Kyrie Eleison

The rumors are not true; I did not quit my blog in disgrace after finding out that I (Tess) was a Hufflepuff.  I’ve just been busy doing things like writing and conditionally passing my PhD comprehensive exams.  (Yes, I know a Ravenclaw would have gotten a high pass.)  I do plan to return to a more regular blogging frequency, and I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about my summer activities, including my upcoming trip to LeakyCon Portland!!!

Today, I wanted to give you a devotional meditation in music, but I found out that I need to upgrade to a paid version of WordPress to insert music files into my posts, and that’s a step I’m not sure I’m ready to take.  So I’m just going to give you track titles and you can look them up if you care to.

Kyrie Eleison means “Lord, have mercy” in Greek.  The phrase, along with Christe Eleison (“Christ, have mercy”), is used frequently in Christian liturgy and often set to music.  (There’s a Wikipedia article if you want all the technical details.)  This week I realized that I have five versions of the Kyrie in my iTunes library, and not a single one of them is that Mr Mister song that you’ve probably heard (though I do enjoy that song).  The five settings of the prayer that I have are radically different and illustrate the universality through time and through the world of the need to rely on God’s mercies, which, as Lamentations 3 says, are “new every morning.”  Yes, as we learned in Awana, mercy is “God not giving me the punishment I deserve,” but mercy is not just something we receive once at salvation; we need it every day.  Great is his faithfulness.

So here is a list of the five Kyries that I listen to often.  I hope you can find them and listen to them; let me know if you have any trouble.

1. Palestrina, Missa Assumpta est Maria–“Kyrie”

Palestrina was a 16th-century composer of sacred music.  This piece is for unaccompanied choir.  It’s beautiful in a vaulted-stone-church kind of way.  It reminds me of Christmas.

2. Mozart, Requiem in D Minor, K 626–”Kyrie, Kyrie”

This piece was written to be sung at rich people’s funerals, and that’s pretty much what it sounds like.  Unlike the Palestrina version, this one is orchestrated.  It’s dark, imposing, and sounds like it should be played at the climax of a dramatic film.  (Ok, so I’m not a music critic!)

3. Fernando Ortega, “Kyrie I,” from the album Come Down O Love Divine

Fernando Ortega is, hands down, my favorite “contemporary Christian” solo artist (don’t get the wrong idea from that descriptor), and I really love this 2011 album, which combines instrumental pieces, choral numbers, traditional hymns, new settings of parts of the liturgy, and even a clip from a Billy Graham sermon.  This opening track on the album features a very contemporary-sounding tune, but it’s still quiet and reverential, and it showcases Fernando’s wonderful voice and piano-playing.

4. Fernando Ortega, “Kyrie II” (same album)

On the other hand, this is a brief a capella choir piece in which Fernando’s voice isn’t heard at all (unless he’s in the choir).  Stylistically, it harks back to the Palestrina version.  It isn’t my favorite choral piece on this album (that distinction goes to the “Sanctus”), but it’s still lovely.

5. David Crowder Band, “God Have Mercy (Kyrie Eleison),” from Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys])

This one was also written for a requiem, but it couldn’t possibly be any more different from the Mozart version.  It’s one of those mid-tempo but beat-driven songs that you can’t quite dance to but can sort of do a seated groove to.  As you’d expect from a Crowder Band song, it has all kinds of experimental electronic sounds, plus a few additional lyrics, but the essential prayer is still there.  I absolutely love this album, by the way; it was one of my favorites of 2012.  Don’t let the highly parenthetical title deter you.  Oh, by the way, the very next track after “God Have Mercy” is  a Johnny Cash cover.  No kidding.

Well, if you listen to any of the music, let me know what you think!

Top three places to read at my house

If you love to read, you know that there’s really no inappropriate place for reading (except, perhaps, in the driver’s seat of a moving car).  However, some places are more conducive to reading than others.  This post gives you a tour of the three best places to read in my apartment.  Sure, the kitchen table is great if the reader needs a flat surface to take notes, but that’s not really the kind of reading I’m talking about.  And the bed may look tempting, but there’s a reason why chiropractors says it’s bad to read in bed.  So the three places below are the top choices for someone who wants to read for an extended period of enjoyable time.

1. The guest room/office

Here you can sit on my slouchy old friend, the futon, and cuddle up with your book and a pillow.  Though you can’t tell in this picture, which I took at dusk, the window lets in some excellent reading light.

 

Possibly the presence of the Triwizard Champions and friends in the previous picture clued you in to the fact that this room is also home to my Harry Potter artifact collection.  In this picture you can see the Triwizard Cup (it can serve as a reading lamp too), the Marauder’s Map, and my wands.

 

 

Now that I have a designated office space, working on the computer isn’t so bad either.

2. The living room

Here you have two options: the couch or the recliner.  

 

I prefer the recliner for reading and the couch for watching TV.  As you can see, the living room is also a great place to dabble in amateur geography.

This bird artwork has very little to do with reading (though it does have a lot of words on it), but I wanted to show it off because it’s the newest addition to my living room.  I just bought it this morning from Sassy Sal Sells.  The bird painting also gives a clue to something you might see if you go through the door right next to where it hangs.  Read on!

3. The balcony

Especially when it isn’t pollen season, the balcony is a great place for open-air reading, as you can see in this post-reading still life.  In case you’re wondering, the book is Barnaby Rudge, the final Charles Dickens novel I need to finish before I can say I’ve read them all.  Barnaby sure ain’t no David Copperfield, which may be why I’m taking pictures and blogging instead of reading.

The great thing about reading on the balcony is that when you look up from the page, there is natural beauty to behold.  Each season has its own special feature to focus on; in spring it’s the dogwood tree that I hope you can see fairly well in this picture despite the crummy lighting.

“Muggles think these keep evil away.  But they’re wrong.” –Luna Lovegood

The balcony is also home to my wind chimes, which I’m sure my neighbors love.  Well, they’ve never complained, anyway, and perhaps the reason is that both chimes are well-crafted and unusually melodious, and since they’re made of two distinct materials, their sounds don’t clash.  This traditional metal chime was a Christmas gift from my brother.  I also have an exotic-sounding bamboo one that I bought in the Outer Banks.

Not pictured: I recently bought a hanging basket of pansies.  Less than a week after I hung it up, I noticed that a bird had built a nest among the flowers.  (I posted an early picture of the nest on Instagram–my username is tessrs.)  Today I discovered that the nest now holds two tiny blue eggs, which I decided not to photograph, not only because of the crummy lighting but also because I thought the bird deserved some privacy.  The past few times I’ve gone out onto the balcony, I’ve noticed the small, gray bird flying away from the basket and over to a neighboring evergreen tree.  Apparently she doesn’t want to hang out with me while I read.

So if you come visit me, bring a book!  I won’t think you’re a rude guest if you slip away to one of these three special spots for a while.

 

 

Another schizophrenic post

Hi, this is Tess. I just want to say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I’ve just been sorted into a house on Pottermore, and the Sorting Hat has placed me in Hufflepuff. Needless to say, I feel a bit conflicted about this decision. I have no problem with Hufflepuff. I like Cedric Diggory. I like Professor Sprout. I like black and yellow (for a variety of reasons). And I don’t believe all the slander about Hufflepuff being a house for duffers. Nevertheless, as you can imagine, the sorting has thrown me into a quandary about a lot of things–major things. Like my Ravenclaw scarf. And my identity.

But I should clarify that while Tess Stockslager may be a Hufflepuff, Penelope Clearwater is still a lifelong Ravenclaw. And therefore, nothing essential will change about this blog. So you can ease your minds about that, dear readers.

The Easter Post: Resurrection vs. Reanimation

This will be a quick post in which I don’t intend to say anything new or profound, except in the sense that the gospel is always profound.  I just think the co-occurrence of The Walking Dead‘s season finale with Easter Sunday is too good an opportunity to pass up.  If you’re a TWD fan, you’ve probably already noticed this conjuncture and have been tweeting little jokes about it all week.  While I can appreciate this subcategory of morbidly irreverent humor, I want to remind us all of a few basic yet important truths.

We often forget that Christ’s resurrection means our resurrection too.  Do a search on occurrences of the term “first-fruits” in the Bible–in the Old Testament, you’ll get instructions about bringing your produce to the temple, but in the New Testament, you’ll find all kinds of good doctrine, most if not all from Paul, about how Christ’s resurrection was only the first in a series of resurrections.  There will indeed be a day when “all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth” (John 5:28-29).  It sounds a lot like a Romero-esque scenario in which “the dead will walk the earth,” EXCEPT THAT THEY WON’T BE DEAD.  The difference between reanimation–when corpses become mobile–and resurrection–when formerly dead people live again–couldn’t be more pronounced.

So when you watch The Walking Dead tomorrow night and you see all those rotting bodies stumbling around outside the gate of the prison where our friends are holed up, don’t think for a minute that this is what the Bible means when it talks about the defeat of death.  There won’t be anything creepy about the resurrection, just like there isn’t anything creepy about having an Easter sunrise service in a cemetery (I saw a sign for one of those while driving past Alta Vista, VA, yesterday).  And when you attend a church service tomorrow morning, as I hope you do (whether it’s at sunrise or not), don’t think for a minute that Christ’s resurrection was just a past event that’s nice to remember but that has no effect on the present or future.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” I Corinthians 15:58

Ghosts by Gaslight

Last night my brother Mark and I went to our second Gaslight Anthem concert, this one in downtown Raleigh’s tiny Lincoln Theater, a perfect venue for getting up close and personal with rock and roll.  On the way home, I remarked that I’ve noticed that The Gaslight Anthem’s songs are constantly referring to ghosts.  Mark added that they tend to write about radios a lot as well.  I’ll let Mark treat the symbolic valences of radios (maybe he could do that on his podcast, Does Anyone Really Need to Hear This?), but let me give you a few of my thoughts on the ghost imagery in the Gaslight canon.

First of all, it’s everywhere.  Here are just a few samples from last year’s album Handwritten:

• “I danced with your ghost” (“45″)
• “All of our heroes were failures or ghosts” (“Biloxi Parish”)
• “I already live with too many ghosts” (“National Anthem”)

I’m sure a thorough or even a cursory listen through the catalog would turn up many more examples.

Invariably, these ghosts aren’t spirits of dead people returned to complete unfinished business.  In the Gaslight Anthem universe, which looks a lot like a Christian universe much of the time, the dead go On (to echo Albus Dumbledore).  This is very clear in the masterful requiem “The ’59 Sound” (“when we float out into the ether/into the everlasting arms”) and in “Biloxi Parish,” one of the few almost cheerful songs on the new album (“when you pass through from this world/I hope you ask to take me with you/or that I don’t have to wait too long”).

No, the ghosts in The Gaslight Anthem’s repertoire are memories–not mere memories, for as the songs heart-wrenchingly demonstrate, memories are powerful and, far too often, malevolent.  I can think of only one example in which ghost imagery is positive, and it’s “Biloxi Parish” again.  In that song, which I think is highly romantic, I don’t think the line “I will eventually haunt you” is meant to be sinister.  But that’s the exception.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the main theme of all of TGA’s music is figuring out how to go on living in the shadows of a devastating past–the shadow of a failure of a father, the shadow of a burned-out New Jersey factory, the shadows of girls named Virginia and Maria.

The ghost references go all the way back to the first album (“like I was a ghost in your dreams” in “Red in the Morning”) and are used to convey a number of different ideas.  For example, “Old Haunts” (which I always thing of as The Gaslight Anthem’s more depressing answer to Bruce Springsteen’s already-sad “Glory Days”) is about people who voluntarily become ghosts by refusing to move forward, always falling back on “if you’d have known me when.”  Even when they’re not using the word “ghost,” The Gaslight Anthem are singing about ghosts: “Keepsake,” the saddest song on the latest album, is about exorcising those angry memories–or, to use the song’s own metaphor, burying them deep at the bottom of a river.  Another theme addressed without explicitly employing the ghost imagery, though the allusion is certainly there, is the determination to avoid creating haunting memories for others.  This is why the speaker in “The Spirit of Jazz” asks so earnestly, “Was I good to you/the wife of my youth?”

If all these ghost lyrics were accompanied by minor keys and funereal tempos, they would be maudlin.  But many of The Gaslight Anthem’s most haunted songs are among their loudest, fastest, and most danceable.  Part of this, I think, is defiance: Hey ghosts, you can’t stop me from playing rock and roll.  But also, maybe–I don’t want to presume to read something that isn’t there–maybe there’s also some hope for what we’ll find after we hear our “favorite song one last time.”

The Bad Guy Report 2012

This past Saturday, after I watched Skyfall for the second time, I had some clever thoughts that I believe deserve to be turned into a blog post.  I realize that it’s a little late to be doing 2012 year-in-review summaries, but in my defense, several of the movies I’ll be referencing are probably still in your local cheap second-run theater.  So here it is: The Bad Guy Report.

The year 2012 proved interesting in the villain department.  For example, in The Amazing Spiderman, we saw Luna Lovegood’s dad stop trying to recreate the lost diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw and move to bigger, higher-tech mad scientist projects, which led to his turning himself into a Godzilla-type creature who enjoyed ravaging New York City.  (By the way, the actor in question may have roles he’d rather be known for than his ten-minute appearance in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, but I persist in calling him Xenophilius Lovegood because it’s a lot easier to pronounce than his real name, Rhys Ifans.)

Speaking of summer supervillains, this year Batman finally met an opponent with an equally incomprehensible voice.  It’s a good thing most of the confrontational scenes between the Dark Knight and his nemesis, Bane (I guess I could have just said “his b/Bane”), involved more punching than talking.  Despite Bane’s sad backstory, Steelers fan worldwide will hate him forever for destroying Heinz Field just to prove something we already knew: Even a giant fissure opening up in the middle of the field couldn’t stop Hines Ward.

Moving on to movies upon which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deigned to bestow their notice, Django Unchained featured Leonardo DiCaprio’s first truly villainous role.  Seriously, Leo, you’re 38 years old; it was about time you played something other than a golden boy.  Well, to be fair, I suppose Howard Hughes wasn’t, strictly speaking, a golden boy; nor was that guy from Shutter Island.  But it’s good (in a troubling way, I guess) to see that DiCaprio can cross nimbly over to the dark side when called upon to do so.  From what I understand (I haven’t seen the film yet), he does it convincingly.  Oh, speaking of bad guys in Django Unchained, what’s this I hear about Jonah Hill playing a member of the KKK?  I didn’t think the Klan allowed Jewish participants, let alone sweet-looking baby-faced Jewish boys.  I’ll have to see that to believe it.

2012 was also an important year for bad guy philosophy.  Wreck-It Ralph is essentially an extended commentary on the interaction (and sometimes the vast disparity) between the roles we have to play and who we really are at our core.  You probably saw the trailer with the bad guy support group a million times, but the words of the hairy wrestler Zangief bear repeating: “You are bad guy.  But that doesn’t mean you are bad guy.”  (N.B. I never figured out what was so bad about Zangief, other than the fact that he left out his indefinite articles.)  And if you’ll indulge me in one more profound quote, this one from an unnamed zombie: “Good…bad…UGHHHH [zombie sound].  You must love you.”

Now it’s time for the bad guy move of the year.  You know, villains are just like professionals in any field; they exchange ideas through trade publications, discussion boards, etc.  (I was going to say conferences, but they generally don’t like to be in the same room with each other, except in the unusual situation described in the preceding paragraph.)  So some years, you might see two movie villains employing the same strategy, both to great effect.  The 2012 bad guy move of the year is as follows: Get yourself captured and placed inside a glass case right in the middle of the good guy headquarters.  Smile unsettlingly and taunt the good guys.  Eventually, when it’s too late for them to do anything about it, allow them to develop the inkling of the idea that you are exactly where you want to be.  Then, escape and wreak general havoc.

Does this strategy sound familiar?  It should, since it was used by two of the most memorable villains of the year, Loki in The Avengers and Silva in Skyfall.  I didn’t notice the resemblance until the second time I saw Skyfall, which is proof that 2012′s bad guy move of the year is fully customizable to a variety of personalities, styles, and situations–although it seems to work best for villains who fall into the category of mischief maker (as opposed to, say, mad scientist or power-hungry politician).  And now that I’ve mentioned mischief makers, it is perhaps beginning to dawn on you that a very similar strategy, though without the glass case, was used by the ultimate bad guy of the past decade.  Remember?  “I want my phone call”?  In case you need your memory jogged, I’ll close this report with a video clip.  After you’ve marveled at the brilliance of this truly frightening 2008 villain, let me know some of your favorite bad guy moments of 2012.

Boycott Saturday

My recent post titles seem quite revolutionary: first we resisted the Oscars; now we’re–what? Boycotting everyone’s favorite day of the week? Not exactly. I don’t have a problem with the day itself, but with its name. Here’s why: Saturday is the only weekday named after a Roman deity (Saturn). English is a Germanic language, doggone it. We don’t need any of that Latin crap.

As a review, our other days are named after, respectively, the sun, the moon (note that these are good Anglo-Saxon words–we don’t say Solisday or Lunaday), Tyr (Norse god of war), Woden (the German version of the more familiar Norse god Odin All-Father), Thor (sexy god of thunder), and Freya (goddess of love and beauty and also dead people slain in battle). In other words, the English names of the first six days of the week make you want to go read the Elder Edda while listening to Led Zeppelin.  

And then we get to Saturday, which is named after…the depressing Roman god of winter and old age and irony?  (To prove my point, if you don’t know what the word saturnine means, look it up; it’ll make you want to lie in bed all next Saturday, even if you don’t normally do that.)  That’s lame.  I think we need to have a good Northern name for the final day of our week.  I’m sitting here with a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.  She clearly favors the Greeks and Romans (Norse mythology gets 15 measly pages), but at least her cursory summary will help refresh my memory.  Here are some replacement names I would like to propose.

Baldersday.  I’m actually surprised there isn’t a day named after Balder.  He’s the Christ figure in Norse mythology.  Balder was killed with mistletoe, but according to Wikipedia the all-wise, “after Ragnarök [the Norse Armageddon; cf. Led Zeppelin]. . . he and his brother Höðr would be reconciled and rule the new earth together with Thor’s sons” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldr).  Baldersday would be a fitting name to mark the dying of the old week and the imminent rise of the new one, like the phoenix from the ashes.  But the phoenix is Greek, so never mind.

Valkyriesday.  Cue the Wagner music.  You know the Valkyries–they’re the “maidens” (Hamilton’s quaint word) who show up after battles and get to pick which warriors they want to take to Valhalla.  On second thought, this might not be a good choice.  The day formerly know as Saturday could become very dangerous.  

Lokisday. Speaking of dangerous.  You saw what Loki tried to do to our planet in The Avengers.  He’s also the one who killed Balder with mistletoe.*  Loki is a shape-shifter and the closest thing Asgard has to a trickster deity (the Norse were a little too serious for an all-out joker), so at least we could say that the last day of the week would be…er…exciting, and a little more unpredictable than Valkyriesday.  On Valkyriesday, you would definitely die and might or might not get to go to Valhalla.  On Lokisday, you might die.  But you might not.

Heimdallsday. Heimdall is the guy Thor yelled at to “open the Bifrost,” remember?  (All I could think of during that scene was “Beam me up, Scottie.”)  But his name is way too unwieldy (that’s a good Anglo-Saxon word) for a day of the week, so forget it.

I haven’t suggested Freyrsday or Friggasday because those would be too similar to Friday. (Actually, according to Hamilton, some people think Friday was named after Frigga, Odin’s wife, rather than Freya; either way, it’s named after a goddess.  Go women!)  I hope it’s apparent that this is all tongue-in-cheek; I’m really not one of those would-be purifiers of the English language.  I just watched Thor over the weekend and am getting ready to teach a lesson on words derived from mythology in my Advanced Reading and Vocabulary Development class.  But seriously, think about it this coming Saturday.

*Actually, Loki didn’t do the dirty work himself; he got this blind guy named Hoder to throw the mistletoe at Balder.  Typical.