Escaping the Creative Ghetto

My friend, Jake, blogged about this article. It's pretty great. Here's a quote that I liked alot:

Entertainment is best when it poses compelling questions, when it is not a lesson for the viewer but a dialogue with the viewer. A movie can show the ramifications of a worldview, but it gets in real trouble when it starts articulating worldviews. Christians will never have real success in Hollywood until we accept that simply delivering the Truth will not help the audience. We must allow the audience to wrestle with the Truth. We need to have the simple trust of the sower who casts seeds out on the ground and then moves on, believing that somebody else will come along to till, weed, and harvest.

Why is it that people of faith have so little faith in people?

This whole article could also be talking about music and the music industry. I realize it's still difficult for some people to grasp, but I'm encouraged that some one else is talking about it. Not to mention that this article is in Christianity Today. Hopefully, this will help CT's readers to better thinking.

"You're Beautiful" but this song still sucks!

"You're Beautiful
You're Beautiful
You're Beautiful, it's true.
I saw your face, in a crowded place
And I don't know what to do;
Cuz I'll never be with you." -James Blunt

These are the profound lyrics of the modern singer/songwriter. (GAG!!!)

I'm sorry, there has got to be SERIOUS payola going on somewhere for this song to be played on the radio so much. The guy looks like a serial killer, his voice is annoying, the melody to this song is amazing in its stupidity only because it is trumped in it's stupidity by those horrid lyrics.

Come on, those lyrics sound like something a sensitive 6th grade boy would write in his first attempts to write a song/poem and realized he could rhyme "face" and "place". (no offense to sensitive 6th grade boys)

The real question is "why this guy"? There are hundreds of great singer/songwriters who have put out their first records this past year and there have got to be artists/songs that are better than this idiot. I mean, I can name half a dozen singer/songwriters with brand new records that make this guy sound like the no-talent loser he is. (off the top of my head, I'm thinking that rhett miller and glenn phillps and bruce springsteen have all put out new solo albums recently, how come none of them are getting played once an hour?)

Holly's radio woke me up this morning and this dumb-ass song was playing. I may need to take some kind of anger management class for when I hear hear it.

powerplay

Today, I ended up going to a funeral. I debated with myself all morning on whether or not I should go, and ultimately decided that if I thought maybe I should, then I should.

So, I was rushing around to get ready, got stuck in traffic and construction and behind slow people all the way to the church, and running late.

Of course, when I got there, there was no place to park. So, after driving around for a little bit, I parked in a little parking area that's actually across the street from the church. The parking lot was actually for a little law firm that's right across the street from the church, but I'd seen two other cars do it while I was searching. They didn't have any signs posted saying "this parking lot for our customers only" or anything like that, and on top of everything else, there were plenty of open spaces in their lot.

Well, as soon as I parked and got out, a lady came charging out saying that I can't park there and that was going to have to tell those two other cars they can't park there either... Like I know who those cars belong to. right...

Keep in mind, i was already annoyed for being late. I couldn't help but tell the lady, "It's a funeral..." as I got back in my van and pulled it over and parked on the church's lawn.

Now, I don't know who that lady was. I don't know if she's like a receptionist or a legal assistant or one of the lawyers of the firm. I don't know if she decided to walk out into the parking lot on her own or if a boss told her to.

But, I so wanted to go in there after the funeral and say:

"Look...it's not the law. You don't have signs posted. There were still empty parking spots in the lot. Yes, it may have been within your rights to tell people to get off your parking lot. But, are your rights so significant that you couldn't have just a little bit of human compassion? Are your rules so important that you had to intrude upon people as they mourn the passing of a 6 year old boy?"

argh. I'm getting all fired up again just thinking about it.

Farewell to Fife, Furley: Don Knotts Dies - Yahoo! News

Well, I don't want to make this a habit. But, Don Knotts seems a part of my childhood, too. I was never really an Andy Griffith Show fan, but I watched many an episode of Three's Company while rolling newspapers before setting off on my route. Mr. Furley cleaned ther Ropers' clocks.

I also remember seeing the Apple Dumpling Gang in the theatre with my family and I watch re-runs of Mr. Limpet and I think I still enjoy the Ghost and Mr. Chicken. I'm surprised that this article didn't mention the movie Knotts made with Tim Conway that I think was called Private Eyes.

Anyway...Thanks for everything, Mr. Knotts.

Another too good to pass up

My friend, Jake found this article and linked to it on his blog first. But, it's so good. In case there's anybody reading my blog that doesn't already read Jake's, you need to check this out.

Amazon.com: Mega Church: Networked Special Edition (PC Game): Computer & Video Games

Amazon.com: Mega Church: Networked Special Edition (PC Game): Computer & Video Games

This was too good not to add a link. Don't worry, it's just a gag...

step outside yourself

ChatterBoxGameShow.com :: View topic - Church steals XBOX 360 trademark to lure new members

This is kind of interesting. Somebody on this video game bulletin board got a postcard from a church parodying (sp?) the new Xbox ads to try to get people to come to their church.

Most of the resulting comments reflect how non-church people respond and react to these marketing attempts made by churches. Particularly take note of how much hostility is generated at just the sight of this postcard.

A couple other things I found interesting:
-One commentor pointed out the fact that if you turned your "life 360" would be turning your life right back around to where you started. Great marketing, guys!

-I found the blurb quoted from the web-site about the children's ministry particularly distateful and the reaction it received to be very appropriate. More and more, I am appalled at the blatant marketing of church. If it turns my stomach so much, and I am willing to believe that the people putting out this crap are at least sincere in their attempts, I can't imagine how repellant it must be to the potential "consumer".

Personally, I just don't want anything to do with church or Christianity presented like this. Thank God the good news is not the Church or Christianity. How sad is it that the Church and/or Christianity have become such hindrances to the gospel?

east win

Not too terribly long ago, Holly and my weekends consisted of regular cycle: -pack up the car-drive somewhere-spend the
night in a host home-get up sunday and sing in a sunday
morning service-eat good, midwest women's cooking and try to
catch a nap on sunday afternoon in said host bed-go back to
church and offer a "sharing time" of my songs for about an
hour for anybody who'd show up and listen- hopefully sell
some CDs and then get to partake in a good ole' "dessert
social"- pack up the van and drive home.

It was a good life. We saw lots of friends and made many new friends out in those churches across the midwest. I know
that southern women are supposed to be the best cooks, but
I'll tell you that some of those midwest church potluck
dinners couldn't be beat. And at the same time, I got to
play my songs for listening, appreciative audiences on a
regular basis.

At the time, the hardest part or true "work" of that
lifestyle was booking the gigs. During the week, I spent
hours on the phone contacting people, sending out promo
materials and building relationships with ministers and music ministers to the point where they would trust me with sharing my songs with their congregations.

Probably 95% of the time, these contacts were not truly cold
calls. I knew lots of people from bible college and we'd
meet other people at camps or conventions or would get
referrals from other ministers. This just helped in building the relationship and letting these people know that I wasn't a cook and and I wasn't a crook and that they could trust me
with my "sharing time".

I tried "cold calling" regularly, and it proved the most
difficult. As I mentioned, since I don't have name that
people recognize from magazines or from christian radio, it
really was a matter of letting the music minister get to know me enough to trust that I had something relevant to share
with their people. It always struck me as odd that I had a
terrible time crossing "denominational lines" and that most
wouldn't even consider me coming a singing if I couldn't
prove to them I was of the correct flavor. However, if that
same person heard somebody on the radio, suddenly that wasn't such a big deal. Anyway...

East Win was one of those rare instances where I found the
church in some directory, called and talked to the music
minister, sent him a CD, and worked it out to go share a
concert the first time. Since then, it's up for debate how
many times we've been back; somewhere between 3 and 5 times.

This church has been so encouraging to Holly and me from the
very beginning. For some reason, my songs and little stories of where they came from just seemed to click.

Two weekends ago, we went back to East Win. It's a pretty
big church. I can't ever imagine that people will actually
remember us and remember the last time we were there, and yet people were actually excited that we cam back! I don't know
how many times people came to our CD table and pointed out
all the CDs they already owned and asked "what's new?"

In the past, my songs fit into the "christian music"
description pretty easily. Now, Gypsy Heart is the newest CD and I had, and I'm the first to point out that these songs
were not designed to spoon-feed anybody my ideas of
Christianity and/or belief to anybody else. I was a little
apprehensive about how this batch of songs might be received
by this faithful audience.

Of course, I'm an idiot for not giving them enough credit.
Even on an especially bad-weather weekend and prepratory
warnings from the Music Minister about how much difficulty he has getting people to come out for concerts, I felt we had a
pretty decent crowd. Not only were they an attentive and
interactive audience, they really seemed to "get" where these songs came from and seemed to accept the fact that their
encouragement and support was encouragement and support for
me to taking these songs outside of those walls.

Obviously, it was nice to get a decent paycheck for my
music/concert/services, and it was also nice to move a few
CDs into the hands of appreciative fans. But more than that,
I hope that East Win knows that how much more their support
and encouragement meant to me.

FontFace.com - Pass the Pigs

FontFace.com - Pass the Pigs

Go ahead, try your luck. My high score is 116. Beat that!

Eugene Peterson on U2 and prophets

U2 news article - from @U2

This is an interview with Eugene Peterson, the guy who wrote the popular new paraphrase, The Message. For years, while leading worship at camps or dealing with friends from college who are now in music ministries or youth ministries, a conversation might come up that goes something like this:
me: "dude, have you heard the new U2 CD? It's is awesome!"
Youth Minister: "No, I haven't heard it. I didn't think they were Christians anymore. Have you heard the new 3rd Day? Now that's a great Christian Rock Band!"
me in my head: "did you really just question U2 and then compare them to 3rd day?"
And then we'd talk about something else...

Anyway, I particularly like the section of this interview where Peterson is talking about prophets and asking whether or not U2 is "christian" is really asking the wrong question.

I'd vote for Bono

BONO'S REMARKS TO THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST - DATA, Debt AIDS Trade Africa

CBS | Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

CBS | Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

I've never really watched the Late Late Show. My routine is usually to watch Seinfeld at 11:30 (when LLS is coming on) and go to bed. However, of course I surf during the commercials, and I've caught bits and pieces and thought Craig Freguson was pretty funny. (Way better than Craig Kilborn, I HATED that guy. sorry, bribrow)

Anyway, I was surfing through the very first commercial break and landing on LLS and saw a really amazing, beautiful thing tonight.

Apparently, Craig's father has just died. Instead of his regular monologue, Craig took the whole segment to talk about memories of his dad. It was kind of awkward at first, because I don't think the audience could tell if this was going to have punchlines (it had a few little ones) or if he was actually being serious. Slowly, it became obvious, that he was serious and that he wanted to tell people about his father, who he obviously loved very much.

If you saw it, you know what i'm talking about. If you didn't, i can't explain it. It was very brave, authentic and beautiful. It will probably always surprise me when one can find moments of such profound grace on television.

Well done, Craig. I'm sorry for your loss. If only more people in the world could know the blessing of a father that loves them. I'm thankful that I did.

...

wow. I don't know why it is the most difficult to blog when I have the most to say.

Blogging is so odd. I realize this and always have. Remember when you were little and could get a diary with an actual lock on it? Then you could keep the key for yourself and nobody could read your secret hopes/dreams/fears.

The whole point of blogging blows that away. The most interesting blogs take those private hopes/dreams/fears and publishes them so that ANYBODY can read/comment/judge.

I wish that I could say that my blog was an outlet for me to share who I really am and what I really think. It's not. In fact, the thoughts/worries/fears/hopes/dreams I struggle with the most have the least chance of being mentioned in a blog.

What pisses me off the most is that by letting myself be hindered in what I write on here, I feel like a certain some-one-who-shall-not-be-named, wins. I wanted this to be an outlet for my thoughts; a way for others to get to know me. Certain-some-one showed me that there are people out there that I don't want to know or be known by at all.

I hope he's pleased with his accomplishment.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!!

I know I've been bad about blogging for the last couple of weeks. Things have been pretty hectic around the shacklett home. To find out what's new with momma & babyshack, zip on over to baby-shack.blogspot.com

Holly's been much better at updating then I have. Lots of things things going on that aren't really blog worthy. Will try to start posting more very soon.

goodbye, Mr. Miyagi

It's always strange to me when I hear about a celebrity that has passed away that I feel overly sad that they're gone. I never knew Pat Morita, I have no idea if he was a good person or a selfish jerk. But, I liked Mr. Miyagi, and I hope that Pat Morita had some of the characteristics of the character he portrayed.

There are many pithy words of wisdom that could be quoted, but the one that I've always remembered comes from the worst of the Karate Kid movies, ("The Next Karate Kid", with Hilary Swank playing the lead. Believe me when I tell you the movie sucked.)

No matter how bad the movie was, Mr. Miyagi came through with a profound little nugget that we should all ponder:

"Never trust a holy man who doesn't dance."

Amen. Rest in peace, Pat.

wal-mart

I know there are a lot of things that I should hate about wal-mart, (well on their way to being the ONLY store which would be the ultimate monopoly, putting all the mom & pop stores out of business, capitalism run amuck, yada yada), but really two things in particular come to mind that I truly despise about wal-mart.

1) This year, they got out the Christmas stuff IN AUGUST!!!! This is annoying like everything about the commercialization of Christmas is annoying, so...whatever...

2) (I really hate this one) Why oh why do I have to listen to constant, LOUD, commercials for wal-mart while I'm in the store? I'm thinkin': I'm already at Wal-mart. I'm shopping here. Do you really need to yell at me the whole time I'm here to tell me to shop here more? What I think is particularly vulgar are these little speakers hanging all the way from the ceiling, but hanging really low over the toy aisles. These little speakers are BLASTING commercials into the kids heads the whole time they're looking at the toys.

Does anybody else see how awful this is? How can this even be legal? How come nobody has thought to think it may not be moral?

Substitute 5th Grade Teacher

Ok, many have asked. Sorry that it's taken me all week.

Of course, I had trouble sleeping the night before and I ended up getting up early, getting ready, and getting to the school even before the secretary. Somebody in the office told me how to get to the room so I went on down there just to try to get my bearings.

When I got to the room, low and behold, the teacher, Mrs. D, was there making sure that all her plans were ready for me. So, she went over everything with me. She was very nice and very encouraging and really helped put me at ease.

I won't give a play by play of the day, but I'll just say it went OK. I was disappointed with the behavior of the students for the most part. They were 5th graders and just intent on trying to get away with stuff all day. For example: The first thing a student said to me all day was: "Oh yea, we have a sub today. The teacher told us that you were supposed to give us an extra recess today..." Yea, right.

So, between my lack of experience, their age, the fact that it was a beautiful friday, made it difficult to keep their attention and keep them on task.

One of the biggest frustrations was the fact that there were reading blocks and math blocks which meant that there were different groups of kids in the room. This happened after we'd only been in there for like 30 minutes. Of course getting kids' named learned in that amount of time was impossible, but after 30 minutes, I couldn't even tell which kids were "homeroom" kids and which were block kids. Between these blocks, some kids going to different "resource" work and testing, I never knew if all the kids who were supposed to be in the class were there or not.

I did manage to make one girl cry for not letting her go to the bathroom just 30 minutes after they were all supposed to have a bathroom break. Which brings up of the the two big things I learned: 1) find out the teacher's bathroom policy 2) find out what should be done with all the papers/work they work on that day. I just had them hand almost everything in.

All in all, it wasn't so bad that I'm not ready to do it again. In fact, now that I've done it once, I'm not nearly as terrified and am wanting to try it some more. However, it was not good enough that I'm rushing to go back to that or any other 5th grade classroom very soon.

Archaeologists Unveil Ancient Church Site - Yahoo! News

This seems interesting to me.

busy week

This week is just crazy. wedding on saturday, Halloween, piano moving, trying to finish keyboard parts on a record we're trying to finish at the studio, more piano moving, filling in for T-rev last night at ConC, going to the OMA's tonight to schmooze for the studio, but not before a quick voice over session right before, big piano moving day tomorrow to free up Friday so I can go substitute teach for 5th graders.

yes, you read that right. I'm nervous.

Music industry still singing the blues - Yahoo! News

Two headlines popped up on my "yahoo! news" this morning. I linked the first above.

The headline right below it?

"Ashlee [Simpson]:'I Am' No. 1" (the article is about Simpson's new CD being #1 in Billboard sales right now.)

Is it so hard to see the correlation? Nobody wants to buy the perfectly packaged crap [a la Simpson] the music industry has been feeding consumers.

This may seem backwards, I mean her CD is number 1. But, the point is that music sales are way down, and even if her sales are number 1, they're still pitifully low especially considering how much money her label put up to market her. (my guess would be $2 million or more, but that's just a guess)

This may only seem relevant to me, but you can go back to whatever you were doing, now.