Vampire Weekend has often been accused of making rather frivolous music that appeals mainly to hipsters, and, in many respects, that accusation is true of their first two albums, Vampire Weekend and Contra. Yet, I personally think that criticizing a band for writing about what they know, especially early in their career, has little merit. You never know when a band is going to take the next step and begin to touch on bigger ideas and struggles than, say, the use of the oxford comma or drinking horchata. On Modern Vampires of the City, the band retains its quirky, anything…
New Music: Phoenix’s Bankrupt!
French rock band Phoenix cemented their place in the indie scene in 2009 with the release of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a catchy, immediate record that is one of my favorites from that year. A skillful blend of pop, indie rock, and electronic cavorting, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix set the bar high for Bankrupt!, Phoenix’s newest album. On Bankrupt!, the band remains enamored with producing dance-ready, saccharine pop music, but pushes even further into the realms of synthesizers and moody electronic soundscapes. The result is an album that is less immediately striking than Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, but has more going on underneath…
Mine Eyes Have (and Have Not) Seen the Glory: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder
Terrence Malick
There are reasons not to perform well at your work. If you give a fine sermon that alters the thinking of your parishioner, your parishioner will have that sermon in mind when he listens to your next one. If you complete your projects at work and impress your superiors, you will be given more work. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, if you host an award show and bring the house down, your only reward is the opportunities to host more award shows.
The quandary faces Terence Malick in the crafting of his new film, To the Wonder. Coming…
Ambition’s Invisible Walls and the “Good Life” Ruthie Lived
Over at the The Atlantic, Emily Esfahani Smith released a book review-slash-sociological study last week on the relationship between ambition and community. She sets up her article on the recently released memoir of Rod Dreher, whom we’ve mentioned on here before, entitled The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, A Small Town, and the Secret of the Good Life. Ruthie Leming is Rod’s sister, the sister who stayed home in small-town Louisiana, who embedded herself in her childhood community, who embraced the ordinariness of her present and who, in her time of great and unexpected weakness (cancer), found…
New Music: Phosphorescent’s Muchacho
In an interview about his new release, Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck described the title as something of a self-rebuke: “If you see someone who is getting uppity, you might just say to them, ‘Hey, muchacho, settle down.’ I was in Mexico, by myself, feeling pretty raw, and I remembered a line in a Neruda poem somewhere. I can’t even remember what it was, but it was something like, ‘This is how it is, muchacho.’” It doesn’t take long in the album to get the sense that he felt Neruda was talking to him, that Muchacho is complementary to its predecessor, aptly…
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Another Week Ends: Jackrabbit Madness, FOMO, Faith Like a Mumford, Radical Rhetoric, Alan Partridge and the Sitcom Smackdown
1) If you are a sports fan, today is (arguably, I know) day two of the best four days in college sports every year. March Madness has begun, and Grantland is the place to be for the most hare-brained predictions and analyses—including a Charles Barkley shark jump and a Marshall Henderson moment only Marshall Henderson could think up. It’s not all fun and games, though—this story on the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits is one of the best team profiles I’ve read in a while. I defy you not to root for this team in the tournament, even it means…
New Music: Josh Ritter’s The Beast in Its Tracks
On his newest album, The Beast in Its Tracks, Josh Ritter grapples with his recent divorce, yet none of the songs come off as overly bitter or spiteful. Among the heartbreak and pain, Ritter carves out a new beginning, treating the entire situation with poise and grace through his characteristically excellent lyrics. Musically, nothing here will surprise fans of the singer-songwriter’s previous work, although The Beast in Its Tracks is considerably sparser than Historical Conquests and feels more worn than albums like The Animal Years or So Runs the World Away. This approach gives the album an intimate feel befitting…
Argo, “Best” Picture of the Year
Or is it? I suspect not, but that’s not the main issue. Critics have reacted against the movie since it won Best Picture, but for misguided reasons: it’s self-congratulatory for the film industry, it plays at a cynicism about US foreign affairs in the opening storyboard sequence only to annul that sentiment with a feel-good CIA story, etc. Its politics are too narrowminded to meet an expanding, globalized world. All of this is arguably true (I’m sympathetic to it), but why is no one talking about the flat characters, their near-total lack of development, the implausibly “this-is-the-intelligence-world” dialogue, the usually…
Mockingbird at the Movies: Warm Bodies
By my own count, there are precisely three films in the underrated genre of Zombie Romantic Comedies, or RomZomComs, if you will. The first was 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, a cult classic where the zombie apocalypse was the occasion in which mid-life crisis Shaun steps up to win back his ex-girlfriend. The second is 2009′s Zombieland, where anti-social, nerdy germophobe Columbus thrives in the zombie apocalypse by teaming up with a crew of misfit survivors, one of whom quickly becomes his love interest. The third, and probably not the last, is this year’s Warm Bodies, which does the…
Desire, Beauty, and Mercy: The Romance of Grace by Jim McNeely
The old commandment presses upon us the obligation to love, but the new commandment releases us into the power of love. He commands the wind and the waves, and they are calm. He commands us to love by first loving us, and so creates the love He desires. It is of grace, because love responds only to affection and not to coercion or force. Love, by grace, must make itself desirable to our hearts by sheer miracle or our hearts will not autonomously engage with affection.
Mbird friend Jim McNeely just released his new book, The Romance of Grace, and we…
New Music: Frightened Rabbit’s Pedestrian Verse
I wake up excited every Tuesday, even if there are no albums I am particularly anticipating, because every Tuesday brings the chance of stumbling into a thrilling musical experience. I had been hearing some buzz about Frightened Rabbit’s newest album, Pedestrian Verse, so I made sure to give it one of my first listens last Tuesday. Then, I listened to it again, and by Tuesday night I was recommending it to everyone I knew. A relative newcomer to the Scottish band’s music (although, since Tuesday I have listened to all of their albums), I was floored. Pedestrian Verse sounds like…
Another Week Ends: AKB48, More Super Bowl, Seeing Cézanne, Failed Rehab, Humanity According to 30 Rock, Presumption vs Grace, and Creepy Lance Armstrong
1. In the “mea culpa” world this past week, Minami Minegishi of the hit Japanese band AKB48 was publicly lambasted and forced to apologize on YouTube, where people have watched her tearful confession roughly 5 million times, for the crime of staying a night with her boyfriend. No one’s ever done a fantastic job with managing celebrity expectations, but this takes the cake, ht AOC:
“As a senior member of the group, it is my responsibility to be a role model for younger members,” she said, before ending the four-minute mea culpa with a deep, lingering bow.
The most striking thing about her apology,…
Short Story Wednesdays: “Big Two-Hearted River” by Hemingway
This week we turn to Ernest Hemingway’s classic, beloved “Big Two-Hearted River”, a story about fishing in backcountry Michigan. Its stylistic technique is the best of any stories we’ve looked at (or probably will!) in this understated story about survival. Read along here.
This story concludes Hemingway’s In Our Time, a beautiful collection of short stories that epitomize Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory’, a method of storytelling that only gives the bare facts and leaves it up to the reader to make inferences. As Hemingway was himself a veteran of war, In Our Time has usually been interpreted as a book dealing with…
A New Bo Giertz Must Have Resource: Then Fell the Lord’s Fire
In his post “The Whole Debt is Paid,” Tullian Tchividjian–our opening speaker at MBird 2013!–recounts a phenomenon that has changed the way he views ministry. He writes:
I have a long way to go (bad habits die slowly, for sure). But a Copernican revolution of sorts has taken place in my own heart regarding the need to preach the law then the gospel without going back to the law as a means of keeping God’s favor. May God raise up a generation of preachers who storm the gates of worldliness with “It is finished.””
In this account, he is not only describing an experience that…
New Music: Yo La Tengo’s Fade
It’s fitting that Yo La Tengo, embarking on their 27th year of playing together, opens their newest album, Fade, with this chorus: “But nothing ever stays the same…so say good night to me and lose no more time resisting the flow.” For a band that has been around for almost three decades and was a vital part of indie rock’s explosion in the early and mid-90s, Yo La Tengo knows a little something about change, carving out a longevity nearly unheard of in the indie rock scene, and this experience and wisdom serves them well on Fade. I’ll spare you…
David Morton: Thanks! Ummm... yeah... that was probably the most dead-on, jam p...
Mark Salomon: How am I only discovering this... today? Best to you and your future e...
David Zahl: Fixed! Sorry about that......
Jim McNeely: It's my favorite nightstand reading these days! An awesome tome!...
Ethan Richardson: Here's the full cast list! Look at all those Zahls... Editing, Sea...