I’ve been trying hard to ignore the whole media-creating a story and then reporting on a story nonsense in the aftermath of the horrible tragedy that occurred over the weekend in Arizona but thanks to opinionated partisan friends on Facebook it’s been impossible to ignore. I don’t have any commentary to add, but I did like this quote from James Calvin Davis, author of a book entitled In Defense of Civility.

“The tragedy in Arizona this weekend signals how desperately Americans need to commit to restoring some sanity and civility to our public discourse. It is inaccurate and offensive to attribute the actions of Jared Lee Loughner directly to the rhetoric of a specific political party. But it seems undeniable to me that the general viciousness, violent innuendos, and mutual loathing taken for granted in our political culture right now set the scene for this kind of act. Political violence is a powder keg that will keep going off until we figure out a different way of talking about our deepest disagreements. Americans need to learn how to disagree civilly and fruitfully, and now is the time for religious Americans to step in and lead the way.”

“One day—one day soon—all of this will become too mundane to be worth mentioning, but for now, while all this access still feels at least a little bit surreal, there are stages to move through as you test the limits of connectivity and your own willingness to connect. Sign on, and suddenly everyone is right there, posting exclamation-point-ridden messages to your wall about how “It would be so great to see you! We should get together!!!” that you quickly come to understand are mostly symbolic, a kind of conventional shorthand similar to the uncaptioned sonograms that passive-aggressively announce new pregnancies and changes to the clinical-sounding “relationship status” that don’t need to be conveyed personally because Facebook delivers the news itself, as a weirdly neutral intermediary. All this blatant good cheer butts up against a steady stream of updates from people saying they hate their jobs, are exhausted, feel sick, feel fat, feel nostalgic for the days when they used to look forward to the life they now have.”

-Eryn Loeb

Because the vuvuzelas create a wall of sound, there has been little of the usual chanting, singing and roaring that are a staple of soccer games everywhere else in the world. Even the fans of the England national team, normally among the loudest in international soccer, could not bring themselves to muster their usual diet of boisterous chants and songs during Saturday’s 1-1 draw with the United States, effectively admitting defeat to the almighty horn.

-Martin Rogers, Yahoo! Sports

“What used to be an amusing byproduct of Internet use has mutated into something horrible: an insatiable parasite that impairs its host’s judgment, rendering it totally useless. Instead of acting as an organic cultural touchstone, the modern meme — from LOL, which hasn’t been used to signify physical laughter since 1997, to Lolcats — now sucks the joy out of our interconnectedness. It destroys uniqueness. Once an “enjoyable thing” becomes a “meme,” we stop enjoying the thing for its own sake, but consume and regurgitate our enjoyment of it as a symbol of hipness, as if to say: “I am aware of this thing’s popularity — therefore I, too, exist!” -Joe Randazzo, editor of the Onion

A brand church, much like a traditional retail space, is defined by its architecture, rituals, and representatives. But in the elevated showcase, products are defined by a grander experience — one that taps into our sensory landscape through smells, sounds, and texture. The evolution of the brand church has not been forced upon consumers by overzealous brands. It is the logical extension of our attachment to the products with which we identify.

Borrowing from religion, brands are cherry-picking rituals to forge stronger brand identities. To a degree, this comes in response to shoppers who increasingly demand moral fiber and civic values from brands–outward expressions of positive endorsements, charity campaigns, or ethically religious business practices. The pinnacle of brand exposure is the hallowed space of the brand church. The most sophisticated brands ‘are those that not only anchor themselves in tradition but also adopt religious characteristics.’ It’s not much of a stretch to think of a few brand messiahs. Microsoft has Bill Gates (saving the world and passing the collection plate), Omnimedia has Martha (risen from the dead), and Apple has Steve Jobs (the second coming).

-Lucas Conley, in the book Obsessive Branding Disorder

This recent story about a couple getting married in an Apple Store with a minister dressed similar to Steve Jobs and quotes of the Apple CEO read during the ceremony only takes this metaphor of the brand church even further.

It’s probably cooler than getting married by a justice of the peace (boring), but still kind of embarrassing if you ask me.

“In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation. Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.

The crowds at big-time college sporting events do not sit passively, the way they do at a movie theater. They roar, suffer and invent chants (especially at Duke basketball games). Mass college sports are the emotional hubs at the center of vast networks of analysis, criticism and conversation. They generate loyalties that are less harmful than ethnic loyalties and emotional morality plays that are at once completely meaningless and totally consuming.

There are the obvious recruiting scandals and greedy coaches, but for all the sins, big-time college sports have become emotional reactors, helping to make university towns vibrant communities.”

-David Brooks

“In 1991 I moved to Athens, Georgia in search of God, but what I discovered instead was Vic Chesnutt. Hearing his music completely transformed the way I thought about writing songs, and I will forever be in his debt.” -Jeff Magnum, Neutral Milk Hotel

Vic Chesnutt died yesterday of an overdose of muscle relaxers. Perhaps in death more will discover one of the most brilliantly underrated songwriters of our time. A good place to start is “West of Rome,” but really you can’t go wrong with any of his 13 records.

“I not only dive for the mute button, but I end up having to close my windows so that the blast doesn’t affect by neighbors…I live on a cul-de-sac, and so the sound resonates.” -Congresswoman Anna Eshoo in an Associated Press article about Congress tackling TV commercial volume.

We all know commercials are loud, but a blast so loud you have to close the windows of your comfortable, air-conditioned house in suburbia? Aren’t the windows of houses in cul-de-sacs already closed 99 percent of the time anyway?

A recent article in New York Magazine about New York City mega church Redeemer Presbyterian and its New York Times bestseller list preacher/author Tim Keller has been producing a fair amount of Web chatter for many of the reasons articles on the topic of large churches and conservative Christian beliefs often do. Last I checked it, the article comment section itself had 189 commenters weighing in.

What struck me most about the article probably has little to do with the discussion. It was this passage:

“I needed something to ground me and didn’t know what it was,” says 27-year-old Shani Barrett, who moved here from Southern California to make it in theater, so far with limited success. “He was, like, dead-on-balls accurate,” is how she describes the experience of hearing Keller speak for the first time. “I just felt he was talking to me and my situation.” These days, she says, “I pray after yoga class, I pray before auditions, and before I go onstage. I put it in God’s hands. What he wants to happen will happen.”

Dead-on-balls accurate. I’d say that’s pretty darn accurate wouldn’t you?

Read more: Why Are So Many New Yorkers Flocking to Evangelical Christian Preacher Tim Keller? — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/features/62374/index2.html#ixzz0Zb9JeOoK

“Of all the ways in which music changed over the course of the twentieth century, the most fundamental was the shift from being something people played to something they consumed and from being part of a larger experience to being a thing that is often heard alone and out of any set context. Audio recording, simply by existing, separated sound from performance. Until recording, music did not exist without someone playing it, and as a result music listening was necessarily social. There was no way to hear a musical group without other people being present — to play even a duet, there had to be two people in the room. It is hard to think about how different that must have been, as everyone reading this book has listened to music alone. Indeed, with Walkmans and MP3 players, it has become common to use music to shut out the rest of the world.” – Elijah Wald, in the book “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music.”

One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years is how anti-social my music listening has become. When I was a teenager, I swapped CDs with friends in the lunchroom (you can still tell which ones in my CD rack because they have cracks in the jewel case), listened to seven inches in friends’ bedrooms and rarely attended a show alone. My groups of friends were all distinguished and labeled in part based on the music coming out of their Walkmans or crappy factory radios in the school parking lot. Live performances, especially ska shows in the mid-’90s that united indie-rockers, metal heads, punks and hardcore kids unlike anything else, were parties we didn’t have to clean up after or fabulate a stories about to explain broken family heirlooms. 

That’s rarely the case now. Outside of the internet and occasional shows where I know at least one of the members in the band, my music life is anything but social. Unless you count the times when my wife hears something that tickles her ears coming out of my speakers and asks me “what band is this?” 

Maybe it’s different for you because you live in a big city or have a significant other more socially invested in a music scene. But me, I long for the days when sharing music wasn’t so easy and impersonal, when even purchasing CDs was a task impossible to do without at least having to ask the record store clerk to turn the volume on the speed metal down. 

P.S. Do yourself a favor and check out the Elijah Wald book quoted above, either from your local library or bookstore.