May 2012
28 posts
too much too much too much love
- Q: Being an artist of some repute do you find the calling to spread the Good News sits awkwardly with your profile? Is it difficult?
- Sufjan: Not necessarily, you know, I think the Good News is about grace and hope and love and a relinquishing of self to God. And I think the Good News of salvation is kind of relevant to everyone and everything... The church is an institution and it’s incredibly corrupt obviously, but that’s because it’s full of dysfunctional people and people who are hurt and battered and abused. It’s very normal in any institution to have that kind of level of dysfunction. That’s unfortunate. I find it very difficult, I find church culture very difficult you know; I think a lot of churches now are just fundamentally flawed. But that’s true for any institution you know, that’s true for education, universities and it’s definitely true for corporations because of greed, and I think part of faith is having to be reconciled with a flawed community. But the principles, I don’t think the principles have changed. They can get skewed and they can get abused and dogma can reign supreme, but I think the fundamentals, it’s really just about love. Loving God and loving your neighbour and giving up everything for God. The principles of that, the basis of that is very pure and life changing.
Clocks/Chicago
Coldplay vs. Sufjan Stevens
Chicago by Sufjan Stevens and Clocks by Coldplay played together
I just smiled so obnoxiously that I think everyone in Espresso Royale considers me crazy. This is brilliant.
Yeah, this is old, but still insane.
“Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanisms of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” Jose Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.”
—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Twin Peaks: Season 2, Episode 19
- Annie: I lived in my head mostly.
- Cooper: Eh, that's not a bad neighborhood.
- Annie: There are some pretty strange neighbors.
“Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Listen
New favorite sub-genre: mountain-top chamber/indie folk.
“The point of the song is, you know, that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the Romantic poets—that we think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it’s a force for good, and if something bad happens then that’s not love. And the therapeutic tradition that I come from—I used to work in therapy—you know, also says that it’s not love if it feels bad. I don’t know so much about that. I don’t know that the Greeks weren’t right. I think they were—that love can eat a path through everything—that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know. I mean, my stepfather loved his family, right? Now he mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this—love is this benign, comfortable force. It’s not that. It’s wild, you know?”
—John Darnielle (via qu4ntity)
