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Wednesday, February 05, 2003 (Mostly) Literary Musings Regarding yesterday... to be fair, the lady at the Hopwood Room is really nice and felt bad about turning us away ("I hate this part")--she thought she'd left the door open a minute or so longer than she should have anyway--but the whole situation still sucks. Especially since I'd been gearing up for it for the last month and a half. Stupid U-M computers. On a more interesting note, Chasing Hats has a great three-part series on Christianity, art, and intellectualism. An excerpt: The Evangelical response to criticism about its "art" is often to excuse the mediocrity rather than to face up to it. The rationale for the cookie-cutter, low-level of craftsmanship in contemporary Christian music is that since it is being performed in the name of Jesus, it is fine if the quality is poor. And so, instead of Christians leading the way in quality of the craftsmanship in music, writing, film and painting, we settle for the mistaken consolation, which is really no consolation at all. We claim that it's fine to be mediocre or even downright bad because we are Christians and God will approve anyway. Truly artistic people know the fallacy of this attitude.... One danger of Evangelical Correctness is that artistic Christians get victimized. Artists by nature see reality a bit differently and think in typically non-formulaic ways. The modernist construct of the 7 Habits of the Highly Effective Church, and the 5 Steps to a Perfect Marriage, and the 3 Keys to Happy Kids, and so on, deny the complexity of reality. Life is much more complicated and mysterious and uncertain than Modernism acknowledges.... We put our stock in well-known Bible teachers or influential leaders, rather than doing the harder work of cultivating our own minds. Truly, it is a sin we have all committed.... Art is powerful communication. It cuts across barriers, it exposes us to each other and ourselves and... it says things that are often too deep for words. Speaking of art, get this: I'm in the middle of (or planning) three recording projects right now. One is my ever-present attempt to finish my EP, First Verse, the second is recording a couple of songs with a friend majoring in Performing Arts Technology for his studio project (Ryan and I have tentative plans to make one of those into a simple music video for the upcoming website and press kit), and the last is an acoustic worship music CD that Godwin is working on--I'll be contributing to a few tracks and playing an original. Kind of cool, eh? And last but not least are plans I'll be developing with a small team to produce a multimedia (online, at least in the beginning) magazine; think film, music, visual arts, and writing brought together in one place. Right now it's just an idea, but if everything works out you'll be hearing more about it soon now that I'm done obsessing with the Hopwood Contest. ^ Top | 2:27 AM | | | 
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