The Hold Steady – Heaven is Whenever

Need any more proof that Craig Finn is a genius? Aside from writing a song essentially about the Catholic concept of heaven coming to earth every time we perform Mass (though his communion is over vinyl rather than bread and wine; no complaints here), check out the research done by some Hold Steady fans to uncover ten or fifteen references in four and a half minutes.

The way Finn weaves countless cultural, religious and personal reflections into a single song that means the world to a lot of people (well, at least two that I know of) is endlessly comforting.

I’m reminded of Scott Adams’s theory of God’s debris: that, as time moves forward, the world at large slowly converges back into a single consciousness that is the consciousness of God himself. Finn might be the patron saint of this idea, if for no other reason than to prove we’re getting better at massive consciousness in compact form. It’s a beautiful thing.

Let’s get this out of the way from the get-go: I have never seen the movie version based on About a Boy by Nick Hornby. And now, having read the book, I feel a minor tinge of disgust at the idea of Hugh Grant playing Will’s character.

It’s not so much that I have anything against Hugh Grant; he has a typecasted character and he plays it well. It’s just that I got an image of someone else in my head for this role. Someone manlier. Maybe Jason Statham with a little more slob and a little less “I’m going to shoot you in the face.”

Anyway. This was a pretty standard Nick Hornby book. That means it was full of well-written, self-loathing, quirky characters who all learned something from each other. And it means it was good.

I love Nick Hornby, precisely because it’s always a complex story, with no obvious endings, but no real twists either, and yet somehow it’s the easiest book in the world to fly through in a weekend. Case in point: I’d made it almost halfway through the book between getting to my gate at the airport and arriving at my destination a few hours later.

About a Boy is about a very boyish man becoming less boyish, with the help of a very mature twelve-year-old named Marcus. Marcus’s mom has some major issues, Will stumbles into it with all the irresponsibility of a trust fund kid and Marcus latches on. Hilarity, epiphany and growing up ensue (for both parties, of course).

It’s not a particularly deep book, nor is it one trying to make any particular point, but it feels realistic, and somewhere within it lessons are learned. Like I said, the beauty of Nick Hornby’s work is that it effortlessly slides life lessons at you. And I get the feeling even he doesn’t mean for them to happen.

I’ve heard that many authors end up discovering that the characters, plot lines and ideas write themselves, whether or not the author himself meant for things to go the direction they did. It’s an odd form of chaos that ends with everyone involved learning something from it, the author included — rather unlike some pithy morality tale where the theme is decided ahead of time.

It is sometimes said that a PhD (short for “doctor of philosophy”) is a sign that one has learned to relate his or her subject of study to the world at large on a philosophical level, hence the name. The more of David Dark’s writing I read, the more I realize that he, perhaps more than most, understands the potential impact of his level of education in English and literature. Rather than devoting himself to insular research, he’s focused his energy on addressing a questioning subculture of the American religious and political tradition through thoughtful analysis of that culture, reflected back by its own literature, music, film, television and political icons.

In The Gospel According to America, Dark’s analyzes the intricacies of America’s politics and its “Christ-haunted idea” through the eyes of George Washington, Herman Melville, Bob Dylan, Flannery O’Connor, Elvis, Thomas Pynchon and others who have found inspiration in the freedom, culture, history and possibility of the American Way.

Unsurprisingly, Dark digs even further than just America’s past, by challenging its widely-held theories and practices concerning faith, salvation and the person of Jesus. He puts forward ideas of faith that both emphasize and support the underlying goals of America’s founders and challenge us to question the way those goals are put into practice. He warns us of the dangers of media pundits and believing we are administers of Truth:

When the church is the blind, uncritical endorser or “spiritual” chaplain of whatever the nation decides to do, it has largely renounced its vocation as the body of Christ.

But he also praises the art of being weird, exploring uncharted ideas and the practice of digging deeper than the sound bite culture to which most of us unknowingly subscribe to:

When we’re no longer willing (or able) to exercise the attention span required to hear, read, or listen to any version of history that can’t be contained in a sound bite or a put-down, our capacity for worship and for contribution to a stable democracy is compromised.

Potential readers of any of Dark’s work only need be warned that his explorations are not a quick read. While his ideas are clearly put forth, he doesn’t waste words for the sake of easy skimming. (Perhaps this is his own way of combating sound bite culture.) It’s more of a “take your time and take notes” kind of book than the more commonly enjoyed pop philosophy/sociology examinations that make it into the New York Times bestsellers list.

If you’re a geek like me, you try to get all your internet content from as few places as possible. Right now, to keep up with all the blogs, communities and people I love, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stack Overflow (and a few of its spin-off sites), a message board or two and, last but not least, Google Reader. Not to mention my own calendar, to-do list and a few other randoms.

The general goal is to get as much of my life into Google Reader as possible. But not everything in my life is an RSS feed, so I have to make do. That is, until I have a couple hours to nerd out and figure out a way to turn one of those sites into an RSS feed.

Today’s target: Tumblr. I love the Tumblr dashboard, but it’s basically its own social RSS feed of everyone you follow, but without its own RSS feed.

So, I created a Tumblr dashboard RSS feed using the power of Yahoo Pipes. All you have to do is enter your Tumblr username and password (don’t worry, nobody will ever see it) and you get an RSS feed that you can throw into your favorite RSS aggregator.

It’s still got a few bugs, but I did as best I could to make it presentable. Of course, it being a Yahoo Pipe, you can always clone it and fix bugs yourself. Or, if you find an issue and you’d rather have me fix it, you can do that too. Just send me an email or leave a comment here.

Known Issues

• Videos don’t show up. You have to click through to see them on the blog site. Still trying to figure this one out.
• Audio won’t play. You have to click through for these too.
• You don’t get feed items when someone likes a post or starts following you. Think of it as an opportunity to reduce your own vanity.

Some credit is due to Satoru Tamura’s original pipe that I cloned this from, which gave me a basic structure to expand.

I guess you could say July was a busy month. I had ear surgery at the end of the month, so I think my brains were trying to get in as much music before I’d be down for the count for a few weeks while my hearing comes back. Sucks to be me.

The beginning of the month brought a re-run epiphany that Pavement succeeded at what Nirvana was trying to do. Long story for another post. And then I found the This Is Dubstep comps and got hopelessly lost in electronic music for the rest of the month. I only took breaks for some new releases, like the new New Pornographers, the new M.I.A., Admiral Radley, Acacia Strain, Best Coast and Max Richter. And in the middle there somewhere was a phenomenal Hold Steady/Whigs show in Memphis. Needless to say, I’m a bit music saturated in my current environment and I am not going to complain about it.

1. Pavement – “Here” (Slanted and Enchanted)
2. Chasing Shadows – “Ill” (GetDarker Presents: This Is Dubstep 2)
3. Tes La Rok – “Darkness Falls Upon Us” (GetDarker Presents: This Is Dubstep)
4. Drumsound & Bassline Smith – “R U Ready (Dubstep Mix)” (GetDarker Presents: This Is Dubstep 2)
5. Fused Forces – “Chemical Reaction” (GetDarker Presents: This Is Dubstep 2)
6. Lung – “Afterlife” (GetDarker Presents: This Is Dubstep 2)
7. The New Pornographers – “Crash Years” (Together)
8. The New Pornographers – “Valkyrie In the Roller Disco” (Together)
9. The Hold Steady – “Positive Jam” (Almost Killed Me)
10. The Whigs – “Right Hand On My Heart” (Mission Control)
11. M.I.A. – “Teqkilla” (MAYA)
12. M.I.A. – “Meds and Feds” (MAYA)
13. Admiral Radley – “I Heart California” (I Heart California)
14. The Hold Steady – “Soft In the Center” (Heaven Is Whenever)
15. Beach House – “Walk in the Park” (Teen Dream)
16. The Acacia Strain – “Btm Fdr” (Wormwood)
17. Max Richter – “Infra 5″ (Infra)
18. Best Coast – “Summer Mood” (Crazy For You)

And here is your playlist, as usual.

Happy July! I don’t even know what to say about my musical selections for June. I reviewed some albums for Ghettoblaster (Sarah Jaffe), continued to get stoked on the new Hold Steady album, saw David Bazan and mewithoutYou live and crept into a major electronic music phase, which I am currently entrenched in. My monthly playlist for July will be packed with it, don’t you worry.

1. Mumford & Sons – “Winter Winds” (Sigh No More)
2. Wye Oak – “That I Do (Mickey Free remix)” (My Neighbor / My Creator EP)
3. The Polyphonic Spree – “Section 2 (It’s the Sun)” (The Beginning Stages of…)
4. N.A.S.A. – Spacious Thoughts (feat. Tom Waits & Kool Keith)” (The Spirit of Apollo)
5. Iron & Wine – “Peace Beneath the City” (The Shepherd’s Dog)
6. This Will Destroy You – “Brutalism & the Worship of the Machine” (Field Studies)
7. The Hold Steady – “Rock Problems” (Heaven Is Whenever)
8. Sarah Jaffe – “Clementine” (Suburban Nature)
9. mewithoutYou – “Timothy Hay” (it’s all crazy! it’s all false! it’s all a dream! it’s alright)
10. Zomby – “Spliff Dub (Rustie remix)” (Mu5h / Spliff Dub single)
11. Burial – “Shutta” (Ghost Hardware EP)
12. Sleigh Bells – “Tell ‘Em” (Treats)
13. Wye Oak – “For Prayer” (The Knot)

And, of course, here’s your free, streaming playlist of all the songs above.

It’s not often I read a work of fiction within a year or two of its release. Aside from the Harry Potter series, it usually takes me at least five or ten years — if not fifty — to get around to reading a well-known story. The reasoning is mostly that stories are often more timeless, while nonfiction has a tendency to be more relevant if read closer to its publication time.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is that I read a new piece of critically-lauded fiction: Flight, by Sherman Alexie. Mostly because my girlfriend said, “Here, read this. It’s a quick, easy read and a great story.” And she was right.

Flight is about a fifteen-year-old half Native American foster kid named Zits. He has low self esteem, due to his zits and his revolving-door stays with foster families all throughout the Seattle area. He channels his low self worth into violent acts and disrespect for his foster parents, which is hardly surprising.

And then Zits meets Justice in a jail cell. Justice tells him how everything is wrong, how Native Americans deserve to do whatever it takes to take back their land from white people, how to shoot a gun. And after weeks and weeks of this righteous indoctrination, Zits walks into a bank with a pistol and a paintball gun.

The story really takes off, though, before he sees the consequences of his violent act, when he wakes up from what he presumed to be his own death to find himself in the body of an FBI agent in the 70s that was fighting against the Native Americans. And, from there, into the bodies of several historical figures fighting either for or against the freedom of the Native American people.

Flight is a unique take on the all-too-common coming of age story. While the whole idea revolves around time travel (or reincarnation, in a weird way), it still seemed the most appropriate way for the universe to help a lost boy find his way, realize the consequences of his violent tendencies and break away from that cycle.

All in all, it was a beautiful and enjoyable read that I highly recommend for any teen or twentysomething.

Conversation #1 and Conversation #2 are two short comic books that discuss the philosophy of art, what it means to live and whether creating art is necessary for life to be worth living.

The style of each book is that James Kochalka, creator of American Elf, personal favorite comic, collaborates with one other comic artist. They write the dialog and guide the direction of the art together, and interfere with each other so that both the dialog and the art are a conversation of styles and philosophies. In the first book, Kochalka collaborates with Craig Thompson; in the second he works with Jeffrey Brown

Both comic books were highly enjoyable, especially as someone who enjoys comics, philosophy and the analysis of art. Both were right up my alley, so being $5 each it was a bit of a no-brainer to invest in a copy of each. Kochalka’s mindset on free expression and open honesty — both things I love about American Elf — come through well, and getting to appreciate the work of two other comic artists I wasn’t familiar with was great.

My only complaints about the books would be that, for one, they were both really short, and also that the conversation meandered in and out of topic a bit much at times, which occasionally made the ideas hard to follow. I wouldn’t say this interfered with my enjoying them, but were the only things that held them back from being a perfect read.

It’s not too often that a widely popular book ends up being even better than imagined. At least for me. Call me picky, but it rarely happens. So when I picked up a cheap copy of Chuck Klosterman’s self-described “low culture manifesto” Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs that I know to be highly popular with the uber-hipster crowd, I figured it’d be entertaining at best.

It turns out that Klosterman uses pop culture to reflect on a lot of deep sociological and philosophical ideas that are relevant for most subscribers to western life. He brings up Marilyn Monroe and Pamela Anderson in crass detail to explain the sexual evolution of America over the last 50 years. He uses the video game The Sims to rant about how we are slaves to the process of living. He states his opinion that MTV’s The Real World and other early reality TV has shaped every young American into one of a handful of prototypical personality types. And he talks about how fascinating serial killers are. Just because.

I suppose I was expecting some massive collection of cultural references that tie together in a clever way that strikes upon valuable insights haphazardly and unintentionally at best, meant more for ironic amusement than anything else. I’m assuming I came to this notion based on my perception of his “average reader.”

But Klosterman truly does have a grasp on a lot of bigger-picture ideas that he very directly discusses at every turn. He just happens to use “low culture” like MTV and video games to help ease into those ideas, making it an ideal introduction to sociology and modern philosophy for the young unaccustomed.

I already have another Chuck Klosterman book waiting in the wings to be read. I bought it quietly on a recent trip to Urban Outfitters, which might say more about me than I originally thought.

I’ve had the same wish for the past five years. My wish is that I’ll live forever. A lot of people don’t understand that… It’s a wish! Go big! I don’t wanna fucking die! How simple is that? I have no interest in dying… Out there? I don’t know what’s out there. It’s unknown. This is known. That’s unknown . I’m sticking with the known. “But Lewis, if you had faith,” my Christian friends say, “the angels will come and they will take you to heaven…” “Well,” I tell them, “until there are photographs, the legal system would say that’s hearsay.”

paraphrase of Lewis Black on his new album

A few weeks back, I had the distinct pleasure of getting to see David Bazan live at a house show here in Nashville. As many are well aware by this point, Bazan has made a major transformation from “leader of a Christian band” (Pedro the Lion) to “openly agnostic solo artist.” It would be easy to assume that someone who was that entrenched in the culture of western Christianity would be having quite an awkward adjustment — especially after “coming out” to the world via one of the best albums released in a long time. It was, essentially, his “breakup album with God,” for lack of a better description.

I was expecting to sit in a living room with a guy who was full of “umms” and “ahhs” that played his songs and mentally prepared himself for a barrage of questions about his departure from faith. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did my fellow listeners treat him with the utmost respect, he was confident, bold, outspoken and, dare I say it, happier and more comfortable than I’ve ever heard of him being. It was as though he had finally settled into his right place.

Especially in North America, evangelical culture persists a lot of black-and-white mentality about what is truth and what is lie, what is to be believed and what is to be rejected. In the past few years, I’ve seen a growing population of Christians who debate and argue and divide themselves over nitpicky theology, which I find more than a little bit disconcerting. Over time, I realized that this mentality is rooted in a desire to prove their beliefs in a concrete fashion which, if you think about it, is kind of ridiculous.

An idea that’s been rolling around in my head for my long absence from blogging here — originally seeded in a growing and poorly-worded curiosity about the validity of the other major religions — boils down to this: faith is just that.

Faith, in the religious sense, means believing in something that cannot be proven. If, as Lewis Black wishes, we can prove that God and heaven and angels and an afterlife exist without a shadow of doubt, it wouldn’t be faith. It would be fact. In the same way, we can’t disprove the beliefs of others, especially when they are in agreement with millions of others.

Western Christianity has made a lot of effort in the past 50 years to prove why Christianity is “it” and everything else is not. It shows a supreme lack of confidence in the unknown and in being wrong. To truly have great faith, one must submit to the fact that, at some point, he has to stop proving, accept what he believes and live accordingly. Or stop believing it.

Certainly we need people who can read and interpret the Bible and the Koran and the holy scriptures of Hinduism in order to form a foundation of beliefs, but interpretation is not something for everyone. In fact, the more that get involved in interpretation, the less unity there seems to be, which completely throw the idea of a body of believers out the window. Our culture’s Jeffersonian push on education has somehow caused us to forget that faith and education are near-polar opposites. Christian culture’s desire to have concrete answers to the eternally unanswerable and ridiculously inane questions of life is causing it to crumble in on itself.

Perhaps if most of us dropped the habit of (mis)interpreting, debating and arguing ideas, submit to the philosophy that it’s not only okay but recommended to not know everything, then focused on practicing the undeniable core of our beliefs — to love and respect and ask everything in humility — we’d all be better off.

Perhaps Bazan’s confidence is seeded in knowing that he doesn’t need to know all the answers or ask all the question to live an inspired and beautiful life.

Required reading/listening:

• The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, by David Dark
• The Religion Episode, by the Grapes of Rad
• Curse Your Branches, by David Bazan