Geez issue 11 is out now

Go down to wherever you buy your progressive Canadian Christian publications (or, OK, order it) and pick up a copy of Geez magazine's eleventh issue. I wrote a piece about Christian dance music (in a broad sense -- it's mostly about Justice, U.S.E., and Family Force Five) which I named, in a fit of cleverness, "Dance Dance Revolution." It looks like they went with a title that they took from one of the sentences in the piece - "Ass-shaking Great Awakening." I like that too. The issue also features pieces from Carl Wilson, Chuck Klosterman, and other very talented writers.

UPDATE to Ryan, Melody, and anyone else: maybe this will explain. Note that I said Christian "in a broad sense."Surely Justice is nothing if not aesthetically Christian.

Take Care of Your Life

I review Xiaolu Guo's new (old) novel 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth in this week's North Coast Journal.

P.S. The Jackson Free Press recently did a story about Johnny which mentions the Synthar album and NoiseTrade.com.

brainstorming

Reading some stuff and getting an idea for a project...

Four Songs of the 2008 Olympics

北京欢迎你 (Beijing Welcomes You)

I really like the Olympics and everything, but thank the Lord they are over, because it means we don't have to hear this song any more. What feels like 5 hours of one hundred Chinese pop stars saying the same thing over and over and over, which is, basically, "hey, check it out - Beijing!"  On TV, they'd just play it when there was nothing else on. They played it on buses. I heard a guy at the Bird and Flower Market whistling it. It played whenever you called someone's cell phone. This song was EVERYWHERE and is now permanently burned into my brain.

You and Me

Actually, I enjoyed the symphonic version that you could hear being played in the venues before the medal ceremonies. It's suitabily cinematic - grand and sweeping, like at the end of every Disney movie where the hero and heroine go off into the sunset. But the opening ceremony version (also played all the time here), featuring an aged Chinese singer (Liu Huan) and a freaky porcelain elf (Sarah Brightman) is just too hokey. This is another video that was played about every 10 minutes on TV.

The Chinese National Anthem

I've probably heard this tune at least 100 times in the last month or so. At first I liked how peppy and military it was, then I got sick of its false endings (ok, now it's over -- noo, now -- noo, now!). This does confirm one thing: every country has a more interesting anthem than the US.

Everyone is No. 1 

Oh. Man. Chinese music videos are known for being melodramatic -- your video really doesn't pack an emotional punch unless there is a girl in the hospital who has gone blind due to a tragic accident -- but this one is so incredibly over the top. Singer and movie star Andy Lau stars as a sucessful athelete (and mailman??) who loses his leg in an accident and begins an inevitable downward spiral culminating in a scene where he ends up sleeping on a heap of empy Tsingdao cans after throwing his trophies out the window.

But ALL IS NOT LOST, because enter A WHEELCHAIR-BOUND CHILD; Amputee Andy Lau finds a reason to go on living, through an inspirational montage during which he regains his poise and self-esteem as a paralympic athlete while the boy learns valuable lessons about never giving up, especially if your mentor is a one-legged mailman who is really Andy Lau.

Honestly.

What A Cruel God We've Got

Did you notice that whole thing about David Bazan being agnostic last year? I did, and it stuck in my craw (wait, is that really what I mean? whatever) and so now you can read what I wrote about it on this remarkably good-looking new web magazine called Patrol. Here it is, "David Bazan's (Inevitable) Apostasy."

UPDATE: A friend emailed to point out that this article caused a huge discussion/debate on a Pedro the Lion message board. I read it (despite what I said about message boards in the article -- I couldn't help myself), but there is no way I am linking to it here.