Hipster Christians, Part MCCLXXIII

The saga continues. Brett McCracken, about whom I've written before, has now published his book about hipster Christianity called, wait for it, Hipster Christianity. I'll give Brett a plug and suggest that you buy the book.

And I'm worried. Admittedly, I haven't read it. I need to read it, and I will. But based on the excerpts I've seen, and Brett's recent article in The Wall Street Journal, it seems to me that Brett is focused on the wrong things. There's much, much more going on here than a desire to be cool, and to fit in with the culture. There is a fundamental rejection of those things with which Evangelical Christianity has been identified. The kids are not just tuning out. They're running the other way. And Brett's book appears to be analogous to a purported critique of the Amish worldview that merely focuses on the funny hats. He nails the fashion trends, but he misses the point.

I don't know how many of you are involved in so-called Emergent churches. I suspect I am, although the members of my church probably wouldn't identify themselves as such. They would simply identify themselves as part of a Christian church. But all of the other earmarks are there. It's full of people about whom the label "hipster" would easily apply if one were looking for outward signs of hipsterism. But here's the deal. They congregate together for theological and philosophical reasons, many of which have to do with an uneasiness with, if not an outright rejection of, the Evangelical cultural trappings with which many of them were raised. Vote Republican? Probably not, or at the very least they believe that whatever Republican candidate is currently running for office has not received a direct endorsement from Jesus. Vote based on a candidate's stance on abortion and/or homosexuality? Nope. Convinced of the God-given merits of free enterprise capitalism? Nope. Take their cues from the evangelical cultural ghetto? What's that? It's not that they've even rejected it. They simply don't even think about it, although they seem to actively engage the culture as Christians. Engage in the culture wars? Emphatically No. They're sick of them, and disgusted by them. Care for the planet that we live on, and take care of orphans and widows, and engage in ending sex trafficking? Yep, big time. They seem to think these things align with the will of God.

Many of them like Sufjan Stevens, and have tattoos and piercings. And Amish people wear funny hats. So what? I know these folks. They're so hip that they gladly welcome a 55-year-old fat guy with a hearing aid into their midst. And I'm there for the same theological and philosophical reasons. Those are the reasons that seem to be missing from Brett's analysis. Seem to be. I'll read the book because now I'm genuinely curious. But those are my concerns.

Best Coast -- Crazy For You

Latest Pitchfork sensation and L.A. "It" girl Bethany Cosentino knows her way around an old Leslie Gore song. Oh, she updates the template a bit, slathering on some lo-fi guitars a la Vivian Girls, but she employs the same little-girl pout as the Queen of '60s melodrama, and she mixes the same lethal concoction of infectious hooks and maddeningly banal lyrics. But it begs the question: do we really need another pop melodrama queen who rhymes "crazy" and "lazy"?

Bethany likes boys, of course, and alternately longs for her missing guy or wonders why she's hooked up with such a scuzzball. She also likes sitting on the couch in her sweatpants, smoking weed, and watching TV. I haven't heard such unapologetically slacker sentiments in a pop album since the glory days of Dinosaur Jr. Which leads to the other big rhyme scheme here, the word "high," which is most frequently paired with "fly" (the upbeat tunes) and "die" (when life is a bummer, man). The songs breeze right on by -- thirteen of them in about half an hour -- and there's something to be said for pop economy. But Crazy For You is the aural equivalent of eating Twinkies. There's that sugary buzz going down. And half an hour later you're hungry for something more substantial.

Born to Walk With a Cane

Neither Bruce Springsteen nor I are getting any younger. A while back Image Journal asked me to write about Bruce. That essay appears in the current issue of the magazine. You can read an excerpt right here. If you want to read the rest, you have to buy the magazine.

Fire in the Suburbs

What does The Arcade Fire have to do with Westerville, Ohio? More than you might think.

James Hand

James Hand writes and sings like Hank Williams, and makes the kind of hard honky-tonk music that hasn't really been in vogue since Buck and Merle raised a ruckus out in Bakersfield in the early '60s. And if he sounds like he's been directly beamed in to the waiting world from some west Texas honky-tonk, well, in fact he's been beamed in to the waiting world from some west Texas honky-tonk.

Now 58 years old, he's been working as a rancher and cowboy most of his life (yes, apparently these people actually exist) and singing in dusty bars on the weekends. He's got two albums out on Rounder Records, one from 2006 called The Truth Will Set You Free (that phrase rings a (cow)bell), and one from 2009 called Shadow on the Ground. And if you like Hank, Buck, Merle, and the whole anti-slick country contingent, he sounds real good. This is truckstop jukebox music at its best.

John Mellencamp -- No Better Than This

And a quickie review of John Mellencamp's latest No Better Than This, also at Christianity Today.

Doug Burr -- O Ye Devastator

Here's my review of Doug Burr's new album O Ye Devastator at Christianity Today.

Eli "Paperboy" Reed -- Come and Get It

Eli "Paperboy" Reed sounds like a white kid from Boston, which is who he is. His songs sound like note-for-note throwbacks to mid-'60s Stax and Atlantic soul. In this case, the whitebread voice is an asset. God knows we've been inundated with retro soul over the past few years. It's a classic sound, of course, but the question remains whether anyone could possibly improve on Otis Redding or Sam Cooke. To his credit, Reed doesn't even try. He's just a white kid who loves soul music, and if the arrangements are slavish imitations of Booker T. and the MG's, the singing is more beholden to Hall and Oates. It's blue-eyed soul, all right, but it's refreshing to hear a singer in this genre who tries to be no one but himself. Yes, you've heard this all before. But perhaps not quite so unselfconsciously.

The Brave New Economy

What Color Is Your Parachute? What parachute? Remember when words like "career planning" used to be meaningful?

But here are a couple helpful tips.

Tip 1 -- Managing a Job Search

In the Brave New Economy, no one hires anybody as a regular, full-time employee. If you have a Ph.D. and want to teach, you may end up as an adjunct professor, which means that you're hired for a quarter or a semester at a time, and you're paid a pittance to teach an auditorium full of undergrads who will eventually graduate and join you in the scramble for very temporary jobs that pay a pittance.

In the IT world, the timeframes are even more truncated. A 2-week contract? Believe it. Yes, employers will now pay you to work for two weeks; no more, but possibly less. Slightly more common are the 4-week or 6-week contracts. What this means is that the day you start a new job, you have to actively and vigorously pursue your search for your next job. Here's a typical scenario: you receive a phone inquiry about your interest in another position on Day 1 of the new job. You feel uncomfortable talking to another employer in front of your new, albeit highly temporary, boss, so you decide to retreat to the bathroom and talk there. Except you haven't been around long enough to figure out where the bathroom is. So you awkwardly try to keep things vague on your end, as your boss listens in from 5 feet away, indicating your interest without revealing too much. And because you're an idiot, and don't really know how to talk in riddles, you end up totally befuddling what may have been your next employer, who concludes that you can't communicate.

Believe me, it happens.

If you have a particularly meddlesome boss (this is all hypothetical, of course) who seems irritated by the fact that you occasionally have to use the bathroom, he or she may get on your case for fielding non-work-related (little does he know) phone calls during work hours. You know what you do? You take the calls anyway. What is he going to do? Fire you? Oh well, there goes 9 days pay.

Tip 2 -- Making Your Way Through the Bureaucratic Tangle

If a potential employer contacts you about a possible job, you will need to fill out approximately 87 pages of paperwork in order to even be considered for the position. Filling out the paperwork in no way guarantees that you will secure an interview for the position. In fact, because you're competing against 2,000 other people for the same 2-week contract, you realistically have about a .05% chance of securing an interview. Nevertheless, if you do not fill out the paperwork, you have a .00% change of ever landing those lucrative 80 hours.

So, depending on how hot the job market is in your area (I have recently had to fill out paperwork for 2 possible jobs, amounting to 174 pages), you need to be disciplined and set aside several hours per day to manage the bureaucratic load. It's also useful to keep the following information handy, because you will need to refer to it during the application process:

-- Four references (names, titles, your relationship to, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, summary (no more than 5 pages per reference) of duties performed while relating to said reference, their education, their certificates attained, relevance of their current position to position for which you are applying, political affiliation (particularly relevant for government work), etc.)
-- Employers for the past ten years (name, address, phone number, name and title of manager, phone number and email address of manager, salary, start and end dates of employment, summary of duties performed). Face it, this is what kills you. If, like me, you have worked for 73 employers in the past ten years as an IT gun for hire and all-around communications guru, this could take a good, long while. Discipline yourself. You have to do it.
-- List of weaknesses -- Helpful suggestions: Sometimes I work too hard. Occasionally I have a difficult time not becoming prideful when my co-workers tell me what a wonderful co-worker I am.

If you can scale the bureaucratic wall, the rest is easy. The odds are 2,000 to 1 that you're done. But if the unthinkable actually happens, wear a suit, brush your teeth, go to the interviews, and, if need be, go pee in a cup. If all goes well, you're set for the next 80 hours.

This is all part of negotiating the Brave New Economy. Best of luck. You'll need it.

The Collected Works

The folks at Paste have been busy, in this case bundling up all the scattered writings of various writers and tying them together with a virtual string. Here's my bundle, about 400 articles and reviews that go back about eight years.

Full Nest

Full Nest, at the Image Journal blog.

Free Energy -- Stuck on Nothing

Sweet and sour. It's a winning combination in the kitchen, and it works just fine in rock 'n roll, too. Philadelphia power popsters Free Energy deliver the sweet by way of memorable singalong choruses and '70s classic rock riffage that recalls Thin Lizzy and T. Rex. Lurking beneath that sugary surface, however, is something equally classic; the sour adolescent mopester who can't get a date to save his life, and who thinks too hard about metaphysical issues such as what happens when people die, and why all the pretty girls are content to stand around mindlessly and snap their gum:

Bang bang, pop pop

When does the searching stop?

This is a disposable summer album with just a hint of autumn chill in the air. Listen closely enough and you might convince yourself that the adolescent mopester nerds will eventually take over the world, and still end up disappointed by it.

Corporate Punks, and Other Non-Sequiturs

I hate the army and I hate the RAF
I don’t wanna go fighting in the tropical heat
I hate the civil service rules
And I won’t open letter bombs for you

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock
-- The Clash, "Career Opportunities"

I couldn't be a punk if you dolled me up in a ripped t-shirt and safety pins, teased my thinning hair into some pathetic semblance of a Mohawk, and gave me unlimited Cockney elocution lessons. And, despite my sporadic efforts, I apparently don't qualify as much of a corporate American, either. So I'll admit from the start that the title of this post is absurd. But grant me this: I think Joe Strummer had it exactly right. Economic recovery my ass.

Another thing I am not is an economist, so I have no idea how this is all going to shake out; whether this is some momentary, albeit several-years-and-counting, blip on the otherwise-bright horizon, or some cataclysmic hemorrhage in the vaunted American Dream. Being an extreme melancholic sort, where the glass is neither half full nor half empty, but rather contains a few botulism-filled drops that are utterly insufficient to slake a thirst, and will kill you if you dare to swallow, I tend to gravitate toward the latter view. But what do I know?

Here's what I do know: There are currently two types of jobs available in Columbus, Ohio. The first type requires you to say words like "Cash or Charge?" and "Grande or Venti?" If you have a master's degree, as I do, you won't even get a sniff, because you're overqualified. These jobs only require a bachelor's degree, as the 82% of 2009 graduates from Ohio colleges who are now working minimum-wage retail positions have found out. The second type is the contract consulting position, which pays a straight hourly rate without benefits. You'll be qualified for these positions (possibly as many as two at a time in a metro area of 2 million people), but you'll be competing with anywhere from several hundred to a thousand people for the same job. If you're fortunate enough to secure one of those jobs, you'll be given somewhat meaningful work for three months, maybe six months, or, alternately, a day or a week or whatever period of time the employer decides. Timeframes mean nothing. A thousand years is as a day in the eyes of the Lord, and six months is as a day in the eyes of an employer. This is the way it goes. If you don't like it, you can be unemployed for all 365 days per year instead of 364.

There are no other alternatives. Let me repeat that. There are no other alternatives. Welcome to the brave new world.

The irony is that poor, uneducated yobs have understood this for eons. The truth is just now filtering down (almost wrote "up," but it's most definitely down) to the middle class. Historically, the poor, uneducated yobs suffer under this yoke for a while and then all hell breaks loose, and eventually palaces are burned down and prisoners are set loose and kings and queens are beheaded, or nuked, etc. Only bread and circuses seem to delay the inevitable revolution. Go Bucks.

So, in the midst of these little economic epiphanies, I'm reading Babylon is Burning by Clinton Heylin, a great history of punk music. It's probably a dangerous book anytime, but it's particularly incendiary given my current mood. Can you tell? And the punks simply did what great music has always done -- get in peoples' faces and tell the truth. London in 1977 was full of unemployed, hopeless yobs and bread and circuses. It was the Queen's Jubilee Year, a time of great celebration, of pomp and glory, until Johnny Rotten hijacked the airwaves:

God save the queen, she ain't no human being
There is no future, and England's dreaming

Thank God for the snot-nosed truth tellers. Somebody needs to do it again, cut through the morass of political speeches and photo ops and lies that pass for Want Ads. Who will be this generation's Joe Strummer or Johnny Rotten?

Kate Rusby

I'm a sucker for Kate's. Aside from being married to one, I have yet to hear a musical Kate -- whether Bush, Nash, Taylor, or Wolf -- I haven't liked[1]. And that's certainly true for Kate Rusby.

Kate essentially only has one trick, but it's such a deep and heartfelt one that I find myself being moved again and again. She's the prototypical English folk nightingale, and her singing is so sweet and lovely that you expect rainbows and butterflies to magically appear whenever she opens her mouth. She mines the same Trad territory as Sandy Denny, mixing in her own excellent original songs that sound centuries old, but she doesn't have Sandy's soulfulness or world weariness. But I can't really get too upset about it. Her pure Yorkshire folk soprano simply soars, and the tasteful and unobtrusive Trad accompaniment (acoustic guitars, Uillean pipes, pennywhistles, flutes, etc.) stays out of the way and puts the emphasis where it belongs -- on that remarkable voice.

Kate has nine or ten albums out now, all of them very fine. But if I had to recommend one, I'd suggest Sleepless from 1998, which features the usual Trad ballads, some unusual and welcome guest appearances from American bluegrass stalwarts Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott, and a wondrous Iris Dement cover.

[1] Note: Katie's are not the same as Kate's. Katie's can be nasty, musically and personally. Katie's are the cute, pop, satanic side of Kate's. Katie's should not be mentioned in the same post as Kate's. Neither should K.T.'s, although the only one I know, Tunstall, is decent enough. Still, she's no Kate.

Hank Cochran

Legendary Nashville songwriter Hank Cochran died earlier today. Chances are, if it was a tearjerker from the '50s or '60s, Hank wrote it, either solo or in collaboration with buddy Harlan Howard.

Hank had a couple hits on his own, but the for the most part he was content to stay behind the scenes, churning out song after song for Nashville's iconic stars. What Bacharach and David, Boyce and Hart, Leiber and Stoller, and Pomus and Shuman were to the pop word, Hank Cochran was to the world of country music. It's hard to imagine country music without him. He's probably best known for "I Fall to Pieces," a song usually associated with Patsy Cline. And that's a great one. But I'm most fond of "It's Only Love," performed here by the consummate country gentleman Ray Price. R.I.P., Hank.

A More Perfect Union

This is my favorite song from the first half of 2010. It's got a Bruce Springsteen quote, Civil War soldiers, and a great shoutalong chorus. Let's hear it for beardos.

A Blessing

The five days Kate and I spent in the Bay area with my sister and her family can be conveniently labeled as "a blessing." What does that mean? It means that it was a rich time together, full of laughter and meaningful conversation, hugs, affirmations, a few tears, and some downtime that enabled us to see some natural beauty, to read a couple books, and, mercifully, to sleep. I was tired.

In the weeks before we left for California I was scrambling to accomplish a ridiculous amount of work in a pressure-filled environment, and I passed with flying colors. I wrote more than I've ever written; something like 53 documents, ranging in length from 1 to 30 pages each, during the seven weeks of my last contract assignment. I didn't know I could type so fast, let alone think so quickly about complex technological issues. But I did, and I left my project in great shape, accomplishing exactly what I needed to accomplish before the vacation break. And that was a blessing, too. I suspect I had some supernatural help.

So we went to California. We watched my sister, she of the cancer-ravaged spinal cord, walk through a redwood forest, the first time she'd been able to walk more than a few feet in more than a month. That was an incredible blessing. We went to San Francisco by ourselves for a day, and did the normal tourist things. We rode cable cars, ate bad seafood on Fisherman's Wharf, took the ferry across the bay to Sausalito, ate absurdly decadent chocolate sundaes on Ghiradelli Square, and visited Grace Cathedral, way up at the top of Nob Hill, an astounding church that is a pint-sized replica of Notre Dame in Paris.

We wondered why we live in Ohio. This is a natural reaction to blue skies, 73 degrees, and one of the most picturesque parts of the planet. Then we looked at the cost of real estate and we remembered. We do live in Ohio, and it was nice to arrive home, but it was also surely nice to have a respite in what seemed like paradise, except for the damn cancer. That still seemed like hell. As my brother-in-law Mark put it, "Well, now we live with the reality of morphine in the medicine cabinet. It's amazing what you can get used to." I suppose you do what you have to do, and you adapt. But I'm not yet used to the thought, and I want, more than anything, for my sister to live. It was all a perilous blessing.

We arrived home on Monday to find out that my job had been eliminated. Who knows the real reasons? They're never entirely communicated. Something about the end of the fiscal year, and no budget for FY 2011. Sure thing. I'm certain that somebody knew the budgetary constraints on June 29th, my last day of work, but I guess it's easier to drop the bomb on the phone, from a distance.

I'm somewhat inured to this by now. The reasons change -- companies are bought and sold, the minions are laid off to appease the stockholders, the recession puts the squeeze on support jobs, departments are consolidated, consultants are always the buffer between the "real" employees and the harsh realities of an economic downturn, etc. But it always amounts to no job, and no sign of a job on the horizon, and starting all over again. Again. And again. It's enough to get a guy down.

For whatever reasons, I thought it might be different this time. I was with a small company -- just the Pres/CEO and me -- and I thought we might make for a pretty dynamic team; he of the glib tongue and the charismatic presentations, and me the grunt to do the actual work. And, in fact, that's how it worked out. He talked a good game, and I did all the heavy lifting, and I can lift a lot in the IT communications world. But even more to the point, I thought I was due for a blessing. There's that word again. The reasons for that are complex, but they basically have to do with the silly notion that God rewards good behavior. And it's not that I was perfect; far from it, in fact. But relatively speaking, I was on the upswing. Things were going well spiritually, maritally, every way. And I don't think I ever consciously identified it as such, but I suppose I figured that God would honor that by dismissing the one thing that was most likely to trip me up in the past -- a lack of job stability. Apparently not.

Ironically enough, my former boss -- yes, the Pres/CEO -- just called. It's the first time I've spoken with him since he told me not to show up for work after I returned from my vacation. And this time I got to ask him all the things I was too stunned to ask him when I talked with him last week.

Me: Were you displeased with my job performance?
Pres/CEO: No, you did a fine job.

Me: What happened to the one-year contract?
Pres/CEO: It got canceled. These things happen. It's nothing personal.

No, it never is. Except when it is, which is every time. I suspect I'm not really cut out for this kind of work. And this kind of work is the only kind of work that's available.

Three times per day I pray the Lord's Prayer, which includes the sticky little phrase, "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." I stumble over those words every time I pray, but I know what they mean. They mean that I have no choice but to forgive. It's not an optional clause, and since I desperately need forgiveness, I need to forgive others who have wronged me. So lately -- over the past week or so -- I've been praying for help to do that, because right now I can't do it on my own. That kind of help would be a blessing. I'd be thankful if those of you so inclined could pray for that as well.

Bill Fox

Music is a funny thing, and the journey from A to B sometimes takes you through some pathless wastes. Witness one Bill Fox, he of the nondescript name and the unfailing melodic gift. Bill was the leader of a relatively obscure Cleveland band called The Mice in the mid-'80s, who should not be confused with the contemporary pop punk band of the same name from San Diego, or Modest Mouse, or any other musical rodent. Ever hear of these Mice? Me either, but I'm told their shows were legendary, which typically means that the 20 people who saw them might be exaggerating. In any case, I'd never heard of Bill Fox until If I Had a Hi-Fi, the latest covers album from power popsters Nada Surf. The opening track is a Bill Fox tune called "Electrocution," and the first time I heard it I pressed the back button on my iPod about five times in a row because I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It's one of those perfect, chiming, three-minute jangly pop tunes that used to be all over the radio, and now are difficult to find. Think The Byrds, The Beatles, Big Star, and Guided By Voices; that kind of jangly pop. It's pretty select company, but "Electrocution" belongs there.

So that led me on a search for Bill's old band. No dice on The Mice, but I did track down a couple of Bill's solo albums, Shelter from the Smoke and Transit Byzantium, two lo-fi gems (recorded at home in four-track splendor, no less) from the late '90s on SpinART Records. These are in the folk-pop vein, but the chiming guitar runs (acoustic this time) and effortless melodicism are still very much intact. There's the semi-expected Dylan influence, too, including surrealistic choruses and the occasional harmonica solo, but at least he does it well, and these songs are far better than average in their lyrical heft. And did I mention the melodies?

I love these kinds of discoveries. Last I heard, Bill Fox works a late-night telemarketing gig at The Cleveland Plain Dealer, performs rarely and reluctantly, and has a noted antipathy toward publicity. Imagine, a guy who writes songs because he likes to write songs. What a concept. So pretend you didn't read this. But for what it's worth, the guy has made some of the best music I've heard this year, twelve years too late.

Here's Bill doing the original version of "Electrocution."

Portrait of the Artist as Screw-Up

At the Image Journal blog.

Deciphering Corporatespeak

Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow. Then again, maybe I won't. If it weren't for little nagging worries like food and shelter, I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to the indignities of corporate America. God knows it's been obvious for a long while now that American business is based on the fundamental principle that the worker is entitled to the same rights and privileges as the cockroach.

Nevertheless, it occurs to me that some of you out there may be entering the job market for the first time, and may not have encountered the peculiar ways in which corporations communicate. Commonly used terms have their own very special meanings in corporate America, and it's to your advantage to understand precisely what you're encountering. So here's a little primer for your benefit.

Corporate term: One-year contract
Translation: Whatever we want it to mean. Could be one month. Could be one day. It doesn't really matter, because there will be a one in there somewhere, and people always work during some portion of a year.

Corporate term: Teamwork
Translation: You do the work, and we'll take the credit for it. Also known as "Work Smarter."

Corporate term: Employee morale
Translation: You'll learn inspiring, life-affirming slogans and possible company chants during the one-day to one-month interim you'll be employed.

Corporate term: Continuous feedback
Translation: You'll be told that you're doing a great job each day during your one- to twenty-day stay.

Corporate term: Consultant
Translation: Cockroach

Corporate term: Integrity
Translation: Bullshit