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The Lost Art of Letter Writing
Monday September 13, 2010
Letter writing, the kind with real ink and paper, has become something of a cultural anachronism, like rotary phones or washboards. Mention that you plan to spend the afternoon writing a letter, and be prepared to meet the same quick-blinking surprised faces you might receive if, pushing back from a restaurant table, you say, “Excuse me while I powder my nose.” It just doesn’t happen anymore. I think this is a pity, because letter writing has held an important place in my life since I was thirteen. It was then I made my first real best friend; we’ll call her Summer....
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Tonio K. and the Metaphysical Boogie
Friday September 10, 2010
Philosophers don’t usually make good rock ’n rollers. Philosophers write dense, convoluted, esoteric arguments about highly theoretical concepts; a prospect that typically doesn’t elicit much wild abandon out on the dance floor. So you have to tip your scholar’s cap to Tonio K. The 70s rocker was as deeply indebted to twentieth-century existentialist art and philosophy as the most arcane academic. And he could whip up a righteous wall of noise that owed far more to The Sex Pistols than Jean Paul Sartre. His brand of punk existentialism was bracing, raw, insightful, and—quite remarkably for dour philosophy types—hilariously funny. Tonio, who took his nom de rock from a Thomas Mann novella, released his debut album Life in the Foodchain in 1978, in the midst of the punk/New Wave explosion. It was the perfect time for a smartass who couldn’t really sing....
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The First Five Non-Christian Records I Ever Owned
Thursday September 9, 2010
For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading through the final pages (finally!) of my upcoming book Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a collection of essays about faith and popular music, mostly in the 1990s, and the musical twists and turns life (mine and others’) has taken since then. For the most part, I listened to Christian rock music in the early part of the 90’s, but eventually, I started exploring “secular” music with embarrassingly milquetoasty gateway albums. This was a struggle for me at first—I truly believed that, as a young evangelical Christian, there was something dangerous and worldly about pop music—but the five records listed below were albums that put me on the path to pop obsession....
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Winter’s Bone: A More Human Hero
Wednesday September 8, 2010
When was the last time you saw a big-screen hero kill, gut, and cook a squirrel? Be prepared for that if you see Winter’s Bone. I wasn’t. Let’s not even talk about the chainsaw, which figures prominently at the end of the film. Let’s focus on Ree Dolly, the seventeen year-old girl “bred and buttered” among a secretive, criminal, meth-addicted community deep in the woods of the Ozark Mountains. For her, squirrel-skinning is the stuff of survival. And what she does to protect, teach, and raise her younger siblings defines her as hero of courage, tenacity, and selflessness....
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The School of Chant
Tuesday September 7, 2010
When the email circulated that there would be a traditional Latin Mass at our parish for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, I immediately and foolishly wrote back that I wanted to be in the Schola Cantorum. The extent of my Gregorian chant experience is one weekend at the Abbey of Gethsemani five years ago. My Latin is limited to two semesters in college, the Sign of the Cross, and a CD of hymns by Beth Nielsen Chapman in heavy rotation at our house every Christmas. I’d been to exactly one Latin Mass, almost a decade ago, and remembered only how completely lost I felt among all those Mantilla-clad women, shuffling the pages in the Missal. All I had was bravado....
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Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
