a coherent collection of random statements regarding God, words and tunes

Ramblings -- Parts One to Whatever

     That's the easiest -- and probably most accurate -- thing to call it. So let me start in the middle, work my way sideways, and probably end up running around in circles thereafter....

     Let's start here: I've embarked on an unusual fast for the next couple weeks, but I guess it makes sense to the 21st Century: I'm taking a break from message boards and music. (Yes, I know, I'm still writing on this blog, but it really is a very different dynamic.) And if you've been following along at all, you can guess that taking even a couple weeks away from music is a tough thing for me. 

     I'm pretty sure I'll also be doing a "normal" fast within the next few days as well, in preparation for heading up to Estes Park this weekend for a self-imposed retreat. I'd mentioned some time back (in late April, no doubt) that I really missed the men's retreat I'd started 10 years ago back in Jersey. As much as it meant to other guys who went, it meant that much more to me... which probably explains why I was the one who needed to start it.

     It also explains more than you know about how these last 10 years have taken me from being just another pissed-off and disillusioned Christian who was as much a part of the problem as anything else, to a church planter (starting in our home, no less), to a licensed pastor, to a guy who finally was given the opportunity to stop using his editorial abilities to service lawyers and to start using them to serve God and his church (shut up, Byrnes ). 

     Which kind of takes me into the now. I love Colorado. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to Jersey. I love my family. No more than the usual crises there. I like my job. Challenging as all get-out -- and even more so since the guy who hired me and essentially started this department seven years ago left earlier this month. (Thus leaving me to literally help plan the stuff I'll be working on for the next year. Cool opportunity, but scary.) But while working in a Christian environment is a heck of a lot healthier than the alternative, it's still a job. There are moments where the stuff I'm working on speaks to me as well, but it's not a substitute for working on my own spiritual life. And all the stuff I had to prop it up back in Jersey -- albeit out of necessity -- isn't here.

     In short: I need God. I need to sing a new song, as it were. And I need to be taught what that song is.

     So I'll be shutting down for a little while. At least everywhere but here.

**********

     One thing I've noticed, going music-less for even a few days, is that there's no shortage of noise to take its place. (That said, I've probably had my most productive couple of days in quite a while.) Or shortage of music, for that matter. Anywhere you go, we lay white noise over the top of the still, small voice we need to be listening for, and to. I think I'm looking forward to going to Estes just to remember what silence sounds like.

**********

     And that's true about the church too. Got into a discussion at the men's group I've been going to for the last couple months (must... suspend.... tangent...). We've been working through A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God (and if you never have, you need to). I don't remember the exact quote, but it got into how we (the church, that is) adapts the ways of the world to try to attract people to Jesus. As if Jesus can't fend for himself.

    And that's especially true of music. Obviously, I like loud and/or edgy music, and I'm not immediately concerned about the spiritual profession of the songwriter -- if they're wrestling honestly with God, no matter what side they're wrestling from, I can hear that loud and clear in the music and I naturally gravitate toward it.

     But 98% of what passes for "Christian" or "worship" music is what I dubbed at said group "Godnoise." It uses the world's ways and doesn't say squat about God, despite what the song's jargon might want you to believe. It's as worldly as the stuff it professes to repudiate. Whether I hear it on a radio or in a worship service it leaves me totally cold. It's all about us. God, you've done this for me, and I wuvwuvwuv you.

     Cripes, Public Image and the Velvet Underground tell me more about God than that. I'm dead serious, and I don't mean it as a slam toward Mssrs. Rotten and Reed either. (Granted, guys like the Swirling Eddies, 77s, Mark Heard, Vigilantes of Love, etc., tell me a whole lot more, but I'm making a point here, dagnabbit.)

     Try this sometime: Perform what I call the "Faith Plus One" test, based on the South Park episode depicted in my "portrait" above (you know the episode I'm talking about), on a given "Christian" or "worship" song.  In other words, substitute a lover from the gender of your preference for each Jesus or God reference in the song, then see if you can picture Britney Spears singing the results. (If you need help, go to http://www.planearium2.de/scripts-709.htm, and look for bold italics, and/or do a "find" on "Executive 1." )

     Yeah. I thought so.

**********

     Speaking of irony (suspend tangent just a few minutes more), while I'm on this "musical fast," I'm also in the process of pulling together my first extended musical set in ages, in support of Marion who's starting a gallery at our church in the middle of town, and kicking it off during the monthly Friday Night on the Town in hopes of attracting visitors off the street. You know, the whole idea that art can glorify God without preaching. (Something that people on both sides seem to have trouble conceptualizing.) Anyway, I'm the entertainment, and need to be ready to go by the 8th.

      again.

     The proposed set(s), for anyone curious:
     Double Cure (Vigilantes of Love)
     The Lust, the Flesh, the Eyes and the Pride of Life (77s)
     If You Want To (Daniel Amos)
     Fascist Architecture (Bruce Cockburn)
     Built for Glory, Made to Last (The Lost Dogs)
     *****
     God Went Bowling (The Swirling Eddies)
     Facsimile (VoL)
     Come Down Here (Lost Dogs)
     Look Over Your Shoulder
     Another Good Lie (both Mark Heard)
     *****
     Jerusalem (Steve Earle) (there's yr spanner in the works )
     The Last Testament of Angus Shane (Lost Dogs)
     Hang on Every Word (VoL)
     For Crying Out Loud (77s)

     Subject to change. But in any event, my guitar will be accompanying me to Estes. One of the few breaks in the silence. But still no CDs.

**********

     OK, initiate first tangent.

     Not entirely surprisingly, the men's group on Saturday mornings has become my spiritual bright spot of each week. And it's well worth bearing in mind that these are guys from another church. A more conservative bunch of guys, but good guys and serious about their walk. I miss that.

     Which is a roundabout way of saying: I haven't gotten anything out of "regular" church for quite some time. It could be me -- and some of it is, certainly -- but I don't think all of it is. Granted, I'd held back for awhile from getting more involved, because I just had too much learning curve at the job to deal with. And then of course, as I finally felt ready to take the next steps, my mom died in February (suspend new tangent). But for the last six months, I've been looking for an "in," and for one reason or another the door's been repeatedly shut on me. And I need to grasp the "why" of that. 

     Which appears to bring me to yet another threshold. The younger guys are restarting their small group early next month, and are actually pursuing the presence of some older guys to come alongside them. Not that I'm enjoying my newfound "oldness," per se, but in a church full of twentysomethings I need to just suck it up.  Anyway, on paper, looks promising -- as you may have gathered from above, I really miss speaking into other guys' lives. The fact that they're now half my age doesn't need to be a deterrent.

     At the same time, it feels for all the world like this is in fact my last best hope of connecting at this church. If it turns out to be yet another case where all the right things are being said but nothing's ever done, and/or has to wait for "perfect" conditions before just doing it already, I could see doing some serious re-looking around come, say, November. And that's never an easy thing, even though this one's not my baby.

     Needless to say, yet something else to take to God this weekend with a vengeance, as opposed to the lame handful of minutes that have been passing for a prayer time as of late.

**********

     And yes, then there's my mother. The estate's a week or two from being officially closed (although the majority of activity has been done for weeks -- see also the "Intermezzo" posts from February and July, if needs be). I've been majorly stressed at times -- dealing with an estate singlehandedly and long-distance hasn't been easy. I especially appreciated the $6,000 worth of bills from the hospital where she was dead on arrival, and who couldn't handle correctly submitting the claims themselves. We only wound up on the hook for a little less than $900, but boy, my highly-strung sense of injustice had my blood pressure going through the roof on THAT one... Suffice to say, I still don't miss being there.

     So anyway, I've been stressed, but I can't honestly say that I've grieved. And I don't know whether that's ever coming or not. I didn't have the greatest relationship with my mother, appearances (and emphasis on appearances) aside, but between publically working out my ministry over the last 4-5 years, then coming out to Colorado, it seemed like the proper distance/perspective was finally being created. Her last visit here at Christmastime was actually pretty good. And I knew full well she'd be coming out here after retiring in a few years, but it seemed like we were on the right track. A few more years of distance/perspective and things could have been very different.

     But that wasn't what happened. I spoke to her on the phone during halftime on Super Bowl Sunday, and the next morning she was gone. Like that.

     I'd dealt with our past awhile back. And now there's no future. I'm not sure where that leaves me. Very possibly right where I already am. But maybe I'll find that out too this weekend.

**********

     Well, I'm finally wrote-out, for now. That feels good in and of itself. We'll see where it goes from here. But it won't be about music for the next two weeks, that's for sure.

Posted by: burninglight at 22:59 | link | comments (2)

Lullabies from the Edge

     Ladies and gentlemen: West Milford, New Jersey's greatest alternative Christian artist is back. 

     OK, so that might not be saying much, especially since the only other competition he potentially could have had left for Colorado last summer. But trust me, if you like your tuneage acoustically and electronically loopy, almost pathologically minimal, and yet somehow strangely peaceful -- and/or get excited by the idea of locking Dave Matthews in a room with a bunch of Fisher-Price toys, Casios, and samplers, and ordering him at gunpoint to stop being a "serious artist" -- Jai Agnish can be your man too.

     It's been six years since Jai (pronounced Jay) put out his mega-indie first album, Automata, and aside from some selections on his self-circulated Blue Bunny Sampler and the correctly titled Our Split EP with Gospel Zombie, pickins has been slim. (And if you visit his myspace site, you'll probably stumble into the simple, plaintive, yet sticks-in-your-head single from Automata, "When You Dream," which will give you a good idea of where he's coming from.)

     Anyway, something happened: One of those close artist-friends who contributed several songs to said sampler put out a little CD called Come on, Feel the ILLINOISe. You know, the one I and a whole lot of other people called the best album of 2005.

 That said -- and if you were reading closely above, you already realize -- Mechanical Sunshine won't remind you much of the aforementioned Sufjan Stevens magnum opus. But if you don't need The Big Statement OR The Big Music, it's a very quirky, winsome, and satisfying little CD, and one which picks up where Automata left off and builds on it nicely as it goes along. His music simultaneously makes you think, "Heck, I could do that," and makes you wonder why you hadn't. It won't change yr life, but it'll pass the better part of an hour quite engagingly.

     "Mr. Mission," the first tune, would've fit squarely on Automata. Bubbly, squeaky, sampled and simple. "Changes" stays in the same mellow, do-it-yourself groove and throws in some marimbas for good measure.

     The happy factor gets upped on the buoyant "Good Times, Good Night," where Jai's joined vocally by Julie Bryant (who contributes nicely in several places on this album), before returning to the acoustic/sampler groove for "Yellow Balloon," then meeting halfway in "Red Eyes in June." I'm not sure how closely the chronology of the songs corresponds to the song sequence, but things start shifting around this point. Nice coda here too.

     "The Argument" is another plaintive, more quiet duet with Julie Bryant. I'm not sure entirely what it means (and Jai's lyrics in general are more impressionistic than impressive - that's not to say they're bad, but they do tend to blend in with the music more than rise above them), but it's pretty nonetheless.

     "Can You Fly" is the sparsest song here (which, you've no doubt gathered, is saying something), but also one of the most effective, featuring some nice melodica from Robert Wenzel (the county judge/former mayor's son? Now see, THIS is the problem with reviewing music from yr former hometown....). Again, lyrical details are sketchy, but the somber, lost melody carries this one along really nicely. "Mind Pride" sways along nicely and childlike, as did most of the best songs from Automata -- think Greg Lake's old ELP ballads, but without the honkin' weight of pretention they carried.

     The more straight acoustic "Known You" nicely layers the guitars while bemoaning, "I wish I had known you much better than that.... Everything is known to you / Even before I speak a word / Even before I make my move.... / In your book you write them down / The things you know before I know them...." God? A girl? Who knows? Just kick back and enjoy it. "Spaceship" begins equally quiet and acoustically, but adds on the samples, Bryant's backups, and Wenzel's keys to good effect.

     I have to admit I'm not a big fan of Jai's work with also-local-artist/collaborator J.S. Rockit, but we get two samples of it here anyway, in the mercifully brief hip-hop phone message "You Made Me Intro" and the not-so-short "All I Ever Dreamed Of." Suffice to say, Jai's atmospheres and chorus (short version on the message: hang onto yr dreams) help me survive J.S.'s wordy yet dumb white-boy rap. Sandwiched in between is the pretty "You Made Me," where the phone-call sampling fades into the background while guitar and xylophone (?) work nicely off one another.

     The real gem here is the next song, "Carnival." As with most of the songs here, it starts off very minimal, but over the course of five-plus minutes builds into something almost... well, almost majestic. Again, who's the heck's he singing to? Doesn't matter. The music gives it the sense of intrigue it needs:

Your mind, it is a carnival ride
You keep changing your mind
You don't know why
Look at all the rides
And look at all the prizes

If this is the way it's got to be
Then how about at least letting me see it all go down?
If this is the way you're going to be
Then how about at least letting me see it all go down?

     "Where We Watch From" is another pretty and peaceful puppy, and one which closes this one out. "This is where I come to find you again / This is where I go to surprise everyone..." 

     Heck, go out and buy this just go the boy can afford to tour outside the NY Metro area. And here's where you do it.

Posted by: burninglight at 21:56 | link | comments