What Control?

Why is it that biopics are all about portraying their subject in the most favorable light possible? The only exception I can think of is that Ed Harris vehicle about Jackson Pollack a few years to the rear. Anton Corbijn's Control the story of Ian Curtis the singer of Joy Division is no different from the pattern.

Curtis grew up in Macclesfield, somewhere near Manchester, England (a suburb perhaps?) a dreary place with dreary parents. At least this is what the film has us believe. He marries at what must be age 17 and then begins his career in Joy Division. Things seem to be OK until he is diagnosed with epilepsy. This begins his inevitable spiral into drugs, alcohol, depression, and infidelity. Oh yes, throw in a baby daughter for more plot complication.

My problem isn't Curtis' struggle with his condition, my problem is the POV of the film, "Gosh, his life is so sad, there's no hope for him, I hope everything turns out OK." According to the film, no one called Curtis on his infidelity, no one seemed to try to help him with his problems--sure they were sympathetic, but no one wanted to do the hard work of helping this guy get out of the hole he dug for himself.

Curtis killed himself in 1980, unable to deal with the pain of his condition and the fact that he couldn't stay married to his wife Deborah and keep a woman on the side. I'm simplifying a bit, but I trust you get the point.


The film itself is wonderfully shot in black and white emphasizing the drabness of Curtis' life. Corbijn pulls solid performances from his actors Sam Riley and Samantha Morton playing Curtis and his wife respectively. I also found more respect for Joy Division's music placing it in the context of the time and Curtis' life.

Walk the Line about Johnny Cash came pretty close to showing what asses so many so-called artists are (actually Pollack was even better on that count), but most fall short of any redemption, that seems to be because the society an artist surrounds himself (or herself) with coddles more than confronts.

Control is a fair movie if you're interested in Joy Division and the New Wave, but if you can't stomach another movie about a tortured artist and his inability to connect with people who really care then skip this one.

On reading as a stoic duty

I've been reading Don Quixote since February and while it started out entertaining enough, I have found, almost 600 pages into it, Se~nor Quixote's "mad" adventures tedious. Yet, I feel compelled to finish the damn thing. Why? I don't know.

1. It's canonical--the first novel to be written. 2. When I start a book, I have it in my head to finish it unless I absolutely hate the thing.

In my 35 years of reading I can only remember, on one hand, of not completing a book that I started (as an adult). . . though there was that book about a donkey in the Grand Canyon that I picked up in Roosevelt Elementary's library and never finished waaaaaaaaaaay back in fourth grade. By the way, Mrs. Hastings, if you're still alive, I have so many fond memories of library time--Thank you for your service.

Anyway, am I the only OCR (obessive-compulsive reader) who won't drop a book out of some sinful pride of duty?

Another Way Crisis Economy Center

Allan Carlson's Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies--and Why They Disappeared was enlightening, entertaining, and disheartening. Why, because he shows the promise of economic systems that aren't Capitalist nor Marxist that did work for a short time. He lays out the history of separate movements that were largely unconnected, yet were all very similar. I'll skip the synopsis and give you the bullet points of the systems.

OK, I can't find the "bullets" options here on blogspot, but you get the idea.
1) They all saw private property as the way to economic independence--limited though it may have been.
2) The family had primacy as the foundation of a good society and the local community ran a close second. The "State" was invited to stay out for the most part.
3) Agrarianism, traditional culture, and religion are all necessary in one form or another to the success of this system.

Whether it was the family wage or agricultural education for peasants these systems had promise (problems too, but I think less than our current mess--have you not read the headlines?) Most saw the rise of Industrial Capitalism as the death knell for traditonal ways of employment, family commitment, agriculture, and property ownership. We live in as Hillaire Belloc puts it, "the Servile State." We trade our economic freedom for mass produced goods and market efficiency.

In the last few years I've been surprised at my interest in economics, but it hasn't been in the lastest news from Wall Street. I'm more interested in how families and their local communities can create systems that are self-sustaining, free from the state or corporations, and work for the common good.

A friend mentioned today that I'm setting myself up for a political campaign based on where my daughter is attending school this year--she, unbeknownst to us, attends a school where the township bigwigs send their offspring. I told him I'm unelectable as my first acts would be to create a township-wide composting program as laid out by Sir Albert Howard and then a tax incentive for property owners who have fruit and vegetable gardens in their yards. My next act? Chickens and solar panels at Township Hall! Ha! Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa! (Look out, he's mad with power!)

Change the Wind

I listened to Jim Wallis speak tonight about faith and public policy. There was more faith talk than public policy, unfortunately. Don't misunderstand, the speech wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, either. I appreciated his avoidance of partisan bashing--instead he bashed both parties and said we need to move beyond right and left and go deeper, avoiding simplistic and shallow dichotomies. I also appreciated his echoing of MLK when he said the Church's purpose is not to be handmaiden nor master to the state, but it's conscience. The most annoying thing. . . ? His incessant name-dropping. He's friends with so-and-so and was mentored by HIM and was present for That Guy's inauguration. OK, OK, you travel in wide circles. I don't care. Give some direction on straightening a bent world.

I couldn't help but think of Jacques Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity. Wallis talked about changing the wind so the politicians will follow that. And that's good, we should endeavor to change the wind, but as Ellul cautioned, how long before that wind becomes stale air? Well, Ellul didn't use that metaphor, but his point was that institutions, even good ones, become subject to sin and corrupt--sometimes into money-sucking bureaucracy and sometimes into a worse beast than the one it killed.

How do we throw the moneychangers out without picking up their change and putting it in our pockets?

Lastly, too many Americans waste the standing O on so-so work. It wasn't that inspiring, people!

Woven Hand

Perhaps you've heard of 16 Horsepower--and if you haven't you're missing the best hillbilly goth ever recorded. Well, they split and David Eugene Edwards, the frontman, created his own side project a few years back named Woven Hand. This is less hillbilly-ish, more. . . eclectic--electric folk with a bit of atmospherics, and always in the background a pinch of Eastern European influences.

Edwards, much like Bill Mallonee, has a way of writing about the spiritual without sounding like. . . Yes(!?) or the ghetto shite of CCM. More than Mallonee, Edwards takes direct phrasing or metaphors from Biblical texts and makes them his own. For instance, his recast metaphor for the sin nature (or St. Paul's "Old Man") is the "Wooden Eye." The opening cut on the new album,"The Beautiful Axe," describes sanctification in a way I don't think I've ever heard before--

"Joy has come/It's risen with the sun/He, the highest on the horizon/Joy has come/In the man that I see/Beautiful the axe that flies at me."

There are a few others, but conveniently they don't come to mind at the moment.

His latest release Ten Stones (my second full album download from iTunes) is a continuation of his sound, though not in a redundant way. The hypnotic wail of "Kicking Bird," the electric blues of "White Knuckle Grip," the low noise of "untitled." Edwards remains true to his core sound, but manages to keep it fresh without resorting to strange novelty.

Brooding, prophetic, personal--Psalms for the 21st century--this is Woven Hand

Restoration/Reconciliation

Nine credits away from a Master's degree and I'm taking Restoration Ecology. I had to write my profs, yes! there are two, and briefly explain why I'm taking the class. I mentioned I was interested in the notion of reconcilation and that "Restoration Ecology" appears to fit somewhere in there. I surprised myself with that one. Restoring ecosystems to a state, not in the past--impossible to do anyway, where they can reach equilibrium and growth is very much like what happens with human relationships that are damaged. This stuff is fairly useful I'd say.

Wish for Eden

This is an older piece I wrote, but it needs a home.

Wish For Eden
A review of Grizzly Man

After the flood in Genesis 9:2 God tells Noah and his family that “the fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea.” Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man would beg to differ. Treadwell spent 13 summers in a remote area of Alaska (I’ve never been there but isn’t most of Alaska remote?) living among grizzly bears under the auspices of loving and protecting them. That is until 2003 when in September or October he and his girlfriend Amy Hoogenard were attacked and devoured by a bear known only as “141.”
Treadwell filmed himself alone for 11 of those 13 summers and then returned to civilization to spread his love of the terrible beauty of those bears, usually to schoolchildren.
What he didn’t show the children (I’m assuming) were his frequent childish rants screaming obscenities about people and the National Park Service in particular. In fact, in the footage that Herzog melded into his film, Timothy Treadwell’s mission is unclear. He loves the bears he claims. Which, I suppose, was obvious in one sense. He also claimed to protect the bears, which was not so obvious. Viewers are left wondering how exactly did he protect them. When some people show up in the wilderness, he only curses them from the brush. Perhaps Treadwell’s trips to schools educated the public about the nature of bears? He formed the foundation Grizzly People “whose mission is to protect and preserve habitat worldwide.” But director Herzog doesn’t focus on Treadwell’s efforts or organization—he focuses on the entertaining lunacy of Treadwell himself.
Most people in the film who criticized Treadwell accused him of crossing a delicate line between human and animal. In fact, Marnie Gaede, an ecologist friend of Treadwell, mentioned in her filmed interview that Timothy wanted to become like a bear. Indeed I found that he didn’t just want to be bear-like, but to be a bear fully.
Some think Timothy Treadwell’s naïveté and disregard for natural boundaries is what killed him. I’m not so sure. He did develop a bond with the bears he filmed; he even named them: Mr. Chocolate, Demon-Hatchet, Sergeant Brown, Melissa, Mickey, and Saturn among others. He and Amy Hoogenard were killed by a bear they didn’t know.
His love for the bears approaches idolatry, however, in a scene where he rushes over to where a bear has just shat. He touches the feces reverently, almost as if it were the host, exclaiming that it’s “Wendy’s poop,” it was inside her, it’s her life, and so on.
It would be easy (though lazy) to write Treadwell off as a misanthrope, yet he did have friends—he had girlfriends as well. And it is not that he hated people and loved bears, it is, I think, that he wished for an Eden so deeply that he forgot (or perhaps ignored) the world’s fallen nature. Most bears have an instinctive fear of us which serves to protect both man and bear.
I remember well my own encounter with a bear—a black bear in Michigan’s Porcupine Mountain Wilderness. Nowhere near the life-endangering encounter with a grizzly, this bear wanted to be left alone. I stumbled upon its walk through the woods, we made eye contact, but then it hurriedly ambled away down the wooded slope.
I can sympathize with Treadwell’s desire to commune with the mega-fauna of the Alaskan wilderness. I think back to a prayer I made as a 13-year-old, pleading with Jesus that I didn’t want to go to Heaven unless animals were present in that realm. Dr. Orin Gelderloos of the University of Michigan-Dearborn informed the congregation at Trinity Church, March of 2006, that we shouldn’t expect Heaven to differ all that much from Earth, while we can argue with him about the details (see especially C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce) I would generally agree with that thought. The trouble with my adolescent prayer and with Timothy Treadwell was we didn’t want to acknowledge the Fall and the post-diluvian relations between man and nature. It would seem impossible to find a St. Seraphim hand-feeding a bear, nor was Treadwell like St. Francis gently counseling a wolf to terrorize the town of Gubbio no more. Perhaps in the New World we will interact with non-human creatures in much the same way that we do with other humans. For now though, man and bear are not meant to be buddies. In fact, it is probably the best for both that we aren’t.

Prophet for President?

While listening to some commentary on the radio today, I couldn't help but agree with the host. Essentially, America doesn't want a revivalist preacher to point out sin. You can't knock American exceptionalism and expect to be elected. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah wouldn't campaign for long.
I have to say that I heard mention of good and evil in the Republican speeches in the last couple of days, but no tragic sense of life at all. To me, that is the best legacy of the ancient Greeks--the sense that life is hard and quite often unjust. We recognize the hardness of life, but Americans seem to want to ignore or use technology or laws to overcome the capricious misfortune that characterizes life. This is true of the Democrats too. Blind faith in technology, American "Can-Do"-it-ness, and optimism are benchmarks for both parties.
We need, in my opinion, an American Euripides who can run a country. Even among the political figures I like the most, no one even comes close.