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Moving On from ainslie henderson on Vimeo.

welcome "home"

The boys and I went for a walk. I exchanged a hi-how-are-you-fine-thanks-and-you-good conversation with a neighbor. The kid asked, "Is he a friend? Why were you talking to him that way?"

My mom told my sister-in-law she liked her purse. It was mine.

My two-year-old took a bite of a string-cheese stick, put it back down on the counter, and asked me if he was allowed to spit it out in the trash. He did, then asked me for goat cheese instead.

friends doing cool things

There's a lot that's crummy about growing old and being adults, but one great thing is watching friends pursuing dreams and succeeding. The list of those friends doing amazing things is pretty long, but one is the CEO of Flannelgraph Records. He's doing some cool stuff and having a lot of fun in the process it seems, and as has always been his way, it puts a smile on a lot of people's faces. I was about to say he wasn't changing the world, but now I realize he just might actually be...
Best of Boiler Room Classics Commercial from Flannelgraph Records on Vimeo.

Mix Tape: Love caging, fickle and failing

I told Travis very little music has inspired me lately. He gave me a disc of his 40 or so favorite songs from 2013. I listened on the drive back from Indiana. This was the next to last song and it grabbed me more than any of the others. I know admittedly absolutely nothing about Phosphorescent or his music, and I am late, and it's okay, because it seems this song is all that needs to be known.

It's dressed up a bit differently, in what's almost early 90's easy-listening synth pop, or not far from Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia." But it's a folk song at its core in every way, with its repetitive churning built on a simple soul-plucking chord progression, its strong melody offered by a wavering worse for wear voice.

"Love never fails," Paul boldly asserts. Taken at his word he sounds like a hopeless romantic with his heart on his sleeve. Like he believes in destiny and soul mates and walks on the beach and growing old together. It's a phrase fit for a wedding day, but we roll our eyes through the daily grind that follows.

He's got his work cut out for him, because the majority of the canon of modern pop music says just the opposite. Love always fails, it never lasts. In the words of this song, it is fading, fickle, a disfiguring, caging killer. Love is a prison. Love is a murderer. Love takes, hurts, breaks, destroys.

Is he exaggerating? Typical depressed folk artist? I'm afraid not. This is the human experience, whether it's sung by Phosphorescent or Miley Cyrus. Oddly enough the lyrics from last year's hit song don't sound much different: clawing, chaining, warring, wrecking and breaking.

If our artists speak for us, we've not much optimism left for love. It's take what you can get when you can get it, enjoy it while it lasts, but overall we're self-protecting cynics, afraid to commit, knowing we'll only one day be disappointed, eventually chewed up and spit out.

Paul and his unfailing love are left to walk the beach alone, taking pauses to write Hallmark cards and happy endings, none of which we actually believe. He's at best an innocent dreamer, at worst a pitiful lunatic.

Or maybe the problem is our notion of love.
Maybe the definition is wrong.
Maybe the object is misguided.
Maybe the source is insufficient.

Maybe all the disappointment is our problem, not love's. Maybe what we call love is hardly love at all, and all its painful failure only serves to point us towards what we're really so desperately looking for. Maybe there exists a love that never fails after all.

Phosphorescent, "Song for Zula" from Muchacho

Just a little something to pass the time.

At the dinner table the kid was talking about how he doesn't really like long car rides anymore. It's a shame, I said, because he used to be our road warrior, always up for a drive, no matter how long the route.

Thinking about the amount of time we'll be spending in the car this summer, I began to troubleshoot. I started to pitch the idea to him,

Me: "You know, you're probably old enough now that we could get you a...."
Him, cutting me off excitedly: "A MOTORCYCLE?!?"

At that point I busted up laughing, knowing that nothing could be further from the idea I was about to pitch. Like the lame, out-of-touch dad that I already am, I continued,

Me: "Well, no, sorry to disappoint you, but I was thinking we could get you an activity book to keep in the car that you could work on each time we go for a drive."

He swallowed his smirk, rolled his eyes slightly, looked at his mother, and the two of them burst out laughing at me in ridicule.

Mom: "WHAT?!? An ACTIVITY BOOK?!? Are you kidding me?! You can keep your activity book, I'm going with the kid on the motorcycle!"
Kid: "Yeah, and we're gonna fly past you so fast, papa! VROOOOOOM!!!!!!"
Mom: "You and your activity book, we're gonna leave you in the dust!"
Kid: "YEAH! VVRROOOOOOOOOM!!!!!"

Sadly, I'm starting to remind myself of this guy more all the time.

Her

Maybe that would have filled this tiny little black hole in my heart, but probably not.

Despite its weird premise, I expected to love this movie. To be honest, I didn't.

It probably had something to do with being just too downright tired to watch. But besides that, it made me uncomfortable. It felt just as narcissistic as the generation that could make the premise plausible. It felt overly condoning, as if it weren't showing the reality, as if it went too far, hook, line, sinker. A shift came, but for me it came too late. I was already weirded out and turned off.

With further reflection, like any good, demanding, challenging film, I've come to see that that might have been exactly the point. That despite all the pathetic and disgusting substitutes our world comes up with to put a band-aid on our isolation, even the ones that end up being really alluring, we're made for flesh and blood connection. It might even be pointing to the one who did indeed come as flesh and blood.

I'm gonna have to watch it again.

(The Extravagant Voyage of) The Young and Prodigious TS Spivet

How could humans create so many right angles when their behavior is so convoluted and illogical ?

Due to limited brain space, my movie reviews are being reduced to the one quote I retain from the movie. I'm just glad I have the brain space to watch the movies, because I had been going through quite the dry spell there.

I will add a few sentences on this one. It's a half-decent film with a mostly interesting heart-tugging look at the way grief affects families. But what's ashame is that it was lacking Jeunetness, the bursting-with-life absurdity and love for the little things that we see elsewhere from this director. Sure, there was some absurdity, but it was all muted and sleepy. I blame about 80% of it on the hokey back porch of the ranch soundtrack, 10% on entrusting all the film's narration to a child, and the remaining percentage to other factors. In the end, we're left feeling just about as numb as the characters in the film, but I doubt that was the intent. They have a much more legitimate reason to feel that way than we do. And it's too bad.

Why pray?

I read Calvin in French for the first time this week. Here's what he says in English:

But if God knows what things we have need of, before we ask him, where lies the advantage of prayer? If he is ready, of his own free will, to assist us, what purpose does it serve to employ our prayers, which interrupt the spontaneous course of his providence? The very design of prayer furnishes an easy answer. Believers do not pray, with the view of information God about things unknown to him, or of exciting him to do his duty, or of urging him as though he were reluctant. On the contrary, they pray, in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditation on his promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into his bosom; in a word, that they may declare that from Him alone they hope and expect, both for themselves and for others, all good things. God himself, on the other hand, has purposed freely, and without being asked, to bestow blessings upon us; but he promises that he will grant them to our prayers. We must, therefore, maintain both of these truths, that He freely anticipates our wishes, and yet that we obtain by prayer what we ask.
Jean Calvin, commentary on Matthew 6:8

This is what I'm listening to today.

I'm not really a free-jazz enthusiast, but somewhere along the way I got introduced to Joshua Stamper's work and I'm always interested in what he's doing. This was released today.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization in this barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity.