In which, inspired by Shore’s work on the film scores, I ponder Tolkien’s masterpiece. At length. (While glossing over some of the linguistic inspiration for Tolkien’s myth.)
The triumph of Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings films is that it makes me want to reread the books. Again. Read on, intrepid explorer →
All creative arts require exercise. This is never more clear to me than when I have not been writing regularly, as in the last year. It is not so much that my writing is always bad. Rather, it is inconsistent. Wildly, annoyingly inconsistent. I can sit down and write one post that satisfies me, and then turn around and write another that leaves me deeply frustrated. Read on, intrepid explorer →
Güngör is really good. Great music, and getting better. The lead is also a good thinker and writer. In a blog post a few months ago, he really nailed contemporary Christian music to the wall. He wasn’t harsh or over the top, but he did say things that need to be said:
Do you notice that nobody really uses that word [creativity] about other types of music? I just was perusing some Itunes user reviews to see if this holds up. I checked John Mark and mine, and “creativity” is very often found. But it’s not often found in reviews of bands like Sigur Ros, Bon Iver, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens or other artists who are certainly very “creative.”
Nobody goes to an art gallery and says, “boy, that painting is so creative.” Why? Because it’s art! Of course it’s creative! Why else would it be there? It’s very nature is creativity. Or like Lisa pointed out to me today, “that would be like saying, I love your house, it’s so architectural.”
But when someone in the Christian industry actually takes their art seriously, everybody is like “holy crap, listen to how creative it is!”
It’s like a person that’s been living among zombies for years seeing an actual human being and exclaiming, “wow, look at how clean her face is! She doesn’t even have any blood on it or anything!”
The rain never stopped.
Sometimes it was no more than a chill mist sitting on the air; other times it came down suddenly, like an angry fist, and the Coop shuddered against it. The sky stood iron above. And the weird wind was ever out of the east.
The trees lost their leaves, but there was no beauty in it this year, not any color but rot. It was as if they had simply given up to the moisture and the cold, and forgotten life. Nor was there any crackling of dry leaves, nor the sharp scent—clean and musty—of falling leaves, nor the blue bit of the year going out. Damp foliage was stripped from the trees by an everlasting rain. The naked trees shivered. That was all.
—Walter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow, p. 63
The raining never stopped. From horizon to horizon, the clouds were locked in place, and the earth was shut up. An east wind—an odd wind to command the weather—brought this wetness and never stopped bringing it.
But perhaps God looked down from his heaven and had pity upon the Coop, for a merciful change occurred in the rain. It became snow. And where water as rain was mere misery, the same water as snow was a soft delight: A hard freeze made the ground bony and firm; snow followed to whiten and to reveal the gentle contour of that ground; the cold air snapped life into the creatures who ventured forth to walk on it; the forest greeted them, tinkling and clinking as if its great trees had tiny voices-and more than any of that, the Coop became muffled in its warmth, because snow drifted up the outside of its walls.
—ibid., p. 70
My heart reflects, sometimes, the darkling ev’ning sky:
Helios a blaze undimmed by watercolor smears of cloud
Until he sinks below the world’s rough edge, falls out of
Mind as out of sight, leaves Hesperos to stand alone beside
Selene’s slim curve; though still the domèd path he trod is
For a while yet lit, as with the embers of extinguished flame.
Problems with the tripod, alas…
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