Mine In Mono

The election is, whether mercifully or unmercifully, in the rearview mirror. Like some others, I want to turn my attention away from the day’s news, so closely coupled as it is with political events. Before I read about Kid Rock being appointed ambassador to the U.N., I mean to spend some time with my head in books. 

Standard Ebooks has inspired me by making the barrier to reading well-produced classics low and ebooks free to obtain. From the site:

Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

This week I downloaded a collection from Emerson (which includes Self Reliance) and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. I haven’t started on Emerson yet, but I’ve found much enrichment in the latter book. Its short, focused chapters are a sort of balm in times when the world feels abrasive. 

In the pages of this 500-year-old book, you will find the very things that speak to the rancor and division of contemporary American society.

True it is that every man willingly followeth his own bent, and is the more inclined to those who agree with him. But if Christ is amongst us, then it is necessary that we sometimes yield up our own opinion for the sake of peace. Who is so wise as to have perfect knowledge of all things? Therefore trust not too much to thine own opinion, but be ready also to hear the opinions of others. Though thine own opinion be good, yet if for the love of God thou foregoest it, and followest that of another, thou shalt the more profit thereby.

I’m praying that I can read these words with fresh eyes. It’s easy to absorb the words at night, though, and much harder to go out into the following day and put them into practice.

Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague about music. I had gone to see one of my direct reports' bands, and they were really genre-hopping. I told her about the experience and mentioned that they blended such far-flung musical styles as punk, hip-hop, and shoegaze. She said she loved shoegaze, but when I asked her if she was going to the Slowdive show, she confessed that she hadn’t heard of them. I was a bit shocked, since I would consider them just below My Bloody Valentine in the pantheon of shoegaze progenitors. I asked her what shoegaze bands she was into and she mentioned Emma Ruth Rundle, whom she described as metal/shoegaze.

The conversation caused me to make a mental note to check out Rundle. I had heard of her playing a metal festival in Asheville (which was postponed after the devastation of Hurricane Helene). What I heard wasn’t what I had expected, since it sounded to me more like post-rock than anything. The first album I looked at, EG2: Dowsing Voice had song titles like “Brigid Wakes To Find Her Voice Anew. The Little Flowers and Birds Show Themselves.” It was like a game of how to tell me your music is post-rock without telling me your music is post-rock. Next, I came across the On Dark Horses album, which really connected with me. Rundle often seems to do more acoustic psyche-folk these days, but this album was different.

Rundle has a dark aesthetic which, at least on On A Dark Horse, pairs well with the primal post-rock rhythms. There is a bit of desert noir in the mix. “Darkhorse” is a particular favorite, its shifting, moody instrumentation serves as a vehicle for Rundle’s powerful and plaintive vocals. When I listened to the album, I was recommended Russian Circles and Mazzy Star. That is as sure a sign as any you are in the right track.

Here, Rundle performs “Darkhorse” and “Control,” two standouts from On A Dark Horse, with a full band.

Emma Ruth Rundle - Full session | Highway Holidays TV (YouTube)

Upon discovering the new single from Yvette Young (via Instagram of all places), I was immediately reminded of Sophie And Peter Johnson. The breezy sophistipop certainly merits easy comparisons. Then I realized that Young did vocals for Brothertiger’s mesmerizing cover of Sophie and Peter Johnson’s “Torn Open.”

Young is a member of the math rock outfit Covet but her solo work here is far from the tightly wound calculus and strange time signatures that are markers of that genre. Though Young’s guitar solos on “Always” have jagged edges that contrast with the shimmery polish present in the rest of the song’s components, most of the instrumentation is pure dream pop. With reverb so wet it will remind you of summer days at the pool and synthetic-sounding drums, the song calls to mind Softer Still’s Nuances LP. Like that band’s output, Young’s new track could be mistaken for an artifact of the 80s, but the preponderance of very visible tattoos in the video leaves no doubt that this is a contemporary affair.

Yvette Young - Always (YouTube)

Some of my fondest memories are of times at the Disney World theme park. In fact, some of the first memories I’ve retained are from my first trip to the amusement park. I was four, and sitting in between my parents in a car on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, filled with a mixture of excitement, fear and familial comfort. I also remember the thrill of going on Space Mountain over and over again later at night as a teenager, the unfettered access to the ride that was so elusive earlier in the day becoming manifest. I can’t forget the luxurious dining experiences my wife and I had on our honeymoon, the kind of which we continue to talk and joke about. I still get a twinge of panic when I think about buying several Lego Star Wars sets and then almost feeling them slip out from underneath my legs on the lurching, fast-paced Aerosmith Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster.

Of course, these memories, and many others were from before a time when I even had children of my own that I could bring to the parks. Taking a child to Disney World is a fresh experience (particularly if they are in that period of what child development experts call “magical thinking”). Seeing things through their eyes, their imaginative lenses, you gain an insight into their sense of wonder and awe. You can’t wait to introduce them to new experiences that you think they will enjoy.¹ Pirates of the Caribbean is a different kind of adventure when you remove all the insouciance that one accumulates on the path to adulthood.

I’ve always marveled in general at the Disney experience. Almost everything in their parks is fine-tuned to give you the best impression possible. The attention to detail at Disney World reminds me of those workspace profiles where you can explore someone’s desk and nothing is out of place. No cables anywhere to spoil the aesthetics, and everything is positioned so deliberately. Cast members travel from place to place via secret tunnels. Care is taken in even the tiniest of details to ensure that when you are in Frontierland, you feel like you are on the American frontier (soft drinks and the availability of other anachronistic food items aside).

Some of that magic may be fading, though, as Disney pushes aside the continuity of themes to make way for the considerations of their commercial intellectual property. Disney is changing its flagship park at Disney World, The Magic Kingdom. They are shortening the Rivers of America, which anchor the early American history and Frontierland areas of the park, to make room for a ride that capitalizes on the popularity of the movie Cars. Garrett Martin notes the impact for Paste Magazine.

Theme parks aren’t just about rides and attractions. When done well, all design elements of a park—its architecture, its interior design, its soundscapes, its natural beauty, and, yes, its attractions—work together to further the theme and, most importantly, create the unique identity and charm of a park. The Rivers of America is so fundamental to what Disney’s so-called “castle parks”—of which the Magic Kingdom is one—are trying to do that one without a river wouldn’t even feel like part of the same tradition. It wouldn’t just lose an invaluable feature that makes the park more pleasurable, it would lose a fundamental part of its identity.

There are other alterations afoot, including closing Muppet Vision 3D, a favorite attraction when we last visited. The Muppet hijinks in 3D present themselves as exactly what is needed to make the technology enjoyable. The Great Movie Ride, which was another favorite, and had a unique concept, has already closed.

Another big concern that may diminish the overall value of the Disney pilgrimage is the rising cost of visiting the parks (NYT gift article). The costs haven’t just gone up, as commensurate with inflation, but many services that were traditionally free now come with a charge. For some, like the FastPass ride reservations system, the amount charged is difficult to predict.

For years, Disney offered visitors FastPass, a free service that allowed them to effectively hold a reserved time slot to ride an attraction without having to wait in long, winding lines. The park replaced it with a paid version in the fall of 2021. The cost of a FastPass can vary depending on the ride, theme park and time of year.

Some services, such as shuttles for transportation, have gone from a flat fee to a surge-pricing model, instead. Good luck budgeting around that sort of variability. Some aspirational park visitors have looked at the expense relative to trips to national parks or even Europe and decided that Disney just wasn’t worth it.

Then, of course, there are the shameless add-ons in the parks (some of which have been around since I can remember). Graeme Wood recounts some of these as a Disney neophyte traveling to the park during peak-Covid.

A cast member offered to take my photo in front of the castle, and she extended to me an electronic device on which I could tap my MagicBand, so copies would automatically upload to my Disney account. “Smile,” she commanded, and before I could ask her how she could tell through my mask whether I was smiling, she added, “With your eyes. Smile with your eyes.” She was referring to the “Duchenne smile,” named for the 19th-century French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne, who discovered that if you electrocute someone’s face just right, you can jolt him into smiling, but you can still tell the smile is a fake because a real one makes crow’s feet beside your eyes. I crinkled my eyes hard. The results look somewhat convincing, but I can’t say for sure because Disney has watermarked the photos, and will charge my MagicBand $69.99 for clean copies. In one photo, to increase the fun, Disney digitally added a snowman named Olaf, a bucktoothed simpleton from the Frozen franchise, to prance next to me.

Wood’s observations should elicit a knowing, if not rueful, smile from those who have been regulars at Disney World.

Disney Existentialism

Another aspect of the Disney experience that Wood writes about in his piece is the pseudo-religious framework in which the entire operation resides. To put it charitably, I have always been a bit suspicious about religious conservatives’ disdain of Disney, but there is some aspect of the fervor that the brand evokes and its messaging that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Wood refers to Disney as a religion and trips to Disney World as a pilgrimage.

Of course, few visitors to the park describe it that way, and I am confident that the family with cross tattoos believe that Jesus and not Donald Duck is their redeemer. But if you ask them about love, they will tell you about Beauty and the Beast. If you ask them about growing old, they will tell you about Up. If you want to know about overcoming adversity, they will ask if you have heard the good news about Aladdin. If enough of your imagination consists of stories like these, authored by (or filtered through) the Disney corporation, then what else is Disney World—where these narratives are ubiquitous and glorified—but a place to nourish your soul in a time of famine?

It’s certainly not that I have a problem with the feel-good narratives that the company produces so much as I shudder to think of them taking a place of primacy in the hearts of the faithful. Their simplicity and ties to crass commercialism make me reticent to spend too much time and mental energy in the shallow embrace of their comfort.

I had been reading a lot of buzz around the Indianapolis band, Wishy, and their seamless blend of shoegaze and indie pop lately. Their debut album Triple Seven was stashed in my queue for later listening. Thursday morning, I browsed through the bands playing in clubs downtown for the free Day Parties, a staple of the annual Hopscotch Music Festival. The schedule app revealed Wishy was playing at a fairly small venue later in the afternoon. I quickly cranked up the streaming and fast-tracked listening to Triple Seven with just enough time to garner an appreciation for the recording before my trek downtown to see them play.

Wishy stays true to their description: “Wishy was born as a kaleidoscope of alternative music’s semi-recent history, with traces of shoegaze, grunge and power-pop swirling together.” When I shared this assessment with my son, he remarked that was how most indie bands today could be described. I’m wondering when my 18-yr.-old became so wizened and cynical, but I’m also not sure he’s wrong. For my part, the description reminded me of a band like Hotline TNT. Indeed, at the Wishy show, I spotted someone wearing a Hotline TNT shirt.

My son had class in the afternoon, so we couldn’t get to the Wishy show until just after it started. The venue was packed and the guy at the door let us know he could only let one of us in (fire codes being what they are and all that). Since I was the one pushing to go to that show, I did what any good father would… I asked my son if he would wait outside while I enjoyed the band that I had only earlier that day discoverd I was really into. He questioned what he was supposed to do while I was at the show. I didn’t have the heart to ask him to go to the open-air hip-hop show across the street where you could plainly hear the curses and racial epithets that are such a staple of the genre. Fortunately, our dilemma was quickly solved when someone left the club and the door guy permitted us to go inside.

Wishy’s set seemed to pass by in the blink of an eye. When the band’s Kevin Krauter introduced a song with “this is the song that has the same name as the name of the album,” I found myself yelling, “Title track!” in a hasty attempt to help him articulate. Krauter responded, “Yeah, the title track,” and the band kicked off “Triple Seven,” a slice of Sundays-esque indie pop as dreamy as it is nostalgic.

Following the title track in the album sequence is “Persuasion,” no less glistening in its approach and even more careful in controlling the chaos underneath that could threaten the saccharine sweetness of the song.

“Game” sounds like something from Love Tara by Eric’s Trip, an up-tempo fuzzed-out rocker that features a striking lead guitar line and hushed boy/girl vocal harmonies.

Hopefully, there is enough there to sample and find yourself convinced to check out the whole album. It’s always fun to find a band like this at the beginning of their musical journey.

I missed Divine Liturgy last week because I had to bid goodbye to my wife’s aunt, who just moved up North. Maybe it was the longing for worship I had missed that made this piece by Zac Settle about discovering Orthodoxy so appealing to me, but there was a lot that resonated.

The chanters might be intoning away during Orthros while the priest is hearing confessions while the altar staff are replacing candles or tidying up while the greeters are setting baked goods in the hands and laps of visitors, setting chairs aright in an imperceptibly off-kilter row, or setting candles in front of the iconostasis, the row of icon panels between the altar and the sanctuary. The choir is upstairs rehearsing, an elderly parishioner wheels in or a child in a chair is wheeled in, and a half-dozen candle-bearers trickle down for the half-hour or so before Divine Liturgy begins. There’s whispering in confession, lines read at the altar, chanting to the right, chattering among those in the nave, and greetings among the worshippers who are standing about. Somewhere, someone has lighted that incense. A father brings his young children to kiss the icons and tell them their stories. Nobody seems to be on their phone, but that can’t be true.

The sense of awe that this is something truly different upon discovering an Orthodox service brought back some nostalgic feelings for me. It’s all there, though, still, week after week. It doesn’t change. When the world feels like it’s going a million miles an hour, and everything is hailed as being “unprecedented,” something that feels like rhythm is welcome.

The bumper sticker that Settle imagines, “Honk 40 times if you’re Orthodox,” tickles the funny bone because, as they say, “if you know, you know.”

Recently, a friend on Mastodon asked followers about their first cassette purchase. I had no trouble recollecting getting Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla when I was in the fourth grade as my introduction to the world of music on tape. I wore that tape out playing the all-too radio friendly songs like “We Built This City” (some might say the song was pandering — the shoutout to all the cities hasn’t aged well). Following that popular anthem in the track sequencing was “Sara,” a ballad at a time when that was almost a separate genre within a genre. Rock bands used to touring arenas had their slower, more romantic songs interspersed with the more upbeat anthemic fare on their records.

The rocker vs. the ballad dynamic was perhaps never more obvious than on hair metal albums. The rockers were dangerous, lecherous and debauched while the ballads were tender and romantic. The ballads were always fewer in number, but reminded fans — especially those of the female variety — that even the baddest boys (the ones with most Aqua Net and makeup) had a softer side.

Noble Oak’s “Eveningstar” is a balled in the rock tradition. Like Starship’s “Sara,” the song has an sophisticated urban sheen with its immaculate mix of keyboards and guitars. The lyrics flirt with unabashedly straightforward metaphors around love and loss. Lines like “the memory of you becomes a shining light, when you were in my life,” would have sounded perfect in the earnest and overdramatic eighties.

Noble Oak - Eveningstar (YouTube)

The creative forces behind Ginger Root have a concept for a show featuring one actress (it’s all they had the budget for). Their Japanese protagonist changes looks and activities often to keep people of the world glued to their sets. In the end, it seems, what suits her best is rockin' out.

The song “There Was A Time” itself has a breezy 70s feel, with a healthy dose of tropicalia in the mix and a smidgen of psychedelia. There is a warped cassette haze on the whole track that wouldn’t sound out of place in the heyday of chillwave a little over a decade ago (this could be due to the Toro Y Moi influence). Ginger Root’s mastermind, Cameron Lew, describes the project as “aggressive elevator soul.” “There Was A Time” is a fun listen and matches the rest of the currently available tracks from the upcoming Shinbangumi in style.

Ginger Root - “There Was A Time” (YouTube)

Shinbangumi by Ginger Root will be released on 9/13/2024 by Ghostly International. The cloud vinyl version includes a pop-out paper building!

I woke up at 4 AM a few days ago, hungry from fasting. I decided to check out what the internet had in store for me and ended up perusing through videos on YouTube. My early morning restlessness led me to a very strange video from singer Caroline Polachek and I followed that rabbit trail to an interview with her.

As with other times I’ve seen her interviewed, Polachek is lively, engaging and articulate. One part that struck me, though, is when she talks about the magic of crowds at her shows singing in unison. She understands the positive power that a group of people singing together brings. However, when she tries to come up with an instance of people coming together to sing in a way that expresses transcendence, the best analogy a creative and intelligent woman like Polachek can come up with is… a sporting event!

This seems strange to me, since at least once a week, I go and sing with others in praises to God in church. I think it’s another oddity of living in the post-Christian West that people now have a kind of ignorance of religious traditions. Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds this to be odd or concerning. Even atheists are lamenting the disconnection from religious roots. Derek Thompson writes for The Atlantic about the decline in church attendance.

That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”

Despite his own unbelief, Thompson recognizes the value that a church community provides. Justin Brierly is a Christian who is capturing the stories of those who realize how much our culture is indebted to Christian values in his documentary podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Shocking as it may seem, prominent new atheist, Richard Dawkins, is now calling himself “a cultural Christian” (though this may be due to his xenophobia more than anything else).

Recently, author and professor Gary Shteyngart wrote a much-discussed and sometimes hilarious piece for The Atlantic about his time aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise. He was interviewed about the piece by Hanna Rosin. His experience of the fervor of the cruise aficionados sounded a familiar tone to what others have been describing about filling in the gap left by declines in religious observance.

So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.

And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to be an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.

There are, of course, more direct ways that people are trying to replace traditional religious practices with secular ones. There are churches for humanists and just plain atheists under the premise that if you just take out the supernatural stuff, church services could be kind of cool. My hunch is that trying to create something based on nothing will not work, in the long run.

I go back and forth about how I like to listen to music and on what media. I've been doing this for 30 years, so I probably won't be settled anytime soon. Wes Davis writes for The Verge about vinyl outselling CDs for the second year in a row.

But it’s not hard to see why record sales are trouncing optical discs. CD players aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they used to be. New cars mostly don’t ship with them anymore, and neither do computers. Plus, it’s impossible to impress anyone with your collection of jewel cases. But invite either your cool audiophile friend over or their nostalgic parent, and either is probably equally likely to pore over the tattered spines of your collection of garage sale scores, special-edition records, and concert trophies — and engage with you when you say things like, “Vinyl is cool, but it’s not actually better than a CD.”

Hey, I've got my CDs (most of which don't come in jewel cases anymore) in some pretty cool storage bins in my Ikea Kallax shelves. It makes for a nice-looking display. Although, I won't be hanging those things on my wall like my vinyl.

I'm going to assume that part of the reason vinyl is outselling CDs is that increasingly, music is released to stream and download and physically on vinyl with no CD version. I frequently see this on Bandcamp. The big exception to this trend is Japan, where CD sales continue to outpace vinyl.

CJ Chilvers has a post about why he is buying more CDs now. He gives a bit of background on how this came about, which involves recordings he loves being changed on the streaming services. Since your two real choices for music on physical media are vinyl and compact discs (sorry cassette lovers), he goes into why he favors the latter.

CDs have the best sound quality. At least they have the best potential for sound quality in physical media. They don’t always use that potential. But, for the music I love most, CDs often have the same or greater dynamic range compared to vinyl, without the degradation over time that vinyl experiences (or distortion, clicks, and pops).

I tend to think the longevity of my vinyl collecting is one of the reasons I now gravitate towards CDs. As I have discovered over the last 30 years, vinyl just doesn't age that well. For this reason, I've always been wary of buying used LPs. I would rather not buy an LP that's already been worn out by someone else. I've also gotten to a point where I don't want to wear out my music media myself, either. The cool factor that vinyl has comes with some serious drawbacks in terms of durability.

In all, Chilvers lists 14 reasons to underscore the rationale for his decision. The one that struck me most was that last item on the list.

It’s fun. I could eliminate all other reasons from this list and I would still be OK with buying CDs just for the fun of it. It’s why I would never discourage anyone getting into an all-vinyl hobby either. Since I’ve started buying CDs again, I’ve listened to way more music than I have since my 20s. I’ve also learned about good audio equipment: what it is, where to find it cheap, and how to restore it. I've found the best-mastered versions of favorite albums in bargain bins, while lower-quality “remasters” sell for 10 times as much. I’ve met new people, listened to new artists, and had new sonic experiences. What more could you ask for in a hobby?

I have only recently resigned myself to the fact that remasters are not always better. This is helpful to know when I get the urge to replace a perfectly good CD from decades ago with a fresh new remaster. Not only that, but a dozen vinyl variants of an album are starting to come across as desperate money grabs. The artist Billie Eilish talked about this in a recent interview focused on sustainability.

Eilish: We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more…

Some trends, such as saturating the market with variants of the same album, portend hitting peak vinyl, but people have been predicting that for years, so who knows?

In Paul Simpson’s review of the new album from the Houston-based Khruangbin (sorry, no link), A La Sala, he acknowledges the fact that they’ve moved past their influences into a sound all their own.

While it was easier to point out the key influences in the band’s sound on their earlier records, from Thai funk to Afro-pop to flamenco, by now it’s just easier to identify the group’s atmospheric guitars and steadily paced snare slaps as sounding like Khruangbin.

At this point, Khruangbin sounds entirely unique, and as this piece from Ryan Bradley explains, they are hard to imitate.

Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.

The consensus on this album among critics seems to be that this is sort of a return to their roots for Khruangbin, embracing the power of a more deliberate groove. The single, “May Ninth,” which was released before the proper album dropped, is a sweetly soporific, minutes until midnight slow jam with an intimate feel.

The whole album is cohesive, so it’s easy to take a song like this as a statement of intent. Listen to the entire record and you’ll probably find yourself in agreement. You’ll also most likely feel a lot more mellow.

Asymmetrical news coverage at most of the mainstream media sites is something that I’ve almost just come to accept without any particular frustration. However, there are times when a particular topic comes up, and it’s so obvious that the coverage has been unfair and skewed, that it creates a sense that I have only been told what the media outlet wants me to hear. It feels a bit insulting that the leadership at these organizations has decided that I’m not intelligent enough to get all the facts and make judgments for myself.

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, just came out about the institutional bias at the network. He relates the conversations he has with people when he tells them he works at NPR.

After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

I stopped listening to NPR a few years ago. I used to love the network. Even though I knew it had some biases, it still did a reasonable amount of fair reporting. That all but ended in the years following Donald Trump’s election, as Berliner relates. For example, it was a given that, almost any time I turned on the radio, I was going to hear a story about abortion. I finally thought, well, they might as well come out and say they are now an abortion advocacy organization and not a journalistic one.

I wrote about the bias in October of 2022. Listeners of NPR simply weren’t hearing certain news stories because they didn’t advance the causes that the organization was promoting. It’s abundantly clear in Berliner’s account that the organization has certain goals it wants to advance and intellectual diversity, or even bare honesty, are not among them. It’s not that their objectives are malicious, by any means, but they aim to provide news that supports a guiding narrative and deliberately exclude that which may call that narrative into question.

I first read about this story in a piece written by Ariel Shapiro for The Verge. There were a couple of things that I found interesting about Shapiro’s take. Shapiro writes of Berliner that “he did not give NPR a chance to respond (journalism 101!).” I mean, the guy has worked there for 25 years and the story is littered with anecdotes of how leadership at the organization responded (or didn’t) to his concerns when he brought them forward. He’s not some outsider who may be misunderstanding the perspective of the company that is profiled in his writing. As is documented in the article, he gave his colleagues at NPR many opportunities to address his misgivings. So, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a valid criticism.

Of the demographic findings about the makeup of NPR’s editorial staff, quoted above, Shapiro writes:

This is remarkable given that NPR has a very specific obligation to its audience (and potential audience). It is a public institution. However pitiful an amount, it does receive public funds. According to Gallup, Democrats make up 28 percent of the electorate, behind Republicans (30 percent) and Independents (41 percent). I am sure that some of you will be angry when I say this, but yes, in order to reflect America, you do need some staffers who understand how the other three-quarters of America thinks.

What’s interesting about that statement is that Shapiro knows many readers of The Verge don’t want to hear any opinions except the ones that reflect those of their own tribe. Some people will be reflexively angry about any notion of including views that aren’t in line with their preferred orthodoxy.

Probably the closest publishing platform to the one I'm using — Ghost — is Substack. Although Substack is much more popular for a few reasons, not the least of which is the low barrier-to-entry (it's free if you are not charging for your publication), it has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately. There was a big push to get writers to abandon the platform after The Atlantic posted an article asserting that there were many Nazi publications using the platform to spread and even monetize their ideas. A prominent tech journalist named Casey Newton, who was using Substack, led the charge to get the company to amend its content moderation policies. After not achieving complete success with his campaign, Newton took his publication, Platformer, to Ghost. Substack did, however, remove five accounts (out of the six that Newton reported) that were distributing Nazi material, in accordance with its existing policies about violent speech. Many writers opined that this was the bare minimum that Substack could do to quell the outrage that was being directed at them.

Despite the outrage, though, no one (that I'm aware of), including Newton, ever really came out with compelling evidence that there was a major content problem on Substack. The six accounts that were reported to Substack were among hundreds of thousands on the platform. Nor did the people criticizing the moves that Substack took ever really specify what concrete actions they were seeking. Others fretted that Substack making content moderation decisions was a slippery slope and that writers who weren't associated with Nazi speech would be the next targets. So the furor eventually died down.

Now, the latest source of upset with Substack is that they recently created a separate category of followers for blogs that are not tied to subscriptions. People are worried that this will create lock-in, as a publisher can export their subscribers, but cannot export their followers. Andrea Grimes (presumably no relation to Elon Musk's mistress and baby mama, Grimes) writes about the change, comparing the move with something Twitter would do.

But when Substack tanks — and I think its right-wing, Musk-flavored, tech-bro-brained management indicates that it will — it won’t just mean losing the audience for our 280-character late-night gummy jokes and covfefe memes. It won’t just mean losing a huge community of colleagues and readers. It will mean losing a substantial portion of the audience for content that takes a hell of a lot more effort to produce — the thoughtful rants, the reported deep-dives, the serial fiction, the smart criticism. And without access to “follower” lists and emails, there will be no way to find them again. Writers will, once again, have to rebuild from near-scratch elsewhere.

It does seem like a concern, and some major publications are reporting that their subscriber growth has dropped off since the changes were made. It's also the latest controversy about the company to get people all riled up (a trend that started way before the Nazi scare). Given the reactive nature of many writers who are terminally online, I think it's safe to suggest a wait-and-see approach.

A friend recently introduced me to the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy podcast, wherein Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick explains the Orthodox Christian faith. One thing I took away from it, and really appreciated, is the exploration of the Orthodox view of competing brands of Christianity. Fr. Andrew describes other sects as "incomplete." Having come from a Protestant background, the characterization struck me as both charitable and accurate. There isn't any attempt to denigrate other forms of Christian faith, but merely to point out that perhaps there is more out there to discover.

I try to remember the words of Fr. Andrew, as I read the writings of Christians from other backgrounds. For instance, I frequently check out the Patheos site, which has a mix of Christian thinkers from different denominations, as well as writings from those of other religious traditions. The articles are helpfully broken up, with categories like, "Progressive Christian," "General Christian" or "Hindu." With these granular distinctions, you really know where the views are coming from!

What I've noticed recently is that I see ads that are targeted towards the demographic of the reader expected to be reading that particular viewpoint. It has been revelatory. One particular ad stood out to me when I was on an evangelical Christian blog post. The ad featured a t-shirt that read, "Wanna Make Everything Electric? Start With The Border Wall." I kind of did a double take when I saw that. I knew that some Christians were particularly vociferous in their opposition to illegal immigration and their support for a wall to stem the tide. When I saw that t-shirt, though, it struck me as especially callous. A flippant joke about electrocuting human beings like insects caught in a bug zapper is a seriously bad look.

Jack Jenkins writes for Religion News Service about a Catholic charity, that helps migrants, receiving harassment from far-right sources.

For Pajanor, whose group operates homeless shelters and 14 food pantries in the city, the recent avalanche of hate followed a visit by James O’Keefe, a far-right provocateur who was recently forced out of Project Veritas, the activist organization he founded, following complaints regarding his treatment of staff. O’Keefe appeared earlier this month with a film crew outside a hotel that was being used by Catholic Charities San Diego to house migrants who had been processed by CBP.

In videos posted to social media, O’Keefe and his team can be seen questioning security guards outside the hotel. O’Keefe even posed as an exterminator to try to gain entry. On multiple occasions, O’Keefe suggests migrants in the hotel came into the country illegally and speculates, without offering evidence, that some were being trafficked.

This kind of targeted abuse is a terrible phenomenon that was mostly ushered in by our former president and current Bible salesman, Donald J. Trump. As the article points out, the Catholic charity was serving legal immigrants who had been processed. They weren't even the Gonzaga basketball team. The tragic irony is that I saw the same ad hawking those crass t-shirts on the sidebar when reading the article about the harassment of the Catholic charity workers.

As many well known voices have pointed out, the Christian supporters of the former president have not, as supporters originally predicted, molded him in the image of Christ. Rather, he has molded them in the image of himself. Russell Moore points this out in his Christianity Today column.

“If The Simpsons were written today and wished to make fun of evangelical Christians,” he writes, “would the caricature be someone inordinately devoted to his family, to prayer, to churchgoing, to kindness to his neighbors, to the awkward purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?”

I follow the logic Dr. Moore is using and fully believe an evangelical caricature like Ned Flanders would look entirely different than they did 30 years ago. The worst realization is that, as Moore depicts, they would be quite the villain.

In many ways, though not in all, it’s gotten much harder to share the music you love with others. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago. For my wife’s birthday, my sister made her a playlist on Apple Music. This was thoughtful and kind, but unfortunately, we don’t have Apple Music. So my wife had to copy down the tracks that made up the list and find the songs to make her own playlist on Qobuz.

Back in the day, when you had a crush on someone, or simply wanted to spread the gospel of superbad tunes for getting down, you made a mixtape. If the recipient of your tape had a cassette player (which everyone did — they were standard government issue), they could listen to your creation until their heart's content. Or until the tape wore out (this is a real thing).

Austin Kleon has returned to the practice of making mixtapes, buying sealed cassettes in bulk, then taping over the music on them and creating his own covers. It has become a monthly ritual for him. I'm assuming those creations are for his own personal enjoyment, though, as there is only a slight chance that anyone else will have a cassette player to play back the contents. Kleon gets around the sharing limitation by making a YouTube playlist that showcases the songs from the mixtape.

While a YouTube playlist is an inventive way of capturing the contents of your mixtape so that others can partake of your bespoke musical tastes, even that method has its limitations. The most obvious of which is the fact that not all the music you want to share will necessarily be available on YouTube. Admittedly, though, YouTube does have a lot of even obscure music. Search for something like celebrated Chinese blink-and-they're-gone shoegazers Baby Formula, and their limited output is available in full.

However, it can be difficult when the songs are taken off a full album stream and divided into chapters. Additionally, you are relying on the kindness of strangers with names like MrTurboExteme to upload your favorite stuff. Otherwise, you're out of luck.

If you have purchased music outright, ironically, it's even more difficult to allow others to partake. I can share a playlist with my wife on our Qobuz plan, but I can't include songs that I've bought through Bandcamp that aren't found on the streaming services.

It seems, that even with the ease of embeds and streaming music, we are missing something with the switch from physical media. It's not dissimilar from books. We used to be able to share a book with a friend after we had read it to spread the love. Now, we're DRMed into keeping things to ourselves (at least some of us — I have to admit to preferring ebooks on my Kindle). I'm immensely grateful for the ease at which I can access just about anything in the history of recorded music, but we are definitely making some tradeoffs in our embrace of bits and bytes to carry art.

Neil Young put his catalog back on Spotify. He was moved to do so by the fact that Apple and Amazon are now serving the podcast he objected to (The Joe Rogan Experience) and that led him to remove his music from the streaming service. He reasons that he can't remove his music from all of those services, so apparently the next best thing is to make it available on all of them. As befits Young, he does advocate for Spotify updating its offering to include hi-res, something that most music streaming services are now doing.

Young concludes his post by stating his hope that Spotify “will turn to Hi Res as the answer and serve all the music to everyone. Spotify, you can do it! Really be #1 in all ways. You have the music and listeners!!!! Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!”

Young doesn't address that Spotify is now paying Rogan more than ever to shoot the breeze with his guests, while paying artists less than ever for their music.

Chris Welch from The Verge cancelled his Spotify subscription after waiting for years for the company to offer hi-res.

But I’m also an audio nerd who owns a handful of very nice headphones and earbuds. And sometimes I just want to plug in my USB-C dongle, lay on the couch, and truly sink into a new album. And it’s those moments where I’m inevitably disappointed with Spotify, because I know what I’m hearing isn’t the best it can be. I’m paying for an objectively inferior listening experience. Well, I was. A couple months ago, I got tired of waiting, so I let my longtime Spotify subscription lapse and purchased a year’s worth of Apple Music.

I much prefer my Roon + Qobuz setup to Apple Music, but I can see Apple's offering as the next logical step when moving from Spotify to get higher quality music.

The Verge also has a guide to Spotify alternatives.

The NYT recently ran a piece about baggy pants coming into fashion again. The observances about the cyclical nature of fashion trends made me pause to reminisce a bit.

My dad drove me the four hours across mostly rural NC that it took to get to my college orientation back in 1994. He didn’t seem in a particularly good mood during the drives. On the way back, he shared an anecdote about a friend long ago who had been hit in the head by a glass bottle thrown from the side of a passing vehicle. He then observed that he didn’t see other incoming freshmen at the orientation dressed like me. I was wearing my standard uniform, informed by the skateboarding culture of the time — baggy jeans and an XL Dairy Queen t-shirt that hung off my wiry frame.¹

My dad believed that a seemingly random act of senseless violence could happen to me simply because I looked different. Of course, he might have been right. People are frequently targeted for bullying based on whether they fit in or "look normal.” What’s interesting here is the arbitrary nature of the cycle of fashion in determining what is right to wear at any given time.

Fast forward two years, and I’m no longer wearing baggy clothes, but tending to favor clothes that fit. I suppose college had reformed me, at least somewhat. However, many other people were now wearing baggy clothes and I still stuck out in a crowd of up-to-date fashionistas. I had been ahead of my time and had certainly been derided by some of the same people who now recognized my sartorial choices as totally appropriate.

A few years ago, I would occasionally wear a mustache. Much ridicule ensued from certain people. People hinted that I looked like the star of an adult movie. One guy I talked to wanted to grow a mustache but said he couldn’t because “I work with kids.” Now tons of guys are sporting mustaches and little is said. It’s amazing how something that is popularly agreed upon as creepy can become cool in just a few short years.

I guess I’m just reminded that, if you feel you are out of step and you are tempted to change your style because it isn’t mainstream, you sometimes just have to wait a bit longer.

1. I did work at the DQ in high school, so I wasn’t a complete poser. ↩︎

Alisa Ruddell wrote a masterful and in-depth review of the visually stunning animated film The Peasants for Christ and Pop Culture. The movie follows a woman named Jagna, whose promiscuity threatens the social fabric of her community in rural Poland around the turn of the last century. The use of the movie’s contemporary changes cast against the original book it was based upon (which was published in parts between 1904 and 1909) provides fertile ground for illustrating changes in society.

Such leanings—of the past towards communal responsibilities, and of the present towards individual rights—are no surprise. The discrepancy convinced me that the movie should be watched and the book read in tandem, to prevent us from imagining our moral “progress” over the past. We aren’t better than peasant communities which stigmatized rule-breakers: we just value mobility over accountability, and we have a different set of rules that makes heroes out of non-conformists and paints disruption as a virtue.

[…]

The greatest danger is the invisible one, which is often the flipside of what garners all the attention. Our culture is obsessed with individual freedom and terrified of losing it. In our blind spot is the life of communal connectedness and relational obligation which has been disintegrating for centuries, and which cannot exist without limiting personal freedom.

In college, I wrote a paper for a history class on the controversy over the preaching of Anne Hutchinson that pitted her against the Puritan establishment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Hutchinson had been a bold and effective preacher, but her leadership and attacks in the establishment threatened the unity of the fledgling colony, which relied on their faith traditions for group cohesion in a hostile and unfamiliar environment. The controversy made rivals out of Hutchinson and John Winthrop, the governor of the colony. Eventually, after a trial on various charges, Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts Bay.

While the earlier sources that I cited in the paper almost uniformly sympathized with Winthrop and the need for the community to be united, the later sources sided with Hutchinson and the dictates of her conscience. The shift in thinking paralleled a transformation in a culture that once placed primary importance on the thriving of society as a whole and one in which the individual is the focus.

Ruddell writes about just how far this shift has gone.

This idea has made us victims of its success. Our chief danger now is the opposite: normalcy is a reproach. To be a maverick, to be queer, to be your “true self,” to have your unique identity hallowed by society—this is the new normal. “Traditional” has become a slur, and rebellion (once a tool of justice) is cherished for its own sake.

The analogy of the early New England settlement is admittedly imperfect. Hutchinson was a committed Christian who was compelled by her conscience to preach, whereas the protagonist of The Peasants, Jagna, seems to be driven mostly by her own desires. However, I think the comparison is sufficient to draw out some introspection around the changes in our moral reasoning and what we owe to our communities versus our desires for personal autonomy and individual freedom.

I don't have any easy answers here. The balance between the macro-level considerations and those are the micro-level is a delicate dance. The shift in thinking towards the individual has had benefits for those that have long lacked them but have left our collective well-being sometimes wanting.

I recently resubscribed to Christ and Pop Culture precisely for this kind of commentary. While I don’t consider myself a pop culture aficionado by any means, I recognize the usefulness of our shared narratives in discussions around contemporary moral issues. This is particularly helpful in contemplating Christian beliefs against a backdrop of rapidly changing values. Analysis of art can build a bridge between two distinct cultures. You can check out subscription offers here.