Ivan Cash asks people near Auburn, Alabama, to tell about the last photo on their phone:
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
The "Secret" History of Halloween
"We have shown that the modern holiday, while incorporating various elements of recreated ancient paganism, medieval Christianity, early-modern Reformation and nationalism, and Celtic Romanticism, is nevertheless an entirely modern construct, coming into its own in postwar North America. This is our Halloween."Many different theories of the origin of Halloween have been floated through the years, but this article digs further into the real story than any I've seen.
Full article...
"Let My Tebow Go"
You won't read a better (or deeper) analysis of the whole Tim Tebow phenomenon than this article. Stephen Marche for NYT:
"[...] Tebow has to play again, if not in New York, then somewhere. Not because it would be good for the Jets or good for the fans or good for football, but because of what he has come to represent (to me at least): the necessity, and the beauty, of absurdity. [...] This is an atheist's plea: Let Tim Tebow play."Full article...
Do-it-yourself Culture
Shea Hembrey at TED on how he invented 100 different artists and their works:
Post-Christian Justice
Al Mohler on how "post-Christian" culture is confused about criminal justice (in light of the Breivik trial in Norway):
Full article...
ht: Vitamin Z
And yet, in another statement from his commentary on this text, Westermann points straight to the reason that a post-Christian culture loses its moral confidence in the punishment of murderers. He states: "A community is only justified in executing the death penalty insofar as it respects the unique right of God over life and death and insofar as it respects the inviolability of human life that follows therefrom."
Once those convictions and moral intuitions are lost, the death penalty no longer makes sense. Eventually, even the idea of punishment itself loses all cultural credibility.
Full article...
ht: Vitamin Z
M. Robinson on the Bible
Marilynne Robinson on the debt that literature owes the Scriptures. This is a great example of why I love Robinson. She didn't send a watered-down version of this to some Christian magazine. She sets up camp in The New York Times and then calmly and contentedly (without a hint of anxiety) starts educating people. She's just embarrassingly good at this.
Link...
Link...
Retweeting the Reformation
The Economist on how there is nothing new under the sun:
"The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today's online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a 'networked public', rather than an 'audience', since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany. [...] A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author's involvement. As with 'Likes' and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item's popularity."Full article...
The 12+ Songs of Christmas
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Sufjan Stevens - Royal David's City.
I know it has become somewhat cliche to like Sufjan Stevens. That's neither here nor there to me: I wish to decide on the merits of the case, and you simply won't find a better late-model Christmas album (or albums) than his Songs for Christmas EP collection. I dare you to listen to this song twice and stop there:
No one can eat just one, so here are three more samples from that collection to choose from:
Sufjan Stevens - Lo! How A Rose E'er Blooming.
Sufjan Stevens - Holy, Holy, Holy.
Sufjan Stevens - Joy To The World.
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Elizabeth Poston - Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.
As near as I can remember, this is an American (late colonial) poem that got set to music late last century, and somehow became associated with Christmas, especially in the U.K. Most recordings of it that I've found are exceedingly boring, but when done right (as below) it is something to see. When they break into parts at the start of the second verse, well, the Grinch's heart starts its upsizing.
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Age of Faith - That Winter's Night.
I like this song. This recording is not quite as good as the album version, but it was available. The song sort of looks at the Nativity through a picture window, stopping on the question of what the singer might have done or felt, had he been there that winter's night...
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Ralph Stanley - Children, Go Where I Send Thee.
Even at this late date, I'm not sure I can pick out all of the numbered groups and identify where exactly they appear in the Bible. It doesn't really matter, though, as Dr. Stanley always brings it back to One.
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Vince Guaraldi Trio - Christmas Time Is Here.
You mean the Charlie Brown song? Yes. The Charlie Brown song. Jazz and Christmas are sort of like canned tuna and marshmallow cream: you wouldn't think they'd go together, but somehow, it works out.
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Andrew Peterson - Matthew's Begats.
As two astute social commentators claimed recently, the Indians always used every part of the firework. Likewise, Mr. Peterson sees no reason why the scraps and unused corners of the Christmas story should go to waste.
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Heather Dale - The Huron Carol.
"Jesous Ahatonhia" (Jesus is born) is, if I understand rightly, a kind of cultural translation of the Christmas story into the Huron Indian language done sometime in the 1600s. That makes it, I'd imagine, the earliest North American Christmas song.
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The Innocence Mission - In The Bleak Midwinter.
Searched around for decent version of this carol. I finally settled on this one. It's so quiet, empty, and cold, but by the end, the icicles are starting to drip a bit.
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Jars of Clay - Christmas for Cowboys.
Why have I never heard this before? Jars of Clay covers John Denver. A lonesome song that doesn't take a day off for Christmas.
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The California Raisins - Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.
No, America, it won't do to deny it any longer. This happened, and we know it happened. And the sooner we admit that it happened, the sooner the healing can begin. Seriously, though, why is this not available, remastered on DVD?
Still not willing to come to terms with it? Exhibit B, if it please the court:
Claymation Christmas - Here We Come A-Waffling.
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Muppets - It Feels Like Christmas.
I'm still confused on this point: of all of the adaptations of A Christmas Carol that have been produced over the years, why does the one billing itself as a children's comedy seem to be the most moving? Come in, and know this clip better, man!
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David Francey - Good Christian Men, Rejoice.
Like stepping out into a cold winter morning. This rendition gets your blood moving, and makes you want to get up and take up the song. Now ye hear of endless bliss: Jesus Christ was born for this!
And, as an added bonus, I present (after long searching), a reading of the "Cajun Night Before Christmas", true to the version I heard as a child on a cassette tape of some big Christmas production at my cousin's church in Louisiana. Laissez le bon Noël rouler! (or something to that effect)
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Trosclair - Cajun Night Before Christmas.
"Perchance to Dream"
Jonathan Franzen writes (quite a long while back) about the novel as a literary form. He manages to touch on a number of different things in the process. There's really a lot here. Here's a taste:
"Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time-increments of cultural change: how to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"
[...]
"We live under a tyranny of the literal. The daily unfolding stories of Steve Forbes, Magic Johnson, Timothy McVeigh, and Hillary Clinton have an intense, iconic presence that relegates to a subordinate shadow-world our own untelevised lives."
[...]
"Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even our commercialized religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us the center of our own universe of choices and gratifications?"
[...]
"There's no bubble that can stay unburst."Full text here...
Repair will rise again?
Some hardware hacker called "bunnie" on why the days of repairing computers instead of throwing them away and buying newer ones might be coming back / here to stay:
"There will be a rise in repair culture as technology becomes less disposable and more permanent. Replacing worn out computer parts five years from their purchase date won’t seem so silly when the replacement part has virtually the same specifications and price as the old part. This rise in repair culture will create a demand for schematics and spare parts that in turn facilitates the growth of open ecosystems and small businesses."Link to full article (with charts and graphs!)...
Which Way Are You Facing?
I found this project very, very interesting. It provides a way to quantify certain underlying divisions that I've always felt and heard discussed. Certain states or regions have not only a location in the U.S., but an orientation: that is, the people there think of themselves as connected with certain other locations.
Here's a link to the big map of new "states", but be sure to check out the interactive map as well. It lets you see, comparatively, how much time your county spends on the phone with each county in the country. All sorts of interesting connections emerge. One I noticed was that on the phone, Alabama is not closely connected with Mississippi. Over text-messaging, however, it shifts alignment away from Georgia and toward MS. This fits well with my own anecdotal observations that younger people in Alabama have more interaction with Mississippi (especially the coast) than older people.
Large, publicly-available data-sets are going to start showing us a lot more about ourselves as we go forward.
ht: Strange Maps; Adam Brown
Large, publicly-available data-sets are going to start showing us a lot more about ourselves as we go forward.
ht: Strange Maps; Adam Brown
Quote #148
"The cyber-revolution has made it possible for us to deceive ourselves about how close we are [...]"
— Douglas Wilson
Zombieland
This post from John Médaille covers a lot of ground. Whether you agree with every little point or not, there are plenty of shining moments. The heart of the essay is in seeking to understand why popular culture has been fascinated of late with the image of the zombie (and don't worry, it isn't all — or even mostly — about zombies):
The image, so silly on its face, resonates with the young because they know, at some intuitive level, that we are already in the midst of the apocalypse, that the world wishes to strip them of their minds and their hearts and make them pure consumers, and relentless consumers of one product, the advertiser’s dream.Link to full essay...
Siding w/ Vinyl
Just saw this quote in an Amazon.com review: "Vinyl is the future of physically packaged music." Funny thing is, I think I agree. (I'm currently in the process of buying a record player. Otherwise, I'm all digital for audio.)
Anonymous Authorities
Mark Mitchell at FPR:
"First, we are learning to obey anonymous authorities. [...] Second, we are growing accustomed to taking orders from irrational devices. [...] Finally, because these irrational devices cannot be argued with, we learn to meekly obey."Full article...
The Seltzer Man
"That's the year I was born, the bottle's as old as I am. Funny thing about it is that now to this day, the bottles are worth so much that I'd be better pulling out all my bottles out of every customer's house and selling them slowly as antiques and collectibles. At this sad point in time the bottle is unfortunately worth more dead than it is alive."Read the transcript...
Land-lines
Full disclosure: I don't have a land-line, and haven't for quite some time. Cell phones come with a variety of conveniences, but they have not yet matched the audio quality of old-style copper. That's one thing I miss. I often tell people that my phone does everything very well, except make calls. In junior high school, during the summer, my friends and I would call each other and watch TV together - if something interesting was on - sharing commentary over the phone. I can't imagine making long calls like that on a cell. That kind of long-duration, reliable telepresence just isn't possible given the kind of call quality I usually have to work with.
Virginia Heffernan:
Virginia Heffernan:
Sound signals, so unfaithful to the original they hardly seem to count as reproductions, come through shallow. You can hardly recognize voices. Fragile, fleeting connections shatter in the wind. You don’t know when to talk and when to pause; voices overlap unpleasantly. You no longer have the luxury to listen for over- and undertones; you listen only for content. Calls have become transactional, not expressive.Full article...
Cartoons as Commentary
Guy Somerset:
What does it say about a nation’s mental capacity that the delivery of well-crafted fiction and shrewd observations can only be injected into the body politic through the most innocuous form imaginable? What sort of satiric societal madhouse can gratify adults’ intellectual needs only through masquerading as children’s programming?The whole thing...
Russell Brand on Celebrity
It's jarring to see Russell Brand talking seriously for a bit, but some of what he has to say is very interesting (note: some profanity and "thematic elements" in this clip):
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