Happy 4th of July

To those in the U.S., of course.

My wife took this a few years ago during the annual fireworks display from the Fairhope pier, which we can see from the bay shore near our house. They’re very pretty over the water. I like the sound almost as much as the sight, and the game of anticipating the delay between the flash and the bang. There’s one that produces only a single bright flash but a very big bang. We’re going to miss the show this year—visiting some family an hour away.

This Weekend's Big Event

Well, yeah, there's the 4th and all, but don't forget the Twilight Zone marathon--in progress now and continuing until early Saturday morning.

Tom Waits in Mobile

It was a great concert. I’m not sorry I paid $100 for it. If you’re a fan, don’t miss a chance to see him. Details follow for those interested.

Let me get the negative out of the way first. At least for live performances, Waits seems to have abandoned most of his many vocal styles for the abrasive bellowing roar, or roaring bellow, that he uses frequently but not always in his recordings. (You can hear what I’m talking about here: listen to the samples of the first two tracks; the second is the voice he used 90% of the time last night.) This is really too bad, because there’s a huge and very effective range of vocal expression on his recordings. Maybe he’s wrecked his voice for anything subtle; I can’t imagine how anyone can make the sounds he does for more than a minute or two, let alone for an entire concert.

For the first thirty minutes or so of the roughly two-hour concert, I was less than enthusiastic. As is too often the case with amplified music, it was too loud for the space—not very loud in comparison to an out-and-out rock band, but still loud enough to muddy everything up and lose all nuance. And there seemed something slightly…I don’t know, stiff, or at least not relaxed, about the performance (both Waits and the band).

But as it went on either my ears adjusted or the sound guys tweaked things, so that the sound got better, and, whether because the artists were more into it or because I was, the whole thing seemed to kind of catch fire, and the rest of the concert was a delight, my complaint about the singing notwithstanding. Not surprisingly, the band was great, including a reed player who faked a horn section by playing two instruments at once.

Waits is a compelling performer visually as well as musically, coming across as some kind of eccentric but fascinating minstrel-hobo (with a dash of Pentecostal preacher). There was a lot of skillful and effective lighting, with the high point being toward the end where he put on a hat covered with spangles of some kind and became a human disco ball, with lights focused on the hat (I think that was during “Eyeball Kid,” which was another and better song than the one on the album).

Speaking of the Eyeball Kid, someone who blogs under that name has already provided a set list, for those interested.

From my Catholic point of view, a few songs toward the end were notable. There was “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” which, yes, is ironic, but never seems to me to be 100% so, followed immediately by one of his bleakest songs, “Dirt in the Ground” (we’re all gonna be just…). But then the closer was the desperate prayer of “Make It Rain,” and at the end of it a rain came down in the form of a shower of glitter. This is, after all, the aptly named Glitter and Doom Tour.

The crowd was interesting, by the way: from teenagers to people as old as Tom and me (he’s just a few months younger than I am). Not that many teenagers, really: the younger end seemed to be college-age and a bit up, like my daughter and her husband and their friends, all in their mid-20s, with the majority falling maybe (I’m guessing) between their age and the mid-40s. There were people covered in tattoos (and I wonder how many were fake) and people who looked like they just came from their white-collar jobs (e.g., me).

The Waitsing is almost over

Tonight I will be at the Saenger Theatre for the Tom Waits concert that I was all excited about a month or two ago. Not as excited as Some People I Know, though. Because Some People I Know are at this moment wandering around downtown Mobile hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

For my part I am controlling my expectations. Somehow I just don't regard it as certain that he will give a good concert. That's based partly on hearing some bootleg concert recordings.

I just hope I don't have a problem getting in. Ticketmaster has adopted a scalper-thwarting scheme which involves photo ids and credit cards. Do I have the right card with me...? I will report tomorrow, as I know there are at least a few fellow fans who read this blog.

Here's a video for you—"Downtown Train", a little over five minutes long:

Snarl

HaloScan is down again, in case you're wondering why you don't see any comments.

This is frustrating. I really want to combine my original site, lightondarkwater.com, and my blog into one integrated and consistent thing. I won't bore you with the details, but there are several options, one of which includes HaloScan and would probably be the easiest transition. But every time I concluded that that's what I ought to do, something like this happens.

Hating God

“I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.”

“What do you mean by that, Cordelia?”

“Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.”

—Brideshead Revisited

I like that, but doesn’t it happen just as often, possibly more often, that a person does direct his hatred explicitly toward God—for a desperate prayer that went unanswered, perhaps— but that it is not really God he is hating, but rather something like himself?— not like him specifically, but like us, the human race. When God disappoints us, we, not knowing who he really is and therefore not able to trust him, explain it in the way we explain it in each other, as failure or ill will. And we think we are hating him when we are really hating the human.

A co-worker of mine recently wrote a paper on Brideshead for a class he’s taking. In the paper, he describes Lady Marchmain (“Mummy” above) as pious but not holy, and, noting that Charles is not charmed by her, says “The pious do not charm many, for that is the job of the holy.”

He divides the Marchmain family into three categories, rather interestingly: the pious—Lady Marchmain and Bridey; the holy—Cordelia and Sebastian; and the saved—Lord Marchmain and Julia.

An Anniversary Worth Noting

One hundred years ago today. Didn’t The X-files make an effort to account for this? If not, it should have.

Sunday Night Journal — June 29, 2008

Cries and Whispers

This DVD had been sitting around the house for a couple of weeks or so before we finally watched it tonight. I had been putting it off, waiting for the right time, because I expected it to be a somewhat intense, maybe painful, experience and I wanted a little time before and after so that I could see it and reflect on it with a clear mind. I knew it was not something to be viewed for entertainment on a Saturday night or relaxation after a day’s work.

If Bergman’s name had not been enough to make me treat Cries and Whispers with a bit of respect and caution, my memory of it would have. I had seen it when it came out in the early ‘70s and been deeply moved, far more so than I had expected to be. I remember being more or less unable to speak for some minutes after the end. My reaction tonight, though strong, was not so strong as all that; I’m not sure entirely why. It may be that the vision with which the final scene left me both then and now is something with which I’m more familiar than I was at 24 or so; I certainly stood in more need of it then than now. It’s a glowing vision of immense joy and gratitude for the sweetly perfect moments of life, and an assertion (or at least a suggestion) that it is these, and not the long hours or years of struggle and pain, that matter most, and are in fact eternal. It makes me think of the lines that close “Burnt Norton,” the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after

Some consider this Bergman’s finest work. Maybe so, although I don’t think it’s reasonable to try to pick a single finest. Certainly it’s among his best. It concerns three sisters, one of whom is dying painfully—cancer, I assume, although that’s never stated—and the servant girl who does most of the work and most of the caring. The two other sisters are both very much wrapped up in themselves and closed to others, each in a different but equally effective way.

I suppose Bergman, the atheist son of a Lutheran minister, just couldn’t help weaving Christian themes and imagery into his work, perhaps unintentionally. At any rate they are prominent here. The dying sister is named Agnes, which is derived from a Greek word meaning “sacred” or “pure” and also has an obvious resemblance to agnus, as in Lamb of God. Her suffering and death provide an opportunity for her sisters’ redemption. The faithful and loving servant is named Anna, from the Hebrew Hannah, “favor” or “grace.” There is an obvious evocation of Michelangelo’s Pieta in one scene, far too close a resemblance to be accidental.

If these remarks seem a little scattered, it’s because they are; the film is too rich and complex for me to do it justice quickly or briefly, and more thoughts and emotions are coming than I have time to write down. And for the sake of those who haven’t seen it, I don’t want to be too specific about the plot. Nor would I want to reduce it to a statement. But I can say that it left me with a very clear sense of how it is possible for a person to choose hell over heaven, and that we are making that choice at every moment of our lives when we make the choice between loving and not loving.

Sartre’s famous play No Exit is said (I’ve never read it) to make the point that hell is other people. This suggests to me that Sartre was already entering hell, because hell is the absence of love. Or rather the refusal to love, because I mean the absence of love given, not love received. To love and not be loved is immensely painful, but it isn’t hell. If one were loved by no creature in the universe, if one were unloved even by God himself, but were still able to love, one would not yet be in hell.

I should also mention that in simple visual terms Cries and Whispers is one of the most beautiful films you’ll ever see. (And warn you that there is one pretty horrifying scene.)

Music of the Week: Mark Heard - High Noon

Those who read this column (or whatever you want to call it) regularly may remember that Mark Heard’s name came up in comments recently, very strongly recommended by a couple of people. I admitted with a little embarrassment that I owned this cd, a selection of material from his last few albums, and had never listened to more than a few songs from it.

I had picked up the cd five or six years ago (at least), either used or on sale, out of curiosity because I’d encountered his name here and there as a highly regarded Christian singer-songwriter who lived a tragically short life (1951-1992). Since I don’t care much for most explicitly Christian pop music—what’s generally known as CCM, or Contemporary Christian music—I’m always on the lookout for Christian artists who don’t seem to be just slapping a Christian message on commercial pop. I was disappointed in Heard, though. I put on the cd and half-listened to the first four or five songs, didn’t care especially for the sound, put it aside, and then forgot about it.

Now, thanks to those recent comments here, I’ve given High Noon another chance, and changed my mind. I won’t go as far as the commenter who said Heard is a better songwriter than Bruce Cockburn, but at his best he is very, very good. The best songs here are certainly in the league with those of Cockburn and a few others. There are a few that I don’t care much for, but considering that someone else’s idea of an artist’s best stuff is never going to coincide with mine, I definitely plan to seek out more of Heard’s work.

Unfortunately I’m not enthusiastic about him as a performer. In particular I don’t care much for his voice and general signing style. He sounds a good bit like T-Bone Burnett, but somehow more abrasive and a little over-intense. This is purely a matter of my personal taste, and shouldn’t discourage anyone who might be interested. It doesn’t by any means ruin the songs, but it does make me wish I could hear more of them sung by performers whom I like better: Buddy Miller, for instance, whose version of Heard’s “Worry Too Much” (not on High Noon) is one of the very best tracks on a magnificent album, Universal United House of Prayer (see here for my review). I’m probably going to be checking out the tribute album Orphans of God in which other artists perform Heard’s songs.

Here’s a video of one of my favorite songs from High Noon, “Treasure of the Broken Land.” I think his singing works better in this song than in some others. The lyrics are essential, so read them here. If you like this, you’ll like a lot more of Heard’s music.

If that ending seems abrupt, it’s because the video doesn’t include the whole track, which runs over six minutes and includes a lengthy instrumental break.

The Wikipedia article has a bio and links to more related stuff.

Testing the search bar

I decided to try the blog search bar that you see at the top of the page; it's a Blogger feature that I can turn on or off. I don't much like the way it looks but I wondered if it might be useful to people. Let me know if it is. Or if you find it really annoying. I'm not at all sure it's going to stay there.

Driving in the Rain

I like rain and I like to drive. And I like driving in the rain a lot. I drove through a couple of nice thunderstorms on the way to Nashville a few weeks ago and have several souvenirs like these.

(Click to enlarge)

It wasn’t actually raining in the second one.