And we’re back!
The five of you who read this may have noticed that I missed last Friday’s round-up. That’s because I was driving to Wisconsin to hang out with my good friend and frequent collaborator, Josh Christianson, for his bachelor party. He’s getting married in the next few weeks, and I’m a groomsman in the wedding.
Which is a bit crazy. Josh and I literally met through Twitter. He guested on a podcast I listened to (The Magnificast), I liked the episode so I followed him on Twitter. Then, a pandemic happened and a lot of us were stuck inside, doing most of our socializing online. We appeared on each other’s podcasts, got closer throughout the years, and now here we are.
It was a really fun weekend, and I’ll talk a bit more about it in the film section of the newsletter. After the weekend came the miserable type of workweek that follows an especially fun or long weekend, where work feels stupid and you just wish you could sleep more. Unfortunately, that miserable workweek also aligned with Holy Week—which is a busy ordeal for those of us in high church denominations. There are a lot of services, and I help run the livestream for my church.
If you were raised more in a secular or evangelical/low church setting, you might not be familiar with all of the services. The only two that we did when I was a young evangelical was Good Friday and then Easter. In high church denominations, there’s technically a small holiday for every day of the week leading up to Easter, although most people don’t do much for Holy Monday and Holy Tuesday. By most people I mean me, I didn’t attend those.
Holy Week has some of my favorite liturgical holidays. It’s mostly because these are the bummers. I’m a chronic depressive and I’m a chronic doubter/skeptic who has gone through numerous bouts of agnosticism and atheism before eventually returning to the faith. This is part of my attraction to high church traditions. The lack of emotivism is helpful for me. I can’t seem to control how much I “feel” it ever. Evangelicalism was always so much about feeling it and believing it.
Most of the time I don’t feel it. A lot of the time I’m not sure I believe it. But I do the liturgy anyway as an act of faith. Because this has always been the case for me, the liturgies that feel most aligned with my disposition are the Holy Week services. These are the crescendo of Lent, the most despairing ceremonies in the Christian tradition that are quite literally mourning the death of God, and the existence of death in general. There’s a lot of catharsis in these services for me.
Tenebrae, on Wednesday, is a service set around reading Psalms and passages from the Bible while slowly, one by one, extinguishing candles. On Maundy Thursday, there is the tradition of the washing of feet, which is a practice I love conceptually but always find weird in practice (however, the weirdness is kind of the point). In the Anglican tradition, and I think a few others, Maundy Thursday ends with a ceremony called the Stripping of the Altar. It’s one of my favorites.
While someone reads or sings Psalm 22 (the “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” one), the priests and deacons slowly remove everything from the altar. This hits especially hard if you're at a cathedral that’s heavily decorated. This ceremony is, in part, a reference to the humiliation and torture of Jesus at the hands of Roman guards, as it’s preceded and followed by the antiphon, “They divided my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.”
After this, at least at the church I attend (I never know what’s universal and what’s specific), there is a vigil that represents the Garden of Gethsemane. In the Biblical narrative, Jesus stays up late into the night praying. The disciples all fall asleep, oblivious that this would be Jesus’ last night before being taken away. Jesus implores them to stay awake with him, but they don’t. In the vigil, we read the Biblical narrative, sing a brief hymn, and the remain in silence until you choose to leave. You can stay “in the garden with Jesus” for a few hours if you’d like.
The hymn that is sung at my church every year is Stay With Me, composed by Jacques Berthier. It’s a much newer hymn, coming out of the mid-20th century, but I find it absolutely gutting every time. It’s only a few words, referencing Jesus begging the disciples to stay awake with him and pray, “Stay with me. Remain here with me. Watch and pray. Watch and pray.” It repeats these same phrases over and over.
Here’s a link to the hymn if you want to hear what I’m talking about here.
Grief feels omipresent to me right now. It has for the last few months. From personal stuff to world events, the tone of the world right now is the tone of Holy Week. Even when I’m not at my most faithful, (and, admittedly, I haven’t been, as of late) I really appreciate my tradition’s ability to liturgize and ritualize grief, mourning, sorrow, and then defiantly proclaim a belief in hope or resurrection, actualized in Easter.
A better world is possible. It’s coming. Watch and pray.
Welcome to the media round-up, a newsletter where I tell you about everything I’m producing, watching, listening to, and reading.
New from me
I mentioned this two weeks ago, but I did the thing I was trying to avoid and ended up putting off Fruitless episodes until the end of the month. I got one out toward the middle of the month, but the other three all got dropped this week. Sorry.
Starting with the free episode, I was joined by reoccurring guest, Alien, to discuss Synecdoche, New York (2008). He’d wanted to come on to discuss the movie with me for a while, and since its is a deeply atheistic film about death, I thought it would be funny to do it as a Good Friday episode. It was a good time filled with some really interesting conversation. You can check it out here.
On the Patreon, two new episodes: one, featuring longtime friend of the show, Chris Barker, discussing the war in Ukraine after two years and its broader geopolitical implications. You can find that here.
Second, an episode with my brother, Caleb. It was a bit of a filler episode because some guests had to delay that month and I just needed something to fulfill my two episode promise for Patreon. It ended up being better than just filler. Caleb and I had a fun time talking about music and how our tastes had evolved a bit over the years, as well as provided some punk, post-punk, and emo history. It’s a good time. You can find that here.
Film
Thank God I didn’t watch a ton of films the last two weeks like I usually do. If I tried to condense two normal weeks for me into one piece, this section would get really long.
Two weekends ago, I went and saw Dune: Part 2 with my brother and my girlfriend. What can I possibly say about this that hasn’t been said yet? It’s fantastic. It looks great. I’m really happy with Villenueve’s adaptation, and I’m excited for more Dune.
That week, I also watched Dazed and Confused (1993), which is one of those big movies that it was embarrassing I hadn’t seen. I really liked it.
Synecdoche, New York (2008) hit me like a bus. It’s a movie that’s open for a lot of criticism, which we talk about in the Fruitless episode, but I can’t deny that it emotionally wrecked me for days afterwards. It’s a masterpiece, I think, even if it’s got some well-earned criticism.
Last weekend was the Bachelor Party. (I feel like there should be a more gender neutral term for that, since one of the “bachelors” was Josh’s sister.) We hung out at an Airbnb in Wisconsin and had a wonderful time. Josh put together a small movie marathon. Because Josh and I influence each other’s tastes a lot, his picks felt designed for me to have a good time.
Three films. I hadn’t seen any of them before.
#1. Four Lions (2010). I’ve wanted to watch this one for a while, but the elevator pitch, “dark comedy about bumbling terrorists,” always meant I needed to be in a really specific mood to put it on, and I never felt quite in that mood. But the weekend was perfect for it, especially with an audience to laugh along with. The film is directed by Chris Morris, who brought us The Day Today and Brass Eye—two legends of British political comedy.
I think of Chris Morris as a more mean-spirited Armando Iannucci. Which is pretty funny because Iannucci is already rather mean-spirited. But Iannucci didn’t produce the most complained-about programme in British television history—that was all Morris.
It’s an incredibly funny movie, but it is also incredibly dark. If you find yourself disturbed easily by the subject matter, I would avoid it. If the idea of four guys in big cartoonish mascot costumes trying to do a suicide bombing sounds funny to you, then you’re in for a treat.
#2. Iron Warrior (1987). I’ve written on here about my interest in Italian sword & sorcery films. I haven’t seen enough to consider myself an expert on them or anything, but I really enjoy them. Iron Warrior is a late-period one, toward the declining days of Italian exploitation films, directed by Alfonso Brescia. It’s technically supposed to be a sequel to Joe D’Amato’s two Ator films, but the backstory is barely referenced. The only throughline is the great Miles O’Keefe playing the hero, Ator.
It’s better than the D’Amato films, I hate to say. I always love going to bat for D’Amato’s strange filmography, but this is a sword & sorcery film that delivers. It’s well-paced, it’s goofy in a fun way, and it has tons of fun swordfights. It rules.
#3. The Killer (1989). An early period John Woo film. The only Woo film I’ve seen is Face/Off (1997), so this was my first exposure to the Hong Kong films prior to his move to America. It’s got some incredibly fun action sequences, and the whole operatic and hyperemotional tone ends up rather moving toward the end. Fantastic film to close the night out with.
Music
Two albums on my mind right now that are kind of a funny pairing.
Every once and a while, an old Christian rock record will pop into my head. My Dad used to listen to a lot of 90s and 2000s Christian alternative, and then I surrounded myself with a lot of Christian emo, metalcore, etc. All varying wildly in quality. Those 90s alternative records, though, I often forget about until suddenly I catch myself humming a tune or something and realize it goes back to it. I then load up the album on Spotify and suddenly realize a huge chunk of my taste in my music was probably influenced by the album and I didn’t realize it.
This morning, right after I woke up, as I was making coffee, an album popped into my head: Them by PFR.
Christian (evangelical) music varies wildly. There were a handful of golden ages for it. Usually a good sign of its quality is to what extent that band seemed to be part of the musical movement they were contributing to, and to what extent they just seem like a Christian rendition of a cooler band. Sometimes that line gets fuzzy, but that tends to be the stuff I still hold onto.
Christian emo and post-hardcore, for instance, holds up better than some of the safe Christian radio rock. You can expect that, because bands like Emery or Underoath would tour with other post-hardcore bands like Silverstein or emo bands like Taking Back Sunday. They were contributing to the moment rather than just trying to make a Christian version of the popular stuff.
Another era like that, I think, is 90s alternative. Some of it ages better than others, but bands like Sixpence None the Richer broke into the mainstream because they were actually just pretty decent songwriters. I’m not sure if PFR had much of a mainstream breakthrough—one thing that helped Sixpence was that they would write traditional love songs on top of the Christian stuff, as PFR is very much focused on their Christianity.
Nevertheless, I threw that record on and went, “Ah yeah, okay, no wonder I would get into Death Cab for Cutie, Built to Spill, and other indie shit later.” You can hear a lot of that in the record. I’m not sure timeline-wise whether that means they were ripping off some of those late-90s indie bands or if they were just contributing to the genre’s development, but I think a few songs on the album hold up, at least for me. The first two songs on the record, Pour Me Out and Daddy Never Cried are still really solid and I might throw them into my usual rotation.
Now the other album on my mind is very, very different. I briefly mentioned the artist a few weeks back as a band Josh introduced me to. The album is All of Heaven’s Luck by Rejoice.
When Josh introduced them to me, he said they were a black metal/hardcore band that was up my alley. It being black metal-adjacent, I prepped myself for some mild offense at some blasphemous lyrics, but I actually found them religiously compelling. They use blasphemous imagery, but it actually seems less hostile to Christianity broadly, and more a condemnation of American Christianity’s merging with capitalism. Here’s some lyrics from the song Malevolent Dieties.
Live and die for the bottom line
9 to fucking 5
Working class Jesus strung up on a dollar sign
Unholy rites
Pantheon of motherfuckers, malice deified
Claws in pockets, fangs in throats
Working class Jesus, dead and fucking broke
Reading
First, a piece from my cousin, Dave Murphy.
Without getting too much into personal details, my cousin is going through a hard time right now. Serious medical issues began to surface in the last few weeks, alongside an ongoing struggle with mental health. Most of this is not my story to share, so I’ll keep it brief, but he wrote a Medium piece last week that I found incredibly moving.
He has been a music blogger for a long time. The piece is framed around the songs on an indie rock playlist the nurse played for him while he was in an MRI, realizing that his health problems may be serious. I wanted to link the piece here because it absolutely gutted me. Dave has been the “cool cousin” for me most of my life. He married into the family, technically he’s my cousin’s husband, but the marriage happened when I was really young, so for most of my life, he’s been the cousin who would talk music with me. He introduced me to a lot of my favorite bands. He came to my shows when I played in a punk band to empty audiences in shitty bars in Des Moines. He’s also a really great, and incredibly personal, writer.
Here are the opening paragraphs to the piece:
“What kind of music do you want to listen to?” she asked. I stammered a bit before answering. I’m a people pleaser, often to a fault. If I think it would mildly inconvenience someone for my benefit, even if they offer or are being paid, I generally decline or defer. I’d hate for someone to be put out. Sometimes, I wipe off my own table at restaurants. Also, that’s kind of a loaded question, because the answer is legitimately anything. Even if I know I hate it, even if I know I’ve given it multiple chances, even if the genre is overwhelmingly and consistently not my cup of tea, I will listen. I will listen and form an honest opinion while listening. After stuttering for a few more moments, I gave my answer.
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you like, I’ll listen to,” I said. It was true, plus I figured it would give me something to pay attention to outside of the noise from the tube. The technician was in her late twenties. She had a couple of tattoos that I would place firmly in the “Live, Laugh, Love” genre and a Stanley cup at her station, so I pegged her as a top-40 or modern country fan. While I knew the chance was high it would make this whole miserable process even more miserable, I also thought, “Hey, she’s got a tough job and deserves to have some happiness. Maybe I can form an even more righteous anger to the artist known simply as Jelly Roll.”
“No seriously, this is all you. I don’t hear any of it,” she said. I picked my head up because I had been staring at the floor pretty much since I sat on the conveyor belt that would drag me into the big tube, brain first. She was holding up headphones. I stammered again because I was a little embarrassed that I assumed she was going to throw a Hardy CD into a boombox or something.
“Oh, uh. I dunno. It still doesn’t matter.” I am still not sure why I didn’t just say something. I guess, I just didn’t have the ability to make any sort of decision.
“I can literally put on anything: rock, jazz, country, 80’s, 70’s, you just tell me,” she said. She was exceedingly friendly. I’m sure she’d dealt with a lot of nervous people in her line of work, and I’m sure I was actually a more reasonable client than others, but still the nerves of the whole thing made me feel like I was somehow doing this wrong. I rubbed the base of my skull. That’s where the headache always is, yet for some reason I think a brief neck massage will cure me, even though it never has. I flipped my hair out of my face. It was approximately nose length and slightly unruly, but soft. I had showered that morning because the idea of being trapped in a tube and smelling myself was a horrifying prospect.
I’m not sure how I summoned the courage, although “courage” is a silly word to use when the act is simply stating your preferred music genre. I took a deep breath and looked her in her dark eyes and said with all of my chest, “How about an indie rock playlist?” Okay, it was only with some of my chest because I felt kinda pretentious.
“Ooh, totally. Good pick,” she said. Maybe I misjudged her musical tastes, or maybe she was just being polite. Either way, I was actually pretty glad I wasn’t going to listen to Jelly Roll.
It gets more personal as it goes. It’s been the first piece of writing to make me cry in a while. Give it a read if you get a chance.
Lastly, I am re-reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone for the Education for Ministry program I’m doing through the Episcopal Church (no, I’m not going into the clergy, it’s a lay program). This is one of my favorite books about theology, and I might not be exaggerating when I say that Cone has been one of those writers that kept me Christian. This book, specifically, is incredibly beautiful and haunting, deriving its theology from the black experience in America, from the blues, and from African-American spirituals. I can’t recommend the book enough.
I think there’s something of a thematic throughline to this piece, but I don’t have a nice way to put a bow on it. Life is filled with a lot of suffering and a lot of death; especially now, both with my personal life events and with the ongoing political struggles, genocides, wars, and persecution that feels so unbearably ominpresent whenever I read the news or scroll online. There is a lot of grief right now. I’m trying to look for joy where I can. I think I’m getting better at it.