Capitol Hill Blog Party

On Saturday after lunch and a walk in the park, Angel and I put on our best hipster costumes and walked down the street to the Capitol Hill Block Party--our local--suddenly really hyped--indie rock music festival. Here are some pictures (most of which are really bad, sorry) and a recap.

(Oh, and PS--Shayne, these are Hipsters. Allll Hipsters.)

We stuck almost exclusively to Northwest bands--not really intentionally, but b/c there were a lot of them there, I wanted to see them, and Angel had no preference because she'd never heard of anyone at the show. First up were the Cave Singers, who make a really good back-woods-old-timey-whiskey-jugs-and-broke-down-cars-and-pentecostal-churches kind of indie rock. There's a lot of that coming out of the PNW these days, and I like it. Fake back-woods as the new grunge?

After them, we sat and drank coffee while Kimya Dawson was singing. I think the top picture is the crowd during her show, and the bottom picture is definitely my old buddy Joel, who we talked to while we were drinking coffee (he wasn't doing that when we talked to him). Neither Angel nor I really liked Kimya, but apparently she sang a song from the movie Juno, which is one of the best movies of the year--apparently.



After Kimya's show we wandered into a packed club called Neumo's to watch Portland's "The Builders and the Butchers". Neither one of us had heard them before, but they were probably the highlight of the festival for us. More slightly pentecostal/old-timey flavored NW indie rock, and awesome. I always think that religious imagery makes a nice spice for music, and they sprinkle it through nicely. I liked them so much (and my pictures are so bad) that I've included someone else's video of their song "Let it Rain". We weren't anywhere near this close.

After that we wandered out to a packed Fleet Foxes show on the main stage. They're everyone's favorite Seattle band right now. As Angel said, they're kind of like the BeeGees. Well, I guess kind of indie rock BeeGees. They use four-part harmonies anyway. They're a good band, but not really a great live show when you're standing near the back of the crowd and a steady stream of people keep pushing by you and tripping over you and that sort of thing.

After the Fleet Foxes, we went back to Neumos and watched two songs by Jaguar Love, who are a one of the three new bands composed of ex-Blood Brothers members. Shrieking indie rock/sort of hardcore kind of stuff, not a bad band, but not my thing. Angel couldn't take it, so we left.

After that, we left and went to dinner at a Vietnamese place next to a grocery store. I had Mongolian Tofu and Thai Iced Tea, and Angel had some mushroom kind of thing.

After dinner, we went to an 'unofficial' Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death show in the ChaCha Lounge, which is in the basement of Bimbo's Cantina, which used to be called Bimbo's Bitchin' Burrito Kitchen, which was a much better name. TOLSATD put on a great show as always; more punk rock than I've seen them before. As a band a few years back, they started off really heavily experimental, but have morphed into something more accessible. Andrea Zollo (ex-Pretty Girls Make Graves) on vocals has been a nice addition to the band over the last year or so. She is pictured above with Spencer and Joel and some people in a bar doing a Bikini Kill cover.


That was kind of the end of the night for us. We stuck around and watched a few songs by the Hold Steady (above) who are fun and dorky, and I probably would have liked more when I was a teenager.



After that we stood around for a few songs by Devotchka. Once again, apparently everyone loves them--they were the festival headliner--but I don't really get it. They're kind of world-musicky and had a song on Little Miss Sunshine, which makes me think that if you consider yourself cultured, fun and indie, you should try to enjoy their music--or at least tell people that you do. With that in mind, I've included one of their videos above.

Tommy Dean

For the last four days, I've basically been hanging around Seattle not doing anything and trying not to spend any money. As part of that experience, on Saturday night Angel and I took a couple of friends to a free concert by Tommy Dean at a record store in the Ballard neighborhood, north of us. (You should click on that link and listen to some of his stuff at MySpace. Seriously.)

I've posted on this guy before (we first saw him at Seattle's Folklife festival with Baby Gramps, who we happened upon at a restaurant the same night, coincidentally enough), but man, what a surreal experience that show was. First off, we were basically the entire crowd. He had two friends there, and three teenagers showed up, but beyond that it was really just us and a few stray store-browsers who were listening. Secondly, he played for two and a half hours non-stop, and we left before he finished (standing around alone as a musician plays for you for two and a half hours is itself an unusual experience). Third, he was absolutely captivating. The two and a half hours of music were almost all original and almost all really really good, but he hasn't released an album. (He's a busker by trade, and sings for money at the Pike Place Market.) His musical style ranged between Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" to old timey, bluesy or blue-grassy stuff. He used lots of weird religious imagery, which I always love, and sung about sex, cocaine and the open road.

I'm gushing now (and this post is starting to read like one of his friends wrote it. I don't know him--really! I said "good stuff" to him at the show, but he didn't respond.) but I really don't understand how he hasn't managed to gather a following. Our friend kept referring to him in reference to early Bob Dylan, which is both a kiss of death and appropriate, I think. My comparison is to Daniel Johnston, the schizophrenic musical genius that they made a movie about a few years back. Whoever you compare him to, he comes off as both eccentric and brilliant, and I would guess that people will hear about him at some point. If you're in Seattle, you should really go see him live--it'll probably be free and intimate. If you're not, watch for an album--he's apparently releasing "Introducing Tommy Dean" on Bad Animals before long. His music is beautiful and classic, his voice is high and strange, and his race and descent are indeterminate. It's not an experience I've had at a show before.

Here are a few strange and grainy videos I found of Tommy on YouTube, to add to the mystique. (Thanks veraviolet)

First Tommy on a Beach:



Then Tommy in the Waves:



And finally Tommy doing what he does:

Never mind the reviews or the seeming idiocy of the premise

I thoroughly recommend this two CD set from 2006: Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys.

Christian Music on the Rocks

I've had an eventful few weeks and I feel like I've got a lot of processing to do and a few stories to tell, so I'm hoping that I can find a lot of time over the next few days to blog. I have a meeting all day tomorrow and Shayne flies in on Sunday, so that might be wishful thinking. We'll be touring the Seattle sights and hopefully going to the US Air Guitar nationals next door to my house, and going to see TOLSATD next door to my house.

In any case though, to begin filling you in on what I've been up to, as you may know our friend from New Zealand, Christie, was visiting for the last few weeks. Two Sundays ago another friend from New Zealand also happened to be in town, Brooke Fraser, who is the artist in the video above, so we all went to the show from which the clip was taken at a little club down from our house. Brooke isn't actually a friend, beyond Angel having said hi to her at the show. She is however a well-known artist in New Zealand, and apparently in the Christian world.

Being there, I realized that it was the first time I'd been to a "Christian concert" in years--since college, I would guess. The last time I went to a "Christian concert" in a secular club was when I saw P.O.D. at Bogart's in Cincinnati, I think in 2000. At the time I felt it was cool that Christians were in a bar, b/c it seemed like a good way to share the gospel. This time I felt like it was kind of a sneaky thing to do. Then I thought of it as redemptive, now I thought of it as kind of dishonest or something, and at least a little bit silly. The Christian rides in on the white horse with a siren song to save the hordes of drunken sinners. Problem is that only Seattle Pacific Christian College students showed up, along with other Christians sheepishly sipping our PBRs.

That's my cynical and unfair projection though. I'm not sure that Brooke was trying to convert anyone--she didn't talk like it--probably just trying to sell records and get her music out. She's an evangelical, but she's a NZ evangelical, which isn't quite the same thing as a US evangelical. They're more "She'll be right, mate", and we're more "If you don't save them, who will?" Whatever the case, I went in to the concert not wanting to like her. I'm not the sappy Christian music type anymore, after all. Now I'm obviously too cool for you because of my knowledge of obscure indie-music that you've never heard of, like everyone else in Seattle (and every other major white-liberal enclave). My taste in music shows that I'm gritty and tough, with a great sense of humor and a depth of understanding. Fact is though, Brooke kicked ass in the most wholesome of ways. I found myself enthralled against my will, as maybe you are too watching the video while you're reading this. Or maybe I just still like sappy music.

Life Canon

I've come across this idea a few times recently, and I think it's interesting: that is, that each of us have a group of books/documents/movies/etc. which we use as a foundation in our attempt to shape our lives and define our meaning. I saw that Aaron at therivermerchant had posted on his, and I thought I'd give it a go. He lays down several ground rules, the most significant of which, I think, is that these can't be sacred texts, bibles, etc.

I was suprised at how quickly these popped to mind and how undeniably canonical they are for me. Here are my top 10, submitted in no particular order for your voyeuristic pleasure:

1 and 2) Jurgen Moltmann's Crucified God and Theology of Hope (Two of a three part series which hugely informs my vision of God. Studied these for a year for my thesis.)

3) Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (I always feel a little pretentious mentioning how much I like this book, but it hugely shapes my thinking on evil, suffering and religion. Spent my senior year of college trying to slog through it.)

4) David Sedaris' Naked (Defines the sense of humor that I want to emulate. Read it in two days on a rainy trip to Bellingham, WA.)

5) Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (Defines the way I feel about my midwestern home. Read it almost entirely in one sitting in a cold and ugly apartment in New Zealand after buying it for a friend on her birthday.)

6) David Quammen's Song of the Dodo (Transformed the way I think about science and the natural world, and was the original seed of my environmentalism and pragmatic, pseudo-naturalist Christianity. Read it while working in a hotel in Louisville, getting mad when customers would interrupt.)

7) Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (Finally convinced me that my fundamentalist Christian meta-narrative was scereeewwwed up. Read it primarily while waiting in line to give plasma during my senior year of college. As good a place to lose faith as any, I suppose.)

8) Mark Twain's Roughing It (Re-convinced me that being an American isn't all bad after coming home from New Zealand. Read it in a depressed period in Seattle while working in a warehouse.)

9) U2's Joshua Tree (The music that defined my adolescence, and I refound the shape of my faith in it years later. Still my favorite album, and the only one that I would call canonical.)

10) Albert Schweitzer's Out of My Life and Thought (My first non-evangelical theological Canonical text, sent me on the trajectory that I'm still following. Read it in in a small apartmen in Louisville during the year after marriage when I was trying to figure out who I was post-Asbury College.)

bell hooks, inequality, illness, and so forth.

Hi everybody. Along with international travel, whining about church, and gallivanting with teenagers, I've been occupying my time lately reading books by bell hooks, a black feminist sociologist and educator who I've been put on to by a couple of friends. She talks a lot about oppression, racism, poverty, patriarchy, classism, political action, art, education, and the struggle for equality, so in many ways she's the consummate liberal. Actually, wait, maybe I am the consummate liberal, because I'm a white, moving-towards-upper-middle-class patriarchal racist classist lazy male who likes to tell people that I read books by people like bell hooks. In any case, by happy, blog-producing coincidence, this morning the Seattle Times ran a short opinion piece by Jerry Large that points to a major reason that I, a well-off white male, am so intrigued by the ideas of people like bell hooks who argue and work for class equality. In essence, the research suggests that when material equality exists in a culture, and resources are distributed evenly (through whatever means), everyone benefits, not just those on the bottom.

Large's point, in short, is:

We know poverty can affect diet, living conditions, access to medical care.

But inequality puts stress on people at every level. Poor people suffer most, but so do wealthy people in societies where there are large gaps between rich and poor. High-income white Americans have higher rates of diabetes, cancer and hypertension than poor people in England, according to a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association two years ago. (Read the whole article here)

In essence, rich folks trying to "protect their money" by voting against upper-class or big business tax increases (and consequently improved social programming) are shooting themselves in the collective foot. Even if they do end up with greater material wealth, their overall health and quality of life decreases with the increase in resource and social disparity. This sense was palpable in the air for us in (more equitably organized) New Zealand, and Angel's studies in Nursing and Public Health have been pointing our thoughts in that direction for a few years. (In fact, Angel's favorite professor Steven Bezruchka was Large's source for the article.) We both see a healthcare system with equal access for all as one necessary battle in the struggle for a healthy and just society, but the point here is bigger. In fact, material and social equality--or at least relative equality--would be beneficial for all of us, and would play a significant role in improving physical, mental, and social health across our society. To put a bit of a spin on MLK's well-known quote, poverty and oppression anywhere are a sociologically measurable threat to wealth and happiness everywhere. So, bell hooks, even though I might be a part of your problems, I'm listening to you because I think your ideas will help me out in the long run.

There is a PBS Documentary series on this topic airing now called "Unnatural Causes ... Is Inequality Making Us Sick". (Info online here) Feel free to argue with me, but you should really watch the series, which should provide a lot more fuel for Large's and Bezruchka's position. I'm hoping that they post the whole series online in the near future.

Rowan Williams on the Sacramentality of Sex

I haven't read it yet, but you can here. Happy Good Friday.

Hey, I met this guy in New Zealand too. (Well, I saw him on tv there anyway).

Blog buddy

I don't know how it happened, but my life has devolved to the point that I now have blog buddies. Check out one of them, Mike Croghan, because he's having an interesting series on theology, and outlining some core issues from an emergent Anglican perspective.

In other buddy news, check out my Rap Buddy Locke. He's the most positive rapper in the world.

Great music from buddies.

here

On a lighter note...

Poached from my friend Joel's Myspace

No one embodies the paradoxical unity of spiritual beauty and bad teeth like Shane MacGowan

Also love and miss 16 Horsepower

I do love the Seattle music.

The Cave Singers, Dancing on Our Graves

I'm excited for this

The Gutter Twins

This is what I've been waiting for from the School of Rock

Portland School of Rock, Best of the Northwest

Angel and I drove down to Portland on Friday, and happened upon this: Portland's Paul Green School of Rock was performing their "Best of the Northwest" Show. Essentially it was a bunch of kids playing with loads of NW musicians: Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie is in this video, the guitar player from Mudhoney played with them, Dave Bazan from Pedro the Lion, a guy from the Decemberists was there, a guy from the Shins was supposed to be there, but wasn't. It was incredible: the most fun I've had at a show since I was a teenager. The kids were really talented, and there was great support from within the local and national scene. It was amazing seeing kids performing songs next to the guys that wrote them without any obvious self-consciousness. You have to give props to Portland for being able to support something like this in a relatively small city. They're the new Seattle when it comes to music, it seems.

The best part was that they were really starting them young. I'm waiting for the clip to come up on YouTube, but some they had some 10 year old (or so) kid singing metal with this awesome butt-kickin' sneer.

Here's an article on the show, and another video.



By the way, Portland has officially made it on to my top 10 favorite cities list.

Jeff Holmes

Jeff Holmes from the Floating Men (video below) requested my friendship on MySpace. I'm not entirely sure how he found out that I was creeping around his profile.

News Flash: David Bowie wins Craziest Genius Award!

The Floating Men

The best Tennessee bar band I found out about at Asbury College.