Had a busy day yesterday and wasn’t able to link to my newest post for Times And Seasons, so here it is: Peter Wiggin (that’s Ender’s older brother) as Lucifer.
Monday Morning Mormonism: Peter Wiggin as Lucifer
Arts
Bluegrass Metallica
The title alone should convey both the content and its awesomeness.
Lorde and the End of Childhood
Spotify let me know that Lorde is a spotlight artist whose debut album was just released and told me I should go listen to it. Always keen to hear new music, I queued up her first track. Always interested in who I’m listening to, I searched for her on Wikipedia.
So here’s what stands out to me. First of all, Lorde is 16 years old. At 32, I’ve seen the tragic trajectory of enough child stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and a gaggle of others to be concerned. Whether it’s Selena Gomez ending up in Spring Breakers or Miley Cyrus twerking (no link needed), the career path always seems to bend towards exploitation as though it were an inescapable black hole. I don’t have any inside knowledge of the record industry, but even from the outside it seems plain that young stars, and especially girls, don’t fare well. We all want to be famous like moths want to be closer to the bug zapper, never paying attention to the burned-out husks below the light.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes her rise:
At the age of 12, she was spotted by A&R scout Scott Maclachlan when he saw her singing in a video of a talent show at her school, Belmont Intermediate. Later, when [she] was 13, Maclachlan signed her to Universal and, at the age of 14, she began working with their songwriters.
Does this make anyone else just a bit queasy? Discovered at 12? Signed at 13? Working with pro-songwriters at 14? She’s the first woman in 17 years to top the alt chart (I would say “girl” with no disrespect intended), and that’s an achievement, but how much of that is a reflection of corporate strategy and marketing? The relationship between artists and publishers is always fraught; how does someone so young hope to avoid becoming the packaged merchandise? There’s something deeply disturbing to me about the worship of youth philosophically and the plight of these starlets practically.
Look, I wish Lorde (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) the best of luck, but at this point I feel like listening to her music is condoning a culture that devours it’s own young.
Ender as Everyman
Today’s Monday Morning Mormon post is titled Ender as Everyman. It’s the first in a series I will be writing about Ender’s Game. There will be at least 2 more in the coming weeks.
Awesome Street Art
Here’s an article with the best street art of 2012. So, yeah, I’m a bit late but I’ve never seen these images before and they are great.
Digital Drama: The Way to Keep Mormon Theatre Relevant?
I believe that keeping the flame of Mormon drama alive is important. Especially at my faith tradition’s still early stage of development as a religion and a culture, we already have a rich heritage of dramatic literature filled with a wide range of excellent plays.
As an effort to preserve and publicize that heritage, Zarahemla Books published Saints on Stage: An Anthology of Mormon Drama, which includes theatrical works by some of Mormonism’s best dramatists. Michael Perry has recently been collecting a lot of Mormon plays under the umbrella of his Zion Theatricals, which licenses performance rights for Mormon themed drama to theatre companies and community groups. Angie Staheli has been encouraging production of LDS drama on the stake level at her blog LDS Plays. In the realm of higher education, Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University continue to produce works by Mormon student playwrights, while independent theatre companies such as the Echo Theatre, Leilani Productions, and my own Zion Theatre Company continue to include Mormon drama in their seasons. There are many individuals and organizations who are striving to continue to vibrant tradition of creating theatre that is informed by the spirituality and beauty of our faith tradition, even when it isn’t explicit in its religiousness.
Yet despite these exciting developments, it sometimes feels like we lose as much ground as we gain, and that we are more often than not treading water. So I’ve been trying to analyze and figure out ways of making Mormon drama not only relevant, but also exciting and profitable, so that it can continue onward. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe the relatively new trend of digital theatre seems to be an effective and exciting route for Mormon Drama to take.
Harry Potter Genetics Decoded
Ever wondered how magical abilities are passed down in the Harry Potter world? Andrea Klenotiz, a biology student at the University of Delaware, did. The simplistic textbook examples of Mendelian inheritance don’t work, but in a 6-page paper, Klenotiz explains how non-Mendelian genetics can answer such questions as:
- How can a wizard be born to muggle parents?
- How can a squib be born to wizard parents?
- How can varying degrees of magical ability be explained?
Check out the article at Mother Nature Network, which includes links to the full article by Klenotiz.
The Ultimate Stairway to Heaven
The Vancouver Sun is right on all counts:
There have been some mighty horrible renditions of Led Zeppelin‘s Stairway To Heaven, but when Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart performed the song in front of the three remaining members of the legendary British rock band at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony on Dec. 2, it made Robert Plant cry tears of joy.
(The band was being honoured by President Barack Obama alongside David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman.)
Watch it and understand why. When the choir kicks in and Ann Wilson wails Plant’s famous “And as we wind on down the road…” you might shed a tear or two yourself.
“Anything You Can Do…”: Feminist Superhero Revolution Starts at Marvel Films?
With recent rumors cropping up (emphasis on rumors!) about the possibility of Battlestar Gallactica actress Katee Sackhoff being in the running for the possible role of Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, feminist comic fans can have a peg to hang their hopes on. There have been a number of compelling female characters in recent superhero films, from Peggy Carter in Captain America, to Pepper Potts in Iron Man, to Catwoman in Dark Knight Rises, but even those characters had problematic elements with the portrayal of their characters. And the above characters also played chiefly supportive roles in the narrative to the male protagonist.
Things are looking a little rosier, though, with the future of the Avengers. In addition to this (albeit speculative at this point) inclusion of Captain Marvel, Joss Whedon, who has a history of writing compelling women in past projects, has already went on record about adding a little more gender diversity to the mix in the Avengers sequel, with the announcement that Scarlet Witch, one of his “favorite” characters (I think she’s fantastic, too) will be joining the team for the sequel, along with her brother Quicksilver.
Getting It Wrong On “Gatsby”
The 2013 version of The Great Gatsby was recently released on DVD/Blu-ray. I haven’t seen the film yet, given that I’m pretty lukewarm toward Baz Luhrmann. (Moulin Rouge! was enjoyable enough, Romeo + Juliet had its moments, but Australia?) But when I heard a radio advertisement for the DVD last night, I was reminded of a Nick Gillespie article from the April 2013 issue of Reason entitled “The Great Gatsby‘s Creative Destruction.” Gillespie is, according to The Denver Post, “a true intellectual, who can, before finishing his lunch, discuss how “The Great Gatsby” might be written today, switch to a riff on free-market reasons for supporting a value-added tax, reference economic studies that detail the “self-correcting” tax distribution in European countries that have applied a VAT, chart from memory the nation’s deficit spending patterns since the Great Depression, and all while handling a pretend-I’m-interested discussion with a political candidate whose conversation is limited to repeating the phrase, “It’ll be a real dog-fight, in every sense of the word.”” Not bad for #18 on The Daily Beast‘s list “The Right’s Top 25 Journalists.” (He would cringe at being lumped on “the Right” given his strong libertarianism.) The fact that he has a Ph.D. in English literature probably helps with his analysis of The Great Gatsby. And it is an interesting one.
He begins,
Based on the trailers and ads made available so far, the new movie likely errs in the same fundamental way that the Redford version did. That is, it conceives of Gatsby ultimately as a grand love story between the title character and the object of his obsessive love, Daisy Buchanan. Given the barebones plot of the book, that’s understandable but regrettable, as those two are the least compelling characters in the novel. Despite occasional moments of darkness and depth, Daisy works hard and mostly succeeds at maintaining a superficial lightness. Gatsby, despite the whirl of excitement and mystery about him, is an empty suit. Even the novel’s adulatory narrator confesses that when he’s alone with Gatsby, “I found to my disappointment, that he had nothing to say.”
The reason that Gatsby (the novel, if not the character) still has plenty to say to us is that it captures the precise moment that modern America came into recognizable shape. It is about the move from countryside to metropolis, from unum to pluribus, from hierarchy to heterarchy in all aspects of cultural and economic life. It captures a world in which nothing is fixed in terms of status, fortune, and self-fashioning—and it narrates the anxieties by such freedom.
…Gatsby…is not simply a story about class differences. It’s about the breakdown of class differences in the face of a modern economy based not on status and inherited position but on innovation and an ability to meet ever-changing consumer needs. Ultimately, Gatsby is the great American novel of the ways in which free markets (even, and perhaps especially, black markets) overturn established order and recreate the world through what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”
Certainly one of the more novel takes on Gatsby I’ve read. The whole thing is worth reading.