Kultur - Songs, Scenes, and Sunday School
A Blog on Culture by C. Michael Bailey
Kultur

A Limerick About...Vain Relatives

Amnesia’s a symptom of vanity

Evidenced by my S-I-L’s (in)sanity

She thinks what she says

Should be accepted without quiz

That she’s really a Barbie not a manatee

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A Limerick About...Liberals

Forever a pernicious rumor
That liberals have no sense of humor
Politically correct
They say, "What the Heck,"
And not with a bang, but a murmur.

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A Limerick About...Jon & Kate Plus Eight II

The problem with young Jon and Kate
Is not that they can't procreate.
With the best medical science,
And TLC finance,
Their marriage now belongs to the state.

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A Limerick About...Jon & Kate Plus Eight I

And what of Jon Gosselin and Kate
Whose want of celebrity won't sate.
With a lack of humility,
And store-bought fertility
The world they would repopulate.

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A Limerick about...Nosey Neighbors

There once was a stout little guinea;
So tight he could shit just one penny
Not one who mingles,
But complains about shingles
Of his own business he doesn't mind any.


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(About) 100 Words on...Cadillac Records

Cadillac Records
Darnell Martin, Director
Tristar Pictures
2008

Darnell Martin's biopic of Leonard Chess and Chess Records absolutely blows with regard to historical accuracy and the use of every romantic cliche possible.  As a movie it ranks with the worst one could waste his or her entertainment dollar on.  As a vehicle for individual performances, like Kiss of the Spider Woman (Island Alive, 1985) before it, Cadillac Records shines.  Adrien Brody is a serviceable Leonard Chess, but his performance quickly pales once the musical icons enter, introduced in a character crescendo.  First is Jeffery Wright's Muddy Waters.  Wright's Waters is a Mississippi Delta sharecropper cum city slicker with a fierce and corrosive dignity and pride.  Columbus Short's Little Walter Jacobs captures that self-destructive genius savant self immolating during his personal Gotterdammerung.  In the first of the three finest performances Eamonn Walker portrays Chester Burnett, AKA Howlin' Wolf.  Where Wright's Muddy Waters was suavely sensual, Walker's Wolf is steaming animal sexual as seen in his studio serenade of Water's innamorata with a salacious "Smokestack Lightening."  Rapper MC Mos Def presents a show-stopping Chuck Berry while Beyonce Knowles slays Etta James' "At Last."  Forgive the film for being bad and wish there had been much, much more of Eamonn Walker' gigantic Wolf.

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Theology for the Criminally Insane: The Shack, A Review

The Shack
William Paul Young
Windblown Media, Los Angles
2007

 I judge books by their ability to provoke conflicting thoughts and feelings.  The more conflicted the thoughts and feelings, the better the read.  The Shack is such a book.  I finished it being very much of two minds: one of disappointment at the inelegantly applied theology, particularly regarding the beginning of things and the other, of a profound awe at the perfect concept of the Holy Trinity and Its grand unified field theory of Love. 

I want very badly to dislike William Paul Young's tome of loss and redemption for leaving the job it starts half done.  The book has achieved impressive sales numbers among the churched and unchurched alike and has been the discussion topic for countless church small groups.  While a heartfelt and serious book, The Shack nevertheless suffers from a painfully applied theological formula, yellowed with cliché and stubbornly defying any meaningful effort at updating (however, this is a part of the Christian charm).  Its dramatic architecture comes off as an attempt to fashion a "workbook" for the Bible to be used in the non-denominational "Bible" churches that are virally replicating themselves in the United States and abroad. 

The Shack's theological paradigm is frankly post-Protestant.  There is neither a whiff of Catholic Marian apparition or Augustinian Original Sin or Calvinic sulfur here.  The Trinity is the book's theological center and Young does all he can to cast Tertullian's divine paradox in as many lights as possible, revealing the philosophy's manifold nature.  This is the book's greatest success.  By addressing the Trinity first, Young does not need to consider the the three parts separately.  In fact, the author makes every effort to present the Trinity as a single unit, even when the book's protagonist Mack Philips spends time with each entity ostensibly alone. 

The plot is a more satisfying rendering of Job, though with a more narrow focus.  Mack Philips loses a daughter in a horrible way, descending into a gray miasma confused negative feelings.  Several years later he receives a mysterious note from God to meet Him at The Shack, the last place of any trace of Philip's daughter.  While there, Mack meets a large black woman, Elousia (The Father); the Hebrew Jesus (The Son), and a sprite Asian woman Sarayu (The Holy Spirit).  Young uses these three characters, together and separately, to guide Mack through grief, acceptance, forgiveness, and redemption. As ham-handed as this politically correct trio is and as brutal as Young's attempt to smash stereotypes with blunt force, this assembly of characters works surprisingly well. 

This laudable presentation of the Trinity is almost completely sabotaged by the old-school treatment of the Eden story and the Fall of Man.  As a myth in the strictest sense — a story (not factual) that presents a fundamental truth — Eden remains a durable, if not arcane, vehicle.  But from a literal interpretation, the story can only be viewed as a superstition, replete with black cats, open umbrellas, and broken mirrors.  Augustine compounds this divine cartoon by linking the Fall of Man and the concept of Original Sin to the sex act, thereby ruining the healthy, natural sexuality for generations.  The Trinity addresses these matters with the protagonist Philips still cast in the old school garb.  Philips would have been better served perhaps with a more Darwinian view of "Original Sin:" 

Humans are animals like all other animals, biologically programmed to act in ways that will prolong the individual human's life.  If left to his or her own devices, humans tend toward the egocentric and self-centered without real concern for the whole.  If "Original Sin" is anything, it is this.  Young does address humans' longing to be the "individual" acting alone, self sufficiently and how this position lessens that of the community of humans, humanity.  Jesus tells Mack that it is the death of the individual that He longs for so the individual will join the collective whole with He, God, and the Holy Spirit.  This path ushers in the idea of "community:" that thread or remnant that extends through written Scripture and history, ostensibly creating the "church community" and thereby amplifying the concept that we all need each other.  This presentation of the Trinity itself in The Shack, magnifies this idea of community to its infinite conclusion. 

Where a more open-minded theological position is presented is in Jesus' dialog with Mack regarding Christians Christian in name only.  Jesus points out to Mack that He (Jesus) is not a Christian and that the idea of Christians is an affectation of Humans.  Jesus goes on to say: 

"...my life is not meant to be an example to copy.  Being my follower is not trying to "be like Jesus," it means for your independence to be killed.  I came to give you life, real life, my life.  We [The Trinity] will come and live our life inside of you, so that you begin to see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and touch with our hands, and think like we do.  But, we never force that union on you.  If you want to do your own thing, have at it.  Time is on our side." 

It is here that Christ gratefully transcends human's flawed attempts to organize man's religious thought.  It is just not that complicated.  Jesus finishes his thoughts with His proper egalitarian flare, emphasizing that it is about the community and not what one calls the community that is important: 

"...Those who I love come from every system that exists.  There were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, and many who don't vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions.  I have followers who were murderers and many who were self-righteous.  Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians.  I have no desire to make them Christian [emphasis mine] but I do want them to join in their transformation into the sons and daughters of [God]." 

Young is not the first to stake out this position.  Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered his concept of "Religionless Christianity" in his writings from prison shortly before his martyrdom at the end of World War II:  

"Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the "religious a priori" of mankind. "Christianity" has always been a form—perhaps the true form—of "religion." But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless—and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any "religious" reaction?)—what does that mean for "Christianity"? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our "Christianity," and that there remain only a few "last survivors of the age of chivalry," or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don't want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity—and even this garment has looked very different at different times—then what is a religionless Christianity? 

The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even "speak" as we used to) in a "secular" way about God? In what way are we "religionless-secular" Christians, in what way are we those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? 

The Pauline question of whether [circumcision] is a condition of justification seems to me in present-day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from [circumcision] is also freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a "Christian instinct" often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don't in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, "in brotherhood." While I'm often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people—because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it's particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)—to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course."

This is what the imperfect book, The Shack, achieves perfectly: a vision of instinct and behavior that reflects The Trinity's love and compassion.  My mentor and friend told me of The Shack, "You will l wish it was this way."  I contend that it is our obligation to make it so.

 


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(About) 100 Words on...Funky Kingston by Toots and the Maytals

Funky Kingston
Toots and the Maytals
Mango
1973

There is a reason that Rolling Stone magazine selected Funky Kingston as one of the 500 Greatest Albums.  It is because it is the best Reggae album recorded.  going on 40 years old, Funky Kingston brims with joy and happiness.  If Bob Marley is Reggae's Dr. Martin Luther King and Peter Tosh its Malcolm X, then Toots Hibbits is its Louis Armstrong, Jamaican musical ambassador.  "Pomp and Pride" alone makes this a perfect recording.  If this song does not pull one from the depths nothing can.  Follow this with "Louie, Louie" and one has a party in six minutes.  I wonder where this disc was when I was in 1973?

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(About) 100 Words on... La Linea del Sur by Renaud Garcia-Fons


La Linea del Sur
Renaud Garcia-Fons
Enja Records
2009

Bassist Renaud Garcia-Fons fancies a five-string double bass as his ax of choice.  Judging by the composition of his band (accordion, flamenco guitar, percussion, and voice) one might believe that this is a Tango outing.  But No...Garcia-Fons has his sights set on a synthesis of the Mediterranean, Latin America, flamenco, and jazz.  Eleven compositions comprise this fine recording, which touches two hemispheres.  Garcia-Fons arco and pizzicato playing are exemplary.  David Venitucci's accordion recalls Piazzolla without copying him and Esperanza Fernandez's humid vocals will cause may dry mouths.  This is beautiful and honest acoustic music meant for mass consumption.  Drink Deep.

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(About) 100 Words on... Jeff Beck Performing this Week...Live at Ronnie Scott's


Jeff Beck, Performing this week...Live at Ronnie Scott's
Jeff Beck
Eagle Vision, Eagle Rock Entertainment
2009

The eternally youthful Jeff Beck appeared at London's famed jazz club Ronnie Scott's.  His working band in tow, including exquisite bassist phenom Tal Wilkenfield, Beck conjures his typical set, heating it, pots on gas on high.  Opening with Jimmy Page's tribute to him, "Beck's Bolero," Beck proceeds to reveal his pared down guitar wares that throw off magic like sparks.  Beck eschewed electronic gimmickry years ago, opting to bend his note with his fingers, volume knobs, and wammy bar.  this has made his guitar playing immediately identifiable.  Cue up the Beatles "A Day in the Life" and see a genius in action.

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