I was in the middle of reading some websites when I got the email notification at 10:50pm tonight that Radiohead’s new album “In Rainbows” was ready for download. I almost jumped out of my skin trying to switch over to mail and hit the special “UNIQUE DOWNLOAD ACTIVATION CODE” link embedded in the mass email. It instantly starting downloading the new album to my desktop as promised. The file is 48.4 mb ten tracks and all are DRM free MP3’s.
It is rare that I get this excited about something, and this is the second time this week for me!I am now on track 3 “15 step” and while it will be awhile before I can give any kind of calmed down reflection of the album, this album is no joke [see edited note below, I listened in the wrong order]. It’s a change of pace from Hail to the Thief, a little less electronic, has some beautiful orchestration, piano and acoustic guitars, yet it contains the same old driving OK Computer-esque rock I love in a Radiohead song (and was almost absent in Amnesiac). So far the first song “Faust Arp” and “Jigsaw Falling in Place” are the ones I like the most. The production sounds incredible, just as good or better than most stuff we hear from coming out of major record labels. It seems like this move on Radiohead’s part (not having a label or distribution) may give rise to some serious questioning from a music industry point of view, especially if they can put something like this out on such a large scale successfully.I think It was well worth the £6 I paid for the pre-order last week for it (thanks to Cate’s early headsup). Check it out here.
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We finally got to see The Darjeeling Limited this past weekend at the Arclight (our first time there) and the whole thing was a magical experience. Darjeeling, the 5th full length movie by Director Wes Anderson, does not disappoint. Besides the typical things we’ve come to love in Anderson’s films – slow motion scenes with classic rock n’ roll in the background, the luxurious colors, the farcical characters, and the off beat dialogue – there are plenty of new twists and turns. For one, this is the first of Anderson’s movie to reference any kind of explicit spirituality. The Darjeeling Limited is the name of a train that crosses the vast landscapes of India, and India as the context for the movie is not without rich resources for offering its own account of Eastern spirituality. Throughout the movie we see the three main characters, who are brothers in the film, tinker with a variety of religious expressions and forms, experimenting to find what works best. These spiritual experiments, over the span of the movie, work to break down the walls between the brothers. And while this is an essential aspect to the movie’s overall scope what is possibly the most important part of the movie is that while the main characters seemingly don’t find anything at all (none of their spiritual explorations seem to “work”) this leads them to discovering exactly what they set out to find: a renewed trust in one another.
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For all those of you who get a copy of The Friend, the only weekly Quaker publication in the world, you will see my review of the Ben Pink Dandelion’s 2005 book Liturgies of Quakerism in this week’s edition. It’s pretty neat to finally get something in The Friend and I hope there will be more opportunities in the future to write for them. The Friend is based out of London (The Friend’s House) and so draws a different crowd than some of our American publications which is another great thing about it.
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Peter Rollins founder of the Ikon Community , an emerging church in Ireland, has recently penned “How (Not) to Speak of God” (Peter Rollins).” It is a book that will be important for every church to wrestle with. Rollins writes as one who is both theologian/philosopher (he has a Ph.D. in Postmodern theory) and a practitioner. He is deeply involved in a church community that considers itself “iconic, apocalyptic, heretical, emerging and failing.”
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I just finished Shane Claiborne’s “Irresistible Revolution,” which is the first assignment for the class I am teacher’s aid for and I thought it was a fantastic read. In fact, if you’ve got nothing better to do in the next thirty minuets go out and pick up this book.
I rarely tell anyone to buy a book, except everyday I am at work at Fuller’s Bookstore, but that’s besides the point. This time it’s an exception. It’s a great book for any Christian who is looking to get some ideas about what other Christians are doing to follow Christ in the States. It’s a really quick read because it’s so short and really engaging due to the stories that flood the pages of the book.
This book is for people who are not looking for an academic book to read but something that’s full of stories showing how young Christians, my age, are living out their faith in downtown Philly. It’s not jaded, he doesn’t make a lot of digs about who the bad and good guys are, the book is more about giving people tangible evidence that following Christ makes a difference, as it should, in the lives of the people we live around.
The church they are a part of is called the Simple Way, because they seek to follow Christ in “ordinary radical” ways. Of course these “ordinary radical” ways are going to push people’s buttons, and challenge the way we understand our own faith, but I think that’s a good thing.
He quotes, Jaques Ellul, “Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society (231).” And then he goes on to explain a bit about John the Baptist and Jesus and some of the adjectives used to describe these leaders of an “ordinary revolution” thousands of years before us.
One of the most memorable parts of the book is when Shane was in college and some of his other college mates found out that some of their homeless friends were being evicted from an abandoned Catholic church they’d lived in for years (and had been condemned even longer). They rounded up college students from their school in Philly and went and slept in the church with the people for the weekend. When the cops came, they decided to not arrest everyone and left.
Every time they’d get word that the police were going to evict the people, they’d blow a fog horn on campus and rally their friends together who’d all jam in their cars and run down to the church. They did this for a long enough time that the city finally gave everyone in that church housing and helped them get on their feet.
So the point of the book is to communicate those kinds of stories. Where simple people are doing simple things because they love God and others. Claiborne says that it’s not about issues, it about people. And because of that, this book’s got me real excited again about how faith changes real people’s lives.
