Thursday Night Service at The Church of James Blake

 “D’angelo!” a member of the audience murmured loudly between songs at James Blake’s April 18^th, Thursday night concert at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz, California.  Who knows exactly what the person meant but a few moments later as Blake fiddled with his keyboard and microphone they said it again, shouting this time, “D’Angelo!”  At the second and louder mention of the late 90’s R&B impresario, James Blake took notice and calmly and wittingly retorted in his endearing British accent, “What, is he here?...I hope he’s here that’d  be great?” Though he was joking there was a purposefully detectable amount of sincerity in Blake’s voice, and the audience responded with  both cheers and laughter.  No, D’angelo wasn’t there, nor did James Blake suddenly break into a set from the D’angelo songbook, but the brief exchange was indicative of Blake’s performance before the intimate crowd in the seaside college town and surfing haven an hour south of San Francisco.  Blake and many of his fans know and appreciate very well the lineage that he and his music fall into (yell D’angelo at an Aerosmith concert and see if you get a reply), which only increased the connection between the sentiment and sound of his songs and the audience that night.  Furthermore, anyone who’s spent some Sundays in a Black church knows where Blake takes some of his musical cues and that the roots of his sounds can be heard from a pew any Sunday morning in Black America.  But Blake’s concert wasn’t a holy event, it was a secular celebration of audible art—in a hallowed way.   At approximately 9pm Blake had kicked off the evening with the mellow intro to his single “I never Learnt to Share”; service at the church of James Blake had begun.  An hour and a half later when the doors of the church were opened and the mostly young crowed filed back onto Soquel Ave., Blake had assured his fans that his is a career worth following.    

Mad Men Sillfully Avoids the Civil Rights Movement

I started watching AMC’s Mad Men from the very first episode of the very first season.  That’s not meant to be proof of my hipness, that I watched Mad Men before it was popular, just a statement of fact…that it also happens to prove my hipness is purely coincidental.   Mad Men at its height was one of the best shows on television, albeit very quietly, and it long ago achieved endless critical acclaim.  Now in its sixth season, the series about a Madison Avenue advertising firm which takes place during the 1960’s finds itself nearing the end of the decade it depicts with episode 6 making it clearly 1968 on the show.  Which makes it possible to declare another great achievement of the series:  Mad Men is a show that’s painfully accurate about the 1960’s yet has almost entirely ignored the civil rights movement.          

Mom, There’s A Canadian Salesman At The Door

Canada is a wasteland of peace, universal healthcare, parliamentary government, and moose. In many ways it is a distorted reflection of America, the distant relative living in the attic that resembles us and shares many of our personality traits while still managing to be noticeably different. There's a comedian, whose name escapes me, that once correctly stated that the entire world…that life… is a freak show and to live in America is to have a front row seat. So where does that place Canadians? Directly behind us politely looking on in their distinctive quaint manner while we Americans scream at the top of our lungs, flailing about as means of ensuring we remain the center of all attention? Oh Canada. There's a constant cultural dialogue that occurs between America and Canada, but you can rest your ego filled American head peacefully because that dialogue is more often a one way conversation in which we constantly dare Canadians to differentiate themselves from us, knowing we ultimately don't care when they do. It's because of the very unique nature of the American-Canadian relationship that Canada has been able to undertake a very successful enterprise that no other nation in the world could duplicate. Canadians are masters at selling us back to ourselves.

100% Complete ████████████████████████████ -FREEDOM-

(John Moore/Getty Images)

Uninstalling Dictator ... 99% Complete ███████████████████████████░ -ERROR-

A sign of the fundamental changes that are coming to our world because of technology.  Also, emblematic of the generational standoff that's taking place across the globe, as the two largest generations ever (think baby boomers and millennials in the U.S.) increasingly find themselves wrestling with one another for relevance.    

Blue Valentine: Matters of the Heart

"Love is not a victory march it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah." The aching intonation with which Jeff Buckley sings that line in his cover of "Hallelujah" was the first thing that reverberated through my head after watching the movie Blue Valentine. The eerie stillness. The bittersweet. Love. It's a testament to the fact that love of the deepest nature can be as painful as it is pleasure. Rarely is the totality of this aspect of our most powerful relationships accurately captured and so completely conveyed in art…in a way that makes your bones creek. It's also true that the stories we all know about love gone awry are replete with the familiar themes of the scorned woman and/or the wayward man. The woman who's man no longer loves her or maybe never did. We hardly ever discuss the opposite. Rarely has there been a movie that is able to arrest so well both the scene and the sentiment of a man sunken to his knees, grabbing at sand as the tide comes in. But the truth is while that's a refreshing plot point in Blue Valentine, that's not what makes it a good movie. In fact Blue Valentine isn't a good movie..it's haunting. It captures the deterioration of a relationship so well, the sorrow in each syllable of the word "goodbye", it's scary and it hurts. In a good way of course.

The Digital Revolution

(A protester in Egypt. Photo by Sarah Carr.)

The internet is the most truly democratic institution man has ever created. The main problem with governments that suppress political opposition  within their country (non-democratic institutions) is that the government  never has an understanding of how deep or widespread public support for a political opposition is. This is often a central reason revolutions are successful, this is often why repressive regimes appear so flat footed and caught off guard moments before they fall. The government finds it wasn't able to appreciate how many people were truly unhappy at any given time because it always dedicated itself to making any small amount of political disturbance disappear. The threat of the opposition is of course an old feature of any political reality, but the internet is a rather new feature of all political reality and it's only making life much more difficult for oppressive regimes. The democratic nature of the internet has always posed a major threat to autocratic, secretive, and oppressive regimes, but as a young generation across the globe comes into its own armed with social media, many world leaders now have reason to seriously worry. The internet and social media are forcing the will of the people upon many unsuspecting figures in the world. That is to say the internet is starting to bring down governments and there is nothing anyone can do…except watch as it all unfolds 140 characters at a time on Twitter.

Exit Through The Gift Shop, The Way We Now Live

What to make of this world we live in, or this world we now live in? Possibly the proper question is what to make of this world we appear to be entering? If the dawn of the 20^th century saw the setting of the stage for titanic global clashes between competing economic and political systems (socialism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, autocracies, etc…) the dawn of the 21^st century appears to be the second chapter of that book. Despite the lingering traces of a bygone world in various spots around the globe, capitalism is king come hell or high water. Even China has gotten on board. So as the lights flicker on in the early stages of the next millennium we humans are being forced to accept the consequences of the choice we've made to make the free market our God. The good and the bad. Thus what we make of this new truly global world we're entering is as fascinating a story as there has ever been, and humans through the millennia have expressed their stories through art, and the preferred artistic form of storytelling in our times is movies. What could be better than a global story about capitalism and art, turned into a movie? Nothing. There is no better phrase for our times, and few movies that capture the pure essence of them as well as Exit through the Gift Shop.

The Truth

The second to last post here, The Turmoil Just Behind the Peace was both oddly and accidentally one of the most honest things I've ever written and sent me into an introspective spiral. And that damn song, "Pues"…well let's just say it isn't the best idea to listen on repeat while you gaze into the inner depths of your soul and rifle through the dustiest boxes in the dimmest recesses of your memory. Either that or it's the best idea ever. I haven't fully figured out yet. What can be said is that everybody must find the truth as it exist within them at a certain point in their life. Some do it on the playground when they're 3 yrs. old, others on their deathbed, and everybody else likely somewhere between those two extremes. There's of course the larger struggle of finding the truth as it exist in the larger world outside our windows, but that's another thing entirely. Most everybody figures that out after they take their last breath and whatever happens, happens…I'm assuming. But finding truth as it exist within ourselves just involves realizing at some point you have to stop getting in a boxing match with yourself and work your way through the world the way that little voice in your head keeps telling you to. If you want to be a clown, be a clown. Alexander Ebert's first words in "Truth" get right to the point: "truth is that I never shook my shadow/everyday it's trying to trick me into doing battle/calling out faker only get me rattled. " Shadow boxing your own shadow eventually wears you out and strips you down. Oh, and the names your own shadow will call you…completely unnecessary and inappropriate. And so, sooner or later we each just stop fighting. And that's the truth.

International Diplomacy

A snapshot regarding the state of global politics, starring apparent friends Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former Russian President current PM Vladimir Putin (via Julia Inhoffe:)

Their favorite activity, however, seems to be holding joint press conferences. At one of their most memorable appearances together, in Moscow, in 2008, a Russian journalist named Natalia Melikova asked Putin about his apparent marital trouble and rumored romance with the young and indecently plastic gymnast-cum-parliamentarian Alina Kabaeva. When asked about the liaison, Putin's face hardened. "There is not a word of truth in this story," he said. Berlusconi, giggling, regarded the exchange. When Putin had finished answering, Berlusconi cocked his hands, and, imitating a gun, fired with a silent "Pow! Pow!" at Melikova. It had only been a year and a half since Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, had been shot in her Moscow elevator, and Melikova was reduced to tears. On the dais, Berlusconi laughed, and Putin nodded. 

Talk about wildly inappropriate.  That's pretty messed up.

The Turmoil Just Behind the Peace

"Here's to the precariously perched highways of life that intersect with ease from a distance yet are filled with an unbalanced commotion."

You can't make someone love you.  Those who have had the experience of realizing this through experience understand the innate pain and agony that accompanies that statement. While it's easy to say and somewhat simple to understand, its outright torture to truly realize.  There's that moment when you have to watch the other person walk away for last time, and while you look at them you suddenly realize that it's not necessarily the last time you'll see them, but that it's the last time you'll see them attached with a feeling of hope. It's in that small moment that the rational part of our nature makes its greatest stand, attempting to beat back the tide of sentiment, screaming in a symphony of lyric-less music—you can't make someone love you.  When that moment ends the memory becomes an instrument of agonizing pleasure, reminding you of why the best was so good and the worst was so bad, while doing its best to feed that small feeling of hope as it slowly makes an exit. It's a tough and bittersweet lesson to learn and indeed the most stubborn among us never fully accept it. You can't make someone love you.  Here's a song that captures the beauty within the sorrow of watching someone walk away, sans hope, leaving you to your memory. Here's a song that goes out to the eerie splendor after the storm. Here's to the precariously perched highways of life that intersect with ease from a distance yet are filled with an unbalanced commotion. Here's to trying to make someone love you.  Here's to finding out you can't. It's a strange peace wrought with inner turmoil.

“The Same Thing We Do Every Night Pinky…”

The race to take over the world has been getting interesting, and Facebook just pulled ahead. If you think Facebook isn't in the process of building a search engine, I think you're crazy. Last week Facebook launched its own messaging application, Facebook's own twist on email. Today, Facebook landed a major coup against Google in their competing bids to take over the world. Apparently Facebook has overtaken Google in web traffic, getting 3% more visits and unseating Google as the most visited site on the internet over the period of a week. Not only that, but Facebook accounts for 25% of all web traffic in the U.S. Wait, what?