That’s all there is too it. They are incredible, and you should love them… right now. Here is their song “Paranoia in B-flat Major.” (Ignore the video. in fact, I would go so far as to encourage you not to watch it and just listen. Also if you are on a laptop or a computer with crappy speakers I highly recommend busting out the headphones; this is one of those songs that can and should engulf you).
The group comprises Scott and Seth, the eponymous brothers, along with bassist Bob Crawford (they often have a cellist with them on tour as well). I think that I’m legally required to refer to them as an alt-country group at least once, since they prominently feature a banjo, but they are obviously much more than that.
The band, which is based in North Carolina, started out when the brothers were playing in the hard rock band Nemo. They started a project called Nemo Downstairs in which they would get together with friends to play country, flat-picking and bluegrass music. The Avett Brothes grew out of these sessions. Some of the rock influence is retained, as is the country/bluegrass/old-time, but they also add in doses of Carolina beach music and classic pop harmonies.
One of the best things about the Avetts is their songwriting. I challenge you to find better active songwriters. You can’t do it. I win.
I like to think of the brother’s songwriting as the antithesis of Bob Dylan’s. Bob is the master of writing lyrics that don’t mean anything. Think about it. The vast majority of Dylan songs convey about 90% of their message tacitly, and only 10% explicitly. This is a major reason that he’s so popular. The less explicit his message is the more the listener can project their own thoughts/desires/intentions onto the song. Not so with the Avetts. Their songs do something that is more difficult. They are often very specific, yet they manage to still be universal. The listener connects with their sentiments with little need for projection.
The impetus for my effusive praise here is two-fold. First, the group is starting in on their first tour of 2008, in support of their amazing album Emotionalism. If you are anywhere near a venue, I highly recommend checking them out. The cult following that they have is primarily from their high energy shows, which are some of the best around.
Second, I just love them. If I would marry The Avett Brothers if I could. In a heartbeat.
And I’m not alone in this. There something about the group that seems to engender a special relationship with their fans. My friends and I have discussed at length how we feel compelled to make other people like the Avetts. I wouldn’t even say that their my favorite group of all time, but I have this feeling about them that I don’t have about anybody else, that I have to tell people. I have a friend who admitted to me that he was recently talking about the Avetts and slipped into saying “we” instead of “they.” Seriously. That’s how much people identify with these guys.
The pastor of a Florida church challenged all of his married parishioners to have sex every day for thirty days. This is a brilliant move that amounts to some really cheap but effective mass-marital counseling.
The reason I love this so much is that I think that churches are far too quick to see sex as a taboo, as the bad guy. This is simply not the case. Sex is a vital part of a good marriage, and while we should be cautious, always, not too cause those around us to stumble (to lust in this case), sex should not be kicked under the rug.
Sex is in many ways the culmination of a marriage and of the physical, spiritual and emotional unity of husband and wife. In this it is a key element of marriage cum symbol–the symbol of Christ and his bride, the church (us Christians!). How is it that our churches shirk discussion of such a powerful way to preach the gospel to ourselves? I honestly believe that if there were more discussion of sex in its appropriate role that the church would then have fewer problems with sexual immorality. (This is similar to the thesis that bringing back the ‘holy kiss’ would help to stem the amount of ‘unholy kissing’.) God has created us to be sexual, and this leads me to believe two things: A, that there is nothing shameful in being sexual; and B, that we are not going to stop thinking about sex any time soon. In light of these two theses I would love to see the church encourage appropriate thinking about sex rather than just saying “Don’t think about it,” or trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Another reason that I like this challenge is that it’s for every day for thirty days! Now, I am a (fairly) young man, and I have a young man’s libido. But I have to imagine that over the course of a solid month, even I would have a day where I just didn’t feel like it. Great! There is something wonderful about having sex with your spouse when you don’t feel like it. Because at that point you will be having sex more purposefully. Hopefully you never will have sex with your spouse solely to fulfill your physical desires, but the more desirous you are, the easier it will be to focus on sating those desires as opposed to loving and being intimate with your spouse. I hope that those who take up this challenge will have their love for each other increased by sacrificing to be intimate with their spouse. I think that this will happen, and that is why I called the challenge cheap, mass-marital counseling.
“From June 2 through July 30, Gibson threw 99 innings — and gave up two runs. According to baseball researcher Bill Deane, the two runs Gibson allowed were the result of bad luck more than anything. One came on a catchable wild pitch, the other on a bloop double that landed inches fair.”
You’ve probably heard the famous anecdote in which Ernest Hemingway was bet that he could not write a story in only six words. His response, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”, was absolutely brilliant.
The magazine Wired ran an article in 2006 where they asked contemporary authors to try and match Hemingway. The results? Well… mixed. The problem was that most of the authors failed to meet the requirement that their six words comprise a story, not just a joke, or headline implying a story.
Here are the entries that I think meet the qualifications. Which do you think is best? Anybody have your own attempt?
Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
- William Shatner
Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.
- David Brin
With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller
Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.
- Vernor Vinge
The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon
More below the fold (including one with a curse word… fair warning) .
Nothing engenders worse arguments than politics. Even religious debate looks like a shinning beacon of rationality in comparison. And here, today, free of charge, I’m going to demonstrate the poverty of one of those arguments.
The argument I want to look at is best captured by Jack White in the Grammy winning song, Icky Thump. The third verse begins with Jack asking a question that some professional politicians have been asking as well:
White Americans, what
Nothing better to do?
Why don’t you kick yourself out
You’re an immigrant too?
This is a reductio ad absurdum that we can make explicit thus:
American citizens want to keep all illegal aliens and their descendants out of the United States.
All American citizens (save Native Americans) are descended from illegal aliens.
Therefore the ancestors of all American citizens should not have been allowed in America.
But if the ancestors American citizens did not come to America, then American citizens would not be here to demand that all illegal aliens be kept out.
This argument is valid, but it is not sound. Put another way, were the world this argument describes our world we could affirm it as true, but it does not describe our world.
What’s different then? There are a couple of important ones. The first being that ‘no one’ is arguing that all illegal aliens and their descendants leave the United States. However, what I want to talk about more is the idea that all non-Native Americans are descended from illegal aliens.
This is patently false. In order for one to be an illegal alien it is necessary that the place wherein he takes up residence be a state, and for that state to have particular laws to make his residence there illegal. When the ancestors of modern Americans came here they did not come in violation of the laws of any state. There was no state presence in North America until its colonization by the ancestors of modern US citizens.
This does not make the actions of our forefathers innocent. We’re all well acquainted with their tendency to deceive, steal from and kill natives. But immoral and illegal are two very different things.
It is obviously sad and unfortunate that the modern world was shaped by immoral actions. But nevertheless, it is the world we live in, and there’s no changing it. Every bit of inhabitable land (and most uninhabitable as well) is now under the purview of a state. And those states have the right to make laws.
For today is the day that pitchers and catchers report to spring training… My soul is happy.
Eff robins. Today is the harbinger of Spring. Today is what reminds us that cold, evil misery does not have an eternal grip on the world, but that goodness, warmth and beauty will return.
Propositions, Truth and Steroids
I’ve been considering how I might wax poetic today, but I didn’t make a decision until this morning. I wished a friend a happy P&C and he asked if I was upset about Roger Clemens. So I decided to get something off my chest about steroids:
The steroids scandal doesn’t bother me much at all.
Just like the strike didn’t bother me (other than depriving me of baseball). Just like it doesn’t bother me 89 years ago a group of eight men played with the faith of fifty million by taking money to throw the World Series.
Don’t get me wrong; all of these things make me sad. But they don’t bother me. The reason is this: I love baseball! It is the greatest, most beautiful, most correct sport ever created, and that does not change with Roger Clemens having allegedly used performance enhancing drugs.
In a philosophy class yesterday we discussed the difference between a sentence and a proposition. Loosely, a sentence is a collection of words in a particular language. The thought expressed by a sentence is a proposition. Otherwise put, a sentence is a local instantiation of a proposition.
Roger Clemens (assuming he is guilty, which he appears to be) is a bad sentence. 1994 was a bad paragraph. Bary Bonds is a mumble of barely decipherable words.
But baseball is a proposition. It is a proposition to which we can assign a truth value. And baseball is true. Period.
This is why I never understood people who refused to watch baseball after the strike. I don’t watch baseball for baseball players… I watch it for me! I watch it to participate in truth and beauty. I wrote a few days ago about transcendent music. There is nothing, no song, no painting, no picture, no poem, no film or play… nothing that I find as aesthetically pleasing as baseball. The field, the rules, the motions, the structure, the sounds, the smells… Baseball is correct, and no poor instantiation of it can change that.
It sounds odd to say it about a 57 year old man, but Tim Keller is the darling of the Reformed community. I can’t count how many superlatives I’ve heard about him and his Manhattan church, Redeemer Presbyterian.
On the occasion of publishing his first book, The Reason for God, Newsweek has run a breif article calling him, “The Smart Shepherd.” I have to say, it’s rather refreshing to see a pastor get media attention for something other than a scandal or a self-help book. Below are links to the article, Keller’s sermons and his new book.
I was looking around youtube for some Gift of Gab / Blackalicious that I haven’t heard yet when I found this freestyle from Tom Green Live.
Now,if you don’t already know, Gab is the greatest mc. Period. He has an incredible flow and he writes for it and for the beat that he’s on instead of just writing lyrics and then making them fit. He’s also a fantastic freestyle rapper, and is incredible here, as per usual.
But I was shocked by how solid Green was. He had a nice Beasties type flow and he demonstrates that he gets hip hop with the rhymes that he puts together.
I was in love with my own ruin, in love with decay. . . .
—Augustine, Confessions
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be the natural
man here below. Lead me in the path of pleasure.
May my will be done and make of earth a heaven.
Upon my instincts I meditate day and night,
I study to fulfill their decrees. Nature’s law
is my delight, the satiation of desire.
But thus far I’ve failed, as if desire’s gut
was growing larger than my own! I’ve fed it
smut and sex, paid dearly for the finest luxuries,
but yearning is thus burned away, leaving me singed
and dry as cinders, Lord.
What wine or whiskey
will purge my gaping throat? I sought counsel
in the house of sinners, was welcomed heartily,
and I spoke, wind escaping the pit prepared for me
within my own chest. Deliver me from craving,
this lust for emptiness—fill me up, dear God,
even though (dear God!) I’m overflowing.
This table, this plate, this bottomless fucking bottle—
I’m fed up, oh Lord. I have become
a law unto myself—forbid, Father,
in your mercy, that I should keep it.
I love this:
You may remember me posting a video of 
The magazine Wired 
