Archive Page 9

This is what happens when you tell me I can’t do it

Published 19 January 2013 Academia , Beginnings 7 Comments
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Seven years ago today, somebody who was very well-informed about how such things worked told me that it was highly unlikely that I could ever be competitive for IU’s History graduate program, given an undergraduate degree in music performance rather than in something properly considered part of the Humanities, and particularly given no real background in Latin or Greek.

I’m pleased to note that as of this week, I have passed my doctoral-level Greek and Latin exams. The Greek exam requirement was satisfied last summer (thank you, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Greek Summer School), and I took my Latin exam this last Tuesday, which consisted of passages from St. Jerome’s Life of St. Hilarion, The Acts of the Divine Augustus, and Agnellus’ Book of the Pontiffs of Ravenna. My examiners seemed very pleased.

Now, on to my oral exams, which are scheduled for 29 March. Because I never do anything in the right order, I more or less have a dissertation proposal once my orals are out of the way, so God willing, I’ll have advanced to candidacy by the end of the semester.

I may still yet have a real job before I’m 40. We’ll see.

Some thoughts on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Published 5 January 2013 General 2 Comments
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On New Year’s Day Megan and I finally got to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Friends of ours were willing to watch Theodore for a few hours, and even bought tickets, bless them. Seeing it in 3-D 24fps, I rather enjoyed it; the supposed departures from the book didn’t bother me for many of the reasons discussed here. One of the things I really liked about it that this article does not mention is that there weren’t any American actors (save Elijah Wood oh-so-briefly) doing English accents that won’t have aged well 10 years from now. That’s something about the LOTR trilogy that really sticks out for me these days; the simple fact is, some American actors have gotten a lot better at accents since those movies were made, and Elijah Wood and Sean Astin really give it their all, but on repeated viewings some things annoy that I suspect won’t with Martin Freeman’s performance.

On that — arguably, Martin Freeman starts out playing his straight man type, John Watson with prosthetic feet, but I assume part of the point will be to see the transformation by the third film (much as, I should add, we see Watson progress in Sherlock). There were already little ways he was incorporating some of Ian Holm’s characteristics; I assume he’ll go further with that as the films progress.

Speaking of Ian Holm, I watched Alien a couple of nights ago for the first time in a long time, and Martin Freeman really does look a good bit like Ian Holm in his younger days. They could have done a lot worse in terms of matching actors.

I saw that Christopher Tolkien has claimed that Peter Jackson’s films “eviscerated” the books. I respect where the Tolkien family is coming from. I can understand the problem of films overtaking the imaginary impetus of the source material and perhaps setting up false expectations. Something very similar to this has historically been my objection to people like Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman being referred to as “opera singers”.

However, something worth pointing out is that Tolkien’s work has in no way been “eviscerated”. Whatever one thinks of the films (and, call me a casual, unserious, uninformed Tolkien reader if you like, but I’ve read them all multiple times, I’m actually surprised at how much Peter Jackson’s films actually do maintain what I see as the spirit, if not the letter, of the books), the books are still right there on the shelves. Not a word of them has been changed (except those that Tolkien himself changed through the various edits and revisions). You can buy Tolkien’s books and read his words for yourself, and many, many people continue to do so, so I find it somewhat disingenuous to claim that the Tolkien heirs don’t benefit at all from this.

Two books I read a long time ago that very much changed how I saw cinematic adaptations of stories from other media are Syd Field’s Screenplay  and J. Michael Straczynski’s The Complete Book of Screenwriting. There are reasons things get changed for films, and even factoring out issues of the economics of film, they have to do with the needs of the medium. Even something as simple as having to decide on a consistent way a character looks or how their name is pronounced has to be decided upon, which itself means you’re going with one interpretation over another. Don’t think this is a big deal? Google “Balrog wings controversy” sometime. I also have friends who insist that the names “Smaug” and “Gollum” are actually pronounced “Smog” and “Gah-LUM”. These are things that an individual reader can decide for themselves when reading it in their own head, but you can’t do that with film.

And, like it or not, film presents an opportunity to “correct” the source material. For every person who thinks it’s ridiculous that Arwen’s story got expanded in the LOTR films, there’s somebody who thinks the filmmakers caved to chauvinistic purists by not going ahead with having Arwen go all-out warrior princess and fighting at Helm’s Deep. (According to the commentaries on the DVD, this was all shot, but it apparently didn’t work when they looked at what they had. Did Liv Tyler just not have the chops for it? I don’t know.) Maybe you can argue that such changes are precisely what take away from the spirit of the source material, but also consider that variations are part of what make myth myth. To the extent that Tolkien was “subcreating” myth, then it becomes problematic to apply some kind of “sola scriptura” rubric to the story. Myths get retold, and they get retold in ways that suit new audiences. Even within the universe of The Lord of the Rings — the book that we call The Hobbit is different in a crucial way from what Tolkien originally published, and it’s because he realized he needed the story to do something else when he revisited it years later.

All of this is to say — I don’t doubt that Christopher Tolkien, perhaps the closest person on earth to the textual sources of Middle Earth still living, feels every and any change from the text like a stab to the gut. I do suggest, however, that that very intimacy with his father’s words make it very difficult for him to properly see the big picture.

“Always start out with a few good jokes” — a choir director’s initial and parting thoughts

Published 21 December 2012 General , music , The Orthodox Faith 1 Comment
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I had my last rehearsal with the All Saints choir last night, and I gave a little bit of a farewell speech. I found some prepared notes from my very first rehearsal with the All Saints choir seven and a half years ago, and they still seemed relevant, if clearly pre-dating some things that I’ve learned in the intervening time. I prefaced all of this by mentioning that my favorite quote from my teaching evaluations this fall was, “Needs dumbed down”, which I find wonderful on several levels. Anyway, I didn’t read all of this last night, just some select chunks, but here’s the whole thing:

2 July 2005, All Saints Choir Rehearsal #1

Always start out with a few good jokes:

Music vocabulary—

Bar line: A gathering of people, usually among which may be found a church musician or two (usually Episcopalians).

Tenors: Most choirs have either a) none, or b) too many. When wholly absent they leave an aching void. When too numerous, they fill the void without removing the ache. Tenors rarely sing words and often produce regional sensations rather than actual notes. During the mating season, they draw attention to themselves by sustaining high notes while the rest of the choir has gone on with the phrase.

Seen in a church bulletin: “At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What is hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice.

The Scriptures on singing in worship

Romans 15:9—And that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy; as it is written, For this cause I will confess to thee among the Gentiles, and sing unto thy name.

1 Cor 14:15—What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.

Ephesians 5:19—Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord

Colossians 3:16—Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

Hebrews 2:12–Saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee.

James 5:13—Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms.

The Church Fathers on singing in worship

“Let us consider the entire multitude of angels, how standing by you they minister to his will. For the Scripture says: ‘Ten thousand stood by him and a thousand ministered to him and cried out, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Sabaoth, the whole creation is full of his glory.’ (Isaiah 6:3) Let us, therefore, gathered together in concord by conscience, cry out earnestly to Him as if with one voice, so that we might come to share in his great and glorious promises.” (St. Clement of Rome (c. 96 A.D.), First Epistle to the Corinthians, italics mine)

“…you make up a chorus, so that joined together in harmony, and having received the godly strain in unison, you might sing in one voice through Christ to the Father, so that He might hear you and recognize you through your good deeds as members of His Son…” (St. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 100 A.D.), Epistle to the Ephesians, italics mine)

“We want to strive so that we, the many, may be brought together into one love, according to the union of the essential unity. As we do good may be similarly pursue unity….The union of many, which the divine harmony has called forth out of a medley of sounds and division, becomes one symphony, following the one leader of the choir and teacher, the Word, resting in that same truth and crying out, ‘Abba, Father.’” (St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 200 A.D.), Protrepticus)

A modern Christian writer on singing in worship:

All quotes from Why Catholics can’t sing by Thomas Day.

“[T]he sung ritual [is] a symbol of a burning faith […] The [sung] liturgy in any language [is] the symbol of faith so intense and filled with joy that it [has] to burst forth in almost continuous song.”

The Great Unwritten Law of Church Music: “[M]usic for the church must not clash with the liturgical function; it must take its place in the objective liturgical setting and not seem like an intrusion. [It] must display a degree of quality and craftsmanship which will be agreeable to a prince and peasant, male and female, young and old. Everyone who […] hears the music must sense a group endeavor, a group prayer: maybe something performed by the assembly or by a choir acting in the name of the assembly […] that seems to sum up the highest religious aspirations of a whole people. [T]he icon painters [pray] and [fast] as they [struggle] to put the holy images into the exacting forms prescribed by tradition. You must try to do something similar.”

Music in the Church is best when it “(1) expresses the noblest aspirations of the communal, cultural, tribal consciousness and (2) seems to submit to the higher purposes of the rite itself.”

So, what does this mean for us?

As an Orthodox choir, our job is not to sing one or two “anthems” or “offertories” at specific points in the service as in a Protestant church. Our job is to help the congregation sing the entire service. With a 90% sung liturgy lasting close to an hour and a half, that’s no small feat. We sing liturgical music, which means we sing the music that comes out of the work of the people (the literal meaning of “liturgy”) [NOTE, 21 Dec 2012: this is the main spot where obviously my thinking has changed, and I would find a different way of putting this today]. That means, simply put, our worship is work. Given our leadership role in the work, our job is not to be individuals who just happen to stand in a different place in the nave from everybody else; our job is to lead the rest of the congregation into the ideal of “one voice” in worship. By definition, to do this takes time, effort, and commitment to taking that leadership role seriously.

It also takes the choir functioning as a community within the community. From one perspective, the expectation is quite high: we’ve gotten up early so our voices haven’t completely woken up yet, and if we’re receiving the Eucharist we haven’t been able to do the normal things that help get the throat and vocal cords going the way they need to—drink water, coffee, tea, eat something, and so on—but we still have nearly an hour and a half worth of singing to do, more if we’re singing in the Matins service. The only way we can do that well, not to mention healthfully, is to support each other, personally and vocally, so that no one person in any section is carrying everybody else for the entire Divine Liturgy. What it takes is simply time, effort, and commitment from all who are willing to give it. It’s that difficult and that easy.

To that end: In consultation with Fr. Athanasius, while I am directing the choir, we will take the following steps:

1) Incorporate the choir into Saturday evening Vespers for the four-part portions of the service, and rehearse either before or after Vespers. We will try rehearsing after Vespers for the time being; we might very possibly try it before Vespers if it is found that this works better all around. I have deliberately scheduled the rehearsal around an already existing service, and I will never take up more than an hour of your time at any given rehearsal. Ideally, there will be rehearsals where my agenda for the evening will take up less time than that, and we will only continue through to the end of the hour if there is something that the group wishes to work on. These rehearsals will consist of a combination of vocal warm-ups, sight-singing warm-ups, announcements, polishing music we already know and learning new music. The balance of these various components will vary from week to week, based on the service requirements for that week and coming weeks.

2) Warm up as a group either at 9:35am on Sunday morning or after the Matins Gospel, whichever comes first. Starting Sunday, 17 July 2005 (that’s two weeks from now), this will be the skeletal minimum with respect to my expectation of you if you intend to sing that morning. If you cannot make a Saturday evening rehearsal at this time, then I absolutely need you to warm up with the group Sunday morning. For those of you who sing in the Matins service, we will devise a regular rotation so that one week you may finish out Matins, the next week you will warm up with the choir, and so on.

3) Gradually phase out the use of soloists for verses and replace them with unison chanting. We will talk about this more as we go, but for Psalm verses and whatnot, I would like to see an alternating “left choir/right choir” approach, where perhaps the women sing one verse, the men sing the next verse, etc. We will experiment with this over time to see how it best works with this group. The vocal and acoustic circumstances are simply not ideal for solo voices, and where it is practical to use an ensemble, we will.

I will also do the following:

1) Put out a calendar outlining rehearsals and services coming up a month out (perhaps two months out, if I find that it’s necessary). If you know you won’t be at a rehearsal or a service, please sign out on the calendar. Additionally, if you plan to attend a service or a rehearsal, should something happen at the last minute preventing your attendance please call me or e-mail me as soon as you possibly can so that I know what to expect for that rehearsal or service. I offer you all the same courtesy—if something happens to me, I will let you all know as soon as I possibly can.

2) Make myself available for work outside of regularly scheduled rehearsals and services. For example—if you need help with something musically, want extra sight-singing practice, if the tenor section needs extra help and wants a section rehearsal, if you need to talk to me about something privately, or if you just want to chat, please give me a call or send me an e-mail and we will find time to do so.

3) Make rehearsals as fun as I possibly can. I want you all to want to come to rehearsal, not feel like you have to come, which in my experience will only ensure that you want to come even less. I want our rehearsals to be a friendly, positive working environment, because I think we’ll all get more done that way.

My final point for now is this: a no is as good as a yes, as far as I’m concerned. If, after hearing all of this, you are thinking to yourself, “He’s going to have to count me out,” that’s fine. I’m not mad at you, and neither is anybody else. What I ask, however, is that you not make a snap judgment now. I ask that you give it some time to see how it will work—perhaps you’ll surprise yourself.

I believe this is a group who is capable of a lot. If we can commit to putting in the time and the effort, and remember that this is not about us but about the glorification of God, I believe we will be able to accomplish a lot.

Okay, I’m done talking now. Let’s sing.

I also mentioned some passages from +BASIL’s essay, “The Ministry of Church Singers”. I think parts of this have to be contextualized as a bishop being pastoral and pious, but there are nonetheless some things he says unequivocally:

There are few ministries of the Church that require the devotion and the dedication that church singing does. You who lead the singing as well as you who follow the leader are precious gifts to your parishes. You are as important to the parish as is the holy table itself. As there can be no liturgy without the holy table, there can be no liturgy without you. This is not to compliment you or increase your pride, but rather to put a little fear and awe in you, so you know what your responsibilities are. Church singing is not a hobby. Being a choir director is not something one does for personal fulfillment. It is first and foremost a duty, a duty of those to whom God has given musical talents. It is sinful, in my opinion, for someone not to sing who has been given the gift to sing. Sinful! You join the angels, and do that which the angels do perpetually. That’s not an interest, avocation, or a hobby; it is a duty. Angels were created to serve and to praise, and you have been given voices for that same purpose.

[…] It’s a holiness. It’s not your ministry. It’s a ministry that belongs to the Church, and you respond to the call as well as recognize that the gift which you specifically fulfill in the church was, traditionally, and in some sense still is, an ordained ministry. The choir was not some club that existed in Church for those with some particular musical talent. To be a church singer was an ordained office within the Church. Canon 15, from the Council of Nicea, the Council of the 4th century, makes its point clear that only canonical singers should be appointed for that kind of ministry in the Church. That means “one set apart” for that particular ministry. Today we might call them Readers. While I’m not saying that every choir member must be a tonsured Reader, I do say that if we fulfill at least the spirit, if not the law of the Canon, that each choir member ought to see his/her participation in the choir as seriously as the ordained clergy take their ministry. I don’t know any priest who thinks that he can say on some Sunday, “I don’t want to serve because I want to sit with my wife,” or, “I don’t feel like serving today,” or, “I’m angry, one of the altar boys offended me, so I don’t want to serve this morning.”

[…] We jump in and we jump out. Some of us jump in on time and some of us jump in a little bit late. In my opinion, being in church for that first “Amen” is a sign, an indication of one’s humility. And where humility is, indeed, a virtue, its opposite is a sin. The sin is not disturbing other people. The other people in the church are not the object of our worship. It is rude, but not necessarily sinful, to disturb other people. But it is sinful to be presumptuous and prideful that one can jump in and sing with thousands of archangels and ten-thousands of angels at one’s own whim. “This Sunday I feel like singing, and next Sunday I won’t sing. I want to sit with my wife.” Leave that Hallmark—card kind of sentimentality for restaurants, concerts, and cinemas. You sing with angels, that’s secondary to sitting with any husband or wife or children. We stand before the throne of God, and when we realize that, every other consideration, all of our own personal likes and dislikes, become secondary. I’m giving my opinion now, and hopefully it humbles all of us. It’s a humiliation, that in its end, should be something that elevates us, that exalts us, something that gives us wing.

[…] You and your choir need be as aesthetically perfect as you are able. God not only expects, but He accepts only our best.

As I said to the choir last night, I’m a convert, not a cradle, and every convert brings with them some baggage from their previous experience. My background is one that places a high value on liturgical beauty and music, and that value is practical, not just theoretical. Church music is a profession. It is not unheard-of for church musicians in my former communion to have terminal degrees and to have half-time, if not full-time, salaries. While I have always known that such a set of circumstances would never even come close to being reality at All Saints, I have always tried to fulfill the musical function at All Saints as though those were the expectations of me — and I should stress the “of me” part, because certainly the point was never to turn the All Saints choir into an opera chorus. Rather, the point was that, if I was excited about what I did and took it seriously in the way +BASIL describes, hopefully everybody else would catch the spark, too, and get excited about it along with me. It was an experiment to see if one could build a fully-functioning music ministry at the only Orthodox parish in a town that was home to a Big Ten university and one of the best schools of music in the country. I’m happy that the experiment has borne fruit, even if it won’t specifically be attached to the parish anymore. All told, this (as well as the ongoing annotation and discussion of it here) represents a pretty good snapshot of my thinking of how the effort worked, and how I would approach such a project if I were to start afresh now.

Δόξα τῷ Θεῷ πάντων ἔνεκεν. As always, we’ll see what happens next. I thank All Saints, Fr. Peter, and those who sang with me for the chance to serve over the years, I hope that I was able to communicate some small element of what I love about our Church’s music despite all of my own faults and foibles, and I wish all of them, as well as whomever my successor will be, many blessings. Again, I crave your prayers for myself and my family as we make this transition.

A transition

Published 11 December 2012 General , The Orthodox Faith 7 Comments
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I suppose I should probably announce this, since it was announced in church this last Sunday —

Sunday 23 December will be my last day as All Saints Orthodox Church‘s cantor and choir director, and it will be my family’s last day as regular members of the parish. We will still be living in Bloomington until such time as our paths take us elsewhere, and I’m sure we will find ourselves at All Saints every so often — our godparents are there, we have godchildren there, we have many friends there, including the priest — but the next few months will probably more often than not see us visiting various other Orthodox churches in the surrounding area.

My last weekend, curiously enough, coincides with the first pastoral visit to All Saints of His Grace +ANTHONY. The transition aside, I look forward to meeting him and talking with him, and I very much hope that that weekend is only the beginning of a long and fruitful pastoral relationship between His Grace, Fr. Peter, and the parish.

Lest anybody add two and two together to get five — I and my family are all still Orthodox, and the St. John of Damascus Society will continue to be very much a going concern (with this just being the tip of the iceberg — lots of exciting stuff coming down the pike that I hope to announce very soon). The work I’m trying to do with the music of the Church is still very much on my plate, and I remain committed to helping in whatever I way I can with the Orthodox Church’s mission in Bloomington and at Indiana University.

If anybody has any questions, please feel free to ask them in the combox. My family and I crave your prayers as we make this transition.

“Do you feel in charge?”

Published 5 December 2012 General , Media 2 Comments
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Spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall, and so on below.

The UPS truck came yesterday. Thus it was that once Theodore was put down, I took a break from Cicero’s letters, and I told Flesh of My Flesh, “I’m making dinner, and then we’re watching The Dark Knight Rises.” The issue being, you see, that she hadn’t seen it yet. Skyfall was the first movie we had been able to see together in   since The Avengers, and that was just because for my birthday, some friends offered to watch Theodorus Rex while we went out by ourselves.

I very much enjoyed Skyfall, incidentally, and have seen it twice now; the transformation of Daniel Craig as the new James Bond into, effectively, the old James Bond, is complete. If one knows something about the history of actors who might have been Bond, the presence of Ralph Fiennes (as well as the reveal of him as the “new” M, who’s really the “old” M) is clever; he was one of the actors being considered back in 1994 to take over the role after Dalton declined to participate in what became GoldenEye. If I’m remembering a particular issue of Premiere sufficiently, the list before they finally circled back around to Brosnan was Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Sam Neill, and Hugh Grant. Fiennes, then, as a former field agent whom we see take a bullet and fire off some of his own shots, takes on some real-life resonance, given that part of the idea with Gareth Mallory seems to be that he’s what Bond would have been if he’d just been a bit more respectable.

I liked the approach with Skyfall of “James-Bond-as-art-film”; we get a lot of Bond fighting in silhouette, and this can get a bit trippy, particularly when he’s silhouetted against lots of moving neon lights. Sam Mendes also seems to be trying to tell you something with how he frames shots; Bond is frequently centered in the frame, as is Javier Bardem’s Silva, but then, at the very end, when Bond is looking out over the city from MI6’s roof, it starts out with him centered only to have the camera nudge just a little bit right so that Big Ben is now centered. The point seems to be that Bond has finally decided once and for all that he’s doing what he does, not out of anger for Vesper’s betrayal, not out of the repressed trauma of his parents’ death, but for queen and country.

But I’m supposed to be talking about The Dark Knight Rises.

So, four and a half years ago, The Dark Knight took up a big chunk of my summer. I saw it, I think, nine times on the big screen all told, six of those in IMAX, and really what I did during July and August of 2008 was call up my friends and say, “Hey, want to go see The Dark Knight in IMAX with me?” I didn’t have much else to do; I had a French reading knowledge class I was taking, and I was working, but so far as I knew at that point, I was definitely not going to be working on a grad program anytime soon, and my wife was in Germany, followed almost immediately by her spending close to a month in Seattle after her dad was diagnosed with cancer. The Dark Knight seemed as good a way as any to kill time.

Obviously, my life has changed a lot in the intervening years, and I have other ways my time is occupied these days, thank God. Still, I managed to see The Dark Knight Rises four times on the big screen, two of those in IMAX. So, draw whatever conclusions you will about that — such as, for example, baby or no baby, PhD program or no PhD program, I’m still an unrepentant nerd.

The Dark Knight Rises picks up eight years after the Batman took the rap for Harvey Dent’s murders rather than have Gotham lose their knight in shining armor. The storytelling reason for this seems to be so that Batman takes on some qualities of being an urban legend, almost a Spring-heeled Jack kind of figure; I suspect that the practical, real-world reason is because it had been seven years since they started shooting Batman Begins, which itself required Christian Bale to play Bruce Wayne over a seven to eight year span, and The Dark Knight was supposed to take place something like six months after Batman Begins while being made three years later. Everybody looks noticeably older than they did in 2005, in other words, and this gives them an in-story way to explain that.

In the intervening years, Bruce Wayne has become a recluse, letting the physical and mental damage he suffered as Batman settle in. He tries to become a philanthropist, but he finds out projects that can save the world also have the dark side of probably being able to destroy it, a realization which just drives him further into the shadows. Commissioner Gordon has been able to use the memory of Harvey Dent to lock up a lot of people, but the lie is eating away at him. It’s a status quo that’s, for all intents, a well-polished rotten apple.

Enter four characters who each stir up the hornet’s nest in their own way. Selina Kyle is a jewel thief who has taken a curious interest in Bruce’s fingerprints; John Blake is a young cop who sees that everybody is pretty much just going through the motions to keep everything looking nice; Miranda Tate is an investment partner of Bruce’s who wants to show him that the world is worth trusting enough to save it… and then there’s Bane, who is manipulating much of this (or is he?) specifically to force Bruce to get back into the ring as Batman.

A running theme of the movie — which goes all the way back to Batman Begins — is that of the “clean slate”. The express purpose of the League of Shadows, after all, was to “wipe the slate clean”, as it were, when cities got too big and corrupt by destroying them, which is the objective that Bane has inherited; Selina Kyle wants to wipe out her own past (there’s a MacGuffin of the “gangland myth” of a computer program that can do this, which it turns out that Bruce acquired to keep from being used; since the Joker had no traceable record in The Dark Knight, it’s possible that this is intended to be an oblique reference to him); Gordon, Bruce, and Blake are all living with accounts needing to be settled, and so on. Is a revolution how society ultimately has to pay its bill? As R’as Al Ghul suggests in Begins (and as Bane trumpets in Rises), is burning away the brush always the solution, and it’s just a question of scale? Can one man show a better way? One might not be entirely wrong to detect a Christ allegory with where Nolan and company end up with this question (albeit thankfully not in the somewhat ham-fisted way that Superman Returns did), but it seems to me that Plato’s cave is far more explicitly referenced.

Rises does a nice job of bringing things full circle back to Begins; the story keys off of R’as Al Ghul’s conviction in Begins that “Gotham must be destroyed”, and shows that just because R’as Al Ghul died, it didn’t mean the idea died. R’as Al Ghul left a legacy, and it’s a legacy Bruce has to deal with.

Incidentally, for anybody familiar with the comics, there’s only one way the character of Miranda Tate was going to make any sense at all, and if you’re paying attention, they telegraph her identity as Talia from the get-go. She talks like R’as (she has a line about “restoring balance” early on), and there are visual callbacks as well, like showing her good at building a fire, much as R’as was in Begins. A reward of repeated viewings, too, is noticing that the little girl in the prison stabs somebody in the back in one of the first flashbacks, much as the adult Talia does to Bruce.

There are other interesting references to Begins; there’s the explicit comparison of the prison to the well young Bruce falls into in Begins, but there’s also Batman walking on ice (apparently having learned to mind his surroundings after all), and the memorial statue of Batman unveiled at the end bears a striking resemblance to the nightmare Batman that Scarecrow hallucinated in Begins. Both Begins and The Dark Knight end with conversations about thanking Batman — Begins: “I never said thank you.” “And you’ll never have to.” TDK: “Thank you.” “You don’t have to thank me.” — and while Rises has its own ending, it has its own version of this conversation: “Thanks.” “Don’t thank me yet.” It’s a little grace note that seems to say a lot about where Bruce sees what he’s achieved relative to his own ideals — in Begins the story ends with his ideals having won the day, in TDK his ideals have cost him dearly, and at this point in Rises it’s unclear whether or not he will even survive his own ideals.

The point of Rises, and I suppose of Nolan’s whole trilogy, is that in this story, Bruce Wayne isn’t trying to become a superhero, he’s trying to build a myth. As R’as says in Begins, “You have to become an idea.” The idea that there might be a big unstoppable demon that comes after you if you’re a bad guy, and you’ll never know who it is, is much more powerful than there being a human being who can be taken down with a bullet. In Begins he takes on the initial trappings of the legend, in TDK he sees a human being who he thinks could become the idea without having to pretend to be somebody else, only to see that person corrupted, and in Rises he has to complete the mythmaking by, effectively, dying and coming back from the dead — both so he can just be Bruce Wayne once and for all, and so that Batman can be that much more powerful. Along these lines, Bane is presented as sort of a counter-symbol to Batman; “No one cared who I was till I put on the mask,” he says.

Do Nolan’s films constitute a “definitive” Batman? Well, what do you mean by that? “Definitive” according to whose take on the character? Frank Miller’s? Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil’s? Bob Kane’s? Paul Dini’s? Adam West’s? Just by the nature of film, where you’re basically blowing up a short story into two or three hours and only being able to do it once every few years, you’re never going to be able to bring out all the nuances that one can play with in an ongoing serial like a comic book or a TV show. Like any film adaptation, the best you’re going to be able to do is honor the spirit of the source material while doing your own thing as well as you can. Batman, by virtue of being a symbol, is open to a lot of interpretation, and I think Nolan has made three pretty great movies with his interpretation. Somebody else will probably come along and do their own interpretation in a few years, and there may very well be things I like about that one better, perhaps things I don’t like as well; who knows? The comics themselves will still be sitting on the shelf right next to these movies, as well as Tim Burton’s 1989 film. What I think one can say is that this trilogy is a long Batman story that incorporates a lot of ideas and images from the comics as well as the animated series (there’s a decent amount of Batman Beyond in Bruce’s solution), and while it’s something you could never do with Batman as he appears in the comics (unless it were an Elseworlds mini-series or something of that nature), it’s a great way, from where I sit, to encapsulate the character onscreen in a self-contained story.

OK. Back to reading some Latin.

The baptism of Theodore Harvey Barrett II

Published 11 November 2012 General , The Orthodox Faith 2 Comments
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Please consider yourself invited to Theodore’s baptism. He will be baptized at 9am on 25 November 2012 at All Saints Orthodox Church in Bloomington, Indiana; his godparents will be our friends Anna Pougas and Benjamin Czarnota. If you can come, I’d love to have you there.

A couple of people have asked me about baptismal gifts. Let it be said first and foremost that nobody is under any obligation or expectation of a gift. Your prayers (and your attendance, if we’re fortunate enough to have you there) are gift enough! However, if you want to do something, there are certainly still items left on Theodore’s gift registries (on Amazon, at Target, and otherwise), and there are also some online forums that talk about appropriate Orthodox baptismal gifts. Links for all of those are below. If none of those quite speak to you, perhaps you might make a gift to All Saints’ building fund; you could also make a gift to the St. John of Damascus Society; and then there is also a restoration project for an 11th century church dedicated to Mar Tadros (St. Theodore the General) in Lebanon that perhaps you could make a gift to in Theodore’s name. More information on the project is here. I am trying to find out how individuals might give to this project; watch this space for details if that’s something that intrigues you.

In the meantime, please pray for him, over the next couple of weeks especially!

Star Wars, geek culture, and periodization

Published 30 October 2012 General , Media 1 Comment
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One of my earliest memories is being in the movie theatre for the second run of Star Wars. I think. I was not quite three when it was re-released on 15 August 1979, but I have a memory of seeing the Death Star run in a theatre seat. I might have been in my dad’s lap. At any rate, it was all Star Wars all the time from that point until I was probably seven or eight; the toys were a regular appearance at my birthday and Christmas several years in a row (the AT-AT was my main Christmas present in 1980, as I recall), I had all the storybooks and novels, I read some of the comic books, and I had the kids’ cassette tape read-along versions as well. Watching the film on VHS was a regular activity when my friends and I had Friday night sleeplovers, and I also recorded it one of the times when it was broadcast on CBS. (Fun fact: John DeLancie, aka “Q” on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was in a cough syrup commercial that aired with that broadcast.)

I never did get into the Timothy Zahn novels — by the time I was in high school, if it wasn’t a movie that George Lucas was involved with, I didn’t particularly care — but I remember the “Kenneth Branagh as young Obi-Wan Kenobi” rumors starting around 1993. (I still wonder if there wasn’t something to those, particularly since it’s come out that Obi-Wan was older in the original treatment of Episode I, and that this older character was basically split into young Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn.) I also discovered the early drafts of Star Wars online around 1996 or 1997, and became fascinated by what might reappear in the prequel trilogy. Might we see Whitsun? The planet Utapau? Would Anakin Skywalker’s character be anything like Annikin Starkiller? (No, yes, and sort of, but Darth Maul attacking Qui-Gonn and co. on Tatooine in Episode I was very similar to a key moment in one of these drafts.)

I never quite understood the unhappiness of some people with the Special Editions; yes, there was some lame stuff, but I had no problem with the stated reasoning behind them (after all, I was one of the people who clamored to see the “Director’s Cut” of Blade Runner that wasn’t actually a “Director’s Cut” in 1992). I also wasn’t one of the people who looked like the sun had just fallen out of the sky coming out of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I enjoyed the prequels — again, yes, fine, there were stupid bits, but I didn’t get the near-total turning on Lucas that the Ain’t-It-Cool-News crowd staged. Were the new films the focus of my existence the way the first three had been? No, of course not, but nor should they have — the Star Wars prequels represented ages 22-28 for me, not 3-6. By the time Revenge of the Sith completed the cycle, the Lord of the Rings films had come to represent a more sophisticated, up-to-date view of fantasy-on-film (as they should have); to some extent, so did the Harry Potter series, and then Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies represent another stage of this kind of moviemaking, at least for me.

(Somebody somewhere along the way probably expected me to write something about The Dark Knight Rises. Well, I had a 4 week old baby when it came out, so that post kinda fell by the wayside. I’ll probably write something when the Blu-Ray hits the street. In short, I’ve seen it 4 times, and I think it rewards multiple viewings; one may perhaps argue that it’s a bad Batman movie, but I would argue that even if that’s the case — and I’m not sure it is — it’s still the right way for Christopher Nolan’s story to have wrapped up.)

Still, some things started to make me scratch my head. The behind-the-scenes material on the Episode I DVD showed Lucas talking about how Jar-Jar Binks was intended to be “the funniest character ever in a Star Wars movie”, and it struck me as weird that he would shoehorn a totally unnecessary character into a story he’d supposedly had plotted out for years. It was also evident from reading Michael Kaminski’s The Secret History of Star Wars that whatever Lucas imagined the prequels (and, perhaps, sequels) might have looked like back in 1979 was a completely different beast from what we got from 1999-2005; heck, for that matter, whatever he thought they were going to look like in 1999, even that was something very different from how he finished up six years later. It was also plain that Lucas really wasn’t a good enough storyteller from a technical standpoint to not need somebody else to edit him and bounce things off of, and that what we got really amounted to him making it up as he went along from movie to movie. Did that diminish the accomplishment? No, not necessarily, but why the need to resort to revisionist history every time he made up something new so that it was always accounted for in the “original master plan” that apparently never actually existed in the first place?

Last year, I made the decision to not buy the Star Wars Blu-Ray box. I could handle Darth Vader’s “NOOOOOOOO” at the end of Revenge of the Sith; it made sense in context. But to tack it on at the end of Return of the Jedi — nope, sorry, George, I’m not giving you my money for that, and I’m tired of apologizing for you. I don’t claim to understand his reasons for revising everything and pretending that it was always the way he intended it, even when it wasn’t, but I don’t want to play the game anymore. Sorry, I really don’t.

With today’s news, we get one more bit of revisionist history:

“For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” said Lucas. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

Compare with Lucas telling Starlog and Vanity Fair in 1999 that there was no way that there would be a sequel trilogy directed by other people, and telling Total Film in 2008, “I’ve left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII – IX” (link here).

I would like to suggest that George Lucas has been perhaps the single greatest contributor to geek culture of the last forty years. Even in the last 15 years or so — in 1996/1997, websites like Ain’t-It-Cool-News, the original incarnation of Corona Coming Attractions, Dark Horizons, and the like all started popping up, and one of the major raisons d’être for such sites was that the trilogy that we’d all been dreaming about for over a decade looked like it was finally going to get made. Such sites made geek moviedom an exciting place to be for a few years.

I would further like to suggest that he has been the single greatest contributor to making geek culture the shrill, bitter, entitled, cynical group of online jackasses that it largely is now. (Lucas, as well as the studios realizing that these websites could easily be turned into just another cheap marketing outlet. I’m looking at you, Harry Jay Knowles, and I’m a guy who remembers AICN from the http://www.bga.com/~rodan/coolnews.html days.) I don’t relate to the “George Lucas raped my childhood” people, but I can’t deny that there’s a big group of movie fans that feel like they got the biggest bait-and-switch in history, and there have been consequences. (By contrast, the guys who maybe have contributed some very serious class to this brave new world? Michael Uslan and J. Michael Straczynski, whose respective abilities to be real gentlemen and to provide an inspiring window into the projects they work on are amazing. Yes, sometimes JMS comes across as a bit full of himself, and Uslan’s non-Batman movies are hit-and-miss at best, but nonetheless, they’re both doing it right in a big way.)

So now we enter the Disney period of Star Wars. One of the things I’m trained to think about as a historian is, when trying to come up with a schema for periodization, looking at the sources to which your historical actors are looking back. The Renaissance is the Renaissance because they’re looking back to Greco-Roman antiquity. Early Modern Europe is Early Modern Europe because they’re looking back to the Renaissance. That kind of thing. In making the first Star Wars movies, Lucas was looking back to serials, to Flash Gordon, to The Hidden Fortress, to a language of filmmaking that had been largely abandoned, so all he had to do, really, was rework it with the tools he had available in 1975, and invent whatever new tools he needed to be able to make that kind of cinematic experience up-to-date for the contemporary audience. There wasn’t really an existing frame of reference for what Star Wars was doing — Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run were what people thought of when it came to cinematic science fiction and fantasy.

The problem with the prequels, ultimately, is that they had an audience with expectations. Both Lucas and the audience had to look back to Star Wars, Lucas so he could figure out where he needed to end up, and the audience to try to second-guess him. Between 1983 and 1999, there were things like Dune, Howard the Duck (ahem, George), Superman IV, Batman and Robin, Alien3 and Alien:Resurrection, Independence Day… lots of ways that audiences had been shown that studios would cynically try to squeeze money out of them with inferior product. Surely George Lucas (who, as I mentioned, gave us Howard the Duck) wouldn’t do that, right?

And, as I say, I’m not convinced that he did do that with the prequels, but there are sufficient numbers of people who are convinced of that, that, really, Disney needs to be very conscious of what they look back to as they approach this new era of Star Wars. Are they going to look back to the prequels (which we might think of as the Middle Ages)? The originals (which we might think of as the Late Antique Roman Empire in full bloom)? The sources of the originals (Greco-Roman antiquity before Constantine)? Will we get a Star Wars Renaissance? Or something else? Are they going to give this to talented filmmakers who idolized the original trilogy growing up to try to reinvent and to do something as revolutionary playing in this universe as the first movie did in establishing the universe? Or are they going to give this to people who do serviceable work-for-hire and hope for a franchise that nobody needs to think too hard about, like Pirates of the Caribbean became? Will these new films be just so much big-budget fan fiction? At the same time, can’t one make the case that the prequels amounted to big-budget fan fiction that happened to be done by George Lucas? Dunno — guess we’ll see in 2015. We’ll see if this new trilogy is worth Theodore’s time the way the original trilogy was worth mine.

And meanwhile, Bryan Singer is back on X-Men, too. He’s coming back to do a sequel to a reboot/prequel/whatever — that he was supposed to direct in the first place — of a series that he got kicked off of to do a sequel to a different series, and the person who originally replaced him on the movie he got kicked off of, and who also replaced him on the reboot/prequel, is whom he’s replacing now. Got all of that? Days of future past indeed. Between this and Leia Organa now being a Disney princess, everything old is new again, and vice versa.

Thoughts on new Orthodox missions

Published 19 September 2012 The Orthodox Faith 1 Comment
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Yeah, I’ve been blogslacking lately. I’ve got a baby and I’m trying to take my exams, what can I say?

I recently offered an acquaintance some fairly detailed thoughts on establishing an Orthodox mission church. They’re very subjective and anecdotal, but they’re based on what I’ve seen in a parish just barely out of the mission stage itself. I’ve written about missions before, but not in anything beyond the briefest of brief treatments. I share here the meat of what I told this person, although I have edited certain details to make it a bit more general. I am interested to hear the thoughts of others on the issues I raise, so please, the floor is open.

Some theory first. From what I have seen, the biggest sign of the spiritual health of a given community, and simultaneously the biggest factor with respect to growth, is the willingness to invite friends to church. As silly as that may sound, Orthodox spirituality is relational and experiential; you can’t read or think your way into the faith, you have to actually go to church and be with other people, you have to actually receive the Eucharist and be in communion with the parish (and with the Church at large as well, something I’ll get to later), and so on. You have to actually do something, and how it is done involves a larger number of people than just yourself. To put it another way, because Orthodox Christianity is experiential, it is also relational; somebody has to tell us to “come and see”, and having come and having seen, it is then incumbent up on us to tell other people to “come and see”. None of this is anything you don’t already know from the friendships you had with Orthodox Christians before you converted, I’m sure. The point is, rearing our children in the Church aside, the Church grows principally through our relationships. I’m Orthodox because of two such relationships; an Orthodox friend stopped me (then an Episcopalian) while we were having a conversation that led to me recounting the Creed; when I got to the section on the Holy Spirit and said, “…who proceeds from the Father and the Son,” he stopped me and said, “No, that’s not how it goes.” That started a conversation with consequences, and then a year later, a Ukrainian friend of my wife’s asked if we would come with her to a blessing of Pascha baskets. Between the two relationships, we had experiences that got us asking questions, and the friends who prompted those experiences were able to be further resources. Subsequently, we had friends we took with us to church, and it has continued down the line. That first conversation about the Creed with my friend has generated something like four generations of converts.

Second, the whole “experiential” part is crucial. The first thing the Church is supposed to do is worship. And we’re supposed to do it well and beautifully, as you well know. Think about the story of the Kievan emissaries visiting Constantinople — they saw the Liturgy and reported back to Vladimir, “We knew not if we were in heaven or on earth — we only know that God dwells there among men, because we cannot forget that beauty.” The Liturgy, then, is epistemological — it’s not just the way we get our chant fix or have an excuse to look at icons or whatever; it is fundamentally the way we know God, and to the extent that that’s the case, it is evangelical. For us to say, “Come and see”, there has to be someplace for people to come to, and there has to be something for them to see.

So much for theory. What I would encourage you to think about, given all of those things, is this:

1) To the extent possible, be geographically accessible; ideally, someplace that might get casual foot traffic. That can be difficult given various economic realities, but particularly as a mission, at the very least it’s not going to do you any good for people to not have any idea how to find you or see you as difficult to get to.

2) Always remember that the church’s primary function is worship. It’s not to sell nut rolls, it’s not to have potlucks, it’s not even to hold Sunday school. These can all be great things, and I don’t criticize churches that do them as such, but I’ve encountered the mentality that says, “Well, people come to church for church, but they stay for the other things the church does. So, rather than concentrating on a worship space, better to make do with a space that allows you to get by for services while also allowing you to do some of those other things.” I suggest that’s exactly backwards. Certainly you have to allow for some economy of space and some clever use thereof when you’re getting started, but from a standpoint of mission and growth it will be better to have a space that allows you to liturgize as best you can while getting by for the coffee hour. I’ve seen missions and churches manage to be located near cafes or whatnot that are able to serve as the fellowship space; it’s potentially a way to be smart about space in the beginning. Along similar lines, make your first priority getting the rhythm of the liturgical life down. Remember St. John of Kronstadt — he did daily services with just his wife as the choir at first, and in the long run they couldn’t fit everybody into the church.

3) Find ways of being visible in the broader community, of contributing to local conversations, etc. If there’s some way you can find to be a leader on a particular local issue, do it. The point here is that, peculiarities of image and calendar aside, the church should be seen as integral, contributing entity of the local community as opposed to a colony of cranks. Food can certainly be a way to do this; there’s a reason people think of Greek festivals and poppyseed rolls when they think of Orthodox churches. Maybe you have a location that enables you to have a really wonderful ministry to the poor; maybe you sponsor picnics that are open to the public; maybe there’s a farmers’ market or community street fair or something where there’s the possibility of the parish having a table. Maybe you’re blessed to have a good singer or two at the outset; find a way that such a person might be able to use music to contribute to the community at large. If your location lends itself to such an effort, do the Sunday of Orthodoxy, Holy Friday, Elevation of the Cross, etc. processions someplace public. Maybe you’ve got a chunk of money to bring an interesting speaker in on some issue of import.

4) Seriously do not stress over the baggage of cultural “strangeness”, be those related to liturgy, calendar or whatever else. If people know first and foremost that they’re welcome at your hearth, they’ll be less freaked out over those kinds of things and more inclined to ask productive questions. Just greet them with open arms, make sure they can find the coffee afterward, and be prepared to explain the various “whys” as many times as is necessary. Emphasize what’s good about the distinctive things in a way that praises the good things people already know, and maybe shows how these distinctive qualities add other good things. The idea of “completion” (the real definition of “perfection”) rather than “replacement” is useful here.

5) Books are good, and a mission book counter/library or something like it is a universal in American Orthodox churches, but they can also be shortcuts that have consequences down the road. The personal connection is probably going to do more than any book by Schmemann or Rose possibly could. I’m a book guy, to be sure, and I’m a scholar by profession, so I’m all about the books, just so we’re clear. I spent hundreds of dollars on books in my couple of years as an inquirer, and being Orthodox has influenced my life in other ways that has led to further thousands of dollars spent on books. But in terms of the literature one tends to read as an inquirer/catechumen (at least from what I’ve seen), there’s a certain sameness, particularly in the convert testimonies. It’s useful to find a convert testimony that resonates with you, but there’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s going to be better found in the services and the prayers than in books. Ware’s (or McGuckin’s) The Orthodox Church for general background and history, Schmemann’s For the Life of the World for a compelling account of what the sacramental life means, Gillquist’s Becoming Orthodox for proof that even cultural Evangelicals can do it, and then perhaps Mathewes-Green for the personal account of the life, but beyond that, I’d really de-emphasize the books. Emphasize the relational and experiential (“Oh, you want to know about <topic X>? Then you should really make sure you come to <service Y> and/or talk to <person Z>”).

5a) Make sure that you’re smart about how you operate any retail sales like that. I’m familiar with a case where the parish bookstore was just ordering things from Light and Life at full price and then selling them at full price, then wondering why they weren’t selling anything. Wholesale relationships are reasonably easy to set up — Liturgica.com and Musica Russica for CDs, Conciliar Press for certain titles, etc. All it takes to start a good parish bookstore that’s self-sustaining in the long haul is $1000 and being smart with your wholesale accounts; a friend of mine did exactly that at his parish.

6) Certain jurisdictions make things very easy in the sense that there’s a way you do things, and you do it that way. Those very same jurisdictions also usually come with baggage arising from the perceived ties with “the tribe at prayer”, and the worry that this is going to wind up being all about building Little Byzantium or Little Beirut or Little St. Petersburg someplace. The truth is, Orthodoxy in an American setting is going to be American somehow just by virtue of the fact that Americans are doing it. Just take seriously that there is a way you’re receiving of how to do things, do it as well as you can, have doing it that way be the normal way you do things from the get go, and resist idiosyncrasy as much as possible. It’s a gift to be given an expression of the Tradition in a clear, whole-cloth form if you’re in a jurisdiction that does that; it takes a lot of guesswork out of things (there are at least four different things one might mean by “Antiochian practice”, for example). There will always be ways that things have to be adapted for particular contexts, but if you just normatively receive it and do it from the start the way they tell you, then you won’t have to deal with the shock to the system later of trying to do it. To return to something I touched on earlier, it will also help at least give you the sense of being in tune with the rest of your diocese/jurisdiction, even if you’re relatively isolated. Being idiosyncratic and isolated is not a good combination. If you want to be welcoming to Orthodox that show up down the road who are used to particular ethnic practices — well, in my experience, a Liturgy served faithfully according to Russian practice and a Liturgy served faithfully according to Greek practice have an awful lot in common. It’s at least going to be recognizably the same ethos, even if the details are different. It seems to me that the solution in America is to do it in reverent English (whether or not that includes thees and thous), don’t apologize for the rest of it, just be prepared to explain the “whys” over coffee afterward (or better yet, have them over for lunch and talk about it over a home-cooked meal).

Bottom line: be faithful, and God will give the increase.

A contribution elsewhere

Published 13 August 2012 General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 3 Comments
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A couple of months ago, the people involved with new online Orthodox Arts Journal asked if I would be interested in contributing anything to their efforts. I’m a big fan of New Liturgical Movement, and as this is sort of an attempt to do something similar from the Orthodox side, I was thrilled to participate however I could. I suggested some things I can do, it seemed to make sense to all concerned, and as of this morning, my first post for them is up. Take a look, and peruse the rest of the site as well — they’re doing some nice stuff, and it’s an honor to be involved.

That’s my boy.

Published 12 August 2012 General , Media , music , The Orthodox Faith 1 Comment
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That's my boy.

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