My First at No Tofu

One of the things keeping me from you is my weekly gig doing music reviews at No Tofu Magazine, a music and movie site. I scored the gig a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a good one. It keeps me in new music for free and gives me a byline — and deadlines. Deadlines are important. Without deadlines, I don’t write.

Here’s my first review. I cover an album by Josephine Foster called Graphic as a Star.

First things should come first: this is not a folk album. Josephine Foster is marketed as a folk singer, but the only thing folksy here is her use of an acoustic guitar. Acoustic guitars do not a folk album make. There are rhythms and rules to folk music – an earthy quality, a deep connection to a place and a people, hence folk. Josephine Foster is about as far from earthy as you can get. She’s subtle and ephemeral, and this record calls to mind a busker in the subway station or the singer at the coffeehouse show more than it does the excitement and violence of real folk music. All of which is to say the album is what it is, urban and contemporary.

Meanwhile, work is getting busy and my home connection remains spotty. But rest assured I remain vigilant.

An Exercise in Homesickness

I’ve lived in New York now for a little less than three months. I haven’t in those months much time to explore, and so I, with sorrowful reluctance, have to admit that I don’t know the city very well; from the JMZ station, I can see All Saints’ Church preening in the southern sky, while the twin spires of Most Holy Trinity decorate the north. This is Brooklyn, and its skyline is hotly contested by its churches, without the insurmountable competition of Manhattan-style towers. Manhattan, though, is where I normally go, or if I must venture deeper into Brooklyn, I go as a matter of habit to the Target store in Atlantic Place. Never as adventurous as I like to tell myself I am, I barely know my own neighborhood, largely restricting myself to the few streets in which I am directly invested, forming a quadrangle around Graham Avenue, my own street its southerly edge.

My time in the city being brief, then, and my life in it inexperienced, I haven’t found a single street that strikes with the same force as Monument Avenue back home in Richmond. I’m sure those streets exist – for a city this old and this big, with a population as diverse and a history as controversial as it possesses, there have to be such streets – but none of them have popped up before me with the same starkness Monument presents. I have found no places that scream with history and controversy and fire, none violent in their proclamations, none so fierce.

Monument is a pretty street, broad and well-manicured. One of those easy, ambling streets like the Champs-Elysees in Paris, it’s cradled on either side by Beaux-Arts and Queen Anne-style houses, elegant in their narrow slots. The yards are well-kept by fiat of a neighborhood association with powers rumored to be nigh-dictatorial and the sidewalks lack Richmond’s otherwise-pervasive cracks. Long stretches of road are not even paved at all, but surfaced with carefully-lain brick that’s a pleasure to see and a pain to traverse. By every account, it’s one of the prides of the city, along with the old-world cobblestone of Shockoe Bottom and the creepy-chic of Hollywood Cemetery, in which four presidents are buried if you count Jefferson Davis. I’m not sure if I should.

Occasionally, as you make your way down Monument, you’ll notice the reason the street got its decidedly-uncreative name: it’s positively littered with statues, primarily of Confederate generals. This city being the former Confederate capitol, it’s really only natural, a sort of perfunctory recognition of the past and the Lost Cause story. You know the story. It’s the story we grew up with, that the South may have lost the Civil War, but they died valiantly for their homes and families in defense of a cause in which they fervently believed: independence. It’s easy to see how naturally it fits into America’s own tale, with such grace it aligns as an antithesis of the Revolutionary War. Both were caused by threats to a region’s economic life, taxes in the one, the abolition of slavery in the other. And in Richmond – really through the whole of Virginia – this is really very hard to forget. It’s everywhere.

Any quick walk through the city’s old quarters fruit: here, where this Richmond Police Department parking garage stands, is where J.E.B. Stuart died in the home of his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Brewer, of wounds sustained during the Battle of the Yellow Tavern; here is where the fire that destroyed the city was set by evacuating Confederate soldiers, leaving a smoldering corpse behind them; here is where Jefferson Davis lived, the so-called White House of the Confederacy, a small building lacking every grandeur one would expect from so damned high a name. This city is a corpse, really; hollowed out and repurposed, but a corpse all the same. It’s almost adrift in its history.

So there, on Monument, there you see the statues. First, in Stuart Court, flanked by two churches, in the shadow of a white and graceful apartment building, is J.E.B. Stuart himself, who died in that parking garage. His pedestal is very informative, giving us his name, his dates, his accomplishments, so that we might look at this horseriding hero and know  exactly why he deserves a statue, tall and cast in bronze and forever gazing into the heart of the city.

Then comes Stonewall Jackson. There’s a little less on his statue. “Stonewall Jackson,” it reads, 1824-1863. He too is atop a horse, the classic equestrian. Dying as he did, he’s a bit larger than Stuart. This pattern repeats itself with Robert E. Lee (whose statue reads nothing but “LEE” as no further explanation is necessary) and Jefferson Davis and Matthew Maury. And then things get odd.

Facing away from the city, almost resentfully, is Arthur Ashe. Ashe was a tennis player native to the city, one of the all-time greats, who died of complications due to AIDS in 1993. It’s an ugly statue with an ugly history. Now, I have nothing against Arthur Ashe. I don’t know much about him — I don’t follow tennis — but if he deserved a statue, he certainly deserved an attractive one. What he got was a statue designed by a committee. It’s squat and uninspiring. Intended to celebrate both his tennis career and his literacy advocacy, it shows him standing amidst reaching children, in polo shirt and trousers, holding aloft both a tennis racket and two books. It’s sloppy symbolism; the reaching children (I suppose reaching after education) look more desperate than eager, and the looming racket is almost threatening. Ultimately, it looks like he stole these books from the children and is about to beat them senseless for trying to get them back.

I remember the mess trying to get this thing installed. There was endless debate over whether a tennis player deserved to be among these great leaders of men. Some criticized the irony of having a black man among Civil War generals. In the end the statue was installed, facing away from Richmond in protest (of what, exactly, isn’t explained).

Context

KeMiRo posting:

One of my college art professors and an award winning editorial illustrator in his own right, Robert Meganck, has a great read on the importance of context in our society.  I felt it a worthy read as any other and had to share it with you guys.

On January 12, at 7:51 a.m. a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeve T-shirt and Washington Nationals baseball cap positioned himself against a wall next to the L’enfant Plaza Metro station. He pulled a violin out of its’ case, turned the case around, put a few dollars in it as seed money and began to play.

During the next 43 minutes while he preformed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. After 3 minutes, one middle aged man turned his head to listen before moving on. Shortly after, a women threw a buck in the case. In the time that he played, seven people stopped for a moment to listen, 27 gave money for a total of $32 and change.

The violinist was Joshua Bell, a onetime child prodigy and an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days prior to the Metro station performance, he played to a filled house at Boston’s Symphony Hall where OK seats went for $100.

The violin was a $3.5 million Stradivarius. The music was some of the most beautiful classical music ever written.

More at the jump.  Maybe Brian and or myself can address this later ourselves (when my plate isn’t piled so high).

One love.

Singing in the rain, remastered!

By George Lucas

Ambiguity

As of my beginning writing this, it’s about 4 pm, Monday the fifth of October. I promised to begin regular blogging again today, but my connection is not cooperating.

I am a big fan of burrito places. My favorite restaurant chain in the world is Chipotle; I could eat there every single day if I though I could afford/get away with it; it is my great cross that I cannot do either. I have gone through stretches where I’ve eaten there or at Qdoba – effectively the exactly same restaurant – daily. The food is exquisite, the service excellent, the prices reasonable. In fact, as a testament to the considerateness of the staff, I have a small story to tell. On two or three separate instances, I have been stopped in the middle of my order  — chicken burrito, pinto beans, hot sauce, sour cream and cheese – and informed that the pinto beans are cooked with bacon grease. Baffled, I say “That’s ok,” and they shrug and move on. It’s only on getting to my seat that it hits me: they thought I was Jewish.

Now, this is not an entirely unexpected phenomenon; I have the Italian features of my dad with my mom’s pale English skin. The result is sort of broadly Mediterranean, and I’ve been mistaken for Greek and Middle Eastern alongside Jewish. But I’m certainly not furiously Jewy; I’m ambiguous enough that such a leap certainly wouldn’t have been warranted were it not for one little thing: my hat.

Since 2005 or 2006 I’ve been in possession of a broad knit skullcap, having first realized they looked good on me after my mom purchased me a cheap Jamaican hat while she was on a Caribbean cruise. I upgraded to one with a more muted and less pan-African color scheme during my whole Judaism phase. I liked having a religious signifier which, if imprecise, certainly made clear to the casual onlooker that I took this part of my life seriously and served as a reminder to myself as to who I was and what I was trying to do, even as it advertised my own religious confusion.

To some extent, though, I really liked that ambiguity. I was intoxicated at the thought that, as I biked through the Fan the people I passed would think “check out that big Jewish guy.” It seemed like I was sneaking into another camp and passing for a member, partaking, if surreptitiously and in shallow breaths, of another culture and way of being. I was mistaken at least once for Muslim, but by and large I was assumed to be a Jew (once by a ridiculously gorgeous waitress; it was all I could to not run with it), and that gave me a great deal of satisfaction. Not that I was ashamed of my Christianity, but I was dealing with grave doubts and I was, I suppose, trying on this other identity. I eventually built up something of a reputation as “the Catholic in the yarmulke.” It was all in the hat.

But, to speak honestly, I’m a natural and studied contrarian. I like straddling the middle and moving through identities. I’m a conservative with liberals, and a liberal with conservatives. With anarchists I am a statist, while statists find me maddeningly anarchical. With protesters I decry protest, while I prod those who believe everything is great. I’m no patriot, but I love my country. I’m no pacifist, but I’m opposed to war. I’m a linguistic purist who embraces change. I’m a prude who curses. I’m a moralist who sins. I’m a collectivist to libertarians, a socialist to followers of the free market, a know-it-all to teachers and a believer in the face of doubt. Not to say I don’t have things I believe in, but to me one of the great strengths of Catholicism is its ability to weave between ideology, and thus allowing me to assume a number of ideological aliases for the sake of argument. I live in ambiguity. It is, I suppose, my natural milieu.

I think it was easier to embrace that ambiguity, though, in Richmond; while I lived on a university campus which roiled in its diverse population, there weren’t any entrenched ethnic or religious communities. In inhabiting that middle zone, I wasn’t encroaching on anybody; I could listen to Hasidic reggae and Buddhist rap and go to the Muslim film festival and dream about being crucified and at most I would Irish up the blood of some university kids. 0I live now, however, in New York City, in a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, not far from a large Hasidic colony, in walking distance to five Catholic churches, two synagogues and at least one mosque. This is a place of strictly delineated ethnic and religious identities. I’m not sure this is a place where ambiguity can thrive.

I suppose the time of experimentation is over.

Re: Saints in Paradise Part III

WHOAZ, Kemiro reporting in, it’s been a while (it usually is) but I was thinking about this and what it means, or at least how I understand it…and this 3rd post got the wheels turning — I wanna take a stab at it.

(off topic: I think it’s funny that spell check doesn’t correct the word ‘wanna’)

Note: Part of my argument was skewed against a misread point that Brian made, that God made man to sin and not made man capable of sin, which puts a different spin on everything, but I reallllly don’t feel like revising this whole thing line by line, so just kinda read it and get the jist of it, the big picture, aight? Ciao ~<3

If Paradise on Earth is pointless, is Heaven pointless?  The world beyond this one that we aspire to; not just in death, but in life here.  I find that when Jesus is referring to ‘Inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven’ in the gospel he doesn’t just mean, the place we go when we die, but making it “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” If war, poverty and suffering, even competition ended overnight, while giving glory to God, here on Earth, is that a failure?  Is that a life bereft of meaning or purpose?

Lets posit that God knew that Eve either would eat the fruit of knowledge, or she wouldn’t.  But he knew that we *could* sin.  Because if God knows what we will do then free will is an illusion.  Rather, lets propose that God knows all that we are capable of within our universe, every possible choice and every possible consequence.  God didn’t create us to fall.  God created us before any other reason, to love us.  He created us in this Earthly paradise, knowing that if we fell from that Grace, he would be there to love us through it all anyway.  He would be there to send Noah, to send Moses, to send, ultimately Christ Jesus.

And with Noah and Moses, again, choice is what carries us forward.  God chooses us all the time, and we turn away, afraid.  The story begins with God choosing us but the story continues because they- the chosen ones – choose.

God’s creation, Man (and Woman), disobeyed God, and in doing so, chose death.  God could have forgiven Adam and Eve right on the spot, but what would they have gained from that? What would they have learned?  What does any loving, responsible parent do to a child who gravely misbehaves?  They punish them.  They discipline them.  The old testament is basically humanity’s discipline (our, whooping, our time-out, if you will) at the hands of the God who loves us. And when God saw that the time was right, he raised us again, in the ultimate sacrifice of Christ.  He freed us from Death, the Parent brought the Child out of their sulking, weeping solitude.

Man has free will, but men are finite beings under an infinite God.  Whatever we can possibly throw at him, he knows the front and back of any path we choose.  If I got in my car right now and left everything behind and just drove until I ran outta gas without a cent to my name, God would be ready for that.  Parents don’t have children so those children can “suffer and sacrifice and so on,” they have children because their love is great enough that it can’t help but extend from them to creation.  That love has to manifest as knew life, and then, new love.  We raise our children to be good, but when they are bad, we have to be ready to deal with it.  Knowing that misbehavior, those steps backward aren’t the end of them, that we can still be loving, be loved, and be holy.

God isn’t one possible outcome, He is every possible outcome, and they all lead back, to Him.

(and to bring it back to 1)

The problem with the Trek universe is that God isn’t present, not that the world is perfect.  It’s not perfect…. because God isn’t there. Our ultimate purpose in this life, never mind the fictional one, is to give glory to God.  We do that through our actions, loving each other, and teaching each other, through the highs and lows of love. We do that in our prayer, our worship, our behavior, and our charity to our neighbor.  It’s when we do these things that we are closest to God and the most alive.  But without the ultimate force of love in the universe guiding us it doesn’t matter if the world is in total harmony or completely war-torn and starving to death.  From my own personal experience, three things I know of have brought me the closest, within inches, of God:  Making love to a woman, great acts of spontaneous generosity, and fearing for my life/safety.  On a gut level everyone pursues these in some form or another as best they know how.  Some people just don’t see religion as ‘exciting.’   [In Trek] We’ve supposedly ‘transcended’ religion, faith in God.  But in that universe we haven’t transcended anything, we’ve just thrown it (and thus, ourselves) away.

One love.

From Penny Arcade, on Marvel <3 Disney

Click for the jump.

What’s old is new again

And funny.

Thoughts on adoption?

Click for full size. This was an actual conversation.

It’s good to be Spider-Man.

Click for the full size.