Weekend Reads (5/28): School Shootings, SBC Abuse, Star Wars, Black Holes, Depeche Mode
Essential weekend reading material for May 28, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Whenever there’s a mass shooting in America, people often share this classic article from The Onion: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The article was originally published in 2014 after the Isla Vista shooting (during which a man killed six people and injured fourteen others). The Onion has since republished the article 20 times — most recently for this week’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas where 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered — and each time they update the article to include details from the latest massacre.
I doubt that The Onion thought this article would remain so timely and relevant after 8 years, but 20 mass shootings later, here we are. Because nothing has changed. And apparently, nothing ever will. Not so long as we have fools and craven cowards in charge, anyway.
Shortly after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, Garry Wills wrote an article that has also, sadly, remained timely over the years.
We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily — sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector.
A recently released report confirms what many have suspected for years: the Southern Baptist Convention downplayed the reality of sexual abuse within their churches, opting to protect the denomination from lawsuits and liability while criticizing abuse victims and advocates.
Survivors, advocates, and some Southern Baptists themselves spent more than 15 years calling for ways to keep sexual predators from moving quietly from one flock to another. The men who controlled the Executive Committee (EC) — which runs day-to-day operations of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) — knew the scope of the problem. But, working closely with their lawyers, they maligned the people who wanted to do something about abuse and repeatedly rejected pleas for help and reform.
The 288-page report can be found here. (Note: The report contains content that might be triggering for those who’ve experienced sexual abuse.)
Russell Moore, who used to be in the SBC, says that “the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.” Meanwhile, David French asks, “How many bad apples must we pluck before we recognize that the orchard is diseased?”
Rachael Denhollander, who was instrumental in bringing Larry Nassar to justice for his abuse of hundreds of female gymnasts, tweeted out a lengthy response:
A few bad actors can eventually be done away with. The mindset that allowed them to control however, will only pave the war for more abusive leadership, if it’s not recognized and rooted out. This is the theme that emerges from this report, more than anything.
Anyone who’s read Opus for any length of time will know that I’m a huge fan of shoegaze music. But what is shoegaze, and where did it come from? The Treble staff have compiled 45 songs that explore and explain shoegaze’s roots.
Shoegaze took off in earnest in the late ’80s, with British bands such as A.R. Kane and My Bloody Valentine, though its seeds were planted decades earlier. Slowdive’s Neil Halstead cites The Cure as an influence, not only in sound but in how Robert Smith maintained picture of stoic restraint onstage. And the seeds of its effects driven wall of guitars were planted not just in the post-punk era, but in the stranger corners of glam rock, the experimental nature of krautrock, and the Velvet Underground’s embrace of noise. As we survey the history of shoegaze as a whole, we trace how we got here, from rough sketches more than 50 years ago to contemporary updates that keep pushing it forward.
Given their mention in the article’s intro, I’m a little surprised that no Cure song ends up on Treble’s list. Methinks “A Strange Day,” “Plainsong,” “Fascination Street,” or even “This Twilight Garden” would fit in quite nicely.
Millions of listeners use Spotify’s ambient playlists to help them focus or relax during the day. Such playlists can be very beneficial to the artists they feature, but are they helping or hindering ambient music and musicians as a whole?
Every acknowledgement that deVine makes of playlisting’s benefits for his artists comes with a searching question about the model’s sustainability or its impact on independent music at large. What happens when a placement that’s been providing a musician with steady income suddenly gets pulled? Might Spotify eventually pivot further toward filling mood playlists with cheap stock music? And what about the countless artists, on deVine’s label and others, whose music is too weird, noisy, and full of words to thrive in the mood playlist context? “I can’t lie. We rely on it, we really do,” he says. “But I don’t think this model is good for everybody. I don’t think this is healthy for music.”
Related: I’ve created some ambient playlists of my own for paid Opus subscribers, including soothing “migraine” songs, a Harold Budd retrospective, and a descent into the abyss of dark ambient music.
Speaking of ambience, scientists have released a recording of the black hole that lies at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster.
In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.) The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions. In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
Via Popular Science.
Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, keyboardist and founding member of Depeche Mode, died earlier this week at the age of 60.
Fletcher’s bandmates announced his death Thursday on social media; Rolling Stone has confirmed that the cause of death was natural causes. “We are shocked and filled with overwhelming sadness with the untimely passing of our dear friend, family member and bandmate Andy ‘Fletch’ Fletcher,” the band said in a statement.
Along with U2 and The Cure, Depeche Mode made up the “Big 3” of bands that helped to define high school for me. This was right around the time that Violator was released, and songs like “Enjoy the Silence” and “Policy of Truth” played on the radio.
Colin Cantwell, who helped design the TIE Fighter, X-Wing, Star Destroyer, and Death Star in the Star Wars movies, died last week at the age of 90.
From a young age, Cantwell was interested in both space and design, according to a biography on his website. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in animation and was personally invited to study architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, though the architect died before Cantwell could study with him. Cantwell went on to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA.
Cantwell also worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and WarGames. The Hollywood Reporter has more details on his career as well as comments from George Lucas (“His talent was and remains evident for all to see”).
Seth Green was hoping to create a new TV show based on his “Bored Ape” NFT. But after it was stolen and re-sold to someone else, Green no longer owns the rights, which jeopardizes the TV show.
On May 8, an anonymous scammer swiped four of Green’s NFTs in a phishing scheme. Green mourned his “stolen” assets on Twitter, where he announced the losses of a Bored Ape, two Mutant Apes, and a Doodle, which were transferred out of Green’s wallet after he unknowingly interacted with a phishing site.
One of the Mutant Apes was flipped for $42,000, Motherboard reported. Transaction ledgers show the Bored Ape was also sold by the scammer to a pseudonymous collector known as “DarkWing84,” who purchased it for more than $200,000. The NFT was then swiftly transferred to a collection called “GBE_Vault,” which is where it currently sits.
Given the fact that the transactions are logged in the blockchain, you’d think that this would be a pretty open-and-shut case. Green could obviously prove that the NFT was stolen and that he’s the legitimate owner. But I guess just file this under “Proof That NFTs Don’t Make Any Sense At All.”
Related: Dan Olson Explains Why NFTs and Crypto Are So Bad
Also related: Some scammers are trying to convince people to invest in a fake crypto investment platform with a deepfake Elon Musk video.
Writing for Mere Orthodoxy, Rabekah Henderson makes a case for beautiful churches (emphasis mine).
Spaces often give us cues of how we are to act in them — a library or a museum inspire peace and quiet, while a music venue or a playground invites noise and celebration. In the same way, we should be careful that our places of worship are created to encourage space for reverence and reflection, and not only for loud praise music or electric guitars. Our churches should be designed in light of the fact that their aesthetics are a tool for spiritual formation.
But a carefully-designed church is not a frivolity or waste of money — rather, it’s an important reminder of a crucial truth: that God is the author of and ultimate standard of beauty.
Finally, my friend Seth T. Hahne is working on a new comic titled Hollow World, and he’s released the first chapter. As far as I’m concerned, anything Seth does is worth checking out, be it his comic book review site Good OK Bad or his other books, like the delightful Monkess the Homunculus.
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