Making music with friends

Maria managed to take this amazing picture with a disposable camera.

The action of Grace.

This is a quote from one of my favorite Flannery O'Connor short stories:

"Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise."

Flannery O'Connor - "The Artificial Nigger"

This vivid description of grace at work demonstrates for me one of the biggest reasons O'Connor is worth reading. I feel that many people start out by reading stories like "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and are immediately turned off by the macabre nature of O'Connor. The thing is, I think one reason she is such a powerful writer is her ability to demonstrate the need for grace in fallen man. This isn't always as obvious as in the above quote, but when one approaches O'Connor's work with this in mind it explains a lot.

I don't belong here.

A reworked version of Radiohead’s song “Creep” serves as the background to the just-out trailer for David Fincher’s latest, “The Social Network.” This brought up a lot of things for me that I wanted to address involving success and how it can be a good and also a regressive sort of thing.

“Creep” is a single off of Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey, and it was their first song to gain mainstream recognition especially in America. It received fairly extensive radio play, and is a song in Rock Band 2. All of this to say that it is probably a safe assumption that many people think of this song first when they think of Radiohead.

A somewhat backwards version of this occurred when Blur’s “song no. 2” became rather popular in America. The song comes off their fifth album, on which they dropped their former place of being one of the two major Britpop bands and transitioned to a more lo-fi alternative sound. You may not know the song by name, but if you heard a bit of it I would bet you know it. Its success was ironic, because the song is essentially Blur’s parody of American grunge bands.

Anyway, “Creep” in many ways personifies Radiohead’s first album: bold grungy British guitar-rock. Their second album, “The Bends” serves in many ways as an extension and refinement of their first. The case can be made that all of their albums since then are masterpieces of one sort or another. Radiohead accomplishes this, however, by rising above their original easy-to-pigeonhole genre. I think of myself as somewhat of an “album purist,” and although I don’t claim to be an authority, many would argue and I would agree that Radiohead produced in OK Computer and Kid A the best albums of their respective decades.

By OK Computer the band had started making disparaging comments about “Creep”. “Karma Police” refers to a radio playing popular, disposable music as “buzzing like a fridge.” Thom Yorke in an interview after the album was released said that “Creep” was just that, the background forgettable droning of alternative rock radio.

The interesting point is that without this initial successful single, who knows what would have happened to the band. It is impossible to tell what creative direction the band would have taken if they had muddled about in relative obscurity for years. I, for one, am happy with what came out of their success.

Richard III

I recently read the Shakespeare play Richard III because I was going to watch the 1995 film adaptation of the same name starring Ian McKellan, and I like to read works of literature before I see their counterparts on film. The play is incredible in presenting Richard III as one of the most Machiavellian characters I have ever seen. He will stop at nothing, even marrying the wife of a man he has had killed, to achieve his desire for the kingship. Of course he fails to anticipate the moral outrage of those who are in the know after he is finished with his string of murders and is thus finally undone.

I went in to watching the movie knowing it was highly critically praised, but even so it exceeded my expectations. The film is set in 1930 Britain. Usually attempts to modernize the setting of Shakespeare plays seem to fail miserably, but in this case it works perfectly. The closer Richard gets to becoming the ruler of England, the more the military uniforms begin to recall those of Nazi Germany during WWII. The dialogue is mostly taken directly from the original, and yet the pacing kept brisk enough to make for a solid story arc. Especially effective are what in the play would be Richard's asides to the audience, which in the film arewhen he looks directly at the camera and speaks his real purposes.

Berries

Things that make me happy:

Hot bread with butter and fresh strawberry jam.

I usually go strawberry picking with my grandma once a summer, and then we go and make oodles of strawberry jam. I didn't go this time, but I reaped the benefits anyway :-)

If there is one thing in the world that tastes like heaven, it has got to be fresh strawberries.

Various things.

So, among other items, I passed Spanish and did ok on my grades. Also, I am almost certainly bringing a car back to school, which will be quite useful.

Have been reading a lot of McCarthy and Faulkner lately. Found a particularly interesting word in McCarthy's first novel, "mizzling," which means about what you would expect it to:

miz·zle ¹ (mzl)

intr.v. miz·zled, miz·zling, miz·zles

To rain in fine, mistlike droplets; drizzle.

n.

A mistlike rain; a drizzle.

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[Middle English misellen; probably akin to Dutch dialectal mieselen; see meigh- in Indo-European roots.]

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mizzly adv.

Also the Middle English/Dutch roots make me happy.

I am currently at my grandparents house in a suburb of Cleveland. Our whole family is going to Cedar Point tomorrow, and I thoroughly plan on going on roller coasters till I puke

Modern World

This is a Wolf Parade song that Spoon covered when I saw them in Chicago.

I'm not in love with the modern world
I'm not in love with the modern world
I was a torch driving the savages back to the trees

Modern world has more ways
And I don't mention it since it's changed
While the people go out and the people come home again
It's gotta last to build up your eyes
And a lifetime of red skies
And from my bed saying your haunted hissing in my bed
Modern world don't ask why
Cause modern world build things high
Now they house canyons filled with life

Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down
Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down
Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down
Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down