Sharpe's Zeroes

If you don't already, I implore you to listen to Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes. I just recently delved into their album 'Up From Above' and have simply been blown away. They remind me of what the Psalters would have been like if they were good. Or, boasting 11 members, they remind me of an orchestral folk version of The Arcade Fire. Alex Ebert has the perfect, rugged vocals that make it work. But many of the songs are made even better by the complement of Jade Castrinos' chalky vocals.

Such as here, on this performance of 'Home' on Letterman.

I absolutely love the part that rings a chord of the old Johnny & June Cash tunes, when the song allows for a brief dialogue. What fantastic lyrics (A = Alex and J = Jade):

A: Jade
J: Alexander
A: Do you remember that day you fell out of my window?
J: I sure do, you came jumping out after me.
A: Well, you fell on the concrete, nearly broke your [tookus], you were bleeding all over the place and I rushed you out to the hospital, you remember that?
J: Yes I do.
A: Well, there's something I never told you about that night.
J: What didn't you tell me?
A: While you were sitting in the backseat smoking a cigarette you thought was going to be your last, I was falling deep, deeply in love with you, and I never told you until just now.

Something so beautiful and 'old-fashioned' you can easily picture it. Nicely done, Ebert & Co.

Why John Iriving is one of my two favorite living authors

I just finished Irving's most recent, Last Night in Twisted River, and, while the whole novel was engrossing, the ending was utterly fantastic. Having read his classics Cider House Rules (twice, in fact), The World According to Garp, and A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the non-classic Until I Find You, I was comfortable calling myself a major Irving afficionado. Until I realized many critics and readers alike believe he has written four classics, with the fourth being A Widow For One Year. So I'm now reading that, but I just love how it starts, especially the second paragraph. So, here you go (since you asked):

One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking--it was coming from her parents' bedroom. It was a totally unfamiliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with a stomach flu; when she first heard her mother making love, Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up.

It was not as simple a matter as her parents having separate bedrooms; that summer they had separate houses, although Ruth never saw the other house. Her parents spent alternate nights in the family house with Ruth; there was a rental house nearby, where Ruth's mother or father stayed when they weren't staying with Ruth. It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced--when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.

My First Time Music-Festivalling

As an avid fan of music and concerts, I typically avoid festivals as the price is always too high to justify it. I usually even avoid single-day passes as the artists I love are typically smattered over the course of the festival. All that changed this past Sunday when A) I went to a music festival. namely, lollapalooza and B) there were enough bands I loved playing in one day for me to justify spending $90. My friend and I chose to use our gaps to get 'good' (relative to a festival) spots rather than dash from band to band. But here's the recap from the four bands upon which we feasted our eyes.

First up, was the amazing (and local) Company of Thieves. Genevieve (the lead singer) has such a mesmerizing voice; quite whimsical at times and smokily angry at others. In addition, she has a fantastic 'rocker' persona on stage that made the entire set a delight. Highlights included hearing many of their brilliant new songs and rocking out to 'Under the Umbrella.'

After a quick food break, we headed over and waited for about a half hour for Mumford & Sons. This was one of the most enjoyable shows of the day as the four-piece band from London had such joy in playing. Highlights include chanting 'Love it will not betray you dismay or enslave you, it will set you free' from Sigh No More with the crowd, the horns on a new song and Thistle & Weeds, and calling the set-closer to be 'Dust Bowl Dance' along with so many others.

We stood through the end of Yeasayer's set plus an hour before we then saw MGMT. While the band themselves were awesome, the crowd was full of absolute jerks. Let's suffice it to say you could barely breathe, let alone move and spent roughly a third of the show passing off body-surfers. Highlights include opening with a brilliant version of Pieces of What and the dance hits that got the crowd rocking; namely, Kids, Time to Pretend, and Electric Feel.Finally, in a tough (*cough cough) choice between Soundgarden and the Arcade Fire, my friend and I saw the Arcade Fire. Almost needless to say, if you haven't seen this band life, you desperately need to. There was eight of 'em onstage, absolutely rocking out and not losing the crowd for a minute. Highlights included absolutely losing it (dancing) on Sprawl II, a most delicious rockin' rendition of Haiti, and Crown of Love with a special dedication to the National.

A Simple Twist of Fate; or, a BIG life update.

I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell.
-Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue

Dear friends, family, and other loved ones, I am writing this to inform you that in a few weeks I am headed East. However, due to a most unforeseen twist of fate, I am headed both farther East and farther North than previously presumed. I am returning to the place where I spent my formulative years (a.k.a. middle school). That place where the ocean sprays fresh on your face. That place where clam chowder is the thing to do. And, of course, that place where the Red Sox are all the rage.

Perhaps if I were a writer, I would have seen the foreshadowing on the night of Wednesday, July 28. Reading John Irving's latest, Last Night in Twisted River, I left the two main characters (a cook and his son) headed towards Boston. Having accidentally mistaken his father's lover for a grizzly bear and killing her with an eight-inch skillet, the 12-year old Danny, accompanied by his father flee the logging town in which they live in Coos County, New Hampshire. I closed the book that night with the two heading towards Boston, to track down the mother of another recently deceased logger.

Earlier this semester, I applied to four graduate schools for biophysics. I never heard back from Boston University (BU). This past Thursday, I received a call notifying me that my application had been lost and just recently found. The professor who called me asked if I would still like the admissions committee to review my application and (of course) I said yes.

The rest is melodramatic history worthy of an Almodovar film (ok, perhaps not), but in the end I have been generously offered a position as a graduate student, taking classes and doing research to one day receive a PhD. And the research at BUMC (The Medical School of BU, of which I will be a part, is quite fascinating). After much thinking and praying, I accepted this offer and am rather excited about this stage in my life. I realize that this path will be drastically different from the immediate path seminary would have laid out for me. The decision was hard, but for a smorgasbord of reasons, I ended up choosing BU. I am quite excited about this path and can always attend seminary later in life.

So in the next couple weeks I will be visiting BUMC and working on finding housing (any leads would be sweet!). And in the words of Tobias, Let the great experiment begin! Though admittedly, attending BU is quite different from having an open marriage...

Summer Tuneskis

With The Arcade Fire's Suburbs coming out tomorrow, I will be adding another fantastic album to my summer listening list. But here's some of the music that's defined my summer thus far in ascending order of importance:

Ray LaMontagne. All three of his albums. But some of the tunes off Gossip in the Grain, such as A Falling Through and I Still Care for You have helped me through quite a few rough patches.

Stars. One of those not-necessarily-exceptional bands that when listened to at just the right time hit the spot. A super melodramatic band. Their new album, The Five Ghosts, is no Set Yourself on Fire or In Our Bedroom After the War, but it is still a solid record.

MGMT. As a fan of more 'obscure' electronic music (i.e. Goldfrapp, Fever Ray, and LCD Soundsystem to name a few), I was very late in hopping on this bandwagon. But it was well worth it. For a dance record, get Oracular Spectacular. For a musically diverse and rich album, get Congratulations.

Mumford & Sons. An absolutely phenomenal debut album. In the running for best album of the year. Incredible banjo/folk music to accompany top-notch lyrics. Little Lion Man is the perfect song to listen to while pissed, while the incredible Christian eschatological hope offered in After the Storm has comforted me like nothing else.

The Gaslight Anthem. Just see my previous blog post. Such a talented band.

Rendering comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for?
-Elif Batuman, The Possessed

Redemption and the Memoir

To claim that my experience reading memoirs is vast, would be a gross overstatement. The memoirs I've read include the loosely Christian, more 'spiritual' memoirs of Don Miller and Anne Lamott. These memoirs seem to unpack a spirituality found through cool encounters or experiences of the heart. On the other end of the Christian memoir spectrum, I read Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God. The intrigue in reading this book came in her chronicling her experiences with Judaism and how that played into her eventual conversion. I can proudly claim that I have read the absolute classic Confessions, by Augustine. Finally, I have read a few memoirs chronicling the hard times experienced by children in Africa or the Middle East. These include What is the What, A Long Way Gone, and the graphic novel Persepolis. What is the What merits mentioning as Eggers notably intertwines and connects Valentino Achek Deng's terrible experiences as a "lost boy" during the Sudanese civil war with a burglary of Deng's house in America.

Within this quite limited memoir experience, I have found one memoirist in particular who I thoroughly enjoy reading, namely, Mary Karr. Her books are not as grave as What is the What or Long Way Gone and do not inspire geopolitical change as these two do. Nor are they the 'fluff' received in many Christian memoirs. Instead, they are raw memoirs chronicling her life. In The Liar's Club, Karr explores much of her childhood, including growing up with a mother who was married seven times (three in her lifetime). She explores how experiences such as sexual molestation and her drunk mother attempting to kill her and her sister with a butcher knife deeply affected her as a girl. In fact, she need vast amounts of therapy to overcome much of this. Karr writes with such wit and ingenuity that all of her memoirs are mesmerizing from the first page.

What I love about her third, and most recent, memoir, Lit, is that it is essentially a redemption memoir. With her other memoirs (Liar's Club & Cherry), it's tempting to get so caught up in her troubled life that you're left licking wounds from the terribleness of the various events. Though it is also rewarding to have seen her grow from such events. In Lit, however, the redemptive trajectory of Karr's life is glaringly obvious. This memoir chronicles how Karr became a raging alcoholic, just like her mother, despite her best intentions. Amidst this, Karr had to raise a young child while experiencing difficulties in her marriage. But the best part of Lit is that it chronicles Karr's rescue from this lifestyle. And her rescue ultimately comes through simple, frequent prayers to a God she has much trouble believing in. She finds great strength in the various spiritual exercises of the Catholic Church, witnessing how efficacious they are in her life.

This is a triumph in itself as it shows the disciplines involved in a Christian life defining one's experiences, rather than the inversion of this. It shows how powerful God is in simple prayers. And ultimately it shows redemption that only comes through a transformed life. But Karr's audience is primarily non-Christians. Which is why this memoir is so wonderful. She makes it accessible to those on the outside, who understand little of the Christian faith. I could go on and on, but you should just read it. Here's an excerpt to get you started (Dev's her son by the way):

"One Sunday after church, the kids are playing in the basement corner, and I'm studying the mangled body of Jesus on a small icon when I say to Dev--now age nine--Why the crucifixion?
He's fiddling with the knot in his shoe. What? he says. His interest in what I say is fast diminishing.
Why does redemption have to come through the crucifixion? I mean, why couldn't you play hopscotch or win at solitaire?
He rolls his eyes and picks at the knot.
I'm thinking of my pal Nick Flynn, I say. He has a poem about somebody giving him Mass cards of Jesus with His heart on fire. It ends, My version of hell/is someone ripping open his/shirt & saying,/look what I did for you.
That's funny, Dev says. He puts his shoe up so I can get the knot loose. I'm picking at it when he says, Who'd pay attention to hopscotch?
Whaddya mean? I say.
He says, I mean, the crucifixion is like Pulp Fiction (the film Mother illicitly showed him years before). Nobody would pay any attention to some goofy song that got sung. Or if God just went poof over you. People get baptized all the time. It's a big miracle to was a person's sins away. Nobody pays any attention at all to it.
That's it! I say. It's marketing. God reaches people by giving them the only kind of gory crap they'll pay attention to.
But Dev has slipped off his other dress shoe and run in stocking feet to join his noisy pals in their game. The bull's eye he hits is original sin. We are a hard-to-sell people--so venal and nuts that we'll crowd into the Coliseum, jubilant to see people hacked to death or devoured by beasts. Or we'll sit drooling before comparably horrific TV images. Only a crucifixion is awful enough to compel public imagination."

Granted, God could have redeemed humankind however he wanted. This was His sovereign and glorious (in the resurrection!) choice.