Top Ten: Black (Not African American) Mix

10. Tribute - Tenacious D. I actually like this song too well for it to be in this position on the list...except for the part where the title nor the "artist" has nothing to do with black. However - lead singer? Jack Black. Go me. A classic of my high school days, an intriguing little ballad, with the delightful point that this is not the greatest and best song in the world - this is just a tribute. Saw these cats live with Weezer and Jimmy Eat World in high school. They had stomp rocket pyrotechnics. Hot to death.

9. War Pigs - Black Sabbath. Although Cake's cover is pretty song, I know it best from Guitar Hero II. It blows my mind how effective their pauses are, and how the song manages to hold energy despite it being nine years long. Even so - another untouchable classic.

8. Little Black Back Pack - Stroke 9. Dude. Remember high school? Just a catchy little tune, light and playful on the chorus - perhaps a precursor to emo? This song is 100% pure high school for me.

7. Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden. And this one is middle school. An alternative classic - though I hear it might be "Black-eyed Son"? I'm not quite sure. Chris Cornell's voice rocks my mind.

6. That Old Black Magic - Spike Jones. An old family classic. Spike Jones' take is the most...soulful...I've ever heard. =P You can find other covers out there, but I think Jones has the definitive version.

5. Supermassive Black Holes - Muse. Not my favorite Muse song, but fits other criteria. Muse's harmony/backup work perpetually impresses, and this song is no exception. This album, and its key single, Knights of Cydonia, are college songs for me.

4. Welcome to the Black Parade - My Chemical Romance. For some reason, this song always tags in my head as "anthemic." Something about it hooks to nationalistic/patriotic music for me (appropriate, considering the parade imagery, etc. I heard this one on my radio station in WA...how do they come up with this stuff?

3. Paint it Black - Rolling Stones. A tune introduced to me by Guitar Hero III, with its irresistable Stonesian hook. Don't you ever just want to paint things black?

2. Heart Full of Black - Burning Brides. Another GH special, this one from GH1. This was the first song in GH that was uniquely mine amongst my group of friends. I still get pumped thinking about it.

1. Many Shades of Black - The Raconteurs. Preferable to racketeers, the Raconteurs bring a delightful retro feel (which seems to be on the resurgence everywhere I look) to the "I've broken up with you" song. Too addictive to be allowed - and I hope it's stuck in your head now.

Christ n' Culture II: Patristic SMACKDOWN

So there are these two early theologians: Augustine (of whom you may have heard) and Tertullian (of whom you may have heard if you are a CHURCH NERD). They were chillin', doing their early church father thing, living lives as Roman citizens, etc.

Now, Augustine, from time to time, was seen down at the show - which, in Rome of the time, meant the gladatorial games. These were brutal blood sports - think Gladiator meets Saw III. Yes, the honor of the slave, of combat, blah blah blah, but seriously folks - if you think we're voyeuristic? At least we don't generally cheer on the spectacle of real people being eaten by real bears. But Augustine went to these things sometimes, and hung out with his boys, at least partially as a ministry to those same heathens.

Tertullian, on the other hand, avoided these entertainments like the plague. Christians, he argued, should avoid anything which might detract from their love for/of and devotion to Christ. The entertainments were pure evil (to some degree) and should be shunned. Christians should be separate.

These have be come, due to the offices of one Paul Tillich, to be called the "Christ in Culture" (Augustine, kinda) and "Christ against Culture" (Tertullian) models. Christians should be in the world, but not of the world...well what the devil does that mean?

My thing, after Tillich's argument, is Christ Transforming Culture. We are here, but we want to be different from the ills of the societies that surround us, and we want those societies to be as much better as we can. If that's through reading and espousing good literature, or even writing good films and books, more power to us. But the first step, as always, is to examine the culture in which we live, particularly (in my case) through film and the sci-fi/fantasy genres.

So, I hope that answers your question, Dawn.

Any other ones troubling you out there, O Internets? Shoot 'em. I got time.

Christ n' Culture

So, Dawn quite fairly asks me the question that has defined much of the last few months for me. Why do I study films at Princeton Theological Seminary? Why am I reading Fantasy Literature for class? Whence the obsession with popular culture?

First: You are what you eat. Nobody seems particularly inclined to dispute the truth of this statement. The foods you input into your body will affect your body's overall health.

It seems logical to state, then, that you are also what you see. Films go into your mind - they're a visually powerful medium. How often have you seen a shot or an image in a movie that, later, you couldn't quite get out of your head?

Same holds true for books. You are what you read. This I can say even more definitely. In this one respect, I regret playing Dungeons and Dragons in my youth - I can never quite elude the paradigm of Lawful and Chaotic, Good and Evil in my own head. The books that I read as a child, and the books I read now, shape the way I see and interact with the rest of the world.

Therefore, it seems to me that I can be a better and more critical reader and moviegoer. I can consciously choose to accept or reject the worldviews of everything that I read, from a covertly Marxist opinion piece on the BBC today, to Fight Club, a favorite film of mine, to the Twilight series, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and about which I may have more to say later.

The best way I know of, though, to become just such a careful thinker, is to practice. I think a generation of pastors trained to think carefully about popular culture and how best to interact with it can only be of eventual benefit to the Church.

Second...well, I think second will wait a day.

Pathetique

So how's this for a sad state of affairs?

I have a writing assignment for my Children's and Fantasy Lit. class. Gotta write 20 minutes a day. Doesn't necessarily have to be for my writing project, although that's encouraged, but I must write for 20 minutes, at the very least, every day.

I am so uninspired, not only by my fantasy project, but by EVERY OTHER PROJECT ON MY LIST that I have been forced to resort to my BLOG to fill out the time.

...

I was writing today (which doesn't count - work-related) on some good advice for bloggers - how to create and maintain a good blog. As a part of the project, I looked back over this blog and read some old posts, both good and ill. The only really embarrassing one was one where I got frustrated with the post towards the end and commented on how bad it was. Sort of tongue-in-cheek, I told these aspiring bloggers to not permit their audience to see the man behind the curtain.

And now I'm doing it again, in a neverending spirally cycle of self-referential doom.

Five minutes for this post. For the record.

DOUBLE FEATURE: A Trip to Bountiful / The Unbelievable Truth

We have here a curious duality - one movie whose title is completely obvious, and another which, after two viewings, I still can't really fully describe. Let's dive in, shall we?

Vital Statistics:
A Trip to Bountiful, 1985
Rating: K

A Trip to Bountiful is based on a stage play by Horton Foote, which I was fortunate enough to see at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, OR. I don't remember much of the stage production, except a crystal image of the abandoned house, picked out in oranges and browns. The play I recall as being very autumnal, which the film is strikingly not. This movie is a summer movie, a summer movie set in southwest Texas of the early 1940s. It's the story of a highly dysfunctional family (which I recall being better played onstage), and one woman's journey to return to her roots. It's a film loaded with hope, a "creation" film. It has one of my favorite hymns in it, and one of my mother's as well - "Softly and Tenderly," a classic old rooter.

As for theology...there's a definite connection between the idea of Bountiful (this woman's hometown) and Eden - a sense of loss and a desire to return to her roots. There's a strong distinction drawn between loving your neighbour and not. Some characters are cruel and spiteful - all the fellow-travelers are kind and helpful. This is, of course, promptly deconstructed when you begin to see the good intentions behind the cruelty and spite of the "evil." I was struck especially by the rather wistful portrayals of the nameless girl on the bus, and the sherriff. Might-have-beens connect with the desire to return to Eden. And once you get there...it helps. It puts you back on a half-remembered path. The journey and the destination mingle to create a new person, once you've walked the road.

That may have sounded a bit maudlin. The movie's kinda like that.


The Unbelievable Truth, 1989
Rating KJ-13

Have you, ever had a conversation where you and the other person weren't actually listening to one another? Not just "waiting for your turn to speak," I mean that you're both essentially monologuing on unrelated topics.

Imagine that, only it's a movie. The whole movie. There's a scene like that in the movie, but, in fact, the whole movie is kind of that way. We've talked a bit in class about film as a conversation, but in this conversation, whatever I might have tried to say to Hal Hartley, The Unbelievable Truth was going to go the direction he wanted it to go.

There's a continuous refrain with the main character: "Are you a priest?" "No, I'm a mechanic." And it sounds absurd. But there seems to be something in common there. I couldn't tell you what, but something.

This, thus far, has been my favorite of the movies, and is a contender for champion overall. We'll see.

*A note on the rating system. These are intended largely for my mother - sort of an old joke. They are as follows.

K - Mom, you will object to nothing in this movie.
KJ - Oh, I'd forgotten that scene. Whoops. Sorry.
KJ-13 - Okay, there are a few bits we're gonna fast-forward through...
F - Sorry, Mom. I broke the DVD.

Babette's Feast

So, the Barkeep would want me to mention that Babette's Gaestebud was directed by Gabriel Axel, and won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The original short story was written by Karen Blixen (Wikipedia also notes Isak Dinesen, with Blixen in parentheses - I'm going with the name in the credits), who also wrote the (oddly) familiar Out of Africa. I don't think I've seen it, but I've sure heard of it.
It occurs to me as I begin this post that I don't know exactly what I'm reviewing for. I'm tempted to just start with numbers, because they're much easier to spout, but that's not real criticism, so in spite of my temptation to award the thing "Four and a Half Jesuses," I'm going to try to confine the discussion to each film's theological message for me personally.
So the big word of the day is "balance." There's a temptation in Christianity towards "antinomianism," that is, a complete reliance on spirit in the body/spirit divide. We've been having trouble with various sects of this persuasion since slightly after the death of Christ, while at the same time we try to react against the materialist obsessions of the (insert decadent civilization here). Body matters, we want to say, but body is not all. Christ had a body - he also had a meaningful divine spirit.
From my end, Babette's Feast is a classic walking of the line. There is no condemnation of the piety of the community (while at the same time not quite endorsing it), and there's no overt endorsement of the delightful banquet - just a view of the pleasant results. The film seems to imply that there's room for both perspectives in a truly balanced view of the world.
I realize that's pretty surface, but I'm running on empty - I'll see if I have more for you tomorrow.

Film!

So, my class this J-term is "Theology in Film." I am the screener for the class, (I'm getting paid anytime there's a movie on, I think), and I get to watch a ton of movies, none of which I've ever seen before. Can't beat that with a stick.

So, this is my film review blog for the whole month of January. Expect multiplicities of posts! Scads of content! Ponies! Links! Ideas! Criticism out the Wazzoo From Which Criticism Should Not Come!

As a special bonus, the inhabitants of the House of Calamitous Intent have requested a movie outside of my class syllabus - I expect to oblige them on the second weekend of term. The Barkeep has been solicited for a further one - does anyone else have any theological film review requests? If you want me to talk about the place or treatment of God in a cinematic expression (including TV episodes), your wish is my command. I'm jazzed, you see.

So - that's the plan, starting tomorrow night, probably during my second viewing of Babbette's Feast.

(I might have lied about the ponies)