I made a goal to see more theater (musicals especially) and this year I’ve succeeded. The Book of Mormon, then Once, and now Wicked, which I saw on Thursday. I loved the music of Once in its own right, but it’s different from the others, which are more traditional showtunes. That said, there is something I love about showtunes I can’t easily describe. It’s almost entirely about the music itself, not the show’s plot or characters. I consider the people who write them to be craftsman of the highest order.
Consider “What Is This Feeling?” from Wicked (above). The first go of the chorus (which starts at 1:12 in the video) is a sparse iteration that builds to the second chorus, which adds the undulating strings beneath the backing band that’s punctuating the singers’ lines. The final two choruses are even bigger and better with the ensemble chiming in and the leads cranking up the melody. The chord structure of the orchestral undertow isn’t anything elaborate, nor are the sung melodies and harmonies; but when combined, it’s like beautiful musical alchemy.
That’s just one example of the many songs created for both the stage and screen that tap into the deep power of music. While I’m sure entire books and dissertations have been written on how music affects emotion, for me it’s not academic. I don’t know why the chorus of Anathallo’s “All the First Pages” gives me goosebumps. Or how the heroic strains of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” makes my heart soar. They just do. And the people who make that music get a standing ovation from me.
Chris Hadfield couldn’t just be a fighter pilot, engineer, astronaut, photographer, musician, or the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station: he just had to be a damn good writer too.
At one point in his superb memoir An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Hadfield describes what it’s like to exit the ISS into the vacuum of space for the first time:
What’s coming out of my mouth is a single word: Wow. Only, elongated: Wwwooooowww. … It’s like being engrossed in cleaning a pane of glass, then you look over your shoulder and realize you’re hanging off the side of the Empire State Building, Manhattan sprawled vividly beneath and around you. … It’s overpowering, visually, and no other senses warn you that you’re about to be attacked by raw beauty.
There was something similarly surreal and dreamlike about the sight in front of me now, which I couldn’t reconcile with my prosaic fumbling with the tether hook a moment before. Holding onto the side of a spaceship that’s moving around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, I could truly see the astonishing beauty of our planet, the infinite textures and colors. On the other side of me, the black velvet bucket of space, brimming with stars. It’s vast and overwhelming, this visual immersion, and I could drink it in forever.
In addition to telling the story of his life’s journey to the ISS, Hadfield dispenses great life advice he’s learned over the years and dishes on the culture of NASA. Contrary to the view we have of astronauts as swashbuckling daredevils, Hadfield is humble and forthright about his failings. He’s also candid about the sacrifices he and his family has had to make for him to pursue his dream. Reading this along with Mary Roach’s Packing For Marsprovides great insight into the weirdness and wonder of space travel, and the men and women who are just crazy enough to do it.
Radiolab has produced another winner in their “An Ice-Cold Case” episode, an illuminating portrait of Ötzi, a 5000-year-old natural mummy discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991. The details scientists have been able to ascertain about this mountain man are astounding.
Radiolab, as usual, brings the story alive, telling what we know of Ötzi’s life and death, down to the meal he had before he died. I find it fascinating to imagine the life this mysterious “Iceman” lived before he died alone on a mountain and was mummified by the ebb and flow of ice and snow over millennia. That he didn’t decay like every other carcass, and instead lives among us now as an avatar for a primordial age, is a peculiar miracle that I’m glad to have heard from Radiolab — a crew that seems to delight in the many peculiar miracles around us.
Fiction usually isn’t my thing, but I want to get better at it. So I’m reading nine novels in November’s thirty days and writing about them here. I’ll update this post as I go along. Some spoilers, natch.Update: Just made it through the ninth book, with only hours to spare. I’m very glad to have deepened my exposure to and enjoyment of fiction in its many faces, but just a little bit gladder to be able to read nonfiction again. Thanks for joining me on this fictional escapade.
Reason number one I read yet another juvenile book: it was short and I was on a (self-enforced) deadline. Reason number two: ending my fictional month with the same author I started it seemed fitting. What a delightfully madcap yarn this one is. Beautifully illustrated too. I greatly appreciate in artists, specifically writers and filmmakers, the ability to tell different kinds of stories in different genres yet still retain their style throughout. That Gaiman can publish something as composed and heart-full as The Ocean at the End of the Lane (see Book 1 below) in the same year as something so zany as Fortunately, the Milk is a great testament to his durability and literary prowess. (Thanks to Jenny for loaning me the book.)
Continuing my accidental quest to read books most kids read in middle or high school, I was eager to pick this one up because I knew so little about it — the elderly bearded man on the cover being my only clue. (Bunny trail: I knew this was an unorthodox book choice for a twenty-something dude like me when a woman on the train asked me out of the blue why I was reading it. Turns out she was an eighth grade teacher who taught the book regularly to her students, so we got to talking about our love of dystopian stories and other great YA literature.) I was delighted to find in The Giver an excellent coming-of-age story sitting atop an undercurrent of dystopia and, as the book would call it, “stirrings.” While I’m not surprised it has been so frequently challenged in schools and libraries due to certain scenes, I’m glad adolescents are exposed to it because it meets them where they are in life. Like Jonas, tweens and teens approach junctions in their lives thinking they know everything, only to be challenged, sometimes painfully, when the curtain falls and real life reveals itself.
I’ve been searching, so far in vain, for a book or movie that accurately captures my high school experience. This isn’t it, but it’s closer than most other depictions I’ve seen. Where it diverges most distinctly is the protagonist; I don’t subscribe at all to the “real men don’t cry” machismo thing, but Charlie cries so much in this story, often for no discernible reason, that I started losing some sympathy for him. Pull it together! I often thought. The epistolary style was the right narrative choice, because it was refreshingly different, and the stream-of-consciousness diary-like model is an expository format that most teenagers can relate to.
A decade later, I’m still getting around to reading books I didn’t get a chance to read in high school. I’m a much bigger fan of Nineteen Eighty-Four (which I did read back then) than this one, but its focus on books and literacy is especially relevant to me after having gone to library school. The central theme seems at once antiquated and prescient, given that it was written in 1953 in response to the rise of television and McCarthy-era threats of censorship but also rings true with today’s book burnings and the dumbification of news. While the amount of and access to knowledge has never been greater thanks to the Internet, we’re losing something important in the increasing obsolescence of physical books. Books in reality aren’t being cast off out of fear, but disinterest. It’s fitting that the group of vagabonds at the end of the novel became books themselves, stand-in vessels for the knowledge being willfully destroyed. We ought to preserve as much knowledge as we can of whatever we can in whatever ways possible — through oral tradition, manuscript, digitization, or other means — and not take for granted the privilege of such knowledge. To do otherwise is folly.
This was like a fantasy thriller disguised as a high-school YA novel. Like the protagonist, I kept trying to figure out who, or what, Stargirl was, what she would do next, and why. Whether she had a grand life plan I can’t say, but what I did figure out pretty quickly was that she was a textbook example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, a proto-Zooey Deschanel for the adolescent crowd. The ukulele and friendship with a rat were especially in keeping with the MPDG’s propensity for quirk and kindness. While a little MPDG-ness goes a long way, the moral of Stargirl’s changing favors within her peer group is a good one for teens to hear: It’s hard to see it in the moment, but you’ll regret not being yourself. (Thanks to Jenny for the recommendation.)
I get a special thrill when a book I’m reading has a word in it that’s also on my cool-word list. (This time it was crepuscular.) While this book, perhaps purposely, meandered a bit, I found the diary narrative to be pleasant and redemptive. Ames was almost too likeable and saintly, and very self-aware. But perhaps the end-of-life letters he was writing to his son brought that out in him.
It felt like my opinion of this book changed every few pages. Just when its hippyish mysticism became too Oprah to be taken seriously, Coelho dropped a surprisingly deep thought nugget that kept me reading. For example, amid talk of “listening to your heart” and discovering the Soul of the World (eye roll), the titular character tells the boy on the quest that “the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” A bit trite, yes, but it rings true. The central fable, though anchored by a few strong key points, seems overly simplistic and eager to fit into any and every spiritual worldview. Perhaps this is an effect of the language translation from the original Portuguese, in which no doubt the story would be more beautiful. (Thanks to Nainita for the recommendation.)
Read this as a youngster but didn’t remember it, so in anticipation of the movie I thought I’d revisit it. The boy in me enjoyed the zero-gravity battleroom scenes, which seem like high-tech laser tag. The biggest hurdle to clear for me was how well-spoken the kids were. I suppose that since it’s set in the future, Card made the choice to make kids sound more adult (though I thought kids are getting dumber thanks to the Internet, or “nets” as Ender’s Game calls it), but it’s jarring nevertheless. I never really grokked Ender himself, but I cheered for his struggle against The Man and was happy with how things ended.
My entrance, beside seeing Coraline, into the Gaiman oeuvre. Since I’ve nothing to compare it to, I can only say that I really enjoyed this book’s lean, loving style and deep sense of wonder. A favorite passage:
“Do you still know everything, all the time?”
She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
“So you used to know everything?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
“To play what?”
“This,” she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.
The pièce de résistance was the view I had when I finished reading:
My great friends Tone and Brian adopted a baby this weekend. Tone wrote about the process here, detailing the long, sometimes painful but ultimately fruitful journey they took from first beginning the process last year to finally holding their first baby, Ruth Marilyn, in their arms last Friday.
When I first saw the name they decided on, I immediately began thinking about an awesome nickname I could give her. Since they call me Chacho, a name-relic of the service trip we went on together to Colombia in 2010, I knew my fake-niece needed a nickname that would pair together with Chacho well — in case we’re in a sitcom together or become a crime-fighting duo. Naturally, I arrived at Ruthio (or Ruthia), in honor of Rufio from Hook. Though Ruth is only days old, I can already tell she’ll exemplify Rufio’s wild yet virtuous nature. The perfect mixture of badassery and femininity. That’s my kind of gal.
Growing up in Madison, the Onion‘s hometown, and now living in Chicago, its current headquarters, I’ve had easy access to the weekly editions. Lately my Onion diet has been exclusively online, so the print copy is hardly essential to the reading experience. But I’ve often grabbed a copy before hopping on the L or the bus, which allowed me to read through whole articles rather than simply skimming the headlines, and to enjoy the little bits you don’t get online.
To go tangential: Like most younger folks these days, I get pretty much all my non-satirical news online. Really, the only time I pick up a newspaper is at my parents’ house, and that’s usually for the crossword. If I’m at the doctor’s office or the bookstore I’ll eagerly devour a print magazine, if only because I’m less liable to become distracted than if I were to read it online, just a tab away from another distracting Internet nugget (Internugget?).
But besides books (no thanks, e-readers) and the occasional magazine, I’m a largely paperless information consumer. I’m OK with that, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss carrying The Onion with me.
I’ll have onion in my dinner tonight, in loving memory.
Rod Dreher, in his new book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, writes about his sister Ruthie’s fight with lung cancer and about his complicated relationship with his family and small-town life in Louisiana. After her diagnosis, Ruthie told her doctors and loved ones not to tell her specifics about her condition, nor even how long she should expect to live. Dreher didn’t understand why:
If I had cancer, I’d demand to know everything at once, on the theory that information is power. And then, me being me, I would surely brood over it incessantly. Ruthie, on the other hand, figured that information would be disempowering. She understood that she was in some respects living an illusion, but if she was going to live at all, she had to be able to curtain off the terror of death.
Dreher later expands on how Ruthie’s way of dealing with information that collided with her worldview or pre-existing opinions was often handicapping to her and harmful to him, but this is an instance where it seems her ruthless resolve served her well.
Like Dreher, I am someone who values information-gathering for a number of reasons: to expand my mind, to gain sympathy for the other side of an argument, to weigh all consequences of a decision or action. I’ve found this trait has served me well in a number of ways.
But I also get stuck in my own head, and the constant theorizing and hand-wringing and countering my own inner arguments gets very tiresome. In a situation like Ruthie’s, throwing on more hard truths wouldn’t have helped: “All the extra information could only sap her will to resist. The truth — the whole truth, that is — would not set her free, but would make her captive to anxiety, and tempt her to despair.”
Though I’m not battling cancer, I know that the more voices and information I add to my thought-stream, the more overwhelming it seems to get. (Maybe I’m the type of person Matthew 11:28-30 is talking to.) Sometimes I would love to be more like Ruthie Leming — sure of my life’s purpose, simple in my goals, and sacrificial above all. But I’m not. At least, not always. This has been Dreher’s discovery, documented in LittleWay, and will continue to be part of mine.The book contemplates what made him eager to leave his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana, and decades later what brought him back. Ruthie’s way is central to this story, and it’s one that will stick with me for a long time.
(Meanwhile, Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has become essential reading.)
Is the Internet making us smarter or stupider? It’s a question Q the Podcast recently tackled in a lively and in-depth debate between lots of smart and interesting people. There is enough evidence to support both sides of the debate. But what I concluded after listening to the show was that for all of the doomsday talk about the technologies and processes that have become embedded in our digitized culture within the last decade or so, how we use the Internet is ultimately not up to the Internet.
No matter how incentivizing are the apps and social networks we frequent; nor addicting the silly games we enjoy; nor efficient the tools we use, there is still a human being making decisions in front of a screen. So while I certainly sympathize with those who profess addiction (willing or otherwise) to Tweeting or checking Facebook, I remind everyone using technology of any kind of Uncle Ben’s famous maxim: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
We as autonomous, advanced-brain human beings have the power to do or not to do things. It’s a great power to have, but it also requires perseverance. The allure of instant gratification the usual Internet suspects provide won’t be defeated easily. It takes a willpower heretofore unknown to modern peoples. It takes resolve to fight temptation that is equal or greater than the temptation itself.
Do you have what it takes? Do I? Eh, it’s day to day.
But flipping this entire argument on its head is Nicholas Carr’s recent article in The Atlantic called “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” which delves into the burgeoning world of automation. He writes about how we’ve become increasingly reliant on computers to perform more elaborate and complicated tasks that had previously been done by humans. The benefit of this is that we’re able to get tasks done quicker and more efficiently. The downside is that some human services are no longer required, which means the skills needed to perform those services are eroding.
Carr uses the example of airplane pilots, who have been increasingly relegated to monitoring digital screens (the “glass cockpit”) as the computers do the heavy lifting and only sometimes take the plane’s reigns. While the usefulness of autopilot is obvious, when computers take away control of the primary functions of flying they are also taking away the neurological and physiological skills pilots have honed over years of flying.
This is a problem, says Carr, because “knowing demands doing”:
One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a difficult task, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but it’s the work itself—the means—that makes us who we are.
Computer automation, he says, disconnects the ends from the means and thereby makes getting what we want easier without having to do the work of knowing. This just about nails social media, doesn’t it? It’s so easy to get what we want these days that the work we used to have to do no longer is required of us. To research a paper in college, one had to go to the physical library and pull out a physical book and transcribe quotes by hand; now a quick Google search and copy-paste will get that done in a jiff (or is it GIF?).
This isn’t a bad thing. I’m thankful that many tasks take eons less time than they used to. (I mean, typewriters are cool, but they’re not very amenable to formatting or mistakes.) My point is it’s important to understand how and why we use technology the way we do, and to acknowledge that we have agency over that use. To disregard that agency is to refuse to accept responsibility for our own power. And we know what happens then.
I was having a bad day. And then I saw 12 Years A Slave and regained some perspective.
Director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s incredible memoir was remarkable in its restraint. Though a strange thing to say about a film that has been lauded for depicting the horrors of slavery accurately and harrowingly, it’s not surprising given McQueen’s adeptness in showing versus telling, and capturing a moment’s deeper truth without resorting to platitudes or judgement.
An example (with spoilers): years after being kidnapped and sold into slavery, Northup meets a white man who is serving as an indentured field hand on the same plantation. Downtrodden after years of humiliation and forced labor, Northup finally works up the courage to ask the white man whether he would be willing to send a letter for Northup without telling his plantation master. The man agrees but quickly betrays Northup, which almost gets him killed by his sadistic, mercurial master if not for Northup’s quick wit and evasion. Nonetheless, McQueen shows Northup burning the letter, focusing on his face as the light from the alit letter — his desperate grasp at liberation — slowly extinguishes, along with his dwindling hope.
It’s a small moment, played beautifully by Chiwetel Ejiofor, that in other directorial hands could have been something lesser, like the protagonist shaking his fists at the sky or angrily monologuing. Instead, it was the perfect image of what slavery’s power did to beat down the slave’s hope and determination for freedom. Northup overcomes this oppression, but he was fortunate compared to his fellow slaves.
The film is full of other subtly strong moments like this, driven by a cast of heavy-hitters. It also follows Northup’s memoir very well, though I hope viewers will be compelled to go back to the book to read the details of this story in Northup’s strong literary voice.
Pushing through Command and Control, Eric Schlosser’s new book about America’s history with nuclear weapons. A fun tidbit: Strategic Air Command, the agency in charge of the Cold War bombers and missiles after World War II, used American towns for training their pilots:
The town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, became one of SAC’s favorite targets, and it was secretly radar bombed hundreds of times, thanks to the snow-covered terrain resembling that of the Soviet Union.
There’s a reason Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the upper Midwest were a Scandinavian haven. I guess they missed home.
Responding to the anti-shutdown right-wing protest in front of the White House on Sunday (which featured the Confederate flag and a rebel yell), Ta-Nehisi Coates gets at something that has long gnawed at me:
If a patriot can stand in front of the White House brandishing the Confederate flag, then the word “patriot” has no meaning. The Nazi flag is offensive because it is a marker of centuries of bigotry elevated to industrialized murder. But the Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of “useful killing,” but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible.
I am a Yankee through and through, born and raised in the liberal hotbed of Madison, Wisconsin, and a denizen of Obama’s Chicagoland. I’m self-aware enough to acknowledge my lack of understanding for the Southern mindset in all things politics and culture. But for the love of Ulysses S. Grant, I refuse to give any credence whatsoever to the belief that wielding the flag of Dixie so loudly and proudly represents a mere appreciation of “heritage” and “freedom” and not what it actually represents: treason.
Let’s not forget: Robert E. Lee and his Confederate military colleagues were traitors. Not grand heroes of a glorious rebellion against the forces of evil, as their past and present acolytes believe, but willing participants in a war against their own country. Lt. Col. Robert Bateman writes in Esquire that Lee, “as a traitor and betrayer of his solemn oath before God and the Constitution, was a much greater terrorist than Osama Bin Ladin… after all, Lee killed many more Americans than Bin Ladin, and almost destroyed the United States.”
It’s staggering to see Robert E. Lee, hero of Dixie, compared to Osama bin Laden, chief executive terrorist and national bugbear. As a genteel general Lee wasn’t a terrorist, but on both points Bateman is nevertheless correct: Lee willingly betrayed his solemn oath and went on to kill thousands more Americans than bin Laden ever did.
I think of Robert E. Lee because people today who wave the Confederate flag and tell the president to “put the Quran down” and “figuratively come out with his hands up” are him. They are him for inciting a destructive rebellion (Civil War, meet shutdown) that was 100% caused by their own party. They are him for scorching the earth to grandstand against laws they don’t like. They are not freedom fighters, nor righteous citizens. The Confederate flag stands not for freedom, but for the abuse of it. In their minds they are still Johnny Reb, fighting a battle that is long over yet insisting that his side won and remains the true keeper of the flame of freedom.
The line between protest and rebellion is wide. Crossing that line requires a deliberate jump that most incidents of dissent don’t make (Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, I think, are included). Properly registering dissent in America is relatively easy. Elections are the clearest means of making one’s voice heard (although apparently these protestors don’t agree with that given their obduracy toward the legally enacted and upheld health-care act). When that doesn’t work, civil disobedience is next (see The Civil Rights movement). But once you make the leap from civil disobedience to contempt for the law, you’re dangerously close to the precipice into which our country fell once before.
The Dixie flag-wavers don’t seem to understand this. They’re off in la-la land where the Confederacy was a great place with “honor” and “heritage” before those damn Yankees ruined everything.
I’ve been to the South. The South has friends of mine. South, you’re no Confederacy. So why do you act like it?
I was on a solo hike a few weeks ago on a beautiful northern Californian day in Shasta Trinity National Park. It was a weekday morning, so I had the place to myself. I followed the Waters Gulch trail for about a mile or two as I trekked the path toward Packers Bay. The river (pictured above) was low, exposing the golden sediment beneath the thick green trees. It wasn’t long into the trail when the bustling world outside the Park faded and the world hushed. Though I knew I was walking through a vibrant and wild ecosystem of life in many forms, I was awed by its absolute silence.
Not a car. Not a plane droning above. Just my boots on the gravel. It was divine.
I wanted to capture that moment to take with me back into civilization, but I knew that some moments are better left uncaptured, free to roam on in time for the next eager seeker in need of some bliss. But I think some ought to be documented, if only because places like that — where noise doesn’t intrude on the soothing symphony of nature — are an endangered species.
And that’s why I suspect Gordon Hempton has the best job in the world. He’s an “acoustic ecologist” who records rare nature sounds and the few places on earth where silence still rules. He’s also the founder of One Square Inch of Silence, a research and advocacy project to protect the naturally silent habitats of the Olympic National Park in Washington.
I learned about Hempton through On Being, a podcast hosted by Krista Tippett I recently started listening to. It’s a great interview series featuring makers and doers of many stripes. Some recent guests include a Zen master and poet, a mathematician, a physicist, a pastor, and an oceanographer. Each has their own area of expertise and interest, but what I like about the series so far is how each show, despite the varying subject matter, still lives within the same sphere held together by the centripetal forces of truth, discovery, beauty, and meaning.
Tippett’s conversation with Hempton was so serene and poetic and enlivening. He defines silence not as merely the absence of sound but instead as “silence from all these sounds that have nothing to do with the natural acoustic system.” He sees the world as a “solar-powered jukebox” and links our modern world’s lack of silence to our inability to listen.
I don’t need an excuse to seek out quiet. My introversion calls for a degree of separation from the world in order to recharge, and often that separation leads me to a quiet place, where I can only hear waves overtaking shoreline rocks, or rain falling on leaves. It’s so hard in an urban setting to escape the noisiness of the world, but it’s important to do so. Quiet, as Gordon Hempton says, is a “think tank of the soul.” We don’t have natural ear-lids for a reason.
And you’ll see the glitter of crashing cymbals and you’ll hear the thunder of rolling drums and the shimmer of trumpets. Ta-ta-ta! And you’ll feel something akin to the electric thrill that I once enjoyed. — “Seventy Six Trombones” from The Music Man
How does God speak? Through nature, according to the book of Job. Through Jesus and a holy spirit, says the New Testament. But ask Rachel, a teenaged fundamentalist Mormon who believes she has experienced an immaculate conception in Rebecca Thomas’ 2012 film Electrick Children, and she would tell you God spoke to her through a song.
On a rustic Utah compound, Rachel, dressed in plain Amish-type clothing, lives simply and dutifully within her Mormon sect’s rigid culture. On the day she undergoes “ecclesiastical interview” by her pious father that is documented on a tape recorder, the existence of which she only then learned. The device is intriguing and mysterious, but according to her pious father, “can be used for evil” and must be guarded only by those who can be trusted.
But when Rachel can’t shake the allure of this (to her) new thing, she does what many teenagers do when confronted with the forbidden fruit: she breaks the rules. Picking out a cassette seemingly at random, she sneaks a listen of The Nerves’ 1976 song “Hanging On the Telephone” (covered by Flowers Forever) and is immediately transfixed. It’s like lightning through her body, an electric thrill that fills her with a spirit she hasn’t known before.
Weeks later, her thoughts (via narration) are told as if recorded onto a tape. “A few weeks ago, I experienced a miracle. An angelic voice came unto me and when I heard it, I was troubled… The only voice I heard was from a song on a tape. Could it be that he did this to me? This wonderful blessing of heavenly light. The voice that sang those words, wonder and spirit: Don’t leave me haaaaaaaaaangin’ on the teeeeelephone. Is he the one who felled me with this Jesus baby?” Juxtaposed with a telling of the story of Mary’s virgin birth, Rachel’s symptoms of pregnancy allude to a possibility too confounding to believe.
But it’s a possibility that her father does not believe, which leads Rachel to flee from an arranged shotgun wedding out into Las Vegas, the wilderness of civilization to her. “I travel beyond the walls of a home I cannot again call my home, in search of the father of my holy child — the man who sings on the cassette tape.” Static clogs her thoughts as she enters the unknown land. She’s on a quest and, though her zealous brother Will follows her in search of a confession of Rachel’s sins, she’s on her own.
The theme of encounter continues along Rachel’s journey. She meets a ragamuffin skater rebel, Clyde, who must have experienced the same electric thrill in Rachel as she did in the tape, for he becomes her shepherd even though he himself is a lost sheep. Later on she even finds the source of the voice on the tape, in an encounter that adds new light to her search for the father.
Spirit is alive in this story’s searchings. Rachel, Will, and Clyde all seek an encounter and a resolution to the dissonant tones clouding their minds. They are infused with an unnamable aura compelling them to act: Rachel, to find a (or is it The?) father; Will, to find atonement for (or escape from) sin; Clyde, to find reconciliation with his family and purpose for his connection with Rachel.
Electrick Children tells this nuanced fable with visual snap and a serene flow. Thomas, who also wrote the script, demonstrates care for the characters and respect for the wide-eyed searching that Rachel undergoes. This is a film not about where a journey ends but about how and where it begins. And the how and the where for Rachel’s odyssey happen to be the same electric thrill of encounter with a simple cassette tape. From there her quest, and that of the other wandering souls, is merely a response to the voice’s exhortation: Don’t leave me haaaaaaaaaangin’ on the teeeeelephone…
When was the last time you touched a tree? I see them often, I walk past them, I benefit from their biology every day, but I rarely touch them. They are no longer an inescapable element of our daily mechanized, plastic lives. Perhaps we wanted it that way: the inception of brick and steel and drywall and kerosene and electricity allowed us to downgrade trees from tool and fuel to mere ornamentation. We protect trees now, in reservations and city blocks and forest preserves, but we’ve stopped touching them.
To touch a tree is to touch history. It’s to touch an impossibly, intricately beautiful creation that doesn’t need a plug in a wall for power. It’s to touch the wisdom of years we were born long after and will die soon before. The tree has seen the world and has seen you. The world will continue on without us, but not without the tree.
The tree doesn’t need our touch for validation or survival. It doesn’t need us at all. And that’s why you should touch a tree. Touch them soon and touch them often. Touch them before they figure out everything they do for us and decide they’ve given enough. Soak in by osmosis their total lack of regard for our lives and thank God everyday they think that way, because no one else is telling us how our mountains are really molehills and how we get our daily air.
Give them this day their daily breath, God tells the trees, but let’s see if they ever figure it out.
What is the meaning of life? Touch a tree and see.
Just read this in the peroration of N.D. Wilson’s (magnificent, challenging, tempestuous) Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:
If the Maker of the world were to descend to earth, how would you expect him? If you heard that the Infinite, the Spirit Creator was entering into His own Art, wouldn’t you look to the clouds? Wouldn’t you look to the cherubim in their storms; wouldn’t you expect a tornado chariot?
There really must be meaning in the universe, because I read this passage the morning after watching Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which asks similar questions N.D. Wilson does. Cecilia, the downtrodden waitress in Depression-era New Jersey with a tool of a husband, goes to see the film-within-a-film The Purple Rose of Cairo so many times that the character of Tom Baxter, the wide-eyed archaeologist, feels compelled to call out to her in the midst of the movie. Tom is so transfixed on Cecilia that he breaks through the screen into the real world and runs away with her.
Tom isn’t the creator (or the Creator) in the story here, but he is the infinite made finite. The eternal, the Art, come down to earth. Not by a cherubim storm or tornado chariot, but by a brave step into another dimension. Cecilia is astonished. All those times she came to the theater alone to watch the film for hope or escape, they are now dwarfed by the source of her hope made tangible before her eyes. Looking at the screen was her way of not looking at the ground, but now, in a way, she gets to look at the clouds.
Alas, the dream would just be a dream, seemingly over as quick as it started. The entr’acte cannot last forever, for the show must go on. The art must return to its frame, and the viewer to her life. But the film’s bittersweet resolution doesn’t negate Cecilia’s soulful resurgence. She watches Fred croon to Ginger: Heaven… I’m in heaven.
Remember in The Avengerswhen it was revealed that Selvig, a scientist Loki brainwashed to do his bidding, had programmed a failsafe measure into the device he had created to harness the power of the Tesseract, and that failsafe was the villain Loki’s own scepter? Imagine that scenario with the good and evil dynamic reversed and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the new revelation, courtesy of ProPublica and The New York Times, that the NSA has been circumventing many of the encryption and security tools put in place to protect online communications from prying eyes.
NSA agent.
For this disclosure we can thank former NSA agent and current Russian tourist Edward Snowden, whose data dump contained documents that uncovered the NSA’s secret efforts to undermine Internet security systems using code-breaking super computers and collaboration with tech companies to hack into user computers before their files could be encrypted.
The most nefarious aspect of this revelation, however, is the NSA’s attempt to “introduce weaknesses” into encryption standards used by developers that would allow the agency to easier hack into computers. So now, not only has the NSA flouted basic civil rights and U.S. law, they’re simply playing by their own rules. They couldn’t win the right to insert a “back door” into encryption standards in their 1990s court battles, so they gave the middle finger to the law and tried again anyway, but this time in secret. It’s a betrayal of the social contract the Internet was founded on, says engineer Bruce Schneier, and one that needs to be challenged by engineers who can design a more secure Internet and set up proper governance and strong oversight.
The worst part of all this is that there’s probably some twisted legal justification for this somewhere. Starting in Bush’s administration and continuing into Obama’s, the dark world of “homeland security” has received both tacit and explicit approval from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches for its increasingly Orwellian surveillance techniques — all in the name of “national security.” I’m sure there’s a lot of good being done behind the scenes at the NSA, CIA, and other clandestine organizations, but really, who are we kidding?
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7 NIV)
Paul beckons us to present with thanksgiving our requests to God. But he doesn’t say that by doing that those requests will be granted. The only thing Paul says we’re going to get for sure is the peace that comes from trusting that one’s desires are being heard. At that moment, whether they are eventually fulfilled isn’t the point.
And why is this holy peace called upon to guard our hearts and minds in the first place? We need only look back at the beginning of the passage. The anxiety Paul refers to, and that we all feel, is often the impetus for praying at all (at least for me). I worry, therefore I pray. Paul, and the savior he speaks on behalf of, knows that prayer contains multitudes more uses than that, but I think he gives us a pass here. He knows how hard it is to send requests to the stars without knowing if or when you’ll hear back.
Job hunters can sympathize well. When I click “Submit” on a job application, I have surrendered control over that process and am now at the mercy of someone else’s divine judgment. I worry my application for a job I’d be great at won’t even make it out of the résumé-infested swamp of the hiring manager’s inbox. I worry I’ll never stop hearing an assembly line of “no”s. I worry I’ll never get a great job again, that I’m doomed to endless days as a grocery store clerk or professional SimplyHired stalker.
But this peace offered by the Comforter is tailor-made for worriers of all kinds. No matter what compels someone to pray, God has the same reply: Message received. Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.
