ben's blog

I would like to buy a hamburger

I've got a weakness for Steve Martin's brand of goofy humor. The Jerk is one of my favorite movies of all time ("He hates these cans! Get away from the cans!"). Here he is in the (otherwise terrible) Pink Panther from 2006 trying to learn how to speak with an American accent. Hilarious.



(ht: JR)

Mankind is no island

This video is fascinating. It was shot completely with a cell phone camera, in New York and Sydney, Australia. The message is compelling, but I also find the craftsmanship and creativity to be inspiring. (ht to Matt Stone)

Movie Meme

This is going around the Internet. I love movies, so I thought I'd blog it:

1. One movie that made you laugh:
Anchorman.

2. One movie that made you cry:
Finding Nemo (really).

3. One movie you loved when you were a child:
Karate Kid.

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once:
A Mighty Wind.

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it:
Walk Hard.

6. One movie you hated:
Margot at the Wedding.

7. One movie that scared you:
I Am Legend.

8. One movie that bored you:
The Life Aquatic.

9. One movie that made you happy:
Juno.

10. One movie that made you miserable:
Love Actually.

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see:
No End In Sight.

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with:
Juno MacGuff.

13. The last movie you saw:
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

14. The next movie you hope to see:
There Will Be Blood.

Your turn! I tag all of you.

A concert, a CD, a movie

Just a post here about a few things I've seen/heard lately. We shall start with the most recent and work backwards in time, because traveling backward through time is way cooler than forward.

Two days ago I watched The Prestige for the second time. This is one of the better movies I've seen in quite awhile, directed by one of my very favorite directors, Christopher Nolan. It's a wonderfully twisting, turning story that has a ton of "aha!" moments when you watch it the second time. Besides being a well-told story, it's also a sobering tale of the devastating, dehumanizing effects of revenge. It's a story about what happens to people when they refuse to forgive, and it's not a pretty site! Plus David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla in this movie. David Bowie is always a good reason to see a movie.

Three days ago, I bought the new Lucinda Williams album. I was driving back from Grand Rapids at the time, and listened to it three times in a row. Here is a singer and songwriter in her  absolute prime. I was blown away by how good this album is. Here are a few lines:

Unsuffer me
Take away the pain
Unbruise, unbloddy
Wash away the stain
Anoint my head
With your sweet kiss
My joy is dead
I long for bliss

I long for knowledge
Whisper in my ear
Undo my logic, undo my fear
Unsuffer me

Yeah, she can be intense, but honest and brilliant.

Finally, four days ago, I saw Sufjan Stevens in concert. (To boost your indie-cred, repeat after me: "Soof-yahn". Not "Suff-jan". Practice it one more time to make sure you can say it naturally, like you always knew it was a soft 'J'. Now you've got it.) Someone asked me the other day what kind of music he plays. I was silent for an entire 15 seconds, trying to figure it out. Here's how I'd describe it. It's kind of folksy, but edgy. And it's somewhat quirky and humorous, but very serious in parts. And it's orchestral and triumphant, but can also be heart-breakingly beautiful. It's ambitious but not pretentious. It's optimistic without being sentimental, and it's realistic without crossing into cynicism."

I guess you have to hear it to figure it out, but I would say it's the kind of music a Christian would make. That whole "hard-pressed but not crushed/confused but not despairing/persecuted but not abandoned/struck down but not destroyed/being handed over to death but not dying" thing (see 2 Cor 4:7-11).

Seeing the live show was incredible. There was Sufjan (who came out with hawk wings on, and introduced the show by saying "Hello. My name is Sufjan Stevens, performing as Majesty Snowbird, and this is my band, the Magical Butterfly Brigade"), 5 horn players (amazing musicians), a drummer, and 3 other musicians who rotated playing guitar and piano and glockenspiel (or something) and banjo and bass, all dressed as butterflies. The show was an incredible combination of bombastic celebration and jaw-dropping tenderness (there were several moments where, after a song had finished, the audience just sat in stunned silence for 5-10 seconds before applauding). Highlights included the first song they played (the amazingly beautiful "Majesty Snowbird" - there's a video of it on Youtube, and the audio quality isn't bad at all) as well as "Chicago", "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." and "Casimir Pulaski Day". Highly recommended.

Director quiz

Alright, it's quiz time. How many of these movie directors can you name? It's an "open Internet" test, so feel free to scour the Net to find their likenesses. These are seven of my favorite directors.

The first one's easy.

Not so easy...
2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

How many do you know?

New photos / random roundup

For those interested, I've posted a few photos from our recent vacation to Virginia Beach on my photo page.

We spend a week vacationing with my extended family every year, which is always a lot of fun.

And now just a few random thoughts about what's going on, and what I am thinking about blogging this fall, just to get the blog rolling again:

Music:

• I am listening to Imogen Heap on headphones right now, and I am very impressed. If you get the album, check out "Goodnight & Go", "Hide and Seek", and "Daylight Robbery".
• I've also heard that Leeland's new album is ridiculously good.

Books:

• I am reading Stephen Ambrose's history of the building of America's trans-continental railroad (Nothing Like it In the World). Interesting stuff.
• I'm still plowing through Jesus and the Victory of God (N.T. Wright). It's a masterful book, and challenges a lot of preconceptions about what Jesus was up to. Very rewarding reading.
• I just started Sacred Rhythms, by Ruth Haley Barton. I've heard good things about her stuff on spiritual formation.
• I also just started Emerging Churches, by Gibbs and Bolger. Many say it's the best book on the emerging church so far, so that's a good reason to read it. I also like to see what other church leaders around the world are up to and how it's working out.

Movies I'd love to see but will probably not see until they come out on DVD:

• Talladega Nights - Will Ferrell plays a Nascar driver named Ricky Bobby, who named his two sons Walker and Texas Ranger. Sounds hilarious.
• Snakes on a Plane - The title is a spoiler. You have to love a movie like that. I've heard the beginning and end are hilarious, and the middle languishes a bit. But I mean, seriously, an entire movie about snakes that are... on a plane? How could it not languish in the middle, unless the snakes do some line dancing or something?

Stuff I'm thinking about that will probably end up in this blog:

• The fundamental dynamics of spiritual growth (or spiritual formation, or character growth, or whatever you'd like to call it). It's still a massively misunderstood topic, from the old question of "Why bother, because aren't we saved by grace apart from works?" to the more practical question of "How in the world can I actually change?"
• Church and culture. This has been a big theme so far anyway, but I want to continue to explore the question of how a rapidly changing culture affects the way we function as the church, the way we lead, the way we teach and disciple and preach the good news.
• Web/Church 2.0 - How does the church create environments that are truly interactive, without losing her soul? How can what we see happening in the world of technology or music or film or design or fashion or architecture or  _________ prompt us toward a more healthy ministry model?
• I'm hoping to start a Master's program this fall - I'm sure many posts will be prompted by my reading for that course.

So those are the happenings in my world as of late. I hope to continue conversing with y'all soon!

A Prairie Home Companion

We went to see Robert Altman's new film A Prairie Home Companion last night.

It was a fantastic movie, full of geniune charm and humor, as well as an interesting focus on death throughout (the radio station is being shut down, one character dies during the last show, Lindsay Lohan's character writes poems about suicide...)

Of course A Prairie Home Companion is a real radio show that has been running for over 30 years, I believe (or "since Jesus was in 3rd grade" according to Kevin Kline's character in the movie). Deb and I love the radio show, and loved the movie. We went with a couple friends who had never heard the radio show, and they loved the movie as well, so it appears this movie would appeal to fans and non-fans alike.

It's classic Robert Altman, in that you never really feel like you're watching a movie, it's more like you're inhabiting the world of the characters. An example of this: I always felt like clapping when they finished a song. It's more like you're part of the audience watching the live radio broadcast than watching a movie about a live radio broadcast. It's also classic Robert Altman in that everyone kind of talks at once, ("Don't wait for your lines" he always says), just like in real life, and there's plenty of ad-libbing going on. It's hilarious to listen in on Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin banter back and forth, and who knew Lindsay Lohan was such a genuinely good actress? I hope she gets more roles like this one in the future, and can perhaps leave her teeny-bopper days behind her.

There are a few crude jokes at the end that would be inappropriate for children, but all in all I highly recommend this movie.

Ideology, Genocide, and Academia

I had bought Hotel Rwanda awhile ago, because it was on sale and because it seemed like an important movie. That was a year ago. I honestly never had the guts to watch it. Tonight, in lieu of renting a movie, Deb and I decided to watch it.

Since we are the parents of four very active children, we typically watch movies in 30-60 bursts. I assumed we'd need 3-4 nights to finish this one up, but we just sat there and watched the entire movie: two hours and five minutes (unheard of for us). This movie was devastating. Almost a million people slaughtered while most of the world did nothing to intervene. The population of Indianapolis and the surrounding area is around one million people.

The sad thing is, it's happening again. Estimates run from 300,000 to 400,000 dead already. How to respond? In the short term there are ways to put out the fire, but if the coals underneath aren't quenched completely, the fire starts up again with enough fuel and agitation.

It's ideology that leads to genocide. The Hutus and Tutsis aren't even separate ethnic groups. Their division was based more on their livelihoods, and the line between the groups was very hazy. But the lines were drawn more starkly when Belgian and German colonists arrived, carrying a racist ideology with them. Eventually the whole thing erupted into the horror of 1994, with people killing one another based on their identification papers (because they couldn't tell Hutu from Tutsi).

It's ideology that leads to genocide. The most difficult thing to change is ideology. We can stop the violence for awhile, we can separate the brothers and put them in time out, but as long as they still hold to their ideologies, convinced the other is deserving of death in the most horrific ways, the result will be inevitable. Ideology doesn't change overnight, though. The ideology that birthed the philosophies of Hitler and Nazi Germany were born decades earlier in academic settings. There does seem to be a "trickle-down" effect, where the academic ideologies being put forth in one era become the unthinking assumptions and "natural" practices of the next era. Most scholars don't live to see the working out of their ideas in "normal" life. (Perhaps if they did they'd think twice about what they publish.)

Some people mistakenly assume that academia is disconnected from "real life", that debating philosophy, studying history or hashing out theology is some kind of exercise in esoteric irrelevance. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ideologies put forth from today's academics become the integrated worldviews of tomorrow's John and Jane Doe. The philosophy is hashed out in the ivory tower today, but tomorrow the everyman says "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

This is why it is so crucial that committed Christians continue to become Bible scholars, philosophy professors and theology nerds. The water that is put into the stream of academia today becomes the drinking water for everyone else a few decades later. Committed Christians ought to continue to put clean, life-giving water into that stream, that those who come after us might drink from it and find a "self-evident" ideology that leads to peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

Walking the Line

I posted about a Johnny Cash song a few days ago, and I saw Walk the Line tonight with my wife. It was a riveting film in many ways. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were stunning in their roles, even doing their own singing (!). This isn't a review or anything, but I just wanted to post this quote that's still ringing in my head. Johnny Cash is trying to convince his record company to record his concert at Folsom Prison, and the record execs aren't so sure it's a good idea...

Record Exec: Johnny, your fans are Christians. They're good people. They don't want to hear you singing songs to murderers and rapists, trying to make them feel better.

Johnny Cash: Then they're not Christians.

Man in Black

With the new Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line coming out this week (sounds like it'll be a good film), I was reminded of his song "Man in Black," which I've always found to be an incredibly powerful, prophetic statement of solidarity with the poor and oppressed (and it's a wonderfully well-written song):

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.

Well, there's things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black