OKC Herbivore

A Lament Carol

2011-12-22T09:56:00.001-06:00

Mourn the cracks in the canopy
That hint at a feral outside
Fettered by little, save physics
Physics, who is always just business

Mourn the distance that offers
From obligations and seasonal allergies
Allergies to spaciousness and quietude
Sneezing out a constant affirmative

Mourn the hours we could have had
To grow humiliated again, by
Our stories we tell when we have the time
Which no longer set aside

Mourn the stories we would have told
Had we ceased to turn with the earth
To burn the oil far more than we planned
And the scabby thought we planned anything at all

Mourn the hours, mourn the quiet
Because we will not get them back quite yet
Let the earth thaw then spill then scorch then freeze again
And we'll see if next year
Could have the footsteps to nowhere
But Your heart, Your frontier
Too concerned this year
For Your heart, Your frontier
Batter my heart, pilgrim me to somewhere lonely, in Your heart, Your frontier

Carol 10

2011-12-12T08:14:00.001-06:00

This is God, who lives among us:
He is with the laid-off casualty
Of progress and its kings
And He does not offer escape
But depths of sorrow instead:
He not only walks beside the pilgrim,
But pulls her further still into her sorrows
Praise Him,
Who does not let us run
From the birth pains of Earth
Praise Him,
Who does not waste our sadnesses,
Praise Him,
Who does not deliver us from this world, but delivers the whole of the world to us
Praise Him, who is calling our attention
To depravity:
where grace is seeded, to be tended, husbanded forth

Carol 9

2011-12-08T08:06:00.001-06:00

You have gone to such lengths
To convince Your creatures
That You do not despise the world
Nor turn away from its deep dark

Yet today we pull at the earthen wires
With bitter and (barely) grip
To sever our distractions
In imitation of imitation of You

But do we forbear a complaining prophet?
Can we allow You to save the world
With another nation than ours?
Can we allow You to save the world?
And not just save the world
That we thought this world should be?

Carol 8

2011-12-06T18:43:00.001-06:00

We hymn Thee from our guts

From the weakest point of trust

Though the light only annoys

Our honesty's employed

We put no store in certainty

Nor worship any coin

But carole with mirth aplenty

For heaven's great rejoin

To the kings' most meager pawing

At the very clothes of the modern poor

The king over kings is already crawling

Over a dusty Nazarene floor

2011-12-05T11:30:00.000-06:00

oh my people

what have we done

unto one another?

we've gone ahead

with our years of plenty

hiding our embarrassing Lord

underground

saints cannot be bothered

with changing times

and prophets give no quarter

to throbbing minds

and if I descend to Sheol,

there You are, because

we have hid You there

embarrassing Father

unable to bear

the warm fact that

You've seen our denuded thoughts,

and You mottled our naked skin,

we'll spade over You the topsoil

of our proprieties and properties,

and occasionally a sinner-

encroaching unfamiliar on our yard

will ask after the muffled sound

that is heaven's voice underground

naming names, patient still

2011-12-04T20:53:00.001-06:00

suffer us not these fences

fence-making experts and their divining

where heaven and hell

wait on our assent

ascension to a kingdom

that has no place

and whose ambition is bland

rather, this odd kingdom

that is every place

that is anyone

opposes the proud

and knees us all

in our sensitive wealth

Carol 5

2011-12-03T13:58:00.001-06:00

noosed by grievous sin

bruises on our necks

transgression's sorry weight

turns out to be our body's hex

our scars not proudly borne

they tell our stories lame

how we have been less than

the cruciform lot we claim

the flesh will differ where healed

though a tent for blood again

if Your promises are anywhere

they're in the advent of new skin

Carol 4

2011-12-02T21:22:00.001-06:00

Teach me not to rage
At the impish, sudden rain
Or to be so quick to feel
The boulevard's pace
Like its personal

Sure, we like to see You
To think we've cornered You
You are large, and honestly frightening
When we actually pause
To get a drop of fallen heaven,
Gravity's casualty,
Only two elements: cold as winter
On our face

So we try to find You
To tame You
But You're gone (and back)
A sly fox, a shy love, a sky drop

2011-11-29T23:49:00.001-06:00

In the evenings' venom ache
There You cause our bones to wake

It's Christ our Lord
Who crafted our globe
And shakes it to stir the snow

It's Christ our Lord
Who watches the slow age
Of the winter trees,
Nude on the great plains

It's Christ our Lord
Who retires into the warmth of home
In Him is any home
And every home we have come to know

Advent Carol 2

2011-11-28T16:49:00.001-06:00

Oh surely He will arrive
As He has continued arriving
From the cosmos' first stirrings

But oh how He will go
And where He goes is marvelous
To the cold edges of our arrogance
And the borderlands of distraction

Who among us will make Him
Walk sooner again in the crunch of the pines?
Or bring the debt-ridden back to solvent life?
Where He goes is the trick, the hook, the turn:

Farther than ignorance,
And closer than judgement
Past our gates of justice,
And into the sinner's room

Yes we wait for arrival,
But we walk as He never left

A'Caroling We Go

2011-11-27T18:27:00.000-06:00

This year, I hope to treat the Advent writings I attempt as hymns or carols, even though they might resemble on some days the normal lyric poems of the season, I do want to stretch into a singable, even celebratory or dance-feeling ethic in these writings. "Carole" does have an origin in dance. I'm not the most dance-y person, per say, but I do hope to break from the usual Advent impatience, into patience; from melancholia (plenty of time for that in Lent!) to promise-recognition. And to bear it all with a sense of already, not yet.

Carol 1

into an escalator light
born into words, and bearing words
that would but stir the blood
so many ascensions would we build
back up to where You began us

bearing down into the gullet of the earth
where we hide swollen appetites
from Your gaze which stares
out from the inside of us, together
and alone, under the humming canopy

one more light we flip, one more match
we put to wick, either way
it's our self-sworn duty to ourselves
to stumble less, in an impatient mime

when our limbs are limbs inured in love
with careless, weightless, and weighty divine

cubic and stabled. (a lower east side fragment)

2011-04-12T16:32:00.000-06:00

a random scribble I ran across today, I wrote in March (Lenten time) 2008 in New York City.

and now the train accompanies
each bloom in the sidewalk
-
now that the ancient voices
are now finally ancient, they
seem cubic and stabled
by our very constant looking back

the piano against the wall
has stopped it's clattering teeth
and half the patrons are ghosts
the rest of us are young graduates
and we're still past our prime
-
so what would our worlds obtain
if we woke one day and acted as if
we never ate dust in the 1920's,
or wasted all of our monuments,
so our history did not belong to a mere few?

Lenten Confession 4

2011-03-24T12:54:00.000-06:00

I confess:

I couldn't begin to see You
until I looked for a world where You didn't exist
or one where even if You did it was just
an organizing principle for synaptic pulses,
wrought by the myth-making of ancient men (never, women, slaves)
who were quite likely possessed of at least
two minds at once, maybe more
one where You were Jane from Xenocide,
except she was real too-and now
I'm in the ontology aisle of the supermarket

So You see this confession clearly:
It's hard to think about You,
as hard as it is to act like You,
to be shaped by You without being guilty
of just shaping myself, which hopefully Ivan and Fyodor
Karamazov have taught me is really impossible:
I'd just stash my money, kill my rivals,
and take anything I wanted, which happens to be a lot
though I've convinced myself otherwise

Buried in my confession that my mind
is too easily distractable,
and too too easy to question You,
is another confession that I really am
the fractured dust-mite Edwards says I am

but I've a sneaking suspicion that You
are not the capricious sovereign male
some acolytes charge You (in an odd show of support)

Because I have tried quite hard to walk
through the furnace of doubt in a Mobius fashion
and You seem to follow me through-and if that's not right
then it is that You are fairly inescapable:
present in deserts (real ones, not just the ones of the heart)
and in suffering (and not as a salve for another life)
and in uncertainty

Omni was never in Your name, so I'm not assuming that
most Hellene of categories
but I'm sidling up to You
who is in the mouthed stories
of peripatetic desert folks
all tribed and particular-tongued
where You wrap Your name
in something adverbial,
un-settling everything

So why should we be afraid?
You've admonished fear, not doubt
and not by way of negation
or way of certitude
but by un-shelving everything
and throwing it on the floor
which is where Your children remain

Lenten Confession 3

2011-03-23T08:57:00.000-06:00

I confess it is difficult to find names for You
not based solely on what You happen to do,
or not do, for me and my family, for
the concerns I know in the wider world,
and my friends

For example, I could call You
Last Minute Provider Most Of The Time
or maybe He Who Has Rescued Prostitutes In Cambodia Yesterday
both worthy nom de guerre's

I could call You Star-Stretcher and
Magenta-Eyed-Sunset-Scribbler and I would sound
a little Native, but still accurate
though it's only because those sights
helped me to feel through the haze of anxiety
that is filmy, opaque over my eyes

If we get down to grit, I could call You
Incredibly Silent and Demanding One,
or Always Subject To Interpretation By Bigots Like Myself
even if I'm bigoted against actual bigots-
I'm still working my hypocrisy like a
police on a beat, a salesman at a door

But with palsied hope I still call You
by ancestors' names, God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
and when I get feisty with those
who would seal You and Your stories
in a hermetic right-angled cube
that only the chosen righteous can see through
it's because those men, (from whom You even took their names!)
were as mottled and losering as me
and if they aren't really all that messy
then there's little left for me

and I've established by now how easily
I just call You whatever I want You to be
for this, forgive me, and become
God Of Clarity, Better Eyes To See
not eyes in some imaginary sense
but be Animator Of What's Actual,
The Shaper Of A Busted Reality

Lenten Confession 2

2011-03-21T17:24:00.000-06:00

I don't plan on this being a habit. It's perhaps modern white man problems 101 to have computer keys and utter frustration on hand.

----

Genuflect, I confess
i really want to buy in
to whatever it is that makes
the distractions all go away
the problem is, i have a suspicion
they will not go away
even when i manage to find a magic pill,
a correct prayer, a place
either inside of me or outside-
a place where You've not balanced
any scales, or justice, or universe,
but a place where You have obliterated scales
for any and all.

i confess this does not seem to be that place,
or I'm just not invited yet (ever?)
to see past the barbs of what's immediate

all I have is my fool's gold,
my fool's tongue, and my fool's assurance
that whatever it is i am doing
it's not terrible distracting
to better saints and wiser managers

but I'm sure i should be confessing
for throwing off the mojo of the saints
whoever they are (or whoever they aren't)
with my incessant concern
for what's only immediate

i confess i have few options left,
so it seems
but to care a little less about what's around
because there's no clear or near horizon
of correction
for my desire to give more and more
(can You see it in me!? how could You neglect to help it?!)
from resources I don't have
and don't see myself having

my last confession is this:
my vision is so small, and I cannot see any change
that doesn't come from me first,
that isn't shaped like "just fixing things,"
that doesn't require me to pack up and leave
not a few things I would rather keep.

So if immanence is 'hommos'
and transcendence is 'hummus'

what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

A Lenten Confession Poem Thing

2011-03-15T12:58:00.000-06:00

I hope the context of this poem in the dredge of Lent helps to allay some of its embarrassingly personal tone. Think of it as an echo of St. John Of The Cross as a lower-middle class white male who is self-employed, self-conscious, and cannot get around the irony (maybe it's irony, maybe more mild tragedy) of being distracted by temporal difficulties from really diving into the transcendent difficulties of faith and crucifixion, normal stuff for Lent. It's like a complaint to God (in annoying kid voice): "But I want to suffer in a different way!"

So here it is. Sarcasm aside (it's how I try to laugh at myself when I despair over little things, usually money related) I do hope it opens up anyone's honesty with God in the time of Lent. Moreso even, honesty with oneself, and not being ashamed of saying it aloud to God.

----

I suppose the first thing to mention is Your
often-unsteadily-steady silence
but it could just be a one way thing-
You might still be listening,
so here's a confession or several
to trouble Heaven's ontological perfection,
which, since no one has photos (that they haven't doctored)
belongs to each's imagination (the perfection, that is)
it seems You wanted it that way,
or You would send postcards at least,
and being thus subjective (the composition,
not the existence thereof)
I imagine the Heaven that receives my
mostly whining but sometimes selfless prayers-
like the ones for friends' babies
and the kids I met in Kampala,
my agnostic friends and my pious friends,
and Samir, a kid who I met in Delhi at a bus stop-
may You preserve his life,
-so this wide-recieving Heaven
must be a mix between Ft. Greene
and the valley north of Taos to me
heated by green chiles, cooled by ales
and filled with the kinesis of drums and bells
It is to this impossible place
I send my very possible prayers

Genuflect, I confess:

A good starting place is that I'm far more concerned
with things I claim have little lasting import, namely
how upside down our money always is,
all screeching experts aside, we're not exactly flush
nor libertine with our cars and tvs
so little sense it makes to me

It's hard to contemplate my frame's perishability
whether like Hamlet or St. Paul, when all my time
is spent matching the 20 ways my bank tells me
such and such is costing you this much now,
and tomorrow will be even more cash money

I get that I came from dust and dirt,
and to it I'll be returning
but until then there is rent, and of course,
daily surprises like depleted water filters,
and increasingly dear gasoline

I confess I find these things terribly low
compared to You and the angels
and even the consideration of mercy
but I act almost always as if grace was nothing
because what grace will be shown to me
by my landlord or cable company?

From one failed font a myriad confessions spring:
I have plenty of fear, but weak charity
I am quick to annoyance, but slow to listen
I want so bad to be right, but don't take the time to consider
I trust You implicitly, but I don't explicitly

For 40 days I'll be hoping to just once
turn down the offer of bread (but how to feed my family?)
to not jump from the temple heights (but how to feel You or feel anything?)
to deny the kingdoms offered to me (I could erase our debt with just enough work and money!)

mercy.

On a non-throwndown theology-throwdown

2011-02-26T22:09:00.000-06:00

Soooo. Here's the thing, enough interest in the little smartarse comment I made about Piper's papal pronouncement towards Rob Bell stirred enough commentary I thought it would be good to go a little bit deeper than the normal internet/Twitter gnomic sarcasm.

So here I go. Please know I approach this as a submitted follower of Jesus, lover of the Church, and someone who does not wish to simply rag on one or many thinkers. This goes, as much as I can make it, in the weird world of dialogue where the exploration of theology meets the patience of the Church towards one another.

Quick recap: Piper posts a little tweet (I don't follow him, but a I know several friends do-and NO, I do not equate anything he says with them. I love my friends, I'm sure we disagree on plenty, but who cares!) saying "Goodbye, Rob Bell" and links to a quick blog post on the Gospel Coalition . The post proceeds to skewer Rob Bell's forthcoming book as a bit of a primer on universalism or universal salvation. This doesn't flow with TGC's writer's rhyme, and he takes a lot of issue with Bell's book.

So I take this succession of events to be a dismissal of Bell, by Piper, via this blog post, from what he considers the folds of the Church. I know Piper doesn't intend to act like a Pope, nor somehow formally censure Bell (thank the Lord for local churches) from his flock, but just to give a clear disapproving of Bell's thought in regards to his upcoming book on hell and the afterlife, what it means for salvation for any or all.

This could easily turn into a really long post, so I'll stay away from the theology as much as I can (i'm long winded there, as my friends well know. But it takes awhile to say things that matter, I think).

The reason I took umbrage with this kind of pronouncement is mostly because it is dickish. I wish I could put it more delicately, but really, that's what it boils down to. The collective front of the blogger equating Satan's hidden "servants of righteousness" to Rob Bell with Piper's glib dismissal of a brother in Christ is just a dick move. Sorry for the crassness. I'm a bit on edge from being worn out by political speech co-opting the Gospel (not the other way around) right now in some larger political events (like Wisconsin-where money/power grabbing by the governor is ringed with his pious speech-ugh). I just want some folks to not be mean, really that's it, not be mean.

So now that I have that out of my system, let's quickly look at perhaps a couple of deeper reasons why the sort of thinking that Piper has seemed to propagate in the past few years, at least in regards to others (NT Wright, Greg Boyd, for example) in the Church who don't share some key points with him, why his attitude is harmful, in my humble and not really mattering opinion.

For theology to be a project of developing right thinking, where the purpose is to discern from the mist of concepts (limited by confessions, creeds, texts, etc.) the correct or even most reasonable fortresses, then arm them and defend with all might any comers, this is a depressing use of God's gift (mixed blessing…some might say) of brain power to men and women. The act of drawing lines around the Church, solely on one's own relation to a very narrow, modified-Reformed worldview is hardly Gospel-minded, nor really even all that rational. It is of course, GOOD and WELL to defend one's perspective (what am i doing here?!) on even specific theological convictions, but theology is NOT an exclusivist tool with which one scythes the chaff from the wheat in the Church. A much more difficult, relational, and overarching rubric to each particular believer is required by those in the Church who know him/her to come to a point of confrontation over persistent sin. I DO in fact think the Church should and can do this, but it is not a matter of one's persecutive on Reformed or otherwise justification, or even, gasp! universal salvation. I am not a determinist when it comes to free will, so then am I out because I would rather work out (not sacrifice) the issue of God's foreknowledge than work out the issue of God's allowance or creation of evil within a deterministic framework. No thanks. Nor would I consider someone worthy of a "goodbye" if they are in fact Calvinist with any number of the TULIP petals intact.

For some folks, theology has become a weapon with which to ward off cultural foes that can be easily dismissed as "enemies of the truth" simply because they come from a different place theologically, while still affirming the one Son of God, and His witness in the Scriptures.

Some of us do theology because of our struggles with the questions of the faith, not because we are looking to root out all uncertainty, as nice as that would be. As Ben Myers puts it (masterfully):

"...as a general rule, you should try to show kindness to theologians. Not because they are necessarily exemplary personalities. Not because they necessarily know what they're talking about. Not because they are necessarily people of great faith. Instead, you should show them kindness because their faith is so weak and so vulnerable; because they are burdened by the difficulty of God; because they are driven to think about God the way some people are driven to drink. You should take care of your theologians the way you would care for the widow and the orphan.

"Thus one of the proper goals of theology is not so much spiritual catharsis or intellectual mastery – clearing up every difficulty so that one can sleep at night – as the cultivation of theological friendships. Friendship sustains the difficulty of thinking about God. I warm myself by the fire of a friend's loneliness. God is near, and so we are lonely for God. Friendship is the small room in which we share together the loneliness and the joy of God's nearness."

I cannot look at the sort of camp-dividing speech of this encounter with TGC and Piper as some cultivation of theological friendship-of walking through the struggle. It is simply: "you don't believe it right, so you are now out of our club." Not a club I'm interested in.

Maybe I'm just defending Bell because he's tall. And kind, we played once at Mars Hill, they gave us free books. I think people mostly rag on him because they have never actually read anything he's written. If you think he's somehow "out there," you haven't read enough theology and philosophy. If it sounds harsh, well, in this case it is. I think Piper's contribution to missions is astoundingly great, and I really enjoy his renewal of the non-fire breathing parts of Edwards back into the contemporary Church (religious affections, etc.). That he brings theological rigor (sorta) to large amounts of young folks (via Passion, etc.) is worth celebrating.

I want to go on, but I am heading out of town, and am ready to go watch a movie with Becca. Which happens to be The Two Towers. Which leads me to two final thoughts.

1. In The Fellowship Of The Ring, Gandalf says, (yep, nerd time folks)

"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends."

If you claim for a second I don't take seriously the judgment of God, the death stink of sin, or the grace offered for them, then feel free to exclude me, or perhaps dig through Romans 5, 1 Cor 15, John 12, et al. I simply do not hope to quickly trust my own broken judgment on who gets what in this life and what waits for us.

2. If the Church is drawn up into a camp composed of those who think right, then we are far, far away from anything resembling the Gospel.

I hope I can rap some more about this, especially considering some theological explorations about salvation, about the cultures of doctrine across the Church (which I get to see a lot of firsthand, both good and ill. More good, I should say, thanks be to God), and how worship really matters a whole heck of a lot to theology. At least for me they are inseparable. Also, how David Bazan might (a big might) relate to this discussion. All kinds of things.

But we all know how bad a blogger I am at being consistent. (what a terrible sentence. I'm leaving it) Please leave your comments if you find this at all interesting.

Peace to you. Leave some thoughts!

Advent Sonnet Dec 24

2010-12-24T15:49:00.000-06:00

Let us gather in the Anatolian light
Of Your eyes over our beggar hearts
Two warm stars to guide our flight
Along the highways covered in merchant's carts
We hear Your murmur in familiar tongue
No language is strange to Your ears
Arrive to knit us in all we've undone
And reason with us over our pyre of fears
Suffer us to not love the sweet rot of wealth
And yarn us close to any forgotten ones
Let their coughs be ours, our health their health
Beat our hearts with Your blood, Your animations
All molecules are Yours, all mud and all mind
Where on Your stage can we stray and not You, find

Advent sonnet Dec 23

2010-12-24T11:04:00.003-06:00

Our civilized age seems the charred edge
Of a bone splinted off an anonymous leg
Under a carbonized wisp of a thistled hedge
Where a shin sticks in cracked earth like a peg
This is the scorched basement of heaven
Where You amble round reason's singed fence
So I don't find it quite so naive to leaven
Our violent enlightenment with innocence:
What's so bloody wrong with the fantastic?
the fascination with a village winter
Where carols under snow drift sound elastic
And there is knowledge of our neighbor

Why dont we worry less for bland accuracy
And more for what's built friend by family

Dec 22

2010-12-23T00:14:00.001-06:00

how many more days of the window's dressing?
how long do we have to cover our tracks?
flipping the spades to pat the earth with their backs:
making cake out of fate, the surface gets a leveling
so we cannot see where we interred the body
we stack with our mottled and mediocre intent
selling our last bottle drops of irony to pay rent
for to us careers, kids, and a mortgage seem gaudy
best left to those who have learned well the fine arts
of matching gears to other gears, ignoring sirens,
ignoring Muses, not leaving kids to their fictions:
to these belongs the Kingdom, not to migrant hearts

suffer us to not suffer too long under our fine fettle cloaks
to us belongs the modest prospect, our mettle is a hoax

Advent Sonnet Dec 20th

2010-12-21T10:06:00.002-06:00

it's no mean feat You've mischiefed onto us:
keeping creation ever on its muddy toes
and by taking away all of our rights to make foes
from strangers, You've brought tidings of great fuss
You have indeed arrived to my buckled perception,
and now my grey wits will never be the same;
never be safe from Your spry, un-voweled name
and my prayers go to a face with fanciful complexion
for no one has seen You at any time, we were pleased
to kill You when You took our blood, and Your
flesh years were too brief and too much for these
creatures of spit and mud, to diversion inured
O do not cease this fibrous, scented company
we are yet to abide this shepherd we can barely see

Advent Sonnet Dec 19th

2010-12-19T00:27:00.001-06:00

we are often accused of making gods with our brains
and You are not immune from the cavalcade:
Your leafy ride into the city, the romanesque parade:
only soft minds are fooled into martyr's gory pains

sometimes it is enough to just believe in a word,
sometimes it is enough to trust You still go walking:
letting the static of the city do most of the talking,
and watching every hurt, even the ells of each bird

but when You arrive crestfallen then You resurrect
the cautious gray globes with their ambitious bulwarks:
when we can no longer believe, and are left to spadeworks
and You arrive in Your bloody sweat, Your dark collect

is a murmur to Your Father who seems to have sent You
into brambles of disciples for whom the sea is only half-blue

Advent Sonnet Dec 16

2010-12-16T22:51:00.002-06:00

..."we are all sufferers, but what we strive for is to be glad in the midst of our suffering; there sits the fortunate man for whom everything, literally everything, suceeds as in a fairy tale, but woe unto him if he is not a sufferer." -Kierkegaard

Happy is the one whom God disturbs with a story:
the barren families, and the pariah mothers,
whose comfort is transposed by plainclothes glory,
who know the truth of how promises can bother
Suffering is the one who abides with the Messiah:
for she will appear simple to her closest friends
walking with a ghost, rasping prayers past her pleura
pitied by the thoughtful, urbane mass she offends
Blessed is the man who has too far left to run,
too much debt on the car, and taxes from two years
who will leave little succor to his wife and son
he has no quarter in which to costume from his fears
fortunate is the life caught in Christ's dread rime:
a seed tumbles, keels, and dies, now it grows the first time

Advent Sonnet Dec 15

2010-12-16T11:39:00.002-06:00

I don't mind being a fool for being found
awake and asleep at the grotto's dim mouth
where it is said,"God has come to walkabout,
but His tangle with the monarchs will end in a rout."
My skeleton is getting looser, and I still loiter
where the less-visible parts of physics keep order
of the sights of incarnation, I've become a hoarder,
and a hawker of the meager love I manage to shoulder
I miss the bell tones of spectral afternoons
when I would spade sure and wide time exploring runes
in reveries of You: a mind as rich as myriad certitudes
now I measure my time by the throb of monsoons

long-armed storms meant to drench by attrition
where each soggy-drop makes a dent in my attention

Advent Sonnet Dec 14

2010-12-14T23:01:00.002-06:00

Some evenings it seems mere vanity
to think of You and Your patience
how You must magpie a bit of insanity
to keep tipping over to us, losing the balance
that our brightest brains swear is Yours:
fearful squared proportions, existential concord
as if You just sweat math from Your pores
yet Yours is the irresponsible kingdom;
a gaudy forbearance is Your array
and Your strong language is murmur
and no creature is too coarse to say:
"Our Lord sends Himself, not just a letter.
He is not outfoxed by our terrain, though barren
His wake is not dread, but beacon and cairn

Advent sonnet Dec 13

2010-12-13T20:57:00.003-06:00

"...From the heart beneath, as if, God speeding me
I entered His church-door, Nature leading me
-In youth I looked to these very skies,
and probing their immensities,
I found God there, His visible power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
of that power, an equal evidence
that His love, there too, was the nobler dower.
For the loving worm within its clod,
were diviner than a loveless god
amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
You know what I mean: God's all, man's nought..."

-Robert Browning, "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"

as we wore out the rail above the dockland greys
i caught the city's furniture in a scratched glance
after a day with the Monmouthshire cabbie's essays,
I shook off the green rain of the western parlance

it was more spirit walk than mind the gap
to alight at Tower Hill, and cross the quays
daybreak on the embankment where time is pinesap
and the common prayer is that of workdays

and there You were: sheer, inaudible, indelible
hidden well behind the canopy, poked by towers
swishing the quietest promise in canary burble
the only promise I've heard that still clatters

over the din of material limits and mobius' ribbons
where the heart of man feigns heretic to reason's inquisitions

Advent sonnet Dec 12

2010-12-12T23:44:00.000-06:00

What dread must fat cat kings receive
From your globe stomach, ripe with promise
That the future will lie with the least of these
And bear children who've no lust for their products

How did you survive the holiness of your friends?
Who no doubt sighed relief at your trip
While you dragged your belly to David's town,
They could finally get on with suckling the law

If we still think God only wants a penis to teach
then we must continue to ignore your song
That He's planted the ages in wombs disgraced:
Where the powerful are turned to dry seed

Slaves now to the winds they always watched
Sold by the things they have always just bought

Advent Sonnet Dec 11

2010-12-11T12:34:00.002-06:00

restore to us Your self as incandescent warmth
to abide the cost of proximity, un-consumed
despite our grail in these weeks of remembering
the quiet savior, the un-remembrance of You

do not let Your face grow so strange to us
and what a face You have-it is indeed one
but contains every broken nose, abscess, pus,
rattled eye, ash-lip, and plain face I have yet won

and Your voice is one, dulcet and dissonant still,
kind melody, surreal harmony, both at once
Your words: one story made hash by history's mill
plot and digression, protagonist and dunce

Your language is mottled: of extant and extinct tongue
Your words are gibberish, but we hang on every one

Advent Sonnet Dec 10

2010-12-10T23:51:00.001-06:00

we are used to hearing gods in human form
with sea-eyes, bird-feet, we fashion them
from the bronze of the fearfully strange
paring the marble of what is untamable

polished by our steady arrogance, employed
to hide the fragile temblor of our gory being
while our captains toil to build us a ziggurat:
a better hierarchy , to hide from the less flush

those thorny souls who would live sans albatross
daring only what they need, the un-propertied
whose dusty prophets smell of naivete, of mean fancy
living off the hard facts we deign to share with them

but these sorry creatures are invisible, unsellable gold
they are, in fact, Your good news to autarkic us

An OKC Urbanism Christmas Wish List

2010-12-10T16:11:00.004-06:00

I know most of these fall under the realm of "Christmas Miracle," which includes the prerequisites of much denser population and building codes than we have, much more mixed use zoning, a culture of walking and biking, a culture of using public transit for leisure as well as commuting, a period of OKC history not marked by kleptocratic energy companies and their pet politicians coupled with rampant white flight and sprawling nascent suburbanism...you get the idea...

So take all of those things for granted as wished, and then you'll get my Christmas list:

1. The squashing of neighborhoods into actual identities.

a. this means stop calling everything south of Memorial Rd. "downtown." Downtown might be all that south of 13th, but really that's midtown, so downtown is moreso that which is roughly the central business district. Don't neglect the Arts District, Automobile Alley, and even SoSa.

b. So then, we can have focused, dense development in various retail and historical focus points. Such as my immediate area near the Chesapeake promised land. Sidewalks are almost in, and more and more useful services are coming, especially Whole Foods. Build close, and build for the whole city, CHK, not just your office workers.

Likewise, Britton, the actual town that used to be at Western and Britton, this would be an ideal place to tighen up development around. It is highly mixed in income and culture, and could service the crowd who shops on Western's antique and music shops/venues, the largely African American neighborhoods around it, and the cluster of offices at Britton and 235. Which leads me to....

2. Trolleys that are not just cosmetic.

a. What if we built three parking areas (garages, not large flat, wasteful lots): at 50th and May, 63rd and May, and Wilshire and May. Wait, we already have big lots there.

b. Now, build a trolley that runs along May Ave's shopping and offices, one every 7 minutes. Until midnight.

c. Build another one along Western Ave, every 10 minutes, until 2am, that connects the Asian District/Paseo with stops at 36th, Will Rogers Amphitheater, 51st (Forward Foods, the Classen Circle), CHK, Nichols Hills Plaza (maybe), then Britton.

d. Make our central trolley that's being built frequent, late night, and connect downtown, bricktown, OUHSC, Auto Alley, Midtown/St. Anthony's, Arts District, Deep Deuce. Plus whatever they build on the river.

3. Someone stop building the following in central OKC: Convention Centers, Large Avenues, Apartments for Upper Middle to Upper Class only. Corollary: Build a damn grocery store before you build anything else. Period. For the love of Jane Jacobs don't build a convention center.

4. All empty lots, and all single level surface parking will be outlawed in downtown.

a. In the home of the parking meter/morbid obesity/climate denialism this would be nothing short of a revolution.

b. This would also help to erase years and years of damage done by urban renewal and cheap gas. One of those we know for sure we will never have again, the other belongs to Sandridge.

c. Nothing, in my opinion, will help the healthy growth and street life of downtown like the eradication of wasteful, wasteful surface parking and empty lots. Up in their place will go apartments, multi-level parking, and maybe a park here and there.

5. A rail line, sponsored by many local companies from both OKC, St. Louis, KC, and Chicago, and Ft. Worth that connects those cities directly. Or even just a rail connection directly to Kansas City. It is ludicrous that we have none. It opens Chicago to us.

Corollary: Commuter Rail that connects downtown Edmond, Britton, Midtown, OUHSC, Downtown OKC, Capitol Hill, south OKC at 240, Moore (either downtown or at the area around the Warren Theater), North Norman (at new Medical Ctr, or around Main and I35), and downtown Norman/OU.

6. Someone please build a friggin walkway between Penn Square Mall and 50 Penn Place. I crossed on my bike today, and have on foot several times. Each time I nearly get squashed.

This would be both a boon to retail in 50 Penn, and help the awful parking and traffic in Penn Square.

Either a raised bridge or an underground tunnel. Either way it needs to happen now. A raised bridge would be more of a landmark.

7. Sidewalks in my neighborhood, Meadowbrook Acres.

I remember despairing a bit when moving here from Jefferson Park. I would have space to work on music at home, and Becca could easily drive to Edmond for grad school, but I thought my urban (well, urban for OKC) life would suffer.

Not so, I found myself walking to many more places from our new spot, many more than I could at 24th and Robinson! When Whole Foods comes in, and CHK finishes its makeover of the area, we will live in one of the most walkable areas in OKC. People assume it must be downtown, and though one has a much better walking infrastructure downtown, there is an important factor missing: anything to walk to after 5pm. And anyone actually living there. I hope this changes too.

Yet in our hood we can walk and bike most places: Myriad food options, Classen Curve, Nichols Hills Plaza, a Pet Store, Penn Square Mall, Wine Shoppe, gourmet grocer (Forward), overpriced grocer (Crescent), shopping at NH Plaza, Farmer's Market, and Grand Blvd Park.

But with no sidewalks we are missing a bit of street life, even though we are a modest-sized home, larger lot hood, with lots of pets and a blend of renters (like us) and homeowners.

I dunno, it might detract from the weird charm that is our neighborhood, the last finger of modest urbanity before the monstrosity of Nichols Hills takes over.

What are your OKC Christmas wishes?

Dec 09

2010-12-09T22:04:00.002-06:00

Tonight we do not fear the sorrows we might bear
and we leave to the cold the tyranny of appeasement
we might even be slow-speeched, and ill-at-peace
for if You do not abide in despair, then You are not everywhere

Let us not be tempted to just assume You stir the earth
with the grace that is contraband in the eye of the Market
We hope until our hearts are melt copper, yet in truth
our lust for comfort shows we might hardly know You

We haven't recognized You as we've built settlements
and peace walls for the sake of the strangers within
that we might somehow keep our appetites from starving them
those godless fools-except You are indeed one of them

and tonight we inhale the emptiness we've wrought
and ask You, stranger God, to tell us once again, who You are

----

i know I'm leaving many of the strictures of sonnet-wringing out from my last few, and I will return to them shortly, but I also hoped in this season to let the rawness of pursuing a thought or image of God, in this case, one that is quite dark, to let that rawness shape the poem's form to some degree. But soon enough the iambic pent. and rhymes will return.

Dec 08

2010-12-08T22:02:00.000-06:00

with what cheap tinsel have we molested You!
stringing out our little deaths upon Your limbs
thinking it's all about our festive divisions
where we feel good about not being sinners
harbingers all, of a kingdom of politeness
we salivate at the very thought of a god
who hates who we hate, and looks like a baby
one we can condescend to, and keep safe away
from those rough immigrants who would profane
His untouchable wail, and flesh-that-is-not-flesh
yes, we secrete such sickly indignation
and suckle the candied teat of fear, sold for less here!
oh great God who pulls our fences to plant tiny seeds
takes form in the hands that dig, wait, and prosper these

December 06

2010-12-07T09:41:00.000-06:00

in mother Russia they are proud of their heaters
in America they are merely afraid of the cold
walk with me beside the cracked white Fontanka
let the small days of winter bury the squawk of the news
put your ears on the rapid tongue of the Haymarket:
the language is like a ladle in thick broth
then take your illness to Kazansky's soundless arms
even the prospekt's echoes are muzzled by the candles
do not fear the length of the rimy-starred night
nor the ghosted flakes that turn to black slush in the city
walk in love, though the sky is mute and remote
and keep one eye on Griboedova's winged lions
let loose of the motormouthed, immediate diversion
let the waiting refrigerate your attention, and you'll begin to listen

Advent Sonnet Dec 05

2010-12-05T21:35:00.001-06:00

We are sweating under the wool of compensation
For the winter we have fashioned new fibrous skin
We shudder to plug a hole in the logic of Eden
that has us as named peoples, strangers brought in
but somehow frail like calm water, like tent skin
You offer no quarter for those who quarry perfection
Your gritted sons and daughters know well these men:
who suckle on the certainty they've found as Your fashion
who battle to keep the seers from their right-angled fen
a bog of loud chieftains with a foregone conclusion
the banes of width who worship mere renumeration
because there is a kind of gold in the ache of the question
are You really who You are alleged? Will You still return?
We await an answer of presence in the winter's gelid burn

Advent Sonnet 6 Dec 03

2010-12-04T18:58:00.002-06:00

it is accomplishment enough for us
to just get one of these damn things done
a madrigal, a tile, a heater fixed: all fuss,
and maybe the fault lies with You, unseen One
who has brought up every dripping moment
from the wet death of nihil's drowning bath
where just an hour in the woods can foment
a scum and steel heart onto a deciduous path

Your handiwork is unforgettable and aged
but the soft copper of meaning is bent both ways
we glance 'neath the skin of charitable hands
but seek out firm earth when sense is flammed-
thunder-drumming the cynic notes from within us again
as the world gains one more widow, one more orphan

Advent Sonnet 5 Dec 02

2010-12-03T10:26:00.001-06:00

there comes a point when chased through woods by wolves
when one learns she can, in fact, change the fight
by listening to the syntax and grammar, through her fright
of the beasts she now finds less feral, less fools
or perhaps the will to keep breathing finds collapse
and pursuant to despair, all that's left is to relax
to let the warmth be the warmth of one's own bloodiness
brought bright from it's mauve cavern skin into ruddiness

when, for ages, it seems we don't see or hear from You
the fibrous and patterned speech of the lonely earth
is all we've left for calories, all we can tongue and taste
like Mobius on a Ferris Wheel: amused by mathematics

All American inculcation tells me it is a sin to just anticipate
But in the woods with the wolves, one must run while one waits

----

with this form i tried to allow the sonnet rhyme to break down over the course of the form, and to even allow the stanzas to shrink as the poem went on, to mimic a kind of breathlessness of being pursued, not only perhaps by external doubts or fears, but by one's own growing numbness to them.

Advent Sonnet Dec 01

2010-12-01T22:26:00.001-06:00

(Isaiah 6:9-10)

our bony winter's air is plucked by a sound
a tremulous finger rings the watery pile
but we've grown bored with the shuddering ground
and listen little to Port Au Prince, to Grand Isle

We've no want for information, the silos are replete
We can name our neighborhoods by the things we need
While I've got the global stats in front of me
let me keep leading you blind into the street

I have never found myself in fear of what seems
the numinous has blunt teeth when champing me
until I notice my heart does not seem to bleed
then what, I ask, if anything, is inside me kindling?

our season is of the stones that keep well the cold
will You not strike the crust 'til we've grown too old?

Advent Sonnet 3 Nov 30

2010-11-30T21:28:00.000-06:00

glassed in the air behind a foggy crystal
stuck firm into the cold hands of a bezel
all I can hear is the twitch of progress
left with too much mystery to undress
but I'll give You this much-you are too obscene
to be buried inside mere ticking things
many think You build order, then set it loose
but Your whirlwind hands leave little to adduce
You rouse green hope from cascading viscera
on a piebald heart You scrawl a bright saga
who could fault us for our now animate anatomy:
stirred to bulbous gravidity, great with story
For still we've mere winters, where patience grows bony
how long will You tarry in the gadgets of history?

Advent Sonnet 2 Nov 29

2010-11-29T23:10:00.000-06:00

Oh make us not afraid of Your uncommon sense
to wrap calmly 'round a whirlpooling ghost
we've little to taste, not much tangible to boast
but still we furrow-brow and fixate on each new fence
a surety of iron, wind-stoppage, thickened mense
i'm quick to shelter in cool reason's granite coast
my grey-eyes of faith dimmed till i'm a milquetoast
who trusts more in a priori's marble-hewn defense
When I hear You called the light, I hear florescent hum
Modest orange and white spots on the earth You wrought
that did not shudder when You were born, unsought
though the pious would soon grab for Your rapid stardom
so this evening we call You an all-lightening glow
and we will be at peace that it is all that we can know

Advent 1 2010

2010-11-28T21:15:00.004-06:00

Hello all-it has been a long time since I've shown my 1's and 0's around here, but diving back in, it's ye olde saison of Advent ( I know I just mixed old English and French, but I'm on antibiotics right now for sinuses).

So for this year, I have made the probably foolish vow to myself to attempt to write only sonnets for this year's Advent poems. The self-imposed ambition is the same: a poem each day of Advent. Each poem is a prayer. Each prayer is also a work, a craft, a deciding, then often drudging, then a savoring of the gift of words. That words have some sort of heft with God is a deep gift for us, because we often finds words far less...committing...than actions. As with any gift, I can easily glut on it, and I hope to not neglect actually waiting for the coming of Jesus, of sharing the ugly hope of Advent, in order to just shoehorn some modern English into precocious sonnets.

I hope instead to make the more difficult act of working with a form an actual part of the work of waiting, and I have been running back and forth between what kind of sonnet to pursue. I am not used to writing sonnets, and prefer open form as much as I can, but I am steeling myself back into remembering that poetry was once a craft, done by hard workers, where form was part of the magic of the thing, not something that ground against the phantasm. Likewise, I say as strongly as I can: poetry is as much a sober art as it is a free and loose one. Sadly, many, or even most Westerners either see poetry as a flighty-tounged fey sport for nature lovers, or as an academic act of autoerotica, or as something from the Beat generation, where an autonomous soul just "says it like it is."

It might contain those less than salubrious tendencies, but by and large it is a way of communicating mystery, a way of mere imagining-and then trying to snapshot that imagination into something well-wrought-and the crafting is part of the respect of the mysterious that poetry attempts to vocalize.

So back to what kind of sonnet-I default to Shakespearean, but also want to try the subtle changes brought by Italian, or even just various poets who dabbled with sonnets. Just to recap, a sonnet is typically a 14-line, iambic pentameter collection of varying rhyme schemes, usually composed of 3 stanzas of 4 lines and a concluding couplet (or 2 stanzas and a sestet). Often the closing sestet or couplet will solve or summarize the preceding lines.

Again, I am a noob at sonnets, and I am rough to say the least with tight meters. But I hope to offer some things worth reading for a few minutes each day of this Advent we have-for anyone who is interested.

The first sonnet I have is actually lifted form-wise from Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" sonnet of 1802, which is actually Petrarchan (Italian) in form.

The most basic of hours is spent on dense theory
even the turn of conspiracy seems to be dun
while we wait for the mist to clear from the gun
the report of the shell cutting air is our quarry

left nearly broke in the square with naught but a penny
Looking down, tossing my hands like i've got more than one
i'm runoff from the tailings, out of the mall's golden tongue
where we're warmed each winter by a shared fright of penury

The confectionary hums out a new economy, pillowed
by a fake yellow age and a fluff of referents
the remembrance we've tamed floats from smokestacks, billowed
from cooling towers lit by us faithful adherents

The Magi become un-pagan, well-kept, and willowed
as we shop to tame them, I mean, bless them, with new vestments

Virtue and Vulture, It Just Sounds Cool

2010-07-13T15:21:00.003-06:00

So I am witnessing a Twitter discussion between some friends, all with more business experience and sense than myself, talking about the value of local ownership of a franchise versus local independent business ownership. This after just reading Peter Rollins' excellent post on the psychology of "resistance," in the context of Aristotle's calling of humans "rational animals." What I gained from Rollins' blog was a sense of the distance between virtue and rationality, that reason can only go so far before it buts up to virtue, and often, if not usually, the two work in concert.

Yet sometimes what is reasonable has moral implications that are unacceptable under various umbrellas of thought, and in our case here, under the light of the Gospel many rational actions and convictions do not add up to Christ-likeness. We have to admit that Christianity can be arbitrarily unrational at times, and there is where the virtues come in to either super-cede or not. We have to face down uncomfortable truths (in the commenters' example, the traffiking involved in chocolate production, and how slow we are to react to what is a glaring problem, very real for those oppressed by it. The Christian has no excuse at all, after one finds out, but we often find ourselves lazier than we think we are when it comes to actually having to do something differently).

That is the heavy sense, and the lighter sense is what I see in my friends' conversation. The two sides of the argument are based on what is better for the community, owner, and the numbers involved. It is a civil one, between good people, so I hope they and you see it as an edifying discourse, not some "well, this person is right, and this one is wrong" nonsense.

One the one hand, the numbers of profit and scale belong to the corporate franchise owner, even a local or small business one, and the argument is that this is better in the long run than an independent or smaller business.

Others disagree, and while I am probably personally sympathetic to independent business in almost any case, the reasons for doing so do not add up to the best economics in the end, if done in terms of economics only.

The argument for the side of independent small business is that it is a better cultural option, in my opinion, and adds more to the community. A corporate business in most, but not all, cases will add a culture that is mass produced or dislocated from a local culture. The easy way to say this is all Chick-Fil-A's are the same, but they are locally franchised, I believe. While the food is delicious, mmm waffle fries, they hardly add to the culture of a neighborhood. Yet an independent, one-of-a-kind chicken shack (think Eischen's) draws visitors and locals alike to money that goes right back into the area, depending on the owner. It does seem to add the admittedly very vague sense of local culture and pride, even with its shortcomings.

Yet Chick-Fil-A will generate more profit, and have more to invest into other businesses, and into the community, and will have the stability of a corporate presence behind it, even if it is obscured in localness. We have to admit-localism is more arbitrary than we like, even if we find it convincing.

So it comes down to: economics (reason in this case), or localism (virtue, in this case). It is not so simple to say who is right, because both are "correct." It just comes down to where the bottom of the convictions lie.

And, to be clear, I am not here correlating economic rationalism with anti-Gospel sentiment, via this second example, because to do so would then become ad hominem against people who are utterly committed to the Gospel.

I just want to use these conversations as a jumping point for mulling that Rollins article.

Peace!

On the Quaintness Of Actually Going to Church

2010-07-01T16:00:00.003-06:00

In my weird profession, time at home on weekends is a rare gift, for numerous reasons: Becca is slightly less consumed with grad school work and work-work, and we have more time together; my friends who have normal jobs that are open on weekends more or less are having get-togethers that I can for freaking once be a part of; and of course, I might get a chance to worship with Becca and people whom I actually live among.

Yet what I'm on about here is something that actually applies more to folks involved in playing in local churches in many places, usually where there are some reliable mega-churches that have a lot of musicians employed, like Atlanta, Houston, Chicagoland, even OKC. The issue is that it can actually be rather quaint to attend a local fellowship, even sporadically. Worship becomes simply where one fills a gig, and where one is depends on the gig quality.

Actually getting to worship, agenda-free, with people who can call you on your bullshit is immensely valuable. This is something I have missed so much in our travels, especially as we have seemed to be gone more and more weekends. It is a trend right now to say "Christianity cannot be lived alone," but it is true. Its truth comes from the nature of the Gospel, however, not some idea that gives primacy to "community," or even "doing life together." Those terms find meaning in the text, not vice versa.

What traveling so much engenders is a bit of the "grass is greener" view when it comes to local church worship. Yet our kind of job, shared by all kinds of people in business and arts, shows the poverty that can exist in one's person when we do not get to share the Eucharist together, do not get to have small group conversation over food, brew, coffee, you name it. Yet the grass really is greener, and there is real damage done when one cannot stay connected to folks that he or she knows on a daily basis, not on stage or talent bases.

This is something that people who travel have to gauge as worth it or not worth it for the sake of their craft, and at some point it might not be worth the cost anymore to travel to keep up what I am doing. This is something that I have to constantly ask.

I might be too sensitive, but it seems often those of us who play around various churches in OKC for jobs, which is not an illegitimate job in itself, often we are quite ironic and distant when it comes to actually belonging to a community. Discipleship is often not even on the table, or viewed as pretty cheesy or distrusted, because often those of us involved in the work of worship often see the brokenness of leaders, or even the hypocrisy of leaders, and this understandably makes for a low view of Jesus, and His people.

On a note that I want to expand another time-I do think the Church should not be too queasy about hiring artists who are not Christians, or who are not particularly pious, and I have a lot of reasons for this (as do others), but that's not really where I am at in this discussion. Just wanted to throw it in there.

I just hope for us to cultivate more non-ironic participation as worshippers, if we profess Christ, even when negotiating the brackish waters of worship musicianhood. For someone who does not get to worship regularly at either home fellowship he tries to call a local body (that's a long story in itself-Bridgeway and St. Paul's), I am jealous of those who do get to share the bread and wine (or juice) with people who actually know them. Of course going to the same local body doesn't guarantee friendship, but traveling too much is guaranteed to erode it. Likewise, always following gigs in a local setting is only going to develop disconnection with the content of worship-and reduce the gift of music to a tool, rather than a chance to use one's imagination, because, let's face it, it is often a problem in local churches as much as in camps. At the worst, it fosters disenchantment with the Church, often from hypocrisy in leadership, which musicians often get to see, and often have the lowest tolerance for (thank God for that).

Mostly, I don't want to feel quaint for sincerely desiring to worship (I mean that in the earthiest sense possible-as Auden calls it: "worshipping, not lying") with people who know me apart from my craft, even though I can never separate my craft from myself. The very loose fellowship I can share with other leaders, musicians is vital in OKC, folks who I see more than once a year. The ragamuffin guys (including me) I meet with on Tuesdays when I am in town are some of the best church I could ask for, regardless of where they are at with the Church. The small house churches we have had at Bridgeway (and lament their current absence) were huge for Becca and I. The mystery and utterly non-personality driven worship of St. Paul's, with the amazingly thoughtful clergy they have, has preserved my faith when every church seemed annoying and shallow.

The whole point is that none of these things come about because of an external conviction. They are not products of a theology on down, but rather, a theology from the basic grammar of trying to be faithful to my friends and to the Eucharist, trying indeed to learn and then live what it actually is to have the mind of Jesus.

To be able to foster this with other musicians, especially those fed up with shallow church, is a dream, and I hope to expand it more. But it begins by not assuming that sincere worship is naive, and it begins by developing churches that can patronize artists in a consistent way that is not based in hypocrisy or simple money. A lot of work is ahead.

The Aesthetic Problem of Performing Music at Camps

2010-06-26T19:31:00.004-06:00

I know the title is wonky, but it's meant to be a bit of a wink. Every summer, hordes of musicians descend into various random locales, to perform for local churches or organizations putting on week-or less-than-a-week camps. Sometimes this is done in some weird world of climbing the denominational ladder (Falls Creek can often suffer from insufferable greentooths who only want to be noticed by whoever can get them on the main stage...is that harsh?), but often times it is a great-hearted chance for a band to get to actually know a group of people that it is not normally with (I count some valuable days with the kind folks of Newalla, among many others, doing this). Too often I feel with us, and with other bands involved in church music, there is a very odd sense of "hey we are coming to worship with you, then leave after we have rocked you, so...yeah...let's small talk." I am bad at small talk so this is pretty unfun for me in most cases.

Yet all that aside, I keep thinking this week that camps often bring out the lower end of the aesthetic spectrum in the Church, for a couple of reasons.

One, the sheer repetitiveness of camp music reduces the songs to usefulness, and to pieces in a program to be fit together and used for the greater purpose of some theme or another. This is a pretty low use of God's gift of music, though I do concede it becomes possible to teach a group unfamiliar songs in ways that a single event cannot. But ideally, church music is done in a local church where one can learn over time anyways. The repetitiveness is also quite maddening for the musicians. Two options: cope via disconnection, or via the pursuit of perfection, very subtle improvisation, and trying to push through the, ahem, boredom. I try for the latter but sometimes end up daydreaming during the 5th iteration of "Chainbreaker." If I am honest.

Two, the environment of camps is one that is built around pressure to create certain experiences based on expectations not unlike a revival tent. While true revival or reviving is often unpredictable, it can be done in various tent experiences, as we have seen in the past. Yet our age seems so either beholden to the big event, or utterly distrustful of it, the healthy big tent experience is tough to make earnestly, without manipulation of fatigue and "get x amount of salvations, calls to ministry etc."

Even this language is a bit dated in the Church, and refers to callings and conversions that are becoming thankfully clearer as more subtle and difficult and even dappled things than we perhaps insisted on 10 years ago.

What this does aesthetically is related to the first point, in reducing music to a tool and not a transcendence, but it also creates an oppression of songcraft into the widest possible angles. Song selection is done to fit the program, please the various youth pastors, and basically renders the band a service that one has paid for in package with the camp.

While certainly the patronage connection means there must be trust between band, camp, and pastors, there is a difference between trust and use, and the consumer ideal applies to camps even. Trying to fit in the many facets of camp and squeeze the often needfully slow or deliberate process of worship and prayer between many videos, skits, presentations, awards, rec, small groups, etc...it can be a channel-surfing experience for sure.

That the band must submit to a program of flashy transitions and wow-em moments, when that might not be in that band's aesthetic, makes for some frustrating moments.

Perhaps this is just grumpy agedness kicking in, and also a related angst with place that i will hopefully write about in the next few days, but I keep thinking about the odd aesthetic pressures that camps induce on artists, in addition to the often good experiences they can become from a pastoral-relational sense.

Anyways, just thinking out loud, I know many folks who probably feel differently or the same, and would love for comments if anyone has thoughts, especially to fill in holes or counterpoint what I am digging out here.

Obsessions with Drums.

2010-05-29T22:16:00.001-06:00

So this afternoon and evening I played a gig with some friends where I basically made some major duffs within my playing (drums), at several points in the evening's performance.

Now, these weren't subtle inconsistencies or personal attempts at a new technique here or there, which is a good way to fail. Rather, this was a combo of playing some new, though not complicated songs, and an inexplicable clumsiness. One tune in particular is based on a kind of triplet feel, that is a little more difficult, and awkward to play, if that makes sense, but it is nothing terribly intense.

Yet. I do want to be a player who is reliable in any situation, save for ones where I am obviously un-skilled or un-practiced. Of course, in my personality, it drives me terribly mad that I am a bad jazz player. Despite never studying music formally outside of a couple of classes, I still expect myself to be able to speak the languages of styles I rarely play or even listen to.

Being terribly self-aware, I don't think of this as any kind of self-confidence, but an incredibly frustrating tic in myself that leaves no room for error.

The playing tonight was terribly shameful, and full of dumb mistakes, in addition to my own being frustrated at the details I seemed unable to play comfortably.

Here's a little inside vision of the mind of whatever a person who calls himself an artist is: it is terribly fraught with a combo of insecurity, obsession, and pessimism.

The rolling stone gathering moss of doubt occurs quickly from such an evening, where I am quickly second-guessing my desires and determination to maintain a job playing music, in production, performance, etc. I feel entirely insufficient as a player, and it snoballs into every arena.

To create something, even something not entirely "arty" as what I did tonight (my creating being my playing in the moment) is terribly full of the potential for failure and mediocrity, the most terrible things I can imagine in my professional life, which of course has little to no separation from my inner life.

I am obsessed with the very details of drums, I see them as sincere, legitimate tools of true art creation, not something for cool people to play and sweat on, or be loud on. Sure, those things are contained in the creating, but there is so much nuance and "basic-ness" to drums. They need not be amplified, and they cannot be well-faked (despite what marketers of various drum-programmign programs might tell you).

Of course, my ideals rise far above my abilities. I hear far more in my head that I wish to play than I can play, and when that occurs, it is like fingernails on the soul's chalkboard. Perhaps it is just the deflation of my big ideals about drums into the reality of my lack of skills in many places on the drums.

I can blame my lack of money on not having more gear to be tools to create. I can blame that lack of money on a lack of time to rehearse and pay for lessons, especially in arenas like Jazz, where I am obsessed, but totally a child. I can blame all kinds of things, but it is all bunk. It's just how it is, and the reality of my limits needs to be faced, and then either overcome or succumbed to.

I say all of this dramatic crap in hopes to explain a bit of the musician's mind, perhaps for mates of musicians, or for musicians caught in the same ruts I am this evening.

In Defense Of Adobe

2010-05-13T15:32:00.003-06:00

Above: our temporary home this week!

So while on vacation in Taos, I am taking a wee bit of afternoon time, with some evening storms rolling into the valley, to write a quick rejoinder to the adobe haters I have run across over my years of loving northern New Mexico, specifically, Taos and Santa Fe.

Since I came here in late high school for the first time, with my family, I have been constantly drawn to, and thankfullly been able to visit and share this place with Becca, and with some of my friends who have fallen in love with it as well. Of course, in sharing this, I often get rejoinders about southwest art, and even general disgust with the adobe aesthetic that is kept in place as development law in many towns in New Mexico. Folks complain about the bland color, the seeming conformity, and just probably against the preciousness that it engenders in folks who fetishize it.

Yet I think that is silly, though in most cases, people tend to not have strong opinions about a peculiar architectural style native to the region, most folks that do tend to have shallow, if any reasons. Note that I say all of this with a bit of a smirk, because it is not entirely essential in any way, but it is illustrative of, let's call it...less-than-thoughtful-criticism-of-arbitrary-things.

The adobe laws put in place in the oldest capital in the US keep a a vastly unique place safe from a lot of blandishment, despite the complaints of folks from all places other than Santa Fe. Sure, it does create a semi-theme-park potential, but Santa Fe backs it up by being a truly odd place. Sometimes this can be frustrating, as its art scene can be very myopic and mediocre, but at the same time, it resists trends in many ways. This is thankfully changing a lot right now, as young folks not interested in de rigeur southwest art explode the traditions of the area in great ways. Yet those laws keep the McDonalds' and strip malls from completely destroying any sense of pride in place, as those blandifying building almost uniformly do wherever they crop up.

Any town where a strip mall is architecturally at odds with everything around it is alright by me.

The constrictions on development have also helped to keep some of the towns and cities smaller, even in Taos, where lots of tourism and growth have made a tense place for locals, it still remains vastly tiny compared to its power as a destination.

Which is another point of adobe: look around. Perhaps one benefit of adobe's dun color is that it opens the eyes to the surroundings of the towns, and in the cases of Taos and Santa Fe, this is no small matter. The Sangre De Cristo range butts right up to these towns, and Taos is dwarfed by the sweep of Taos Mtn. and Wheeler Peak over the Rio Grande gorge. Houses seem wildly insignificant when compared to what stands a few miles away.

Let's not even spend that much time on how environmentally thoughtful adobe is: it adjusts to changing seasons very well, though it does require maintenance and replenishing. It is made from what is around it: mud, straw. It is delightfully humble, not built as a trendy material of the moment, nor expensive status material (though it can be used that way). It doesn't create a house as a stubborn object keeping the world out, but rather stands in humility and fragility as part of the world around it.

Any creative person knows that oftentimes the way to move beyond an imaginative impasse is to set limits on something, or follow a tradition, then try to make that tradition over in a new way; to use the limits to help create, not shackle anything. Sometimes the elimination of options is the best way to move forward, especially in a world that fetishizes infinite options as the apex of freedom. Adobe can be a small metaphor, a silly little reminder, that perhaps we do best in creating our civilizations in tension with the past, not ignoring or abolishing it. We do best looking around us before we simply raze everything to build our temple of Newness. The unkempt fragility of adobe reminds us that we live in places, and we have much to learn from where we live.

Church as Place, or Off The Chartres

2010-04-01T14:39:00.002-06:00

Architecture puns always win.

In continuing the thoughts I laid out in the previous post, I wanted to expand a little bit on our sense of place in our local church buildings, and perhaps how this relates to the lack of excitement by artists (who share the same reticence to shut down any and all conversations with a "I'm playing at xxxxxxxx church" when asked a venue) to relate the place they are playing in a given town.

In a venue we played at in Orlando this past weekend, they have some lithograph-type posters up of various European cathedrals, very detailed and striking posters from Siena to Westminster Abbey. In the midst of these famous landmarks, there was a plaque essentially linking this church's building campaign to the various great monuments of architecture and ecclesiastical wealth spread across the old continent. While this Orlando church had a large campus, a very large one, it was hardly an architectural achievement, and was geographically unbound to the town, though in Orlando (as in most southern cities) this isn't terribly hard to do. They might have been a bit generous to themselves in linking up their structure with Mont St. Michel.

Being someone who senses place and responds to the various depth of culture and geography in places, as much as or moreso than I do to people in various places, I tend to feel quite strongly the dearth of connection to a city that a suburban megachurch often has, and the general feel of cleanliness and "don't touch anything" anesthetic that can often occur. This is not always the case, but more often than not it is.

Part of this can be linked to the ability to walk from a place to other places, an important thing to be able to do when on the road, stuck with 4 or 5 other guys in a van, bus, or plane, and wanting to simply go look at a place where one is playing, or get coffee, or browse shops or buildings. These things are important to some folks (others don't feel this need as much, and they are lucky), and when one is in a giant campus surrounded by parking lots and highways, there is nowhere to gain sense of location.

Another difficulty comes when a church is linked to its environs, and those environs are more or less wealthy or upper middle class burbs, and for the community the building is in, it becomes a subtle hint that this place is built for the ones who can pay for it, and the less well-off are often not found anywhere near, though the church might offer chances to minister to poorer folks, it is still a condescension, not a location among the "least of these." This can add to a church's perception among it's own locals as a country club, or a club for folks who have it all together, or a club for folks who like Casting Crowns' music but everything else is a little too weird. It's not that these are bad people, just that my heart and imagination have long been un-linked to that sort of world.

Finally, there is a sense of cultural location that is vastly important. In OKC there have been a spate of churches growing in poorer or downtown areas, and this is a big source of excitement for me. People who genuinely love place, and the people around them are working in the midst of cultural flows in the city. This is happening all over to some degree, and in most churches individual members do this quite often.

Yet more often than not, this isn't a consideration for building programs as much as cheapness of land, or location near high-giving members might be. Not to mention the question of planting a church versus building a bigger single campus.

When we play in theaters, college campuses, cafes, or bars/venues (with other bands or myself), there is a sense of submitting to the cultural stream of a place, and adding one's voice to it, in a legitimate way, that will be heard by many kinds of people. In doing the same on a church campus, it precludes most of the population of a locale, definitely keeps away the suspicious or skeptical believers whom I (admittedly) care most about engaging, and sort of cordons off the sharing of music and conversation into safe-territory. Which might be good for some folks, but, again, my prejudice lies in interruption of thoughtless worship and music, not the perpetuation of it.

The places we choose to create these events in do, in fact, matter, and not only does the conversational aspect suffer from the baggage many people have towards churches as venues or just places of worship, but the aesthetic does as well. We tend to shy away from adventure in an environment we sell as setup for safety, rather than exploration.

"So, where are you playing?"

2010-03-27T09:49:00.006-06:00

(nb: Sorry I am very inconsistent at blogging)

Brutal honesty time. Stick with me, it takes a sec to get there.

So...when we travel (being Charlie Hall and band), we are often asked two questions when in the airport at the ticket counter checking in our massive amounts of gear that we (foolishly) subject to flight travel nearly every weekend, or wheile waiting curbside to get picked up by a rental or venue van, or while wandering about together in any sort of locale as a group who looks more or less like a bunch of ruffian musicians. The two questions are:

"What kind of music do you play?"

and

"So, where in town are you playing?"

This happened yesterday in the Orlando airport as I was helping an elderly lady discern the tram from the gates to the baggage claim, and where to go to claim the bags. She told me she was taking her grandkids to Disney World, and I (not sarcastically, though i pretended to be ironic)asked if I could just tag along. She was a cool old lady, what can I say, and I have wanted to go back to Epcot since I was a kid.

Anyways, I happened to encounter her at the curbside while we waited for the rental van, and she asked where we might be playing in town.

"Errr..I think First Baptist Church of Orlando..." I said as if i hadn't just looked at it on iCal, sheepish and with a dose of Williamsburg-style ennui. She made an odd face (I semi-expected her to be surprisingly pleased, since we all know most old people are Baptists, not to mention they all follow the Gospel), and then made pleasantries and hopped in the car with her son (probably 35ish) and grandkids. She told her son about us, gesturing to the mountain of cases curbside, and he quipped "she's a great background singer, you should have her along with you guys," and I retorted that Disney would be a lot more sunny than a gig with us (I know, zing). I think it mattered a lot to me that her son appeared to be a hipster kind of dad, full beard, cooly-understated clothes, casual gait. It is not a stretch to say he might be a musician himself, perhaps in some really cool band that I don't know.

I relate all this to answer that second question we face on every trip (the first will be an even longer post someday).

Most of the time we are asked that, and the venue is a church or something similar, we generally feign ignorance of where we are playing, or deflect, or make it sound very neutral, or sometimes we genuinely don't know. But always, I can tell we aren't entirely forthcoming with our immediate outing as a "religious musical group" as we would then be lumped by folks who perhaps aren't believers themselves, or are believers and then are ready to make us safe from the scary world with all the attendant baggage of either side: "Style: tepid, safe, irrelevant" "oh, so you're like Creed?" "Republicans, all of you are Republicans, right?" "I'm gay/Muslim/Mormon/Buddhist/Unitarian/Environmentalist, so that probably means you hate me, right?" "Can I hear you on K-LOVE?" "Wait, just let me get away so I can escape proselytization" "Can Christians have tattoos?"

Let me be clear that I am not characterizing non-Christians as somehow all having bias or misunderstanding just waiting to blow off any religious person who speaks to them. The opposite in fact, there is misunderstanding because of the abhorrent witness Christianity has undertaken in American context for so long now. More specifically, Christian music (which, once again, is a marketing construct, and that is it). There is church music, and it is valid as a corner of the Church's own expression, but even it is not meant to be jarred up in the hermetically sealed safe world of us v. them Christianity.

I also am not counting the tons and tons of thoughtful Christians out there who have nothing to do with this sort of thinking, witness, or imagination. May God increase you, dear folks.

So I was finally just struck by how odd it is to immediately set oneself up for shut down in conversation, and that is why we, and myself, are reticent to just locate ourselves within a tiny world while trying to simply converse with strangers. I am adamant in saying it is not due to some shame at being a Christian, I and my bandmates absolutely don't feign coyness just to be thought cool by someone who is non-religious, we do it to preserve the possibility of conversation, even if it is very short. Ideally, folks would ask for our website or something and then discover us through our own music, or spend enough time in conversation to be intrigued by the Gospel in us, rather than repelled, condemned, judged, pigeonholed etc. by association with the unfortunate political or social repression that the Church can woefully be party to.

I really think we will still be found odd, found strange by folks who do not share in the Gospel, but I think that is the key to living a life that intrigues people to dig into the Good News, to interact with Jesus in ways that are as bereft as possible from the baggage and preconceptions everyone bring to Him. It has to retain mystery, has to retain space for each person, and smothering is all that occurs when the sudden pigeonholing of strangers occurs, in either direction.

That's it for now, friends.

Substance of Marriage

2010-02-01T17:50:00.002-06:00

On the second day of our honeymoon, Becca and I were in Paris, having just flown in via Houston, after a brilliant wedding and dance-filled reception. Reception is a word that doesn't really apply to ours, nor many of my friends' after wedding parties. More like after wedding dance party in the spirit of Cana, or something like that. Though we didn't have any wine.

Anyways, so there we were, having braved my momentary panic of forgetting my new debit card pin at Charles De Gaulle's cash machine, where we almost went Euro-less for our trip. We loaded a taxi, and woozily gazed on the Peripherique as we exited and drove down onto Rue St. Dominique, to our hotel for the week.

(n.b. Rue St. Dominique is one of the best streets in Paris)

So, exhausted, evening, having spent a sleepless flight, after a sleepless week of wedding prep, we were quite ready to crash and not rush our time in Paris, her first time out of the country, my third time to a city that is oddly underrated, despite being, well, Paris. I knew we would have plenty of time afoot and on train in the capitol, so we decided to take a nap on arrival in our small room, named for Victor Hugo (as are most things in Paris).

Eventually, my stomach woke up and then the rest of me, and I asked Becca if she wanted to venture out and grab some dinner, then come back and crash till tomorrow in the hotel. As I was soon to learn as a greenhorn husband, getting ready and going out is not the ten-minute affair it is for most guys, for my wife. (I spent each morning watching the only English-channel in the hotel for an hour or so while Becca got ready, learning all about the stock markets of the Euro Zone...).

So I ventured out alone, grazing the metro map for a place to grab a few groceries that we could snack on all week from our hotel fridge. We were close enough to the Champs to walk, and I knew there was a Monoprix along it, so I hopped across the Pont L'Alma to the Metro and went one stop to Franklin D. Roosevelt (yep, he has a Metro stop in Paris). During the walk, I breathed in the lit up air, the orange of the Eiffel Tower not far to the west along the river, the detail of the mostly humdrum Pont L'Alma, and the whirr of traffic at the cirque across the river, always whirring except on Rue St. Dominique.

I made my way up the noisy Champs, a thick artery of designer stores and weird chain stores, teeming with what were probably tourists, and I ducked into the refreshingly domestic Monoprix grocery store, below the K-Mart-like clothing section above.

I picked out some random items, trying to find good champagne and Bordeaux for a steal (it's still expensive in France, don't worry), and picked out some random cheeses and crackers, and a couple of baguettes. Not to mention wine gums, Europe's gift to the rest of the world (imagine gummy bears made of wine flavors. amazing, non alcoholic).

I went back to the hotel, firmly satisfied in my Parisian domesticity, in opposition to the touristic masses all eating prix fixe meals in the Latin Quarter, I was going to the supermarket, just like I do everyday since I live in Paris, well, for 7 days. You get the idea: the satisfaction comes from living like someone who actually lives there, who doesn't find the Metro fun and exotic, but workaday and never on time, who can appreciate the Sacre Coeur, but as a landmark to find east, or north.

We proceeded to devour those cheeses and breads, stuffed with little spices or veggies, as if we had never eaten (indeed, we had not had much in the way of anything other than plane food for awhile). It was the first of what will be millions of moments together, as a married collective, smashing together the mundanity of a meal, of ignoring the gastronomie in favor of what we wanted. We curled up over the covers and broke bits of bread all over the floor, fought over our favorite cheeses, who would get the last bite, and watched the financial news on tv (only thing in English, remember), beginning a shared life.

And a shared life is a wacky, tremulous, expansive thing. The collision of the usual (groceries, tv news, cheese) with the sudden remembrance that this person is also of your flesh, is also an inheritor of your ambitions, and a sharer in your concerns-that is an un-tamable thought.

Why Not Thee, Animals?

2010-01-12T08:47:00.007-06:00

So the long break of winter is done, and the new year is here, and now I finally get to share a little essay I have been wanting to for a while.

I have been a vegetarian for about three and a half years, and often get questions as to why I do not eat meat. In full disclosure, I do eat sushi (including fish pieces) about once a month, depending on budget. I do not eat sashimi, which was becoming my favorite before I stopped eating meat. I consider this cheating, and just a quick reminder: folks who regularly eat fish are not vegetarians. In our ever-savvy provenance in the South of the US, this can often be confused.

Perhaps this is due to a subtle wish on the part of folks I encounter who are struck a bit by vegetarianism, and who secretly hope I just do it for health (fish also being a bit healthier than beef or chicken), rather than the sentimental animal-respect, or worse, a religious reason.

So my answer as to why I forego meat is tripartite:

1. I began eating meatless because I enjoy odd foods, and would try the odd veggie meal here and there, and when I did, I seemed to feel better, to sense the health it engendered in me. While this was probably also power of suggestion, it came at a time I began to connect the dots in how much food effects us, and how it matters within Christianity's frameworks of keeping one's body healthy, in respect to the Creator, and in respect to other humans. If drunkenness and other vices are prohibited, then we are vastly hypocritical with our diets. It is not that eating fast or fatty food is wrong/bad/sinful flat out, of course I eat comfort and fast food from time to time, but as in issues with drinking, etc., the point isn't teetotalism, but discernment, and not "quenching the Spirit," which leaves more room than perhaps moralists are comfy with, but seems closer to the heart of the matter.

2. Now to the gritty: I have stayed veggie out of a love and respect for animals, and creation at large. This is both a portion of the "sentimental" factor in eating creatures, in appreciation that while humans are obviously different (i.e. only sentient), they are also sharers in creation. I do not doubt for one second that nature is "red in tooth and claw," and I am sure a Mako shark hardly cares whether I respect him or not, but I also realize the responsibility that a more powerful and aware creature has over less fortunate.

3. And, yes, I do link following Jesus and being a vegetarian, though I do not make this link for anyone else, nor does it seem a mandate in Scripture of any sort, at least specifically. How I link these is mostly in the above thoughts, but I also find a few surprises as I encounter folks from all over (in band travels, often in very non-veg friendly areas). One thing that people need to know is that there is asceticism involved in any specific diet. This means one does not always get to eat what one wants. I LOVE turkey, bacon, hot dogs, burgers (especially buffalo), etc. But I choose not to eat them, and that is the rub. It is a choice, and for someone who loves food, it is a missing out. Yet it also reminds me, as a Western white male, that I cannot get anything I want just because I want it. Hopefully it can teach me to forego my own pleasure for someone else's gain in any and all areas of walking about.

Kosher, Buddhist, Hindu and Halal diets have long advocated (from holy Scripture) humane treatment of animals used in slaughter, and God obviously values animals as sacrifice (or valued them), because of both intrinsic created worth, and social/personal worth to the sacrificer. This is why Indian, Muslim, Greek, Lebanese, Kosher, Georgian, etc. food is both vegetarian and tasty, in that they have long learned to be creative within a limited diet.

Finally, I am not evangelical in this, in that I do not think everyone needs to or should become vegetarian, and by NO means do I think that vegetarians are in any way superior to omnivores. The first thing I swore to do as a veg. was to remain non-snotty as much as humanly possible about my diet, even in the face of Russians (crazy carnivores!), Baptists, the folks at Passion (BBQ for every meal!), and overseas, where I severely miss trying new kinds of animals for meals (e.g. duck tongue in Jakarta).

The hope I have is that while not all go veg., all would learn to respect where their food comes from, and crap, to even know from where their food comes. The environmental impact of meat production is staggering, and is absolutely quantified, it is not a controversy. It is simply unsustainable as more countries can afford beef and other large game. The production of most major meats around the world is vastly cruel to the animals involved, and both the spiritual and dietary effects are myriad, and negative.

Eating less, eating locally, eating organically, and eating less meat will someday become more normal for everyone, not just us crazy hippie vegetarians. (I'm not a hippie). This will happen due to pressures on the ecosystem that we will eventually be unable to ignore. Climate change will exacerbate this, but it will happen regardless of climate.

I do believe we are given animals for food as part of God's intention, but in the normal tension of the Gospel, we are called to look after the Earth, and one heavy contribution comes from foregoing meat as food, alongside humane attitudes and actions towards animals.

The hope is folks see this ahead of time, and see the value of respecting our role in ecosystems, and how we are reliant on them for our very survival. Likewise, showing respect to creation is showing respect to the Creator. Not everyone feels the same, and culture has a lot to do with perceptions of animal respect, and diet based around them. Yet I hope that by the efforts of everyone who cares about what they eat, whether it be meat based or not, conscientious respect of creation will grow among us.

Christmas (Advent Closing)

2009-12-27T18:38:00.002-06:00

if there's anything we cannot give,
it is παρουσια, one to another

aching so, to be one another's benefactors
to have debtors to forgive,

since, of course, we have found power
from grace, which is no place for self-made men

who pay thin tribute to Mary,
but really fashion themselves Magi

bringers of evanescent smells,
and the gold of the age

we can swing right in, even into
such a tumult as a basement under an inn

what smells and sounds!
and the blood of birth,

the press of civic obedience,
and the frowns of relations

upon a hasty, and messy parenthood

we, the givers of gifts, can swoop on in
rescuing mystery from such confusion,

giving doctor's notes to a situation, where
a Messiah is born just like every non-Messiah

and He didn't erase the racists,
He didn't stamp out Rome,

and He won't take our gifts of correction
to His tottering planet, it's puzzling physics

instead He gives

Advent 24

2009-12-23T23:22:00.000-06:00

Look across the ages to us
And count not our distortions,
Listen not to our arch-opinionists
The Grand Inquisitors don't speak for us

We haven't forgotten that we
Are grafts into the promise,
Lepers let out of the fences
And given a tactile gift

Look across the ages
As one does across the tundra or prarie
And do not count against us
That we hardly know the names of lands we exploit

Drawing greedily from the pregnant crust,
The earth is not our mother,
But she is a mother You give to us
To bring to term, a groaning trust

But here I am getting lost
I'm just trying to catch Your eye
Across too much time
And bring along my friends
And see the child as if through their eyes

Advent 23

2009-12-23T00:07:00.000-06:00

Let us pause, and examine Your arriving
Counting up the Renaissance works,
Where You are painted in oil and marble
As a vague Florentine merchant,
Or given a body not unlike Mercury, lithe, un-mottled

Oh what wars have begun,
Only because we see only ourselves in You

Let us pause and examine, colonial Galilee,
Teeming with blended caravanseries
Mutt peoples and the pax Romana,
A pax via bellum, not forgotten by a
Tribe of a well-aged diaspora

Yours was not caught up in epic
Nor were You concerned with getting Your story straight
Rather, You breathed the dust of Palestine,
And ate figs to fuel long walks,
Walks with plenty of stragglers and opportunists
Looking for that Mercurial marble god,
On whom could be fashioned all manner of dress:
He really could be rich like us! He could be as vengeful as we!
A marble god needs little interface,
And we could civilize him well

Yet there You go in offensive submission,
Wearing our hopes of corroboration
To court, to beating, to death and disappearance

Disappeared, at least, as a marble god,
A plaything of realpolitik, a philosoper's chewtoy

But perhaps quite present
As harbinger of an odd
Pax via memoria et servitum

Advent 22

2009-12-21T23:24:00.001-06:00

Time is either a wheel or a line,
According to your geography:
Around you, tell me, do you see stupas?
Perhaps onion domes, or tram wires
If you see spice vendors nearby,
Wheeling with scrawny legs
A bright orange or red cone,
You're likely to find time ending where it began,
Or if you navigate by the red eyes
Of tv aerials, you likely follow a time that is a line
To where? Who knows, maybe it ends with cured cancer,
Or it ends in Solana Beach or Montauk

So as You intersect us in our geometric concerns
Do you stretch and play with vague fate?
Did the wheel split, and the line begin to ache
At such a child as this?

It's to follow You in a water-like epoch,
With new bodies and new time
A vastly impossible task
For which we, sometimes unsteadily, wait

Advent 21

2009-12-20T23:40:00.002-06:00

Our lot on this earth
is not to speak in clear increments
ours is a mixed light

the demigods of research are in love with the walls
and the lords of religion are lusty for the ceiling

but the children of God
are keepers of a small,
shared space

and when You appear
You do not crash through the roof,
nor press down a wall,
but-there You are in our midst;
with us, as we are with ourselves
so we hardly notice

Advent 20

2009-12-20T01:32:00.000-06:00

Hardy called it "the madding crowd,"
I say "it" like I am not one of them,
and though the right men,
with their pencils lining out the
borderlands of right belief,
might discount you, I gather
in your scribbler's heart
you had more faith than the plastic spokespeople,
for politics' meager ends,
for temporal measurements

no, I think you would be looking for
that one
far from the noise of consumption
emanating from rich districts world over,
you would be looking for Him
where us skeptics always tend to look:
in the contrary. You would find Him there,
but not only there.

Look also in the forgotten woods
of grey leaves making rest,
look in the silence

You'll find Him not in loud speech,
nor with the "defenders of Christmas,"
who would cease defending,
if they knew the cost of actually listening to Him

yes.
Find Him in the furnace of doubt,
and look not to the ones with it all laid out,
but with the awkward poor,
the ungraceful thief (whom I find hard to love),
and with the children,
slugging mudwater from a stream,
not far from Lake Victoria.
Watch not their dejection,
but their dancing:
the long-expected kingdom
is in that loose unraveling

Advent 19 a third triolet

2009-12-18T23:30:00.000-06:00

Wait, past the foaming teeth of Scotland's coast
I am the one who is found ancient, among the ruins
When each concern is put forth in sunlight to roast
Wait, past the foaming teeth of Scotland's coast
I know you have little room in your soul for glasnost
And your concern is not salvaged by trite little tunes
Wait, past the foaming teeth of Scotland's coast
I am the one who is found ancient, among the ruins

Advent 18 A Second Triolet

2009-12-17T23:25:00.000-06:00

Our Earth is borne on the scars of a refugee,
And our wealth will dull his strangeness
Each casualty of prosperity is among his pedigree
Our Earth is borne on the scars of a refugee
Our pious math will smoke out the mystery
And our age has no word for 'blameless'
Our Earth is borne on the scars of a refugee,
And our wealth will dull his strangeness

Advent 17- An Advent Triolet

2009-12-16T22:47:00.000-06:00

Would that I was underneath the inn
Back then, with memories to keep
Of the child who nullifies striving men
Would that I was underneath the inn
I wouldn't need to believe again, then again
That God is neither mute nor asleep
Would that I was underneath the inn,
Back then, with memories to keep

Advent 16

2009-12-16T12:23:00.003-06:00

it's a good thing people don't exist,
just persons, and tribes of persons
un-abstractable, and stable
only in their dire straits

while all the pundits and saviors
busy themselves saving people
let's turn again to the wondrous odd,
to the swollen silence of good news
which we hardly recognize as news at all

and it is my loss,
and it is your loss, busy pilgrim
when we "umm hmm" to the story
of God-in-skin, even God-who-notices

that's news, isn't it?

Advent 15

2009-12-14T23:42:00.002-06:00

You again, stirring lights
up from the asphalt,
sound up from the desert sea

where one can see time
get embarrassed of herself,
a naked wristwatch

the solar bleaching
and peeling earth
give no quarter

to the whimsy of taste
or fashioned dialect
of humankind, distracted

our horizon stare drawn away,
by pillage grown pious,
and good society is buying
every glance we can spare
from wasting ourselves with
appreciation,
the kings of this age
do not require fealty,
just distraction

Advent 14

2009-12-13T00:33:00.002-06:00

every dun carpet
of wintering forest
is set as if a spring:
compressed and potential

the cracked leaf,
the bent helix
of sheltering herds,
the incense of our hearths

making an offering
of our tenuousness,
our flimsiness in
Your lawful elements

I know we don't look for
a gradual release
for the coils
of pining nature

we serve all things sudden
but You talk and talk
in aged tariffs, provisos
like "rest," and "abide"

and when You finally
set stakes into fresh earth
we hope You will linger,
we hope You will stay too long for comfort

Advent 13

2009-12-12T20:23:00.002-06:00

so it seems when we pray
we're not praying to You,
nor when we await,
we're not awaiting You

but rather some vapor,
under an ornate lid,
a polite curtain,
to whom we can give hint and innuendo
while we concern ourselves
with grown-up work

like paying obeisance to Ozymandias,
or giving due to the hour's opinion oligarch,
tenderly nursing our self-corroboration

all while smiling politely,
like we do at children who know better than
to skip a fascination, to never waste a curiosity,
we give a condescending "truly"
to Your arriving interruption

Advent 12

2009-12-11T00:19:00.003-06:00

To the East we find a bearing star
tuning the clock hands
in fine gradient,
increments of desert soil,
which You understand,
and count by number

I can't really imagine what we're waiting for,
nor could the gifting foreigners,
who were looking for something astral,
or the parents, looking for a cry-less tot,
who didn't foul his nappies or throw a fit
Your beseiged tribe sure hoped to find You
bearing Maccabean thunder and heat, not light

all this Greek talk of λόγος,
and one would think You were made of everything perfect
all we are not:
that would Your substance,
if we weren't so busy
hating the limits of our flesh
we might notice Your beads of sweat,
Galilean dress, and bruised hands

and here we thought ό λόγος
was composed of anything
but that: cracked flesh

Advent 11

2009-12-09T23:41:00.000-06:00

The silence is too much for us,
Surely You know that

Everything we rely on,
Hums at least 60 cycles per second

So You know we cannot attend blank air,
We will fill Your absence with something

Perhaps a hummed note of Reason,
Not unlike the Spirit making tones over the water-void

But we have sloughed off the invisible
And snuggled close to tactile sounds

In appliance and other's appliances
We hear one another's cars-that's how we know we even exist!

But I can't pretend to not hear You,
Mostly I hear Your silence

The rare speech I get-
More a winter sun glint off an office tower window-

Is wide as Your heart must be,
You have a lot of promises to keep

But I hear You still,
And I hope You listen for me

If not in my squat language,
Then in my very waiting

Advent 10

2009-12-09T16:41:00.002-06:00

for now, the groaning slows
into a placable hour
of adobe-tinged rest, motionless
and sure, which is curved,
unlike the cut edges of logic's labor
even love's ancient work, and disillusioning
is safe to run your hand along it

so do so now, feel the tiny mountains
in the skin of the clay, the glow of
angled light on the taupe
unnoticed in almost every single moment,

but present now, insignificant things
that smirk forth the earth's personality,
shaped by someone smart enough
to know that perfection is tedious,
and patient enough to know
we probably won't recognize it

until a blunt arrival, makes a gradual clearing

Advent 9

2009-12-07T22:28:00.002-06:00

come then, curved noises
that shake loose us nervous mammals
into a frost-toed scatter
out to examine what stirs the night

and there, may we find messengers
who look nothing like us, but
for once, we entertain the immigrants,
who chatter to us,
apparently fascinated with life on this side of history

oh do not leave us be!
to blink crusted eyes at a curious dream,
then sleep only for the sake of forgetting
and wake only for the sound of earning,
meeting some day's goal
which is the good coaching
of one or another of our sacred leaders

who long ago stopped listening
for curved noises, Gabriel's clanging descent
declaiming some Utopian drivel,
in speech full of water, not cement

may we keep our watch curious,
and our only dogma thus:
"what in the world is happening?!"

Advent 8

2009-12-07T17:46:00.002-06:00

weary of cheap visitation,
gut-full of the moment's innovations
that will cover like ash strewn
until the next small breath cleans the place

we bottle the light only
to where we can store it,
safe not from thieves
but our own encounter

string it along a plugged line,
and change your speech
to cover a manifold of offense:
our favorite sin, inanity

how much will the light
forgive how much we have forgotten
in the years since?

Advent 7 "Бездомныи в бездомном"

2009-12-05T18:09:00.002-06:00

"...Бездомныи в бездомном."

"homeless unto homeless"

-from Joseph Brodsky's nativity poems

perhaps we latched onto
the portion of His arrival
that we like the most:
the one where people give
the hour's frankincense, and
more importantly,
get the myrrh of the hour

it's not a shock
that we seem to watch for the Christ child
in malls and holiday films,
in melted cocoa, and nog of egg
in familiar space and speech,
between bites of warm meal

there's the rub with temporality:
it happens only once, then
gets remembered,
and its interruptions amended
for polite company

Advent 6

2009-12-05T00:51:00.002-06:00

I bring You gifts I understand:
local cheeses and peaches from Stratford,
and bits from afar:
Eiffel tower statues, and scarabs from Al-Qahira,
the color of a fake sea blue,
but bought in the shadows of Giza,
her monuments shrugging
in city smoke

I bring You gifts I understand:
scribbled notes from the pub,
my memory of reading Blake
and His recollections of You,
while hunting down my ancestors
in Abergavenny

I bring You gifts: a sharp inhale of winter air,
maybe settled down from the canopy
above the Sangre De Cristos
where I go to bring You gifts of
Aspen tree and sage, knowing You
appreciate the scents You've made

Advent 5

2009-12-03T22:59:00.000-06:00

I'll admit this to You,
And offer my throat to the assured:
We have a hard time knowing what to expect

After all, we missed the eastern blink,
The angels in the fields, and the foreign pilgrims
We missed the voice over the Baptizer,
And we even missed Your voice,
Your accent, is it, Nazarene? With a touch of Egypt?

We are left with dappled letters and parables,
Kindly ammended by folks just like us:
Ones who know that You couldn't have meant That,
You must have really meant "the poor in spirit,"
Cause we're not poor but we want to be blessed

I wonder if Your holy mother knew
That You were there when God gave childbirth
It's sting and travail, the tearing, the blood?

Did she guard that in her heart,
Even until the end of Your visible days?
The irony of grace?

That not even the Son Of Man passed without pain,
Controversy, last minute changes,
Every one kept close in Your mother's chest
I promise You she noticed every twitch

Advent 4

2009-12-02T14:55:00.002-06:00

often all I find for pastoral anymore
is a patch of switchgrass
between the cloud grey, but earth bound
lanes of throughway

worn rivulets through
bluestern prairie
the wires of family,
making dislocation possible, and
selling the script that it's not even there:
our sprawled relations

i catch my dragged attention
on a rusted depot, kitsched up
for main street, the renewed center

then I'm on again, the green beat of mile signs
is this it then? the next one? the next after that?

and at a standstill, just off the turnpike
I can finally watch, when light the shade of
a burnt bulb
glides across the dun brush
of cross timbers, of winter deciduous
sandsage, and juniper pinion

that's what is meant by "into the ages,"
don't let anyone tell you you won't be able to smell it,
be warmed in it, and listen to it crunch
under the weight of blunt presence

Advent 3

2009-12-01T23:00:00.000-06:00

California, you're just a possible world
Baby don't pack your things
We have no estate,
We have no blood

New York city,
You have no room for us
Youre just a playground
Soon to be toothpicking
The last of your working class
From your golden teeth

Possible worlds, don't you ever come close to me
Don't you ever tell me about a possible world
It's just quantum porn for the proletarian
Who has no means to shape anything

If Your arriving is anything,
It is the prevention of possibility

an apocalypse of
everything watery and nourishing
Basic, but hardly necessary

Advent 2

2009-11-30T22:01:00.002-06:00

promise is
a pliant object
needing a taut state
to sound a note

a flake-on-tongue
when geometry melts
mathematics
get born into sea

here we've no quarter
for limp pathos
nor forgetfulness

leave them to their newness,
such machinery is thirsty

instead spade out the pavement
to find light, which is quiet, and unkempt

Advent 2009 Poem 1

2009-11-29T21:42:00.005-06:00

So Advent is here again.
Last year I wrote a bushel of poems I didn't despise too much after the moment every day for the month of December. This year I hope to tie up with the larger calendar better and begin on the first day of liturgical Advent, namely, today. This is part of the Adventus OKC project in some sense, but I would do this anyway, and will have to keep working on this past the various due dates of the city-wide art project.

I hope this year's work still lives for me like last year's does (I'm using some of last year's for lyrics in upcoming songs for this year). I hope you all, whoever you are, take these to heart as well, and please, as always, leave some comments or poems, prose of your own.

Quick notes: I will try at some forms, but expect lots of lyric. I will probably also post a lot at late night, like I am currently doing. I capitalize the pronouns I use to refer to God, but this isn't necessarily due to grammatical piety, lest you find it cheesy, this is due to clarity in referring/speaking to him.

Advent 1

spine, heel, red clay, wet sky
who here has also grown tired of his own body?
quashing the blood-land with my surfaces and ends

I'm hand-in-air proud
of my mastering the particular human skill set
of forgetting the earth while being covered in it

all my people have copped skeptic
and the rest are holed up in battlements

who will slobber wet heartbeats all over our
miles of figuring out and declaiming loud?

so loud, one can decry another's excrement
while forgetting they are covered in it

but I have grown tired of my body
and suspect
that whosoever may, will
wrap hands around the light
and recognize it

OKC Finale!

2009-11-17T16:19:00.000-06:00

To finish our discussion of OKC's urbanity, which I have neglected so shamefully over the past month (including during a 2 week tour that I had planned on having some organized time within, and that didn't quite pan out), I would like to offer a few bright spots that contrast to the criticisms I leveled earlier.

To restate, and keep venting, I think the desire of many OKC pro-urbanites to see our home be more like successful urban locales is very healthy, but also more fringe and perhaps futile than we feel. I count myself among them, but also want to stay realistic about what we face in our city when we say we want to make it walkable, or develop better public transit, or develop our neighborhood identities, or help depressed areas while not dislocating their current inhabitants.

The heavy political hand of energy interests keeps our politicians mostly (though not all!) under the thumbs of folks whose desire is to sell more petrol, not build rails. Our development occurred in several periods when automobiles were more ubiquitous and thus, spread our city out in ways that older cities are dense. While our housing is hardly as bubbled and bloated as larger cities, our relative income is still quite low, and limits tax finding for public projects, as well as preventing overpriced development from really exploding in central areas (like the Triangle, Block 42, etc.), the demand for them is quite narrow. Likewise, heavy top-down development has grown faster than any ground-up renewing of neighborhoods by creatives or younger professionals. Our white-flight suburban period was very successful (and continues to be) due to our lower cost of living and land, and this has created an extremely unsustainable sprawl and culture of personal transit.

Yet it is not all doom and gloom, and our city has many virtues, and many potentials within.

The way I like to describe our city to folks across the States is that it is surprising. Folks look at Oklahoma City and perhaps just picture the prairie, or teepees, or the Murrah Bombing Memorial, or conservative politicians, or flat land, or dust storms, ad nauseum.

People seem surprised that we both resemble most other large cities in various surface artifacts (towers, grid streets, a river, etc.), and also in various diversity factors. We have a legitimate Asian district, with accessible and authentic markets and food (though we do lack a good street market). We have GLBT areas, though they are quite modest. We have several arts districts, including the faux one around the otherwise excellent Museum Of Art, and a real one along the Paseo. We have a vibrant Hispanic population, with excellent epicenters (including the historic Capitol Hill), thought they sometimes face racist legislation.

We have amazing old neighborhoods, including those for the East and West Egg wealthy (Heritage Hills, Nichols Hills), and everyone in between, with Mesta Park home tours, Belle Isle's wacky cinder block homes, NE 23rd Street's black heritage that's largely intact, and the varied incomes and styles in spots from Jefferson Park's and Paseo's bungalows, Linwood, Edgmere, and the Plaza District's A-frames and variegated sizes of attractive brick homes, Cleveland and Miller's New Jersey character, all contributing to a diversity and beauty that is found with age, and cannot be faked, thought it can be neglected.

We have respected schools and the OU Health Science Center, bringing jobs, tax dollars, and revitalization to our center. We have the various surprising parks and open spaces that get taken for granted, like the airy expanse of Lake Hefner, the nearby jewel Martin Nature Park, great urban parks from Edgemere to the Myriad Gardens, and a world-class zoo!

MAPS, though under fire in its current version, has been a shining example of urban renewal, and though Bricktown has questionable cultural value right now, it is a fun place, very accessible, and has re-energized downtown like nothing else. If we can get the current MAPS proposals to not center on silly vanity projects (like a convention center), but develop metropolitan ideals, like a central park, more investment in the river, and above all, massively increased transit investment, it will go down in urban history as a brave move in an unexpected city.

Chesapeake's slow, but steady investment in OKC has been very fruitful, from the boathouse to the small city centered on 63rd and Western, as is Devon's new skyscraper a great landmark and resource for the company and the city. OU, OBU, and OSU all have small campuses in the city, and invest well in the higher learning here, as well as OKC University.

-----

Some Specific Hopes

One of the ways I think OKC can develop real urbanity within the difficulties, and not ignoring them, is by working on focusing on various neighborhood centers. What I mean here is looking at focal points across our sprawl, and then developing in radii from them, not simply radiating out from our distant downtown.

Here are a few examples.

Several small satellite towns exist within the larger incorporated city, including Britton and Nichols Hills. These townlets are vastly opposite from one another (Nichols Hills being yuppie central, a new-Old Money enclave, and Britton being right next door, a depressed rail depot, like a Texas-ghost town on the way to golden slumbers in Edmond). Nichols Hills could center up on the Chesapeake area at 63rd and Western, and up along Western to Wilshire, which is a vibrant commercial corridor already. The park along Grand Blvd. in Nichols Hills is a treasure, and remains public and large enough to accommodate plenty of folks from both the wealthier areas and the less wealthy surrounding. Making the spaghetti of streets between Classen, Grand, 63rd, and Western, just southwest of Chesapeake, into a walkable, dense area of offices and shops/restaurants, would not be much of a stretch. The daytime traffic from the offices would help feed the businesses, and the nighttime traffic and weekend use of residents would be plentiful, especially centered on the OSU-OKC farmer's market, and the diverse shops at 63rd and Western.

Likewise, a trolley concentrated along Western Ave, perhaps connecting 23rd and Western (as the Asian District/Mesta Park/Paseo end of the line) to Wilshire and Western (as the north end of the line at Nichols Hills) would be very successful. Along its route, you have some of the best sushi in OKC (Tokyo, Neko), the best music store hands down (Guestroom Records), live music venues (VZD's, Speakeasy, Hi-Lo), nightlife/food (Irma's, Saturn Grill, Snow Pea, VZD's, Speakeasy, Bin 73, Will's Lobby Bar, Flip's, many more), and plentiful shopping. Running a frequent trolley here, with car lots on either end and the middle, and with discounts for using it at each retailer, would help spur on walkability and be a boon for local businesses, not to mention alleviate traffic and add attractiveness to the congested Western Ave.

Britton offers a different, though more centered opportunity. The older storefronts and small warehouses along the train tracks just north of the old graffiti bridge have long been used as various shops, bars, venues. However, the old downtown of Britton, still intact for a few blocks along Britton Rd., has been blighted for awhile. To center along this corridor with investment in community goods, such as a great few restaurants that are walkable from the many homes located right alongside, good local services, and perhaps even a themed concentration of artisans or professionals would help to re-awaken this historic and valuable area. The TV stations and Oklahoman could develop media centers here, and/or the craftspeople and shops of the industrial areas could link to this area and make it a focus for crafts, antiques, or light arts industry, such as screen printing or ceramics.

Britton is set up very well for a local bus system, dense, frequent, and small, and for a large development of bike lanes and sidewalk investment. It is also an ideal location to develop a light-rail stop, being exactly the kind of place that could grow immensely as a stop-over for folks to and from Edmond and downtown OKC.

Another quick location that already has the vast commercial development up and running, but that could stand a re-thinking of its contribution to car culture is May Ave, from NW Expressway to Grand Blvd. (or even up to Memorial Rd.). This stretch could very easily support a trolley of the kind described for Western Ave., helping to pull people from their cars, and out into the dense chunk of shops and food lined along May Ave here. We could even insert a real rail trolley here, making a potential connection to a wider transit network as it grows, but being a local attraction until it becomes a practical one. Swinging the trolley down the median of the Expressway to Penn Square Mall would also be a nice touch, barring the development of a good commuter rail within NW Expressway from Classen Blvd. to the vast tracts of housing out to the Kilpatrick Turnpike.

----

Whew.

Well, I want to move on to some other thoughts, and hopefully keep things going at least once a week if I can, but I hope to continue comments and thoughts from anyone interested in this stuff. We have some fun developments coming up in MAPS, and in Core 2 Shore development, and I would love to keep the conversation living.

Thanks to anyone who reads this stuff, and thanks to the commenters, let's keep loving and growing our city!

Landed Gentry, OKC Urbanity Part 4

2009-09-27T20:43:00.001-06:00

The last phase in all of this i want to dig through is one of gentrification, and how it has been rather peculiar in OKC.

The Sultry New-Old

I will quickly run down a pedestrian version of how I interpret gentrification in some classic examples, and general degrees, then look at how we have had some subtly odd variations on theme in our hometown.

In most cases, gentrification happens when a generally run-down portion of a city, usually somewhere in the downtown core or just outside it in the earliest suburbs and outlying dense areas, begins to be inhabited by folks not local to the area in terms of income, ethnicity, job, culture, etc. who are drawn in by the affordability and usually central location of these neighborhoods. In the most healthy cases, it is the very people who grew in a neighborhood, and were able to grow their education and income beyond the mean of the area, who help reinvest in local businesses and local development, thus gentrifying less than simply renewing their own locales, yet often bringing in the negative effects with them unintentionally, such as unaffordable rents, and often a swath of chain stores. What this does is begin to turn the attractiveness of the area to the middle class into something "edgy" or "urban" and thus creates some 90 degree turns in terms of culture and income to the area. This then shifts to a full scale overhaul of the area by municipal re-investment, re-zoning, and commercial investment, especially in terms of services and nightlife. Finally, the area becomes mostly unaffordable for the "original" inhabitants, and the "settlers," and it becomes a full-fledged upper-middle class to wealthy area, hopefully with pockets of various incomes throughout.

Due to the way that both race and class issues have happened in the last century of the US, in most cases, the shift is from an area inhabited by some minority mostly, including religious minorities in the larger cities (think Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was once a home for Orthodox Jews, and still is in some parts, which creates interesting social tension with the very successful hipster culture there, or Ballard, Seattle, that was a Scandinavian fishing town, now home to a mix of young and old folks, in various industries), to generally white upper-middle class, and generally this begins with an influx of younger professionals, single, and in creative industries such as music, design, media, software, etc. There are many exceptions, but generally, this is the flow as we have seen it in its most vivid US portions.

Gentrification begins to shift from the "exciting" stage of early settlement, and cheap rents, to the gentrified stage when it becomes both safe enough and well-serviced to be attractive to young families, and even older professionals who want to live in the city environment, and the rental situation begins to change. While I earlier decried the "suburban" attitude of "what is best for our hood is what will raise property values" as a portion of a consumerist way of grading quality of life, this same thing is applicable to the owners of dense rental property in large cities, and any rental tenant in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia or NYC, or Seattle, San Francisco, or Portland can attest to this. The property value works in different ways, but it has the same alienating effect, and still creates situations where the bottom line is the only ethic.

Overwhelmingly in the US, the culture shifts are those towards twenty-something cultures and the attendant needs of nightlife, caffeine, imaginative consumption (i.e. very dynamic fashion of all prices, lots of music and media), and environmental morals (thrift/resale shops, organic and green-grocers). The younger generation carries a decent amount of trans-racial interplay, but there are still marked differences in the services needed and offered in lower-income african american or hispanic neighborhoods than in generally gentrified hoods.

Open Letter (To A Landlord)

The main controversy comes about in the way neighborhood costs grow to exclude the inhabitants who had historically lived in an area, and who perhaps gave the area a unique culture, in that it was unique to the "outsiders" coming into an area. Both the influx of nightlife and the inflow of money help and harm an area, in that it brings value and safety to an area in terms of increased folks who want to be safe, and who value the appearance and character of an area, in balance with the economic realities of the families who live there. A neighborhood gentrified out of being a safe haven for drug sales or theft obviously benefits immensely from it, and it is unequivocally positive, but one that loses its ethnic character or historic buildings for commercial "progress" suffers from the same fate as if it were a crack-riddled hood. Except this new crack is for wealthy consumers.

A peculiarity of the current twenty-something cultures (that I belong to as well) is a desire to discover and be original, in the sense of always having something on the edge of the trends, and then discarding it when it becomes too established, in most cases. This applies across most cultural artifacts, including one's locale. The minute predictable shops and less-than-stylish people begin to inhabit a neighborhood, it becomes a bit passe.

However, the darker side of the renewal offered by gentrification is in the displacement of the forces that helped to rejuvenate an area, especially those of the creative arts, who are rarely able to compete with other industries in terms of income, unless they are the few higher up in various firms or collectives. Likewise, the developers and landlords who see the growing value in an area are only operating by the rules of healthy capitalism when the raise rents or build new condos at higher prices, and this slowly, or quickly, and surely makes the situation difficult if not unlivable for those on the edge of the culture, since the economics at the edge are hardly kind or consistent.

So, OKC's Take on This?

I will take a few different examples from our current urban geography to illustrate the peculiar ways we have gentrified, or refused to, and what it might tell us about how we are developing.

Bricktown

Bricktown is one of, if not the crowing success of the MAPS tax initiative, and is something we should be vastly proud of in terms of using a "natural feature" of our inner city to shape a neighborhood. The canal is pleasant, the food is mostly quite good, and even original in most cases, and the Brick ballpark is really well done for our modest baseball team. As time goes on in the canal and streets, hopefully the wear of all of the newness will congeal with the aged warehouses, providing a lived-in feel like San Antonio's riverwalk has, but with more space and less scorching heat (hopefully...).

Yet Bricktown faces some difficulties (aside from the growth of clubs with cleverly-misspelled names, which are mostly a waste of space), in the most part from its setup as an entertainment district only, which creates more of a theme-park feel, than an area that people could actually live in. The major dearth of housing keeps it a destination for in-city tourists, but hardly a place to reside, and the few places there are not entirely in harmony with the aesthetic of the area, the glaring example being the bland apartments built along Reno in front of Harkins Theaters. They (along with the Legacy on Walker Ave.) are daft pandering to suburbanites that developers hope to entice (with their stable tax dollars) into the city. Not an altogether bad idea, but building seemingly color-by-number apartments in an evocative brick warehouse zone does no one a favor. Though, I am glad they are infilling and not tearing down warehouses to do so. The various little flats above Brew Ha Ha are a better example, but there are precious few.

Yet there is still hope for Bricktown, and plenty of room to keep working on adding new destinations and housing, hopefully opening the area to not only the younger, single, nightlife-seeking professionals who can afford the steep rents, but also a mix of folks who could even work in the offices extant in the area, and develop even more commercial growth.

The Triangle

The Triangle, and Deep Deuce are two of the most promising areas in downtown OKC, and also two of the most frustrating. While Bricktown suffers from too much single-use, The Triangle is an example of building a new suburbia in the inner city, and/or a stubborn application of trickle down economics, the opposite of the usual gentrification.

The Triangle still has a mixed use feel to it, with the random small industrial parks nestled to the open lots and sprouting brownstones coming in. Its location is absolutely prime, and the new buildings are actually very lovely, and varied, and fit well in an urban setting, at least on the exteriors (many interiors of the models shown for promotional use are very bric-a-brac appearing). The sidewalks being ushered in, with sweeping views of downtown, easy highway access, and pleasant gardens and public areas, this is a master collection of urban drop-down planning.

Yet it is all crazy expensive.

Some of the Maywood Park brownstones (my personal favorites, seriously if I was rich I would move there in a jif) are up to 3000 square feet of space. This obviously carries a pretty nice price tag, and the new construction and location round out an understandably costly venture. I cannot deny the economics involved, but I am also trying to see it in terms of gentrification, in that there was no period when people sough out the cheap rents for growth in value over time, it was simply decided that it would be upper-crust, and the sheer costs involved will keep any attempt at economic diversity far away. It is to the developers loss. Most people who appreciate Block 42 will not be able to afford its high cost, or they already enjoy life with more space in a spot further out from downtown. With the massive floorplans of many of the units, the very point of density and diversity are muffled by the low population. Street life will be difficult to develop, despite the almost unique in OKC aesthetics and potential.

It remains to be seen what kind of effect this will have. Most units are still unoccupied or being built, even if they are (inexplicably) sold. This is a potentially disappointing case of a city built by developers, and not settled and developed in tandem by its inhabitants.

But I still love the potential of the area, and hope it will succeed, even for rich folks.

Core 2 Shore/ South of Crosstown Expwy.

This is the current locus of debate and focus in the next 10 years of OKC growth. The swath of homes, warehouses, storefronts, and yes, the OKC empty downtown lots just south of the death-trap Crosstown Expressway is being looked at as the key to tying the oddly disconnected and feral Oklahoma River to downtown, a very valuable resource (though quite polluted) that can offer some great growth in outdoor activity and aesthetic growth.

The plans currently being peddled by MAPS 3 potentials are indicative of a problem we have in not filling in what we already have, and just replacing it with grand projects that have little daily human scale use. A giant park would be nice, but perhaps enlarging the Myriad Gardens slightly would serve better, since they are hardly crowded as it is, save during the Festival of the Arts. We look at razing so much of the area, when we could tap the street grid for renewed housing and storefront growth, creating business growth incentives, expanding offices from downtown into the area, and helping to fight blight in the residential sections, which face a grim fate right now in the hands of the developers.

We have hardly filled in the myriad vacant spaces in Midtown, The Triangle, Deep Deuce, and have much more room to grow even in downtown proper, but already we turn to wipe out vast plots of urbanity for some developer's vanity projects.

It is the disease inherent in the drive for a streetcar, it does something superficial, and is nice for tourists and even perhaps day workers downtown, but it does little to tie together neighborhoods, foster density, or even move people to walk more downtown and at large in the city.

Yet I also understand the city's drive to connect the river to the downtown core, and it is a healthy one. The next steps take us even to tie Capitol Hill to the north sides of the city, and help it to recover from the difficulties places on it by racist legislators. The expansion of park space is always a good idea, but it should be done on a human scale, and not in the name of a convention-center scale.

But, Looking On The Bright Side...

We have had rare cases of the usual process of gentrification in OKC. Rarely do we have a neighborhood saturated with growth in creative industries, that helps to renew the fabric of the area, and in turn, can price out the middle class native to it. Even the remotely artistic spots of OKC have little density, save the Paseo, which is actually still pretty affordable in many cases, and the Plaza district, which offers OKC a massive hope in terms of neighborhood identity and natural creative growth. 23rd street between the Capitol and Classen should have long ago become a gentrified area, sandwiched between such robust residential hoods, but it has been a stubborn case of spotty gentrification, with a lot of low-key urbanity reserved, and in depressing cases, empty storefronts on a prime strip of land. It still feels like a place you drive along and to, not walk along and to, though it is slowly growing. Heaven help the Tower Theater to regain some glory!

Yet OKC is not NYC, not Seattle, not Chicago, not any other place. Each city has its own needs and weaknesses, and we must look ours square in the eye, and see what we can do to work within the culture to grow our urbanity, if we believe in it as a good, and not an ill for our town.

It is the honest look that I have hoped to engender in these little rants, and I know we will never have some of the things many people love about the aforementioned large cities. We are simply too sprawled, too poor, too young, too culturally different to grow some of the key pieces we need.

Yet we also have some great potential for change that none of us could ever dream of, and wise city leaders and brave politicians can help us, the people of OKC to grow in amazing ways, with our humble roots intact, and with hard work and an under-estimated diversity and innovative bend.

So, for the next posts, we turn to daydreaming some ways to tie our hoods together, and grow urbanity in islands across our sprawl.

Over The Hedge-OKC Urbanity Part Three

2009-09-20T18:09:00.007-06:00

Before I continue on with a quick look at gentrification as it has, or seems to be occurring in OKC, and how it has happened in some different ways here than in its most visible and (depending on your position) laudable or despicable locations in some larger and older cities, I want to respond to a comment (and other comments too) and help clarify some assumptions that underlie the discussion, and hopefully are germane to the whole thinking-out that we are doing here.

A comment on Part One is hoping for some reasons as to why "I still live here" in light of the critiques I have been making, and observations on the specific urban character of our city, and also asserts the virtues of suburban community as well, alongside or against the criticism that we need more density here. It is a valid and thoughtful comment, and I will make a detour here for a sec to help discuss the issues raised.

Don't Taze Me, Okies!

The primary clarification I need to make is that I will very soon get to the good things about our city, and although I am accused of "speaking as a typical outsider," I am actually just adopting a tone that hopefully makes the discussion possible in terms somewhere between someone with education in civil planning/urban development/etc. (which I do not have, obviously) and someone who just cares about his or her city deeply enough to also point out flaws, where we could improve things. I really intend this to be a forum, a discussion, and I welcome all comments, positive or negative. I have lived here my whole life, and thought for years about the value of our place as a home, and continue to do so because of our family and friends, who when it comes down to it, value a place more than anything else.

I also have simply not arrived at the point of looking at solutions to some of our problems, which I will in the next post or the one after. I also realize that contrasting OKC with other urban centres is rife with fallacy, since each place has unique situations, cultures, people, and challenges. This is a point I will make again in a few posts.

Yet the main thins I wanted to dive into is the issue with suburbia, because I feel like I skirted it too much in the previous posts, and I hope to make clear a couple of thoughts.

Out Of Bounds

I first hope to distinguish between the suburban portions of our geography and the urban core, and anything prescriptive I seem to be pushing at applies to the core, NOT to the suburban areas, which are of another type of semi-urban environment. So lest you think I am trying to tie walkability into Edmond, that is far from it, and likewise, I cannot criticize Edmond or Moore for the same issues because they aren't built to be urban anyways. In fact, I hint at this in saying that our cultures here need to be taken seriously, and taken honestly, because there are definite virtues to suburban living, against those found in urban living, and one set does not invalidate the other, and different cultures will have need of different community situations.

I describe the urban core of OKC as roughly that which lies inside of I-44, North of I-240, and West of I-35, though there are notable exceptions, including my own hood that rests just a few blocks north of I-44. You could apply some of these thoughts to the very inner parts of Edmond and Norman, which are quite lovely and walkable (note that they are also the oldest parts, built on a human scale), but few other suburbs have such historic centrality.

Virtue and Shoe Stores

The second issue is that of the virtue of suburban versus urban life. I think the term "virtue" is important here, since it is a real question for us: is a healthy urban fabric, with some of the points I described in the first post, a virtue, or just a preference for some people, who wish that every city could be like NYC or London or something like that?

I am of the conviction it is a virtue, and not simply a preference, though, as I said above, it hardly entitles anyone to some sort of moral win, as there are differing needs. Yet I also believe that the urban fabric contains some virtues that are very difficult to develop in suburban settings, ironically, the very ones put in opposition to "density" on the comment.

Community is a very promiscuous word, that is really as much an inkblot as something concrete and defined. The best I can say on it comes from David Dark, that "community is a verdict," opposed to it being something one can simply do by following steps. I think that divorcing community from density, when it applies to neighborhoods, is how suburbs are often devoid of community, not the other way around. Gated neighborhoods, even open ones closed to their own main streets, are the high example of this, yet so is the ubiquity of chain stores owned by remote corporations, and not local businesses, strip malls-who by their very structure are built with cars in mind, and not people, and the general sense of economic conformity (with the requisite ethnic suspicion) all lead to de-communitizing things, and the verdict is hard to pronounce as widely communal. Density creates an interaction among folks on a scale that is based on organism, limited by space, price, and simply an old street grid at times. This is why there are few (none, in most cases) Wal-Marts in inner cities, despite the desire for convenience that affects every American, because their business scale is simply unsustainable in an inner-city grid. It makes even the humble grocery store a product of a neighborhood, and the fates of both are intertwined as to warrant mutual support. Spending my money at Foot Locker is hardly a moral act, and they do not need my dollars, since they are located all over, and owned by out of towners. Yet spending my money at Shoe Gypsy means I hand dollars to someone whose kids' college savings I hope to be contributing to, someone who is a friend. Supporting a local pizza joint means mutual survival, but Pizza Hut can stand without a neighborhood, at least for awhile.

Likewise, living near where one works saves the waste of time, money, fuel, and stress of commuting in one's own car. Suburbs so not support large numbers of offices in small areas, like downtowns do, and this makes commuting necessary over longer distances. The live-work setup creates innovation in a community simply by providing more time, interaction with other people who can help and challenge, and less waste of resources.

Sustain Pedals

Sustainability is likewise linked more to urbanity (or countryside on the other end) than suburbanity, and Shane's comment is one example of just how this is shaping our city life and discussions. Regardless of politics on the issue, energy and fuel usage is changing, and has to change due to climate issues, fossil fuel supply issues, and economic pressures (importing oil and other fuels). The debate rests in how to adapt, not if it is happening or not, as the political arena tends to think.

This is a good image for the following thoughts:

From Treehugger.com

The reason urban core density is so tightly linked to sustainability is that, primarily, it can offer options other than individual cars as transit. Bikes, walking, buses, subways, and trolleys all offer more sustainable ways of getting around than single cars. This is very difficult to maintain in suburbs because economically it is more difficult as it requires more riders than a non-dense grid can offer, in order to be useful for most folks. The simple physical spread of suburbs makes walking, transit, and bikes very difficult to be of everyday use. Note that I make a distinction between being able to ride in one's neighborhood (which is very pleasant in the suburbs-I grew up doing this in Edmond), and using your bike for transit, which is a very different thing, and requires some sacrifice on the part of the rider. Especially for folks like me who sweat easily and live in a warm climate like Oklahoma. Not pleasant most of the year...ha!

Sustainability is related also to environmental preservation, and while the city is absolutely a non-natural environment, within its bounds a concrete jungle, full of non-organic sights and sounds, it also creates a limit on human expansion and destruction of natural habitats and areas. The big joke is that a subdivision is named for the natural feature it bulldozed to be built (like, Rolling Meadows, or Oak Tree, or Willow Branch, et al), and this is somewhat sharp. The physical facts of sprawl actually impinge more on natural habitats because there are few limits to how far out they can go, depending on how long people will drive for a commute, and in a lower-traffic city like OKC, this is pretty long in terms of distance. While urban areas have to be condensed due to walking issues and street grid, this doesn't apply to sub-urbanity. A clearer distinction between city and countryside is possible with core (dense) development.

Sustainability is also offered in terms of interaction and neighborhood identity. While I remember being less well-off than others in my young years in Edmond, and there was little distinction of neighborhood except by class, as in, who lived in the hugest houses. There was no sense of unique cultures and landmarks, no desire to go compare Taco Bells, and little in terms of nightlife, save an amazing freak period when Edmond hosted a vibrant independent music scene, around 1995-1998. Notice that zoning laws and community groups and neighborhood associations work to prevent economic diversity-how many hoods want to build apartments near them in suburbs? Few. Would a Hispanic or Asian-dense area be welcomed in a suburb? What is the primary motivation behind zoning laws and neighborhood groups? Home value. This hardly screams "community" to me, yet seems to land more on the side of individual wealth growth. That is not necessarily a bad thing (I would struggle to find anyone NOT trying to make money in some way), but as a neighborly aspect it probably needs to be kept in suburban contexts and not urban ones, where space and economic diversity take second fiddle to the energy and innovation inherent in close-quarters and shared public spaces.

So, I grant an urban fabric a "virtue" statues because I do think sustainability and community (whatever it is) are linked better to it than to suburban setups, and because some personal desires of life-ordering are found only in urban contexts versus suburban ones, such as using transit, biking more for commuting, walking not only on my street, but to run errands, etc.

All You Need Is...Well, You Know...

Yet, as I have said all of this, I hope to bring it back to the beginning of the posts on OKC. I meant to temper the expectations of those fervent urbanists who think that OKC needs or must be made into a Chicago, New York, or even Seattle or Portland, in terms of trendy urbanity. Part of the reason this won't really happen is because we have a larger culture here that finds the virtues in suburbanity as opposed to urbanity only, and this isn't something we need to rattle against, but accept, and hope to develop a core, but also keep in mind convictions and trends will change and shift, and urban virtue is hardly infallible.

I grew up in Edmond, in a completely suburban existence, and many friends and family still live there, and I would never consider them somehow allayed against sustainability or community, I love them! I likewise recognize the value of growing up there, in good schools, in peaceful neighborhoods with a lot of greenery around. I grew up in Eagle Crest, on the southeast boundary of Edmond, before the Kilpatrick Turnpike, and there was plenty of woods to go explore, just behind our backyard. The city was mostly empty and even dangerous in this period, though not all of it was, and it would make little sense for my parents who worked in Edmond schools to live in OKC. Indeed, it would be worthwhile to look at what portions of suburbs we need to inject into urban cores, things we have learned from them-like how to have better schools and put a premium on green spaces!

The value of suburbs for the folks who so desire them is that very peacefulness, and even personal space, which is hard to deny as attractive. Family life is often easier to order in certain ways, and just as there are sacrifices in urban life, there are in suburban life, and these are not to be taken lightly.

The last thing I would want to do is villify some portion of our city, as if people who love suburbs also hate the Earth and small businesses. That is NOT the case. It is simply that we don't often consider the consequences of our consumption, and while I can call on some folks to do so, it works both ways.

Likewise, the sheer value of land in suburbs is much lower in cost, so one gets more for less, and this is a coming economic shift, as cities renew, downtowns fill up, the land gets astronomically expensive, creating an economic conformity that is just as obvious as in suburbia. This is a scary trend, and relates to the next post I will hopefully get up in the next few days, on gentrification (and the reversal of it in suburbs), as it relates to our city specifically.

Finally, I would like to take umbrage with the assertion that I somehow love our city less, or have nothing to offer but "deconstruction" to our home. While I enjoy the discussion of the above issues, I do also personally take up the cudgel that somehow thoughtfulness on one's city, and the honest assessments of its characteristics somehow equates with sheer disgust. Of course I will rail on about our poor public transit, but it is because I know how much better transit would help us! It is akin to allowing a friend to take a drug for fear of offending that friend with intervention-one of our drugs being our trend of sprawl, of course I hope that we avoid that abuse!

I will, in a few posts, get to the defense of our city, and I hope anyone who has the same love for our place will bear with me until then, and that everyone feels free to keep offering critiques of these thoughts and additions that I overlook! The joy of the blogosphere is found in interaction!

You're My Density, I Mean, My Destiny. OKC Urbanity, Part Two.

2009-09-14T11:26:00.004-06:00

So let's to the difficulties I hinted at in the previous post, after outlining the basic assumptions of what I take to be a healthy urban fabric.

In OKC, our largest problems all tend to revolve around one another, and they generally fall under the realm of lack of density, and the cultures that lack entails.

Space Invaders

Our city has a problem that is not unique to us, that is a problem for many cities outside of the oldest developments in the US, in that we are very spread out, even in our basic core. The problem is that we developed late enough in the game of city zoning and construction that only a small portion of our city grew in the age before cars. We indeed have a historic physical geography that hints at the former walkable/transit grown sense of place, but years of neglect and downright hostile political/economic forces have destroyed it. We have shadows of the old trolley lines, but they were bought up by Standard Oil and other auto/oil companies and dismantled. Our downtown includes some storefront based architecture still, but it is chopped up into small chunks with vast parking lots (single level!!) in between.

In the post-war growth of suburbia, the wealthier middle class began to leave the central part of most cities in the US, and the car-based culture grew extremely fast, helped by eager businessmen who began to feed development like Scrooge McDuck. Yeah, that's a DuckTales allusion. Our physical geography changed, and we noticed here in OKC how many downtown streets became ways to get through downtown, rather than ways to get around downtown, and this is evident in the numerous one-way, three-lane avenues that only last year were returned to two way driving. The point was to get in and out quickly, not to actually have anything to do but work in a tall building, then leave for the 30 minute commute back to the house. The suburbs exploded in development, money, school districts, and we never thought twice about it, except that the city was for the poor, minorities, and eccentrics.

What also changed was our culture. We began to see everything in light of convenience, and in light of what was drivable. In a city with as low of a population as ours, everything was "15 minutes away," and of course, this was by car. Our once semi-rural and humble towns of Edmond, Norman, Mustang, Del City, Piedmont, all blossomed into vast stretches of housing, fenced and sometimes gated in, and surrounded by interstates and strip malls, and the great shopping malls of the 1980s. The moral implications of energy use, oil consumption, climate effects, obesity, time wasting, economic segregation, and even lack of landmarks and important civic architecture were all still just-bubbling up to warn us of our own vapidity.

Now our physical geography within the city is so emaciated and thinned-out that we hardly notice neighborhood delineations, we have potential for great landmarks, but far too few as they are. There is little about our city that bumps together, and that fact keeps our density low, while also being a product of it.

So, density suffered, and now, as we begin to seriously consider public transit expansion, from our vastly inflexible and infrequent bus system, we are faced with a vastly frustrating conundrum.

The Cart, Or The Horse?

Some argue that our city does not have enough mass transit riders to support the cost of putting in even the simplest light rail system, say, to and fro downtown to the main few suburbs (Edmond, Norman, Moore, Midwest City, and maybe the Northwest side of OKC). Some argue that we won't have the riders until we allow a system to develop and people to get used to the idea. We are stuck, as MAPS initiatives have been focused on other pursuits, and politically we have little will from our leaders to grow.

To put it bluntly, OKC's mass transit is probably it's biggest reason why it is not, what some call, "a world-class city." It is the biggest hindrance to several ills, but mostly it prevents any real urbanity from developing, where walkable neighborhoods become reality. To walk in one's own few streets is of course, possible here, but beyond that, to even have a chance at connecting walkable areas with something other than single cars, it simply isn't done here.

If there is one thing OKC needs to invest in NOW, it is public transit. Simply doubling our bus frequency tomorrow would not even begin to address the issue, and that itself would be too expensive in the eyes of most. Developers can build all the expensive brownstones they like near downtown but people will still use their cars for most errands, because there is simply no density to support the needed services in an area.

Yet our funds are hard to come by, and the political will has long been absent to develop anything more than cosmetic. I will not go into the long history of this save, for this brave example of stupidity given by Ernest Istook here.

Trolley Folly

Likewise, the current hubbub on the potential for rail trolley service in downtown and Bricktown is an example of just how poorly we perceive our transit needs here. Transit advocates are all aflutter over this, but it honestly is a step in simply making cosmetic improvements to an area of town no one lives in anyways. It puts transit in the category of tourist attraction, when transit should be a basic method of travel to a city, for both locals and tourists.

A trolley in an area that is already walkable is a waste of political capital, and actual dollars. What is needed is commuter light rail, and preferably one that also has connections to major retail, entertainment, and transit points. This means stops at NW Expwy and May, a line that runs often to and from the airport, stops at Quail Springs, The Adventure District, the Capitol, the State Fair Park, and even locales on the southside, such as Capitol Hill.

What would be even better is a rail system that serves to link neighborhoods with local lines, smaller, frequent, and with far more stops, thus building every possible good gift of development along the routes and at the stops, and then supplement it with commuter rail lines that peak and ebb more with commute times, and serve the longer distances with less stops, making the rides quicker for the outlying communities.

Thus density will not come until we make vast improvements to our transit, but our transit won't be financially viable until our density increases. Most folks in OKC and in the suburbs don't want to pay the prices that come with higher population densities. These include more traffic, more expensive services and goods, more crowds in various locations, and smaller homes and private spaces.

Shoebox Living?

Our cultures here are wary of the cost of real estate in actual cities (whose exemplars I deem New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Boston, in different ways). I have heard many times, aghast exclamations at why anyone would "pay so much for a tiny rental!" in the Lower East Side, when one could own a house with a yard in OKC for far less. This is absolutely a valid point, but it shows the difference in cultures apparent in many cities. That people are incredulous that the Triangle developments here are so expensive for some smaller floorplans (though there are some monstrous floorplans as well-I'll get to that asinine point soon enough) shows how little value we put in place.

I once had a friend respond to my comment of how I wanted to live in Brooklyn with a question of why I would want to live in a city of millions and just be another tiny person there, with no identity. That response did not really make sense to me, and I wondered if that person had actually been to NYC, and partaken of anything beyond the tourist traps and superficial largeness of the place. The magic of place, that one in particular is very real. 8 million folks aren't deceived into living there, with the concomitant discomforts, they are drawn in by the real imagination of the place.

We simply have a very low sense of place here, which is sad in a city that draws a lot on rural life and provincial life, who usually have strong senses of place, but perhaps moreso in European contexts. This low sense of place doesn't put value on specific location within the city proper. This also relates to the lack of neighborhood identity, save for spots like the Paseo, Plaza, Asian District, and slowly, the Midtown and Triangle areas. Note that neighborhood associations are not the same as identities. Associations serve to protect insular interests of the hood, but neighborhood identity serves to invite visitors in to experience something that is interesting to them, and different from their own hood.

Our low sense of place puts the priority on value, not on beauty or even location, as the real estate adage goes. What I mean by value is that frugal McDonald's-Protestantism of "what gives me the most land for the least coin?" This is turned on its head in the actual city context, where location should have the most importance, and the value is found in being near the action and collaboration involved in real urban life. There is little thought given to the costs environmentally, socially, and financially to having more floor space and two-car garages. These things are not conscionable in the actual city, however, because space is too valuable, and place and activity matter more than objects and accumulation of things.

Yet with the proliferation of a laissez-faire attitude of suburban life, where the point is to have one's own property and stuff, that is no one else's, and "I paid for it-It's mine" as a prevailing moral, the side of the city life where innovation occurs from the dense interaction of creatives, businesspeople, service vendors, families, singles, minorities and majorities all rubbing shoulders and sharing a tight space-this doesn't appeal to much of our culture here. The reasons are rooted in political and historic tendencies, and these are difficult to change. Political and familial conservatism doesn't lend much to the growth of urban spaces, and "don't tread on me" works poorly in a sidewalk based-neighborhood.

Until Soon...

The point I make above about cultures is very dear to me, and does matter a lot to what I hope for my own family's life, that we could live actually proud of and connected to our place, not ignoring, or in spite of, wherever we find ourselves.

I would also like to say, the cultures I mention as preventing or slowing progress in OKC's urban growth are not incorrect in their assumptions and desires. Just as healthy politics means healthy debate from at least two angles, so do healthy populations. The desire to have a yard, a big house, and a quiet street are not foolish, not incorrect, especially for larger families. I know this contains generational, familial, political factions in it, and in no way do I assert something as intrinsically superior to the other I do think that environmental considerations have pretty obvious moral implications, however, and I do not budge from them). I simply hope to offer an explanation of where I, and folks with similar convictions, come from.

There is more to come on our difficulties, and more to come in the way of possible solutions. Stay tuned, and leave your thoughts!!!

Innerspace, the Urban OKC? Not the Dennis Quaid Movie. Part 1.

2009-09-07T18:34:00.004-06:00

There has been a long-growing, and indeed, grown movement in OKC towards redeveloping our central city, which is peculiar in our kind of town: midwestern/southern, newish, very large and sprawling, and still mostly sub-urban, even in our own core. For most older (read: East and some West Coast) cities the center, though often having periods of neglect and crime growth, the center has always been physically and culturally rooted and valuable.

In our city, this has not always been the case, and indeed continues to be so, even as many businesses are starting to reinvest in the downtown/midtown area, many developers are gobbling up long-forgotten properties, and people are beginning to linger south of 13th street after 5pm. Yet it is still the exception, and our town has only a few factors feeding the growth of downtown, while many important citywide issues of development and urbanity continue to be atrophied or AWOL.

Simply count the single level parking lots in our very inner city. This would be unthinkable in most cities, as it is a waste of space. Notice the myriad empty storefronts and empty stand-alone buildings in our major intersections, from downtown up to 23rd street, to Walker and 30th, to Western and Britton, May and NW 16th Street, anything south of the I-40 Crosstown Expressway Death Trap, Capitol Hill, the list goes on... It is remarkable that so many prime locations stand vacant, when entire neighborhoods could rely on them for groceries and goods.

Despite the trend of core development, new urbanism, and the like spreading across the United States and Europe, there are places where it will be difficult, if not mostly impossible to take root. While I strongly enjoy and am evangelical about urban life, about dense city growth, I continue to run into obstacles both theoretically and practically, on the ground when I consider my home city in their light.

Note that this is a personal obsession, as anyone who knows me is probably annoyingly aware. It matters because Becca and I have seen urbanity done well, and we encounter it here, done quite poorly. Yet this is our home, full of our friends and family, and we cannot just jettison hope for some changes out of hand.

I love and admire my city of birth, OKC, but I have to admit it is very unlikely that a more or less comprehensive urban fabric will develop here in my lifetime. I am with many who have such hope for our city's center, and I too have had dreams of wind-powered trolleys, world-class dining from the most posh to the most funky and cheap, Farmer's Markets ripe with our great produce, fashion and art innovation happening at studios and boutiques all about our town, being able to walk or ride a bike to most errands and workplaces, having local grocers and cafes and hardware shops in each neighborhood, enjoying the diversity of Capitol Hill, the Asian District, NE 23rd street, etc. via connective transit, and even rail and bus transit, tying our city together in lovely ways, and freeing us from a long-incubated shackling to our cars. And glory be if we have a frequent, and fast rail connection from Will Rogers Airport to downtown! Yet I think there are some insurmountable obstacles to OKC really doing this in a timely manner.

I will give a quick summary of what I referred to above as "comprehensive urban fabric," then go over a few of the difficulties we face, in the next blog entry.

Comprehensive Urban Fabric

There are a few distinctives to what I believe is a healthy urban fabric.

1. Street Life. This takes several forms, but usually contains a few common elements.

A. Pedestrianism is one, and this takes place best in a city that is built on a walking scale. This means common goods and services are within reach of most homes in a given area, with perhaps more small stores embedded in residential areas, or central strips along main streets in a given area. This is obviously found in older cities that were built before cars were common, or even invented.
B. Play and leisure on streets or stoops. This can take place only if there is ample sidewalk room, eyes on the street from other residents, shopkeepers, parents, and pedestrians to ensure safety.
C. Shops and goods that are built to the sidewalk, and meant to be walked into, run across. This includes neighborhood grocers, home repair, cafes, salons, and retail.
D. Aforementioned shops and goods are not built behind parking lots. Any place in our current age needs car parking, but this should be concentrated in garages behind, or in concentrated points along a condensed street of services.

2. Public Transit. This easily ties into, and both relies on and is relied upon by pedestrianism. A successful transit system is several things:
A. Intermodal: It connects buses that ply spaces between train and highway service to trains, park and ride lots, and bus hubs. Light rail or commuter trains ply longer distances, to suburbs and back, and to airports or ferry points. If the city is dense enough, even in pockets, the rail needs to stop here, if not be supplemented by a localized subway or trolley system.
B. Frequent: In order to be useful and flexible to the shifting needs of riders, the system must have frequency enough to not utterly throw a rider's schedule should he or she miss a time point.
C. Connective: The connections between lines of bus, train, and subway need to offer flexibility to riders to connect in various ways, and with some straightforwardness.
D. Considerate of both commuter and leisure riders. The system that is relied upon to go to work in a regular, daily commute must also support impromptu trips to grocery stores, clothing shops, baseball games, etc. This also means extending hours into nightlife and weekend times of service.

3. Density. This relies upon and creates the above opportunities, and population density is often the key factor in making Public Transit and street front development economically sustainable for both municipal and private investors.

A. Density is more a product of a longer time of development in an older city.
B. Older cities developed in times prior to the explosion of automobile use (or even manufacture), making highway based and parking lot based development impractical.
C. Density also reflects a mutual sense of shared space among a city's population. This can create tension over space, parkland, resources, noise, cleanliness, etc. but there is also a cultural expectation that these are shared with one another and the municipal and private authorities of a given area.
D. Density creates a need for services to be variegated and in closer proximity when compared to sub-urban development or rural development.
E. Density relies on the shipment of non-urban goods into a given city, such as many foodstuffs and larger manufactured items that cannot be produced or grown in a city environment.

4. Cultural Artifacts. These are quite hard to pin down, and change with each city in some ways, and of course change over time and technology.

A. Neighborhood identity develops in accordance with ethnic/immigration qualities, business/craft association, geographic features both environmental and in terms of city spacing (think "midtown"), in home type, and in other ways.
B. The pace of general commuting and daily activity are often accelerated, in order to accomplish usual tasks. This can obviously be an unwanted, but unavoidable characteristic.
C. Ethnic diversity is almost guaranteed, due to various housing options, more economic diversity and opportunities (even if only perceived), and the sense of shared space that can either calm or exacerbate racial/economic tensions.
D. Tourism flourishes, based both on "local" definitions of place, and on tourist-specific developments or areas.
E. A pervading regional/city identity and sense of place grows from the various ecological, city-physical (such as skyscrapers or other built landmarks), historical, commercial, ethnic, and similar strains of the city's past and present. This can often lead to a disdain for non-locals, especially if tourism is flush, but it can also create much civic pride and shared upkeep and crime-stopping of city places.

In the next post, I will get specific with difficulties we face here, and follow them with some solutions, and some admissions of what we will probably not change, no matter how hard some of us want.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sickness Unto Death -Healthcare Reform Considered

2009-08-12T14:00:00.001-06:00

On the radio today I listened to a man cry out the following to Arlen Specter, D-Pa during one of the town hall meetings on health care reform:

“I’ll leave,” the protester said, as several police officers stood nearby. “And you can do whatever the hell you please to do. One day God’s going to stand before you, and he’s going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you’ll get your just deserts. I’m leaving.”

I agree with the man that politicians will have much to answer to, and indeed already do in the face of their constituents. However, the above comment finally sent me over the edge in a debate that I really actually enjoyed watching, as a friend put it, like watching NASCAR for the crashes. It really was just fun to watch the crazies for awhile, but then I began to consider the experience I have had with healthcare, and then consider why we are even bothering with it in the current economic toilet bowl we are in. I personally despise my healthcare (which has always been bought by me, being self-employed, and is expensive, inefficient, and hardly sufficient-no dental, vision, preganancy, etc.), but honestly don't expect too much to change, regardless of who is running it.

I would wish to ask that protester what he expects to answer to God, when he is faced with questions on how he cared for those less fortunate than him. Because the debate over health care revolves very tightly around those who have the least, those who are already sick, injured, single-parents, immigrants, or even just lower-middle class folks.

The bottom line is this: the wealthy and mid to upper middle class will never want for health care, though in the lower rungs it will press more than the upper. They will never want for quality care because that is simply how market economies work. If one has the money, one can have anything.

The health care debate really effects those who are lower than most middle-class income brackets, depending on number of dependents, pre-existing conditions, and any sort of disability or injury.

I somehow doubt God is waiting to find out how well we defended laissez-faire capitalism from socialism, rather than how we cared for the poor, though that seems to be the press of most of the protestors at these events, and in any punditry available on either side. Likewise, I doubt God cares much for muddleheaded partisan defenders, of left or right. I also think long-term viability is more vital than anything that simply blankets care on folks but leaves our children's children broke (much like we will become as the boomers collect Social Security-a Leninist program if I ever saw one! Joking...). We are already well on our way to leaving our children a ruined ecosystem, so let's back away from fiscal incoherence, often evidenced by the reformers.

According to the laws of pure capitalism/liberal economics, what makes sense fiscally is to continue the way it is, with perhaps some trimming of inefficiencies. The profit margin is the only ethic, incentivizing and trickling down financial success, and of course there are nuances, but they only apply economically, not with particularity or pathos to the hoi polloi. Thankfully, most folks believe in a nuanced capitalism, if not something more social.

However considered by the lens of the Gospel, which is not chief among other lenses to Christians but is simply, the Gospel-the only lens, it is hard to justify the reform along lines of fear of government options, not because it involves the government (which has plenty of negatives), but because the basic question is "what provides care for the folks who have the least?" That is it, not, "what keeps me safe and comfy?" or "what will make us the most money and cost us the least?" Those are questions of patriotic idolatry and capitalism-idolatry, respectively. So we need to be considering what covers those who cannot afford to cover themselves, and not in terms of getting them jobs (most already do, or have suffered catastrophic denial of claims or have pre-existing issues) to pay for it, but in terms of help. It is about help, not hoarding.

So as I look back at the above spiel, I realize I haven't offered any answers, and I assure you, I am beholden to no party or side. I simply hope to keep in my friends' and my mind, as we talk this stuff over, a place of humility and reason, of patience and generosity, perhaps opposites of the slobber we have been subjected to by either side.

I also, most of all, hope for Christ-thinkers to have something else to say besides the usual (and untrue) criticisms of mandated euthanasia, and blind-cat defenses of capitalism. And may we say it in a true sense of community debate, not loud-mouthed grabbing at who is right. And may we continue to exorcise the (very real) demons that tie us to political interests as if we have any allegiance other than to the Gospel.

Book Review-The Sacredness Of Questioning Everything, by David Dark

2009-07-06T07:42:00.006-06:00

Cosmic Plainspeak, Considered.

I came across David Dark in his work with the Calvin College Festival Of Faith and Music, a gathering of thoughtful songwriters and musicians whose work reflects on religion and spirituality either in devout ways (Sufjan Stevens), satirical ways (David Bazan), or outside-in ways (Neko Case). Yet all three fall under "devout," thanks to reflection offered in his book The Sacredness Of Questioning Everything.

The Festival of Faith and Music is personally one of the most perfect events I could imagine, though I have yet to attend (performing/dialoguing would be even more astounding!). The title of this book was also a revelation without even splitting its pages.

For someone who both sincerely digs his or her fingernails into the Christian gospel, more or less orthodoxically, and someone who works with sincere doubts about both the specifics and the generals of that faith from time to time, being encouraged by the "sacredness" of one's honest feelings and mind-scuffles is a deep act of pastorship on the part of the author, intentional or not. Yet the book goes far beyond "just doubt," and reaches into the value of a general position of bugbear to the assumed status of reality, borne out by popular and political culture, in addition to the smaller circles of the Church.

The book begins with a whirl of discussion both opening the door for the health of questioning the "Uncle Ben" God who waits for humanity's mistakes to punish them with righteousness (9). It then turns it's scope on religion, and makes an interesting, and thankfully wide point in that religion is both the "con," and the way "of naming the con" (35-36). Dark is allowing room for redemption of the very agent of our mindlessness. He is allowing discussion for discerning both healthy religion, and the harmful kind, wisely avoiding blanket condemnation of what is merely descriptive.

"Our religious faith, what's left of it, becomes difficult to distinguish from the
sentimental coziness of the warm electric blanket Flannery O' Connor warns
us about, an anesthetizing presence in our lives" (43).

Dark then launches into an interesting chapter that has genius just for placing my favorite writer (Dostoevsky) in the same few pages as Steven Colbert, yet gets even more interesting by questioning "offendedness" by those who think they have everything sussed out in terms of what is right and wrong, true and false. He puts forth that the offense masks a fear that questions and doubts we have mean that perhaps answers and having the right thinking grid are not as simple or easy to possess as one would desire, especially when "being right" creates such a warm feeling of pride in us.

One key phrase Dark offers is in the fourth chapter, where he asserts "what we're reading or listening to, or rather, what we are getting into lately is in some sense the most profound question we can ask each other" (82). This blend of simple personal interaction, with it's popular culture awareness and intention to dig deeper into interpersonal communications and what sort of passions one has, is a strong reminder of how what is vastly important (even "ultimate concern") is just below the surface of the right questions.

In his chapter on questioning language, "The Word, The Line, The Way," Dark offers some analogues to the strong belief that many have in the value of words themselves, much like the Ents in The Lord Of The Rings books, who take so long to say things, they never say anything not worth taking a long time to say.

Seamus Heaney, another literary lodestone of mine, has a strong belief in the power of words and specifically poetry to be effective in both voicing the hidden blood of daily life and neighborhood, and in enacting shifts in culture of those very things. Dark recounts a telling encounter between William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsburg, where Ginsburg reminds Buckley that poesy was prior to analysis (123). Our culture has grown rife with punditry, both in the traditional media, self-made media of many flavors, and in our personal interactions, faking a globalistic view with instant-rice expertise, since we have vats of information at our fingertips.

Yet poetic language takes our words and makes them basic to our passions and imaginations. Heaney is still a true believer in public poetry, creating a new space for the power of poetic thought and form in common life, not just academia. This impetus is vital to our society at large, as Heaney posits in his prose collection, Finders Keepers,

“…. .it does represent a strong life-urge in the artist himself. To avoid the
consensus and settlement of a meaning which the audience fastens on like a
security blanket, to be antic, mettlesome, contrary, to retain the right to
impudence, to raise hackles, to harry the audience onto wakefulness-to do all
this may be not only permissible but necessary if poetry is to keep on coming
into a fuller life” (214).

The poetic in language asks the one who encounters it to enter into the story, to have to consider what is being said, or to ask for guidance from another, eliciting relationship. Rather than seeking to define everything clearly in one bullet of a sentence, like media or experts attempt, poetry tries to show everything to be a complex and dynamic weaving of the "seen and unseen" (134).

The centrepiece, and indeed, somewhat of a thesis of the book can be found halfway into the book, and I would like to quote it in full here,

"I want to announce the good news that God, the God in whom I believe, never calls anyone to playact or pretend or silence their concerns about what's true. I want to break through the mind-forged manacles that render us incapable of seeing truthfully for fear we might let in the wrong information. God is not made angry and insecure by an archaeological dig, a scientific discovery, an ancient manuscript, or a good film about homosexual cowboys. Nor would I imagine God to be made angry or insecure by people with honest doubts concerning his existence. God is not counting on us to keep ourselves stupid, closed off to the complexity of the world we're in" (143).

In an odd twist of cultural norms, the above sort of thinking is usually relegated to a fringe of trendy young church thinkers, not a basic experience of almost all believers that creates such a strong faith-the experience of true doubt, then the recognition that if God is who he says, and we believe he is, then his substance is not threatened by the various attempts to discover his absence or presence in our rational or physicalist means (though I also don't think it is foolish to attempt so).

This is where I sense the pastoral nature of this book, one where the sometimes embarrassing questions of conflict in Biblical texts with science, or where moral lines seem so hateful and complex (but are often reduced to easy black and white), where these questions can seem like ones that really "spiritual" people don't have, they are in fact the marks of real spirituality. The taking of God so seriously that it isn't that the Gospel encounters each part of life, it is that the Gospel creates each part of life. It helps the believer who encounters doubt to not hide it from the Lord or friends, or pastors, but instead to be honest-not not feign assurance at the cost of true relationship.

So the outflow of all of this? Is it then a community of half-convinced kingdom of God bearers, Sort-Ofs who have little to offer the world who could probably get by with the distractions already in place?

Dark thinks not, and I agree. The whole examination up until now has been about how OK it is to have doubts, but the point is not the negative, but the positive: sincerity. Hypocrisy is born when a feigned infallibility is shown to be false, and it bears false witness to the Gospel each time. Sincerity, however, leaves room for screwups, not so they have license to fail, but they have license to begin new, and look for redemption. If everything is in it's right place, then what use is redemption?

Yet the one who sincerely questions the status quo around him or her, that person is invigorated by the Gospel to think deeply and act peaceably to create the kingdom come. Dark describes this in echoes of Martin Luther King,

"there will always be new, death-dealing norms at work in the global market
and in 'foreign affairs' concerning which we will do well to feel maladjusted,
just as there will be new and unforeseen ways of performing and acting
directly out of our evangelical refusal to be "well-adjusted" to them" (204-5).

There are few descriptions of the Christian's status as a citizen loyal to the kingdom of God over and sometimes against the kingdoms of our flags, our market systems, our cultures, our religions. The tension and protest here is not for the "radicals," the youth groups, the fringes of our Church, but is normative to being in the world as followers of Jesus, of many colors and shapes.

Indeed the book sagely ends with some workings-out of eschatology, namely that of questioning the security of the United States as being on par with the working of justice and grace to those who might fall outside the borders of our nation, or outside the borders of capitalism, or outside the borders of middle- and upper-classdom. Let's end with this quote from John Howard Yoder, quoted by Dark on page 235:

"We are not called to make the bread of the world available to the hungry; we are called to restore the true awareness that it always was theirs. We are not called to topple the tyrants, so that it might become true that the proud fall and the haughty are destroyed. It is already true; we are called only to let that truth govern our own choice of whether to be, in our turn, tyrants claiming to be benefactors."

This is itself an echo of Dostoevsky's Elder Zosima, who in The Brothers Karamazov, asserts "each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything." What this assertion does is not create a world of moroseness, but a place to begin from, a sometimes painful, sometimes relieving realization that one's own supposed infallibility can in fact be one's own blindness, a lack of "ears to hear." The humility this affords before God and one another creates opportunities for actual spiritual life, that both speaks in sincerity with the Holy Spirit, and also acts with a peaceable imagination to live in God's kingdom, already, not yet here.

Dark's tome is not perfect, indeed the lack of exegesis might disappoint some, the lack of biblical reference, (which to be fair is not in this genre of book typically anyways), and the balance of how to live with skepticism of so many portions of contemporary life, while still not being a constant sour-puss or contrarian might be a trick for some who are simply looking for license to complain, yet these are avoidable, and not present in the spirit of the book, so to speak.

It would be interesting, and worthwhile in light of the strength of this work, to have an exploration by biblical scholars into how much of an applicable ethic a state of constant State-questioning, of passion examining, of constant self-and world-awareness, how much are these rooted in both biblical witness and general examination of Jesus' life. Part of the danger lies in what Krister Stendahl long ago put forth as a reading-in of the "introspective conscience of the West," built from Augustine's Confessions, and carried on in the proud traditions of psychoanalysis, and the various popular forms of it borne in our usual self-awareness and ironic detachment, the current way of being-in-the-world.

Dark does not lean on this too much, in fact, his book is heavily tilted towards political and communitarian response, and is refreshingly not built on the self-looking side of things. This is a work that pushes out from the reader, not into only, and our local families and communities would be better from it, and indeed those who we might oppress ourselves, or who are oppressed in our names, living in solidarity with them is not peripheral, but basic to our faith, and looking to find what makes us and our friends numb, and what pressures us into insincere religious playacting, and lowering those flags, we might find a robust and faithful Gospel soaking everything around us.

Buy this book! HERE AT ALIBRIS!

More Roominations!

2009-07-01T11:02:00.000-06:00

Drew-I will hopefully answer some of your questions here from the last comments, you bring up a few good questions there.

To recap for vocals:

I usually don't do two vocal mics at the same time, though it might be a good option for some projects. Having both a dynamic like a SM57 up with a LDC (large diaphragm condenser) would be a good combo, the trick is watching for two things:

1. phase issues-anytime a couple of mics are in that close proximity to the same source, especially not in an x-y or like setup, phasing could occur without careful alignment or use of a phase correction plug-in.

2. For softer singers, or vocal takes where a "close" sound is needed, it would be important to get enough gain for noise from each mic, and the dynamic may need more of this. Proximity effect is also present on more dynamic (and cardioid pattern) mics, so making sure the singer stays into the mic is important.

But-it is a good option, especially when one is limited in tracks and time, it captures some different tones for the same take. Experiment! Some great sounds can come from this. Try putting a lapel mic on a singer in addition to a large mic, or get a natural reverb from a mic in a nearby corner or odd angled wall (trying to avoid right angles if possible).

Post-Production/Post-Engineering

For anything post-engineering wise, here are some basic things that are pretty common to any mixing/post-processing setup. Some of this applies really to mixing, which if one is recording for a mixer, a lot of EQ and Panning things should be left to the engineer, unless a specific effect is what one really wants on something (like a "radio" EQ with lots of peaked midrange on a BGV or something).

1. Low cut everything except Kick Drum. Adjust the shelf of the EQ accordingly for instruments with little to no low end. This cleans up tons in your mix. Even on the bass gtr or synth, putting a slight shelf on can help to fit it into a mix better. Also, look for some low mid and midrange boost in your bass track, this is often a magic area to help its tone.

2. For Vocals: I enjoy fairly aggressive compression on vocals, this brings out the breaths, the grit of the throat, and various other "imperfections" that lend character and energy to the vocals. It can also bring up room noise, preamp noise, and soften dynamics too much in the voice. Care should be used, but setting a fairly low threshold, and a ratio around 10:1, watching for about -8 to -10 dB reduction in the response (if one has a meter for this), that is usually where i begin for this effect.

Making sure to add "air" EQ can help a muddy or muffled vocal, boosting gently in the 8-10k range, or even a bit higher.

3. Stacking Stacking

-for Vocals-a great effect for vocals is to stack multiple takes of a few parts, usually just two will do. Have the singer sing along with him or herself, or sing a new track exactly like the old one. Then take the parts and stack them. This is great to buttress choruses or parts that need emphasis lyrically or emotionally.

Panning the two takes hard left and right will also create the signature doubled vocal, often used by Elliot Smith, among others. This is helpful for less confident singers to feel strong about some parts, but even the best singers can sound amazing with this effect.

-For Guitars-doing this to rhythm guitar tracks is almost de rigeur for me at this point, unless one has two separate parts that need to be layered. Simply play each part exactly alike twice, especially rhythm parts, then pan them hard left and right. This will increase wideness in a song.

One can also do this without taking two different takes by copying a take to a new track, then sliding the new track over by milliseconds, just a few will do. While not as wide as two separate takes, it can give some slapback or doubling effect fairly quickly.

Those are a few basic tricks that will help in post recording work, anyone out there have other questions for this stage or the tracking stage?

In the next week I hope to have a couple of book reviews and some more music notes up. Home for just long enough to catch up some!

peace. Dustin

Room Mic Ruminations, Part 3

2009-06-23T09:56:00.002-06:00

So for the remainder of recording techniques...for vocals and guitars, and for other melodic instruments.

For acoustic guitars, as well as electric, I don't feel like anything too revelatory has come about thus far, both in the limits of the mics i have at disposal, and as far as working well in getting a roomy acoustic sound. My favorites thus far have been some sounds of Tyler Hopkins,' for some acoustic demos he recorded (well, not demos really) at the apartment. I kept the Cascade Fat Head, through the 12AY7 for his vocals, and a stereo set of KSM 109s for his acoustic, one on the bridge, at an angle into the soundhole, and one flat angled at the neck (12th fret). Then i sat the Sterling LDC in the fireplace at a corner of the room, and cranked it through a compressor. This gave some aggressive tone options to the usual voice and close mic'd acoustic setup.

Another great sound was from a live take of Kinsey Charles and her husband Steven, recording the song "Sister's Keeper" (which you can find on iTunes-hint). They sat down and played the song as a new one they had worked up, and immediately i threw up a couple of room mics and a close vocal mic for Kinsey, and they laid it down in the moment. What is key about this recording is the performance was very "in the moment." It was a capturing of something very present, not just trying to get "the perfect sounding take" of each part. It was about capturing the feeling of this haunting song being played right in the room with the listener. On these it is important to not fear the sounds of chairs moving, people breathing, strings squeaking, even little timing errors, as long as these things don't feel sloppy or distracting, they are indicators of real live people playing music, not antiseptic corralling of the best takes.

For vocals, the best things i have been able to put together is that a delicate balance of low background noise and very present voice is key. i love to compress vocals fairly aggressively, and so any noise behind the track comes through when this happens. I have definitely not figured out the best options all around, and I love the sound of the ribbon mic (the Cascade Fat Head) on the voice of most people, but if the singer is at all quiet, there will not be enough gain from the mic, meaning noise gets in the track instead. This can be remedied by either using a condenser with a higher gain, or a dynamic favorite, such as an SM7 or RE20, which give more aggressive and narrower sounds.

A great sound for BGVs i have found is to run a Beta 57 through the 12AY7, bringing the gain up to where the tubes just begin to drive on the pre. This cuts a lot of the main sibilance and boom out of the sound, both things that tend to help BGVs sit better in a mix, and it has enough liveliness to it to also act as an option for a narrower lead vocal, much like an SM7 or similar.

It is important to keep reflections down in vocals when you plan on leaving them fairly compressed, and you are in anything but the most silent of rooms (which our flat by train tracks, a highway, and other people's apartments is anything but silent). Some ways to do this are building your own foam shield in a semicircle around the vocalist's head, or draping a thick blanket against the main back wall behind the mic. these are ghetto options, but they are netter than nothing, especially behind plaster/sheetrock walls.

Another thing to remember in acoustic guitar sounds, is when fitting them into a mix of many other instruments, they often don't need to have the widest range possible. Many of us grew up listening or playing by ourselves with an acoustic being the bass, mid, and treble option. it is a "one-for-all" instrument in that it is meant to cover bass notes, melodies, and rhythm all at once. When recording just an acoustic and a few other instruments, this sort of approach is great, and using a ribbon or LDC on the acoustic to my ear is preferable to stereo or mono small condensers. However, in a band mix, the acoustic guitar is as much rhythm as it is anything else, and while i get annoyed at the super hi-end, clicky acoustics often found in pop-rock on the radio, that sort of shaker-type sound is probably the best way to fit it into a busy mix. this does mean that the parts need to feel very tight and rhythmically consistent. Listen to how the Shins lean less on James Mercer's acoustic from the Chutes Too Narrow record to Wincing The Night Away, which has more dense layering.

More to come. Hope this is interesting for you all.

peace. Dustin.

Room Mic Ruminations, Part 2

2009-06-15T11:12:00.000-06:00

So let's talk about some specific techniques and sounds, possibly more applicable to the janky-setup type recording studio.

One thing the recordist can do in any situation is asses where the strongest and weakest points of signal processing (tone) and performance are. What this means is to see how the instruments are being played, what kind of plain tone they have, and then see how any channel effects, in the box effects, can help or harm that sound if it needs help (or harm).

Since I am limited to only one tube channel, and a few very clean and non-"fat" pre's on my interface (a MOTU 828 MkII), I tend to go for the the plainest sound on the front end, before the sound hits any in the box effects. While I would highly prefer to have some color options in preamps on the front end, the only color I have comes from an Electro-Harmonix 12AY7 tube pre. This pre is a fairly lo-fi, colorful but simple channel, and I usually use it on the kick drum during drum tracking, with just a hint of tube overdrive, and often on the bass channel, driving a bit more, to get some mid-range harmonics from the bass.

A recent favorite using the 12AY7 has been to run a Shure Beta 57 through it, and edge the overdrive just to a nice sweet spot, which lends a nice excitement to the otherwise flat (on vocals) mic. This works well for lead or background vocals, though I tend to want a large diaphragm condenser for lead vocals.

Which leads to an important point about recording in general, but especially for folks in small home studios: The main rule is that what sounds lovely to your ears is what matters, even when the technique seems thrown together. I do believe it is valuable to learn the fundamentals and traditional approaches to begin with, because they are traditional for a reason: they work well. Yet they also rely heavily on quality gear, and if one does not have a great API channel for some drums, some of the main ways that engineers lean on gear will not apply to the home recordist.

Yet that is no reason we can't make something work. There is nothing that will replace good gear, and in music equipment you almost always get what you pay for, but thank goodness a great musical performance, captured well and mixed well, will stand up without Neumann's and 1073's as well.

Back to techniques.

For drums, I have found a few odder setups that work well for getting sounds with limited channels and having some real character to them, without a lot of colorful inputs. One early technique I just threw together in my early days of figuring things out was to use a large diaphragm overhead, a 57, and a 52. The OH mic (my favorite for this was a borrowed AKG 414B XLS) was positioned between the ride and high tom, about 1.5 feet up above the drums, and turned toward the snare about 30 degrees. This captures both the full range of the toms and snare, and a semi-room image as well. Combined right with the close snare mic (the 57, placed close in over the snare), this lends a very fat tone to the drums, a great mid-low thickness in each drum.

Another great revelation came when working on Brand New Mountain Speeches in the Backroom in OKC. I read a bit on TapeOp's Message Board (an indispensable resource that is free!) about engineers using a setup pioneered by Glen Johns, engineer for many classic records, including those by Led Zeppelin, among others.

The Johns setup uses two large diaphragm condensers places as overheads, one above the high tom, about 1.5 to 2 feet up, pointed at the snare, and one over the floor tom, about 1.5 to 2 feet up, angled roughly between the snare and the floor tom surfaces. Then a close 57 on the snare, and a large diaphragm dynamic mic inside the kick. For Brand New Mountain Speeches I also added a small diaphragm condenser (KSM 109) on the left side of the kit to add some high end on the hi hat side, since my middle overhead was a darker ribbon mic.

The LDC mics are meant to then be hard panned L and R to give a deep stereo image. This setup was an absolute revelation to my taste in hearing drums. The balance of roominess and precision was stellar, and there is room enough for both subtle and classic drums, and punchy modern drum sounds available. It will not replace the flexibility and detail of more modern setups (with stereo SDC overheads, close tom mics, and stereo LDC room mics), but if you are willing to commit to a roomy and wide sound, I highly recommend this setup.

For young engineers, it helps to have a setup like this for both practical reasons, as it uses less channels, and for teaching reasons, as it gives less options for sounds, and forces the engineer to really focus on the sounds available, and getting them right, rather than just trusting that mixing can fix the sounds since they are so individualized.

It also helps that drums can sound very flat and two dimensional when close mic'd with low quality mics, or close mic'd without much room image. I made this mistake plenty when I began to record. The modern assumption is that bleed in mics is automatically bad, that roomy sounds aren't "punchy" enough (and they might not be), and that isolation is king.

However, a growing spate of artists and engineers have been wanting more musicality in their drums, found in the way that the room mics catch the drums, rather than a small ear of a dynamic close mic right on the surface of the head.

I will continue on some other instruments soon, since this one is getting way too long, but I would like to conclude by reiterating the point that the limitation of gear gives opportunity, as well as frustration.

The opportunity comes from really listening to the source sounds and the source playing coming from the kit.

For the setups I just described to even work, it requires playing that is balanced, coming from the drummer. A lighter touch on the cymbals, and solid hits on the drums, what drummers call dynamic independence, is vital to make these work. Otherwise the cymbals might overpower the mix, and remove the punchiness and balance in the drums. Likewise, a well-tuned kit, with darker and quality cymbals, will lend itself better to this than brasher, cheaper cymbals.

This brings the art of recording back into the art realm, mixed with the basic science of the sounds and signal paths. It also brings the responsibility back to the musicians to perform well, to work hard to make a balanced effort on each individual instrument, with attention paid to tone, dynamics, technique, and of course, imagination!

Peace. Dustin

Room Mic Ruminations.

2009-06-03T13:45:00.004-06:00

I hope to be a better blogger, even though i don't think there are many folks out there who read this. perhaps because i never write, but mostly because there are many other, better blogs.

So for an attempt at some sort of regularity (one a week?!), I hope to begin with several posts on recording at home, and the techniques and philosophies I have developed as runoff from the press of the stress of home recording.

The first post, here today will be about the different ways one can blend home recording with other venues of tracking and composing, and the process that usually begins the whole recording project for each artist.

Next week, I will hopefully cover some tricks and tips, some possibly unique to my situation, and some no big deal ones from the long line of recordists before me, and some that might be foolish.

Then, perhaps some thoughts on what would make my particular setup (and thus, many others' like mine) better, or more complete, and some dreams or goals I might have for the recording arts.

So-here we go!

---

Firstly, I never wanted nor planned to be an engineer, just like I really didn't even do that as a musician, though I wanted to. It seems in both cases to be a collection of events that happened to me more than I made them happen, though they stemmed naturally from things I already loved. I feel very much like a novice, even in the production side that I feel more comfortable with, but a lot of my neuroses stem from gear restraints. So all of the experience I have gleaned thus far does feel weighty, like I can make these kind of statements, but it also feels so tentative, and I fully expect to grow into something new each time I tackle a project, form one song to a whole compilation album of various artists.

I still consider myself a producer who records as part of the production process, but I do not particularly consider my setup "a studio," nor even myself as an engineer, making a distinction between producer as the one who oversees, plays (maybe), and help arrange and inspire the artist(s) to perform the best possible music under the scope of the microphone.

A quick note: as Sufjan Stevens posits in a recent TapeOp issue, the term "producer" might not apply or have the same semantic power that it used to, especially in indie pop/rock/folk circles, as the business side of the producer usually associated with glamorous hip-hop and pop. Instigator might be a better way of looking at it. Instigator/Arranger would be the preferred title. Don't know what Sufjan thinks about that, but perhaps you all out there have suggestions too?

So as an Instigator/Arranger, I usually begin by finding out what kind of project the artist is hoping to create. The early phase of this is like any relationship: ask good questions, and listen much. I don't have some genius vision for someone's music I have never heard, an the artist doesn't need to hear me blab philosophy, excepting the questions that he or she has for me.

So is this an EP? A demo meant to be shopped to a label (by the way I don't believe in demos-the process of recording has become so cheap demos are relics, and the term demo seems to denote some half-assed project, not a work of art, no matter how short or humble, just a thought)? Is it a full-band recording, or something more built around smaller acoustic or electronic percussion. Does the artist have rough ideas recorded yet? What kinds of sounds is the artist into, what records sound good to the artist? What records and movies and books does the artist love, both new and old? These are vital wonders! Is there a time frame involved, a limit to the time? What is the budget, and is it best to work hourly or by a song or day rate?

So let's think about budget for a second. Almost every artist I have worked with has not had a budget to do my ideal process, at least in Oklahoma City's environment of studios and music. The ideal scenario is for me to come along as an instigator/arranger and player if the artist wants, and to track the drums and vocals at a studio, a proper one. We could then do various bits of tracking guitars, keys, BGVs, and other layers, then return for any additional studio tracking, including vocals, at the end. This precludes any sorts of tracking where maybe vocals are done first over rough tracks, or there is live tracking happening with a band live. This would be an elusive, but fascinating process I would love to do soon: track a live band for a studio record.

This process has not yet happened, though a couple of projects have had an engineer in addition to myself, and this helps tons to leave the arranging, playing, and organizing side to myself and the others involved. Usually, it ends up being myself manning tracking and arranging/instigating, with some playing involved. The benefit of this, besides massive financial savings, is the ability to pay very close attention to sounds on the front end (i.e. the sounds before any effects or mixing happens on the computer). This can help guide the imagination of the project form the get go, and brings a modicum of intimacy to the process, where studios can often create a sense of a laboratory, where the soul-strewn tunes of the artist are poked and prodded and put in Bunsen burners. While it is never worth sacrificing sound quality for space, it just might be that a great mind space for the artist trumps the ideal working condition for the instigator.

Time is another major factor, and adjusts how other musicians come into a project especially. When working with folks who have much more rigid and normal work hours, it can often be difficult for myself to plan time to work with them, as I have day time like anyone to work, but need evenings for time with my family and friends. This is currently the largest frustration I run into-trying to make the time work out well for everyone to have sufficient involvement in the whole process, not just a few hours here and there.

Once these pieces are laid out, it is time to look at the songs themselves. Standard-wise, I usually want to hear roughs of each song in the project, or to sit and listen to the artist play through each one, and then pick a tune to begin with, and work on arrangement, if it is needed.

With arrangement, it might sound a bit self-illusory for rock and folk music to dig too deeply as if into a sonata or something, yet I am someone who highly doubts the supposed divide between thoughtful popular music and "Western art music," known colloquially as "classical." That is a bunk distinction. But I digress. Arranging is the process of trimming parts of a song that seem flabby in context, like a repeating instrumental section that loses specialness with each repeat, or adding sections to build tension. Chord choice can be examined too, where maybe a minor could be a major, or a more open chord can become closed or limited to triads or fifths, to allow room for other pieces to fill in.

This can be an interesting part of the process, as I often can hear some full ideas in my head, but cannot express them to the artist in the moment, before they are there, and this gets sticky when the artist just does not seem to be into what the instigator is, and in those cases, maybe allow the artist to hear a rough version of an arrangement idea, and if they still don't like it: scrap it. This is not the instigator's record, it is the artists, and as long as the artist's ideas and visions don't fatally clash with the instigator's styles and visions, then it belongs to him or her, not the instigator.

This brings me to a close for the moment, but on the most important note. It is a paramount honor to be trusted with someone else's music. Any songwriter who comes to me for production honors and freaks me out with the value of what he or she is bringing to the world at large, and to be shaped and completed with my help. This is a humbling honor, and to be remembered at all times by the instigator, even in moments when the instigator needs to be firm or carry the vision forward, it is still a gift. What gift.

Peace. Dustin

OKC Photo Time

2009-05-15T08:56:00.005-06:00

While I work on finding time for an essay-ish blog, I thought I would share some of this winter's OKC photography for you all, since we are finally approaching the warmth of summer, easy-sweaters/layer-lovers like myself can reminisce....

Fruit of The Looming

2009-04-24T21:24:00.001-06:00

As the looming release of the Red Land Tradition comes up, I find myself pretty nervous. It is a very odd thing to be so anxious about releasing music and performing it, since that is my job all of the time as it is, and though I am not a type-A person at all, I do enjoy and feel comfortable performing in front of crowds, and the few 10,000 plus gigs I have done I still really enjoyed, though they seem to blur a bit more in the nerves.

Yet, as these songs are about to be shown to the public beyond my friends and family, I am growing a bit peaky, thinking some different things, like, "does my voice make me sound over-serious or over-emotional?" Or, "are the allusions too heavy-handed, does anyone care why I call a song 'Kammerjunker,' besides 19th-century Russians?" "Is anything too precious, or built on 'this is what i think about THIS!' kind of writing?" Cause I won't abide that crap.

I have been listening through some old songs (from the Flyover-States days, my previous nom de plume), and enjoying them much more than i thought I would. Even the very rough recording skills(?!) I had then are kinda endearing, kinda annoying. Some of the lyrics are cheesy or not complete, and some are too maudlin (thanks adolescence!), but mostly they aren't too bad. Some ruminations on Belfast violence, God's silence, and a wacky dream of Becca's, come across not too bad, save for some vocals I should have never put to tape...

Yet this collection of songs is the one i feel wholly pleased with, as wholly as a vastly too self aware producer/writer can feel about something that he has been tweaking on for a few years in bits and pieces (paying projects have all precedence). Though there will always be things I would like to redo, to rethink, it is vastly satisfying and peaceful to feel relatively whole about this collection.

As a too self aware person, I do trust myself to not do something utterly embarrassing art-wise, but there is always that kernel of doubt that everything I am making is either just another drop in a very saturated market of music, or a poor-quality ego-fest, or something pleasant but too polite, not gritty enough.

It is a scary thing to mean what you sing about, write about, to not lean on irony so much that it keeps you safe in the land of detachment. To care about both music, and about the books and people and Gospel I try to write about, that care sets one up for some serious mockery. Believe me, I know how precocious brainy music can be, and I hope so hard to avoid that. The only thing I trust is that I really do mean and study what I sing about. (In college a professor called a paper of mine "sort of precocious" and it was the worst thing anyone has said about a creation I have done so far in life...I took it that my paper sounded like it had lots of depth but actually had none, like political speech or something...I was crushed).

So anyways, whenever we find some reliable internet (besides my phone), this will appear on your screens.

to listen to what makes me so nervous, visit eutopianaccident.com

peace be with you all. Dustin

Age and Action, or, I Am Getting Old-Face?

2009-04-18T17:25:00.005-06:00

Yesterday, in San Diego, we visited the Invisible Children offices near downtown, as Charlie and the band. We have been connected with them in a few ways, they used a tune of Charlie's for a promo vid, and we from time to time try to be useful to them as they still struggle to end the conflict in the north of Uganda. I have a whole collection of dialogue on how and if we are even useful to organization enacting justice as they may (we have also tried to be useful to Lifewater, Safewater Nexus, and IJM). As a only mildly popular artist, who tours pretty inconsistently, I sometimes doubt our real usefulness, and sometimes I am encouraged that we do help.

The connection between art and social justice is often very exaggerated, though some portions of justice can best be expressed in art. But that is another collection of thoughts.

I was struck by the sheer energy of the folks working there, many volunteers, and how focused every piece of wall art, scribbled paper, in the haphazard office space, how everything was centered in the notion of how accomplishable everything is to stop the abduction of children by the LRA, and the concomitant violence in Acholiland and beyond.

Being in the space, in a bland of bland office tower, it felt as if the war really was only days from ending. It was exhilarating, and I believe it was so, not in a white-Western guilt sort of way, but in a sense of a real point-to-point connection of our support for IC's mission accomplishing a very specific thing.

We drove off, my mind full of how we can spread the word about The Rescue, their current event coming up in a week, and imagining how to once again adjust Becca and I's life to be oriented with the poor, even if they are distant.

Then I went to check our bank balance, and began to remember the slowly building steam of stress and frustration that has been building for a few weeks, and even panicked at the few bucks we had in the account we have to pay bills. Deflated. The air full of golden excitement at doing something hand-to-hand for these wretched gifts of Jesus-the kids of the LRA-that air was emptied almost instantly.

Does the revolution always have to belong to the young?! How so suddenly are we caught in the whirl of "paying for things?" When money is so tight, "paying for things" like rent, gas, insurance, etc. becomes the key concern. It pulls the mind into some world where bills and social advancement are the real, and not giving away as much as we can, living connected to people worldwide, not just in our tiny circles.

I have been thinking so much recently on how a few key pointers in my work as an artist point to success: a production project that is full of lovely songs, being considered for a label deal (all in the air still); my own music being released by a label, a legit one, that is a sincere dream come true; touring with Charlie on a bus around the West, playing for my job-is this not success?

Yet what scuttles it is so damn mundane! It is only money-but how can these things all be happening and yet we live just barely month to month, in a cheap city, in a cheap way? I hardly desire nor expect to be fed grapes and fine cheeses in the Caribbean all day because I wrote a song about Dostoevsky, but at least can we not wonder if we can have health insurance next month and go to a movie? Is that just the tax for having a job you don't always hate?

I know very well that success is not based on how wealthy one is by any stretch, though that is admittedly a romantic thought. Yet I cannot help but feel the pressure in myself between the art-pull-that pulsar inside of me that seems to never let me not create (if you can't understand an artist's temperament, just understand this pulsar. it can be a pain, and a blessing)-and the tension between the reality of making a family and a life.

I have no delusion that "La Vie Boheme" is the only way to make music, yet when things become so spare in musical work, it is hard not to feel like the situation is telling me to move on, get a job, make music in the background.

And for the work of the young in giving themselves for larger pursuits-in the folks who can move anywhere, be flexible to take months off work to give away time and blood-what envy do we all have for them! Does this just stop when you get past a certain age? When the 27th rolls around will I pass out of another Flexibility-For-The-Sake-Of-The-Gospel bracket?

Jesus seems to take this for granted, that our lives would be worth only as much as we are connected to the poor-around us and far from us, and I get suspicious of my own life's value when i neglect this fact to worry about making ends meet, if I can put it so harshly.

Yet I cannot let my family down just to reach beyond my own means to give. There has to be a better way to do this.

Ramble on. Peace be with you all. Dustin

A Small Litany, Kyrie Eleison

2009-03-23T19:42:00.008-06:00

For: The Institute Of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

So this was my project for Essentials*Red, an online course several of us in OKC are doing. For my project, I wrote a short litany, drawing on the theme of the traditional cry for mercy, Kyrie Eleison. From that theme, I tried to keep it within the Lenten sense of contrition, and even worked from the tune of "What Wondrous Love Is This?" to enact a mournful tune.

The music is meant to be pretty open formed behind the words, to be behind the reading, or a basic template to sing the litany from, melody wise. So there are some options.

Hope you all enjoy. And please let me know if it is ever useful in a service for you, I would love to know!

peace. Dustin.

(So does anyone know how to post an audio file on here? I have been trying as a movie of all sorts but can't!?)

(edit-see if this following works for you!)

A Small Litany, Kyrie Eleison

Analogue Glue

2009-02-27T17:43:00.004-06:00

For: The Institute Of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

In Ancient Future Time, Webber puts forth early on the idea of walking along with Christ through the instrument of the Christian year, following seasons to shape one's life as Christ did his (Webber, 24). He describes "Christ" in the following way: "...the mystery of Christ born, living, dying, and being raised again for the salvation and healing of both creature and creation" (24). The term "mystery" is applied often here, and naturally sets the concrete events alongside the hard-to-quantify experience of the Holy Spirit in the present, and the reconciling of the Scripture of thousands of years prior to current events and trials.

What the great benefit of the Christian year offers is a pulling together of the cloudiness of the mystery and the hard earth of the history of the Christ's time before death and rising. Our attempts to know these stories so well that they absorb us relies greatly on being able to glue, as it were, the mystery together to practical acts that both give us an anchor and discipline as we are "blown and tossed about on waves" as James says.

In a similar sense our different ways of weekly and daily expression of solidarity with the mystery of faith, such as music we sing together, or bits of words we write, or time spent in silence, or time spent helping a needy person, all of these act as analogues to the wider story of Christ’s story, lived among us.

Webber, Robert. Ancient Future Time. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004.

Journalist Of Now, Or Novelist Of Now And Then? (Essentials Red)

2009-02-19T08:26:00.003-06:00

For: The Institute Of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

How do those who hope to create and engender worship acts, in imagination, in creativity and cultural fluency, preserve the historic elements of the Church year, while staying away from gimmicky programs? The trend in many large churches to roll on a topical theme for an extended time perhaps substitutes in many cases for a relation to the Church year (being stodgy and laid-out), and this can be to the detriment of connecting the congregation to a longer story than the pop culture phenomena of the month.

Instead of the worship calendar and flow acting as a newspaper of sorts, it can act as a novel, while remaining active to the larger culture, it creates worlds, it takes the time it needs to brew reflection on ancient mysteries, that both apply and collide with the culture the Church is within.

Time, as it is being discussed in Essentials*Red thus far, has been a sort of synecdoche for the Church calendar, in the seasons of Advent, Epiphany, etc. Walking this route then, perhaps the Church seasons can give a lasting tone to the otherwise ephemeral “series’” of a particular body. However, they seem to do this out of a sense of ancientness, a sense of unfamiliarity to many, if not most, Evangelical Protestants. This means they are refreshing where they could be old hat to the older generations, or those who grew up under mindless enactment of traditions.

Perhaps that is a key to the transforming power of the Church calendar: the odd, and stirring tying of the Church in its current space/time to the Church that trembled under the Roman coliseum, but did not crumble. The Church of too much state-power in the middle ages, but also the Church that knew the size of God allows for even architecture to point out the mystery and beauty of the Gospel. We may see ourselves as a Church disconnected and in flux, but we have centuries of the rhythms of worship in the Church year to clasp onto.

Edit: I posted a comment on Ben Myers' blog Faith And Theology, responding to a semi-related thought.

Visualityness, Part 4

2009-02-04T07:44:00.004-06:00

Recently I managed to complete a collection of my own songs, a long process done in between paying projects and travel, some tunes being a year or more old and some being months old.

One of the tunes is based on a random loop I created one time, that at some point in the demoing or writing process, I misremembered as being written in Denver (and I named it thus). It was actually written in OKC, but as it developed as the "Denver" song, I began to link it with a photograph I took in 2003 of Denver's downtown at night. For some reason I was feeling evoked or sublime as I was driving to and from the airport to help a friend get a rental car (his was broken down), and I snapped a picture with my old point and shoot while driving.

Back to the song-As the words came together not a few weeks ago, I finally worked out some lyrics and a melody of sorts for the song. The song is framed in such an odd timing of elements that it was difficult for me to write any lyrics for it. The music has been around for at least a few years. The drum pattern was written on a drum machine, and when I tried to play it myself for the first time, it turned out to be quite difficult to play smoothly, and took a day of playing it over and over, until it fell under my hands.

I remembered the photo during the recent writing of the words and somehow still love the link in the way the image feels, a blur of life and commerce seemingly moving at a fast rate, from my vantage point behind the wheel. Yet that is just it: I am the one in transit, and the lights are standing still.

The song can be found at my myspace, and I am working out some release details for the music itself, very soon.

Here is the photo, with the lyrics underneath. Peace. Dustin

Denver, Blurry

I still locate You
in ragged hours
with Your blurry gift for us
that we've no muscle to quit Your love

is there a friend at hand?

I still find You
in my dislocated attention
where I push an iron cart
down the aisles of options

when we call You a mountain
do we then forget?
what altitude asks of our bodies and breath

The Importance Of Being Muddle-headed

2009-01-27T13:30:00.001-06:00

My good friend Jase sent me an article this week that has been blowing my mind a bit since I took some time to read it. Basically, it tells the story of Joshua Bell, a Stradivarius playing virtuoso violinist playing his 3.5 million dollar instrument in L'Enfant Metro station in D.C. He did this as a stunt for the Washington Post, to see how people responded to a famous classical musician playing very complex and lovely music as just another busker trying for some change.

Not many folks noticed, though there were some small victories, and it was probably no different from any other day of street performers in D.C. To see Bell play usually costs around 100 bucks, for middle-nice seats.

Later on, there is a bit by a curator at the National Gallery, wherein he says that if one took a million dollar painting from the Gallery to a restaurant and threw a $150 price tag on it, it would hardly draw any attention, and any art curator that sees it might think, "That looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt." I was stunned by this because I know it is very true. I am also constantly irritated by folks who wonder why artists charge so much for their work (when so much is actually 100 bucks or more), acting as if it is just something to hang on wall and Target has a great photo of the Eiffel Tower in sepia tone for 12 bucks on sale. $30 with a frame. The toil goes both ways, and pays both ways, from the artist to the participator.

I say participator because this is who a person becomes when one attends a concert, looks at a gallery, buys an album from iTunes, watches something on YouTube by a band, supports a museum. A consumer calls out for the best product, because he or she is the one in charge, having spent hard-earned money and it simply is not fair if the end result is not exactly what one wants. Yet a participator is someone who understands that patronship is a key part of creativity. Let us be participators when we cannot be artists.

I still remember encountering buskers in London's tubes for the Tube, the sound all the more harrowing for its echo down the endless halls, a sax player on the metro in Paris, who bounced from car to car with his boombox accompaniment, and one of the loveliest singers I have yet to hear in New York at the 2nd Av. F station. Of course I feel a particular bond with these folks, as they do the exact same thing I do for a job, only mine is subsidized (sometimes) in more organized terms. However, especially recently, there seems as little guarantee on this end as there is in setting some instruments up in Bricktown and letting loose some originals and covers. Which I have long intended to do. I try to give cash if I have some, regardless of the quality of the busker. My hope is that it is not charity but a valuing of someone trying to bring a hint of sublimity to an otherwise monotone locale, and it feels just as spiritual to give for that reason.

The story of the kid in the Metro station who appreciated the violinist even as his mother pulled him along is especially key to grasping the importance of allowing oneself to be muddled for a moment in the middle of one's day. Billy Collins' assertion in the article that we slowly teach children not to appreciate poetry as they grow is certainly a tad Romantic. Yet along those lines I remember a recent thought from a midday Eucharist in downtown OKC-"we don't teach children religion, they teach us." Slowly they learn to grow out of superstition and mysticism, and dive into the real world of bills and success. Even today there are kids playing in the snow all day in OKC, while adults (like myself) are thinking, "I have so much to get done I cannot take a break."

As I try to give some direction to this, my pretty unfiltered response to the article, I keep feeling misdirected by my own mundane anxieties, in contrast to the (self-fulfilling and ego-stroking) part of me that wants to call out people to appreciate art, while they toil in seemingly mindless or "soulless" jobs, doing the "real work." I am very sympathetic to "real workers" because I am not convinced of the pay-value of art, my cynicism fed not in the least by my own dire straits, and current looking for work of any sort.

And let us not forget that sometimes the fuel for the "creative enterprise" is the grain from the most mundane job imaginable. I think of some of my friends who aren't as spoiled as I, like Chris Clark who is a painter, father, and uber-talented violinst, drummer, programmer. Or David Dani who has a haunting voice, great melodic sense, and solid guitar skills, who also works for Earth-straw-sucker Chesapeake. Or Chris Goff the medical student, Jenna Davis the Starbucks worker, Kinsey Charles the teacher, David Broyles the music store manager, and many more. These fellows and ladies are all very skilled at music, talented, even if they do not realize it, yet all have to balance the context of mundane and transcendent.

None of them are fooled by the assertion that to be an unknown, broke, bohemian individual is to be a real artist, that having a family or job negates the travails of being creative. It actually usually makes it a bit more tumultuous, balancing the roles and imaginations one has for all of the people one has to look after. Nor is it more authentic to be professional like Joshua Bell or even myself. I don't draw much authentic comfort from being paid to play sometimes for gatherings where we could just as easily play the top hits on a worship chart and no one would know the difference as we are there to fill a hole in the program called "band."

I have no more direction for this thought-essay, and, fittingly, I need to move onto some concrete tasks, but I hope to give great honor and a salute to all of my friends who are working hard in every kind of field, to the authenticity of their lives and families, and to all the kinds of art that each one of them makes, from the obvious, to the hidden in families. Go support them today.

Thanks to Jase for the article and distracting me from oh so important work...

and to OKCans: go play in the snow. It'll be 60 next week...

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Visualityness 3

2009-01-24T15:11:00.005-06:00

Recently I have been randomly dwelling on New York, and my wife and I's on and off ambition to live there for a time, and just the general strength of the place in memory and pull. Plenty of people feel the same, and I still remember not liking my first experience there (I liked Boston better, NYC seemed like a flashing light and Boston seemed like a warm pub filled with books, it still does but I have since leaned on NY more). I also remember "recognizing" how many people feel so strongly about the place and sort of feeling like my secret band I like that no one else knows of was outed. Of course I was and am ridiculous in thinking like that, but oh well.

So, though I have several thought out chunks to write, I do not feel patient or inspired enough for them at the moment. I leave you then with some NYC photos, the ones I am most proud of, and moved by.

A small cafe at the 2nd Av. F train exit, where I remember listening to Beck and Tears For Fears and having an excellent morning, it was April and brisk, and I walked a long way on Houston that day. A pretty banal picture if it weren't for the fact that this sort of experience has no wow factor visually, just happens in New York.

A neighborhood in Crown Heights where Becca and I stayed with our friend Kara. This one catches the quiet loveliness of Brooklyn, always welcoming in its dirtiness.

A look back from the Manhattan view at the East River Park in Williamsburg. The skyline here and swath of grass gives a good note to the contrast one gets just crossing under or over the river.

A view at midtown from Williamsburg. One night some friends of mine and I sneaked under a fence here at about 3am to photograph this skyline at night, now it is a park with a condo next to it. This is a dangerous thing that has long been happening in NYC.

The piano in Pink Pony, a great breakfast/lunch place in the Lower East Side. Each time I am in NY I try to go here, I had a great lunch with my friends Brett and Auburn one time as they were passing through, and a great breakfast with my wife here, who loves the granola. I love the pancakes.

I think this is somewhere near NYU or in the West Village. Small corners like this are were the magic of NY comes out. One can just be walking, getting lost somewhere, and when you look up, you feel something present and glorious about the moment, about what you see. So I snapped a shot of it.

After a night of hanging out in the city with some friends on a tour with Charlie, I noticed my pocket contents splayed on the hotel table, just as they were and decided to get a still life of some oddly evocative jeans-detritus.

A shot of the balcony at the Beacon Theater when we played there in 2004. One of the highlights of my musical life. When I feel like a failure or an adolescent because of my job, I remember this place, and the feel of joining music and art history by walking on its creaky stage, a gift from Jesus even as I tried to honor him back with my music.

That's all.

Peace. Dustin

Phantasm

2009-01-22T21:49:00.004-06:00

This morning I woke with a flax seed stuck to my back
We'll get to the why in a minute
But first I'll share what might have happened:
The seed in fact lodged in my skin
And drew enough photo-breath
And body water (the body is mostly water, we have learned)
To sprout a tree from my spine,
Deciduous and magnificent,
The most elephantine dream
A seed could ever have

Naturally I would be startled,
But honored, though in public
I would drape a coat over it,
And it would appear a backpack
Or even angel wings

Nor would I fear wintering
Or winter, dropping leaves to the fall
Like clothes before a lover
And settling in for the bareness
Of newness, how alone can anticipation be!

Yet the first new yawn of a leaf
And the resurgent malleability of my limbs
Would be a gift I wrapped and unwrapped
Every turn into warmth and rainshower

Visualityness, Segundo

2009-01-10T22:35:00.009-06:00

While I plan to rotate from writing to photos to creations, I will add again another few visuals for contemplation.

I love the way that cities and industrial building create rhythm in very tight patterns. This can also be called repetitiveness, but every drummer knows that the beat to move bodies into dance is one of many repeats and coherent groove. In the same way, the small bits of culture that all people share in some form lend a rhythm that connects various places and various people into recognition. Somewhat like polyglots, these little instances help us to translate our knowledge and way of walking about into strange territory. Transcendence is not the word, not something that goes over, but something bubbling up from underneath...

So, here are three benches.

Taipei Airport, en route to Indonesia for the first time. This was the first sight on waking after a very long trans-Pacific flight, groggy, stumbling, these chairs showed a strange blue resting place I wanted to collapse in. One that wasn't moving through the troposphere and cramped.

Also note the shocking red fire extinguishers that look like they craftily sneaked into the photo at the last second.

The next are in Paris, in the Metro. On a trip there with my family we traveled in my style, which is as publicly transported as possible. My family were real troopers then. These chairs somehow remind me of innocence or childlikeness.

Or old men in newsie hats smoking cigarettes at a diner. Definitely a Midwestern US one.

Also in Paris, on the RER train to Versailles, on our honeymoon. As I write this it was almost a year ago that Becca and I traipsed out to the revolution-baiting chateau. The chairs are transit chairs, and train travel is my favorite and most mind-lighting form of transit. The odd collision of industrial-revolution-technological wonder with the very throwback from today's lowest common denominator travel and hyper-individual travel makes it somehow evocative. Many deep prayers have happened on every sort of train from Welsh cross-country, to Russian sleeper, to Boston commuter, to California coaster, to Coney Island elevated subway. Our nation is much poorer for its lack of rail transit...

So. Anyhow, I hope you all enjoy the benches, and I encourage you to look for items of rhythm wherever you travel or stay put.

Peace. Dustin

Visualityness-Part One

2009-01-08T09:50:00.004-06:00

So in an attempt to stay somewhat consistent from day to day or week to week, I hope to share some random photos from the years with whoever is out there, as a fun break from my scribble-filled usual rants and thoughts.

I am certainly not a professional photographer, but have always enjoyed finding patterns and evocation in everyday and in unexpected vistas. Yet even so, at time the most expected or banal view can produce something oddly exciting, beautiful.

So I begin with a particularly special one for myself.

This is the Bankovsky Most (bridge) in St. Petersburg, Russia. In January 07 I stayed in Moscow and Peter for a little over a week, wandering, writing, riding trains, eating borscht, trying (almost entirely successfully) to be a vegetarian in the most un-vegetarian place this side of Texas, and basically getting lost from day to day in the snow and canals. This bridge is right outside of the apartment I stayed in, in central Petersburg. I would walk it everyday.

While taking a literature and landscape class in London, in my time at OBU, we visited an exhibit of William Blake's artwork at the Tate Gallery. Much of his famous work is centered on illustrations of the Divine Comedy, and even while reading Dante's work earlier that school year, I was caught up in the image of the "Griffin" (or Gryphon). Blake has a famous "painting" where Beatrice is borne in to Dante on a Griffin.

The Griffin is a fantastical blend of lion and eagle (and/or dragon), and is used in Dante as a symbol of divinity, or even of Christ, in a sense. Both Dante's and Blake's appreciation for the mystery and fantastical sense of Christ's position as both guide and king through wildly varying ages and peoples is very rich, and during that class in England I walked away with a heavy ghost of appreciating the real (that is, romantic and frustrating) mystery of faith.

Being fortunate enough to find a cheap place to lodge in Peter (Russia is not cheap), I was enthralled to have such a great reminder of presence of Christ in travels, and in strange places. So with that I leave you.

Wheels, Or "Hate Feeds Hate Feeds Hate"

2009-01-07T12:43:00.001-06:00

In the film Bloody Sunday, starring James Nesbitt, there is a speech at the end of the narration by his character, Ivan Cooper, who is a Member of Parliament for Stormont, the provisional government of Northern Ireland, administered by the British. "I have a message for the British government..." he begins, speaking in a press conference following the murderous march, and he then goes on to inform them because of the aggression they showed on that day, "all over Derry tonight there are young men signing up for the IRA..." and indeed the movie cuts to show some young protagonists who lost a friend in the shootings ambling down a dark hallway to get rifles from the Provos. Indeed, in Irish history, this day marked the turning of the Troubles into decades of death and oppression at the hands of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, and the RUP and British Army.

While this film is a combination of commentary from actual inquiries into the incident, and fictional shifts of perspective and storytelling, it does put forth, in the chilling conclusion, a view that is currently being repeated in the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. I cannot help but think Gazans are thinking just what the Irish in Derry were thinking that day. Already quotes from both militant and civil leaders in Gaza reflect a willingness to spiral into the culture of death that Israel is currently enacting upon them.

Make no mistake, there are two sides to this conflict but it is difficult to not find Israel in the position of oppressor. While Hamas' intransigence on denouncing violence is just as deplorable, the very support they find among non-violent Gazans is indicative of the helplessness that Palestinians feel under Israel's blockades and attacks.

Rocket fire into southern Israel and terror attacks within Israel are inexcusable. Yet these claim (no less innocent) a few lives a year. I am having difficulty seeing past a UN school being destroyed, along with 40 civilians, almost all women and children, in one afternoon.

The tricky thing with any war is finding a way to pitch the violence as targeted towards only those who are violent. Yet any war bears evil down on those who are geographically connected to the violent, regardless of their innocence. This is what makes war, by definition, unjust. Israel knows this, and as the overwhelming power in the conflict, bears the overwhelming responsibility to behave in a non-evil way. Where it does good or evil, it needs to be called out as such. Likewise, it cannot ignore evil enacted on it by Hamas, but it will never solve the problem of Hamas by killing Gazans. It is that simple.

For any nation to claim that civilian casualties are unintended in war is a lie. Every war creates civilian and innocent death, though this is rarely considered, or considered in cold blood.

Yet the Bush administration has blocked a UN Security Council proviso to call out Israel, on grounds of its own war on terror, which brought Al-Qaeda to Iraq, where it did not previously exist, in a seeming proof of the Derry chain of events.

In the States it is so precarious to criticize Israel that the Palestinians plight, even under the soft violence of Israel's blockades, and the news coverage, and foreign policy, and religious voices are all very one-sided and often frighteningly militaristic. If anyone wants to bridge some of the divide of faith between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, then offering aid to both the injured Israelis and Palestinians would be a place to start. Likewise, our soon-to-be President can create a striking new opportunity for dialog and peace, though up until now that seems a distant hope.

I am currently sitting in a cafe hearing a conversation next to me between two elderly men on the same topic. One is imploring the other to read the Bible, and it will explain why Palestine is wrong. This is depressing.

It is time for the moderates to claim the debate, for both Israel and Palestine, to rid the region of the hardline militarism of Israel, and the hardline militarism of Hamas. Yet as long as this wheel of death continues, the lyrics of the Blenderhead song in the title will stay current news.

I have run my fingers along the long, grey wall in Belfast built to keep literal neighbors from throwing nail bombs at one another. I have seen the cubes in neighborhoods there painted different color according to the local preference of nationalist or unionist. If this is the future for Israel and Palestine then may Jesus have mercy on us all, for being silent in the face of such hate.

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Advent Epilogue

2008-12-27T17:53:00.003-06:00

So a slowly approaching winter has grown on us a bit here in OKC, though it switches from 70 degrees to 20 in one day fairly often...and so I thought it would be good now to wrap and reflect on the Advent poem experience I underwent this season.

As I hoped it would be, the poem writing was pretty much pre-cognitive in the sense that I typically wrote "in the moment," and not necessarily from a lot of reflection before hand. This was often due to a laziness on my part where I would end up writing at the last moments before I went to bed to read. Thanks to the Christmas iPhone this was pretty easy to do. The downside is that it did all come from a momentary response, rather than a long contemplation of some source materials, like I had planned. However, it did produce some verse that I enjoy on looking back, both for (my subjective) enjoyment of the originality of it, but also for the content in a devotional sense.

Do understand that I kind of view these little writings, and any songs I make, etc. as living entities that somehow separate from me after completion. So it is not too weird for me to refer to them on terms of their own quality (to my perception and tastes), and I really hope I don't sound odd or especially that I do not sound arrogant or something in referring to them. It is just that they are like proteges of my mind, related to me, but I can evaluate them as if they are completely separate from my consciousness.

Anyhow, the poems.

I noticed that early on, I would focus on some very specific pericopes of Scripture, trying as I was to couple translation with the creations, as in the first poem where I pulled on the idea of encountering the Lord in very customary acts, basically what we experience everytime we go to worship or pray or sit to read: the discipline of the act may or may not give way to any revelation, and this is both frustrating and rewarding about the Lord. This particular hope, that He does in fact meet us in our acts seems sometimes small and selfish, but it also comes out in very long lasting revelations, foggy or specific. I have found these unexpectedly from the Lord in Taos, in London, in Chattanooga, in New York, etc. Yet I could try to make an altar from them, as the custom of my Judaic fathers, but even as I do i cannot make another experience happen whether by place or visual remembrance. Nor do I expect it when it does.

December 2nd's poem did what I wished to do much more of-make an interpretative/dynamic translation of some of the early prayers (Magnificat, Zechariah's) and narratives, though I only did this a few times. While I normally tend towards as literal as possible, I have recently tried to listen to the sounds of the Greek, and to transmit that as possible into English, as if Seamus Heaney or Gerard Hopkins were translating. I noticed Drew's response to this, and enjoyed it very much, as he is a scholar beyond my means now, and is knee-deep in language/theology work in CA.

The one longest-limbed theme that kept creeping into each poem was that of the Christ child. For some reason, this was almost always my starting place of imagery, and I would approach most poems from this first place: imagining myself in the room with the baby, or imagining myself as the baby, seeing through His eyes. At times this was mystical, and at times simply a starting place metaphorically. On 12.8 I imagined myself a lamb in the corner.

The child theme both echoes the later invitation that Jesus gives to be childlike, and it echoes something of the innocence of Christmas, how focused it is on gift giving, and on children's stories and gifts. Indeed, where magic, as a theme in myths and in seasons, where magic is located, there is usually an abundance of childlikeness, and that is to be valued. This magic is a mirror to the mystery of Jesus' story, a collision of God with the Earth, and with all of the prophetic signifiers mixed with a simple birth. It is a lot to ask of our imagination, and magic sometimes gets thrown in as the yeast to story-or as a distancer for the non-religious.

Though the poems strain and settle to be both hopeful and honest to the world around, perhaps I will end with a thought about today's very news, from Gaza. The situation in the land of Jesus is as terrible as ever, a true blister on humanity, and one borne by all of us, with terrible prejudice on both sides, and a refusal to face decency by all sides. This is the reason for both hope and unease this Christmas, the questions of how long will will wait for Jerusalem's peace, for Palestine to be a home, and Israel and her will join hands, not rockets. The questions of how to imagine Jesus' sad child eyes as He watched His land disjoint, and continue to rot even this day. Peace on earth has no better and no less vital fountain than this tiny wedge against the Mediterranean. Have mercy on us.

The whirl will not cease
the center black will expand
for more souls, more broken limbs

the white walls will shudder or disappear
and Bethlehem rests not far from the
pillars of smoke, guiding the ambulances
if they can hurdle the closed roads

open Your sweet eyes to this
to the dust from the shaken ceiling
to the nervous rams and shaken horses
shifting under the low concussion
of retaliation, a wheel of fire
a wheel of clustered fire

I can hear Your cry bring
a silence for once, not death
I can see Your tiny hands
tear great chunks from the
dry bones of the peace walls

I can watch Your arms
cover newborns and soldiers
keffiyah'd teenagers with molotovs
and politicians with kalashnikovs
and not one felt remorse until this moment
when Your fingers made the 'v'
and immediately we threw our
warplanes into the green sea

but this is not yet
so we wait, we wonder
how long

12.24

2008-12-25T01:19:00.002-06:00

This unapproachable light
Promises us a constant abide
A windowed waiting room
A rutted trail, and
Three days of dark

Already down the line
I can see Your driven wrist
Muddying the ground, down the blade
Out of Your sour sherried chest

I should warn You, gentle child
Our laws will only hasten Your death
Will You believe in us, still, at the end?

All of the earth bends and thins
Like plastic turning white under stress
All the earth aches
And trees are slapping their dwindling hands
The cedars of Tripoli double the beat
Towards Bethlehem-a concussion of a stilled star
Pressed hard into the troposphere
Where trade routes pass along provincial fences
And common, us so common and unrich
Begin to warily hold in our hope
And slowly and unimpossibly
Our striped backs begin to heal
Reshaping under the most child-borne,
Gladdening words of light

Hallelujah-God is with us,