Are All Religions Equally True?
The Sisterhood
Can't stop me now
You are the quarry
We are the Amish
-- 9.30.04
Hemingway With Coffee
Dear coffee, I love you.
Reports of the end of the world have been greatly exaggerated.
St. Michael and all angels
Please help me.
-- 9.29.04
Ruth Franklin has a simply stunning essay on the religion and writing of Graham Greene. A must-read, especially if, like me, you too would take doubting Thomas as your patron.
Greene’s fundamental difficulty as a Christian was that he doubted his own ability to love God—to make the leap of faith, the unconditional surrender, that transforms a sinner into a saint. But his failings as a Christian were his virtues as a novelist, because the novelist’s dedication is to humanity, not divinity. If man truly is made in God’s image, then the distance between the two poles may not be as great as Greene thought. “Some of us have a vocation to love God,” he once prayed. “Some of us only have a vocation to love a human being. Please let my vocation not be wasted.” It was not.
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Also, while you're reading, pick up a copy of the Pulse today and check out John Totten's remarkable interview with Jeff Tweedy.
Speaking of death: Josiah has told the story of the Big Purple Van o' Love's breakdown on last night's Wilco road trip, though he left out the best details. Like the part where the serpentine belt snapped on the Interstate, leaving me driving with no automatic steering or automatic brakes, and how I navigated this disabled vehicle through the country's most curved off-ramp and coasted directly into (of all things) the parking lot of a huge Chevy dealership. From there began the challenge of getting all my passengers back to Chattanooga in other vehicles, fitting people into other carpools with a series of pleading cellphone calls. Thanks to many generous friends, everyone made it home. I will not bore you with details.
The BPVOL is back in Chattanooga action -- thanks in no small part to Mr. Chris Totten and his awesome VW hatchback transport service -- but that was likely her last extended road trip. We, the BPVOL and I, drove home today through the almost-autumn mountains, listened to Alan Jackson's "Livin' on Love," and remembered the good times. We agreed that most of them somehow involved Morris.
Was this whole bizzare two-trips-to-Nashville adventure worth it? Don't be silly. It was for Wilco.
When I first read Ron Rosenbaum's damning rebuff of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, I refused to believe it was true. (Especially the part about the sex-predator spirit medium.) I threw Diet Coke cans at the screen and cursed angry oaths; I begged Rosenbaum to offer me some respite from Kübler-Ross' pseudo-soothing jargon. But there was no use bargaining with an article, and I felt mighty low. Cried a little, yes. But now I've come to accept it: this is a great piece, a sharp critique of how an accepted bit of "science" is no more than a secular religion of death, a "gauzy romanticism of self-examination, self-expression." It's dying, Oprah-style.
Ryan, who has done a crackerjack job of following Dangate, has asked for my "professional" opinion on Rather and CBS newsroom's comical inability to comprehend typography, and the role of blogs in revealing the Evening News errors. So here goes nothing.
I think this whole mess suggests two disconcerting trends (which existed before Dangate, but are all the more obvious after):
1. Mainstream media outlets are growing increasingly obsolete, through a combination of arrogance and ignorance of technological paradigm shifts.
2. The blog community is not an acceptable replacement as an information source, unless we are wiling to accept a fragmented, trivialized discussion of current events.
I think the first half of this argument is basically self-evident and needs no explaination. The second, of course, is a wee controversial, in the sense that I expect angry polibloggers, should they ever find this comment, to immediately demand my head on a fine China platter. So let me begin by saying that I don't think that blogs are an inherently less trustworthy source of news. I don't believe in the golden calf of mainstream journalistic objectivity, and although I think the major networks/papers have managed to be reasonably accurate and fair in the last four decades, there's no reason to believe that the blogosphere cannot be equally accurate, and (if not terribly fair) at least balanced by sheer number of voices.
I am not concerned about objectivity, but I am deeply worried about perspective. The internet has, by its inherently wool-gathering approach to information, encouraged de-contextualized writing in every field. Writers are no longer obligated to achieve a certain level of contextualized knowledge before they start publishing. In the genre I follow most closely, film review, Harry Knowles can declare "Requiem for a Dream" as the greatest movie ever made, even though he couldn't tell Pauline Kael from a tree snail. Hundreds of other amateur critics are free to spout similar ignorance, and no voice of tradition exists to stop them. Well, the voice of tradition still exists, in the form of Anthony Lane, A. O Scott, et al, but these voices are now free to be ignored, and the result is not some utopia of critical equality, but a mad rush into the insanity of uninformed taste.
When applied to political blogs, this myopic, traditionless writing leads to a fascination with the trivial. In the case of this election, an entire week has been spent discussing font. While the bloggers debate the authenticity of documents, no one is noting that the discussion of George Bush's National Guard service is a distraction from the actual issues at stake in this campaign. We're ignoring the candidates' Iraq policies, their differences on Social Security and medical lawsuits, in order to discuss Vietnam again. And no moderating voice exists to guide the conversation back to matters that are of urgent (or any) import.
This role, the arbiter of "newsworthyness," used to be filled by traditional media outlets. But their obsession with objectivity has reduced them to referees, even cohorts, in a constant game of "he said/she said" between the two dominant political parties. And no one in the blog community seems prepared to take up this mantle of organizing and contextualizing news, of deciding whether it matters or not. What is left is a form of madness, a hurricane of information with no eye to direct the storm. Without major adjustments -- either by high-placed bloggers or a newly humbled mainstream media -- I see the state of the Fifth Estate as being so chaotic that it leaves the door open to tremendous loss of freedom for the American people.
(Of course, my anti-blog paranoia may well be the result of losing perspective by reading too many blogs. Perhaps I need to go for a walk outsid... well, never mind. There's bit of a storm out there.)
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Have posted my film review for the week, along with an absoutely stunning track from a Montreal band called The Arcade Fire. I'll talk more about this track tomorrow...
Today I was hired as the City Editor of the Pulse. I'll be developing and managing a weekly news section, as well as increasing my previously unofficial work on editing and writing feature stories. I'll still toss off movie reviews on the side. It's my first honest-to-goodness journalism job in years, and I'm thrilled. Plus, I get to work for Bill, and you know how sexy he is.
In celebration, I'm off to Nashville for the $10 Ben Folds concert. And heck, now seems as good a time as any to post my September mixtape playlist. It started as an attempt to create a wordless mix, but only the first five tracks ended up instrumental. Now the whole thing has, unintentionally, developed a certain "descent into depravity" theme to it, with a fantastic moment of recognition at the very end. Bobby still blows me away.
Bourbon on the Breath: Mesh’s September Mix
01 Wilco – Instrumental #1
02 The Section Quartet – Crooked Frame
03 Arthur Fielder and the Boston Pops – Rodeo: Hoedown
04 Woody Herman – Northwest Passage
05 Wilco – Instrumental #2
06 Kenny Rogers and the First Edition – Just Dropped In
07 David Bowie – Starman
08 Wilco – Poor Places
09 Paul Westerberg – As Far as I Know
10 Millard Ramsay -- Titanic
11 Jim O’Rourke – Halfway to a Threeway
12 Randy Newman – Sail Away
13 Sufjan Stevens – Woman at the Well
14 Bob Dylan – Blind Willie McTell
So a tree falls near the forest, power lines snap, the power source blows in my CPU, and my computer doesn't make a sound for two days. (Which answers that question, in a fashion.) The break gave me plenty of time to label 70 manilla envelopes and read that Louis Menand piece in the New Yorker that Andy's been pitching.
But I'm back, thanks to the machinations of ROC's computer guru Steve, and ready to update all those updatable things. So there's a new Pulse movie review (of Super Size Me) and a new Thursday MPThree. I would have loved to include a version of "Blind Willie McTell" but none of the legal bootlegs of it are much worth hearing. So I'll settle for a catchy, longing-soaked track from the new Paul Westerberg album, "Folker." I think that title is a pun.
It's raining.
Sometimes it rains a little bit sideways, and drops get on my cigarettes during smoke breaks.
I will keep you updated on this perilous situation.
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What a lovely wedding weekend. Andy has photographs. They are beautiful. You should gaze upon them.
The 12 hours on the interstate, with Morris behind the wheel to Virgina and back, provided me with a welcome opportunity to pore over Christopher Ricks' close-reading study of Bob Dylan's lyrics, "Dylan's Visions of Sin." Fantastic work. Elevates rock criticism to heights I hadn't imagined. His analysis of "Blind Willie McTell," as a song of gratitude that is neither hopeless or hopeful, but merely allows for hope, was so engaging that I have now listened to the song some 45 times in the last two days. More on Ricks late this week...
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Frances didn't have much impact on my family beyond dumping buckets of rain on Lake Wales for nearly two days. My dad has noted that the storm managed to find all four Meshes: first my sister in Sarasota, then my parents, and now a few days of rain on my roof.
I'm off to Roanoke, Virginia with Morris and Marr, a six-hour journey in the Jap's sweet new ride which, if history is any judge, we will fill with the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos and lots of smoking. Should be a busy weekend: I have two film reviews to pen, along with some extra Pulse pieces, and I'll be trying to keep close tabs on my family throughout the hurricane. I'll try to fit in Ben and Anna's wedding for good measure.
I will return on Tuesday with a story from my salad days with Zell Miller. Yes, I used to know him. Yes, he once directed me to a restroom. No, he did not challenge me to a duel.
Today is turning into a very pleasant day, the sort of afternoon that makes me regret writing such dolorous prose all the time. A couple pieces of good news, neither of which I can discuss, and a double shot of Maker's Mark have me all bubbly. I'm even feeling a bit better about Garden State, a movie I have given mixed reviews in the Pulse (the link's to the right), but would happily see two or three more times. Narcissistic, sure, but very beautiful. And Peter Sarsgaard would be fantastic in anything.
In honor of this almost certainly fleeting good mood, I offer White Hassle's "Life is Still Sweet" as this week's Thursday MPThree. I don't know anything about the band. I'm not even sure the song is all that great. But it's happy, and darned if that's not worth something.
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Now, to the serious stuff: Please pray again for my parents and sister, who are preparing to ride out the second Florida hurricane in less than a month. We go 44 years without a direct hit in Polk County, and now we're looking at two. Oy.