Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

You can’t get to heaven on a pair of skates

In my less holy days, my conclusion might have been, “well, if THINKING them is the same as DOING them, you might as well just DO them; same penalty, after all.”

“…’cause you’ll roll, right past those Pearly Gates.” Old song that popped into my head.

So Chris Honeycutt found my villainous thoughts totally inadequate; I’m unsurprisingly all right with that, and she came up with her own here and here and here. My, she’s thought about this a LOT, it would seem.

But in between, she poses this question: Can you be a good Christian and fantasize about being a villain? In the main, I totally agree with her that “we should want to be Christlike, but in reality, we’re, well… not.
“Story is good, IMHO, for exploring those un-Christlike qualities that we possess. If we don’t face them as a reality, we can become repressed. And while suppression (holding back emotion and thought until an appropriate time and expressing them in appropriate ways) is good, repression (trying to hold back emotion forever until we blow like a tea kettle) is very bad.”

Yes, that’s why I read Tea Party blogs, to understand how the minds of people not like me think.

And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any less-than-ideal thoughts of my own regarding others now and then. It was that I never really identified with a particular archetype or methodology. Moreover, I just find my own failing less reprehensible than sad. What can I say?

I’d long wondered about those quotes attributed to Jesus, that if you think evil thoughts, it’s the same as doing so. For instance, in Matthew 5:28 “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Now in my less holy days, my conclusion might have been, “well, if THINKING them is the same as DOING them, you might as well just DO them; the same penalty, after all.” My approach these days is more nuanced.

In any case, I was watching Easter Sunday’s This Week on ABC News. Jake Tapper interviewed Rick Warren of the huge Saddleback church. He shared the fact that dogs and even cats go to heaven. He managed to sound like a politician when he talked about J-O-B-S. But Warren also complained about how magazines exploit Christmas and Easter with religious covers:

JAKE TAPPER: This week’s “Newsweek” magazine, which has a very provocative cover, has a different perspective on what ails America’s religious communities, under the headline “Forget the Church, Follow Jesus,” Andrew Sullivan argues that American Christianity is in a crisis, it’s too focused on politics and policy, too little on spirituality… So what is your reaction to this line of criticism from people who like faith but don’t like religion?
WARREN: Sure. Well, first place, let me give a little personal gripe. I think it’s disingenuous that magazines like “Newsweek” know that their circulation goes up at Christmas and Easter if they put a spiritual issue on the cover, but it’s always bait-and-switch. They never tell the stories, never tell the stories of what the good — what good the church is doing. Never. It’s always some obscure scholar, who’s debating something that kind of supposedly disproves this or that, or Andrew Sullivan — I don’t consider Andrew Sullivan to be a religious authority, okay?
And so it is — they know they’re going to make money, every time you put Jesus on the cover of a magazine, it skyrockets. You go do the history. “Time” magazine, “Life” magazine, “U.S. News and World Report,” those are always the best issues. So they make money on it, but then it’s a bait and switch, and it’s always a disappointment. And I wish they would have a little bit more integrity than that, and tell the other side of the story, maybe just occasionally.

While his premise may be technically true, it’s not Time’s or Newsweek’s job to promote Christianity. On Easter Sunday in my church, we said, “Christ is risen indeed.” We said that last year and we’ll probably say that next year. The magazines’ job is to find a different spin. I didn’t see the Newsweek article, but I did read Heaven Can’t Wait By Jon Meacham, the cover story in TIME. And I found this interesting:

“Yet we don’t necessarily agree on what heaven is. There is, of course, the familiar image… But there is also the competing view of scholars… What if Christianity is not about enduring this sinful, fallen world in search of a reward of eternal rest? What if the authors of the New Testament were actually talking about a bodily resurrection in which God brings together the heavens and the earth in a wholly new, wholly redeemed creation? As more voices preach a view that’s at odds with the pearly gates (but supported, they note, by Scripture), faithful followers must decide which approach they believe in.

“It’s a distinction with some very worldly implications. If heaven is seen as life’s ultimate reward, then one’s vision of paradise shapes how one lives. It is an essential tenet of Christian faith, of course, to love one’s neighbor. But if you believe the world will be destroyed at the last day while the blessed look down from a disembodied heaven, then you are most likely going to view the things of this world in a different light than someone who believes there will be a bodily resurrection on an earth that is to be, in the words of a great hymn, ‘our eternal home.’ Accepting the latter can mean different priorities, conceivably putting issues like saving the environment up there with saving souls.”

So I hope the “secular” press keeps observing the sacred world with a journalist’s eye, rather than a believer’s.

Erasing the Deceased QUESTION

How do you handle the written records of a deceased friend or loved one? Do you purge them right away, or is it a gradual process?

(Weird – I scheduled this particular post for this day a couple of weeks ago, before vacation. Didn’t know I’d be writing so much about dead people this week.)

I still have a print address book; you know, the kind made of paper. And when someone dies, I never know when to erase that person’s name. It seems that doing so means they are REALLY dead. The only time I’m likely to drop someone is if the book falls apart, I buy a new one, then rewrite the names in the new book, but only the living.

It’s no easier for me in my electronic address book. Deleting someone, especially someone I cared for, is tricky. I suspect that my mother’s still in the system, and she passed away over a year ago.

When Albert Wood from my choir died on Ash Wednesday, his logo picture kept showing up on my Facebook home page. But I didn’t want to “unfriend” my late friend, especially since people keep writing “to” him. A side issue: Are Users’ Facebook Profiles Are Part Of ‘Digital Estates’?

How do you handle the written records of a deceased friend or loved one? Do you purge them right away, or is it a gradual process? And should relatives be able to get access to their loved ones’ social media after they die?
***
In the non-human category, SamuraiFrog says goodbye

My bag is sinkin’ low and I do believe it’s time

Ever since I read, a couple of days ago, that Levon Helm of the band The Band was near death, I got in a very reflective mood, fueled in part by others’ reaction to the news. One of my colleagues, who has seen him perform in recent years, was already in mourning. Another, who had seen The Band perform in their heyday, was walking around the office singing “The Weight;” “I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead; I just need someplace where I can lay my head.” I’ve known this person for nearly two decades, but this was a side of him I had never seen.

He noted that he played his copy of The Band’s eponymous second album, the brown-covered one, so often that his college roommates needed to switch rooms to get away from that music. He had to buy the LP a couple of times because he wore the first copy out.

I have a similar love for that album. I remember that my friend Karen turned me onto it in high school. In fact, she was the editor of the high school yearbook, and she replaced one of the pictures of the school band with a photo of The Band. Those first four albums, including Stage Fright and Cahoots, I played a LOT in college. In fact, the house where Music from Big Pink, the first Band album, was recorded was not that far from my girlfriend’s (the Okie) parents’ home.

Conversely, a couple of our young interns didn’t even know who The Band was, and I felt obliged, nay, compelled, to share this bit of Americana with them, playing some songs on YouTube, such as The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Rag, Mama, Rag. I told them that MARTIN SCORSESE filmed their farewell tour as “The Last Waltz.” I noted that they used to back Bob Dylan – they DID know who Dylan was. Elton John named his song Levon after The Band’s drummer, Levon Helm.

Levon, moreover, was the voice behind so many of those Band songs. I remember seeing this clip on CBS Sunday Morning back in 2007 when he was recovering from throat cancer and put out some albums, the first two of which I own, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt.

I only regret that I never had a chance to go to one of his Midnight Rambles, a series of fundraisers to help defray the massive cost of his medical procedures. See the unbridled joy expressed only last month as the legendary Band drummer recounts stories from his long career and rambles through two classics.

The Weight – The Band from Woodstock
Up On Cripple Creek – The Band from The Last Waltz
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down – The Band from The Last Waltz
Poor Old Dirt Farmer – Levon Helm
And in the “apple doesn’t fall from the tree” division:
I Am Waiting – Ollabelle, featuring Amy Helm, Levon’s daughter, on this Rolling Stones cover

Levon Helm, Drummer, and Singer of the Band, Dead at 71
Whip to Grave: Levon Helm, the Real Voice of America
The Band cover story on Coverville

The ubiquitous Dick Clark

“And then Dick Clark approached them, said ‘I know a thing or two. I’ll put you on a TV show and make big stars of you.'”

Dick Clark was everywhere, or so it seemed. I remember him from American Bandstand, which I watched almost every week for well over a decade in the 1950s and 1960s, and occasionally after that. That show had a feature called Rate-A-Record, from which the catchphrase “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” was made famous. This version of Bandstand Boogie by Les Elgart, which became the American Bandstand Theme, has several shots of Clark. Here is The Time performing The Walk on AB from 1983.

I was an avid viewer of Where The Action Is from the late 1960s, a show which, I distinctly remember, introduced the videos for the Beatles’ Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. That show featured the group Paul Revere and the Raiders, who namechecked Clark in the song Legend Of Paul Revere: “And then Dick Clark approached them, said ‘I know a thing or two. I’ll put you on a TV show and make big stars of you.'”

Undoubtedly watched him most as the host of the game show Pyramid (initially the $10,000 Pyramid), a show I tried out for and failed to get on in 1977.

When I bought a Time-Life CD collection covering the rock and roll hits of 1955-1961, guess who was listed as the compiler?

But check out his IMDB listings as producer and host of a variety of award shows, and other specials. I did see him, early on, doing the New Year’s Eve show, though not since his first appearance after his stroke a few years back.

The New York Times story.

Here’s his appearance on the TV show This Is Your Life from 1959, where he appears with his first wife Barbara, and his eldest son.

Mark Evanier’s take.

An unflattering portrayal of Clark in the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s By Joe Boyd; some of the allegations seem to be contracted by others.

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

From ABC News: Dick Clark, Entertainment Icon Nicknamed ‘America’s Oldest Teenager,’ Dies at 82

PLUS:
Lester Bangs on Dick Clark, from nearly 40 years ago.
Reminder: Dick Clark, not Dick Cheney, died Wednesday

Gotcha journalism

What occurred to me is that the notion of “gotcha journalism” has been turned on its head.

The first big story I noticed when I was out of town last week was the death of CBS News’ 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace at the age of 93. He was one of those old-fashioned hard-nosed reporters who irked politicians, the powerful, and occasionally his own network with his investigative television journalism from the show’s debut in 1968 until his retirement in 2006, and even to his 2008 piece on Roger Clemens. Here is the New York Times obit, and his story in The National Memo. His interviews with Ayatollah Khomeini, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, and cigarette company insider Jeffrey Wigand, among many others, were legendary.

One of the trademarks in 60 Minutes reporting, used by him, but not exclusively, was the use of the hidden camera to ambush some person changing the odometer on an automobile or making some unsubstantiated medical claim. One of my favorites and I don’t recall the reporter, involved a black couple in Illinois going to see if a property was available for purchase, and told it was not. Then, a shot later, a white couple would show up, and the property would suddenly be available again. Next, the reporter would come in and expose the duplicity. While effective, CBS tended to shy away from the technique, dubbed as “gotcha journalism.” It was my contention that the hidden camera reporting should only be used when no other way would expose the fraud.

What occurred to me is that the notion of “gotcha journalism” has been turned on its head. When Sarah Palin complained that the “lamestream media” was using “gotcha” questions, it wasn’t a hidden camera trying to entrap her over some wrongdoing. It was an open and aboveboard question over what newspapers she read or why she would be competent to be President if John McCain had been elected, and then later was incapacitated.
***
The next story I read about was the Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen getting in trouble for something he said; not that unusual. But I didn’t really catch what the content was until he apologized for saying it and was suspended five games. What the heck did he remark? The Venezuelan told Time magazine he loves former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and respects the retired Cuban leader for staying in power so long. But he claims his intent was lost in translation: “I was saying I cannot believe somebody who hurt so many people over the years is still alive,” Guillen told folks at the follow-up news conference. My inclination is to believe him, and the calls in the Little Havana community to fire him I find a bit troubling. This may be more of a public relations problem than a substantive issue.

Ramblin' with Roger
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