Testing the Simmons-Klosterman Hypothesis

The greatest development of the podcast era[1] has been that about twice a year Chuck Klosterman comes on Bill Simons podcast and I get to listen in as my two favorite cultural exegetes[2] (vintage X) discuss a wide range of topics that (with the exception of Reality Television) never fail to engage me. Simmons-Klosterman share the uncanny ability to bring unparalleled analytical analysis and carful thought to total trivialities that are, in fact, not remotely trivial. For example in the opening five minutes of this episode Chuck gives THE definitive answer about why the rock music of my childhood was so bad.

But my favorite moments in these podcasts are when Bill and Chuck talk about craft. They have both carefully projected images as shiftless Xers…but the secret that seeps out when you get to listen in on a casual conversation is that they both think very carefully about their craft…and work very hard. At one point in their first podcast (which does not appear to be extant) they argued that writers (including themselves) improve with age while musicians make their best contributions early in their career.

The great irony of this discussion is that I think that, while they both remain worth reading, I think both of these guys peaked in the early years of their careers. While all of his works are worth reading, Chuck’s fist widely published book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs was unquestionably his best. And Simmons early columns were so shockingly original that they created culture at an astonishing rate.

Anyway, I am fascinated by the creative process and am particularly fascinated by the contrast between momentary virtuosity and sustained excellence.[3] I consider engineers and scientists participants in the creative process (at least the ones I respect). But we unquestionably improve with time. You could plot the quality of an engineer’s work with time and apart for loss of interest or the cognative hardening that affects advanced life stages, it would plot as a steady increase. [4] So, I thought I’d test the Simmons-Klosterman Hypothesis with bands I have enjoyed in the last year or so.

My data set includes seven bands that fit the following criteria:

1. I have listened to most of their music to the extent that I have an opinion on it
2. They have 3 or (preferably more) albums spanning a decade
3. At least one of their albums was outstanding

Results

I’ll open with the Killers because Simmons has, himself, expressed an opinion on their trajectory:
“I don't want to say The Killers are going in the wrong direction, but their third album made their second album sound like a cross between "Born in the USA" and "Nevermind" ... and I'm currently using the second album's CD as a coaster for ginger ale.” –Bill Simmons

Well, I thought Hot Fuss was very good, but Sam’s Town is their finest work in my opinion. [5] I loved the concept and while none of the songs were as subversively original as “Mr Brightside” they were consistently excellent (and on themes I found more enobling). “When we Were Young” can still make me shudder from time to time. Then they fell off a cliff. The only memorable song on the overlong Sawdust is a remix of “Mr. Brightside”. Day and Age was a slight improvement due entirely to the comedic possibilities surrounding lines like ‘are we human or are we dancers’.

And this sets the template. It appears that several of the bands I like reverse the assumption of a sophomore slump. Instead we see a sophomore surge. A very good debut is followed by a phenomenal second album, after which, things fall off.

Paramore follows this trend precisely.

mewithoutYou also demonstrates this pattern, but their albums are all so good, that, while there is a relative tailing off between album 2 and 3, the latter albums are still exceptional.[6] In fact, Brother Sun Sister Moon, still cracks my all time top 10…but it is a ‘drop off’ from Catch for us the Foxes which is my favorite album of all time.

Sufjan is more like an engineer. His music starts good and just gets better. Avalanche cannot be considered a drop off because it was the compilation of the 21 tracks that were not good enough to make it on the 22 track Illinoise. It is a double length B side of a double length album and is still excellent. Sadly, it seems that Sufjan has gotten board with pumping out phenomenal albums. But I have to respect the impulse to not make music rather than putting out art that is less than he knows he is capable of just to make another paycheck.

Death Cab for Cutie is a special case. They do not have a transcendent album…but they also do not have a bad one. When Death Cab puts out an album you know what you are getting. [7] They are indistinguishable…but they are indistinguishably good.

The Decemberists started strong and peaked four albums in. Crane Wife would be a perfect album if it wasn’t for two conspicuously sub-par songs in the middle. But then The Hazard of Love did not live up. (Note: Hazard of Love is a serious piece of concept art. I have not really gotten into it since I got it for Christmas, but I have not really invested the work it probably deserves. While the album failed to make me want to do the work it is possible I just don’t ‘get it’ yet. And this band has certainly earned the benefit of the doubt).

Finally, Modest Mouse is the quintessential late bloomer. This first couple albums are pretty brutal. But he tinkered with his sound and themes in Good News for People Who Love Bad News and the results were fantastic. Long time fans saw it as a sell out, but count me in the camp that considers it his greatest work. He kept the pieces in place for We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank and the quality remained high.

Discussion

No definitive trend emerged. I had long held that a bands best album (or a writer’s best book) was usually their first, because they worked on it for a decade, and then were pressured to produce a follow up in a tenth of that time. But it seems like the second or third album is the sweet spot. The band is still raw and hungry enough to resonate but has learned the lessons of the early work.

Post Script: The KLOV-ification of Christian Music

I found my mistaken hypothesis (that bands peaked with their first album) interesting and gave some thought to its genesis. I believe I have identified the culprit: the most promising bands of the late 1990’s Christian Music scene.

I spent the 1990’s listening exclusively[8] to Christian music[9]…and I wasn’t even interesting enough to listen to Five Iron Frenzy or The Choir.[10] So you have to believe me when I tell you that you cannot understate the sub-genre renaissance represented by 1995-1997. Not only did DC Talk put out an album you could listen to without embarrassed smirking[11], but three new bands came on the scene that seemed to actually be doing art. We thought we were witnessing Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century or Motown at the beginning of the last one. Jars even got some mainstream attention for their driving ‘Flood’ which was excellent but wasn’t even the second best song on the album.

But here are their subsequent time series[12]:

All three bands quickly traded in their gritty, driving, and/or experimental flavors for bland easy listening. We never got another ‘Consuming Fire,’ ‘Bus Driver,’ or ‘Liquid.’[13] We never even got another ‘Flood.’ And I blame KLOVE. KLOVE was the Walmartification of Christian music.[14]

With the exception of ‘Flood’ the bands weren’t quite good enough to get mainstream play[15] the only way they could get exposure is through the historically tepid ‘contemporary’[16] Christian radio stations that market themselves as ‘safe for the whole family[17].’ It might just be me, but it does not seem like ‘safe for the whole family’ is the head space in which great art thrives.[18]

So instead of a sophomore surge, these promising young bands quickly gave us, what I will call ‘music for vacuuming.’ Our best chance at resonating with Xers turned their talents to the middle age house wives that drive Christian radio giving. And it seems like the powers that be have actually convinced the artists that it is for the better. Amanda and I went to a concert a couple years ago where Aaron Tate joked that they had tried to destroy every copy of their first album out of embarrassment. The only song that gets play from those three seminal works is the tepid ‘Love Song for a Savior’ that might not even exceed the median quality of the album it appeared on, but is sufficiently tepid for the airwaves.

Anyway, because the first three bands I cared about as an adult followed this trajectory, it became my default hypothesis. Bands come on the scene with the pent up creativity of hungry decades, and then follow up with lesser works.[19] But I have come to believe that this is not so much a general insight on the creative process but an artifact of the structure of late 90’s Christian music.

This post was written while listening to We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank by Modest Mouse

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[1] Here I am talking about podcasts proper, not the explosion of outstanding, free, MP3 content. A close second is the Economist podcast.
[2] I talked about my affection for these guys in one of my favorite posts.
[3] Sometimes, when I write fiction, I write a sentence and then sit back and say “I can do this.” But then it is a week before I write another…meanwhile there is a 500 page Updike novel in my backpack that conspicuously lacks a single pedestrian sentence. Last week some golfer I have never heard of hit a single round all time low score…something Tiger et al have never done. When interviewed he said the reason that Tiger et al were great and he was just good is that he has amazing days and bad days…they consistently have great days. Consistency seems to be the currency of greatness…unless you are Nirvana…then you just have to write the single greatest song of a generation and the rest of discography gets a mulligan.
[4] An interesting counter-example to this appears to be Mathematicians. Apparently if you haven’t made your mathematical contribution by 25 you resign yourself to mediocrity.
[5] He wrote this right after their 4th album, so I am going to chalk it up to a mistake…I think he is saying that Sawdust was terrible and Day and Age was worse.
[6] I have written about this before and they will eventually get their own post, but part of this sustained greatness is a complete reinvention of their sound for each album.
[7] Good lyrics, a great but familiar sound, some compelling story telling and mopy themes…essentially country music for hipsters.
[8] Someone at the time told me that I was being ‘too Christian’ by limiting my artistic appreciation to a sub-culture. The irony was that I wasn’t being Christian enough.
[9] Whether ‘Christian music’ is a helpful or even a meaningful label will eventually be another post if I can edit it to the point of less-than-disturbingly-bitter.
[10] In a related note, I did not have much interest in music in the late 1990’s. And, yes, I know that that means I missed grunge in real time, the quintessential artistic voice of my generation…please don’t rub it in.
[11] Seriously, Jesus Freak was a water to wine (2 buck chuck, but wine none the less) transformation that could be cited as evidence for a all powerful and benevolent creator. I know this sounds silly, but going from being as bad as they were and then suddenly listenable still strikes me a requiring divine intervention.
[12] It is worth noting that I probably grade Christian music on a curve. These bands’ good albums probably get overrated because they were getting compared to Carmen, Sandi Patti and DCT’s early work at the time. But the latter albums are probably not as bad as I am remembering. The grades are likely the residual physic effects of my disappointment.
[13] In their recent album, Jars included a song ‘O God’, which was a refreshingly honest song about the hiddeness of God that had a distinctively ‘Worlds Apart’ feel to it…the primary reason this album didn’t suck.
[14] Over the course of the 1990’s and 2000’s the localized Christian radio stations that offered mostly radio preachers, children’s shows, goofy reenactments and hymns were gradually replaced by and expanding juggernaut, KLOVE, that offered exclusively musical content. This played out like the premier of V. At first the V’s appeared to be benevolent allies, but soon the dark side emerged. Having a single centralized entity determining national radio play acts as quality control on the industry but it also militates against niche (the force that has driven the greatest era of musical creativity since Motown and Vienna) and results in a bland, lowest common denominator selection process.
[15] And, it is possible that they suffered from anti-religious bias…but Christians have hidden bad art behind that boogieman for so long that I hesitate to invoke it, even in part.
[16] I love Driscoll’s thoughts on the Christian use of the word ‘contemporary.’ He likes to say that ‘Most contemporary services wouldn’t even be contemporary for 1984.’
[17] Actually, this is the tag line for KLOVE’s commercial competitor, but they both say the same sorts of things, and seem to share play lists.
[18] My friend Dan actually objects to this idea more broadly suggesting that there may not be a more alien idea to the teachings of Jesus than the pursuit of personal safety.
[19] As a side note, Switchfoot’s time series looks much more like those previously documented. Their best album was their second, the 1999 New Way to be Human (which would not get a sniff of KLOVE play time) and subsequent work did not fall of quite as precipitously.

Three Generations, One Mountain

Last week, I gave a presentation on a sediment model I helped with on the Cowlitz River…the main waterway impacted by the devastation of Mt St Helens. My involvement with this project has afforded me the opportunity to visit the mountain a couple of times (including once by helicopter). It is a truly dramatic sight…4 billion tons of mountain is no longer mountain.

There was a special poignance to this presentation, because two weeks ago, I was home helping my mom go through stuff to get ready to sell her house. Amanda and I spent most evenings scanning old pictures.[1] I found the single roll of film my Dad shot while stationed in Washington State during Vietnam[2] including this picture of the same mountain. It was taken just a few years before the eruption and, as I hinted at in the Portland post, it is indistinguishable from Rainier, Hood or Shasta.

But then, just to give us the generational hat trick of Gibson men and this epic mountain, I was going through the attic on my last day in town and I came upon a collection of old postcards, circa 1944. They bore the signature “Stanford”[3] in my grandfather’s unmistakably illegible hand. I had never pictured my grandfather anywhere but at the camp or in Korea during the war, but there, forgotten on a shelf since Dad moved grandma to assisted living over a decade ago, was the evidence of an extremely adventurous youth. And, sure enough, about half way through the book, I found this:

This post was prepared while listening to the Brand New channel on Pandora

________________________________________
[1] I have two additional posts started about this project.
[2] Dad’s coke bottle glasses disqualified him from the jungle, but his integrity got him a position guarding top secret technology. He could not tell anyone what he did for 15 years. His ‘cover story’ was that he was a cook. We believed this until Mom took a class in the evenings one year. The fifth week in a row we had beans and hot dogs, our combined 13 years of life experience outed him…though he didn’t actually tell us about it (in even the vaguest terms) until 10 years past the silence period.
[3] My Dad’s name was Edwin Stanford Gibson. If he had been a Stanford, I would be something between Stanford Gibson the 5th and 8th, from what I can tell. Somehow, my parents still felt the need to give me a name that peaked in 1910 and fell off the plot by the time I was born.

Porifera Love: A Play in One Act

I have not posted much fiction on this site…mostly because it is too long. But I enjoyed this little piece and thought I’d post it.[1] I wrote this while I was supposed to be studying for my Aquatic Invertebrate Ecology final. I justified it by telling myself “You’ll never forget the Porifera life cycle.

Warning: The first line is quite a bit more crass than the rest of the "play".[2]

Porifera Love

Fera: “Well, I ejaculated this morning.”

Pori: “Good for you. Hey, you never know.”

Fera: “You know, you said that last year.”

Pori: “And it is just as fitting this year”

Fera: “This makes three years for me…more for you. I’m honestly getting tired of it. Just sending it out there. I mean, what if we are alone here? We still don’t have any evidence that there are others of our kind close enough to matter. I am probably just sprinkling the lake bottom with the spent relics of my misguided attempts to reproduce. Seriously, I’m thinking about…”

Pori: “Here we go again. If our populations are thin here, the last thing we need to be thinking about is asexual reproduction. Robust populations…”

Fera: “Screw meiosis. (Pori giggles at the pun) I’m officially thinking about fragmentation. There is no evidence that there are others out there. It might be time to take matters into our own hands…”

Pori: “What’s a hand?”

Fera: “It’s an expression.”

Pori: “I don’t know how you could even consider fragmentation. Honestly, we really should wait until dark to talk about this. You are probably scaring your algal symbiotes.”

Fera: “They’ll live. I know it isn’t romantic. All hot and diploid. But maybe it is time to just grow up and get past sex.”

Pori: “You’ll never talk me into fragmentation. It is just too existentially violent. You really want to rend your psyche into pieces? You really want to wake up the every morning and know that you are no longer the only you? Little gemules of yourself spread who knows where. It’s creepy.”

Fera: “It really depends on how you look at it. What if it’s true that sponges aren’t actually individuals at all, but colonies of self-interested cells?[3] If I am not a unified self, anyway, but a colony then fragmentation makes a lot of sense. I would just be starting a bunch of little me franchises. Most of our kind eventually resort to it, Pori. I’m starting to feel like I want to persist as more than just a filtering shell of myself.

Pori: “Oh, I see what this is about. You are just feeling existential since I told you that we will continue to filter water after we are dead.”

Fera: “Come on, you have to admit, its creepy. But, yes, the idea that I will keep filtering water after I go all abiotic[4] has got me thinking about stuff. “

Pori: “You are a sponge, Fera. You are about two defining characteristics away from being a plant. Thinking is not your strong point. But in the filtering and sperm propulsion departments…you are king of the lake.”

Fera: “Well, if you object so much to fragmentation, there is another option."

Pori: “Don’t say it!”

Fera: “I’m just sayin.”

Pori: “Don’t say it!”

Fera: “It would alter the nature of our relationship.”

An uncomfortable silence hangs in the water between the amorphous organisms. The sound of water jetting from their osculums, usually unnoticeable in its constant familiarity, became deafening.

Fera: “I mean, we are very close and…”

Pori: “I’m not doing it!”

Fera: “Come on, you never know until you try. You might make a stunning lady. Seriously, you might be really sexy.”

Pori: “I’m not turning into a lady…you turn into a lady.”[5]

Fera: “Well, I guess I kind of assumed you would do it.”

Pori: “You would.”

More silence

Fera: “Awkward.”

Pori: “Identifying a moment as awkward does not make it less awkward.”

Fera: “I guess relationships are complex even when you aren't.”
______
[1] As I am still mostly confused about what constitutes quality blog content.
[2] Biology students of all kinds forget that sperm is not a topic of polite conversation. Once, when one of my classes ended, one girl said to another behind me, “We talked about sperm in every one of my classes today. I bet English majors don’t have to deal with this.
[3] Actually, it is no longer debated whether or not sponges are individuals. The cells are too specialized and interdependent to be considered their own organisms. The debate is if sponges have ‘tissues’. If you put some of my tissue or your tissue or the tissue of any non-sponge animal in a blender and press the red button…it will remain blended. But a sponge will reassemble its cells into their appropriate position and functionality.
[4] Sponge morphology is so well optimized for filtering water that it doesn’t require the thousands of little flagellated ‘motors’ to push the water through. An empty sponge skeleton will continue to filter water.
[5] Sponges can go through a one year process of changing sex.

Cities Part 2: Portland

I love cities. So, a few months ago I started a series of posts on the various cities that my work takes me to. This week, I returned to one of my favorite cities in the country. Really, only Seattle, New York and San Francisco come close to Portland in the contest form my favorite US cities.

Unlike most cities, the Portland experience begins with getting there. The 1 hour and 23 minute flight, along the I-5 corridor, from Sacramento to the Pacific North West is one of the most is one of the most interesting flights in our nation. It is likely the most interesting as a ratio of intrigue to length. You definitely want a window seat.

There are two things that strike you as you fly north into the Pacific Northwest. The first is the clear cuts. The patchy vacancies of the wooded slopes tells a thousand tales of our collective appetites. [1]

But the real highlight of the areal approach to Portland is the Cascade Range. The cascades are unlike any other mountain range in the United States. They are benignly disguised as their more innocuous brethren but their solitary nature betrays a more menacing reality. Unlike the great communal mountains of bygone orogeneys in the central and eastern US (done growing and now, like most of us, experiencing the slow but relentless tug of entropy an gravity) the Cascades stand alone. These solitary frosted peaks loom ominously as signposts of volcanic power along I-5. It is as if, like Lewis’ inhabitants of Hell, their isolation is a function of their wrath.[2] We call them ‘dormant’ but that is a polite way of saying ‘not currently exploding’.[3]

The incredible experience of flying through the Cascades is that peaks that look so solitary from the ground line up like single file soldiers keeping ominous watch into the horizon. At one point you can see uncannily symmetrical and identical peaks[4] lining up like disciplined sentinels, successively monitoring our northward approach.

Mount Hood is the soldier Portland’s assigned soldier.[5] It seems more sinister in that it is only periodically visible (on Portland’s notoriously infrequent clear days).[6] But despite their digression, there is no major environmental hazard that is more visually ubiquitous. The northwest lives with its risk.

Portland’s highlight is the Waterfront. If Portland is a city that lives openly with its hazards, it is also a city that enjoys connection to its great river. There are walking/biking paths along both sides of the waterfront that makes you actually want to run.

They also claim the biggest bookstore in the country: Powells. Now this is cool enough to warrant checking out in its own right. You may not find a bigger fan of Amazon.com than me[7] but I do miss the many hours Amanda and I would spend on date nights in Madison Wisconsin wandering the dusty shelves of the town’s many book stores search of that rare gem. But Powells has been on my radar since it was practically a character in Don Miller’s Blue Like Jazz.

I ate at a couple of fun places like The Oyster Bar, which is over 100 years old.[8] I also finally made it to Voodoo Doughnuts. Voodoo donuts is home to some of the most original raised dough concoctions you will ever encounter. They include the maple bacon bar[9], m&m, tang, coco pufff and Captain Crunch[10] covered doughnut, doughnuts that resemble lit joints and a wide array of creative variations of the doughnut theme.[11] One of the odd things about V[12] is that you can get served in a relatively timely manner in the morning, but in the evening, forget about it…the line snakes down the block.

I got them for the class I was teaching on Thursday, the day I started with a theoretically difficult two hour lecture.

But, in my opinion, the highlight of the Portland food scene is ‘the carts.’ Along the outer edge of most downtown parking lots, people have parked converted wagons, vans, campers or tents and sell a huge variety of different foods. Overhead is low, so variety is high and it gets the city out of the office and onto the beautiful streets at lunch time.

I think one of the real attractions of Portland is that it manages to feel simultaneously small and cosmopolitan. You can walk the whole downtown in an hour and feel relatively safe at night, but it seems to bustle with culture and opportunity.

I think my least favorite thing about Portland is the uncanny density of strip clubs. I didn’t count, but the strip club/acre statistic has to be up there with any downtown in America.
Portland traffic is notorious…but it is really commuting traffic that is bad. There is surprisingly light traffic downtown for such a vibrant town. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. The downtown traffic is comparable to a depressed rust belt city…but the downtown itself is buzzing with activity. I think the answer to this riddle is public transportation, walking and biking as Portland is perennially rated highly in each category.

As has become my custom on business trip I brought one book to read (John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies) and one to listen to as I explore the city (Marylyn Robinson’s Home). By some strange coincidence or by some unsettling commentary on my literary preferences, both these books are period pieces about Presbyterian ministers and their deeply damaged children.

My last evening in town I took the light rail to the park.[13] Not like a standard urban park, more like a stand of well maintained woods on the edge of the city. Instead of the well maintained and obviously manicured lawns of the parks in San Francisco, Saint Louis or NYC, Portland’s Park appears to be a bonified wood managed for the outdoor enjoyments of its inhabitants. The number of runners and cyclists I saw here provided a hint to the dilemma I articulated in a mid-week facebook status:

Stanford Gibson thinks Portalnd is a magical place. They put bacon on their doughnuts and their sausages and still remain mysteriously thin.

I got out early on Friday and returned to the park to check out the zoo. The zoo was unremarkable, but its grounds were. It was built into the wooded hill of this great park, maintaining most of the towering trees, creating the illusion of a kind of wild otherness despite the teeming humanity.

One other thing I liked about this park was the subway station. You have to take an elevator down 250 feet from the park to the platform. There, on the platform (which is new, bright and clean) they display one of the borings extracted to explore the subsurface for subway construction. It is incredibly well done. 250 feet of 3” diameter baring cores were displayed in a horizontal acrylic tube. Each facies change was identified, dated and correlated with the palohistory of the region. There was ash and lava[14] and glacial silt and outwash from the Missoula flood[15]. Now, I know I enjoyed this more than most, but what a great opportunity to expand the pedagogical value of the museum stop for the park by providing something really interesting and subway related to help people usefully pass the time they spend waiting for the train.

Next Stop: Las Vegas

This post was prepared while listening to The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists[16]
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[1] I often wonder if there isn’t a substantial upside to well managed logging from a climate change perspective. In the classic global carbon budgets (the ones that demonstrate that there is a 4Pg surplus of carbon going into the atmosphere over historical levels) there is the curious phenomenon of ‘the missing Carbon’. The global Carbon balance does not balance. There is one Pg that is unaccounted for. Some speculate that it is in the wood that is sequestered in buildings around the world (wood that would have otherwise released its carbon into the atmosphere during the decay process). In a sense, buildings are the carbon swamps of our era.
Planting trees does not provide Carbon mitigation in perpetuity. There is an early benefit as carbon is fixed, but photosynthesis is mirrored by an exact reverse process that releases the Carbon as the trees die and decay. The replacement vegetation fixes approximately the same amount of Carbon, meaning that once an acre has mature trees it has maximized its carbon fixation capabilities. And while we are talking about atmospheric Carbon loads, few people realize that the carbon budgets identify soil disturbance from agriculture as an equal contributor as fossil fuel use. But, I digress.
[2] Lewis depicts hell in The Great Divorce as a vast suburban sprawl because the inhabitants of hell can not stand each other and want to be as spread out as possible, leaving an ever growing, sparsely populated, decaying urban core. My wife’s response to Lewis’ hell (before he revealed what it was) was ‘this place sounds like Buffalo.’
[3] The latent destruction these quiet cones represent is particularly real to me since most of my trips to Portland have dealt with the aftermath of Mount Saint Helens
[4] Well, identical except this one: Crater Lake.

[5] The video game that historically consumed the largest chunk of my time was the original SIM CITY. SIM CITY was a great urban planning game but once you got board planning your own cities, they had a dozen or so ‘scenarios’ in which SIM models of actual cities experienced disasters and your job was to re-plan the city in the aftermath. It included a dirty bomb in NYC and an alien invasion in some other town. But the most memorable was Portland. In the first time step of the Portland Scenario, a brand new volcano formed in the middle of the city and after the emergency management stage of the game, you had to re-plan the city around the volcano.
[6] Actually, Hood is sleepier than the peak overlooking Seattle. The catastrophe waiting to happen is Rainier which some volcanologists (people who study volcanoes not Star Trek cultures) say is way overdue.
[7] The diversity and mailability of books optimized the business for internet shopping and this is one area of my life where I prefer efficiency and affordability to human contact.
[8] I have mixed feelings about old-school restaurants. It is indisputably fun to go to a place that has been part of its city for generations. But I worked at a legacy restaurant in high school and they had simply been surpassed by more innovative establishments. It got that feeling a little bit about the Oyster Bar.
[9] This is exactly what it sounds like, a maple bar with a strip of bacon…and it is exactly as good as it sounds like.
[10] (that they cleverly call Captain, My Captain)
[11] Apparently, they had peopto bismal doughnuts for a brief period until the health department shut that down.
[12] This is how they abbreviate their business…not to be confused with the recent, surprisingly watchable alien show that borrows heavily from Battlestar Galactica (I’ll have more to say about that in my next fragments post). I can’t imagine why they don’t want to go with the natural abbreviation for their business (VD).
[13] I ended up encountering a professional soccer match on the way home. I had to choose between it and watching game 7 of Celtics-Lakers. It was a tough call…but I had gotten sucked into the Boston-LA narrative.
[14] Insight into the both the frequency and magnitude of the Hood’s awakenings.
[15] The Missoula flood is one of the great glacial paleo-floods of the Northwest. The story goes that as the glaciers melted, great lakes formed behind ice dams that periodically collapsed, releasing the biggest floods in history, the results of which can still be observed throughout the region.
[16] A Portland band.

Paul being Paul and The Dialectic of Humaness: Three Thoughts on Cold Souls

Amanda and I went through an extended film slump. We watched a string of films so disappointing that we started Netflixing (verb?) almost exclusively documentaries and television shows. So after a few months of film sabbatical, we were surprisingly welcomed back with one of the best series of movies we can remember enjoying. We watched 500 Days of Summer, Cold Souls, Moon, and The Time Traveler’s Wife[1].

We really liked each of them. But Cold Souls was our favorite by a pretty substantial margin. This is how film is done. The film had us repeatedly laughing out loud, working hard to piece together and anticipate the story line[2] and interacting with big ideas. It was well written and exceptionally well acted. So, I will try to give as little away as possible, but I simply recommend seeing it before reading this post.

The basic idea is that the protagonist cannot bear the weight of his soul and in an ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ type plot device, finds a company that can extract his soul and put it in storage. But we slowly learn about an underground Russian black market in replacement souls[3] which takes the story to a darker and more interesting place.



And, with that, here are three things[4] I liked about old Souls:

1. ‘Paul being Paul’

I recently had a lively interaction with a friend about a passage in Acts. His assertion was that the apostle Paul was being a ‘total douche’ in Acts 20. Now, some of you know that I am not the guy Paul would want defending him (seeing as I often find him annoying despite being God’s vessel for a good chunk of His self disclosure) and I conceded that there were portions of this passage that was just ‘Paul being Paul.’ This phrase, comically, came to mind again as we began watching this movie. Cold Souls is an exercise in Paul being Paul.

When I recommend this movie I lead with, “It includes Paul Giamatti playing himself.” That was all it took to sell me on the film. I am a Paul Giamatti fan. I was trolling his IMDB page and found these two things that help articulate why I find him compelling.

In the 1998 remake of Doctor Dolittle (1998), Paul portrayed a human in charge of a talking orangutan, in the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes (2001), he portrays a talking orangutan in charge of humans.

“I've got to be the geekiest guy in the world in a lot of ways. I'm like a zeta male.” –Paul Giamatti

But, here is the thing; he doesn’t really just play himself. He actually plays three distinct versions of himself.[5] This is one of the great actors of our era and was stuck far too long playing nerd and tool roles because he lack’s Pitt or Bana’s marketability. I’m thrilled that he is finally getting roles worthy of his talent.

2. A Subversive Dualism

I have written a couple times about philosophical dualism[6] in contemporary art in[7] this blog…mostly with respect to Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and, more recently, Stargate Universe. Cold Souls explicitly claims to have no interest in questions we would classify as ‘Philosophy of Mind.’ Early in the film, as the premise was explained, the film makers essentially punted on all philosophical questions.[8]

“People come here and the all want to know if the soul is immortal and how it functions…and we haven’t a clue. No clue. We only offer the possibility to de-soul the body or de body the soul. You can see it either way.”

But as the film unfolded and people start exchanging souls or simply putting them in storage, the narrative got far less agnostic about the nature of the soul. Here are a few positions they took:

-It is not a person’s intellect, memories, education or personality.
-Its beauty and value is not correlated with its appearance.
-It appears to be without gender.
-It is physical but vanishes (or at least becomes immaterial) at death.[9]
-It both affects and is affected by its physical ‘vessel’.

This last position is the one I find particularly interesting. More like Dollhouse than Stargate, Cold Souls is an exercise in what I will call ‘flexible dualism’. Despite building its whole premise on the soul-body duality, it finds the actual relation of these messier and overlapping. This, as I have mentioned before, puts them surprisingly close to a Christian theology of the soul.[10]

3. So, what is the soul?

While the film makers seem coyly unconcerned about whether it is or is not eternal, they take a surprisingly specific position on what the soul is. It seems that the soul is composed of the formative influences of our life’s most jarringly painful and beautiful events. Who we fundamentally are is the result of our cumulative response to the dialectic of joy and pain that composes our lives.

When Paul first contemplates storing his soul he says “I don’t need to be happy. I just don’t want to suffer.” But it turns out that pain and darkness and heaviness are requisite characteristics of humanness. They work with beauty to make us most fundamentally who we are.

And so the most beautiful souls in the film are those who have allowed pain and joy to do the most thorough work on them. They are the ones who have not wasted either their hurt or their happiness. They have not been sidelined or undone by either. In the film the greatest demand was for the souls of Russian poets…but the actual beauty of the soul was uncorrelated with opportunity or vocation. The most beautiful souls are those who had found a fiercely contented existence in the heaviness of this puzzling tension that is the horrific beauty of life. While this is, by no means, a complete description of the soul (and, I’m sure, was never meant to be) it is an excellent insight into our condition. Who we fundamentally are is deeply affected by what we do with our most devastating hurts and our greatest joys. In light of this, it makes a lot of sense that God would offer us the cross AND the resurrection as our supreme resources in this quest.

This post was prepared while listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron and Wine

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[1] I know this film got panned critically, but I really liked it. Seriously, I’m pretty easy…the bar is pretty low…it’s just that film has ceased to be a story telling genre. I have been putting together a post asserting the (sure to be controversial) thesis that we are currently in the golden age of music. But the opposite is true of film. It has never been so bad. The naught-ies were to film what the late 80’s and early 90’s were to music.
[2] We had to watch the movie twice to piece the story together. This is because, there is a lot of story that is not told, only eluded to.
[3] One of the best gags/plot devices in the film is that Russian women serve as soul ‘mules’ because ‘souls are volatile at elevation.’
[4] The impoverishment of pragmatism and the bankruptcy of functionalism compose a fourth really interesting theme. Here is one exchange that highlights it:
Paul: My God, how did we get here?
Doctor: When you get rid of the soul everything makes more sense. Everything becomes more functional and purposeful.
[5] One of the best scenes depicts a literally souless Giamatti delivering Chekov dialog. I simply cannot express how enjoyable this is. There is an extended version of this in the deleted scenes that breaks the rule that ‘deleted scenes are generally deleted for a reason.’ It is transcendent.
[6] This word means far too many things to be useful. I am talking about the idea that the human self is composed of distinct physical and non-physical components.
[7] Do you write ‘in’ a blog or ‘on’ a blog? I’m not really sure.
[8] To belabor the sports analogy: leading with ‘we have no idea’ then unpacking the idea for the rest of the film is like punting on first down because you have the best chance to score with your defense on the field.
[9] Sort of. It will persist if its original owner dies but the soul is in another person…but it vanishes as soon as it is freed from its carrier.
[10] I have belabored this point in this blog so I will relegate it to a footnote. Christian theology believes that the soul and body are distinct entities. However, a robust Christian theology of the seat of the self is far more complicated than the physicalist straw man (or, perhaps more aptly, straw ghost) would admit. The incarnation and the physical resurrection demonstrate that the Christian picture of ‘who I really am’ is one of an inexorable connection of physical and non-physical realities. The soul is its own thing but only in reference to the biological organism. The shocking (and overlooked) reality of the Christian picture of ‘who I am’ is that it is remarkably biological.

The ‘New Atheists’, the ‘New Calvinists’ and the New A-Team movie

I have been reading the ‘New Atheists’ recently. I am working on a serious post about things I found interesting in their writings. This is not that post. This post is entirely silly.[1] Here is the thing. I can’t get over how hansom Sam Harris is. Am I the only one that has noticed that he could choose Bradley Cooper as a Facebook[2] doppelganger?

This made me think (in light of the new film coming out in which Cooper is cast[3] as “Face”) that if the ‘New Atheists’ were the A-Team[4]: Harris would be “Face”, Richard Dawkins would be “Hannibal” and Christopher Hitchens would be a comically surly combination of “Murdoch” and Mr. T.

I don’t mean this to be ad-hominem…just a fun brain storm. So, of course, you could do the same thing with the guys closer to ‘my team.’[5] If the ‘New Calvinists’ were the A-Team[6], Matt Chandler[7] would be “Face,” Jon Piper would be “Hannibal” and Mark Driscoll would be a comically surly combination of “Murdoch” and Mr. T.

This post was written while listening to Good News for People who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse
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[1] Some of you may have noticed that in order to get weekly content up, I have been trying to alternate serious, borderline thoughtful pieces with shorter, lighter posts.
[2] There is a pun here given the next two sentences…I just can’t find it.
[3] I had a long discussion about casting for this film with my co-workers. We decided that they should have spent the Liam Neesome money on getting Ed Norton to play Murdoch.
[4] Get it, “A” for Atheist.
[5] I am not a Calvinist. I call myself a one and three-halves point Calvinist (accept total depravity, reject limited atonement and find tensioned data on the other three in the Scriptures – so I leave my theology on those intentionally unresolved). You could say that I am a Calvinist like I am a Democrat…I’m a bad one, but the label often fits better than the alternative. That said, I generally have a lot of respect for these guys.
[6] “A” for, um, well, Anti-Arminian?
[7] As I have mentioned before here, Chandler has very serious brain cancer…which has affected me deeply. I wrote this post before I saw the with a 12” scar across his bald dome. I stand by it. Somehow, he remains a remarkably good looking man…only now, his hansomeness is accompanied by a dramatic and unmistakable beauty.

The Kingdom of God is Like…a Vernal Pool Ecosystem

The Kingdom parables combine Jesus’ favorite topic with his preferred pedagogy. They usually start “The kingdom of God is like…” and then go on to describe something that is empirically unimpressive that is infused with a more fundamental and powerful reality. Yeast is hardly visible but makes bread possible, the mustard seed is among the smallest of the seeds but grows into an enormous plant[1] and the ordinary field conceals treasure hidden just beneath the surface. [2]

Far from the uncritical reading that the ‘kingdom of God’[3] is talking about a future ‘pie in the sky,’[4] disembodied, ethereal state…Jesus is talking about an empirically subtle parallel reality that is more fundamentally real than our reality. In this reality, God rules truly (hence the kingdom language) and it occasionally breaks through into our reality. ‘Your kingdom come,’ is not a prayer for the end of the world but that we would be rooted enough in true reality to make this one reflect it more accurately.

One of the primary features of Jesus’ parables was their situatedness. Even the most rudimentary mental picture of Judean peasant life demonstrates that he was doing HIGHLY contextualized theology, telling the story of Israel’s liberation with the cultural furnishings of the life of a Judean peasant. I was once in a Bible study where the leader asked us to re-tell the yeast parable using something from our profession or daily life. Mine sucked. I have tried to think of better examples several times with limited success. But now I have one. The Kingdom of God is like…a Vernal Pool Ecosystem.

I am taking my first entomology class this quarter: Aquatic Invertebrate Ecology. It is simply thrilling.[5] I could not have predicted[6] how engaging I would find bugs that live under rocks. But the other amazing thing about this ‘lab class’[7] is that most of the labs are field trips. Are you kidding me?!? As if the class wasn’t already fun enough.[8]

All of that to say…our first field trip was to a set of ‘vernal pools.’ Now, vernal pools are not impressive. It is a fancy way of saying ‘really big puddle that accumulates during spring rains and dries during the summer.’ They totally fit the criteria for the topic of a Kingdom of God parable…visually unremarkable. And that is why they constitute a threatened ecosystem…because no one thinks twice before tiling them up for crop land…surely there is nothing of sublime beauty and intrinsic worth in these mucky puddles. You see, the Kingdom of God, is like a vernal pool ecosystem…empirically unremarkable but intrinsically stunning.

Careful attention to these glorified puddles tells the story of a subtle but astonishing reality. They are home to one of the most remarkable aquatic ecosystems in the world. I expected an invertebrate sample of one of these pools to turn up some wormy things and some beetley things and a few squirmy things (I am still cultivating my entomological vocabulary). Instead, the samples told the story of a complex and intricate food web dominated by creatures that look like they should be from another planet and the oldest living animal found on our own.

Vernal pools are dominated by fairy shrimp and tadpole shrimp.[9] The fairy shrimp is aptly named. It is a sublime, translucent back swimmer (we saw one, but I didn’t get a good picture - so I borrowed). It is unlike anything I have ever seen. If I saw it on a nature show I would guess that it lived in an eccentric brackish estuary of Brazil or Malaysia, not in a glorified cow puddle 25 minutes from my house.

But the real shocker was the tadpole shrimp. Triopsidae have been around for 300 million years, giving them the title of ‘oldest living animal.’ They are found in temporary waters on six continents. Our most ancient organism, our oldest living fossil, makes its home in temporary waters around the earth, but almost no one knows about them because transient puddles are perceived as unremarkable.

So that is my yeast parable. The Kingdom of God is like a vernal pool, it does not appear to be much, but it is infused with a truer, more sublime, reality that can break through into our mundane existence if you are looking for it. But the Jepson Prairie vernal pools that we visited also work as a parable of the ‘treasure in the field.’ The way this parable goes, when you find a field that has buried treasure, you sell all you have to buy the field, because it is worth far more than it seems. That is what the Nature Conservancy did with Jepson Prairie. Realizing that vernal pools were being tilled at an alarming rate, they went out and bought these (at, presumably, a huge price). To most people they looked like big puddles, but the TNC realized that they had far more value than the vast majority of people perceived. That is what the Kingdom of God is like.

This post was prepared while listening to Brother Sun, Sister Moon by mewithoutyou

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[1] That is ecologically important. I have always liked the detail in this passage that the mustard plant “so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches."
[2] And the theme that God often inhabits the empirically unremarkable is a broad theme in the larger text. The tabernacle housed ‘the glory of God’ (whatever that means) but was essentially a tent of cow hides. And in 2 Cor 4 Paul translates Jesus’ agrarian peasant analogies to a more ‘urban’ context: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” (Note: I love referring to Paul as ‘urban.’ It is historically correct. Jesus was small town (another way in which God consistently chose to inhabit the empirically unimpressive) and Paul was thoroughly cosmopolitan. If it calls to mind the Apostle listening to hip hop and decked out in ‘bling,’ well, that is just bonus.)
[3] Or, in Matthew, ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’ Matthew will often tell exactly the same stories but with just one word replaced. The standard theory on this is that Matthew was writing to Jewish background Christians who were exceptionally careful about how they used the word G-d on second commandment grounds.
[4] This phrase is often used derisively to deconstruct religious hopes in a future better world…essentially mocking their lack of present utility. Here’s the thing, though. I LOVE pie. If you want to deconstruct Christian eschatology, you may want to choose a less compelling word picture.
[5] My Ecology graduate program does not start until the fall, but I have been taking classes to get up to speed all year. I have found each of them entirely satisfying and so full of wonder and intrigue that ‘thrilling’ is the only word that seems to consistently capture how I have felt about them. Now, you don’t accumulate the number of degrees I have without having a pathological enjoyment of learning…but this is different. I simply like biology better than math or engineering. Only my theology degree was comparably enjoyable. I finally think I know why. Because biology is a narrative in a way that math and engineering are not. By the end of a quantitative class, you know how to do something, but by the end of a biology class, you have another clue to the grand narrative of life. Each class is like an episode of Lost, leaving you desperate for the next piece of information that might move the story forward (though, like Lost, new insight usually opens more questions than it resolves).
[6] But, in retrospect, maybe I could have predicted it…since I find the rocks themselves so compelling.
[7] For those of you who were not science majors, lab classes are extraordinarily bad deals, credit wise. I never understood how 3 extra hours in class and almost 100% more work somehow only added one credit to a 3 credit class. I call it the science tax…but I digress.
[8] Here is my first insect collection (mostly Bietiae Ephemeroptera, with one very cool Placoptera and a water mite) and a Megaloptera (the most bad ass of all the aquatic insects) that someone else found in the same trip.

[9] It is their temporary nature that provides this unique niche…as the invertebrate communities of most fresh water are dominated by insects. The shrimp can survive the dry season in a cyst form, hatch before insects can colonize, and out compete for the pools resources. But they do not do well elsewhere because they are especially vulnerable to fish predation…which is conveniently absent in the temporary waters. It is a rare convergence of conditions that make being a crustacean an unqualified plus in fresh water.

And the people did feast upon the sloths and carp and breakfast cereals

So I made a sumbmission to graphjam. It started out as the opening gag for my Acts 13 talk.