Phil Keaggy Speaks the Truth
Here's a revealing interview with Phil Keaggy, where he's saying some of the things about the Christian music industry that I've been saying at Looking Closer for a decade or more.
This is just a piece of that article...
Considering the fact that some Christian music listeners expect a certain number of Jesus references in their songs, where does wordless music fit in with ministry?
Keaggy: I don't know. It's always made me feel odd when I'd get a Dove Award for an instrumental album that has nothing to do with gospel. When I think of gospel music, I think of spreading the Good News with words. But maybe it's just because I was heralded once upon a time as one of theirs. The category of instrumental music seems sort of important to the big picture, but I felt a little embarrassed at the same time.
Does your instrumental music come from spiritual inspiration?
Keaggy:No, not necessarily. More than sometimes it does feel that way, but across the board no. It's something I do like putting on my clothes or taking a shower. It's like breathing. I'm not always thinking in terms of CCM or thinking in terms of gospel. When I pick up my guitar, there are times where I feel the Lord just bless it. I feel a blessing in what I'm doing and that's just a result of wanting to serve him and please him.
But I'm [bothered] by the fact that Guitar Player magazine has to put "Christian guitarist" before my name. I can't just be known as a guitar player; I've been pigeonholed in the situation. I feel like I'm on periphery of CCM and not quite in the world. I think Larry Norman felt that sort of way. They didn't know what do with him and they didn't know what to do with Sunday's Child.
What irks me most about the Christian music business is the model on which they built the whole thing. It's based on the world's model of taking songs and masters from artists and owning it, when they make you pay back the production budget based on your royalties' percentage and then they end up owning it. It's like making 30 years of payments on a house that the bank never gives you!
How did you get reeled into that kind of partnership?
Keaggy: I was young and naive. I wish I knew in the '70s what I know now. I would've never given my music away like that. You've got stars in your eyes, Christian or non-Christian, and you want to be expressive to let world hear where you're coming from. It can bring a blessing into this world, but at same time in my own life and for other fellow artists, we're so discouraged by the selfish system put in place, based upon the model of the world.
It may be a selfish system, though it seems the mainstream is better at re-releasing an artist's back catalogue than the Christian market, such as the constant re-introduction of the Beatles to a younger generation.
Keaggy:There are new generations of Beatles' fans yet music from the '70s in Christian music is forgotten. They are only thinking about the present and not the treasures of the past or the futures of their artists—which is why the indie explosion is best thing that ever happened to Christian music. I just wish the hearts, pocketbook and bank accounts could have real righteous actions to go along with the explosion of CCM. I don't know, I might get myself in trouble! (laughs)
So are you suggesting that the genre of "Christian music" shouldn't exist?
Keaggy:Maybe. I would've been out there more in the world playing, selling CDs and spreading some light instead of conveniently singing to the choir. What Bono's doing is dangerous. He's basically sharing the gospel in a very real sort of way, and I kind of respect that. He didn't want to get tagged and pulled into CCM. [Bob] Dylan wouldn't let that happen either during his Slow Train Coming days. At same time, barriers are put around us. When you go to Europe, they don't know what CCM is! Let's all just do our music and go where we're led to go.
I don't do altar calls, but I do love gospel music way before labels. That's when it had an identifiable personality that was unique. What's on the radio sounds the same, though I suppose it's like that everywhere. I just like playing to audiences, and have spirituality come out and be expressed.
Sony Starts Up the Next Dan Brown Movie
Well, like I said, I'm done posting about The Da Vinci Dud.
But Peter Chattaway has just caught wind of a whole new pile of poo: Sony is starting the engines on their next Dan Brown movie -- Angels and Demons.
It's also worth reading Chattaway's discovery of an applicable G.K. Chesterton quote, and Amy Wellborn's recent parade of home-run posts. So if you want to read the blogs of folks who haven't tired of writing about this, there you go.
Frank Rich on Gullible Christians Getting Duped
A rather arresting commentary from the notorious Frank "I Still Hate The Passion of the Christ" Rich.
The sad thing is that this time, he right about a lot of things.
Problem is, it's on NYTimes Select, so you may not be able to read it.
Here's a snippet:
The Machiavellian mission for the hit-deprived Sony studio was to co-opt conservative religious critics who might depress turnout for a $125-million-plus thriller portraying the Roman Catholic Church as a fraud. To this end, as The New Yorker reported, Sony hired a bevy of P.R. consultants, including a faith-based flack whose Christian Rolodex previously helped sell such inspirational testaments to Hollywood spirituality as "Bruce Almighty" and "Christmas With the Kranks."
Among Sony's ingenious strategies was an elaborate Web site, The Da Vinci Dialogue, which gave many of the movie's prominent critics a platform to vent on the studio's dime. Thus was "The Da Vinci Code" repositioned as a "teaching moment" for Christian evangelists — a bit of hype "completely concocted by the Sony Pictures marketing machine," as Barbara Nicolosi, a former nun and current Hollywood screenwriter, explained to The Times. The more "students" who could be roped into this teaching moment, of course, the bigger the gross.
Ms. Nicolosi remains a vociferous opponent of the film. On her blog she chastises Sony's heavenly P.R. helpers for coaxing "legions of well-meaning Christians into subsidizing a movie that makes their own Savior out to be a sham." But you do have to admire the studio's chutzpah, if the word may be used in this context. It rivals Tom Sawyer's bamboozling of his friends into painting that fence. The Sony scheme also echoes much of the past decade's Washington playbook. Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of "faith" are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.
Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into ostensibly "anti-gambling" letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino clients by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal exploitation of "faith" voters by Washington operatives, it's all too typical. This history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed.
Anybody Who Ever Watched "Siskel and Ebert" Needs to See This
If you thought Siskel and Ebert were good at fighting about movies, wait until you see what happened off-camera.
The best music site on the Web is going to get even better.
Andy Whitman is going to work for All-Music Guide.
Oh. my. stars.
Thom Jurek, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, and Andy Whitman... three of my favorite music critics all in the same place. Fantastic.
Specials: Kaurismäki. Ceylan. Rohmer. And X-Men.
GreenCine Daily has all of the Cannes links you could hope for, and some very interesting, if somewhat disappointing, reports.
DIM LIGHT
I loved Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without a Past. But according to reviews posted at GreenCine, Kaurismäki's new film Lights in the Dusk isn't as easy to love.
CEYLAN RETURNS
I'm also very surprised to read the disappointed reviews over Ikilmer (Climates), the latest feature by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His last film, Distant, which I reviewed for The Other Journal, showed him to be one of the potential inheritors of the kind of vision that blessed Tarkovsky. Perhaps it's one of those "when you see it the second time" movies. Or perhaps it's just a step on the way to another masterpiece. Either way, I'm still anxious to see it.
ROHMER IN A BOX
Six short films by Eric Rohmer are coming to the Criterion Collection in a boxed set. Very cool. I've enjoyed every experience I've had with Rohmer, but I've never devoted enough attention to him. (The only film of his that I've reviewed is The Lady and the Duke.) Hopefully someday I'll get around to revisiting and writing about his greatest films like Claire's Knee and My Night at Maud's. But for now, Tim Lucas is writing about Rohmer, so the rest of the world can't say nobody told them.
X-MEN "DOWNGRADED"
Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells calls Brett Ratner's X-Men movie the "coarsening of a action franchise that had more than a touch of class -- wit, smarts, well-sculpted characters -- when Bryan Singer was directing. But of course, everyone knew this was in the cards when Rattner was hired, and if you accept the downgrade as the way of the corrupted world it's not that bad to sit through." And at Ain't It Cool News, Moriarty's prayers are answered -- according to him, the movie doesn't suck.
Last post on "Da Vinci Code": a review by Steven D. Greydanus
Okay, to wrap up the week of "Da Vinci Code" reviews, here's Steven D. Greydanus:
Some Christians have optimistically hoped that The Da Vinci Code might provide a potential opportunity for dialogue and discussion about Jesus with people who might not otherwise be open to such discussions. Yet if anything the film seems calibrated precisely to inoculate viewers against any such discussion — to leave viewers with a skeptical agnosticism about efforts to set the record straight is all part of the conspiracy, “what they want you to think” (or “we can’t be sure”).
The Da Vinci Code throws so much mud around that at least some of it is likely to stick in viewers’ minds. Was Constantine really a lifelong pagan who invented the doctrine of the deity of Christ and compiled the Bible as we know it? Did the Church really declare Mary Magdalene to be a prostitute in 591? Was Sir Isaac Newton really persecuted over his theories of gravitation, the way we all “know” Galileo was for his heliocentrism (or not)?
How many viewers will have any idea about all these questions? There are so many specifics, so much information, surely some of it has to be true, or is likely be true, or could be true. Or at least, “we can’t be sure.”
...
Is it possible to put all this aside and just enjoy the story as a thriller, an enjoyable yarn? I honestly have no idea how people can take that approach.
Catholic writer Mark Shea tells an anecdote about a college bull session among students at Central Washington University over The Da Vinci Code. “Even if it’s just fiction,” a student opined, “it’s still interesting to think about.”
To which another student replied: “Your mother’s a whore.” And then, to the first student’s stunned incredulity, he added, “And even if that’s just fiction, it’s still interesting to think about.”
I love it when one of my favorite writers quotes another of my favorite writers.
And now, on to much, much better things.
How can we be so sure that these new "gospels" aren't true?
Read Jesus Out of Focus, if you want a concise, focused reply to the surge of new theories driving The Da Vinci Code and The Gospel of Judas.
Here's an excerpt...
Of course, to evaluate these claims we must determine the value of these apocryphal Gospels. Do they represent legitimate voices suppressed in antiquity? In the last five years, this debate has intensified. Some scholars argue that the canonical boundary that separates our Scriptures from the apocrypha should come down. Others argue that Gospels such as Thomas should have equal weight with Matthew. Still others believe that notions such as "orthodoxy" and "canon" are simply arbitrary conventions of the winners.
But they fail to mention that while most of the recently discovered Gospels will claim to come from an apostle (such as Mary or Peter), virtually every scholar knows these claims are fictitious. Moreover, these Gospels are not easily dated. When someone claims that, say, the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas is "late first century," we are merely hearing conjecture.
Furthermore, the early church was well aware of these writings and understood that they offered a view of Christian faith utterly different than the genuine apostolic Gospels. Christians of the time did not see these Gospels as rivals. They simply saw them as wrong in every respect: They presented an understanding of creation, humanity, Jesus, and salvation that significantly departed from what Christians had believed from the very beginning.
Also well worth reading: N.T. Wright Debunks The Da Vinci Code, right here, at Seattle Pacific University.
Mike Johnson prepares "The Tale of Despereaux"
One of my favorite childrens' stories... the kind that's so good, adults should be reading it... Read more
Roger Ebert, Rolling Stone, Peter Chattaway open fire on "Da Vinci"
It's National "How Ridiculous is The Da Vinci Code" Day, it seems.
SECOND UPDATE:
David Poland thinks that the bad reviews have been too kind!
* * * * *
UPDATE:
A.N. Wilson and Christopher Tookey in The Telegraph, linked by Amy Welborn:
* * * * *
Peter T. Chattaway: The press kit for the movie is contradicting both the book and the film on historical matters.
Peter Travers (Rolling Stone):
There's no code to decipher. Da Vinci is a dud -- a dreary, droning, dull-witted adaptation of Dan Brown's religioso detective story that sold 50 million copies worldwide. Conservative elements in the Catholic Church are all worked up over a plot that questions Christ's divinity and posits a Vatican conspiracy to cover up Jesus Christ's alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene and to drive all things feminine from the church. Here's the sure way to quiet the protesters: Have them see the movie. They will fall into a stupor in minutes.
I know it bored me breathless.
And then he says:
As the movie gets swallowed up in its own stilted verbosity, I kept thinking that it would work better as one of those audiobooks. Just don't listen to it while driving. You might get drowsy and hit a tree.
And then,
Dan Brown's novel is utterly preposterous; Ron Howard's movie is preposterously entertaining. Both contain accusations against the Catholic Church and its order of Opus Dei that would be scandalous if anyone of sound mind could possibly entertain them. I know there are people who believe Brown's fantasies about the Holy Grail, the descendants of Jesus, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei and the true story of Mary Magdalene. This has the advantage of distracting them from the theory that the Pentagon was not hit by an airplane.
Watch this space: More to come!