Music and misery.

This is relevant to the post I just wrote about Weezer over at The League.

"... some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

-From Nick Hornby's High Fidelity

Karl Barth / public faith.

"Faith means choosing between faith and unbelief, wrong belief and superstition. Faith is the act in which man relates himself to God as is appropriate to God. For this work takes place in a stepping out of neutrality towards God, out of any disavowal of obligation towards Him in our existence and attitude, out of the private sphere, into resoluteness, responsibility and public life. Faith without this tendency to public life, faith that avoids this difficulty, has become in itself unbelief, wrong belief, superstition. For faith that believes in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit cannot refuse to become public."

-Karl Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline

Video games will save the world.

I didn't like Jane McGonigal's TED talk that much on first listen, but the more I think about it, the more I think she's on to something.



All that time I spent playing Grand Theft Auto when I could have been doing useful things… McGonigal's right that the structure of achievement in video games gets at something important in human psychology. The most compelling video games out there find ways to give the player challenging-but-doable tasks. My favorite games made me feel like I was accomplishing a lot, though when I thought about it later I would always realize that I hadn't done much of anything. McGonigal's idea is to build "games" that give the player incentives to do little things. If somebody made a Facebook app that gave people arbitrary "points" every time they volunteered at a soup kitchen or worked at a habitat house or something, I bet some people would get really into it. McGonigal seems pretty sharp, so I hope she finds a way to create something along these lines that really works.

Big money and local politics.

When Citizens United came down, the national media quite naturally focused on how the ruling would affect national politics, which is where big money dukes it out with big money. But who was thinking about the little races? Certainly not me.

Thank goodness for Carter Wrenn. He's watching the battle between Alcoa Corporation and the Stanly County Commissioners over chemical dumping in Badin Lake. Here's the key final paragraph:

Alcoa’s an international behemoth conglomerate. Its Chairman is from Brazil, its President is from Germany, it’s partnered with the Chinese and its world headquarters is in Pittsburgh, old Andrew Mellon’s hometown. It smelts aluminum everywhere from Iceland to the Amazon Rainforest and its annual budget is bigger than the State of North Carolina’s – so what hope on earth do three local County Commissioners (who may raise $5000 in their entire campaigns) have of winning re-election if Alcoa with its $20 billion annual budget is dead-set on retiring them?

You ought to know that Wrenn played a major part behind the scenes of some of the roughest campaigns in recent NC history, so he knows a little something about the power of TV advertising.

OK so NOW I live in Baltimore.

Tonight I watched the Orioles while eating crabs and drinking Natty Boh. NOW I live in Baltimore. That's all I wanted to say.

Blogroll.

I've added FLG (Fear and Loathing in Georgetown) to the blogroll. The other day, FLG offered an interesting description of the variety of subject matter on his blog: there's no problem with “addressing both sex with inanimate objects, pirates, and also politics, philosophy, and economics.” That's about right. I should have added him this a while ago, but, you know, hiatus.

Charm city.

I've moved to Baltimore, Maryland, and I'll be here for a while. I hope that wandering around in a new city will give me more to write about, and that this blog will kick back into gear. But I can't yet offer any guarantees.