Click here to listen to a song I wrote in the late nineties entitled "For a Season." Make no mistake, this song is a straight-forward pop power-ballad. Think Journey or Air Supply two decades later. I could never imagine myself writing a song in a similar vein today, but hey, that's where I was toward the end of college. (This is probably why it's still the favorite song of mine on the part of the many women in my life!) I haven't written much while in seminary, but I hope to do so more often in the near future. And if I can someday achieve my dream of owning a mac with garage band I will most definitely record and share more of my music here on the blog.
I have earlier written all about my former band. The person who arranged, performed, and recorded "For a Season" as heard here is Joey Wright, a former member of the band. (In the picture above Joey is center, Brad Wright is the long-haried hippie on the right, and I'm the dyed-white-hair guy on the left. The pic is from the show at Mozart's Coffee House mentioned in my F.O.M. post.) At any rate, Joey is an extremely talented singer and musician and you might like to check out more of his music on his website. Thanks to Jo-Jo for making my song so beautiful and for hosting it on the net. I'll add a permalink in the sidebar.
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p.s. If you know Shane Gibson, he is the woman in the lower left-hand section of the picture above.
Well, after four long years Laura and I finally graduated from Covenant Theological Seminary last night. It has been a special four years, and I'm sure we'll miss our seminary days down the road, but for now we're quite glad to be through and heading to vocational ministry.
Laura graduated as Master of Arts in Theological Studies and I graduated as Master of Divinity. Of course, as usual (!), my wife showed me up by graduating summa cum laude--and this while raising twins.
The best part of the ceremony is when you cross the stage, receive your diploma, then get "hooded." (See that thing around my neck.) I was hooded by the infamous and incomparable Jack Collins. Anyways, pretty cool to be done. Now off to be with family and friends for a few days.
Blessings.
The above picture is one of two pieces of glass I bought for Laura for her birthday. (The picture on the side bar is a close-up of this piece.) I bought them while I was in Tacoma, Washington, a few weeks ago visiting my Dad. Tacoma is the home of world-renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly (you're like me if you exclaim at this point, "There's such a thing as a 'world-renowned glass artist!'"). I bought the two pieces at the Museum of Glass in downtown Tacoma. Laura and I had visited the museum years ago and have dreamed ever since of purchasing a Chihuly-like wall hanging such as this for our future home. But since I am not rich and do not plan to be in the near- of far-future, I settled for these two little balls, which are still very nice, made by Chihuly apprentices, and much more affordable.
Well, to our happiness, our favorite place in St. Louis for a Saturday morning stroll--the Botanical Gardens--just opened up with Chihuly's Glass in the Garden exhibit. Here are a couple of pictures I took at the exhibit. It's truly beautiful to see such exquisite pieces of art taken down from their normal sterile walls and integrated seamlessly into a lived garden environment.
So start with Chihuly if you want to know what "world-renowned glass art" is all about.
Here is an exquisite articulation of art's role in our modern world by Anglican Bishop Tom Wright. I strongly encourage you to read this article, The Bible and Christian Imagination, whether or not you are yourself an artist--or a Christian. We all ought to understand, appreciate, and encourage such a high calling. The above picture is of the sculpture mentioned by Wright in his final paragraph. You can view more pictures of The Tree of Life here.
This is the title of a gorgeous new song by my friend Brent Palmer. You can download "Street Pilot" for free here. You can also listen to a few other previously released tracks at Brent's MySpace site. Don't miss out!
Brent and Amy, I can't wait to see you guys this weekend at my graduation. Don't forget to bring some Texadelphia with you...and your guitar!
I'll leave it for the future to decide whether that post title is properly interpreted as meaning this is my last post on Lost or my post on the last Lost. Now that you're sufficiently confused:
Lost is back on it's game. The last, but not last, Lost was near perfect. I was pleased.
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So during the last-:)-commercial break I notice a commercial for a company called the Hanso Foundation, which rings a bell as it is the name of the company in the show that funded the experiments on the island. I see on the commercial a link to this website: www.sublymonal.com. So after the show I go downstairs and type in the address. Weirdness! After I "OBEY" and tap the television screens a respective 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 times I get a secret password and then transferred to The Hanso Foundation site. Well before I get too deep in this a friend calls me and admits he's doing the same thing but decided to cut corners and wikipedia the last Lost episode. There he learned about The Lost Experience.
Now this turn of events is indeed fasinating. The producers of Lost had experimented with faux sites for Oceanic airlines and such when they launched the show, but now, in order to keep their fans interested over the Summer months between seasons 2 and 3, they have launched an alternative reality game based on Lost. I'll let wikipedia explain the details, but there is a real-life game going on all Summer. I do NOT plan on participating, by the way, but I was intrigued enough by the concept to waste 30-minutes Wednesday night surfing the net to get the gist of the game. I'll throw you a few links and interesting tidbits I found.
First of all, the game kicked off in the U.S. two episodes ago when they aired a Hanso Foundation commercial that gave a phone number to call. When you called the number, I'm told, you heard this. Lots of clues were threaded in the voicemail. The Hanso Foundation website is sort of the center of the game, and will open up only on certain days for people to search for the right spot and type in their secret passwords for more clues. A mysterious woman named Persephone seems to be hacking the site to give you clues.
But this is not all. Lost has actually had a real book published! It's currently number 15 on Amazon and it's entitled The Bad Twin. You may remember seeing Sawyer and Hurley reading this book on the television show. The author is ostensibly Gary Troup, who on the show was the first survivor to die and be buried. He supposedly turned in this final manuscript to Hyperion Publishers just before boarding the ill-fated flight. (Fans are speculating that Stephen King is the real-life author.) In the book, there is evidently much negative reference to an evil company named The Hanso Foundation. Well, in real life, this advertisement was taken out last week in a number of North America's largest newspapers.
So clues and hints about the show--especially the Hanso Foundation--will continue to be delivered via novel, telephone, newspaper, internet and television throughout the Summer. Unbelievable. If you'd like to keep up without doing the leg-work yourself, I suggest following this blog.
Namaste!
Just turned in my final assignment for the completion of my Masters of Divinity degree.
Watching the second in a 7-disc documentary on the history of New York last night, I learned that the great American poet Walt Whitman was a Brooklynite; not only that, he was from neighborhoods surrounding Park Slope and was involved in the forerunner to what is now the Brooklyn Museum of Art--which is more or less located in the Slope.
Funny how one often fails to maintain facts and minutia unless there is a personal reference involved. I studied Whitman some in college and didn't recall that his greatest work, Leaves of Grass, is almost entirely concerned with Brooklyn and Manhattan, a fact which would have kept me from being so surprised about Whitman's provenance. All I remembered from my former studies was a vague impression of free-form verse, frank sexuality and self-eroticism, and some mental connection (of my own) with Allen Ginsberg.
I plan to take another look at this work. The poem I'm starting with, appropriately, is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. The narrator of the documentary from last night read at length from this poem, and I was struck by Whitman's attempt to explore his own version of the communion of the saints (in this case, the communion of those lovers of New York who know the experience of traversing the East River). He certainly does succeed in making himself more alive to me, more aware of his former experience--as vital as my own, and forging a type of connection with me, the reader.
This tack by Whitman struck me as a more subtle and mature use of an ancient poetic technique that attempts self-immortalization. Shakespeare in his sonnets, for example, imagines that his love for his lover, though extinguished by death, will defeat death and live immortal via the permanence of his words on the page. I dislike this conceit more and more. Especially as it relates to the way we often sentimentalize our memory of a lost person as some means to overcome the sting of death. No, in some cases, Death has reason to be proud. But now I've gone astray of my original topic. I preferred the subtle way that Whitman achieved a means of re-invigorating himself to his future readers, simply by forcing an acknowledgement of shared experience and humanity. And using Brooklyn at that. More to read...
(and pushing the frogman down...)
bye, at last
- I'm shookfoil
- From Brooklyn, New York
- Church-planting apprentice.
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