Weekend Reads (Mar 23): Ryuichi Sakamoto, Near Death Experiences, CCM, the X-Men
Recommended weekend reading for March 23, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Before he died last March, composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded one final performance on film, which was directed by his son, Neo Sora.
Though many of the choices — the concept, location, pieces — may have been Sakamoto’s, it’s hard to ignore Sora’s subtle hand throughout Opus. For what was always intended to be the final performance from an extraordinary artist, the film doesn’t feel like a somber affair. Even as Sakamoto struggles to finish certain pieces, his fingers not what they once were, the energy draining from his ailing body, there is a sense of triumph each time a song reaches its final note. So much is conveyed by the silence that comes after — the relief of execution, a glimpse of ecstasy.
To date, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus has received universal acclaim. Watch the trailer:
The Discogs staff highlights essential Krautrock albums from the 1970s, including titles from Amon Düül II, Faust, Ash Ra Tempel, and of course, Kraftwerk.
Krautrock, also known as kosmische music, is an eclectic genre of experimental rock that was developed in Western Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Known for its avant-garde arrangements, psychedelic experimentation, hypnotic rhythms, and trailblazing electronic compositions, krautrock empowered participants of the West German student movement and beyond to create a type of popular music that felt like their own.
Near death experiences are often associated with heavenly and comforting visions, but they can have a musical component, as well.
Tony Kofi grew up in Nottingham and, upon leaving school at 16 in 1981, got an apprenticeship as a roofer. Whilst on a job one day he fell from a three-story building. As he plummeted, he was certain he was going to die and describes time “standing still.” He felt relaxed, and experienced a number of very specific visions. In them he saw places he’d never been, and people and children he’d never met. “The one thing that really stuck in my mind was me standing up and playing an instrument,” Kofi remembers in a BBC interview from 2021. “I just thought, ‘This is the weirdest feeling in my entire life.’ And then that was it, I completely blacked out.” Thankfully he doesn’t remember hitting the hard concrete headfirst. Days later, Kofi woke up surrounded by family in a hospital in Notts, bewildered and in serious pain. As he made his recovery over the coming months, this vision of himself playing an instrument — which he’d later find out was the saxophone — kept replaying in his mind. He claims he could even hear the music it produced. “Every time I closed my eyes, these images were there... I couldn’t understand it, I thought I was going crazy.”
Adam P. Newton reviews Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock & Roll to You, “an underheard story about Contemporary Christian Music.”
[T]he book gives us much more than back-office shenanigans between the movers, shakers, and contract signers. It’s replete with both origin stories and the long-term impact of CCM icons in terms of how much they sold, how the fans treated them, and how the artists felt about the industry. We hear tales of the immortal “Jesus Per Minute” ratio imposed upon the lyrics, the infamous “If You Like This Secular Band, You’ll Love This CCM Band” posters, and the tours sponsored by influential parachurch (as in, not formally affiliated with any specific denomination) organizations like World Vision and Compassion International.
As someone who grew up listening to CCM in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I feel contractually obligated to read Payne’s book. I’ve listened to several episodes of her Rock That Doesn’t Roll podcast, and it’s must-listen material for anyone who grew up listening to Christian rock in that era.
Cosmologist Paul Sutter picks his list of the top 5 astronomical discoveries of all time, such as the motion of heavenly objects.
Nothing like this had ever been deduced before. Working from an ungodly number of hand-written tabulations of planetary positions, Kepler’s work provided the theoretical springboard for the entire scientific revolution. Here, Kepler was able to succinctly and accurately describe a whole host of phenomena with three simple statements. Kepler’s laws were so simple and so easy to calculate that it drove the transition from a geocentric to a heliocentric conception of the Universe. Without ellipses, the heliocentric model of Copernicus, the one championed by Galileo, wasn’t that much simpler than previous models. With elliptical orbits, the Sun-centered Universe was a slam dunk.
All I’m saying is that if I won the lottery, there would be some signs.
Grab your dice and get ready to (literally) assemble your adventuring party next month — Lego has finally unveiled the 3,745-piece Dungeons & Dragons set it co-developed with Wizards of the Coast as the tabletop roleplaying game celebrates its 50th anniversary.
The $360 set, called “Red Dragon’s Tale,” was inspired by Lucas Bolt’s fan design, “Dragon’s Keep: Journey’s End,” and retains many of the same features. There’s a tower, a bridge, a tavern with a removable roof, and yes — both a dungeon and a dragon.
Self-professed X-Men nerd Tyler Huckabee reviews the new Disney+ X-Men ‘97 cartoon and discovers that it kicks ass.
Talk about understanding the assignment! This is a show that knows its most likely viewers are either old fans now pushing 40 or those old fans’ kids, and it has plenty to offer both groups. There’s a lot of bright, splashy fun for kids who want to see the BANG! POW! stuff, but the writer’s room is also developing sharp and complicated relationships. Cyclops, Jean, Storm, Rogue, Magneto and the rest all have well-rounded personalities and motivations and things they want that sometimes bring them into conflict with the world around them and with each other. It’s not exactly rocket science but it is wild how much modern storytelling forgets to do this!
I loved the original X-Men cartoon series back in the early ‘90s, so of course I’m interested in this. And I totally agree with Huckabee’s assessment that superheroes work better in animation. For me, this has been particularly true of the DC universe. DC animated titles are routinely more interesting and enjoyable than their live-action counterparts.
The World Wide Web turned 35 this month. Its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has penned an open letter to mark the occasion — and he has some concerns.
There was no roadmap to predict the course of [the web’s] evolution, it was a captivating odyssey filled with unforeseen opportunities and challenges. Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity — what I term the 3 C’s. It was to be a tool to empower humanity. The first decade of the web fulfilled that promise — the web was decentralised with a long-tail of content and options, it created small, more localised communities, provided individual empowerment and fostered huge value. Yet in the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them. The consequences are increasingly far reaching. From the centralisation of platforms to the AI revolution, the web serves as the foundational layer of our online ecosystem — an ecosystem that is now reshaping the geopolitical landscape, driving economic shifts and influencing the lives of people around the World.
Via Pixel Envy.
When parents become influencers and begin using their kids to generate content, those kids can easily end up with a lost or even stolen childhood.
Being the child of an influencer, Vanessa tells me, was the equivalent of having a full-time job—and then some. She remembers late nights in which the family recorded and rerecorded videos until her mother considered them perfect and days when creating content for the blog stretched into her homeschooling time. If she expressed her unease, she was told the family needed her. “It was like after this next campaign, maybe we could have more time to relax. And then it would never happen,” she says. She was around 10 years old when she realized her life was different from that of other children. When she went to other kids’ houses, she was surprised by how they lived. “I felt strange that they didn’t have to work on social media or blog posts, or constantly pose for pictures or videos,” she says. “I realized they didn’t have to worry about their family's financial situation or contribute to it.”
Every time I see an influencer’s family on social media — even if they’re doing something obviously fun, goofy, and harmless — I feel uncomfortable, like I’m being given a glimpse of something that I really shouldn’t be seeing.
Back in 1991, author and journalist Philip Yancey was invited to Russia along with a group of other American Christians to discuss communism’s failure and how best to “restore morality to the Soviet Union.” But the invasion of Ukraine has left him wondering what went wrong in Russia.
As I listen to news reports from Russia now — fleeing émigrés, assassinations, mass arrests, press clampdowns, war crimes, nuclear threats — I keep replaying the gripping scenes I witnessed in 1991: dazed Pravda editors grasping for truth, peasants standing in a packed chapel, journalists applauding prison ministries, and even KGB agents issuing a public apology. It seemed as if an entire ideology had melted around me. Instead, it went underground, only to reappear in a more sinister form. Sadly, the war in Ukraine is all too typical of Russia’s current modus operandi.
Related: My review of Yancey’s memoir, Where the Light Fell. “Consistently winsome, even when he’s plumbing the darkest parts of his past.”
From the Blog
A recent post from one of my favorite social media accounts inspired a few thoughts on AI and its creation of a post-truth society.
AI proponents will likely dismiss the concerns of a nerdy social media account, but what The Spaceshipper describes is precisely what a post-truth society looks like. That is, a society where it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between the material created by actual (human) artists, filmmakers, and creators, and the stuff resulting from AI prompts.
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