Frosted Echoes

I never was one to buy a ton of records, but one of the reasons I have slacked off of my vinyl purchasing lately is that not everything I have been excited about has been released on that format. That may be a problem with a resolution, thanks to Bandcamp’s new vinyl service.

Today, we’re offering a first glimpse of an initiative from Bandcamp that aims to address these challenges. Our new vinyl pressing service streamlines the financing, production, and fulfillment of vinyl records. With no up-front investment, an artist or label can create a vinyl campaign and start taking orders almost immediately. Once they reach their minimum goal, we press their records and ship them to their fans.

For bands that can’t take the risk of pressing records without knowing the level of interest, this provides them a safe way to test the waters and give the fans what they want.

This is another reason I consider Bandcamp to be a tremendously valuable service and an innovator in a time of a lot of upheaval in the music industry.

(Of course, sold out prereleases are a completely separate problem.)

This is a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago. It never made it to this blog but it seems relevant as Christians head into Easter and celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

I’ve written favorably of The Faith Angle podcast before, and I continue to be impressed by the content on the show. In the fifth episode, guests Ross Douthat and Father James Martin argue the importance of adhering to traditional Catholic doctrine and when it’s imperative to set aside that doctrine in light of individual conscience and grace. Both are grounded in a strong theological tradition and both make strong points to support their views.

The primary doctrinal point of discussion is the indissolubility of marriage, which comes straight from Jesus’ teaching in the gospels. The question of application of the teaching comes into play when people are caught in a situation that finds them outside of the bounds of what is deemed acceptable by the church, sometimes through no fault or choice of their own. Co-host Kirsten Powers brings up the example of a friend whose husband cheated on her. After attempts to reconcile, the husband ended up leaving her friend for the other woman. Now outside of the Catholic Church’s rigid rules against divorce, the woman cannot receive the Eucharist.

Douthat, as the representative on the show for the more conservative viewpoint, sticks to the letter of the law in insisting that the woman should not receive the Eucharist because of the situation in which she has found herself. When listening to this judgement, it is important to remember that the Eucharist is one of the sacraments in both Catholic and Protestant churches. A sacrament is an avenue to God’s grace. So, in Catholic teaching, a woman who has been abandoned by her husband is also cut off from a way to receive the grace of God. I certainly support Powers point that such rigidity without consideration of circumstances seems unfair. I would go beyond that, though, in that I believe the practice seems spiritually destructive.

In his book, A New Kind of Christianity, author and pastor Brian McClaren tells the story of an Kenyan man who wept after participating in a worship service to which McClaren had invited him. When he asked the man why he was crying, the man assured him that the tears were caused by joy. The man was so happy because he had never before taken part in the Eucharist. In Kenya, the Anglican Church to which he belonged had made a policy for polygamous converts that only children of the first wife could participate in the Holy Supper. This man was the child of a third wife and therefore had never been able to take the sacrament.

We must be very careful in the exclusion of anyone from the table that Jesus sets for them. There are many instances portrayed in the gospels in which Jesus eats with or heals those that the religious authorities deem unworthy. In those cases, Jesus rebukes those who want to cling to rules over grace and inclusion. I believe we need to be especially discerning when we forbid people from participating in an avenue to God’s grace for reasons over which they have no control. These individuals have not flouted the commandments or even given up on their faith. People were not born into, nor can they be forced into, a situation that keeps them from being close to God through His son.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8: 38-39)

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

For those who are creating on the web and even monetizing their creative output, Richard MacManus - @ricmac - has had some appealing content recently. His interview with Jason Kottke dives into the journey Kottke has gone through in his 20+ years of blogging. I probably don’t need to do too much to recommend Kottke’s blog, as it already seems to have such a broad following. I will say I’ve been reading the blog for years and he consistently has a variety of interesting posts. The posts on the popular blogger’s site range from topics like maps of fairyland to the life changing magic of the $15 minimum wage. The interview with MacManus touches on where blogging stands in the current landscape of the web and gives insight into Kottke’s view of things as a veteran of the medium. I have to admit, though, I never pictured Kottke looking the way he does in the picture that accompanies the interview.

Another fascinating interview is with Cherie Hu, who runs the newsletter Water + Music. I’ve been reading Water + Music for the past year and have been impressed by the level of professionalism and angle of the content. The newsletter reads like a trade magazine about music and new media. Hu is definitely someone to watch and MacManus lets the interview run a bit longer than usual to get a fuller scope of her thoughts.

My little guy had his seventh name day not long ago. He was over the moon to receive what he called, “birthday love” from all the kids in Sunday School, grinning from ear to ear when they sang to him. We don’t do big birthday parties for our boys, so he doesn’t usually have a bunch of kids singing to him. We worried that he would be embarrassed, but that wasn’t at all the case. The birthday love led him to search for “birthday songs” on my Apple Music account. These are the results that came up. All explicit.

It reminds me of the scene near the end of Catcher in the Rye, where protagonist Holden Caulfield discovers vulgar graffiti in a museum and gets all bummed out about how it will affect the little kids who see it.

Somebody’d written “F**k you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought about how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them - all cockeyed, naturally - what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.

Later on, when he sees another instance of the same graffiti.

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, someone will sneak up and write “F**k you” right under your nose.

Last year, for the first time, I fasted during Lent. I made Friday my fast day and fasted from sunup to sundown. It was an interesting experiment. Some days it wasn’t too hard, other days the hunger was intense, or I would get a bad headache by the end of the day. The point of fasting (especially as part of Lenten devotion) isn’t for it to be easy, though.

This past month, I spent 3 weeks sick with the flu and then bronchitis. During that time, I had little energy for anything and an appetite to match. Every day was difficult and it was even hard to sleep thinking about the things I had to do with such little resources. As I thought about fasting for Lent this year, I felt like I had already been through a fast-like experience. I wasn’t sure it would be good for my body as I healed to put it through the physical fast, so I decided against following the routine I began last year.

As I was searching for alternatives to the Friday fast, my wife passed along this list from Pope Francis to which our Associate Pastor had posted a link on Facebook. I’m trying to keep these guidelines in mind as I go through the season of Lent.

• Fast from hurting words and say kind words.
• Fast from sadness and be filled with gratitude.
• Fast from anger and be filled with patience.
• Fast from pessimism and be filled with hope.
• Fast from worries and trust in God.
• Fast from complaints and contemplate simplicity.
• Fast from pressures and be prayerful.
• Fast from bitterness and fill your heart with joy.
• Fast from selfishness and be compassionate to others.
• Fast from grudges and be reconciled.
• Fast from words and be silent so you can listen.

A few of these, such as “fast from pressures and be prayerful” and “fast from worries and trust in God,” are especially meaningful to me this season. I hope I am able to keep them in my heart and mind and continue to cultivate habits that make them part of my life.

Most of the Record Store Day exclusives recently have not been my cup of tea. However, this year, one release in particular caught my eye after the tragic death of Richard Swift.

Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard will pay tribute to friend and collaborator Richard Swift with a new 7-inch split single featuring two unreleased tracks recorded by the pair. The A-side is an unreleased demo of “Me and Magdalena” which Gibbard wrote for The Monkees’ 2016 album Good Times!. The B-side is an alternate unreleased version of Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” from Gibbard’s cover of the band’s Bandwagonesque album, which he released in 2017. Limited to 1,600 copies, with proceeds benefiting MusiCares.

I can vouch for the quality of the album version of Gibbard’s cover of “The Concept” from his full-length take on Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque. It will be interesting to listen to the alternate version. Many times, with Swift’s production, you can hear his style in the recording. I think I get just as much of Swift as I do Jurado on Damien Jurado’s “A.M. AM.”.