ReformedAnglican
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Breaking the Mold
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Tree of Life- A "Sort of" Emperor Has No Clothes Piece of trash
Sunday, July 17, 2011
James Vincent McMorrow
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Introducing the Civil Wars
Sunday, February 06, 2011
The Best Superbowl Ads for 2011
Super bowl ads seem to always have elements of humor, sensuality, male & female stereotyping and lots of incredible story telling. Some company’s commercials aren’t worth commenting on and others seem to be able to capture the human story year after year.
This year, we had the usual funny and manly categories telling great stories about what it means to be human. Two growing categories are Epic commercials and commercials that take us through a timeline, or emphasize history.
Standouts for me were VW’s Dark Vader commercial, Coca Cola’s Border Crossing and Chrysler’s very moving Eminem
FUNNY
Carmax I Feel Like
There was a lot of irony in this commercial which always gives us this three second delay in humor… “I feel like a kid in a candy shop”… all the way around until you hear, “I feel like a customer in carmax.”
Doritos House Sitting
Doritos pushes the envelope and often uses shock humor and surprise to make us love their stories. In this ad we see Doritos having resurrection power, “I missed you grandpa.”
Pepsi Shooting Cooler
Every Superbowl should have a “Revenge of the Nerds” storyline and this one even made fun of preppy people.
Three ads felt Epic, like they were not just telling earthly stories, but ones were the whole universe was involved. I loved these ads.
MAN TARGET
The following commercials all seemed to have men as their target audience.
Careerbuildercom Chimps
Bridgestone Reply All
Budweiser Tiny Dancer
Bridgestone Beaver
Volkswagon Black Beetle
Chevy Lassie Truck
I really like the way so many technologically driven corporations are tapping into the fact that even though their industry depends on change and progression, they are now old companies that have histories that span generations and tell the stories that help us understand who we are and where we came from.
Chevy Volt
Hundai Old School
See Video HERE
Carmax Service Station
***Chrysler Eminem
Mercedes Diddy
NOT REALLY WORTH MENTIONING
The Soooooo Creepy Doritos Finger Licking Commercial
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Josh Garrels Featured on The Bible Illustrated
Josh Garrels New Album Coming Spring 2011
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Ten Most Significant Cultural Trends of the Last Decade
Originally printed in Qideas
Ten years is a very short time. As I reflect on the world in 2011 compared to the world in 2001, I’m less struck by how much has changed than by how much is the same. Terror, war, new technology, economic boom and bust, surprising political triumphs followed by sudden changes of fortune—yup, sounds like the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and 1960s to me. It’s almost axiomatic that any change big enough to shape an entire nation or society happens in long waves spanning generations, not a mere ten years.
Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one sense, walking, riding a horse, driving a car, and traveling by plane are simply variations on the millennia-old human theme of mobility, tracing back literally to the earliest signs of our restless race. But the difference between five miles an hour and 500 miles an hour is not just a quantitative matter of speed, but a qualitative change in the horizons of possibility.
Here are ten significant trends in North American culture that accelerated dramatically in the 2000s—almost always for better and for worse at the same time.
One | Connection
By far the most significant acceleration was in our technologies of connection. In June 2000, 97 million mobile phone subscribers existed in the United States; in June 2010, the number rose to 293 million. Urban and suburban Americans swim in a sea of WiFi (sitting in my living room on a quiet side street I can see 8 wireless networks)—and in the middle of Nebraska, you can get online at McDonald’s.
What did not take off in the 2000s was “virtual reality”—a world constructed entirely of disembodied bits, populated by avatars and existing only in the realm of the ideal. As the 2000s ended, the virtual-reality world Second Life was on virtual life support.
Instead, we used technology to reinforce our embodied relationships. Facebook was the highest trafficked website in 2010 (US subscribers in 2000: zero; in 2010: 116 million). Look at your Facebook friends—unless you are a celebrity, the vast majority of them are people you have met in the flesh. Same with the recents on your cell phone. Rather than replacing embodied connection, our devices supplemented and extended it, an electromagnetic nervous system to match the physical infrastructure of transport built in the twentieth century.
Two | Place
Therefore, oddly enough after a decade of wild growth in invisible telecommunications, place mattered more in 2010 than it did in 2000. Travel and transport remained basically flat throughout the decade. Total vehicle miles driven, while an impressive 3 billion miles in 2010, were only up from 2.7 billion miles in 2000, a period during which the population increased from 288 to 318 million—meaning the average American drove less in 2010 than in 2000. At 9:45 tomorrow morning there will be roughly 4,500 commercial flights in the air, just as there were on 9:45 the morning of 11 September 2001—no change despite a decade of economic and population growth. And mobility, the hallmark of twentieth-century United States culture, declined throughout the decade and reached a post-war low in 2010, with less than 10% of American households changing their address.
At the Q gathering in 2010, urbanologist Richard Florida observed that young adults meeting one another no longer ask, “What do you do?” They ask, “Where do you live?” More and more people will change careers in order to stay in a place—connected to family, friends, and local culture—than will change place to stay in a career. The 20th-century American dream was to move out and move up; the 21st-century dream seems to be to put down deeper roots. This quest for local, embodied, physical presence may well be driven by the omnipresence of the virtual and a dawning awareness of the thinness of disembodied life.
Three | Cities
Cities, the places where both connection and local presence can thrive simultaneously, had an extraordinary renaissance in the 2000s. The revival of American cities was underway already in 2000, but it reached its full flowering by 2010. Of course not every single American city flourished in the last decade, but those of us old enough to remember New York, Chicago, Atlanta, or Houston circa 1990—not to mention Portland, Columbus, or Phoenix—can only be astonished at the way economically fading and often crime-ridden city centers revived as centers of commerce and creativity.
The challenges often associated with urban life, meanwhile, began a movement to the suburbs that may well accelerate in the 2010s. The frontiers of justice, mercy, compassion, and reconciliation are now in the suburbs—places where connections are harder to sustain and local culture is thinner and less appealing than the cities. Some suburban environments will reinvent themselves, but multi-generational poverty, crime, and gangs that provide a substitute social network where others have failed are already as common in Westchester County as in the Bronx, in the San Fernando Valley as in Compton. The really radical and difficult place to raise a family by 2020 will be . . . the suburbs.
[See Tim Keller's Q talk on "Grace and the City" and Joel Kotkin's on "The Future of the Suburbs."]
Four | The End of the Majority
Everywhere in the 2000s, cultural majorities collapsed. Predominantly black neighborhoods became half Hispanic. White rural communities saw dramatic immigration from Asia and Latin America. City centers became internationalized. Mercados and Asian food markets sprung up in suburbia and in exurbia (drive down a thoroughfare well beyond the 285 beltway in Atlanta, and you will see shop signs in a dozen different languages). White Americans were still a bare majority of the population by the end of the decade, but in delivery rooms they were already only a plurality (the largest of many minorities).
We are all minorities now. Evangelical Christians are a minority, as are liberal Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists. The establishment of Will Herberg’s 1955 book Protestant—Catholic—Jew is now a minority. Barack Obama is a minority, but so is Sarah Palin. Republicans are a minority—so are Democrats, and so are independents.
There may never have been a society in history that was as culturally, religiously, and politically diverse as the United States is today—except perhaps the Roman Empire. There are few models for how such a diverse community can sustain itself, and plenty of models for failure. Perhaps the most hopeful model is a community that arose at the edges of that Empire and eventually spread to its heart, among whom there was neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.
Five | Polarity
We used the technologies of connection and the commitment to place to sort ourselves into more and more tightly homogenous subcultures, refuges both virtual and real from the heterogeneity of our society. Republicans became more Republican; Democrats became more Democratic. Salon lost ground to the Huffington Post—CNN lost ground to Fox News. A president elected on the premise of unity presided over two years of ever-sharper rhetoric of division and seemed unable to change the game. Hipsters got more extremely hip. The Reformed became truly Reformed.
It was not at all clear, as polarization accelerated, that anyone could convince any large number of Americans that they had anything crucial in common.
Six | The Self Shot
When movie directors in the 2030s are trying to convey in a single glance that their scene is set in the 2000s, they will use the self shot—the self-portrait shot from a digital camera or cell phone held by one hand extended away from the subject. We look out at our own hand, perhaps squeezing another friend into the frame, composing our face in a smile or a laugh. We are shooting ourselves.
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The visual presentation of the self accelerated in the 2000s. Previous generations saw themselves most often in mirrors. But mirrors do not show us what others see—they show us a mirror image with right and left reversed. The difference is subtle but real, and symbolic of a deeper reality. Now most 20-year-olds have seen thousands of images of themselves as others see them. In the 2000s we learned to shape and groom our image for public consumption. Body modification—augmentation, reduction, smoothing, straightening, whitening, tanning, not to mention tattooing—became normative. The closing years of the decade gave us the word “manscaping.” Enough said.
Seven | Pornography
Underneath it all was porn. Pornography is as old as visual art, but in the 2000s it was more ubiquitous than it had been since the ancient Greeks erected herms at every crossroads. Superimposed on every image of our own bodies, and the bodies of our friends and lovers, were the idealized bodies of pornography and its close cousin, advertising and popular culture, which differ from porn only in not consummating the voyeuristic impulses they arouse.
And yet as omnipresent as porn was, it remained underground—a subject of shame even among the most secular and urbane. Our culture seemed to draw back from the brink at the same time as it plunged into the abyss. The bestselling memoir was titled Eat, Pray, Love, not, Eat, Pray, F@#k. No one really wanted the culture of porn to become a runaway train. But neither was anyone sure how to stop it.
Eight | Informality
Men untucked their shirts. Billionaires wore jeans. The most powerful CEO in America was universally known as “Steve.” Indeed, informality was now a sign of privilege—only low-status workers wore uniforms. And the ubiquity of the camera meant that everyone—including celebrities, politicians, business leaders, people who in past decades would have been insulated by privilege—was caught off guard, meaning that status now accrued to those who could be most artfully informal, rather than those who could protect themselves from view.
Most institutions, with layers of tradition and deference accumulated over years, struggled to stay relevant to an informal culture. Tie-wearing network news anchors were eclipsed by cable-channel comedians with open collars. Journalistic codes of integrity and objectivity looked simply foolish next to the raw data of The Smoking Gun and Wikileaks. Marriage, with its vows and formal attire, became for many young people a distant aspiration far on the horizon, while cohabitation became the accepted gateway to adult relationships. A crippling blow was dealt to the cultural legitimacy of the oldest institution of all, the Roman Catholic Church, not by sexual abuse per se (almost all the cases reported had happened at least a decade earlier) but by the realization of how its hierarchy had covered up the scandal. The most informal and anti-institutional demographic cohort in a century, Generation X, moved uneasily and unsteadily into adulthood—symbolized neatly by its most celebrated religious movement, the emerging church, refusing to institutionalize at all and naming the leader of its most prominent organization a “coordinator.”
Nine | Liquidity
Wealth was ever more disconnected from real assets. Countries that pumped one particular liquid from the ground acquired vast resources of sovereign wealth that went looking for high returns. The most storied and prominent financial firm, Goldman Sachs, ended its century-long system of limited partnership and become a publicly traded company. Hedge funds made billions by trading not shares, but shares of bets on the future price of shares (and derivatives far more exotic). Your mortgage, once the most boring and staid of financial instruments, was sliced and diced into tranches of risk.
Money sloshed around the globe like quicksilver (the title of Neal Stephenson’s epic 2003 novel about the earliest moments of modernity). It sloshed beyond the borders of nations, of national regulators and politicians, quickly breaching the levees of international financial standards like Basel 1 (replaced by Basel 2, soon to be replaced by the soon-to-be-swamped Basel 3). Anyone unwilling to swim in the sea of liquidity drowned (or, as one Wall Street executive said, as long as the music was playing you had to keep dancing). As money sloshed, prices of oil, food, housing, and labor spiked, then collapsed, then threatened to spike again. Those who could trade on volatility often made untold fortunes; those actually needing to buy and sell real goods often suffered.
Ten | Complexity
There was a bull market in oversimplification, and no shortage of attempts to find someone to blame or, more hopefully, some way to make a difference. At the close of the decade some Christians were especially excited about the potential for cultural elites to change the world—just at the moment when elites everywhere were waking up to how little they could do to change anything at all. If there ever had been reliable levers of power—the Federal Funds Rate, Fashion Week, the New York Times bestseller list, the Nobel Peace Prize—they no longer carried much leverage in a world of countless connections, devolved into countless particular locations and conurbations, filled with fractious and fissiparous minorities, and ceaseless self-preoccupied informality. It was not a good time, to say the least, to be a central planner.
Yet all this complexity also contained the seed of certain kinds of promise. The human brain, after all, is also complex, interconnected, embodied, improvisational, constantly being rewired—simply put, the most complex system known in our universe. The culture of North America in the 2000s took several not inconsiderable steps toward having those same qualities. Not without risks, not without loss, and with every expectation of grave difficulty ahead. And yet in the most surprising places what was emerging could be called intelligence. Of course, intelligence needs to be married to wisdom—and in surveying the history of that most elusive of all cultural goods, we can only conclude that the 2000s left us neither worse nor better off than human beings have ever been.
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In your opinion, did Andy miss something? What would be on your list?
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Reformed Anglican Top 10 Films of 2010
It was a tough year for films. However, those that were worthy of praise as films that have depth, tell a compelling story, and capture the culture rose up out of the garbage heap of movies that obsessed about horror, crack-addicted-action-filming, and stupidity. Having said that, most of the great films of 2010 were very dark. From the moving post apocalyptic dystopian plot in The Book of Eli to the amazing meth lab drama of the Ozark mountains in Winter's Bone, the great films this year were very gloomy. Even the animated wonder of Despicable Me and Toy Story 3 featured orphans, an evil villan as anti-hero, a jaded kid who has forgotten his childhood and an evil fluffy teddy bear that smelled like strawberries.
1. Winter’s Bone
2. Despicable Me
3. The Book of Eli
4. The Fighter
5. Exit Through the Gift Shop
6. The Ghost Writer
7. Toy Story 3
8. Inception
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. The Social Network
Monday, January 03, 2011
Reformed Anglican Top 10 Songs of 2010
Here is my very subjective top ten list for best songs of 2010. These are the songs from 2010 that either consistently ended up on my itunes playlist or that I really enjoyed hearing on the radio throughout the year. Since I like, rock, indie, folk, alternative and whatever is excellent in music, the list is a bit eclectic.
1. The Black Keys (Brothers) Tighten Up
It’s Rock N’ Roll. Guitar and drums and that’s it. Like The White Stripes or early Zepplin, The album is superb and this song seemed to always be playing on the local radio station in Pittsburgh.
2. Colonizing the Cosmos (Colonizing the Cosmos) Dear Citizens
When front man Josh Moyer sent me the pre-release of their debut album I listened to the whole thing three times in a row and then told my wife, “This is epic.” There are few albums today written in a way that tell a story throughout. Fewer still where ten of the 15 tracks on the album are amazing, catchy, and enduring as songs that will show up on your play list over and over and over again.
3. Regina Spektar (Live in London) Laughing With
This Russian Jewish genious immigrated to the US at 9 and has risen to be an amazing voice is music. Laughing With is a stunningly beautiful song voiced by a woman who believes in the God she is talking about.
4. The Avette Brothers (Live, Volume 3) I and You and Love
I and You and Love came out in 2009 and I have been listening to that whole album ever since. The live album has a great version of I and You and Love as well as a deep well of Avette excellence.
5. Mumford & Sons (Sigh No More) The Cave
Everytime I hear Mumford and Sons I just stop what I am doing and listen. This band creates very traditional sounds combined with all of the benefits of the technology of the new millennium.
6. Vampire Weekend (Contra) Giving Up The Gun
There are so many great bands out now. Vampire weekend is sophisticated, deep, hip, and playful all at the same time. Their songs get stuck in your head.
7. Kt Tunsall (Tiger Suit) Uummannaq Song
This Scottish singer-song writer has energy reminiscent of Sinead O Connor. The Tiger Suit album is good but this song and Fade Like a Shadow stand out on the album.
8. Pomplamoose (Covering Lady Gaga) Telephone
Jack and Natalie sent out all these youtube releases covering famous songs. I most cases, I liked the covers better than the originals. In the Spring of this year, they released this Lady Gaga cover and now what seemed like an inane bit of pop drivel is full of life and vigor. I love Pomplamoose.
9. Kings of Leon (Come Around Sundown) Radioactive
Last summer I sat with a bunch of 40 year olds who were commiserating about how they don’t make good music anymore. Of course, since they only listen to music from the 80’s they were not able to pick up on the amazing music that is being made today. Kings of Leon make great music. It is raw, stright forward Rock N’ Roll.; arena rock that can hold up to anything out there. The Come Around Sundown Album proves it once again and radioactive is just one in a series from a great album.
10. Kid Rock (Born Free) Born Free
Yeah, Kid Rock. No, seriously. This “kid” from Michigan is not just rappin about bein a cowboy. The album sounds like Bob Seger meets Brice Springsteen in the trailer park. So, of course, I love it. Born Free is a great song.