A list of things that are true

1. I am in Nashville.
2. I am at the Flying Saucer.
3. I am smoking Pembroke.
4. I am drinking draught Abita Root Beer.
5. My soul is Happy.

Frank Capra and Ayn Rand

Here is one of my favorite posts from one of my favorite blogs that compares how we think about the main characters in The Fountainhead and It's a Wonderful Life. Enjoy!

I defy you...

To watch Sweeney Todd and tell me that Anthony doesn't look like a cross between Hillary Swank and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast.

I saw the film Christmas night and thought it was excellent. I think that it should get consideration for, but not win, best picture, and I think that Johnny Depp should get serious consideration for best actor. Helena Bonham Carter was outstanding as well.

I'm not generally a fan of musicals, but the macabre aspects of the story helped it avoid many of my normal complaints. Some of the music did tend to get repetitive, but not too bad, and one benefit of seeing the movie instead of the play was that when two characters are singing separate things it was fairly easy to discern them both. As I've already noted, the acting was fantastic. And of course Tim Burton was the perfect choice for the surreal morbidity of the story. The whole notion of a musical is fantastic, and he provides that fantasy with his colors and sets. It should be noted though, that this includes Sin City-type blood, that spurts in a way reminiscent of the first Kill Bill. And the violence is by no means off-screen.

I did have one significant problem with the whole film, which was the ending. The secondary plot is never wrapped up, and I found it bothersome. I think that the author and/or Burton worried that doing so would detract from the dirk climax, but I believe that there was a way around it. I think that if secondary protagonist had been shown leaving London singing the lines that Todd sings in the beginning of the film that there would have been closure that remained true to the film. (Sorry to be so vague, but I don't want to spoil anything).

All in all I'd give the film about a 9 out of 10. Anybody else seen it? What did you think?

Small group hazing and I

The Holy Observer is my (distant) second favorite organ behind skin (skin is the largest organ, it provides a barrier against most bacteria and viruses, and it prunes in the tub... there's really no competition).

Anyway, the HO has a very important story in its latest issue that blows the whistle on small group hazing. I myself have been subjected to this recently at my own church. As some of you may have noticed, John made me yell out a request for "Free Bird" during a lull at our recent Christmas sing (when in fact I would have much preferred "Stairway to Heaven"). Furthermore, I was forced on three occasions to clean Allan's apartment while wearing a French maid's costume that was much skimpier than anything I would normally don.

Humiliating? Yes. Degrading? Yes... But at least I didn't have to deal with Joseph and the cream cheese.

Some good blues

This past weekend I stopped by St. Louis on my way home for Christmas break and had a great time (car problems and icy roads notwithstanding). I got to see good friends from college and have some light dinner conversation about covenental theology, training up children, and the ethics of a range of embryonic procedures. I got to hang out with Wes of Wilderness Wonderings (which I couldn't recommend more highly) and his lovely wife Steph. We discussed adoption, some great ideas on imagination and Christian living, and poor thinking skills (all three of which I hope to post on soon). AND I got to hear some amazing blues.

This blues was provided in the confines of the renovated BB's Jazz, Blues, and Soups (not to be confused with BB Kings mediocre chain). The good BB's is a deceptively large blues bar located at 700 S. Broadway in St. Louis. They have music every night of the week, usually jazz earlier in the week, and blues for the back half. If you're ever in town I highly recommend it.

I also highly recommend the two acts I saw last Saturday:

1. The Bel Airs
Several bands have sported this name, but these guys hail from Columbia, Missouri. They're a three piecer and they play rhythm and blues, jump blues, and basically anything blues-like that is conducive to dancing. I wouldn't recommend their cd's, but their live shows are phenomenally fun. This was my third time to see them, and I was sad that I had worn my body down from the week of paper writing such that I was unable to enjoy them for more than a set.

2. Joe Price
That said, I in no way felt cheated. Remember in That Thing You Do, when the black valet is suspicious of Guy Patterson and quizzes him to see if he's worthy of being told the best jazz club in the city? After Guy answers some very esoteric questions the valet exclaims: Get in the car. GET. IN. THE CAR! That's how I felt the whole time I was listening to Joe Price(often accompanied by his wife Vicki).

Joe plays a brand of blues that is, in the literal sens of both these words, unusual and compelling. For most of the show he was picking and playing slide and Vicki was playing an electric resonator. At one point though, Joe picked up a gorgeous, early thirties National resonator. He could also be considered a multi-instrumentalist as his foot stomping is purposeful and driving and integral to much of the music (much like Hooker, though, unsurprisingly, with more complex rhythms).

It took me a while to figure out how to describe the style that the Price's play, because the electricity threw me off the track. In fact Joe plays electric guitar, but in the country style, much the way that bluesman first played electric before they developed separate styles adapted to the medium (most notably Memphis and Chicago blues). The best way to describe Joe's playing is as a cross between Elmore James and the Muddy Waters field recordings (with a little bit of John Lee thrown in for good measure).

I'll leave you with a (poor, unfortunately) sample for your listening enjoyment:

An Excuse and a Video

So just as soon as I get a compliment on the consistency of my postings I have my longest drought yet. Well done there.

Anyway, hopefully with papers finally out of the way and having made my way back homewards I'll have some good stuff coming for the next few days. For now, I will leave you with another Michel Gondry video. This one is Beck's "Cellphone's Dead." Enjoy.

Umm...

I love Mythbusters, and once I found this I didn't really see any way I could not post it. But, umm... I... yeah...

Led Zeppelin

So Led Zeppelin has actually played a successful reunion concert...


Crazy.


For those of you wondering, late drummer John Bohnom's son Jason filled in for his da'. Go here if you want to read about the concert in a bad Rolling Stone article that sets the record for most effusions of praise since the first publishing of the Psalms.

There are two things that distract me, yea three that are ruining my life

Links to three procrastination enablers:

1. At the Movies
I love movies and I love movie reviews, and I knew the second I found this site that it would be a bane. I've more than once spent hours at a time tracing trails of reviews that play like extended versions of "Six degrees from Kevin Bacon."

2. Google Reader
Used to be that I just had a group of about six blogs called "Daily Blogs" in my Firefox bookmarks. I would open them all once or maybe twice a day and check to see what was going on. Now with Google reader the annoyance of having to open all the blogs is gone, so I have feeds to a score of blogs that update throughout the day. While I didn't have time to bother with mildly interesting posts when I had all my daily blogs to slog through, now I feel compelled to read each and every thing that pops up throughout the day.

3. World Wide Words
I mentioned in a recent post that this website was a new favorite. And so it is. I find the Q&A section to be a particularly excellent procrastination tool.

Paul McCartney Videos

I'm not really a very big Paul McCartney fan, but I've been constantly listening to the new songs "Dance Tonight" and "Ever Present Past." Both of the videos are fairly interesting too. "Dance Tonight" is by Michel Gondry, the greatest music video director ever, and stars Mackenzie Crook (Gareth, from The Office) and Natalie Portman. Enjoy!

Good ol' Betty

It's a bit of a strangled-route-and-left-at-the-traffic-lights path, but when an incredulous person says something like, "300 yard drive my ass!" they are actually using a descendant of the phrase, "All my eye and Betty Martin!" (Hands up if you've heard that one before... anyone?).

I hearby propose...

That followers of Feyerabend be labeled "Feyerabanditos."

Frost, and saving the semantic phenomenon

I usually hate when people say something like, "I want to live my life to the fullest with no regrets!" The statement is usually meant in one of two ways, both of which are complete foolishness. That said, though, I do think there is a way to save the phrase.

Here are the two ways most people mean the statement (and my problems with them). Then my attempt to make it work:

1. No regrets in general
To regret something is to wish that one had acted differently. Clearly no one can ever live a life in which they never wish they had acted differently (unless it is a life utterly bereft of reflection). "Even the wisest cannot see all ends."

2. No regrets about missed opportunities
What a lot of people mean by the phrase, is that they don't want to get to the end of their lives and say something like, "Gee, I really wish I would have gone base jumping with a penguin named Harry strapped to my chest." But missed opportunities are just as inevitable as unforeseen consequences.

To testify to all of this, here is the most overplayed poem in history (except maybe "A Dream Deferred"): Robert Frost's "Road Not Taken."

The obvious thrust of the verse is that a thoughtful person will always and forever be faced with mutually exclusive choices, and will never be able to know what might have been if they had chosen aught else. The sigh that Frost will heave is indeed a sigh of regret.

3. Living without meta-regret
There is one way in which I could accept the notion of "living without regret." This is that a person determines the values and rules that will guide his every move. These grant him a calculus by which to act in all situations, that he believes will minimize regrettable choices and actions. Then, at the end of his life, he may say that he has no regrets about maintaining that optimal calculus (even though it did not eliminate all first level regret).

A like mind

I was joyed today when I came across the Touchstone magazine article, "Top Twenty Books Nobody Reads." Why? Because number one was dead on:

1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. C. S. Lewis: "I never met a man who said he used to like The Faerie Queene." It's the longest poem in English (26,000 lines), possibly the greatest (Paradise Lost and The Canterbury Tales are the only competitors), and by no means an easy read for us nowadays. Hawthorne used to read it to his daughters by the fireside, but that was back in the day when people enjoyed poetry. The poem is about -- what is it not about? Love, sex, the body, the soul, the nation, the Christian faith, matter and spirit, justice, courtesy, time and eternity. It has the greatest ending of any poem I have ever read -- almost an ending fit for all poetry, the end of ends.

I can't wait to get to the end now, though I'm surprised that it's so good. After all, Spenser only completed six cantos of an intended twelve.