2024-06-26T13:35:18+00:00

What Happened?

June 26, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Brittany Murphy was a super talented actress who died at 32, in circumstances that were cloudy and subject to a bunch of suspicious guesses as to ‘what really happened.’ The documentary on Max is awfully sad, and after 2 hours, the circumstances aren’t so much cloudy as they are unimaginable. A 32 year old woman shouldn’t just die of pneumonia in her bathroom with her mother and husband in the next room. And the husband shouldn’t then die months later of the same cause. But it did happen, so now what?

The husband, Simon, was (by most of these accounts) not a terrific person. He had the gift of overwhelming charisma, and when that was combined with a lack of character and/or morality, he became a very dangerous influence. It’s hard to know what was true, because he so rarely was honest. He had 2 children that some of those purported to be closest to him found out only in this documentary. He was ridiculously controlling, isolating both Brittany and her mother, Sharon, making all decisions on all matters, big & small, personally & professionally. Probably, if Brittany Murphy was married to a different person, she would be alive today, but she wasn’t. She was married to this one.

I loved Brittany Murphy in all of the films I saw (of course, nobody saw all of her films, her later work was far beneath her talent). I found her electric and engaging. As we all saw her wasting away in front of us, a victim of anorexia and drugs and whatever else contributes to a woman’s public disappearance, we mourned well before the news reports. The story starts as an uplifting, hopeful comedy, but is quickly revealed as tragedy, and that’s just the worst – not because she’s a celebrity, or because we loved her, but because she was a human being in a world that wholly consumed her.

So, what really happened?

I’m thinking how we all have our self-destructive impulses. Drugs aren’t mine, and neither is anorexia, but maybe they’re yours. No matter, we have buttons of insecurities and inadequacies. We have fears and voices in our heads that whisper some of the nastiest things anyone has ever heard. We aren’t celebrities whose every choice and picture is eviscerated by armies of Perez Hilton’s, but if we were, maybe we’d live in a filthy apartment and swallow handfuls of pills and not go to the Dr. Or maybe it would be something else. Maybe we’d drink bottles of wine all day. Or eat m&m’s on the couch, mindlessly scrolling through TikToks. Or run for miles and miles, never escaping the pain & pressure of staying alive, never dodging the arrows. I think it’s mostly the height of arrogance to think Brittany Murphy is so different from us. Maybe we had relationships that were unhealthy, where we changed so much we didn’t recognize ourselves. Maybe we’d go a little crazy, too, lonely & small without a community of people to love us in real life (instead of on screen). Maybe it’s just by the grace of God that we are here and she’s not.

What happened is heartbreaking, but not so strange. What now, then?

Kathy Najimi said, through tears, that she wished she’d have gone over there and pulled her out, called the police. Even if Brittany Murphy hated her afterwards. And Kathy Najimi is right. We all wish she did, too. But we all figure we wouldn’t have, either. Maybe minding our own business, pretending everybody is so divided, isn’t the answer. Maybe it never was. Maybe we should start to know our neighbor’s names and stories, to laugh with the comedies, and call the police in the tragedies. Maybe we can reach out, and maybe we can show up. Maybe it’s a cliché, but loving each other might be the answer. Maybe not, too, but it’s worth a shot. We’ve tried the others for way too damn long and they haven’t worked, even a little bit. Maybe it’s time for a revolution.

Hellville

May 8, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

So, I watched the Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion documentary on Max last weekend. Brandy Melville is, apparently, a wildly popular clothing store for young-ish girls that I have never heard of. I don’t know how to feel about that. Of course, a middle-aged man (and I don’t know how to feel about that, either) maybe shouldn’t be too concerned with the fashion trends & habits of girls. There is an argument to be made that a middle-aged man maybe shouldn’t be too concerned with fashion trends & habits, at all, but whatever. I happen to like to be familiar with popular culture, as it is what we generally regard as our principal connector, and as I happen to like to connect, the popular culture is important to me.

Brandy Melville was created and operated by an older man named Stephan Marsan. Maybe that’s weird. The men are pretty creepy, sexist and racist, which is worse than weird, but if we knew who runs all of the companies we patronize, it might not be a collection of the best people in the world. This guy might not be such an exception.

The idea is that our clothes are disposable and our conscienceless consumption is unsustainable. In the service of providing them to us inexpensively, the supply chain is overflowing with slavery and human trafficking. This obviously isn’t only clothing, I’m typing on an iPad that’s production story would absolutely horrify us. And our phones and tvs and food and furniture. Everything probably has a similarly sordid path to our nameless big box retailer. And afterwards, we discard the old without thinking, and they end up in landfills or on, as this doc details, on the beaches of Ghana.

Why do we need so much? When will we finally see the manipulations of marketers/advertisers as the lies that they are? These solutions for modern life that we neeeeed will not fill our holes or our broken parts. They never did, they were never supposed to – it’s how they stay in business. If those jeans or that car did make us whole, we wouldn’t buy next season’s models, which would leave them all unemployed. The consumption is an issue, but not the one I am interested in today. The disposability is.

Everything in our culture is made with a shortened shelf-life. We use them today and throw them away when they no longer serve us, and get a new one. This is troubling when we’re talking about t-shirts, but exponentially more so when we begin to talk about people & relationships. The t-shirts are cheap, temporary, and we carry that to our commitments, friends and marriages. The second they stop serving us, making us feel a certain way, we toss them aside and get a new one.

I just don’t think this sort of perspective should be allowed to exist any longer, anywhere. Maybe 4 friends we’d die for are much, much better that 4,000 “friends” we barely know. Maybe 1 pair of jeans that’ll last for the rest of our lives is preferable to 8 or 10 to last the month. Instead of trading our partners in, maybe marriages should last, even after the excitement of falling in love fades. Maybe we all feel that we’re only as good as our last conversation or report, and maybe that’s causing us all to feel very, very anxious. Maybe that’s the birthplace of everybody’s increasing perfectionism.

Maybe not, of course, maybe it’s progress, and maybe I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned… Either way, I’m going to buy less cheap garbage and keep the Angel forever.

Weirdos

April 17, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I watched Asteroid City and Red, White, & Wasted last weekend. They’re quite different, but they share some characteristics. Or, at least I thought they shared some characteristics.

Asteroid City is a film made by Wes Anderson, the famously quirky creator of gems like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. He’s totally unique, his movies look like no one filmmaker’s. Not only did no one else make them, no one else could possibly have made them As a matter of fact, he’s a pretty big exception.

Every genre, begins with a true innovation (inasmuch as anything is true innovation), and is immediately followed by a B group that drives roads recently paved, then C, D, E, & F groups, that simply copy a commercial blueprint. When this happens, the genre is “Dead,” and we all mourn the A’s and move on. Take grunge music, for example. Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, and others were the A set, cutting paths into landscape where none exist. Then, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, et al, came along, who were sometimes great, followed by a few averages, then by absolute trash like Puddle of Mudd and Ugly Kid Joe, who looked the part and sometimes sounded the part but lacked the soul of the A’s and B’s, for whom the music wasn’t a moneymaking enterprise, and was dna.

Wes Anderson has no B’s. No one even tries to be as idiosyncratic as he is.

I liked Asteroid City very much, but I love weird things. I love cultures, people and ideas that are different from my own. This is an odd movie. I don’t pretend to know what it means, or really even exactly what happened, but my understanding isn’t always necessary to an experience.

Now, Red, White & Wasted is a documentary that, on the surface, seems up my alley. I appreciate weirdos doing their weird things, freaks who are freaks – in other words, people being just who they are, who are different and embrace that other-ness. They’re weirdos, just like you and certainly like me and probably all of our favorite people. The caveat to my love of these films is that the filmmakers cannot judge the subjects. If the people behind the camera are making fun of the people in front of it, it’s mean, smug and condescending, and I can’t stand mean, smug, and condescending. Different people aren’t lesser people, obviously, they’re just different. Wes Anderson knows this.

ANNND, the documentary has to have an arc; a beginning and an end. That’s the genius of documentary filmmakers, they find the narratives in our real life clusters. Maybe Red, White, & Wasted didn’t laugh at it’s people, but they didn’t celebrate them, didn’t appreciate them, and didn’t show any sort of movement. Now, it’s entirely possible there was no movement among all of the gross -isms and the horrific degradation of human beings, especially the women. But I have trouble believing that. There is always movement, always understanding. (Ok, maybe not always.)

So, Asteroid City was beautiful and weird, and it didn’t matter too much that I didn’t perfectly understand what in the world was going on. That sounds just like life, and I sure love that, so maybe that explains my perspective.

Red, White & Wasted, on the other hand, was weird and ugly, and I knew very well what was happening. I just love people too much to like it.

The Josh Lucas Situation

April 8, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

2 weeks ago, the Angel and I watched a movie called Life As We Know It, starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. It falls squarely in the often disrespectful and dismissive rom-com genre. To trash an entire genre is pretty unfair, some romantic comedies are solid, well written, and deep. This is not one of those. This is one that deserves to be dismissed. This is a great example of why rom-coms are not taken seriously. But it’s something else, maybe something that’s not entirely harmless.

But to get there, we have to talk about Josh Lucas. In the movie Sweet Home Alabama, Reese Witherspoon is engaged to marry McDreamy, but was previously, secretly married to Josh Lucas. She goes home to find him and secure the divorce papers to re-marry. The movie is mostly unremarkable, except for the fact that McDreamy is awesome. He’s full of class and grace, even when she leaves him at the altar, saying “So this is what this feels like,” loving her by letting her go. She leaves him to return to Josh Lucas, who is a not a nice person. His love for her is so great he treats her terribly.

In Life As We Know It, Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel are the best friends of the individuals in a married couple. When that couple is killed in an accident, the 2 leads have to assume the parenting of their baby. Duhamel is an overgrown boy, using and disposing of hordes of women (this is somehow played as charm), and is desperately trying to avoid the responsibility of fatherhood. Heigl is cold and focused, being chased by local pediatrician Josh Lucas, who is (in a nice reversal) a great dude. Like Reese, Heigl also chooses poorly, choosing the selfish boy who expresses his love through disrespect and being super nasty.

It seems to me that, for a woman, romance should be marked by a mean emotionally stunted child who “loves” so much they just can’t possibly be expected to be kind. Swoon!

My friends and I, in middle & high school

[Incidentally, the solar eclipse is happening RIGHT NOW, as I write this]

Anyway, my friends and I used to lament the fact that all of the girls seemed to not be able to get enough of the boys who treated them the worst, in direct correlation. And we, who did not act as if the girls were something we stepped in or only for meeting our physical teenage desires, were alone. As I got a little older, I realized that maybe this scientific theory was more anecdotal than scientific, and only felt like the horrible people always had dates while we watched Point Break on repeat together.

But what we can learn from Josh Lucas is that we were right. He is beautiful in both movies, the only difference is that he’s a heel in Sweet Home Alabama. The other difference, of course, is that he also gets the girl in Sweet Home Alabama. Holding doors and listening are a direct road to nowhere, while pouting and shouting down at your date like a jackass is the only way to mutually fulfilling relationships.

In the brilliant Nick Hornby novel High Fidelity, our hero wonders whether we liked the music we did because we were a certain way, or if we were a certain way because of the music we liked. Did the movies follow reality, or did they create it? Do women love jerks because they loved rom-coms first, or do they love jerks and the rom-coms that described their lives followed?

Life As We Know It was, honestly, pretty offensive, but maybe that’s just because I have been trying to love the sweet Angel through soft words and doing the dishes, telling her how much I appreciate her and proving it in my actions, believing she is someone to be valued and cherished, as we lean into her independence and great strength. Maybe this has been my problem, maybe she’s left crying herself to sleep, after we lay like spoons and I fall asleep always next to her, wishing I would drink too much and cheat just enough to assert my sharp-edged machismo. Maybe she has been dreaming I’d berate her with long strings of curse words, turn the table over and throw the plates of the dinner she made against the wall. Will she then run into my arms in the rain like in The Notebook??

My message to the Angel is that I guess I can try for her. But maybe it’s those last 2 words that show how predictable my failure is. Nothing is “for her” in these movies. Hm. Now I don’t know what to do. Maybe I’ll watch a few more to find out how to do romance. Wish me luck.

George Clooney v. James Franco

March 12, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I’ve watched several films lately. We’re going to cancel the cable tv in our house, so I’ve been spending a little more time on streamers than channels. There is a sort of greater truth hidden in the fact that the more channels you have, the less chance of finding anything to watch. We have access to everything, now, does that create a sort of paralysis? Is that why so many of us spend so much time on social media sites? Do we spend hours on TikTok because their algorithm decides what we’ll watch, and not us? With these apps, we are mostly passive consumers, we eat what is put in front of us.

Is that why it’s so hard to find something to order at restaurants with 15 page menus? I have grown accustomed to asking the servers what the best thing is, and just get that. Who would know better than the server? Is that the human version of scrolling through the social media algorithm? In the presence of too many options, they decide what I’ll like for me.

Anyway. The Monuments Men is one of the best movies I’ve seen, or at least one of the movies I’ve liked the most. Those 2 categories are different. Radiohead’s Kid A is a great album, and I just hate it. If I ever hear one note of it again, it won’t be because I chose to. It’ll be because I ended up in a place that would, and I’ll be looking for an excuse to leave immediately. But I really love every Alkaline Trio album, and probably none are what a critic might call “great.” I love Point Break, but Citizen Kane is a “great,” important film.

I think Monuments Men is both. It’s based on a true story, concerning the value of art in our lives, in our world, and the lengths aware, intelligent people will go to preserve all of it (even the pieces they surely don’t like.) It’s beautiful and I loved every second of it.

George Clooney directed and acted in it, and if I’m honest, I’d watch anything in which he has any part. He’s gorgeous and has all the charm and likability. I’d like to play basketball or go on a road trip with him.

I have a very great friend who was seeing a boy, who isn’t a nice person. He’s not a nice person to her, or anyone else. But there is a pattern that is difficult to understand. He has 4 children (3 mothers) whom he does not see or support financially, has spent more time in jail than out, is a violent substance abuser, and has a line of women (whether it is romantic, or sisters and cousins and a mom who all go to extraordinary lengths to enable his poor behavior) waiting to be the next to be mistreated by him. Without exception, they are mistreated and wait by the door, just in case he would choose to do it again. It’s very strange.

If he looked like George Clooney, I might understand. He doesn’t. If he acted like, or had the boundless charisma of George Clooney, I might understand. He doesn’t. If he were both, I would certainly understand, but he is neither. It’s very strange.

James Franco makes movies that usually aren’t very good, he’s not too handsome or talented or likable, and he has a solid career. He continues to make movies. Same phenomenon. Why would we continue to stand in line, to pay money to watch James Franco movies? Very strange.

But maybe the James Franco analogy really doesn’t hold up. He isn’t hurting us, isn’t manipulating us, isn’t abusing us. He’s just making bad movies. And maybe you think they’re not bad movies. Maybe you don’t like Point Break. That’s the wonder of artistic expression, and it’s why we’d fight and die for the right to create, regardless of our personal tastes. We live in a culture where the diversity of thought and opinion is awesome, where difference doesn’t subtract, it adds exponentially. We’re a better world with James Franco movies than without. (I can’t believe I just wrote that last sentence.) We don’t simply tolerate each other, we appreciate, we love each other. We hold hands and dance to wildly contrasting types of music, types of music that would not get along if they met at a party. But this isn’t a party, it’s our lives, and everybody belongs.

(Except maybe that guy my friend was dating. At least not until he stops damaging everybody he sees on purpose. Then, he’s more than welcome to come in and make himself at home.)

The Valuable Pain of Nostalgia

March 4, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I was watching Point Break (the classic original, not the silly, pointless remake) with my son last week, and I felt the familiar pangs of nostalgia. Point Break is the movie I have seen the most times, probably between 50 and 100, though it’s entirely possible that number is higher. There were weekends my best friend and I watched it 2 or 3 times, almost beginning immediately after rewinding the VHS tape. We saw it in the theater over 20 times (this was before we’d have to work 2 full time jobs to afford to go to the movie theater)! I still love it more than is reasonable.

Later last week, I heard Round Here, by the Counting Crows, and Rebel Yell, by Billy Idol, on the radio. Also, The awesome John Cougar Mellencamp 2 disc greatest hit collection is now in my car CD player. Who knows when that’ll come out? I cried at the Wham! Netflix documentary. The heartache of this nostalgia is nearly unbearable sometimes.

Nostalgia means “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations,” and I think it’s generally regarded as fairly unhealthy. Another dictionary writes, it’s an “excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition,” and brings to mind the white-washing of the “good old days,” which in all likelihood were not so very good, certainly not as good as we remember, and a return would be cultural/social regression.

Nostalgia can also be an avoidance of mindful presence in the here & now. My nostalgia is strange to me, because there is no place I’d rather be than here & now. There is no part of the past that was better for me than right now. I am married to the Angel, to name just one very amazing reason (but I could go on and on, as you know if you’ve read any of the posts on this site.)

I love music, and for a music lover, my Amazon Music app, with it’s algorithm that knows me and what I like even better than my sister, (I am currently listening to “My Discovery Mix,” where the algorithm gives me 25 songs I’ve never heard by artists I’ve never heard of that they are absolutely right to think I’ll like) is a perfect divine gift. I write a blog, am fairly active on Facebook (because I’m a million years old), stream my tv shows, wear Bluetooth headphones to the gym where I check in via QR code on another app. I do crossword puzzles on my phone. For a Luddite, I’m not a very committed one. All of these facts make my nostalgia quite peculiar, so why is it so pronounced when I hear any ‘90’s alternative rock songs before 1995, when the genre started to eat itself?

And I think I know.

On December 2nd of 1983, the 13 minute short-film music video for “Thriller” was released. I watched it at my neighbor’s house with my cousins and our families. We all had our minds blown together. And that’s why I feel nostalgic, and why I think it’s not unhealthy at all, and is, instead, our souls crying out to us in sadness and lack. Our souls asking us to fix us.

We all watched Seinfeld together, in our own homes, and talked about it Friday morning. We all heard Round Here on the same radio stations. There is nothing like that now. When we want to talk about most of the best new songs, we have to send links first. There are so few communal activities in art anymore. Everybody watches the Super Bowl, even if they don’t like or care about football or the teams, because we all do it together, as one people. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are sort of similar, I guess, in that we all know what they’re doing in real time.

We’re created for community, to be together, and when we are not, we feel that lonely emptiness. And we desperately search for it, and there’s few places to find it, really. On one level, I love the local church for the same reason I love the relic that was Top 40 Radio. Because we experience(d) it together. And don’t even get me started on the heartbreaking extinction of record stores.

Our hearts are begging us to find others with whom to walk through our lives. That’s nostalgia. Not because Silver Spoons or Diff’rent Strokes were particularly great, but because families watched them together at the same day, same time, each week. We laughed together, cried together, waited together. We had the same reference banks, and while that sounds superficial, I assure you that in a divided world, it is not. We have forgotten that we are all human, that we have far more in common than we don’t, and that loss of shared experience has a huge cost. We are all human beings, and we are made to love each other, in the same rooms, facing the same directions, no matter how far removed we get.

Nostalgia is just a subtle reminder that we miss it. A lot.

Who I Am.

January 22, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

There are a few works (Barbie, Echo, Strange World) I’d like to discuss. Well, sort of. The site asked me my first name and what it means in the prompt. It’s Charles, but I have gone by Chad forever. Don’t ask me how you get Chad from Charles, I’m not sure that’s a usual shortening, but if it matters that much, you’d have to ask my mom. It was her decision. Why does the site care? Why would it prompt me with that?

I think the site believes that we can learn a bit more about each other, if we explore the meanings and etymology of our names. It’s wrong, of course. What does Charles, or Chad, say about me, who I actually am? Chuck Klosterman, in his book Fargo Rock City, says any review says almost nothing about the actual whatever (film, album, etc) being reviewed, and everything about the one doing the reviewing. If that’s the case – and it is – then you already know who I am, in the most significant way. Much more than if you knew my given first name is Charles or that I’m a Junior.

Barbie is both dumber and smarter than I expected. It’s purposefully cheesy and embarrassing, in parts, and deep and nuanced, in others. It’s really a fascinating film, perfectly cast and surprisingly well written. The characters are plastic, but developed as flash and blood, with lots of authentic facets of the human experience. I loved it and my mom hated it, which is one of the best compliments I can give. Nobody hates vanilla ice cream. It’s nobody’s favorite, but nobody thinks it’s gross, either. We all like it. Morrissey is my favorite singer, and my brother cringes at the sound of his voice. You can’t really love something without edges. The things that truly matter are, on some beautiful level, polarizing. Barbie is.

Echo is one of the best Marvel series on Disney+. Echo is a deaf Native American woman named Maya, the show is culturally wonderful and very violent. The most important sections of Black Panther were the music and practices of Wakandan culture. This is why the Tolerance Crew’s virtue of “colorblindness” is so dumb. Why would we all ever want to be the same???? My ancestry doesn’t have powwows or quinceaneras, and that’s too bad. But I have other things. I don’t want to lose my traditions and I certainly don’t want to eliminate theirs. I want us all to live in the most vibrant, colorful world as possible, where we are not simply tolerated (which is an offensively low bar to aspire to) but appreciated and loved. Echo was great.

Strange World was totally average, with amazing graphics.

I wonder what these last 3 paragraphs say about me. Probably you know that, as a target demographic, I am very easy to please. I want to like everything, so when I don’t, it’s depressing to me. Maybe when I don’t, it’s because I’ve just had an argument with the Angel, or my stomach hurts, or I’m preoccupied with the drama of friends and family. Books are a little exempt from this, because they take much longer to consume.

I’m reading one now, called As Good As Dead, by Elizabeth Evans, that has an act of unfaithfulness as it’s inciting event. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, even though Elizabeth Evans is awesome. That kind of betrayal hurts my soul and my soul is damaged enough simply living an engaged life in the world. Enough real life unfaithfulness exists to suffer. Maybe I don’t need the nauseous response of a fictional anxiety.

Yes, that last paragraph reveals much more of who I am than the 4 letters of my name ever could. Listening to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out is more important to me and who I am than a German lineage.

The first thing I wanted to know when I began talking to a prospective romantic interest is what sorts of cds she owned, not her middle name. (Incidentally, the Angel’s collection was awful, but she’s so jarringly gorgeous, exceptions were made.) I don’t care as much, now that I’m not a teenager, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care at all. Or that it’s irrelevant.

The honest truth is that it matters if you like Pulp Fiction, and why or why not, and it will always paint a more accurate self-portrait than any of us will admit.

Cover Songs

November 8, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Earlier this week, a cover of “Killing In The Name,” came across my “You Might Like” playlist. I have been very open with my acceptance of the fact that Amazon absolutely knows what I might like. I’ve even embraced the omnipotence of The Machines, if it means I get new songs by new bands on a regular basis.

“Killing In The Name” is a Rage Against The Machine song, from their first eponymous album, and it is perfect. Everything about it is perfect. Rage Against The Machine was awesome, especially for a 17 year-old boy who was socially frustrated and angry (like me).

The cover version is from something called Sueco, and it’s a shot for shot remake, like that equally superfluous Gus Van Sant Psycho remake. The problem with this sort of cover of this sort of song is that the decision to make it a carbon copy (with the only difference being the people playing it) is a guarantee that it will be worse in every way. For example, whoever sings for Sueco (maybe Sueco is his name?) is decisively NOT Zack de la Rocha. Instead, he’s a sad substitute. When I tried to look this up, I discovered that Machine Gun Kelly made the same mistake in 2020. It’s also faithful, which also just makes it worse.

If “Killing In The Name” (or any Rage song, really) is going to be covered, the artist has to be wildly different, like Tori Amos or Sarah McLachlan. That would be interesting, right? New, different aspects would be emphasized, words we missed before might be noticed, it could reach an entirely new audience. And that is the point of a cover song.

What does Sueco or Machine Gun Kelly’s version add to the world? Literally no one would listen to theirs when the perfect Rage original is available. Why would they? (Maybe Sueco’s mom would, but moms are like that, it’s like a beautifully pure form of maternal insanity.)

I care for lots of reasons. First, because I care about music and art and I care about what it says about us, individually and as a culture.

And the second is because it makes me think of the Bible. The Great Commission of Jesus is that we spread the Gospel. This Gospel never changes, but the way we present it does, based on who we are, our personalities, the things we like, and gifts & talents we have received. And as we are different, our audience is, too. We’re like walking, talking, loving cover songs, playing the original (in this case, the Gospel) authentically, from our own unique design.

What if we try to play our version by trying to sound just like somebody else’s? What if we are Sueco, playing a Rage classic, while bringing nothing that is strictly Sueco’s. It’s simply unnecessary, which makes it offensive, if you happen to care about our individual creative sparks, which I do, very much.

Maybe Sueco is terrific? Who will ever know, as long as they are trying to play somebody else’s songs, just like that somebody else? Maybe they should cover “Love Is A Battlefield” instead, but this time like Sueco, not like Pat Benatar. I’m assuming Sueco is a hard rock band, but what do I know? They could sound more like James Taylor on their originals. Now I’m assuming they have originals. The point is, they have been given something that we will never experience as long as they’re trying to be someone else.

And as far as the Bible, I can reach certain types, but I can’t reach some people that you can, or that my sister can, or that my neighbors can. But they need to be reached, so now what? How about if we all stop trying so hard to be someone else, doing what someone else is doing, the way they’re doing it, and start doing it the way we do? We’re the only ones who can – you’re the only one who can play it like you, who can love like you. And if you don’t do it like you, not only are you making pointless Sueco covers that no one will hear, but you’re not making your own songs. And we desperately need your songs, our story can’t ever be completely told without them.

So, This Is What This Feels Like

September 18, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

The Angel is home from work sick today. She works in an elementary school, so early-September illness is part of the job description. As we all know, children are sometimes very cute, and they are always germ farms, little individual super-spreaders. Everybody feels great when school starts, but as the runny noses (wiped on forearms and sleeves leaving slime trails like giant slugs) begin, viruses and infections are generously given to all inside. It’s inevitable, we take our turn and move on.

So as it is the Angel’s turn now, we watched the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Sweet Home Alabama today. As far as rom-coms go, it’s above average. But there is one very notable, very surprising, characteristic.

Reese is someone called Melanie, Jake/Josh Lucas is her childhood boyfriend. They marry, she moves away and meets McDreamy (from Grey’s Anatomy fame) – Andrew/Patrick Dempsey – and they want to marry, so she has to go sweet home to Alabama to secure Jake’s signature on the divorce papers. All sorts of hijinks ensue. You see, she hasn’t told anyone from her new New York life that she was ever born, much less from embarrassing (but wonderfully quirky and endearing) parents in Alabama, and was once married. (I’ll spoil the ending in a minute.) Obviously, it’s fairly rote, could’ve been written by an early AI rom-com program.

There are a few movies, like the Karate Kid and the Hunger Games, where the stars/heroes are the worst. Daniel Larusso and Katniss Everdeen are, by miles, the most unlikeable characters in their respective stories. Reese and Josh Lucas are terrible, the script says they are “in love,” but they clearly hate each other’s guts. Their marriage was a train wreck, and honestly, it’s good she moved away and they both moved on (sort of).

Moving on in the same way we hang on to old awful relationships because we’re seeking “closure,” whatever that means. This mythical “closure” doesn’t have anything close to the power to make these relationships healthy, but we hang on and Hollywood calls it romance. Go figure.

The great big exception is McDreamy. Our recent pop culture creates, almost exclusively (except for superheroes), caricatures of men, where they are always confused, embarrassing, and ‘hilarious’ in their utter uselessness. They are Raymond Barone, we shake our heads and laugh.

McDreamy is awesome. Not only is he gorgeous, but he is principled and classy, he loves Reese unconditionally and forgives her lies, deception and infidelity. It’s quite jarring to see a man played like this. He’s confident and assured, which allows him to choose her, not because he needs her or that she completes him (2 reductive movie tropes), but because he will love her, they will love each other, without balls, chains, manipulation, or co-dependence. That’s what he thinks. That’s what marriage is. She does not want this kind of adult relationship, though.

She leaves him at the altar, and he says precisely what we are all thinking, as we watch a deep, positive depiction of masculinity: So, this is what this feels like. Yes, this is what it feels like to be left at the altar, but it’s also what it feels like to see our expectations met by a man who behaves well; kindly, gently, selflessly. He is a unicorn, at least on film. But he exists in real life. I know many just like him, and it is absolutely beautiful to watch and enjoy.

She made the wrong choice, to be sure, but we all won. Sweet Home Alabama is an A.

Reminders

August 8, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

The site prompt is to find an “entirely uninteresting story,” and consider how it relates to your life. I don’t understand it at all. There is almost nothing that is entirely uninteresting, and as everything is connected, considering doesn’t take much time or effort. Maybe finding uninteresting things requires being uninteresting ourselves, and we are lots of things, but uninteresting is not one of them. If anyone told you otherwise, they lied to you.

I watched 2 movies – fiction, not documentaries, as is my usual practice. Both were excellent. Well, maybe they weren’t excellent, but I sure loved them. I would, because they were pretty sweet and very hopeful. I shed buckets of tears at both, which felt like a beautiful soul-cleansing rather than the anguished expulsion of the broken-hearted.

The first excellent movie was Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. I was surprised, too. Dreamworks isn’t Pixar, after all. There aren’t any Up’s or Inside Out’s to be found on their slate, and with few exceptions (the How To Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda trilogies), they’re all sort of average. Shrek is mostly ok, but the sequels bring the property values waaay down. I wouldn’t say I wanted to watch The Last Wish, but my son suggested it, and I like him a lot, so much so that it would more than make up for an hour and a half of garbage. But it was great, the feel good hit of the summer, as they say. I don’t know or care about any of the characters, but mortality, family, the battle between selfishness & selflessness, and love transcend studios or personalities. Everything negative said about it is true, it was predictable and broad. But we like what we like, and there doesn’t have to be a good critical reason. Some Britney Spears songs are terrific.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was the other. Finding original material instead of sequels/prequels/re-makes/re-imaginings is apparently quite difficult. The MCU has been on a losing streak lately, scattered and sophomoric, and this affected my expectations for GotG3, which I chose not to spend the million dollars to see in the theater. And maybe there are mountains of negative press for this, too, and probably they’re accurate, too.

I watched it twice in 2 days. The second viewing was better than the first. I have a bit of anxiety when I watch a new movie, ignoring (or trying to ignore the) questions: What’s going to happen? Will these characters live or die? And then, I don’t want them to die, I want them to live happily ever after. I like when the good guys win, evil is vanquished, the one ring is destroyed, and the emperor dies. So I can’t relax while I focus on plot and consequence. Afterwards, I can think about writing and performance, cgi and music. I can finally see the film.

Anyway, if you didn’t like it (and some in this house didn’t), that doesn’t matter to me. I wish you would have, obviously, but that’s because I want you to have a great life and enjoy the things you eat/see/hear/read/experience. I want you to feel the significance & delight in his/her lips when you kiss them. I want you to dance wildly and sing out loud. You deserve wonderful things.

Anyway (again!!), it doesn’t matter because I did. I don’t need you to, I don’t even really need it to be great high art. Like The Last Wish, it’s mortality, pain, meaning, selfishness v selflessness, identity, family, and most of all, love. I love it even more as I’m thinking about it now.

I guess that’s the point that young me so often missed, it doesn’t have to be “great” to be awesome. Kid A is a masterpiece and clearly a superior work than The Bends. But The Bends is perfect, something we all can listen to forever, and Kid A is horrible.

The things that matter touch us in ways we can’t always explain, but they leave us transformed. I might not be able to articulate why I love Local Natives cover of “Right Down The Line,” (which you should listen to as soon as you can), I don’t know the chords or the time signatures, but I do know it makes me get so lost in the Angel that the 2 become inextricably linked. It’s not Dylan, but baby, it’s .

The Last Wish and Guardians 3 are not Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction, but not everything has to be. We just have to feel them. They remind us we’re alive, and what better compliment could there ever be??

Love With A Capital L

A journey towards living an inspired life of love in the modern world

Tag: pop culture