PeaceBang

Melinda Doolittle Is My American Idol

I watched “American Idol” on Tuesday night and, um, Melinda was the only one who didn’t have serious pitch and tonality problems.

What happened this season?

That kid Sanjaya was atrociously bad. What was the deal there?

The kid who sang badly and then tried to redeem himself by giving a shout-out to his friends at Virginia Tech (Chris?) had terrible tonality issues, and was “pitchy.”

Jordin Sparks was waaaay overrated. She had a few great moments, but I’ve seen local karaoke singers do a much better job with similarly difficult songs. She went flat several times!

I was rather horrified by the scream fest that was “Jesus Take the Wheel.” You have to know your voice better than that.

Melinda was the one bright spot in a painful evening. She’s the hands-down winner in that group.

Oh, and by the way: Simon wasn’t rolling his eyes at Chris’s tearful comment. He couldn’t *hear* Chris’s tearful comment. He was understandably pish-poshing the kid’s snotty protestation that “nasally is a kind of singing.”

I won’t be tuning in again. There seems to be no competition there.

"Why We Need Religion" by Jeff Jacoby

This editorial by Jeff Jacobs appearedin today’s Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/18/why_we_need_religion/

Have at it, gang.

I appreciate that for once, a conservative writer admits that atheists can still be good and moral people (THANKya, Jesus), and I really–especially lately — appreciate his point that the philanthropic spirit is not as natural to human beings as self-interest. It takes some kind of moral discipline to develop the benevolent, community-oriented ethic that the pastors he references obviously have. Religion is one way to get that.

But I wonder about his final statement asserting that a world without God in it would be “an evil place indeed.”

Really?
How does he know?

Does he mean ontologically, or socially, or what?

I mean, if there is a God that can be said to even vaguely resemble our our limited human intuitions and descriptions of It (mysterium tremendum, LORD, Oversoul, inexpressible magnificent intensity, etc.), isn’t it a little silly to even posit a world without that God? Including evil, which, according to most theistic concepts, is part of the created order?

And if there isn’t a God, what would get more evil about this world, really?

Maybe Jeff hasn’t figured out that millions of us God-believing folk aren’t so much honoring a reality that we’re sure of as honoring an Ideal, whether it actually “exists” or not.

All of this Atheism-vs-Theism stuff is just the latest Big Popular Unnecessary Polarization, anyway. As the globe gets smaller and we really see that all humans are just human, we’ll grasp at anything we can find to put ourselves into separate, antagonistic camps. Both rationalism and theism, in their distinct ways, counsel against such polarities, but hey, if it makes a buck and gives people a reason to fight, it ain’t going away anytime soon.

UUs and Class

Joel Monka wrote a very provocative post here:

http://cuumbaya.blogspot.com/2007/04/working-class-unitarians.html

referencing another article by Doug Muder that was like a punch in the stomach, but a really loving and good punch that let’s you see the stars while you’re lying on your back getting your breath back:

http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2007/04/unitarian-universalism-and-working.html

What The Body Knows

Still Waters
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I knew something was wrong, or off, yesterday when I sang almost an entire concert from somewhere not quite in my body. Every third or fourth song, I would look into the audience and really connect, but most of the time I was smiling and energetic but on some deep level I just wasn’t home.

Partly it is this time of year. I go into reveries and while I’m technically in 2007, my mind is living 25 years ago. A smell can cause this time travel, or a song, or a quality of the rain. April is the cruelest month, as the poet wrote. For me it is the most nostalgic.

I watched a father and his elementary school-age daughter snuggling at rehearsal on Friday night, she sitting in his lap, he absent-mindedly kissing her forehead, and I felt absent of words, just a little mouse in the hidey hole with the other mices. Very tender, very vulnerable.

Another person at the rehearsal is hugely pregnant and due to give birth any day now. I watched her prepare a little piece of French toast for her firstborn, so grounded in her big, extravagant body, and I felt like I was floating out of mine.

I put 100 miles on the car without having any real sense of where I had been.

I slept 8 hours most nights this week with no real sense of the days being different from the nights. My mojo is looooow. I re-read my Easter sermon and couldn’t remember having written it. When did I write that? Was that me? Did we really dedicate that beautiful baby girl that morning, our living evidence that God loves us enough to keep inviting us to the party even though we’ve been such a bad guest at Her house?

It should have come as no surprise, then, when I was hit with a major panic attack yesterday evening. When my mind, body and soul slip apart like that, my body is usually processing through the accumulated stress and trauma of the past few months and deciding what to do with it. If I have not been consistent with exercise, prayer, quiet time and intentional healing work, I fall prey to anxiety attacks, or just chronic sense of anxiety that sits in my chest, back and neck and holds me in the kind of bear hug granted by an overly-needy participant in a men’s spirituality retreat.

If you’ve never experienced a full-blown anxiety attack, it’s hard to explain. For me, as I’ve described before, there is the textbook sensation of “fight or flee,” a quick spreading heat all over my body, tingling extremities, blurred vision and a sense of “losing it.” I literally can’t see straight. I can’t focus my thoughts. Every bit of energy is occupied with the struggle to remain calm, remain in the body.
My thoughts come in big block letters: “YOU ARE NOT DYING.”
” YOU DO NOT NEED TO CALL 911″
“YOU SHOULD BREATHE DEEPLY AND SLOWLY.”

I talked with my mother as it hit, and she was good, allowing me to put the phone down and stretch and walk as I needed. She did not panic herself. She knows I’m fine.

Sleep came only after much effort and stern admonitions to self (”WE HAVE CHURCH IN THE MORNING. GO. TO. SLEEP.”). When I awoke with slight fluttering and trembling, I shot out the back door into the cold yard and walked firmly around it, telling myself all the while to “CUT IT OUT, NOW.”

It was so good to be with my church. The service went well. The music was beautiful. My congregants were healing to me, with their fine energy and their humor and their warmth.

The struggle continues. I talk about it because I believe that chronic anxiety is an extremely common ailment of our time, and because I believe that creative and spiritually-oriented folks need to know that someone like them — someone whose very life blood is in the work of ministry, pastoring, writing, witnessing and living as deeply as possible — is willing to speak honestly about the ways we can skid off the road and into high weeds if we do not care for ourselves as tenderly and in as much detail as we care for others.

Oh, it’s not worth beating ourselves up over. I’ve done that and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t work. What does seem to work is just accepting what is, getting help that I need from whatever sources seem promising, and talking truth about it. In my experience, having an anxiety disorder is less exotically stressful the more honest and plain I am about it. It is simply an extreme fight-or-flight response that happens out of context, shocking the respondee and causing more fear and alarm.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made. And yet, it is a challenging responsibility to be the best stewards we can be of these marvelous instruments within which we experience the miracle of incarnation.

I wish you health, and a peaceful heart.

Blogger Picnic May 19th?

blogger picnic
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Philocrites asked a few weeks ago if we all wanted to plan a Boston Area Blogger’s Picnic.

We are welcome again at First Parish in Milton, and maybe if we pick a good date, it won’t POUR RAIN THIS YEAR!!

Does May 19th work for you?

Sweet the Sound Concert Tomorrow!

Sweet the Sound Concert Tomorrow!
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Sweet the Sound will have a concert tomorrow, April 14, at 3pm at the First United Methodist Church in Melrose, MA.

The church is at 645 Main Street

This probably concludes PeaceBang’s blogging until such time as she has many hours to devote to the problem of signing into Blogger. She has cleared her cache, chosen new passwords for Google accounts, messed with three different browsers, deleted an interfering Gmail account, signed in and out of her three MSN e-mail addresses and enabled her cookies. She is at wit’s end and can’t devote any more time to the issue for the next several days.

In the meantime, and until I can transfer to WordPress — a transition for which I’ve been preparing for some weeks now — PeaceBang blows you kisses and wishes you all well.

Imus Fired

I’m glad he got fired.

I am depressed, however, reading the comments on MSNBC.com, which I have to believe represent the Average American.

There’s the usual trite comments about “free speech” and “double standards,”
the expected vitriol against Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the brilliant analyses about how this is “all about money,” and lots of folks saying Imus went too far but he shouldn’t have been fired.
I’m too tired to write at length about this now, so I hope others of you will. I said my piece earlier and I’m still trying to process why I feel this episode was so particularly ugly and upsetting.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I spent most of Monday curled up with this marvelous novel about America, about incestuous love, about sexual identity, about family secrets, about growing up and getting pounded into manhood or womanhood by culture and self and the deep desires of mama and papa.

After years of slogging through pointless, derivative novels, it was a joy to read something so thoroughly engaging, original and well-written. I didn’t love Calliope, the narrator, I respected and admired her.

Eugenides is an amazing talent. I’ve never seen an author play around with past, present and future tense with such alacrity.

The novel is so redolent of immigrant culture it made me yearn terribly for juicier ethnic life than we have on Boston’s South Shore. I finished the book thinking, God, it’s so white where I am. So, so white. When I put down the book, my body literally ached for the colorful New York Jews of my childhood, and for the wonderful ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, my favorite of the cities I’ve lived in.

A delightful read. But long, so don’t start it when you’re too busy.

Love You, Mr. Vonnegut

Love You, Mr. Vonnegut
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I’m going to manage to say that I love Kurt Vonnegut without feeling the necessity to mention his Unitarian connections.

Because they don’t matter.

His literature and his essays and lectures do matter.

I adore/d his genius mind, and his work has greatly enriched my life.

Rock on, Mr. V. Your works go before you.

This poignant image was on his website:

http://www.vonnegut.com/

Imus and The Culture of Incivility

One of my guilty pleasures is reading celebrity gossip blogs, but lately I’ve reached my disgust limit with them and I don’t think I’ll be going back again.

The thing is, although the sites are often quite funny, they can also be incredibly vile — and they give really ignorant, decidedly unfunny people a forum for contributing extraordinarily hateful comments about the various celebrities — particularly focusing on their bodies.

On a typical site, photos of Uma Thurman in an ill-fitting bikini generate 106 disgusting meditations on the condition of her breasts, which are apparently committing the crime of not being silicone-filled and immune to the effects of age and child-bearing. A photo of Britney Spears with a stain on her blouse appears on dozens of these blogs and obliges dozens of anonymous posters from all over the country to call her names that should make any decent person blush with shame. Cameron Diaz caught by paparazzi without make-up earns her savage insults, and everyone and anyone is referred to as “slut,” “ho,” “fag” and “pig” and “bitch.”

It seems that merely being an entertainer or celebrity — especially a female one — makes anyone fair game for this sort of insanely vicious attack.
It’s one thing for bloggers to engage in hyperbolic tirades against politicians or world leaders who make offensive policy out of ignorance and arrogance. For instance, I’m not offended by anyone who spews venom at a Rick Santorum or a South Dakota Senator Bill Napoli (have you forgotten? I’ve reproduced below his outrageously misogynistic remarks regarding what he thinks would constitute an acceptable definition of rape for the purposes of allowing abortion — to which my own blogger’s response was that he should be anally impaled on the Statue of Liberty — which I thought had a fine democratic zing to it) as a way of publicizing and puncturing the outrageousness of these guys’ rhetoric.

Blogging is a way that people with no power can hollaback at people with a lot of power. Celebrity blogs, however, aren’t so much confrontational as they are parasitic. The celebs feed the media machine, the bloggers consume it, and the whole thing becomes an ugly, totally unproductive spectacle about beautiful people with way too much money.

Don Imus’ incredibly disgusting, offensive remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was, for me, the last straw in wanting to participate in any way in this big media version of “the dozens.” What we seem to have forgotten, culturally, is that the art of doling out extravagant insult is something that can be done within affectionately affiliated peer or family groups, not by outsiders and not by wanna-bes. If my girlfriends and I want to call each other the “B” word, and if African-American folk want to call each other the “N” word, and if Jews want to knock on each other, it’s all in the family. Outsiders may critique the practice, but they can’t participate in it. Period.

Don Imus is most definitely not in any of the cultural “families” who use insult as a way of honing humor and resilience amongst themselves. He can’t claim affectionate affiliation with the talented female athletes he egregiously verbally violated, nor can he claim to be puncturing their power and influence for any good reason. He is simply an overpaid, privileged white man who spews hateful, sexist, racist invective because he has done so before and has gotten away with it under the guise of “entertainment.”

His party is apparently over, and maybe now he can start to bridge the great divide between being the so-called “not a bad man” he claims to be and the harmful, hateful radio talk show host he’s been behaving as. And the rest of us can continue the conversation about how it is that women in our culture are so regularly denigrated in just this way with no public outcry whatsoever.

[Editorial note: I don’t have time to edit this post and I can’t sign into Blogger at home right now, so this will have to stand as is. - PB]

*Said Senator Napoli:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”