Undercover.

Wye Oak covers The Kinks

The AV Club's midway through a feature where they invite bands to their office to play cover songs. I'm getting more into this than I should, and it's clear that the quality varies widely. You could even say that the songs fall into three categories. The best of the bunch obviously have had some work put into the arrangement and the performance. The second tier consists mostly of stripped-down versions, performed well, but without much transformation. The bad entries are the ones that seem thrown together with lousy harmonies and improvised instrumentation.

First-rate:

• Wye Oak - Strangers (by The Kinks): The most recent entry is by far my favorite. Wye Oak have done right by the original, but added some ripping solos. Jonathan Meiburg from Shearwater sings the harmonies wonderfully.
  
• Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Everybody Wants to Rule the World (by Tears for Fears): The series led off with Ted Leo, who set the bar so high that the next seven entries seemed pretty disappointing.
  
• The Fruit Bats - One on One (by Hall and Oates): I'm really glad that the Fruit Bats grabbed this one, because the lead singer knows how to sing, and I doubt that most of the other singers could have pulled off the song's range and key change at the chorus. The Fruit Bats also chose to take the song seriously, which was good. Compare with Cursive's annoying deconstructive approach (below), and you'll get some insight into what makes an effective pop cover.
  
• The Clientele - Paper Planes (by M.I.A.): It's hard to do this song without the gunshots and cash register, but the cool violins make up for it. Again, playing the song without winking at the camera is the right move.
  

Pretty Solid:

• Ben Folds - Say Yes (by Elliott Smith): Ben Folds does a good job with this one, and it's tempting to put it in the top category. But I don't think you can get within striking distance of the lovely original without a larger band; Elliott Smith completely owned the stripped-down performance. Still, it's definitely a worthy tribute.
  
• Justin Townes Earle - Atlantic City (by Bruce Springsteen): I like the picking pattern and the desperation in Earle's voice, but he can't touch the Boss.
  
• Alkaline Trio - Web in Front (by Archers of Loaf): I was disappointed in this one. There's nothing wrong with Alkaline Trio's performance, but the original is a quick, melodic, musical version of a punch in the gut, and I didn't get the same urgency here. More guitar work might have helped, or a harmonica, or something.
  

Poor effort:

• Maritime - Enjoy The Silence (by Depeche Mode): I feel bad about putting this one so low, but it just didn't grab me. I don't know the original, and while I like a bunch of songs by the Promise Ring, that affection doesn't carry me through to Maritime.
  
• Retribution Gospel Choir - Kokomo (by The Beach Boys): They tried to have fun with it, but letting the drummer sing lead was probably a bad idea. It's nice that they like the song, though.
  
• Cursive - We Built This City on Rock and Roll (by Starship): Tim Kasher is singing terribly here. Maybe they like the original in a so-bad-it's-good way, but their approach exaggerates what's annoying in the song and ignores anything that might have been good about the original performance. This is exactly the opposite of what the Fruit Bats did, and you can see where it puts Cursive on the list.

There are fifteen songs to go, and of these I'm most excited to see who plays Superchunk's “Detroit Has A Skyline” or The Replacements’ “I Will Dare.”

Politics and LOST.

I've been wondering if there's a good way to tie LOST to politics. I'd wanted to chase the leadership angle that Noel Murray at the AV Club often writes about, but Brett McCracken at The Search has beaten me to it by a mile. I really like his explication of the show's geopolitical themes:

“As I reflect on the show having seen all six seasons, I think the central thematic tension of Lost has always been that of the global vs. the local, the big view vs. the narrow view, “for the greater good” vs. ‘my own private island.’

[…]

“The show presents a way forward for our chaotic, treacherous, ‘WTF?! Where are we??’ world. And the way forward is sacrificial love for our neighbor– ‘neighbor’ meaning our children and love interests, but also our broader global family… those who are very different from us and yet nevertheless struggling to make sense of ‘the island’ we all inhabit.”

The whole post is much longer, and all of it is worth reading. My attempts to come up with something similar kept foundering on the difficulty of pinning characters to the leadership styles of actual leaders — I thought I might have had something with a comparison between George W. Bush and Locke at the height of his man-of-faith phase, but I couldn't really make it fit. But where my allegorical readings stumbled, McCracken's analysis of themes really succeeds.

Barth in Korea.

So did you ever wonder how Barthian theology has been received in South Korea? Wonder no more: this post from Faith & Theology will put you on the path to discovery. This in particular is really interesting:

“…even today a huge number of Korean pastors and theologians view Barth’s theology as a dangerous ‘liberal’ deviation from Calvinist orthodoxy. Young-Gwan Kim’s study doesn’t go into much detail about this Calvinist context of Korean theology; but I think it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of Korean Barth-reception. Protestant liberalism has never taken root in Korea, and this fact alone has a decisive influence on the way Barth’s work is read and received. It helps to explain why Barth’s avowedly anti-liberal theology could be condemned as a ‘liberal’ threat by so many Korean theologians and institutions.”

“Can a Scientist Pray?”

If there were any easy way for me to get to New York City on a Thursday evening, I'd go see John Polkinghorne give a lecture called “Can a Scientist Pray?” at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, this Thursday at 6:30 pm. Hopefully the event will be well-attended despite my absence.

Information here.

The spirit of Charlotte's architecture.

W.J. Cash, 1941: “Probably it would mean nothing if I said that the skyscrapers which were going up were going up in towns which, characteristically, had no call for them … for it would merely be said that the Middle West was doing something of the same silly sort. But if I told you that they were often going up in towns (like Tar Heel Charlotte and Winston and Greensboro, or South Carolina's Columbia and Greenville and Spartanburg) which had little more use for them than a hog has for a morning coat…”

Robert A.M. Stern, 1986: “[Uptown Charlotte has] the ugliest collection of third-rate buildings in America. Charlotte has defined a type unto itself — a town that has grown very fast in a very mediocre way. There’s no place like Charlotte.”

(I should confess that I'm immensely fond of the exterior of the Hearst Tower in Charlotte, though I've never been inside. Actually, now that I think of it, none of the interesting buildings were around in 1986. Hopefully our city center is a little better now.)

Milliner on beauty: Barth and Maritain.

I'm more or less recording this for my own reference, since I have absolutely nothing to add, but Matthew Milliner's been on a roll, writing-wise.

He wrote a blog post called “Beauty and the Barthians,” which explains why, for all the good things to be found in Barth's theology, Barth is a dead end as far as theological aesthetics are concerned. I'm just dipping my toes into Barthian waters now, and I'm really glad that Milliner has already mapped out how Barth relates to Hart, whose book The Beauty of the Infinite I read and enjoyed several years ago.

And then, a few days after showing us a dead end, Milliner points to the more promising paths explored by Jacques Maritain in an article for Public Discourse about “The New Maritainians.” Clearly, I'm going to have to chase down some of the books he's mentioning here.

Really, millinerd.com just keeps getting better and better.

An exchange about David Foster Wallace.

New York Magazine's Vulture blog is running a discussion panel about a recently published long-form interview of David Foster Wallace. The interview was conducted in 1996 or thereabouts, around the time Infinite Jest came out. It will probably be quite some time before I get around to reading it, for the following reason, which was offered by Garth Risk Hallberg:

The urge to turn our dead artists into motivational speakers is perhaps a symptom of the peculiarly American disease Wallace is concerned to treat in his fiction. It works well enough for pop music, which after all is an art already made out of sound bites; I'm as heartened as the next guy when I pass that ride on Coney Island with an airbrushed Tupac and Biggie presiding over the kiddie cars, friends in death, as they couldn't be in life. But as someone who was imaginary friends with David Foster Wallace, there's something unsettling about the compelling simulacrum this book offers.

It's maybe unfair to pit an interview against a novel this way, or to judge a book by its cover. But if you're really interested in Wallace's "astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world," and are new to it, Vulture readers, don't start with this book, and don't listen to the revisionists who tell you DFW's journalism is his great achievement. Get thee to a bookstore, and go read Infinite Jest.

I don't have enough global experience to know if this is an exclusively American danger, but a book-length interview seems like a way to try to get around wrestling with the books and stories and essays.

Weird drain.

I have wanted to link to this for a while. It's a blog post about a strange drain in a reservoir, designed in such a way that it presents “an edge over which it is impossible to look”:

“Because you can see the endless walls of the abyss both below you and facing you, nothing is hidden except what is down the hole. Standing on the rim, you are very close to a mystery: a space receiving the light of the sun into which we cannot see.”

Really, take a look.

(via Alan Jacobs)

Revelation.

“In some strands of evangelicalism, especially in fundamentalism, God's revelation is depicted as a static deposit of truth that is directly accessible to man's reason. But this subverts the idea that God is sovereign even in his revelation, that God remains hidden until he gives himself to be known. The knowledge and grace of God are not simply available to man even in the Bible, and this means that God remains the Master and man the servant even in the area of the knowledge of God.”

-Donald Bloesch, in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. I: God, Authority, & Salvation

I'm only about fifty pages in, but I'm enjoying this book. It's succinct, highly readable, and the author draws on a wide variety of sources. It's got to be good for me to take occasional tours across the wide domain of evangelical theology. One should know one's tradition.

Arkansas castles.

Someone is building a medieval fortress in rural Arkansas. At first this seems like another one of those weird Americana things, like the Nashville Parthenon, but the Ozark Medieval Fortress folks are trying to use actual medieval building techniques, so it seems like there's actually a whole lot to be learned from this project.

Anyways, if I'm ever within seventy miles of this place I'm going to do whatever I can to make a visit.

I have a feeling that it is going to be an important place in the post-apocalypse.

Via Eve Tushnet.

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.

Tourists and pilgrims.

I am always impressed by Matthew Milliner. Here's something he had to say about tourists and pilgrims:

“The tourist seeks interesting places. The pilgrim seeks to realize the way that a particular place freshly articulates the truths of faith. Hence the pilgrim, like the tourist, can be deeply impressed by the scale of the Parthenon, but equally overwhelmed by Mars Hill just below, where Paul's message, then mocked, would soon make of the that Parthenon a church. The pilgrim, like the tourist, will be awestruck by the Roman forum, but struck all the more - looking out at the mushrooming church domes over the Eternal City skyline - that the forbidden religion overcame imperial might. Pilgrims, like tourists, can’t help but be affected by the pyramids, only to then sense the shattering contrast of the Sinai wilderness, where the man-made pyramids are dwarfed by far larger natural ones, and where Pharonic splendor is both tempered and judged.”

If I kept quoting the good stuff I'd just steal the entire post.

Self-indulgence.

I am thinking about using the League to post some of my late-night Garageband covers of North Carolina bands. Is this a good idea or a bad one?

Bad ideas.

I wrote something for the League on Friday and Saturday, realized it was sort of dumb on Sunday, and posted it anyway on Monday. The first comment is right: I do make mountains out of molehills. I spend lots of time on conceptual points with no direct application to anything at all. Sorry! But I'm not going to change.