lambertba's Xanga

My Band!

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:24:53 GMT

Innervisions

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:36:14 GMT

It’s 11:00 AM in the office, and I’m jamming out to some Stevie Wonder. “Golden Lady I’d like to go there” baby, yeah! (To be said in my best Bootsy Collins impression). Stevie was never much of a lyricist, but his voice sure convinced you of whatever he said. There is one bit on the “Innervisions” record I find rather intriguing. In the song “Higher Ground” it can be induced that Stevie subscribes to a reincarnation philosophy, which is unique to an African American R&B singer. “I'm so darn glad he let me try it again, Cause my last time on earth I lived a whole world of sin, I'm so glad that I know more than I knew then, Gonna keep on tryin' Till I reach the highest ground”. Hmmm.

These floating and flowing humid summer days of mine are spent reading and dreaming and playing some guitar. If only the rest of my life could be so simple and contented. Last night I went walking after a short rainstorm, the slick asphalt darkening the roads as the leftover raindrops sporadically fell from the trees. I feel as though I’m still learning how to listen to music. It is one thing to hear, and another to allow the sounds to penetrate your soul. Music, like philosophy, should change your life, not just passively make its way through it, like background noise that only occasionally sparks your interest. It should make a difference.

So many folks miss out on the beauty music can offer us in its more pure forms. I’m not an elitist to the extent that I’ll exclusively advocate pre-rock & roll genres, although I’m tempted to peer through that lens from time to time and question rock (as all good things should be examined). So what do I mean by pure forms? The answer involves distinguishing art from product.

On a technical level, there are certain aspects of commercial recording that drain the pith from music. Namely, over-compressing and auto-tuning methods can render a song “too clean” to the point that all the elements are so perfect they become inhuman (yes, imperfection is inherent and necessary in all regions of human life, not that we know any other scenario). Running the risk of an embarkation into a debate on the merits of electronic music (which I’m not opposed to at all within a certain extent), I’ll make the claim that computers have no soul; music is to be made by living breathing beings. By not appreciating these recording techniques one pigeon-holes just about everything you hear on Top 40 as a sterile product, mixed in such a way that no element is too abrasive, edgy, or threatening so as not to tip off the listener of its inanity and intellectual vapidity. The big record companies just want to give you a catchy seven note ditty that you’ll pay to hear again and again until, just as the previous hook wears out, they can sell you a new one (fortunately, the major labels are dieing an increasingly rapid death. Anyone interested in the decline of mainstream music and the various new directions should check out Bob Lefsetz’s blog at http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/).

Trying to avoid the temptation to negatively define what music is not, let’s examine what attributes real music displays. Really, it all comes down to soul. But what does that ambiguous term entail? The soul is the quintessence of all other signs of life. Just like humans, in order to be considered alive music must show some portent of consciousness. There must be breath, counterpoint, a sensitive and clear perception, sincerity, and perhaps most important, dreams and ambitions, a striving after unreached heights. It may be difficult to hear these concepts in music, but try listening to a record like you would a brand new acquaintance. Even when you first meet someone you can intuit the level of their sincerity. You often tell immediately whether they are insecure, arrogant, spunky or friendly. In this same way you must allow a song to speak to you. Depending on the music you are familiar with you may be alarmed at the inability of some records to say anything. Yet, you may also garner an entirely new perspective from a record you’ve spun a hundred times. So, don’t just listen to music on shuffle in your car or while you work out. Sit down, pick an album you enjoy, and consume it from beginning to end without distractions. You never know, you might learn something.

Oh comely (some thoughts before I left for Nashville)

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:10:13 GMT

Oh comely. Tomorrow I see Radiohead in Charlotte, and Saturday I depart for Nashville to do some recording with my band. This will be our second EP, the first being tracked on my computer and is still currently unfinished. Starting with Merlefeast I have been to around six different shows in the last couple of weeks, the most recent being the likes of George Clinton with Parliament and Funkadelic. Music, hmm. It is difficult to try and place where in my life and to what degree of importance music plays in my unraveling strand. For a long time music has just been there. Yet as I reflect on my few years I can already see the various shifts and roles it has taken on at different points.

I look back to the Fifth grade when R.E.M. was my favorite band. They served to imbue me with such an energy, yet simultaneously with a penetrating melancholy, a sort of beautiful awareness of the ever-present sorrow in all things. All these sentiments I drew solely from Eponymous, which was a collection from their years on the I.R.S. label, and Green, which if I’m not mistaken is their major label debut. “This one goes out to the one I love, this one goes out to the one I’ve left behind, flyer.” There was something in the simplicity of that soaring chorus amidst the offset complimentary backing vocals that intensely struck a chord with me, reshaping my phenomena of living in this world. I’d picture myself with possible future loves, folding laundry in a small apartment and spontaneously embracing just at the climax of “Fall on me”. All kinds of amorous dreams were given to me by the songs on those two records. Listening to “You are the Everything” I would envisage scenes of my elderly days spent with an aged girl “in the backseat laying down the windows” and I’d “look at her and I see the beauty of the light of music, the voices talking somewhere in the house late spring and you’re drifting off to sleep with your teeth in your mouth.”

Other songs were filled with unrelenting exuberance, like “Radio Free Europe” which had me singing at the top of my lungs “Calling out on the transit! Calling out on the transit!” Man, I was eleven years old and I memorized the lyrics to “It’s the end of the world as we know it”, and I felt pretty cool about that. In fact, I felt pretty cool about my R.E.M. infatuation anyway because I was the only kid within my sphere of interaction that knew about them at the time. I suppose that brings us to another point; why is there such a mystique and sense of self-satisfaction that accompanies the discovery of an unheard of band? It makes you wonder why so many hipsters seem to hoard their gems either to themselves or their esoteric friends instead of bringing them into the light for all to see. I guess it says something about the pomo (an abbreviation for postmodern that I learned the other day and I’m choosing to flaunt now) world where individualism is valued exponentially more that the community. Not that I’m one to talk.

(Part Two of this blog will be published at a later date.)

Bright Smiles, Dark Eyes, and the Summer Manifesto

Tue, 06 May 2008 19:21:03 GMT

I had the privilege of attending a Josh Ritter concert at the Orange Peel last Friday. For me the most poignant moment of the show was his rendition of “The Temptation of Adam” from his record “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter”http://www.joshritter.com/news.php . After strapping on an acoustic guitar as the rest of the band left the stage, he stood alone and asked for all the lights in the venue to be turned off. Then in the dark he slowly made his way through this chilling and completely original song. I mean, seriously, have any of you heard of an amorous liaison set in a missile silo? Incredible stuff. Here are the lyrics:

The Temptation of Adam

If this was the Cold War we could keep each other warm I said on the first occasion that I met Marie We were crawling through the hatch that was the missile silo door And I don¹t think that she really thought that much of me

I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the Bomb She just came along and started to ignore me But as we waited for the Big One I started singing her my songs And I think she started feeling something for me

We passed the time with crosswords that she thought to bring inside What five letters spell ³apocalypse² she asked me I won her over saying ³W.W.I.I.I.² She smiled and we both knew that she¹d misjudged me

Oh Marie it was so easy to fall in love with you It felt almost like a home of sorts or something And you would keep the warhead missile silo good as new And I¹d watch you with my thumb above the button

Then one night you found me in my army issue cot And you told me of your flash of inspiration You said fusion was the broken heart that¹s lonely¹s only thought And all night long you drove me wild with your equations

Oh Marie do you remember all the time we used to take We¹d make our love and then ransack the rations I think about you leaving now and the avalanche cascades And my eyes get washed away in chain reactions

Oh Marie if you would stay then we could stick pins in the map Of all the places where you thought that love would be found But I would only need one pin to show where my heart¹s at In a top secret location three hundred feet under the ground

We could hold each other close and stay up every night Looking up into the dark like it¹s the night sky And pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead And carve our name in hearts into the warhead

Oh Marie there¹s something tells me things just won¹t work out above That our love would live a half-life on the surface So at night while you are sleeping I hold you closer just because As our time grows short I get a little nervous

I think about the Big One, W.W.I.I.I. Would we ever really care the world had ended You could hold me here forever like you¹re holding me tonight I look at that great big red button and I¹m tempted.

This summer I will attempt to learn to be a person again.

Weddings...

Tue, 06 May 2008 18:56:45 GMT

I’m not sure that I have ever been this excited about summer before. My band played at a friend’s wedding last weekend. Weddings put me in an uncanny place; I really do not know how to feel about them. Being at such a ceremony seems to me as though my quintessence has been poured into a strange sack of corduroys and a collard shirt and then forced to wander through a world of chocolate strawberries and beanie weenies, flowers and bubbles, and somehow I cannot seem leaven the initial awkwardness that is aroused at the unusual combination of these elements. Of course this being the first occasion in which I have assisted in instilling the impetus to dance as opposed to watching passively, the experience differed slightly from attendances in the past. Playing in a band at a reception has a certain vantage point; no one pays any attention to the band so it really is like viewing the whole shindig through one-way glass. Weird stuff.

The greatest critique of "Christian Art" ever bestowed upon man

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:39:05 GMT

A Curmudgeon’s

View of

“Christian”

Media

Tom Willett

I got into the inspirational media business in a natural enough way. I knew Christ. I knew music. And there were people who would pay me to officiate at the wedding of the two. It wasn’t long, however, before I discovered that this was a marriage that would require an uncommon amount of compromise.

As an A&R man for Word Records (we used to say it stood for Airports & Restaurants—that’s where you spend most of your time), I was charged with discovering uniquely-talented artists and working with them to create a musical repertoire that would capture the best of their spiritual and creative gifts, while appealing to the widest possible audience.

Of course, the contemporary music business isn’t just about matching singers with songs, but involves making albums, shooting videos, orchestrating marketing campaigns, and doing your level best to assure that some semblance of the artist’s original vision makes it through the production and distribution pipeline to the end consumer.

As such, you spend just as much time on TV and film sound stages, in radio station control rooms, and at magazine and book publishers, as you do in the recording studio. Working alongside other believers who were likewise seeking to aid this alliance of enlightenment and entertainment, I quickly learned that the relationship between Christianity and the media was often a troubled one at best.

With your indulgence, allow me to offer a few reflections from the trenches. Without question, the gaudiest flower in the whole religious media garden is Christian TV. I’ve produced videos using the network staff and facilities of PTL and TBN, filmed live concerts at ORU and Liberty U, and I spent a month one Sunday backstage at the Hour of Power. It began to dawn on me that the problem here is much like that of the war on drugs. Faced with such wanton waste of minds and resources, one must determine whether to attempt to bring constraint upon the suppliers or the users.

If I had my way, no person guilty of watching more than 15 minutes of Christian TV per annum would be eligible to drive an automobile or operate heavy machinery within the 48 contiguous states and Canada. For those fortunate few unfamiliar with the amiable vapidity of religious programming, (no mean feat, since the Baptists, the Methodists, the Catholics and a host of neo-Pentecostal entrepreneurs all have their own satellite or cable outlets) even a cursory scan of the religious networks invariably leaves viewers howling in one accord: who are these people and how did they get their own television shows?

More disheartening than what goes on during these programs is what does not go on. A stack of books covering the areas of life in the Spirit never broached on religious TV would fill the shelves of a modest seminary library. In fact, they do. And those subjects that are addressed are typically served up in a simplified, emotionalized, often Southern-fried gumbo of Gospel Lite.

Nowhere else in the entire spectrum of visible light can one witness such an array of performances so free of real impact or import, unencumbered as they are by the concern to help viewers integrate faith into everyday life, or to bridge the gap between inspiration and incarnation.

So determined are religious programmers to achieve a holy separation from “the world” that they have apparently managed en masse to free themselves of the more troubling features of life among the higher primates, such as the enlargement of the braincase, the elaboration of the sensory pathways to the brain, and the shifting of the eyes to a forward position.

Only a lack of prayer and fund-raising techniques have kept them burdened with the sin of opposable thumbs. Even a first-time viewer can see through this pastiche of pseudo-spiritual speechifying and penny-ante pedantry. Never has switching channels and watching re-runs of C-SPAN seemed more like a godly act of sanity.

One of the chief vehicles for getting the word out about a new album is to get it on the radio. Thus, enterprising singers find themselves jockeying with DJs and dishing with talk show hosts in an effort to win a spot on their play lists, if not in their hearts.

In my experience, religious radio can be said to be superior to parochial TV only in that it lacks the ability to confound the visual sense while it mounts its relentless auditory assault. Since the invention of the electron tube, pious practitioners of the radio arts have held forth with a mighty and boisterous roistering, words without end, Amen.

All across these benighted states, radio preachers and Bible teachers, dogmatists and dramatists, pointers of fingers and alarm bell ringers regularly confuse vibrating the laryngeal muscle with having something to say.

Why is it that you can spin the radio dial in any city in America and always pick out the religious station in less time than it takes to say “WHUH on your AM dial?” Sure, on the lesser stations it’s the semi-pro announcer or the lousy signal. But on the better outlets it’s not the quality of the sound, but the quality of life they portray.

Radio is a two-way street of lifestyle marketing. The on-air personality of stations is carefully crafted to deliver not only an enjoyable and loyalty-inducing experience to the listeners, but to deliver those listeners as a demographically and psychographically select group to potential paid program providers and advertisers.

Within this dynamic, religious radio is chiefly remarkable for its consistent promotion of a lifestyle that is both unseemly and untenable. Behind the mind-numbing niceness and soporific musical pacing is a fear-driven you-and-me-against-the-world metaphysic that expresses itself alternately as detached denial or belligerent confrontation.

This siege mentality is founded in a pervasively negative view of life, mankind and the possibilities of living in a redemptive relationship with God, each other and the world at large. To these secessionist patriots, everything “down here” is reduced to the world, the flesh, or the devil, at great cost to their ability to perceive the astonishing glory of God as reflected here and now in the created order.

But life as conceived by the Creator is no more an exclusively heavenly-minded affair than the drinking of beer is about taking nourishment from the barley therein. As such, normal sentient human beings can as easily subsist on an exclusive diet of religious programming as a hand-rolled cigar can survive outside of a humidor.

The fact is that the essence of life in Christ happens at the intersection of heaven and earth, where the miraculous mingles with the mundane and the prophetic promenades with the pedestrian. In the twenty-odd years that I’ve been involved in the religious record business I’ve yet to have a single conversation with family or friends in which someone said, “I heard a great song on that Christian radio station the other day.”

In fact, if you stopped ten people on the street and asked them “What is CCM,” seven would say “I don’t know,” two would clap one hand on their wallet and walk quickly on by, and one would launch into a malevolent harangue regarding the separation of church and the state of the art.

Contemporary Christian Music is a Pop Music sub-genre so rich in wishful thinking and muddled intentions as to suggest the burlesque, its aesthetic shortcomings and spiritual deficiencies being too obvious and saddening to enumerate.

In the halcyon days of the Jesus Movement, the idea of creating a musical format to give voice to a generation’s experience of spiritual revival made complete sense. Yet the 20/20 vision of hindsight suggests that shortly after the first blush of Jesus Music began to wear off, many believing musicians—like their non-musical counterparts— should have moved on to the deeper things of life in Christ.

As artist/producer T Bone Burnett famously put it at the time, “Many musicians have seen the Light. The question for each of us is whether to write songs about the Light, or about what one sees by the Light.”

Instead of responding to the natural dynamics of spiritual and creative growth (where the pursuit of Christ leads to an ever-deepening penetration of the Spirit into our everyday humanness, and the pursuit of Beauty leads to an ever-widening creative engagement with the world around us) “the Movement” calcified into an “Industry” whose hallmark became a nostalgic recycling of a once-vibrant faith tragically debilitated by infantile paralysis.

Of late there has been much corporate wrangling as inspirational record companies have sought to align themselves with secular entertainment conglomerates in a belated effort to expand their sales beyond the moribund religious bookstore market. Despite their best efforts to infiltrate mainstream record shops, their product in large part continues to be relegated to the novelty bins.

Moral Anthropologists point to this lackluster sales performance as proof that there remains enough of the image of God in the hearts of even the most depraved of mankind that they instinctively abide by the unwritten law that friends don’t let friends listen to Christian music.

Until believing artists find the courage to accept their God-given mandate to creativity, and mission-minded executives learn to address, not suppress, the tension between art, commerce and spirituality, Nashville will remain the Branson and Gomorrah of the music business and true Christians with real talent will be forced to seek the nurture and opportunity they need amongst the heathens.

As the great web of interactive media spreads inexorably across the planet, technologically savvy religious groups have begun sprouting online as fast as moustache hairs above a Sunday school teacher's lip. Suited as it is to the broad dissemination of information while engendering a vague sense of community, the online world is a movement-friendly environment.

Yet Christian sites suffer from the same problem as do their philistine counterparts: the future of online services depends largely on the quality of their content providers (bloodless term), and, despite the Church’s rich cultural heritage, the contemporary religious cyberplex has not shown itself to be exactly a wellspring of belles lettres or the beaux arts.

Regardless, trend-watchers can rest assured that the expansion of religious entities into the digital domain will continue unabated. Web sites are like hemorrhoids— in the end, everybody will get one.

Confronted recently with advance copies of the latest tomes from some of contemporary Christendom’s leading inspirational authors, I was reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s assessment of an earlier writer’s achievement. “I found your work both original and good. Unfortunately the parts that were good were not original, and the parts that were original were not good.”Based on the size of the religious publishing business, one can only presume that these books must, in some enigmatic way, meet the impenetrable needs of a certain type of mind.

Possessed of all the intellectual stimulation of jicama and the visceral bang of tofu, the majority of today’s sacred treatises reek of the opiate of the obvious, and invariably leave their readers grinning like Cheshire cats—and I mean Cheshire cats in heat. Life as bestowed by God is so full of mystery & complex-ity, so enriched by subtlety and nuance, so rife with irony and paradox, that it should be the first inclination of enlightened authors to use fantasy, poetry, fiction and drama to grapple with the ineffable wonders of the life of faith. And yet the shelves of your typical Bible bookstore are chock-a-block with how-to books.

Charged with holding forth the Word of Life, religious writers have managed in the past century to cover the entire range of spiritual subject matter all the way from A to B, unswervingly guided by a zealous dedication to the time-honored editorial aesthetic: why use a metaphor when a 2” x 4” will do?

These purveyors of platitudes and traffickers in trivialities have spewn forth a miasma of high-handed, low-minded doggerel that in the span of a few years has given the entire history of Western literature a spectacular spanking.

Most inspirational writers’ work bears exactly the same relation to literature as that of a copy of a fax of a copy to the original document, or a church Single’s Supper bears to a night on the town, or the separation of church and state bears to an amicable divorce.

In fact, it is the wide-spread consumption of today’s inspirational writing, and not repressed memories or chronic fatigue syndrome, that is chiefly responsible for the cultural nullification of the late Evangelical Church.

One could throw a hundred Bibles in your typical Sunday service without hitting a single person who has ever read the Harvard Classics, much less the enduring works of faith. The literary intake of most folks populating the pews of America extends no further than the nearest religious magazine, the swilling of which leaves one with a feeling that can only be likened to drinking too much decaffeinated coffee—you feel headachy, cranky and gaseous, but not at all stimulated. Allowing for a few rare exceptions, the entire output of present day religious publishing is worth precisely as much as a degree from a Vacation Bible School.

Perhaps the prevailing “Christian” vision of the arts & the media is demeaned because, among many believers, the Christian vision of life is demeaned. At what point in the history of the Church did we slide into this almost exclusively negative anthropology that gives rise to all manner of dehumanizing attitudes and actions?

When did we begin to fixate on the Fall and man’s sinful nature while losing sight of our unique place in the cosmos as those created and redeemed to incarnate a material spirituality? If Christ, the Son of God, is Absolute Man for all time, then our understanding of humanness must be substantially positive, as must our comprehension of the nature of relationship between God and His people.

Are we called to witness and work for His Kingdom? Unquestionably. But the mystery of the oneness with God into which we are welcomed cannot be subsumed into even the most fervent evangelism or steadfast social activism.The case for Christian involvement in mass communications is grounded in the need to reexamine not only our aesthetics and methodology, but our ontology, cosmology, anthropology and theology. Without the careful and heartfelt pursuit of God’s mind in each of these fundamental areas, no lasting and meaningful portrayal of life in Christ via the media can be possible.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:46:56 GMT

We only have three weeks of school left…this pleases me. It is probably in the last few weeks leading into summer that our childhood most strongly returns to us. I think about playing baseball in the backyard where our “field” was so tiny that a line drive had every potential to decapitate the pitcher. Throwing the ball was one nostalgic activity in which I indulged myself this past summer when I was living at home (an escapist decision not to be repeated again, living at home that is). This year I will be at the Treat, working in the Admissions Office and playing with my band (www.myspace.com/jonathanammons). And reading and sleeping and further wandering through the days when time expands. “The days are just packed”.

And I’m almost through with my sophomore year. Every human being experiences the following sensation and it has be repeated countless times in varying degrees of literary value, so forgive me for doing so as well; I simply cannot believe how bewilderingly fast these two years have gone by! It seems as though an entire lifetime has been compressed into my recent past, and I am left doubting very severely if there is any resemblance of who I was as a naïve freshmen in me now. Everyone should listen to Daniel Machado and the Guitar Show, it will do you mo’ bunch of good.

Some quotes and thoughts...

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:26:32 GMT

"There was a time before we were born.
If someone asks, this where I'll be . . . where I'll be"
Talking Heads

“Time expands and then contracts”, swells with hope and then languishes

and then tastes a pinch of hope once more.

“Today was just a day fading into another.”

“Sawest thou ever thy friend asleep? Wert thou not dismayed at thy friend looking so?

O my friend, man is something that hath to be surpassed.”

“Sleeping is giving in no matter what the time is;

sleeping is giving in so lift those heavy eye lids.”

In the midst of the flux we pine for the primordial self;

we cling to the vestiges of the womb, free from the voice of our parents

and the pernicious obligations of the contrived ideal which is born of depravity

and festers amongst the rabble.

“Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back.”

“Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now.

A trouble and a terror is the hero to them.

But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul!

Maintain holy thy highest hope!”

All this to say that we must wade through the ideal self and be purified until the real self,

the primordial self that God made us to be can be actualized. Sleeping is giving in.

In response to the wise words of Mr.Hofheins

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:26:07 GMT

All I really wish to say is that I concur whole heartedly with Caleb’s observation of the obscure cloud of noise that is the modern world. Reflection and contemplation have receded into obsolescence in the wake of an Ipod driven and overly stimulated consumerist society that is being deafened by itself. The trappings can be found in the declining level of literary comprehension and the omnipresence of ADD medication, the effectiveness of kitschy advertisements on a sea of uncritical minds, and the emergence of crises-centers for video game addicts. Where have picnics and long walks, sunset viewing, and rainy days spent reading gone? These age old edifying activities are moribund in our crank driven lives. And then we marvel at the exponential increase of depression! Perhaps if we turned down the noise and looked beyond ourselves to the ostensible and ever-present beauty that surrounds us, our pain would be leavened, or even eradicated.

Albert Camus wrote that (paraphrase), “Man stores up in one day enough to examine over the course of an entire lifetime.” If only his eyes were open…

Further Defining My Terms

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:22:30 GMT

To start, I would graciously like to thank Borker (I am presuming this is a pseudonym…maybe not, who knows?) for his input. Hitherto, I have not been given any feedback on these blogs, and so getting responses and starting discussion is a trend I would certainly like to cultivate. Also, I greatly appreciate how succinct and well thought out his comments were.

For clarification, I most assuredly believe and confirm the undeniable existence of truth in art, and its capability to allow rays of eternity to surreptitiously creep through the cracks. To be sure, if sublime art was not intrinsically transcendent, it would not exist, because there would be nothing to separate it from the rest of the muck in this world. “Funk can move and remove, dig” as Parliament put it so simply; for instance, beautiful music can stir our inner being and wash away our maliciousness, leaving us transformed for the better. Here I am arguing an extraneous point, as I am sure we are in unison of the validity of art in and of itself.

What I was speaking of in my previous discourse, albeit a tad disjointedly, was the inhibitions of the aesthetic life in the realization of selflessness. I feel as though, regardless of what the artist may exclaim, substantial art requires the engulfment of an individual into their own sphere of consciousness. It is through the enlightened self that the artist presents their very own unique representation of the human condition. The bystander may be led to God as a result of the art, but the process of creation itself must begin from an internal realization of one’s own individually manifested conscious plane.

But can God be found through this personal reality? No, of course God can only be sought without and not within the self. We must die to the flesh and be resurrected in the spirit. Now, can art be made post-salvation? I suppose the answer is yes, but “art” is this sense is very different from what is deemed “art” by the modern world at large. The question is can a Christian justifiably and accurately portray the human condition after salvation? No, for your kingdom has left after you pray “Thy Kingdom Come”. You are now a member incorporated into the body of Christ, His kingdom on earth. Therefore, if you produce art earnestly, what can now be your subject material? The human condition is depravity and dissipation, so to dwell upon such is fleshly. So, you must put away childish things, and seek the eternal. This leaves you restricted to the content found in our contemporary praise and worship music, a genre exclusively focused upon the reunion with God, and the ineffable experience of God’s presence. (The genre is also under severe suspect of more often than not being contrived as much as, if not more so, than the realm of secular music. Christianity has major labels and quotas too.)

Now, one may point to artists such as Sufjan Stevens, who are Christians and still express an intimate perceptive understanding of flawed humanity. I am certainly not one to question a person’s salvation, but my inquisition lies more in the realm of “Does this focus on carnal matters leave one as a lukewarm Christian?” One can indeed reach an acceptable, in fact venerable level of holiness in the milieu of the modern world, and still straddle the earth/heaven fence. This is due to the fact that we have moved away from times in the past when there was still a distinction between sacred and common art and no question of which one was superior. However, the Faith has compromised since then, and the Church no longer wishes to be set apart, but instead it endeavors to beat the secular art world at its own game (of which it is indubitably losing).

Of course the secular and sacred titles send artists into a philippic of indignation and the refutation of the accuracy of such definitions. And I agree that it is asinine to attempt to separate the Hellish and the Holy based on external premises. The fact of the matter is that if you are of the world, you will compose accordingly and if you are a child of the king, your words will be His words. Only God knows our hearts. And maybe it is possible for an artist to wade through the underbelly of our world and rise to the surface with truth in hand. But as for me and what I have found, the damage that such a passage leaves on one’s soul makes it overwhelmingly difficult to see with an unmarked eye. Now I do not mean to belittle the omnipotence of God; man can be healed from these experiences and reach a state of enlightenment, but I do not find this to be possible during the creation of poignant art that concerns itself with the earthly human condition. And does not the recollection of these sinful episodes during the creation process hinder spiritual growth? I would think so…oh wait, I know so.

At the end of the day if we are to maintain our faith, the answer must be that all is possible in Christ. I suppose all I can conclude with any assurance is that the life of the aesthetic on the road to enlightenment has plenty of hindrances, and is ill-advised for those who genuinely seek God. Poignant art requires passion, which I use in the original sense of the word, which is “to suffer”. Then again, any passage through this transitory life must have the same. I’m afraid I must end with the inconclusiveness which befalls me in all endeavors of my life. Hmmm.