I have relaunched my Living in Woodstock, Illinois blog (old one here). I was posting inconsistently and I just wanted to do better. So a fresh look gives me a little motivation to gett'r going again. Unless you live in McHenry County with me, don't comment there. It's meant to be a local blog and most of you are not local. But I thought you might like to see it.
Living in Woodstock, Illinois is really about my experiences as a resident of Woodstock/McHenry County. I figured it would be a great way to interact with my culture. I post my photos, talk about restaurants and cafés, local sports and kid stuff, nearby places that a resident here is near enough to travel to (like downtown Chicago), and a lot more. It's meant to be a positive expression of what life looks like here because I love where I live.
Molly Update: Molly is very, very tired. Every day she sleeps about the right amount of time and feels like lying down for the rest of the day. She can't nap well and never feels refreshed or energized. It's very frustrating for her. I regularly walk in the house or walk upstairs from my office and find her on the couch or in the bed. Her attitude is in the right place but her body just won't keep step. Calls to the neurologist and medication adjustments continue.
Who is pumped?! I look forward toNational Poetry Month (April) during the other 11 months, and now it starts up tomorrow. You can check out my '07 and '08
posts to whet your appetite. It's going to be a month full of delight
and pain and discovery and contemplation. I hope you, even if not a big fan
of poetry, will awake a bit more through poetry to the wonder of things
usually unnoticed. Here are a few quotes about poetry to get us thinking...
Poetry fosters and nurtures life by finding wonder in the
nooks and crannies of ordinary life. (via)
Poetry is what gets lost in translation. -Robert Frost
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. -Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. -W.B. Yeats
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. -Plato, Ion
As most of my readers know, The Avett Brothers have been a favorite of our family these last few years. I continually get feedback from folks who have found the Avett's through Reformissionary and come to love them as we do. Some good stuff out there right now about the band, including articles by American Songwriter Magazine and Rolling Stone. They also have a new album coming out this summer called I and Love and You. Look for it. I'm sure I'll be talking about it as the release date approaches.
I love throwing more Avett Brothers videos out there for you, and here's a great live performance of "If It's The Beaches"...
And here's a little video interview with The Avett Brothers at SXSW by last.fm...
Last week I got to host anotherpodcast for the Exponential Conference. This time it was with Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church
in Manhattan, New York City. And Tim was simply brilliant! At one
point in the podcast (I have listened to see if they edited this out) I
just start gushing and say, "Tim, I don't care if nobody else
listens to this podcast, this is such great stuff, I'm glad that we got
to have this conversation!" So, click HERE and check out some great stuff on church planting and how movements are constructed by Tim Keller.
Also of note, and I just keep forgetting to mention this, the Tim Keller Wiki.
I found two remarkable quotes, from different sources, and realized they were from the same speech from Karl Paulnack about music. Here's one of them (via)...
I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.
With that in mind, I present to you an obvious basic human need...Music Monday. First, Neko Case has a new video for "People Got A Lotta Nerve" off her excellent new album, Middle Cyclone (download, CD)...
DM Stith's Heavy Ghost (download, CD) continues to haunt me. The short, first track is "Isaac's Song." Here's the video with Stith's art, about the story of Abraham and Isaac. Put yourself in that story and walk with them into the forest with your father...
The first is something fun I did with Elijah's concert photo from this week. The second is rural Kentucky in April of 2006. Got some great photos from that trip. My photography.
The Curator is a new (fall of '08) website of the International Arts Movement (IAM). I think IAM is great and this website should gain a large audience.
The Curator launched on August 29, 2008 as a web publication of International Arts Movement(IAM), which announces the signs of a “world that ought to be” as we
find it in our midst, and seeks to inspire people to engage deeply with
culture that enriches life and broadens experience.
In keeping with IAM’s belief that artistic excellence, as a model of
“what ought to be”, paves the way for lasting, enduring humanity, The Curator
seeks to encourage, promote, and uncover those artifacts of culture –
those things which humans create - that inspire and embody truth,
goodness, and beauty.
The founder of IAM, Makoto Fujimura, is interviewed (part 1, part 2) at The High Calling.
In my studio, I use ground minerals such as malachite and azurite, layering them to create prismatic refractions, or "visual jazz." Via my art I hope to create a mediated reality of beauty, hope, and reconciled relationships and cultures....In order to find hope, even in the midst of the broken and torn fragments of relationships, in order to begin to journey into the heart of the divide, we must first wrestle with the deeper issues of faith. We must be willing to be broken ourselves into prismatic shards by the Master Artist, God, so that Christ's light can be refracted in us.
The more I look through The Open Sourcebook the more I love it. About the site...
Welcome to the Open Sourcebook, a growing collection of resources for
worship. Our collection grows daily, and comes from real-world church
contexts. You are welcome to use anything from the Open Sourcebook for
free, as all of our content is protected by the Creative Commons
License.
Molly Update: Mol has been tired lately. Meds help her sleep, but she has just been dragging. We'll see what the neurologist says next appointment. No results on her neuro-psych test...other than Molly doesn't know jack about Madame Curie and can't do mental math as good as our 6 year old. Fortunately for her I married her for her body and not her mind. :) And yes, I had her permission to say that.
Found at Culture Making: "Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.” "
The new Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Beware, is getting good reviews. Sample it at Amazon. Review and song preview at Paste. It releases tomorrow (download, CD). Remember Radiohead's great performance of "15 Step" with the USC Marching Band? Awesome. Go watch the nearly 9 minute video behind the scenes.
On My iPod...
I'm listening to a lot of John Coltrane's The Ultimate Blue Train. You can still download it for $1.99 and I highly recommend it. Sale won't last much longer. DM Stith's Heavy Ghost (great reviews!) is eerie and wonderful so far (download, CD). The Pogues are perfect for St. Patrick's Day and a Shamrock Shake. Really, they are great any time of year. No question their If I Should Fall From Grace With God is worth a lot more than Amazon's $3.99 price! Our Sunday morning at-home music before gathered worship was David Crowder Band's Remedy. Only $5 right now.
Videos...
I grabbed the 2008 Missy Higgins album, On A Clear Night, because it was only $5 (still is!) and it's just the kind of music my wife loves. I'll be honest, I really like it too. Here's a great quality live version of "Where I Stood." This chick can sing...
Don't miss this last video. Maybe the most important song ever made...
I need to get back into my Phriday Photo posts, so I'm vowing (right hand raised, left hand on my Nikon) to make my best effort. Thanks to those of you who gently nudged me to get back to it. So for today a new photo and an older one. First, my son Jack on Monday in a waiting room at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison. The second is from March of 2007, a sunset photo.
Great sub.text forum with Ed Stetzer today. Ed's a lot of fun and full of tons of info. Good to think through our suburban mission. Hopefully in the near future we will have some audio to put up over at sub.text. I was challenged particularly today by Ed's encouragement to consider the idols of our culture.
I picked up a few books today at the Trinity bookstore, including Makoto Fujimura's Refractions. I've been a Mako fan since I learned of his work through Redeemer NYC and IAM.
I missed my Music Monday post because we were gone most of the day and I just didn't care to put it together last night. So here's a little music on this rainy Tuesday in Chicagoland.
Neko Case is great on Leno. That chick can sing! Watch it at Hulu.
I'm very impressed with the online samples of DM Stith. His album, Heavy Ghost, has been released today (mp3 download, cd) and you can stream the entire album here. Some who don't understand my musical tastes may be equally weirded out with Stith, but he's sounding brilliant to me at this point. Here's the creepy, haunting video for "Pity Dance"...
One more, from My Brightest Diamond. Not new, but new to me...
I shared the Avett Brothers cover of "Glory Days" on Wednesday of last week. It was from a project called Hanging Out On E Street that includes other artists covering Springsteen. Here's one from a dude I really like, Mat Kearney...
If you missed The Weepies $1.99 album, Hideaway, you are too late. I'm really enjoying it. Sounds a lot like a favorite band of mine, Winterpills. Here's The Weepies with "Can't Go Back Now"...
One last video, for fun. I don't watch Ellen. But I came across this by accident on YouTube and I thought it might be fun to share it with you...
I have relaunched my Living in Woodstock, Illinois blog (old one here). I was posting inconsistently and I just wanted to do better. So a fresh look gives me a little motivation to gett'r going again. Unless you live in McHenry County with me, don't comment there. It's meant to be a local blog and most of you are not local. But I thought you might like to see it. 
