James Franco and Bradley Cooper Are More Perfect Than You

Remarkably insightful article by Carina Chocano in this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine, "Our Imperfect Search for Perfection," using, among other things, the two recent Hollywood releases "The Adjustment Bureau" and "Limitless" to discuss our profoundly troubled relationship with perfection. Certainly the first time I've ever seen Pelagius in the Times (and certainly in conjunction with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills). I was only disappointed she gave the Christian understanding of human fallibility such short shrift. Weird, almost - because fashionable or not, what she's describing here is nothing less than the unshakeable and inherent religiosity that plagues all of us, believer or no. As a treatise on the anxiety and despair produced by the Law, however, not to mention the absurdity/tragedy of the universal human addiction, it's one of the two or three best things I've ever read in that paper. And the line about Franco is one for the ages:

Given the recent hell-in-a-handbasket zeitgeist, you’d think we would all find more comfort in “The Adjustment Bureau” idea that control over our own destiny is just an illusion; that if it’s not God or fate or John Slattery in a fedora controlling what happens to us, then it’s something like luck, birth order, genetics, macroeconomics, the law of attraction, big government or your damnable idiot boss. But this is not so. Given the amount of time we spend thinking and fretting and dreaming about how to become more perfect, it’s clear we’re all living in a “Limitless” world. After the movie, a woman beside me sighed, “I really need that pill.” And I blurted out involuntarily, “So do I!”

“Limitless,” in all its pulpy glory, represents the logical terminus of a certain pattern of modern thought, endlessly fueled by the culture: if you can theoretically become perfect, then it follows that you should at least try. This idea (that man is perfectible and so should strive for perfection) has been around for 2,000 years, but it has lately been streamlined and turbo-charged: in its contemporary incarnation, it regards any unfulfilled human potentialities as a particularly sad and sclerotic form of entropy. [CONTINUE READING]

Part X and the Death and Resurrection of Hollywood

Lots of interesting connections and disconnections to be found in the New Yorker profile of Barry Michels, therapist to the stars. Michels is an interesting conglomeration of Jungian psychoanalyst, self-help guru, and Alcoholic Anonymous-style breakdown-inducing tough love. You have to slog through a fair amount of nonsense, but the stuff about judgment as it relates to creativity is particularly relevant, not to mention Michels' insights at the end about death and rebirth. One can't help but wonder how much Michels picked up from close family friend Rod Serling?! ht RJH:

One recent afternoon, Michels put on his glasses, pulled out a file, and began to leaf through a pile of yellow legal-pad pages. It was a difficult case—a writer who had been blocked for two years. He was a type Michels sees frequently: someone vacillating between thinking he is God’s gift to mankind and thinking he is garbage. “Mmm, now this is interesting,” he said, looking at his notes. “That voice, the voice that says ‘I’m [crummy]’ or ‘I’m above this,’ is going to increase in volume the closer you get to actually doing the deed. You have to anticipate it, label it, and reject it every time it comes up.”

The voice belongs to what Stutz refers to as Part X, a deeply primitive dimension of the personality he identified after he began to work with show-business patients; its characteristics are petulance, rage, arrogance, hypersensitivity, a sense of victimization, and, above all, a resistance to process. Michels explains it by invoking the behavior of a two-year-old. “It’s the part that’s pounding on the table because nothing’s good enough,” he says. “They’re saying no to everything, even the color of the sippy cup—unacceptable. Most of us grow beyond the expectation that life will meet our needs in every instance. Some don’t. That’s the head of the studio, the head of the agency, or whatever, pounding his fist on a table and saying, ‘God damn it, somebody is going to pay for it!’ It’s the part of the ego that is so egotistical it believes it’s God, king of the universe. At every moment, the universe is telling him, ‘Sorry, bub, you’re not God,’ and he’s screaming, ‘No, you’re wrong and I’m going to prove it to you!’ ” [CONTINUE READING]

Iron Mike Mellows Out

The mesmerizing jumble of contradictions that is Mike Tyson soldiers on! The NY Times magazine published a treasure trove of soundbites on identity formation/deconstruction last week in their profile, The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson. Mike appears to be turning his back on the glory-culture that's defined him lo these many years, and doing so with religious vigor. What on the surface might seem like an outside-in approach to self-improvement has to be filtered through the bottoming-out narrative that has long characterized Tyson, reaching its tragic apex with the death of his daughter in 2004. And then there's his touching relationship with pigeons, which provide quite a foil to the way he has described his nature in the past, i.e. that of a "vicious tiger." Autodidact or no, there's definitely some serious insight here. Fascinating, ht JG:

The astonishing discipline and drive Tyson once put into “the stern business of pugilism,” to quote the boxer Jack Johnson, is now being channeled into the business of leading an ordinary, even humdrum existence. It is impossible not to wonder whether this effort can be sustained indefinitely, whether you can reshape the contours of a personality by a sheer act of will, but there is no doubt that Tyson has committed himself to a wholesale renovation.

As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me — no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath and has dropped 150 pounds since he weighed in at 330 in 2009. “I’ve learned to live a boring life and love it,” he declares, sounding more determined than certain. “I let too much in, and look what happened. . . . I used to have a bunch of girls and some drugs on the table. A bunch of people running around doing whatever.”

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace. One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons...
[CONTINUE READING]

Oprah, Lent and the Real American Idol

I ran across an fascinating interview on Salon.com with Kathryn Lofton--Assistant professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale-- who is the author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The interview is entitled "Worshiping at the church of Oprah Winfrey."

The interview begins,  "In the past quarter-century Oprah has become shorthand for self-help: a spiritual guide, a confessor and a warm shoulder for her adoring American public. Now in the final season of her revolutionary daytime talk show, Oprah's pronouncements have become the Word to live by for a staggeringly diverse audience. In fact, you could argue she is a religious leader for an America increasingly skeptical about organized religion." Indeed. This is exactly the premise of Professor Lofton's book. Here are some excerpts from the interview: 

What was it about Oprah that made you think of her in the context of American religious history?

Within these very corporate formats of daytime television, extraordinary forms of suffering were being confessed to and described. There's a great book about Oprah by Eva Illouz, "Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery," and Illouz points out something that I dig into, and that is the strange way in which the extremity of human despair -- not merely estranged spouses, we're talking stories of people coming home and seeing that their spouse has murdered all their kids and then themselves -- are being dealt with in the same way as these topics that are seemingly shallow. Good glasses for a spring party, best new strategies for boyfriend wear. This exposure of human need at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon made me think, "What is this thing?" We're so accustomed now to reality programming and a whole spate of shows spun off from Oprah, but, as a scholar of a religion, I think it's one of our jobs to be cued into how people manage pain, and the idea of evil, or whether or not we live in a just world.

What is Oprah's religious background?

Oprah talks about a Baptist church that her grandmother took her to in Mississippi. She tells an anecdote about how she was a successful young churchgoer and was asked to preach in front of that audience and was a very good girl who memorized scriptural passages. Then in her adulthood, she has some criticism of male figures in the church and the dominance of male authorities and it seems that by the time we get to the '90s, it's circulating that she's no longer a member of the church but she continues to use Christian idioms in her conversational speech. She says, "Jesus lives." She'll say, "Amen." She'll occasionally sing lines from obviously Protestant hymns, but she claims now that she's no longer interested in organizational religion, and she's more interested in a personal relationship with God. Indeed, she has around her a large collection of spiritual purveyors of a wide variety: Buddhist, Hindu, Unity Church. Every flavor of the contemporary, spiritual rainbow is welcomed into her studio.

If Oprah is a preacher, what is she telling us? What is her gospel?

Her gospel -- her good news -- is you. The good news is that if you take hold of your life; if you discover (as she says) your best life, anything is possible. Of course, this good news is translated not only through her exhibition of you -- you through her audience members, guests, columnists, message board commentators -- but also through the unending rehearsal of her. The good news is her revelations about her best life -- lived, she says, in service to you.

Why do you think so many people who shun religion are comfortable looking to Oprah for "spiritual guidance"?

Precisely because she says she doesn't seem typical in her authority. Because she represents -- in her race and gender and origins -- being utterly outside established power. Also, she isn't preaching to sell you something singular. She says, over and over: I am here to let you be you. My answers are mine, and they made my struggling life something fantastic to share. You're not joining a group, you're just finding your inner fabulous. This is appealing to people who associate religion with controlling authority, rigid dogma or social adherence. This is a religion for those who don't want to be religious, but want to feel revelation.

Given the ubiquity of suffering and despair, far be it from me to begrudge Oprah's audience from flocking to a place where they find a bit of tenderness and compassion, but, as Professor Lofton observes,  the deeply religious overtones of Oprah's "gospel," begs the question: what is the difference?  What is the difference between what Oprah offers through her“. . .  large collection of spiritual purveyors of a wide variety: Buddhist, Hindu, Unity Church.[where]  Every flavor of the contemporary, spiritual rainbow is welcomed into her studio.” and the Christian Gospel? 

Historically, this demographic to whom Oprah ministers--those who are seeking "[a] religion for those who don't want to be religious, but want to feel revelation"---is similar (if not identical) to the majority of the world into which the first Christian preacher came saying things like, “I am the way, the truth and the life. . . , " and "whoever would save his life will lose it. . . "

He and his followers definitely did not get IPads, but some eventually did make it to Australia. 

What Noel Gallagher Is Not Supposed To Feel

Today brings the release of the first post-Oasis project from a Gallagher brother, the debut album by the Liam-led Beady Eye, Different Gear Still Speeding. And you may be surprised to hear that the record is really pretty good, at least on par with Oasis' 2009 swansong Dig Out Your Soul. So what better week to reappraise Oasis' underrated fourth album, the quintessentially hungover Standing on the Shoulder of Giants? When it was released, the expectations were astronomical - Oasis were still the biggest band in the (rest of the) world, albeit weighed down by/wrestling with the question of how to follow-up the relative "failure" of Be Here Now, a record which has rightly come to symbolize the utter hollowness of 90s Britpop hubris/excess. If you're Noel Gallagher, you toss your brother a few swagger-anthems and spend the rest of the disc getting introspective. There's always been a moral undercurrent to Gallagher's tunes, usually covered up in melancholy, but it's never been as prominent or sincere as his trio of regretful masterpieces on SOTSOG, "Gas Panic," "Where Did It All Go Wrong?," and "Sunday Morning Call" (not to mention the closing prayer, "Roll It Over"). They're all surprisingly thoughtful ruminations on foolishness, mortality and hypocrisy, from a guy known mainly for his incredibly brash self-belief.

The specter of a Roman Catholic upbringing rears its head all over the place, especially in "Sunday Morning Call," in which Noel comes as close as he ever has to a Romans 7 'despair in the flesh' moment: "In your head do you feel/ What you're not supposed to feel?/ And you take what you want/But you won't get it for free/ You need more time/ Cause your thoughts and words/ Won't last forever more/ And I'm not sure if it'll ever work out right." Not exactly the So-Sally-Can-Wait singalong that fans were hoping for. Indeed, instead of glorifying rockstar mythology with slightly obscured platitudes, as he ingeniously did on their first three records, SOTSOG weighs the cost and comes clean about the consequences - and does so with humility. No wonder it didn't sell all that well.

On the next record, Heathen Chemistry, an exhausted Noel retreated from the confessionalism, relegated his more personal statements to Bsides ("Just Getting Older," "Idler's Dream" and "Shout It Out Loud") and handed over the reigns to his bandmates, effectively throwing in the towel. With a few notable exceptions - he is Noel Gallagher after all. But here's to hoping that his forthcoming solo record taps a similarly vulnerable vein:
[CONTINUE READING]

Give Up, Charlie Sheen!

But alas, the exhortation to "give up" does not engender the ability, nor the desire, to "give up."

We've posted bits and pieces on Charlie Sheen's very public, very unfortunate meltdown before, but one might argue that Thursday the "bottoming out process" began. CBS has halted production on Sheen's successful TV show, Two-and-a-Half-Men, in response to Sheen's recent disastrous radio interview. Sheen attacked, among other things, the show's producer, Alcoholics Anonymous, and, of course, Thomas Jefferson? As Sheen publicly tailspins, he becomes a public example of the bound will we all wrestle with day-in and day-out. Some moments from Sheen's recent spectacle [from buddytv.com]:

On Alcoholics Anonymous: "This bootleg cult, arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous, reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent. Do the math ... another one of their mottoes is 'Don't be special, be one of us.' Newsflash: I am special, and I will never be one of you! I have a disease? [Expletive implying the previous statement wasn't true]! I cured it with my brain, with my mind. I cured it, I'm done."

On how he's a High Priest Vatican Assassin Warlock: "Guys, it's right there in the thing, duh! We work for the Pope, we murder people. We're Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they're not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons [a term of endearment] in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom. Print that, people. See where that goes."

On his own awesomeness: "I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time--and this includes naps --I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground."

On Jefferson: "I'm not Thomas Jefferson. He was a [expletive implying weakness]. But I dare anyone to debate me on things."

Perhaps Sheen's meltdown is at its most discomforting when, in feverishly rejecting his need for further help or recovery, he shows his desperate need for help and recovery. In passionately rejecting AA, he shows his desperate need for AA. In his refusal to accept grace, he shows his desperate need of grace. It is in his "health" that everybody else can see his sickness.

So, Mr. Sheen, all we can really do is leave you with that which you most despise: Step 1. "We admitted we were powerless... that our lives had become unmanageable..." Speaking from experience, this powerlessness is the only thing that gets you through the times when your F-18 crashes and your mind can't find the cure. Maybe one day we can be your "gnarly gnarlingtons?"

The full interview is available online, but listening to the whole thing amounts to cynical enjoyment in another person's vocational train wreck, which we don't endorse at MBird. As DZ said in his previous post- we really hope CS finds he help he needs!

p.s. For a glimpse into the hyper-relevant Mockingbird publication Grace in Addiction: What the Church Can Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous, go here - if we had his address, we'd send him a copy (nudge nudge).

Sweet Emotion on American Idol?

Not being a huge American Idol person, or post-Rocks Aerosmith fan, everything in Jon Caramanica's article in this past Sunday's NY Times, "Steven Tyler Escapes From Idolatry," was news to me. Those of you who've seen the episode in question can tell us whether it was indeed a lightning-striking instance of grace on TV or a carefully played media-moment (or both, as the article suggests). But there's an unmistakeable note of Nazareth here - in regards to Mr. Tyler, that is - of folks being caught seriously off guard by his charisma/character/kindness, of their preconceptions being exposed for what they are (myself included), not to mention the sheer unexpectedness of grace, ht CW:

Fame isn’t all gold, honey and massage oils; it’s also the successful navigation of a steady stream of unlikely and uncomfortable situations. At this, the first few weeks of the 10th season of “American Idol” have proved, Steven Tyler is an unalloyed genius.

The moment when Mr. Tyler, one of this season’s new judges, claimed the show as his own came during the third night of auditions. Chris Medina tried out with a muscular version of The Script’s “Breakeven” after telling the story of how his fiancée, Juliana Ramos, suffered a brain injury that left her in a wheelchair, able to move her left arm and little more. After he sang, he brought Ms. Ramos in to the audition room at the judges’ behest. By any measure it was difficult to watch, testing the viewer’s urge to turn away, to wish for a speedy change of scene.

Randy Jackson and Jennifer Lopez introduced themselves to Ms. Ramos, but Mr. Tyler took charge. “Hi, girl,” he said, shaking her hand. “I just heard your fiancé sing, and he’s so good.” At this point, as she teetered back and forth, he was gripping her shoulder and staring at her comfortingly: a rock, a confidant, a seducer. “You know, because he sings to you all the time,” he said, leaning in to her, stroking her hair, kissing her warmly — all with tenderness — then whispering in her ear, “That’s why he sings so good, because he sings to you.”

It was a stellar embrace, the sort of practiced sincerity that’s one of the wages of extreme celebrity. Except that, over time, it can shake free of its dishonesty, as was the case here. In that moment Mr. Tyler was both deeply practiced and deeply humane. It made for a stunning display of kindness unusual not just for “Idol,” but for all of popular culture in matters of dealing with the severely disabled. [CONTINUE READING]

Tina Fey and The Baby-Career Dilemma

Tina Fey plays the double messages of modern life better than anyone, particularly those that relate to women. On 30 Rock, her character Liz Lemon is a catalog of contradictions, constantly (and hilariously) battling the differences between the ideal and the real, her 'shoulds' and her 'wants', her convictions and her appetites, etc. She mines those discrepancies for laughs, and in doing so, has become something of an icon for (a certain kind of) modern woman, a walking commentary on contemporary gender politics. She adds just enough straight-man self-deprecation to get away with some fairly subversive comedy, and whenever 30 Rock veers from that mold, it gets pretty shrill/snobby, pretty fast. Anyways, Fey recently put her considerable skills to work for the New Yorker, examining the question of whether or not to have a second baby, "Confessions of a Juggler." The piece, which is really very funny, doubles as a crash-course in moving-target Judgment, both the internal and external kind, and the fruit it produces: sleepless nights, canker sores, counter-judgments, etc. And in the final paragraph, if you substitute "minister" for "gynecologist," (and assume Christ as the basis of the assurance), you almost have Law/Gospel treatise on your hands... I'm only sort of kidding: 

"What is the rudest question you can ask a woman? 'How old are you?' 'What do you weigh?'... No, the worst question is: 'How do you juggle it all?' 'How do you juggle it all?' people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes, 'You're screwing it all up, aren't you?' their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggles as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I've poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.

The second-worst question you can ask a woman is: 'Are you going to have more kids?'
[CONTINUE READING]

Indiana Gaga and The Temple of Superstardom

Fantastic article by Neil Strauss about the relationship between faith and superstardom in last week's Wall Street Journal, entitled "God at the Grammys: The Chosen Ones." Among his interviewees are Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Christina Aguilera, and Aaron Rodgers, all of whom credit their success to some form of divine intervention. Not much needs to be said that Sean Norris didn't say last year in his post "The American Music Awards, Mickey Rourke and the Thirst for Glory", i.e. if superstars teach us anything, it's how undeniably hardwired we are as "theologians of glory," always locating God in success rather than failure, in victory rather than defeat, in Jerusalem rather than Nazareth, in Easter rather than Good Friday. Which is not to say that artists are somehow exempted from any honest-to-God sense of vocation (Bono "springsteens" to mind), just that when fame - and awards/rewards - get involved, the waters get pretty muddied, pretty quickly.

When this year's Grammy winners accept their awards on Sunday night, God is likely to be thanked and praised more than a few times. It's a longstanding showbiz tradition, after all, prevalent at the Oscars, the Emmys and even the AVN Awards for adult movies. Until I began interviewing many of the winners of these awards two decades ago, I thought this was a sign of humility and gratitude (or at least an affectation of them) [ed. note: which it certainly can be on occasion, and even when it's not, is clearly preferable to unrestrained self-aggrandizement, no?]. But the truth is more interesting than that.

Before they were famous, many of the biggest pop stars in the world believed that God wanted them to be famous, that this was his plan for them, just as it was his plan for the rest of us not to be famous. Conversely, many equally talented but slightly less famous musicians I've interviewed felt their success was accidental or undeserved—and soon after fell out of the limelight.

As I compiled and analyzed these interviews for my new book, I reached a surprising conclusion: Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. Of course, from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual's soul than his or her secular success, and one's destiny is unknowable. So what's helping these stars is not so much religion as belief—specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else. [CONTINUE READING]

Disconnecting Paul Haggis

A thoroughly engrossing, if absurdly lengthy article in The New Yorker about screenwriter/director Paul Haggis' much publicized break with The Church of Scientology. While The New Yorker might not be the first place I'd look for a balanced look at anything remotely religious in nature, the article contains some undeniably provocative quotes. Plus, reality checks are always useful, especially when it comes to something that, in certain very superficial lights, resembles AA or Roman Catholicism or American Evangelicalism. For our purposes, the details of Haggis' protracted "disconnection" are less interesting than all the tidbits about the ideology itself: the unapolgetic self-salvation and elitism, the blatant intertwining of "good works" with success, the heavy internal policing and hierarchical gnosticism, the extraterrestrial stuff, the very idea of what constitutes a "faith," etc. The more you dig, the more it looks like the very antithesis of Christianity, a religion in the most negative sense, precisely the sort that Christ came to expose and dismantle. But perhaps that's being charitable... to Scientology, ht LB:

The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan—an immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as “the source” of the religion. Hubbard’s writings offer a “technology” of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides “the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality.” A church publication declares, “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.” Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. “As Scientologists in all walks of life will attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities.”
----------------

I asked Haggis why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged. “I identify with the underdog,” he said. “I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”
---------------

...what [Haggis] understood to be the ethic of Scientology: “Hubbard says that there is a relationship between knowledge, responsibility, and control, and as soon as you know something you have a responsibility to act. And, if you don’t, shame on you.” [CONTINUE READING]

Amy Adams on Children and Freedom

A quick one from Mbird friend Russ Masterson.

Amy Adams, who just received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her role in The Fighter was on Tavis Smiley in December to promote the film. Tavis asked Amy about having a new baby, and her response was priceless:

“I like the world more now. The focus is off of me, and that is freedom. That I no longer am the most important thing in my life. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, before I was self-centered. I didn’t even realize how self-centered. My small day to day drama is now so different.”

All us parents, say, “Yep, uh huh, yes maam. Preach it, Amy.” We know of what she speaks. I’ve always said that I realized how selfish I was when I got married. Then we had a child, and I realized even more how selfish I was. Then we had our second little girl, and I realized again, to a greater extent, how much I mainly think about and concern myself with myself.

It may not sound like it, but this insight into my depravity has actually been a gift. It has forced me to look beyond myself, in the direction of freedom, both in terms of my standing with God (the sufficiency of Jesus’ forgiveness and imputed righteousness), not to mention my ability to truly love anyone.

Here’s the complete conversation between Tavis and Amy over on PBS.

The Ripped and the Righteous: The Gospel According to Jack LaLanne

Frank Bruni cooked up (!) quite the enlightening editorial in Saturday's NY Times about the recently deceased fitness guru Jack LaLanne, tracing the ways LaLanne was responsible for turning exercise into a religion, the gym into a temple, etc. I'll spare you a diatribe about the superficiality of "discipline" for discipline's sake - Bruni says/implies what needs to be said/implied - what's more interesting here is that although LaLanne may not have come up with the outside-in approach to self-improvement (that particular 'face' has been launching ships since the Stone Age), he was certainly instrumental in figuring out how to market it. It would seem he casts a shadow of Charles Finney-like proportions. I for one was unaware how explicit the movement was, from its outset, in co-opting religious language (ht AZ):

That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These... are [Jack LaLanne's] doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul.

“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”

The message that perspiration is a gateway to, and reflection of, higher virtues is captured in health club slogans like ones used by the Equinox chain over recent years: “Results aren’t always measured in pounds and inches.” “My body. My biography.” “It’s not fitness. It’s life.” The same idea is encoded in the language of personal improvement. A “new you” usually means a trimmer, tauter version, not someone who has learned to speak Mandarin or picked up woodworking skills.
---------------

In his own way, Mr. LaLanne was also a moralist, proselytizing about diet and exercise. To go back and look at his language is to be struck by its religious flavor.  He once compared himself to Billy Graham, saying that while Mr. Graham (no relation to Sylvester) was “for the hereafter,” he was “for the here and now.” He called what he was doing a crusade, adding, “To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America." And he admitted that exercise wasn’t always pleasurable or diverting. You did it because it was right and good and true — because it would better you. The Protestant work ethic pulsed through every one of his jumping jacks.
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There’s a bullying strain to the modern fitness ethos, a blurred line between cheerleading and hectoring. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that kind of intimidation — in addition to the social and economic realities of diet and exercise — helps explain the paradox that for all the newfangled aerobic machines and reduced-rate January gym memberships, Americans aren’t noticeably haler and healthier.

When exercise comes wrapped in value judgments, does it wind up entangled in an anxiety that threatens the very resolve to get fit? As Mr. LaLanne was siring new methods for shaping up, he was fathering something else, too: a potent, and in some cases immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt.

Lifting Up Jeff Lynne and The Wilbury Sound

There haven't been any books written about Jeff Lynne yet, but there will be. ELO was fantastic and would certainly be enough to qualify him as hagiography-worthy. But what separates Jeff from many of the pop musicians of his generation is the extremely potent second wind that he caught in the late 80s.

ELO never put out a dud in their 15 or so years together, refining a "sound" so infectious and cool that it's no surprise it's experienced such a dramatic revival in the past few years (where would the Flaming Lips be without ELO?!). Jeff's outspoken love of The Beatles meant that they got saddled with a pastiche tag early on that didn't remotely do them justice. Sure, his voice sounds uncannily like all four Beatles singing at once, but the space-age obsessions and synth proclivities are all dressed-down 70s prog, brilliantly assimilated into a pop-classicist's sensibility that manages to sound lush yet synthetic at the same time. The highlights are probably the near-bookends of 1974's Eldorado and their unsung 1981 time-travel masterpiece Time (which, more than any of its sci-fi concept-record brothers from the same period, has stood the test of, um, time. Eat your heart out, Alan Parsons). But I digress.

Lynne's second wind, which was really more of an explosion, has as its center The Traveling Wilburys' first album. We've made a lot on here about the genius of that record; the spontaneity, the remarkable ego-less-ness, the sheer joy, not to mention the effortlessly fabulous songs that mark it as a prime example of What We Talk About When We Talk About Fruit, i.e. what can happen organically when plans and pressures are somehow supplanted by love and freedom as the motivating factors of an endeavor. Indeed, the Wilbury period, from roughly 1987 to 1991, marks an outburst of creativity that was fueled, at least in part, by some deep friendships. These guys were having fun, relishing their shared love of rock n roll and of one another, and that joy found its way into the grooves. If you haven't watched the documentary, do yourself a favor (or just watch the corresponding half-hour in Runnin' Down a Dream). It's all highly illustrative of a great passage in Grace in Practice:

For when work is produced from a natural desire and motive, rather than from the idea of actions resulting in proposed consequences, the best work is done. This is because the subject of the work, the “I” of all human endeavor, is not its end. That “I” is dead; it was dead on arrival the day grace arrived on the scene, irrespective of your gifts, talenst and givens. Under grace, career advances only one way: away from the wreckage of the “I” and the absence of any fixed need for achievement. (pg 73).

Truly, there's no hint of youthful self-aggrandizement in any of the Wilbury records. If anything they're self-deprecating - the lack of pretense is astonishing given the talents involved. Yes, lyrically-speaking, apart from Harrison's project, these may not be the deepest tracks ever cut, but they more than make up for it with their uncontrived generosity.
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Lil Wayne Reads The Bible

Priceless quote from the upcoming Rolling Stone cover story, ht BG:

In prison he read biographies of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Marvin Gaye, Joan Jett, Vince Lombardi and Anthony Kiedis. "[Kiedis'] Scar Tissue was really good," he says. "I also read the Bible for the first time. It was deep! I liked the parts where some character was once this, but he ended up being that. Like he'd be dissing Jesus, and then he ends up being a saint. That was cool."

Top MBird News Pieces of 2010

In the age of the 24 hour news cycle, here are my picks for Mockingbird’s Top News Stories of 2010

10) The Rent is too Damn High, November 2010

Jimmy McMillan, candidate for Mayor of NYC, has found the solution to all of New York’s problems. The rent is just too damn high. Take the rent part out, replace it with unmerited grace, and you pretty much have Mockingbird’s philosophy of preaching- repeat the gospel over and over again till people start to change.

9) Kill the Ump! Grace & Baseball, June 2010

Jim Joyce, professional MLB umpire, blows a perfect game call for Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga. The teary eyed, apologetic ump becomes the woman caught in adultery, and while the rest of the world is ready to stone him, the Tigers extend him forgiveness and grace. The previous M-Bird post can be found here.

8) Katie’s Star Wars Water Bottle, November 2010

Katie, a first-grade gal, was bullied by the boys for having a Star Wars water bottle. Once the all-powerful Star Wars fan base heard her story, Katie was bombarded with toys, lightsabers, and Star Wars school supplies from every corner of the U.S. She was even photoshopped in a poster with a lightsaber! The Gospel in this situation? Katie, who was adopted at an early age, was so loved by her parents (and the greater Star Wars community) that her rejection by her classmates was overpowered by unmerited love of her family. (See Galatians for a further discussion on salvation & adoption)

7) Lindsay Lohan & Tiger Woods- Summer & Fall 2010

In the bound will category, LiLo, child star, actress, and Hollywood socialite, spends the second half of 2010 in and out of jail and rehab. Similarly, Tiger Woods confesses to, well, a lot of marital indiscretion. But still, at the end of the day, we’re just as addicted to ourselves and in need of just as much grace as our starlet and athlete friends. Grace and peace to you both!

6) Wikileaks, Fall 2010

While Julian Assange is no messiah, there is a familiarity about a man who exposes deep dark secrets and is suddenly the target of universal prosecution. I can’t wait till this whole saga gets turned into a movie (the Social Network 2, anybody?). While we may disagree over the moral and political consequences of Mr. Assange’s wikileak organization, let’s take note at how un-David like governments responded to this Nathan-esque situation.

5) Michael Vick's Football season, 2010

Vick’s redemption has been the subject of a prior Mockingbird post, but now that President Obama is throwing his lot in with the Philly Quarterback, it’s worth repeating again. The power of second chances and forgiveness is truly transforming (though Tucker Carlson, who said this week on national television that Vick should have been executed, might disagree).

4) Mel Gibson’s Meltdown, July 2010

Mel Gibson, actor, producer, and Passion of the Christ director, gets caught verbally abusing and threatening his ex-girlfriend/baby mommy over the phone. While other Evangelicals may look down, blush, and shuffle their feet in embarrassment, I think Mr. Gibson was the perfect person to direct the Passion. The real-life passion was meant for such a man as Mel, and truth be told, you and I are no different.

3) The Chilean Miner's Dark Side, Summer 2010

For many, the story of the trapped Chilean miners was the one inspirational news story in a year of oil spills and jobless angst. But every now and then, a piece about the Chilean miners would come out detailing how the families of the miners were confronted by their husband’s secret lovers as both tried to lay claim as the significant other. It just goes to show you- there’s a dark side to any news that celebrates the achievement and tenacity of the human spirit!

2) Jet Blue Employee Quits with Style, August 2010

In a textbook case study of the relationship between law and sin, a flight attendant decided to quit his job in style. After saying a few choice words into the jet’s PA system, he grabbed a couple of beers from the beverage cart, popped the emergency shoot, slide out of the plane, walked to his car, and drove home. It goes to show you that the command to smile and be nice to rude passengers doesn't engender the ability to obey that command, but instantly feeds the desire to disobey. Just as important: the near universal response from the rest of America: “Oh, I wish I could do that…”

1) Antoine Dodson: Bed Intruder, July 2010

What started as an angry, despairing rant with the local news crew turned into an escape from the projects for the Dodson family. After youtube picked up Antoine’s rant and turned it into an autotuned remix, the Bed Intruder Song flipped what was the darkest day for the Dodson family into their ticket out of the slums. It was a true-to-life example of how the darkest day and the brightest day can be joined together- not unlike Good Friday.

Honorable mentions: The secretly Evangelical Insane Clown Posse releases Creationism Rap, BP Oil Spill is Sign of the Apocalypse, and Dallas Pastor Caught Allegedly Burglarizing a House on Christmas Eve.

Happy New Year, Mockingbird! See you all in 2011!

Five Favorite Documentaries of 2010

Kicking off our year-end lists, the five best documentaries I watched this year:

1. Bigger Stronger Faster
Who knew the steroids "epidemic" could inspire such a profound meditation on identity, righteousness, strength, addiction, masculinity, hypocrisy, politics and family?! Seriously, as an unflinching yet entertaining look at the human condition, this one just cannot be beat. Bigger Stronger Faster not only makes a very convincing case for bodybuilding as a Religion, but more than any other film I've seen this year, it deserves its own Mockingbird breakout session (it sort of is its own Mbird breakout session). BSF also comes recommended by our resident Documentary King, The StampDawg himself.


Note: the trailer doesn't even come close to doing the film justice.

2. Public Speaking
This is a brand-new one, directed by Martin Scorsese, and only available on HBO for the time being. Essentially a feature-length soapbox for writer-humorist Fran Lebowitz, it's jam-packed with wit and wisdom of the utterly non-PC variety. Her thoughts on audience, forgiveness, race, technology, gender, sexuality, self-esteem are all fascinating, wildly entertaining and believe it or not, surprisingly sympathetic. Lebowitz is a treasure.
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The Secret History of William Axl Rose, Pt 3: Left So Far Out From The Shore

[Concluding our three-part series on Axl Rose. Read part one and part two.]

"The name [Guns n Roses] helped the music [on Chinese Democracy] more than you could ever know, and I'm not talking in regards to studios and budgets. I mean it as in being pushed by something, and having to get the music to a place where I can find my peace regardless of what anyone says." - Axl Rose, 2009

We come now to the third act, or what some might call the epilogue of the story. With the original band having gone up in smoke sometime in the mid-90s, Axl forged ahead. Or at least, announced that he was forging ahead. But then, silence. There were "wars and rumors of wars" for a while, but after the forgettable Spaghetti Incident and a pretty atrocious cover of "Sympathy for the Devil" the greatest (and globally most popular) American band of the late 80s/early 90s faded from view. Completely. The turnaround was dramatic - all of a sudden it was 2000 and an Axl-sized hole was gaping.

Axl claims that his absurdly prolonged absence wasn't a matter of perfectionism. He refers instead to an unrelenting barrage of woes, both artistic and letigious in nature, that kept him from finishing the new album. The revolving door of personnel and management seemed to tell a different tale: that of an erratic artist getting more erratic.

In the story of Axl Rose, we've seen how the Law (the "oughts" of the Bible and the world) provokes intense rebellion, how its converse fosters creativity and collaboration, and how the pressure of success turns in on itself, killing conviviality. We've also seen how when standards are met, by say, producing the best-selling debut album of all time, self-righteousness and greed soon follow. In this final chapter, we see how the Law paralyzes. In fact, the 14-years-in-the-making Chinese Democracy has already come to function as a shorthand for creative paralysis. I mean, five years would have been a long time! But Axl needed to prove himself sans Slash, to demonstrate conclusively that he was the driving force behind the band all along, that the critics had been wrong about him, and of course, that the music in his head was worth the wait/struggle (and worth recording, period). And as the years went by, the standards naturally rose... and rose... and rose. Axl rationalized the process this way:
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Jesse Eisenberg: Crazy Cat Lady?

I love it when the first guest on a talk show, always a FAR bigger name than the second guest, stays for the second guest and the musical act. A classy move. What usually happens, though, is that the star's handlers get them there, shove them onto the set, they respond to a set of pre-approved "questions" ("I understand you recently had an interesting experience on an airplane..."), pimp their latest project, and get out of town.

Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale, Zombieland, and most recently, The Social Network) was on Conan on Thursday, and was a class act. He was funny, self-effacing, and most importantly, stayed on the couch through the Venus Williams interview and the Decemberists' song. Great move, Jesse, now I like you even more.

But the thing that I liked even more, the reason I'm blogging about this episode of Conan, was something that Eisenberg said in his interview. When Conan asked him if his life had changed in any way since the release of The Social Network, he said, somewhat cryptically, "I have a lot more cats." So it comes out that Eisenberg is on a list of cat-adopters, so his apartment is basically a cat boarding house. He said that it's full of cat food, litter, and nothing else. Why does he have all the cats? Guilt! He said that he feels guilty for having such success in movies, and so cares for abandoned cats. The more success he had, the more cats he adopted. More popular movie? More cats. The result? Some potentially (and temporarily) expiated guilt and a house full of cats!

Isn't it great that we have a God who accepted expiation once and for all? Who doesn't require that we keep punishing ourselves (by filling our homes with animals who think they're smarter than us)?

Another Week Ends: Seminarian Plagiarism, Disney's Decline, DCAU, Mad Men, MJ

1. Our Pensacola mini-conference is underway! If you live in the area, don't be afraid to drop in unannounced... We would love to see you. And those of you that don't live in the area, don't be afraid to say a prayer in support.

2. An unsettling firsthand account of professional plagiarism over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "The Shadow Scholar", the most arresting portion for us being (ht AZ):

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.

3. A worthy look at Disney's conflicted relationship with its religious past over at First Things, through the lens of Armond White's review of Disney's current PC-schlock-fest Tangled. The always provocative White employs Mbird faves Carl Dreyer, Hans Christian Anderson, and The Pet Shop Boys among others to make his point. He writes:

We’ve accustomed ourselves to the formula by which a family movie designed to pacify children is considered innocuous, but we cannot ignore the ramifications of entertainment concepts that move away from profundity or that deny audiences the persuasiveness and the confirmation of epiphany.

Religion offers a way to understand our human impulses; popular culture has become a way to muddle them. That’s the theme the Pet Shop Boys identify in [their new project, a musical adaptation of] Hans Christian Andersen’s “Most Incredible Thing”; it’s also exemplified by the commercial corruptions that Tangled performs on the tale of Rapunzel. In his classic study The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that readers “find folk fairy tales more satisfying than all other children’s stories” because “fairy tales carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time.” As pop culture gets away from faith, it also abandons its most important social function, confusing rather than uniting our humanity. It will take faith to raise corrupted pop culture from the dead. 

4. New York publishes two curiously affirming profiles of evangelical figures in one week!
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(Don't) Take A Look At Me Now

Poor Phil Collins having his 2 Cor 3:6a moment in the recent issue of Rolling Stone, and it's hard not to have compassion for (and maybe a little chuckle at) the guy. He sounds like a truly defeated man, very much ready for 6b. I wish he could come to Pensacola:

In the summer of 1994, reports began circulating that Collins had informed his (second) wife that he wanted a divorce - via fax. He denied it vehemently, and the fax itself was never produced, but no matter: Suddenly, it was open season on the guy. Oasis' Noel Gallagher started hammering on him any time he could, to uproarious effect. Among his choicest bon mots: "You don't have to be great to be successful. Just look at Phil Collins."... And so it's gone, especially on the Internet, where I Hate Phil Collins sites have flourished. He gets criticized for everything. For his hair, for his height, for his pants (pleated khakis), for his shirts (tucks them in), for being "a shameless, smirking show hog."

"I don't understand it," he says, looking pained. "I've become a target for no apparent reason. I only make the records once; it's the radio that plays them all the time. I mean, the Antichrist? But it's too late. The die is cast as to what I am."

"When I say, 'I'm going to write myself out of the script,' I'm serious. When I say I'm stopping, and I don't care about all this, I'm serious. I mean, I will write songs, and I will have fun making demos, but I may well not make another record. My deal with Atlantic is over with this Motown record. It's sobering and quite liberating. Anyway, I've had enough of being me. Not to the point-" He pauses, and then he goes on, "I have had suicidal thoughts. I wouldn't blow my head off. I'd overdose or do something that didn't hurt. But I wouldn't do that to the children. A comedian who committed suicide in the 60s left a note saying, 'Too many things went wrong too often.' I often think about that."

"Everything has added up to a load that I'm getting tired of carrying," he continues. "It's gotten so complicated. It's the three failed marriages, and having kids that grew up without me, and it's the personal criticism, of being Mr. Nice Guy, or of divorcing my wife by fax, all that stuff, the journalism, some of which I find insulting. I wouldn't say that I have suicidal tendencies over my career or bad press. They're just another chink in the wall. It's cumulative. You can say, 'Grow up, man, everybody gets criticism.' I know that. And I've philosophically adjusted to it. But does that make it any more pleasurable? No."[CONTINUE READING]