Final, Mk. II

Writing for this class has helped me to come into my own in a number of ways, and it has also helped me to learn a lot about ways in which I could improve.

One thing that I’ve learned is that despite my deliberate attempts to expand my tastes, I still carry a lot of prejudices. For instance, if I see a band filed under the “Christian” section of the record store, I tend to ignore it. In fact, if I’m wandering through a record store and find myself in the Christian music section, I tend to dash out of it as fast as I can. I’m not a fan of Christian Rock, Christian Alternative, or any of that. There are a few guys that I listen to. Switchfoot actually used to be a pretty great, musically tight, jazz-infused rock-and-roll ensemble that dealt with a lot of theological and philosophical issues in their music. Larry Norman, the grandfather of Christian rock and roll, is pretty fun to me as well. But by and large, when I listen to these bands play, I hear the sound of people trying to cash in on the earnest faith of their fellow human beings. Like, if you’re not cutting it as a shitty rock band, then just be a shitty rock band that sings about Jesus and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed audience. I know that’s really cynical, but as a professor of the Christian faith, it offends me when I see (and sometimes this is transparent, and obviously isn’t just me) musical groups that are cashing in on other peoples’ deeply-held beliefs. My problem is that I generalize that to everyone who sits on that Christian shelf at the music store. One day someone brought in a song, “Wedding Dress” by Derek Webb into class. I actually have a Derek Webb album on my computer that the guy offered for free a while back, but I never got around to listening to it because I really wasn’t that enthusiastic about it. But “Wedding Dress” was incredible. It was a raw, emotional, deeply searching song about the faithfulness of God in light of the overwhelming hypocrisy of the singer. It was beautiful. The music was beautiful, the lyrics were haunting…it was a fantastic song. And I realized that I hadn’t noticed it belongs to a musical world to which I have shut my eyes. And I can’t ever, ever afford to shut my eyes, or I’ll be like those people who say they like everything except rap and country. Gotta keep delving. (By the way, I prefer East Coast to West Coast hip-hop and Outlaw Country to Pop-Country. There is beauty EVERYWHERE, if you look for it.)

As for my limitations, as far as a consumer of media, I have way too many interests to really get into any of them the way that I want to. I have my fingers in too many genres of music, I want to see too many films, read too many books for me to ever really appreciate them. Sometimes great CDs go unnoticed by me because I picked them up in a torrent of other new music that I was more in the mood for at the time. Sometimes I’ll get a DVD and not have a chance to watch it for a year or so. The other thing is that, as evidenced bits of that previous paragraph, I can get uppity. And I don’t like that. As a writer and as a person in a conversation about our culture, I want to be as open to new things and as willing to like them as I possibly can be.

My aspirations for criticism are sort of wide open. I’d like to look into video game criticism or music, and honestly, the extent of my ambition probably only goes as far as entertaining a few people, maybe educating a few others. I don’t want to change the face of criticism and I really don’t plan on making any money doing this, although that would be cool. I do hope to keep it up, though. I think that maybe when the space is all mine and I’ve got more wiggle room as to what to post and I don’t have any deadlines, I might be a little more apt to drone on about music and fun things. Or I’ll just stop posting. But I really, really don’t want to do that. (As for reviewing games, I’m afraid that seat’s already been taken by Internet superstar Yahtzee, but that’s okay, because he more than deserves the throne.

As for other aspirations, I want to continue my current attempt at liking things. I enjoy liking things, and Donna in particular has helped me to do so unabashedly. I guess that my ultimate goal is to reach a point where I can defend all of my tastes, but am secure enough that I don’t feel like I have to do so. I guess that sort of ties back into the issue of prejudice in musical genre. Took another blow to my elitism, incidentally, when someone showed King of the Hill in class. That show was pretty great, but I had ignored it for years (maybe coming up on a decade)? Because I was never really a big Mike Judge fan, and because if I want to see examples of life in the South, I could just look out my front door. I vastly underestimated that show.

I guess that’s my problem, really. I underestimate things, and then I miss out on cool stuff. I’m pretty good about finding things to like about what I am watching or listening to, but at the same time, my sorting process can be a little harsh because there is so much to get through.

My writing style and voice are usually pretty clear. I know that I’m kind of verbose, but at the same time, by the time I’m finished writing, I usually feel like I have communicated my thoughts pretty clearly. This blog’s posts don’t usually see much of a revision process, and I’ve felt really bad about that because I can usually rein myself in pretty well on a second or third draft. I’ve never really known what tone to take with this blog, though. My experience with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg was intensely personal, but I didn’t really post it here because I wasn’t sure if this was the right place to do so. At the same time, I couldn’t detach myself and just talk about the film from a technical perspective. And so what came out was really conflicted-sounding, very tense, I’m afraid. The same thing happened with a number of other reviews. Another thing is that I still haven’t learned how to end these things. Part of that problem may be the subject matter. Saying, “Go see this movie in theaters” feels a little more pertinent to say than, “Go rent this 40-year-old film on DVD.” (By the way, go see Iron Man. It’s awesome. Best comic book movie ever made, and one of the best action flicks I’ve seen in a long, long time.) Even if the film needs the attention, I have a hard time convincing myself that a critical review site is the place to do it. Other people can and have done it well, but considering the low volume of output here, I really tend to think that I need to pick an M.O. and stay with it; I need to be either a current or a nostalgic critic. The other thing is that I never know how technical to get. I discussed a lot of music theory, or at least it felt like I did, when I was writing the John Williams post. I was really proud of that piece; I think that I was more proud of that than anything else that I wrote for this class. At the same time, I often worry that people already know everything that I have to say, or that I’m going over peoples’ heads. Worst of all, I imagine falling into that middle ground where people who are really into music either already know everything I’m trying to say or (worse) see that I’m doing everything wrong, and people who are interested in music but don’t know much about it find it all soaring over their heads because of my poor writing, and then no-one is happy. So while I feel pretty comfortable with my writing style as a whole, I guess I’m still just trying to find a way to work it into this context

I guess that I talked about a lot of my writing strengths and weaknesses just above. My greatest strength as a writer is precision; my greater weakness is concision. I can just be a little too descriptive. and a little too proud of myself at times.

This class has been an eye-opener in a lot of ways. We only had a handful of students, but we all came from some pretty different backgrounds, at least as far as the popular culture is concerned. But everyone learned a lot in that class, I really do believe so. I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples, but I think that everyone has contributed to my taste in there. And that’s weird, because it’s like they’re shaping me. That’s a stupid-as-hell sentence, but what I guess it means is that I can point to something specific and say, “This person has affected me in this way.” The blogs have done that a lot. People have gotten me to reconsider movies, to look into music I’d never heard before…the emphasis on local musical artists in this class has delighted me, and the Internet being what it is, I can just go look these people up now…It’s amazing.

I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere anymore; I feel like whatever narrative or rhetorical thread I had going kinda started unraveling in that last paragraph. I’m okay with that. I got carried away, but I’m going to leave it there as a testament to how easy it is to get excited about this class. This group of people, this shared experience, has changed me for the better. If that’s not worth getting excited over, I don’t know what is.