps because we are able to converse in another niche that we share that we are able to communicate.
The feeling of disconnection can take the form of feeling left behind by one’s peers or misunderstood because the niche that becomes dominant in one’s friends is not the same as that of our own. This happens to me all the time. I can devote a great deal of effort to work and thought within one specific niche but that niche is not as dominant or popular as the niche that my friends and peers participate in. This can result in a sense of pressure to adhere to the values esteemed by other niches even if such niches don’t question their own internal logic. This pressure is, I think, similarly felt by those who have graduated from college but have yet to obtain the kind of job they’d like, have yet to be in a longstanding partnership, etc.
With the loss of a central and totally dominant mainstream culture niches have emerged. The values central to these niches must be explored and examined if we are to progress towards conversations full of meaning and not as much misunderstanding. Human connection is not devalued in this niche-culture of ours so much as it is distracted and disrupted. So, where is our transvaluation of all values now? Is it turning inward into smaller and smaller niches (a la Dwight Schrute’s creation of a 2nd life inside of the actual second life)? Can we even get past the limits of our own niches and actually communicate with others? Do we even want to?
I would certainly like to move beyond the limits of my own academically inclined niche or my obscure pop-culture niche but I make no promises. I do, however, hope to participate in meaningful cross-niche conversations beyond such pressures.
We human beings have, what I like to call, a tendency towards sedimentation. In other words, we take something that is new or odd or different and over time we transform it into something familiar, understandable, and limited. Its not that this process is good or bad either, it simply happens. What’s more is that we still think that it is innovative (and niche’s still might be but on a smaller scale) when in reality, what has happened is that rules have been established, parameters marked off, and horizons set in place. What is possible creatively, what is determined as legitimate, what determines legitimacy, all of this takes place within the rules of the niche. So there are limits to what is possible to be done in any given niche even though we don’t want to admit to those limits because, for the most part, admitting that there are limits is forbidden in a great number of (I say this with some irony) dominant niches.
What I find more interesting than the way that niche-culture has transformed popular culture is the ways in which it has transformed our social spaces. We have become participants in a multitude of different conversations each with their own rules. Its not that we weren’t participating in conversations before—no, it’s that the number of conversations has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the amount of information that is distributed amongst these conversations has become so plentiful that the overlap between conversations becomes difficult. And oftentimes, we confuse the conversations.
Confusing the conversation has less to do with confusing information, as it has to do with confusing the value of that information. As I said earlier, each niche has its own conversation rules or logic internal to it. And these conversation logics are based not entirely on reason so much as they are based on values. Specifically, each logic might be said to have a value or number of values that are esteemed more important than others. So people can be conversing with one another regarding the same information but, because of different niches or logics, they can never be talking about the same thing.
Moreover, we are able to participate in multiple conversations. This means that we can be participants in cultural niches whose values are in conflict with one another and not even realize it. It’s often an enigma as to how people can behave one way in a certain social setting and drastically different in another. One way of explaining this might be to say that they are participants in conversations that are operating under completely different sets of values. Such difference in behavior makes sense within the specific context because the logic aligned to the context demands behaviors that, from another perspective, are contradictory.
There’s a tendency amongst graduate students to feel disconnected from their peers who are not toiling away in libraries or cramped offices. You become so accustomed to specific conversation logics that you can have a hard time talking about things that you care a great deal about with people who are not within your specific niche. This happens even between people in different departments. Just ask my friend Kate how hard it is for the two of us, both graduate students in the humanities, to be on the same page about anything concerning our academic interests. It is perhaps because we are able to converse in another niche that we share that we are able to communicate.
The feeling of disconnection can take the form of feeling left behind by one’s peers or misunderstood because the niche that becomes dominant in one’s friends is not the same as that of our own. This happens to me all the time. I can devote a great deal of effort to work and thought within one specific niche but that niche is not as dominant or popular as the niche that my friends and peers participate in. This can result in a sense of pressure to adhere to the values esteemed by other niches even if such niches don’t question their own internal logic. This pressure is, I think, similarly felt by those who have graduated from college but have yet to obtain the kind of job they’d like, have yet to be in a longstanding partnership, etc.
With the loss of a central and totally dominant mainstream culture niches have emerged. The values central to these niches must be explored and examined if we are to progress towards conversations full of meaning and not as much misunderstanding. Human connection is not devalued in this niche-culture of ours so much as it is distracted and disrupted. So, where is our transvaluation of all values now? Is it turning inward into smaller and smaller niches (a la Dwight Schrute’s creation of a 2nd life inside of the actual second life)? Can we even get past the limits of our own niches and actually communicate with others? Do we even want to?
I would certainly like to move beyond the limits of my own academically inclined niche or my obscure pop-culture niche but I make no promises. I do, however, hope to participate in meaningful cross-niche conversations beyond such pressures.
Friday, December 25, 2009
The Blogtastic Voyage Pt. 2
I cannot find my cell phone charger and it is extremely annoying that it is lost. Perhaps I will have to wait until morning to find it. Tonight is the night. The star, the sheep herders, the astrologers, the lowly...it's all in this night. A whole season waiting for this night and for the breaking of a still more glorious dawn when Christ is born. I have to admit that this December has not been as outrightly advent-driven as in previous years. The surprise bonus of such a distance from this season is that I haven't felt drawn to the commercialism so derided (and yet so followed) nor felt the pressures of obligations that used to be much beloved traditions. In fact, the only thing that I feel has been retained of this season is the waiting itself. Perhaps, to be more specific, it is not just the waiting but something that is at work inside of the waiting. A certain tension. I'll call it, the tension between hope and expectation.
I remember way back in 2004 being in a homiletics class which required an advent sermon as one of the assignments. I'll be charitable and say that what I wrote was much closer to an advent lecture than anything sermonic. Still, I remember discovering something open-ended and elusive to this whole advent position of waiting. There is the tension between the openness and perpetualness of hope and the very concreteness and very particularity of expectation. Jesus doesn't come as we expect him to. (I concluded thusly before even a word of Derrida had crossed my path) We hope beyond the particularities and limitations of our own ideas of what a savior or a king would be. We hope out of humility, out of the feeling that our sight is feeble and our thoughts are short-sighted.
But why did I feel that my sight was feeble and my thought's short-sighted. Because of that very strange, terrifying, and wonderous thing known as particularity. I cannot but hope from out of the feeble and short-sighted peculiarity and particularity of my own body, mind, and very peculiar self. The openness of hope is not without the determination of such particularity and peculiarity. And isn't it that strange, terrifying, and wonderous think known as the incarnation that we celebrate at advent? Isn't it the strangeness God made flesh that captures our imagination and also our fears. Our fears that what we hope for will, in fact, be what we expect; that our short-sightedness will get the better of us and we'll miss the messiah entirely. This is what I fear about this season. Will the waiting be in vain? Will I wait expectantly and call it hope?
I have been blessed to have read some truly wonderful reflections on advent from a friend and the friend of a friend; reflections that have spurred my thinking in directions previously occupied by the obligations that graduate study bestows at this time of year. Advent isn't advent so much as it is paper-writing season (or application finishing season). This isn't true of course; just because I'm preoccupied with the productive dialectic of Ideology and Utopia as it pertains to John Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charitie" doesn't mean that waiting is not the posture I should take. Advent doesn't go away; the monster or the messiah trekking towards Bethlehem is not stopping. That baby is coming and there's no stopping it.
I have been thinking, as of late, about typography. Typography, that old Christian practice of reading the stories of scripture and the tradition into the present, can be a dangerous enterprise (see: American and Muslim Fundamentalisms or Manifest Destiny/National Covenant). Still, keeping such dangers in mind, might there be a way to read the seasons of the Christian year into one's life. Might there be a way that I can view my life as a particular season requiring a particular "posture?" Might we think about time, not as a succession of days, but as something much more fluid and fluctuating?
I'll take as my example this season, the season of Advent. The posture one assumes during advent is, as has been mentioned above, one of waiting. Inherent to this posture is the tension between the particular and the open-ended, the ever-new; the tension between hope and expectation. Yet, what if this season and its posture extended beyond the winter? What if I experienced Advent during the summer, in the middle of ordinary time? Anyone who's gone through the application process for college or grad school knows that the most anxious waiting takes place in late February and on into the Spring and certainly not in December. Advent's status as a marker of a certain time, as a season, becomes exaggerated here. One's life is marked by a season of waiting, of being held within the tension of the openness of hope and the particularity and peculiarity of expectation, of a time that cannot simply be marked by dates on a calendar.
For a while now I have felt that my life has been one of Advent-ish waiting. The particular has presented itself but it does not satisfy the openness of hope, of desire. Perhaps that is what is most particular to hope itself, its inability to be exhausted or satisfied. I await, sometimes patiently sometimes rather impatiently, the coming of a particular fulfillment to a particular need, whatever the need might be. I also await something more. Something open and endless, something that gives itself in such a way that the adventure of exploring it in its fullness will never cease.
Yet, waiting is not all there is. There are seasons of simplicity and repentance that extend far beyond the limits of Lent. There are epiphanies that are experienced every day regardless of the time. There are whole years that feel so ordinary that they seem like they will never end. Still, this season is the season of waiting. Maybe next season will also be a season of waiting. I pray our postures will be appropriate to whatever season it is.
Merry Christmas all.
I remember way back in 2004 being in a homiletics class which required an advent sermon as one of the assignments. I'll be charitable and say that what I wrote was much closer to an advent lecture than anything sermonic. Still, I remember discovering something open-ended and elusive to this whole advent position of waiting. There is the tension between the openness and perpetualness of hope and the very concreteness and very particularity of expectation. Jesus doesn't come as we expect him to. (I concluded thusly before even a word of Derrida had crossed my path) We hope beyond the particularities and limitations of our own ideas of what a savior or a king would be. We hope out of humility, out of the feeling that our sight is feeble and our thoughts are short-sighted.
But why did I feel that my sight was feeble and my thought's short-sighted. Because of that very strange, terrifying, and wonderous thing known as particularity. I cannot but hope from out of the feeble and short-sighted peculiarity and particularity of my own body, mind, and very peculiar self. The openness of hope is not without the determination of such particularity and peculiarity. And isn't it that strange, terrifying, and wonderous think known as the incarnation that we celebrate at advent? Isn't it the strangeness God made flesh that captures our imagination and also our fears. Our fears that what we hope for will, in fact, be what we expect; that our short-sightedness will get the better of us and we'll miss the messiah entirely. This is what I fear about this season. Will the waiting be in vain? Will I wait expectantly and call it hope?
I have been blessed to have read some truly wonderful reflections on advent from a friend and the friend of a friend; reflections that have spurred my thinking in directions previously occupied by the obligations that graduate study bestows at this time of year. Advent isn't advent so much as it is paper-writing season (or application finishing season). This isn't true of course; just because I'm preoccupied with the productive dialectic of Ideology and Utopia as it pertains to John Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charitie" doesn't mean that waiting is not the posture I should take. Advent doesn't go away; the monster or the messiah trekking towards Bethlehem is not stopping. That baby is coming and there's no stopping it.
I have been thinking, as of late, about typography. Typography, that old Christian practice of reading the stories of scripture and the tradition into the present, can be a dangerous enterprise (see: American and Muslim Fundamentalisms or Manifest Destiny/National Covenant). Still, keeping such dangers in mind, might there be a way to read the seasons of the Christian year into one's life. Might there be a way that I can view my life as a particular season requiring a particular "posture?" Might we think about time, not as a succession of days, but as something much more fluid and fluctuating?
I'll take as my example this season, the season of Advent. The posture one assumes during advent is, as has been mentioned above, one of waiting. Inherent to this posture is the tension between the particular and the open-ended, the ever-new; the tension between hope and expectation. Yet, what if this season and its posture extended beyond the winter? What if I experienced Advent during the summer, in the middle of ordinary time? Anyone who's gone through the application process for college or grad school knows that the most anxious waiting takes place in late February and on into the Spring and certainly not in December. Advent's status as a marker of a certain time, as a season, becomes exaggerated here. One's life is marked by a season of waiting, of being held within the tension of the openness of hope and the particularity and peculiarity of expectation, of a time that cannot simply be marked by dates on a calendar.
For a while now I have felt that my life has been one of Advent-ish waiting. The particular has presented itself but it does not satisfy the openness of hope, of desire. Perhaps that is what is most particular to hope itself, its inability to be exhausted or satisfied. I await, sometimes patiently sometimes rather impatiently, the coming of a particular fulfillment to a particular need, whatever the need might be. I also await something more. Something open and endless, something that gives itself in such a way that the adventure of exploring it in its fullness will never cease.
Yet, waiting is not all there is. There are seasons of simplicity and repentance that extend far beyond the limits of Lent. There are epiphanies that are experienced every day regardless of the time. There are whole years that feel so ordinary that they seem like they will never end. Still, this season is the season of waiting. Maybe next season will also be a season of waiting. I pray our postures will be appropriate to whatever season it is.
Merry Christmas all.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
The Blogtastic Voyage Pt. 1
First of all, not writing for about 2-3 months has to qualify as a Homeric fail (Karl? Jon? What's the criterion for the scale? I know it's at least at level Wagner...). Still, one gets busy with reading or conversing or playing way too much wii baseball that your neck hurts in the morning and all of a sudden its been two months. To be honest, I've attempted to follow up at least a half dozen times and every attempt, as has certainly been observed, was scrapped. I figured that no one really wants to hear me rambling on from the depths of the vertiginous Derridean stew which owned me this semester (seriously, I'm done with Derrida until late January...I promise).
So what now? Well, if history is to be believed, then we have the infamous year end list to throw down. That said, I want to mix things up a bit this year. This year was kinda funny when it comes to best albums and songs. I feel like this was the year that we became so vastly aware that there is some kind of culture machine which operates with or without our participation that we started jokingly referencing it. Perhaps this was already happening and this year was just the tipping point or perhaps I've been stuck beneath too many books to notice until now but it appears that something has changed. I remember looking at a blog post about The Dirty Projectors' "Bitte Orca" before it was even out asking "Is Bitte Orca the best album of 2009?" Before it was out! I thought this was completely absurd until I began to think about what records I knew would be coming out and how they would on a year end list somehow. Was I surprised by any of them? Maybe by one or two but that's mostly with the lesser knowns who came up big. Still, major talent's owned this year even if they come from within that weird incestuous narcissistic world known as the indie-rock-blog-community. But mixing it up is the name of the game so let's begin.
First off...Albums 2009.
Now, there are several ways to go about such a list as this. I could make a favorites list or a "best" list or a most played list or a most influential/important list to name a few. I think that I'm gonna go with a little bit of all of them because, let's face it, who wants to admit that their favorite album kinda sucks. I truly believe that deep down we all love excellent things, we just sometimes don't know what those excellent things are. I also believe that my limitations prevent me from ever being certain that my choices about culture are ones that exhibit excellence, but I hope that they do. Having said that, here we go...
The Champion's League:
Curse Your Branches--David Bazan. I love love love this album. I love how it's a record in a very literal sense. A record of the man's struggles, of his doubts, and of his hope. It the second best thing he's done since Control and it shows a master craftsman at work. I'm not putting up numbers on this list but, if I were, this record would be the undisputed number one. I've rarely been as inspired as I was listening to the master.
Veckatimest--Grizzly Bear. I somehow knew that this record was gonna be great when I saw them play "Two Weeks" on Conan back when he was still in NYC. I've not been a believer in these guys until I saw that performance and then heard this album. It's got such a great sound (has anyone else, since MBV, done so many things with reverb and done it this well?) and is such a carefully pieced together work. I thought I'd get bored with it but it keeps coming back. If it rains outside I usually turn to Kid A or Bon Iver but now, now I've got a new rainy day record.
Middle Cyclone--Neko Case. "This Tornado Loves You" is one of the most brilliant pieces of wordplay I've ever heard and turns out to be a fantastic song too. Neko swallowed a cannon somewhere and she showcases her booming voice here with poise and precision. When the songs need to soar they do, when they need to be intimate they are. Nobody sounds like her and this record certainly makes us aware of that fact.
Merriweather Post Pavilion--Animal Collective. If AmCo makes records this good all the time then I don't care if they are a band "created by/for/in/because of the internet." I don't care if they are the poster children for the Williamsburg scapegoating that has gained sway. "My Girls" is a brilliant pop song. So is "Summertime Clothes". The album as a whole finds a way to make electronic samples sound warm and inviting rather than isolating and digitized. Maybe it's because they don't abuse autotune...
The Hazards of Love--The Decemberists This is the record they had to make. It's not as poppy as The Crane Wife but it picks up where that album took off and explores even more epic territory. Colin Meloy tells a weird but ultimately compelling story full of great performances (My Brightest Diamond brings it home like no other and the organist goes full on Yes/Styx). This is an album for Lit nerds by Lit nerds. I didn't like it at first but my friend Jon made me play it so much when we rode around the Hub that it grew on me.
The New-ish Ones
Young artists came up big this year and artists who were on the verge of excellence moved even closer. I'll mention these with a bit more brevity.
Manners--Passion Pit. I never thought I'd really be into dance music just like I never thought that I'd enjoy dancing and then somehow both become true. I can't help but love these songs. They remind me of sweaty summer nights in Boston forgetting that I had French to study.
The First Days of Spring--Noah and the Whale. I don't like his guitar tone. That is basically all I can say about this record that I don't like. It's a complete piece and one that I think is best experienced sitting down and listening to it the whole way through. I think we need to get back to just sitting around and listening to albums as a whole...and doing nothing but listening...who's with me?
Wolfgang Ammadeus Phoenix--Phoenix Maybe the best pure pop music I've heard this decade. Another record from the summer that was constantly playing and thoroughly loved.
Oh My God, Charlie Darwin--The Low Anthem. The title track is worth it. Its so beautiful and so sad. The rest of the record is great and a bit more uplifting without getting too saccharine.
Mama, I'm Swollen--Cursive Man did I sweat this record when it first came out. I still do because Tim Kasher knows how to throw down and the band sounds so great even though they don't have a cellist any more.
Biggest Surprise: Axe to Fall--Converge. I'm not really a metal guy nor do I fully appreciate Converge's monolithic "Jane Doe" as much as one mr. Chase Macri but I really like this record. The guitars sound so good and the songs offer a lot more textures than the other metal record I enjoyed this year (ABR's Constellations).
Biggest Disappointment: The Most Serene Republic and Headlights. They put out two of my favorite albums of 2007 and then completely let me down with their latest. Both are snooze-tastic.
Why Didn't I Have This Record Yet 2009 Edition: It seems like every year I have one or two albums from years past which I'm shocked I didn't listen to and obsess over already. In 2007 it was Minus the Bear's "They Make Beer Commercials Like This In Heaven", 2008 was "Boys and Girls in America" by The Hold Steady and "Z" by My Morning Jacket. This year it's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel. Seriously, how did I miss it? Its so so so good.
I need to go practice guitar more record: Animals--This Town Needs Guns, Antidotes--Foals. So I got interested in some math rock-y stuff this year and now I need to go practice super-compressed single-coil finger tapping....le sigh...
Book You Really Need to Read: Home--Marilynne Robinson. She's brilliant and wrote my favorite book of all time (Gilead) and does it again with this book. It will make you want to be more graceful and forgiving.
I don't have film recommendations because I didn't see any that made me really excited to get on DVD besides not seeing many. But I will say this...if you ever get the chance to see Pulp Fiction on the big screen, DO IT! So worth it...great movie and a great experience seeing it in a theater.
Well, that's all I got for this part. Stay tuned...in three months I might post pt. 2...
So what now? Well, if history is to be believed, then we have the infamous year end list to throw down. That said, I want to mix things up a bit this year. This year was kinda funny when it comes to best albums and songs. I feel like this was the year that we became so vastly aware that there is some kind of culture machine which operates with or without our participation that we started jokingly referencing it. Perhaps this was already happening and this year was just the tipping point or perhaps I've been stuck beneath too many books to notice until now but it appears that something has changed. I remember looking at a blog post about The Dirty Projectors' "Bitte Orca" before it was even out asking "Is Bitte Orca the best album of 2009?" Before it was out! I thought this was completely absurd until I began to think about what records I knew would be coming out and how they would on a year end list somehow. Was I surprised by any of them? Maybe by one or two but that's mostly with the lesser knowns who came up big. Still, major talent's owned this year even if they come from within that weird incestuous narcissistic world known as the indie-rock-blog-community. But mixing it up is the name of the game so let's begin.
First off...Albums 2009.
Now, there are several ways to go about such a list as this. I could make a favorites list or a "best" list or a most played list or a most influential/important list to name a few. I think that I'm gonna go with a little bit of all of them because, let's face it, who wants to admit that their favorite album kinda sucks. I truly believe that deep down we all love excellent things, we just sometimes don't know what those excellent things are. I also believe that my limitations prevent me from ever being certain that my choices about culture are ones that exhibit excellence, but I hope that they do. Having said that, here we go...
The Champion's League:
Curse Your Branches--David Bazan. I love love love this album. I love how it's a record in a very literal sense. A record of the man's struggles, of his doubts, and of his hope. It the second best thing he's done since Control and it shows a master craftsman at work. I'm not putting up numbers on this list but, if I were, this record would be the undisputed number one. I've rarely been as inspired as I was listening to the master.
Veckatimest--Grizzly Bear. I somehow knew that this record was gonna be great when I saw them play "Two Weeks" on Conan back when he was still in NYC. I've not been a believer in these guys until I saw that performance and then heard this album. It's got such a great sound (has anyone else, since MBV, done so many things with reverb and done it this well?) and is such a carefully pieced together work. I thought I'd get bored with it but it keeps coming back. If it rains outside I usually turn to Kid A or Bon Iver but now, now I've got a new rainy day record.
Middle Cyclone--Neko Case. "This Tornado Loves You" is one of the most brilliant pieces of wordplay I've ever heard and turns out to be a fantastic song too. Neko swallowed a cannon somewhere and she showcases her booming voice here with poise and precision. When the songs need to soar they do, when they need to be intimate they are. Nobody sounds like her and this record certainly makes us aware of that fact.
Merriweather Post Pavilion--Animal Collective. If AmCo makes records this good all the time then I don't care if they are a band "created by/for/in/because of the internet." I don't care if they are the poster children for the Williamsburg scapegoating that has gained sway. "My Girls" is a brilliant pop song. So is "Summertime Clothes". The album as a whole finds a way to make electronic samples sound warm and inviting rather than isolating and digitized. Maybe it's because they don't abuse autotune...
The Hazards of Love--The Decemberists This is the record they had to make. It's not as poppy as The Crane Wife but it picks up where that album took off and explores even more epic territory. Colin Meloy tells a weird but ultimately compelling story full of great performances (My Brightest Diamond brings it home like no other and the organist goes full on Yes/Styx). This is an album for Lit nerds by Lit nerds. I didn't like it at first but my friend Jon made me play it so much when we rode around the Hub that it grew on me.
The New-ish Ones
Young artists came up big this year and artists who were on the verge of excellence moved even closer. I'll mention these with a bit more brevity.
Manners--Passion Pit. I never thought I'd really be into dance music just like I never thought that I'd enjoy dancing and then somehow both become true. I can't help but love these songs. They remind me of sweaty summer nights in Boston forgetting that I had French to study.
The First Days of Spring--Noah and the Whale. I don't like his guitar tone. That is basically all I can say about this record that I don't like. It's a complete piece and one that I think is best experienced sitting down and listening to it the whole way through. I think we need to get back to just sitting around and listening to albums as a whole...and doing nothing but listening...who's with me?
Wolfgang Ammadeus Phoenix--Phoenix Maybe the best pure pop music I've heard this decade. Another record from the summer that was constantly playing and thoroughly loved.
Oh My God, Charlie Darwin--The Low Anthem. The title track is worth it. Its so beautiful and so sad. The rest of the record is great and a bit more uplifting without getting too saccharine.
Mama, I'm Swollen--Cursive Man did I sweat this record when it first came out. I still do because Tim Kasher knows how to throw down and the band sounds so great even though they don't have a cellist any more.
Biggest Surprise: Axe to Fall--Converge. I'm not really a metal guy nor do I fully appreciate Converge's monolithic "Jane Doe" as much as one mr. Chase Macri but I really like this record. The guitars sound so good and the songs offer a lot more textures than the other metal record I enjoyed this year (ABR's Constellations).
Biggest Disappointment: The Most Serene Republic and Headlights. They put out two of my favorite albums of 2007 and then completely let me down with their latest. Both are snooze-tastic.
Why Didn't I Have This Record Yet 2009 Edition: It seems like every year I have one or two albums from years past which I'm shocked I didn't listen to and obsess over already. In 2007 it was Minus the Bear's "They Make Beer Commercials Like This In Heaven", 2008 was "Boys and Girls in America" by The Hold Steady and "Z" by My Morning Jacket. This year it's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel. Seriously, how did I miss it? Its so so so good.
I need to go practice guitar more record: Animals--This Town Needs Guns, Antidotes--Foals. So I got interested in some math rock-y stuff this year and now I need to go practice super-compressed single-coil finger tapping....le sigh...
Book You Really Need to Read: Home--Marilynne Robinson. She's brilliant and wrote my favorite book of all time (Gilead) and does it again with this book. It will make you want to be more graceful and forgiving.
I don't have film recommendations because I didn't see any that made me really excited to get on DVD besides not seeing many. But I will say this...if you ever get the chance to see Pulp Fiction on the big screen, DO IT! So worth it...great movie and a great experience seeing it in a theater.
Well, that's all I got for this part. Stay tuned...in three months I might post pt. 2...
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Under Big Skies
I had forgotten how beautiful and open the skies in Illinois can be. I had grown too accustomed to light pollution and hills that seemed to leap from the soil at random. The northeast is gorgeous in its own way, famous for its mountains and dense forests, and it makes one marvel rather quickly at the wonder that is the north American continent. However, I had noticed myself longing for something wider. Something more expansive. A place where there was room to take deep breaths and not feel like you were stealing air, like Internet, from your unknown neighbors. As route 70 turned into route 57 on the southeastern side of Illinois, that place I had been longing for opened up in all of it's splendor. I had forgotten how large the clouds were, how blue a sky could be, and how the sun cast shadows in some places and put forth pockets of resplendence which painted the land like a checkerboard.
There are some images that bring forth imaginings and then explode them, tearing to shreds the fictitious with the luminosity of that which is. (This is why phenomenology is, for me, a remarkably christian endeavor.) Witnessing that sea of grass and corn and sky and cloud was such an explosion. It reminded me of when I pulled off of 70 for the first time and drove with my parents into Greenville. There is a feeling that can be described as a home that's been waiting for you--that's the feeling I had as the imagined return to the middle west fractured before the revelation of what I was actually seeing.
There is also a romance about the middle west which is not the whole truth. But what I talk about when I see the flatness and the enormity of the sky is not this romance. Spend just a little bit of time in Granite City or even in parts of Carbondale where I live, and you will see something very unromantic. Size and expanse make a distinct culture something difficult to see. It doesn't help that the culture of the middle west has been caricatured and propagandized like pretty much everything else. The exploding of this image, the putting to the side of the negative associations that accompany living in a kind of isolation, is something that takes work. And this work cannot simply be putting it all away from your mind. That would be creating a whole new romance which is naive and fearful and untrue.
To think the isolation--and therefore the loneliness, the sense of limited possibilities, the different kinds of poverty and addiction that are found here--is to think this place in its fullness. But it's too much all at once and maybe that's what I love so much about this place. The simplicity of the landscape, the openness and the largeness of the sky; all of these reveal a place full of complexity and nuance that does not demand you pay attention but invites attention. How very middle western.
I have finished my first week of classes at my first non-religious school since high school. It wasn't as big a deal as I had feared it would be. Philosophy is philosophy and it doesn't have to be in a professors office for an independent study or in the magisterium known as BC to be well done. I am excited about my classes for numerous reasons but mainly because, after a summer of French and fiction, I'm back to the work that I love to do.
Living in Carbondale, I am without a lions share of the luxuries that Brighton, Brookline, and Allston provided as everyday occurrences. They don't have software to track the school shuttle, they don't have a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's or even a Target. I've yet to find a really great coffee shop to study in. The library looks too new, not enough stained glass and stone. Still, every day brings more comfort to me. Every day brings more acceptance and excitement to live in so simple and complex a place as this. To see the grace bestowed that is my time allotted here in southern Illinois, that is a task worth undertaking.
There are some images that bring forth imaginings and then explode them, tearing to shreds the fictitious with the luminosity of that which is. (This is why phenomenology is, for me, a remarkably christian endeavor.) Witnessing that sea of grass and corn and sky and cloud was such an explosion. It reminded me of when I pulled off of 70 for the first time and drove with my parents into Greenville. There is a feeling that can be described as a home that's been waiting for you--that's the feeling I had as the imagined return to the middle west fractured before the revelation of what I was actually seeing.
There is also a romance about the middle west which is not the whole truth. But what I talk about when I see the flatness and the enormity of the sky is not this romance. Spend just a little bit of time in Granite City or even in parts of Carbondale where I live, and you will see something very unromantic. Size and expanse make a distinct culture something difficult to see. It doesn't help that the culture of the middle west has been caricatured and propagandized like pretty much everything else. The exploding of this image, the putting to the side of the negative associations that accompany living in a kind of isolation, is something that takes work. And this work cannot simply be putting it all away from your mind. That would be creating a whole new romance which is naive and fearful and untrue.
To think the isolation--and therefore the loneliness, the sense of limited possibilities, the different kinds of poverty and addiction that are found here--is to think this place in its fullness. But it's too much all at once and maybe that's what I love so much about this place. The simplicity of the landscape, the openness and the largeness of the sky; all of these reveal a place full of complexity and nuance that does not demand you pay attention but invites attention. How very middle western.
I have finished my first week of classes at my first non-religious school since high school. It wasn't as big a deal as I had feared it would be. Philosophy is philosophy and it doesn't have to be in a professors office for an independent study or in the magisterium known as BC to be well done. I am excited about my classes for numerous reasons but mainly because, after a summer of French and fiction, I'm back to the work that I love to do.
Living in Carbondale, I am without a lions share of the luxuries that Brighton, Brookline, and Allston provided as everyday occurrences. They don't have software to track the school shuttle, they don't have a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's or even a Target. I've yet to find a really great coffee shop to study in. The library looks too new, not enough stained glass and stone. Still, every day brings more comfort to me. Every day brings more acceptance and excitement to live in so simple and complex a place as this. To see the grace bestowed that is my time allotted here in southern Illinois, that is a task worth undertaking.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Mosquitos Love Me This Time of Year
With but a short pause amidst the dedicated and methodical movements of packing away my belongings, I thought today about adulthood. Sorting bags full of smaller bags full of books full of words, I wondered about faulty pressures felt more than observed. You should be married already, you should be completely independent already, you should have a mortgage already, you should be climbing up that ladder of your career already, you should be mowing lawn and trimming shrubbery already. You should be wearing a tie to work already. But I was not living inside of these thoughts for they were that felt pressure carving out a voice for themselves. Instead, I was putting large gray bins full of books into the bed of my father's pickup truck and taking breaks to listen to WXPN play whatever folksy-roots songs they saw fit, lessening my thirst with iced tea straight from the jug. Instead of trimming hedges, I was washing clothes bought at Goodwill or stolen from my father's hamper.
I have been found myself pausing to consider adulthood because I don't think it really exists. Having moved from Boston, I have lost my favorite human observation facility--Common Ground's 80's night--my local Allston haunt. This weekend, however, I was blessed with the observation of my family at a barbecue. I saw people there who were not the gray-haired conversationalists of my childhood but something rather strange. I saw people who accepted this thing called adulthood because they believed it foisted upon them many years prior. But all the same interactions were there that seemed to have been there from their childhood. My mother, the facilitator, one uncle the instigator, one the speaker of presumed wisdom, one the constant clown, and a handful who were old in their minds before they were old in body. I've seen children act this same way and so I have a hard time believing that adulthood is some stable thing, some consistent state of being.
It appears to me that perhaps all of these pressures concerning adulthood are brought forth by an "ordering voice" that longs for nothing more than the hearing of its own pontifications which are little more than prevarications. Adulthood seems like the assumption of responsibility but when have I not needed to assume responsibility? When I didn't know things? How much has the last 5 years of my life proven that I know far less than I ever thought possible? Am I to be responsible for things I don't even know about yet prior to knowing them?
But then I see friends and acquaintances acting in a way that I can only call childish and I wonder about the other side of adulthood. Perhaps adulthood is that remarkable country where we can shoulder the wounds of childhood just a little bit better, where we can let things go. Knowing how nursing a grievance like an old wound can actually provide a place of stability, I doubt this is true. So I don't believe that adulthood exists. We just get better at being children.
I have been found myself pausing to consider adulthood because I don't think it really exists. Having moved from Boston, I have lost my favorite human observation facility--Common Ground's 80's night--my local Allston haunt. This weekend, however, I was blessed with the observation of my family at a barbecue. I saw people there who were not the gray-haired conversationalists of my childhood but something rather strange. I saw people who accepted this thing called adulthood because they believed it foisted upon them many years prior. But all the same interactions were there that seemed to have been there from their childhood. My mother, the facilitator, one uncle the instigator, one the speaker of presumed wisdom, one the constant clown, and a handful who were old in their minds before they were old in body. I've seen children act this same way and so I have a hard time believing that adulthood is some stable thing, some consistent state of being.
It appears to me that perhaps all of these pressures concerning adulthood are brought forth by an "ordering voice" that longs for nothing more than the hearing of its own pontifications which are little more than prevarications. Adulthood seems like the assumption of responsibility but when have I not needed to assume responsibility? When I didn't know things? How much has the last 5 years of my life proven that I know far less than I ever thought possible? Am I to be responsible for things I don't even know about yet prior to knowing them?
But then I see friends and acquaintances acting in a way that I can only call childish and I wonder about the other side of adulthood. Perhaps adulthood is that remarkable country where we can shoulder the wounds of childhood just a little bit better, where we can let things go. Knowing how nursing a grievance like an old wound can actually provide a place of stability, I doubt this is true. So I don't believe that adulthood exists. We just get better at being children.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Cultural Artifact circa summer 2009
The thickness of late summer air in the east has found its way up north to those of us here in Boston. The air has a heaviness to it that marks those who travel through it with an odd sticky film. It is the mark of summer that is not as aesthetically pleasing as a tan nor as pleasant as a breeze in the park under the canopy of an oak. However, walking down Commonwealth Avenue and across campus last night I was reminded of the beauty of a humid night. Every light has an extra glow. The greens and reds and yellows of stoplights are warmer and more alive. The blues of emergency stations seem to hang in the air much like the moisture. All the miracle, mystery, and authority that BC attempts to muster in its gothic architecture is softened by the glow of lights on a muggy evening.
I have burned through and burned for more books than I thought I would want to this summer. There were gentle and grace-filled books and there were raw sexual and political escapades (in the books. My life is nowhere near that interesting.) A good piece of fiction can cover a multitude of sins. A great essay can do the same. Learning the origin of the essay in my French class was quite helpful in my appreciation of that genre of writing. In French, to essay is to try. It is an attempt at something. There is a notion of an essay being a shot in the dark, an potential answer but by no means the final word. There are always more attempts to be made.
Words have very much been on my mind this summer, which is no departure from the fall, the spring, or whatever other seasons there might be. I have been thinking about how lightly I use them. Humor as justification for the lightness of words is only so much of a justification. I fear that the words set forth are done with far less heft than they can carry. Part of this comes from Marilynne Robinson's writing style. It is prudent and thrift without being too minimal. The same could be said for Flannery O'Connor's style. I wonder if place shapes these words and the way they are delivered. The isolation of the O'Connor farm or Iowa City might give rise to a subtler literary voice. It might also make one crave company and overstuff the times spent with others with words like a pillow with too small a pillow case. A tendency of mine, which has been suffered by my always more than patient friends, is to see every detail as important, every connection as relevant, and every person in need of a backstory. Perhaps there is a way for me to sift through the connections and the details and the characters of my own tales in such a manner as to disclose them in their fullness without providing an unneeded surplus of words. I have yet to find it.
Still, the cultural artifact. There is a kind of spiritual art which stands out to me. It is art that is deeply personal and acquainted with sorrow and joy which fails not in its creativity nor its compassion. I can list off those whose works bring forth this spirit but it is by no means exhaustive. David Bazan, Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Flannery O'Connor, mewithoutYou, and several others. I do not know how to describe the spirit of their work in any other way than to say that they could all easily say the line: "Its a cold and its a broken hallelujah". And these artists seem connected to a much deeper and much older tradition than other works. Theirs is a spirituality that is unsettling, theirs a God who is trouble, theirs a spirit who haunts. Their Jesus has flesh on his bones. I don't really know what to say other than that my mind and my spirit has been continually blessed by listening to "Control" whilst reading "The Lame Shall Enter First". If you know some good visual artists who exhibit this same spirit--if it even makes any sense--please let me know. I feel that's missing from this collection of cultural artifacts.
I have burned through and burned for more books than I thought I would want to this summer. There were gentle and grace-filled books and there were raw sexual and political escapades (in the books. My life is nowhere near that interesting.) A good piece of fiction can cover a multitude of sins. A great essay can do the same. Learning the origin of the essay in my French class was quite helpful in my appreciation of that genre of writing. In French, to essay is to try. It is an attempt at something. There is a notion of an essay being a shot in the dark, an potential answer but by no means the final word. There are always more attempts to be made.
Words have very much been on my mind this summer, which is no departure from the fall, the spring, or whatever other seasons there might be. I have been thinking about how lightly I use them. Humor as justification for the lightness of words is only so much of a justification. I fear that the words set forth are done with far less heft than they can carry. Part of this comes from Marilynne Robinson's writing style. It is prudent and thrift without being too minimal. The same could be said for Flannery O'Connor's style. I wonder if place shapes these words and the way they are delivered. The isolation of the O'Connor farm or Iowa City might give rise to a subtler literary voice. It might also make one crave company and overstuff the times spent with others with words like a pillow with too small a pillow case. A tendency of mine, which has been suffered by my always more than patient friends, is to see every detail as important, every connection as relevant, and every person in need of a backstory. Perhaps there is a way for me to sift through the connections and the details and the characters of my own tales in such a manner as to disclose them in their fullness without providing an unneeded surplus of words. I have yet to find it.
Still, the cultural artifact. There is a kind of spiritual art which stands out to me. It is art that is deeply personal and acquainted with sorrow and joy which fails not in its creativity nor its compassion. I can list off those whose works bring forth this spirit but it is by no means exhaustive. David Bazan, Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Flannery O'Connor, mewithoutYou, and several others. I do not know how to describe the spirit of their work in any other way than to say that they could all easily say the line: "Its a cold and its a broken hallelujah". And these artists seem connected to a much deeper and much older tradition than other works. Theirs is a spirituality that is unsettling, theirs a God who is trouble, theirs a spirit who haunts. Their Jesus has flesh on his bones. I don't really know what to say other than that my mind and my spirit has been continually blessed by listening to "Control" whilst reading "The Lame Shall Enter First". If you know some good visual artists who exhibit this same spirit--if it even makes any sense--please let me know. I feel that's missing from this collection of cultural artifacts.
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