Homesick......aka Who in their right mind watches TV?

I felt remarkably homesick tonight, yet I didn't call my parents or my brother or sister, I just waited it out. I got through the pang, and now I'm just tired. I have to read quite a bit for class this week, and I look forward to it, but it also looms. I have a meeting with my Mentor this week as well, we'll see how that goes. I am so grateful to be back here because I've found so many more things to waste my time on. I don't have TV, I have people to hang out with. Instead of staring at the boob tube all day, I have turned to riding the metro into downtown LA, or staying up until three in the morning riding bikes with some of my best friends, or reading late into the night and thinking about ways to be romantic. This is what it's supposed to be like. I got to be with my family all summer, and now I miss thier company, I miss thier presence, I miss thier smiles, hugs, sounds, smells, and touches. Yet, I have so many people where I am that care about me and live life with me. I thought about my mom and dad a lot today, and then I wondered were my sister would be spending the night. On a beach somewere? Or has she already made it to Alaska? I wondered how my brother and how his three beautiful girls are. Why are there such gaps in my communication with them? I have time to call, but blow it off. Why? Why do I push things as far back as they can go before I actually set to work on them. Or is that work what really matters now? Was my day just as well spent having meaningful conversations with my floormates and riding all across town with my friends, as it would have been doing the work due next week? I think so. There is so much to fill the day with, how could I have missed it before?
Can our imaginations break? Or do they just get tired out?
Aspirations are a good thing, if you are perseverant.
Bed calls, but the mind is still turning, working, solving, and mulling.
My mind hasn't felt this worked for a while.
Thank God I'm back,
When can I go home?

hideaway folk family

I am part of a band called hideaway folk family. The band is M.A. Christian and his Destine, Nitch Vader, Abraham, and Dan Christian, with many other members coming and going. We are in the process of making an album, called Stray Bullet. Please visit www.myspace.com/haffwayhouse to learn more and listen to demos.

Listen to Stray Bullet and follow the story of the hideaway folk family as they cross the black seas...

and meet many friends...
VilliansAnd heroes!We hope that you will join us on our journey........

(all artwork by M.@. Christian)

JUSTICE

I love music. I don't think I could live without it. In honor of this love, I will be periodically talking about some of my favorite bands, and their different styles. I figured I'd start with one that I have recently gotten into.

So, I have discovered Justice. I saw the shining outline of a cross and was taken, and have just become more so while listening to the album. This is my first venture into Euro-Electro House, and I am amazed. This album has some funky synth bass, some dirty electronic sounds, amazing rhythms, and will most surely make you groove, but I'm not sure I understand where this band is coming from yet. Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay have a great musical vision for a dance house duo. This is much more than trite industial canned beats and filller pop. They are most definately saying something with their music that is communicated through something greater than lyrics, yet the lyrics on the album seem either satyrical of the typical clubbing lifestyle (Tthhee Ppaarrttyy), or in homage to a certain club or character (D.A.N.C.E. and DVNO). The rest of the album is an amazing soundscape. The song on the album that stands out the most to me right now, in having an amazing mesh of title and sound, and of portraying the title of the song very well is Stress. This piece is actually stressful, and makes you feel on edge...through the entire 5:00 minutes. The part of this song that confuses me is the video. It is a very violent film for a music video. It portrays a gang sporting the symbol of the band, the orange cross. Throughout the video, they beat numerous people and spit on and slap people in the face. They destroy whatever is in their path. It is an extremely well made piece of visual art, and fits the music amazingly, but I'm not sure what Justice is trying to get across, especially by having the gang where the image of the cross.This probably stems from my very limited knowledge of immigration and gangs in Europe, but there are an amazing amout of responses to the video already, many from French citizens.

To me, as a Christian, the empty cross is a symbol of life. It is a symbol of Christ's sacrifice for the sins of everyone who believes in his name. It is not a symbol of violence. The cross is a large motif in the work of Justice. They even perform live with a large lit up white cross in center stage. Thier myspace page proclaims them as Christian.Their actions, and even words, do not match what they portray in the video for Stress. The video most definately does not condone gang violence, in fact, the video made me feel disgusted all the way through. It seems like they are sending double messages when they have the very gang in the video that is portrayed as doing wrong wearing the symbol of Christ, and the symbol of the band. Whatever they are trying to say, they are for sure getting people to talk and discuss what is going on.

For me, this does not change that they are great musicians, and that I greatly enjoy the music. I'm just slightly confused by their message.

Listen to the Whole Thing

I just had a recent conversation with a friend about what to do when you get a new album. Listen to the whole thing. I have run into more and more people this year only buy an album because they like one song. There is more importance to an album than that. An album is a cohesive thing; it is a collection of expressions, and should be searched out completely. All parts of the whole must be seen to appreciate the music. When you are seeking to enjoy the music you listen to, you can't skip around an album and still gain what you would by sitting and listening to the entire work. Thinking about an album as a full piece of art is, I think, very logical. You wouldn't read the first, third and last chapters of a book on the first read, for you have to get the whole picture. Later, you may go back and re read your favorite passages, just as you would go back and listen to favorite songs off of an album.


This brings to mind something that my brother related to some of the younger musicians out in the world today, and how they didn't grow up with vinyl. With vinyl, you have to listen to a complete side, or at least you had to. There was no skip button, you laid down the needle and relaxed. The more developed bands of today, more often the older ones, still write with this in mind. Radiohead is a prime example. Their albums are composed in two separate halves. There is a point at which the LP would be flipped over. The Beatles are an even better example, because their music was originally on vinyl. Another awesome example is Led Zeppelin. Every song on Zeppelin IV is so good, that they can be listened to by themselves by someone familiar with the album, but to get the full force of Zeppelin IV, they all have to be heard together. They record this way because they realize and think in a way that suggests a full cohesive album. One song by itself does not carry as much meaning without the song before it and after it.

The Composers Power

Today was the Biola University Band Festival/Invitational Competition. I attend Biola, and play percussion in the Symphonic Winds. All Winds players are required to help out in the Festival and I had the privilege of being the band liason for my former high school. It was amazing. I had forgotten how much I loved all of those guys. I was reminded greatly today of my passion to teach high school music, especially in talking to my high school band director. It was so fulfilling to here that band that I had been part of for four years play so well today, and to see the great difference between a high school band an a college band. They have much learning to do and skill to build, and I so hope that I can be there with them when they do. Yet, I still have much to learn as well.

I love high school musicians, because they are just starting to perfect their skill in music. In high school happens the realization of how awesome, full of emotion, and amazing music can be. Student musicians in high school start out and may not know what they want to play, or may just be taking band class to get rid of a fine arts credit, but eventually it builds to much more than that. Those that dont actually love music with a passion in the first place will eventually leave, and those that live, breath, and emote through their instruments will stay.

To truly play music and perform music, you have to love it. I want to help the budding musicians in high school, who are still figuring out how to love one of the greatest gifts of God in the universe. God created every note and rhythm in the world, and gave us the creativity to put them together into beautiful mixture.

"She thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and godlike was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality." ----Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles chaper XIII

The power of the composer is power to express, emote. To communicate to others through sound what he was feeling at certain moment.

How amazing it is to be the conveyors of this emotion as musicians.

The Greatest?

"No, No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved."
--Soren Kierkegaard

Is this really what it is all about? being great? I personally could live with no one knowing my name.....nope, thats a lie. Pride is a dangerous thing, to live with and deal with. Are we really here so that we will not be forgotten later? I don't think so. We are not here to lift up our own names, but to lift of the name of Christ, but will our names be remembered because people saw Christ in us? How can we bring recognition to Christ and still live outside of the spotlight?
Just recently a man very important to the school that I attend passed away. He was extremely faithful, extremely loving, and was an example of Christ to many people, yet those people that he impacted remembered him becuase of Christ, not himself. He loved, as Christ loved, he loved. How can we love as Christ loved? What love can we give that would be at all representative of what Jesus Christ has done for us?
It has to be possible to love with this love, because we are called to do it. Through doing it, we lift up the real and pure love of Christ. But, by doing this, do we bring any recognition to our own name?
Are we truly "crucified with Christ" and "no longer live" but "Christ lives in us."
How do we love others, and really deny ourselves?
God help me to do what you have called.

Oh God "Grant what you command, and command what you will" -- St. Augustine

Midnight Teatime

It is a wonderful thing to sit with friends and drink tea. Thats probably why I do it so much. Myself and a couple of other guys here where I live just started to sit together. It happened very randomly, and is all the better for it. If it were planned, it wouldn't be the same. Now it has become a routine, at midnight. Midnight Teatime.
It gives you time to talk to each other. You may have work to do, and you may get some done, but you always feel the better for just sitting and trading words for a couple of hours. You could really drink any type of tea too, because that part of it doesn't really matter. You could drink Chamomile, Earl Grey, Chai, Green, Mate, Vanilla, whatever....as long as you speak between sips. The meaning comes through the conversation. I love to talk to people, and sometimes wish that I could live without sleep. If I look away from my work to sit and talk with my brothers, is it bad? The work will get done later. When conversation calls, it should be answered.
Really, it doesn't even have to happen over tea. It could happen anywhere at anytime as long as there is more than one heart beating in a room. Talk, whenever there is time, talk.