Achtung Babies

This one's for anyone within driving distance of Lexington. Tonight, Sarah performs with one of the essential inspirations of our lives, one Reva Williams, at what is alleged to be the greatest bar in the history of time. As is always the case, Sarah has new songs, and it will be a very rich time. I don't know how to publish someone else's instagram images, but I end with a shot of her preparing for a radio appearance. The girl is out and about. Stay tuned.

Believing Radiohead

Reading this incredibly thorough Thom Yorke interview got me thinking about the way particular thinkers and artists came together for me in the late nineties and early aughts. There was a season in which I'd buy and read anything associated with Radical Orthodoxy with the same fervor I'd once reserved for folks like John Byrne and Alan Moore. As is often the case now, I found it difficult to grasp an awful lot of it, but I'd dutifully mark and transcribe whatever struck me as interesting in the hope that it might prove helpful later on. I don't know that anyone who's read Everyday Apocalypse loved it enough to scour the footnotes and journey over toward John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory, but I doubt I'd have ever thought to argue that there isn't a secular molecule in the universe if he hadn't given me "Once, there was no 'secular.'" Within a few days of the September 11th attacks, it was announced that our government's military response would be called Operation Infinite Justice at about the same time I'd underlined the phrase "nontotalizing metanarrative" in Milbank's volume. I e-mailed him to remark that we could do with more of such ways of viewing the world in our radioactive days, and he e-mailed back with one word: "Exactly." This was all the affirmation a young high school English teacher required. Throw in William Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist ("The distinction between politics and religion was not discovered but invented") and I had a way of talking about pretty much everything.

What these concerns have to do with Radiohead (or James Joyce or Ursula Le Guin or David Lynch) has been a driving question in everything I've written since, and this morning's Guardian interview almost felt like a checklist. Yorke: 

We are still the generation who went into an illegal war...The commodification of human relationships through social networks. Amazing!.. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that's unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in. My problem with bankers or, rather, the banking system is, that it's the ultimate expression of "Fuck you, buddy". There is no communal human consciousness, no will to co-operation, we are all slaves to the market. It's as if it has always been thus. It hasn't...

These bankers have made personal fortunes by stealing, exploiting and destroying our assets, our workforce, our resources and our planet. All protected, assisted and now bailed out by our governments using our money. High priests to a false god that they've done very nicely out of, thank you very much.

Which brings me to D. Stephen Long. I'd do my darnedest to appropriate the insights of Richard King and Jeremy Carrette's Selling Spirituality and David Loy's Buddhist economics before realizing I'd gleaned similar wisdom via his Divine Economy earlier this century. Long turned me on to Michael Budde who observed how that which passes (or is advertised) as Christian "often has as much to do with the life and message of Jesus as a GM Pontiac has with real Native Americans--nothing except a claimed, mostly imaginary, continuity of name." And Long himself gave me gems like this: "The market as salvific institution is and must be heretical." There's so much more to say, but I'm up against deadline as Longs appears among us tomorrow (see above). If you're unsure as to how to get to Neely, e-mail me and I'll meet you somewhere near Belmont beforehand. This is all.

What Are You Nashville?

"What are you Nashville?" I whispered to myself while driving Sarah to a performance.
"You always say that when we drive by the Whiskey Kitchen," she remarked.
And this is completely true. It's where 12th Avenue approaches Broadway. We're out of "the Gulch" and approaching Virago and an abandoned McDonalds that says "Closed for Remodeling" and isn't. My proprietary feelings for Nashville kick in right about then. What's going on here, place that formed and forms me? How are we feeling? Are we at the end of our tether?
My Nashville is often a kind of alternative universe in which all my genius friends are incredibly famous. Communal touchstones. Local visionaries through whom I'm able to see the world. A couple of them had a "big label" moment in the late 20th century as the Evinrudes. Think Philip K. Dick and Eudora Welty and songs like "Jimmy's On Crack (And I Don't Care)". They're Brian Reed and Sherry Cothran. They've kept right on thriving at every turn to the delight of anyone nearby. They've both in bands with Sarah. And THIS FRIDAY NIGHT,they're going for it again with Evinrudes tunes aplenty alongside a few of their own songs, Brian within the entity called Rosy Gears ("Scarface the Pitbull," "Demon from Hell," "Lily White") and Sherry eponymously.
What's more, there's the matter of Bulb (J. Todd Greene, Tony Doling, Randall Lancaster, Jake Larson, Sarah, and Brian) who haven't opened for the Evinrudes in over thirteen years and who just recently finished what I believe to be their twenty-third album. It seems to me (and I imagine there are at least eleven people who would agree) that if Nashville has a William Blake, Bulb is it. One might prepare a little by considering this. An EP featuring the latest goodness produced and mixed by the endlessly inventive conjurer and wordsmith Chris Leonard will be on offer.
AND we have a young fellow I occasionally spy at Bongo Java re-reading Lost in the Cosmos. After a years-long hiatus from Bulb-related phenomena, the alluring, enigmatic, hypnotist collector Max Perkins is scheduled to reappear.
It's a 12th and Porter situation past the sad McDonalds on the other side of Broadway. Doors open at 8PM. Tell the people. Nashville happens.