Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom

Tom Waits is releasing a live set of performances culled from his Glitter and Doom Tour. You can pre-order the album on CD or vinyl LP, or get one of the pre-order packages that include, among other things, one of Waits’ “stain” T-shirts.




NPR is streaming one of the shows from this tour here, if you want a preview.

Hat Tip: Remy

We are Food Prudes

We Americans have always had a problem taking pleasure in eating. We certainly have gone to unusual lengths to avoid it…the sheer abundance of food in America has bred “a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run, rather than to dine and savor.” To savor food, to conceive of a meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery…To the Christian social reformers of the nineteenth century, “The naked act of eating was little more than unavoidable…and was not to be considered a pleasure except with great discretion.”…Kellogg himself was outspoken in his hostility to the pleasures of eating: “The decline of a nation commences when gourmandizing begins.”
If that is so, America had little reason to worry.

- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, pp. 56 – 57.

We Know by Blind Instinct

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all…In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And int eh act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 38-39.

In Which We are Sure that we are Simply and Solely a Chicken

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probably that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections…The madman is the one who has lost everything except his reason…He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea…

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic…If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that…The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. the mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid…Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility…

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 23-33

In Which There is not Always a Right Decision

This story was amazing and oddly shocking. Is this surgery removal of a growth? An abortion? A routine procedure? A tragedy? All of the above?
Related note, on the rare occasions when a pregnancy will kill the mother, the child or both, what is the ‘morally right’ decision?

In Which We Desire Sidewalks in the New Heavens and New Earth

Moreover, we have every confidence that we will get them.

In Comment magazine’s June 2007 “Summer Reading” issue, a gentleman named Eric O. Jacobsen contributed a list of books on Christianity and Urbanism which you best pick up. I pass a few of them along with short excerpts from Mr. Jacobsen’s longer blurbs. Again, if you don’t subscribe to Comment, go sign up now.

Also, Jacobsen maintains a site called Sidewalks in the Kingdom: Resources for Christian New Urbanists which you should check out. I have added a permanent link on the sidebar under “Sidewalks”.

OK, the books:

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

I learned to love the city from Jacobs with her eyes to see “the ballet of street life” while trained experts could only comprehend the city as rationally organized blobs on a zoning map.

2. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Duany, Speck, and Zyberk.

These pioneers of the New Urbanist movement spent the last few decades leading a renegade group of architects and planners who in one way or another rejected the post-war suburban neighborhoods and urbanism…They possess the clarity of insight to ask whether the suburban experiment has delivered on its lofty promises, and whether its existence has really justified scrapping thousands of years of human wisdom embedded in traditional urban forms in favor of its seductive charms.

3. The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition by James Howard Kunstler.

Kunstler is both hilarious and spot-on accurate in his observations about contemporary North American Life…In The City in Mind, Kunstler…develops the notion that the ability to create quality urban environments is an important litmus test for any civilization. He does this with a series of eight case studies ranging from Atlanta, “this giant hairball of a thirteen-county demolition derby,” to Paris which embodies the difference between a “city worth caring about and one that is not.”

4. Great Streets by Allan B. Jacobs.

After about fifty years of slavishly accepting Le Corbusier’s rash dismissal of streets for anything but high-speed automobile traffic, we are once again recognizing that a requisite component for a truly great city is great streets. Some of the most significant public spaces ina city are to be found on its streets. Alan Jacobs’s treatment is a tribute to Great Streets, and a serious study of some of the best-loved streets in the world.

5. Global City Blues by Daniel Solomon

As a penitent formerly modernist architect, Daniel Solomon is the perfect guide to the waves of modernist hubris that nearly killed the city during the second half of the twentieth century…Most seasoned practitioners of the recent urban renaissance are self-avowed pragmatists and polemic apologists for the movement. Solomon may be more of a poet at heart and as such he may provide helpful inroads to the movement for a theological discussion of “creational norms.”

6. The Good City and the Good Life: Renewing the American Community by Daniel Kemmis.

Daniel Kemmis maintains that focusing our political attention exclusively on the national scene can only fall short of our expectations, and we will eventually become jaded. In the Good City and the Good Life, Kemmis recommends a return to the city as a context for human thriving and for rediscovering the dignity of political life.

7. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg.

The notion that we need a place to hang out that is not our workplace nor our home helps to explain the success of places like Starbucks and Barnes and Noble…Ray Oldenburg anticipated this phenomenon and coined the term “third place”…Oldenburg helps us place this phenomenon in a wider context and he helps us to better understand the significance of this rediscovered impulse to a sociability…We learn what is appropriate and inappropriate public behaviour by spending time in coffee shops and other public places where we receive instant feedback on our public behaviour.

8. Until Justice and Peace Embrace: the Kuyper Lectures for 1981 Delivered at the Free University of Amsterdam by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Wolterstorff understands that for most people, beauty in the city is found in the spaces between the buildings. From this perspective a beautiful city is a city in which the streets feel like outdoor hallways that invite us to explore.

In Which Wisdom comes out your Speakers

The good folks at WRF” sent me the latest Think lecture, by the always wonderful Calvin Seerveld. It is entitled “Cities as a place for public artwork: a GLOCAL approach”, but the role of art in the public sphere is only the beginning. In the process of laying the foundations for his thoughts on public art, Dr. Seerveld outlines in broad strokes some of the moral underpinnings for a redemptive understanding of economics and community. You can (and should) download the lecture here (think #15). Don’t neglect to look at the urban artwork gallery (from the slide show which Dr. Seerveld used at the lecture, I assume).

This particular lecture is a part of the Stained Glass Urbanism project. In light of Revelation 21:10 – 22:5, this is something we all ought to be actively interested in, but I think will be particularly exciting and encouraging to those living in metropolitan areas. Listen, read, and then do.

In Which We Make No Home for Freaks

First Things, a journal of religion, culture, and public life (as its byline states), published an excellent article in their On the Square: Observations and Contentions section entitled
Worth Dying For by Richard John Neuhaus. This is something you should read.

Years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that the reason we no longer have freak shows at county fairs is not because we are more sensitive and compassionate but because we have created, or aspire to create, a world that has no place for freaks. I regularly pass on the way to work the New York center for cerebral palsy. It is both touching and inspiring to see caretakers gently helping hundreds of children—their eyes rolling, limbs flailing, and grunting speech—getting in and out of the buses that transport them to the center. Prenatal testing and the unlimited abortion license will make sure that there is not another generation to burden us with the need for such caring.

In Which Client #9 is Worth Two Bits

This article on the media’s love affair with both the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer is insightful, if not slightly ironic in its lack of self-awareness.

Once revolutionary in early twentieth century literature, deconstructing heroes and wallowing in the exposed hypocrisy of the mighty has become our tabloid-culture’s national pastime.
This is not news to anyone who is even mildly culturally aware, but it seems that our delight in the sullying of honour explains not only the extensive media coverage and general national glee over Spitzer’s hypocrisy, but also the media’s previous abject love of “the Enforcer” as he went after New York’s rich and powerful with a less than scrupulous zeal:

Spitzer has delivered the goods both coming and going.

In Which We Give Advice

The Following is one of several reasons we, though absolutely enamoured of our snakes, do not recommend owning one of the large (meaning 15 – 25 feet) constrictors:

African Rock Python

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In which Nietzche Defends the Grass

This article, re-posted by Steve Bishop, has some interesting things to say about Christian involvement in environmental protection. And while most of the background information is pretty solid (and well worth your time to read), the central thesis seemed problematic to me.

Note: Read this BBC article for some background on the Newbury Bypass incident so you know something of the situation that is being used as an example.

A Christian then can engage in civil disobedience, but there are also God-given constraints. It should be: a last resort; non-violent (harming neither people or animals, and property only minimally); an opposition of policies, not people; and done fully realising and accepting the consequences; arising from it.

Disregarding for the moment the rather anemic justification offered for Christian civil disobedience (given the brevity of the article, this can perhaps be forgiven), how do we make the jump from refusing to obey a direct order to sin to actively disrupting a government-sanctioned violation of the dominion mandate? Refusing to kill Hebrew babies for Pharaoh and disrupting construction of a freeway bypass are hardly analogous situations. Tenuous at best. How does one make the jump?

Secondly, the stated “God-given constraints” seemed ever-so-slightly odd: “Last resort” is standard enough, and so is “non-violent”, except for the “property only minimally ” bit. “Only minimally”? Que? Where does one get the right to trash someone else’s stuff because one doesn’t like what they are doing with it? Can I go slash my neighbor’s Hummer tires? That’s relatively “minimal” property damage, and would certainly keep him off the road for a few days. How about sabotaging IRS computers? Hacking a computer doesn’t even damage property, technically. The government is certainly violating all kinds of moral and civil law by unconstitutionally demanding taxes from my income. Can I punish them too while I’ve got my sheriff star and spurs on? If civil disobedience in environmental action is proper, when is it ever not? How does one construct boundaries for a vigilante?

Speaking of which, let’s look at it from the other side: Why only minimally? If this is war against injustice, why can’t one go all the way? A good general knows that you send enough troops and enough firepower in the first time to ensure the job gets done right. Cutting gas-lines (or break-lines, for the activist with a mean streak) will annoy your average back-hoe operator, and probably slow construction down a bit, but if the goal is to stop the process, why not blow the machines to hell? Bomb the suckers. What is the dollar cut-off for proper Christian property damage? And while we’re at it, why not injure or kill the construction workers? Better yet, surgical strike: Assassinate the developer or the politician who instigated the thing. We do not war against abstract corporations, governments, or “policies”, but against people. Always people. Someone wrote that policy. Cut off the head and the body will wither.

While I appreciate the frustration of watching our governments, city planners, and seemingly-faceless corporations commit all manner of heinous stupidity in the name of “Progress” (may her name be ever glorified), and would argue that there are any number of things Christians can and ought to do about it, this so-called ‘civil-disobedience’ stinks of the same revolutionary, impatient, self-centered, faithless, historically un-thankful spirit that informs and drives the power-worshiping, pseudo-laissez-fairre, Nietzche-in-a-Wallstreet-suit mentality, which screams “Mine and Devil take the Hindmost!”. Two sides of the same damned coin.

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In Which We Quote

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) was an Irishman, member of the British House of Commons, and an eloquent critic of the republican revolution in France .  This elegy on the occasion of the execution of Marie Antoinette under the National Assembly in France is beautifully melancholic and, while certainly a little nostalgic, it also displays Burke’s typical prescience and astute discernment of the zeitgeist.

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”

Edmund Burke – 1793

While I think most historically minded folks of a conservative bent can relate to most of Burke’s observations here, the last statement caught me a little off guard.  I want to agree, and I can feel something percolating on the subject back between my ears, but I want to throw this out for your perusal while I think about it. 

Does, can the nobility of a society cause “…vice itself [to lose] half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”?  What might Burke mean?

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In Which Mary Had Child(ren)

Friend Nathan sent me the following article.  You might find it interesting.

The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus by Matthew Levering

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