Wander

Wandering outside of Reykjavik

Contact With Mystery

I wrote this piece on Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and what 'The Revenant' misses on purpose over at Christianity Today. 

“Iñárritu doesn’t offer a deus ex machina solution to a problem his protagonist can’t solve. Rather, the climax is a form of grace that reveals a better resolution than Hugh determined to achieve. Usually the end of a story is about a giant choice that changes everything. Hugh makes a passive choice rather than an active one.”

— "Contact With Mystery," by Elsa WIlson

Taken As We Are

I wrote this reflection on rejection, resurrection, and Vincent Van Gogh for Mockingbird.

“As I approached the first room of the exhibit, I wondered how they could make Van Gogh more “alive” than he already is. He is perhaps the most alive of any painter I know. The Olive Trees pulse at the edges of their frame every time I see them at the MoMA, New York City. But as I watched the exhibit’s narrative unfold – an arrangement currently on tour in Warsaw – I realized that it wasn’t only the art that was resurrected there. The experience seemed to exist as a reminder that we, too, could be resurrected. As I wandered between the projected light beams and the wall, the paintings were literally placed onto me, turning myself and other unsuspecting participants into image-bearers in a vaguely biblical sense.”

— "Taken As We Are," by Elsa WIlson

Writing the Wound: Wim Wenders Narrates Grace

I wrote about Wim Wenders over at Mockingbird.

“The Salt of the Earth follows Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s global pursuit of compelling images and stories. His photo projects take him from the gold mines of his native country to post-genocide refugee camps in Rwanda. Although Salgado narrates most of the film, Wenders’s vision for and attraction to the content shape our reception of the story. Salgado was entranced by the sense of dislocation in the people he photographed, and Wenders in turn reveals this dislocation to the viewer. Near the beginning of the film, Salgado says that photography is “writing and rewriting the world with light and shadows.” ”

— "Writing the Wound: Wim Wenders Narrates Grace," by Elsa Wilson

How to Eat Apple Pie

Ingredients:

1 piece of apple pie (the kind with the apples still crisp and coated in only cinnamon, with the kind of crust that you imagine when you imagine baking a whole pie crust to eat by itself and by yourself. I prefer pie a day old, when the flavors have become friends and the warmth left is a result of the pie and not the other way around)

1 half-piece of bacon (the kind of bacon that is leftover from breakfast and is lovingly split between you and your brother. The last piece of bacon is usually the best, but this is difficult to prove. Any good real bacon will do in a pinch, but sharing always adds to the satisfaction)

1 drizzle of homemade caramel sauce, also a day or so old (the kind made with heavy cream, real butter, love and vigilance: “watch the sugar carefully but do not stir or touch it!” is a difficult triumph)

Lastly, 1 splash of coffee. Note that this coffee should be at least a few hours old, preferably from the fourth or fifth cup of the day, the one you have been nursing for the better part of the morning or even afternoon. The first coffee of the morning, the kind you reach for zombie-like before you can think of or muster anything else, should be savored by itself and in hearty quantities. The coffee used for this pie should have been sitting on a desk while you have written or on a windowsill while you have read. It should have heard at least a few conversations, perhaps been microwaved once or twice to be fully matured. It’s purpose here is not to lift the spirits, but to remind them why they are lifted. It is more sacramental than foundational: the communion rather than the salvation.

Note: Apple pie, all pie rather, is exceptional cold or lukewarm, but I like this mixture warmed, once all the components have met in a sprinkling of introductions. If weather permits, eat the pie outside, observing the both the earth and the Creator you are enjoying.

The New Art of Apple

The following is a cultural theory piece I wrote in 2012. 

“Culture is what we make of the world.” In his book Culture Making, cultural commentator Andy Crouch uses this definition to show how cultural products represent the spirit, desires, and aspirations of the societies they are created in. How does that happen? Some examples seem obvious. We glimpse the ethos behind the ancient Greeks’ pursuit of aristeia by reading Homer. We can sense the disenchantment of the 1960s from A Hard Day’s Night. The spirit of the respective times is undeniably captured in literature, music and the visual arts. But what about parts of culture that are not generally considered art?What about creativity that is hidden in algorithms and in the wiring beneath computer keyboards? Technology. What does technology say about us? What can we learn about our weaknesses and dreams from our cellphones and laptops? To find out, the viewers must take themselves away from the end goal and think about how they got there. Why buy MP3s instead of vinyls? Our artistic ends have not changed, but our ways of reaching those ends have evolved. What do these changes say about twenty-first century zeitgeist?

Steve Jobs once said that Apple was “really shooting at Museum of Modern Art quality.” What does this mean? Can something as seemingly mundane and objective as a computer really be called art? The creative seeds of Apple Inc. offer a brave new worldview in which practical utilitarianism harmonizes with aesthetic beauty. Jobs is famous for giving the world a new computer, a new phone, and a new MP3 player, but closer inspection reveals what really made him a visionary. Jobs gave us a new form of art.

The modern world is a culture of self. In the West today, everything is about “me” – or, more accurately, Westerners are each at the centers of their own little universes. The focus is on the individual. Personal trainers are more in demand than group workout classes. Hyper-customized drinks at Starbucks and Jamba Juice give us the attention we want and make us think we are set apart from the customer behind us. As Joe Fox says in You’ve Got Mail, these opportunities to personalize give us “an absolutely defining sense of self.”

Flooding the electronics aisles is a whole stream of products that boldly specify their self-centralized agenda. iPods, iPads, and iPhones are all about us. They draw us away from the collective and toward our individualized tastes. Instead of buying an album and hearing the tracks in the same order as everyone else, we can pick and choose single songs on iTunes and create and name our specialized playlists.  iPhones allow users to recreate the organization of the home screen, select background art, file apps, name the files, and even personalize the use of the home button. Furthering this sense of self, Apple products are geared toward making our lives easier. Because if they really are about us, they should give us what we want, which for most of us is comfort.

But the ingenuity of Apple goes deeper than simply catering to what people want. Jobs hired German designer Hartmut Esslinger to create what Walter Issacson calls “a consistent design language for all Apple products.” Esslinger lived by the idea that “form follows emotion” – meaning that Apple products have a very pointed view of the world they are sold to. In creating Apple, Jobs was telling us that the technology we use every day can be both elegant and efficient. This is what makes an iPod different from a Microsoft Zune. It may be why you have not heard of a Microsoft Zune or have a hard time thinking of an MP3 player that is not an iPod. It is also why Mac users are different than PC users. The spirit of the technology itself reflects the spirit of the user, making different products attractive to different groups. CNN Tech ran an article called “Mac vs. PC: The Stereotypes May Be True.” According to a survey, CNN reported that “PC users’ tastes trend towards casual clothes, tunafish sandwiches, white wine, Hollywood movies, USA Today and Pepsi. Mac users prefer designer or vintage duds, hummus, red wine, indie films, The New York Times and (we’re not making this up) San Pellegrino Limonata.” So while Apple may be successful in part because it understands our society’s love of ease and being “cool,” there is something that transcends its successful functionality.

In the beginning, Mac computers were advertised as easier to use than PCs. Apple wanted to win over the un-savvy through easy-to-use applications and self-explanatory operation. Budding filmmakers, grandmothers, and soccer moms can all use iMovie to create projects that would take a lot more expertise on another program. But now, being tech-savvy is part of growing up in America. iPhones and iPads function on such intuitive principals that it is common to see babies playing with these devices. This user-friendliness is part of the reason kids are so tech-savvy. But babies are certainly not the majority of the tech market and everyone has to learn Microsoft Word at some point. So what continues to attract people to a $1499 Macbook instead of a much cheaper laptop?

Something makes Apple unique enough to compete at its high prices. Why is Apple so special? In his biography, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson explains it like this: “At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.”

Any purposeful innovation is the inventor’s answer to a perceived need or shortcoming in the existing progression of the time. What void was Jobs filling? He wanted technology –something that necessitates utilitarianism and practicality – to be something people want to show off and display. There is a certain feeling associated with pulling out a MacBook in Starbucks. It is giving off a message: this is expensive, this is sleek, cool, sophisticated, cutting edge. While this says a lot about human pride and our excessive focus on appearance, it is also a reflection of how Jobs thought the world should be. One of his old colleagues agreed that Jobs saw Apple products as “an extension of himself.” It is not hard to see how Jobs’ personal beliefs and philosophy were transmitted onto the products he invented and designed.

            Jobs believed he was creating art. He insisted that even the circuit boards of Macintosh computers be designed with aesthetic integrity. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible,” he said “even if it’s inside a box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” When the design for the Mac was finalized, Jobs had the design team’s signatures engraved inside each computer. Bill Atkinson, the graphics developer for Apple said “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art.”

Jobs wanted to defy the clunky, dismal look of competitors like Sony. To him, there was much more potential to technology than Sony’s industrial impression. He said “The current wave of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal grey, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it….It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” There was a better alternative, one that would become a successful trademark. “What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white.”

Jobs hated the idea of something existing only for its function. This is perhaps why many artistically inclined people choose Macs over PCs and iPhones over Blackberrys. Apple’s design insists that there is something more than functionality. Apple exists for the same reason that gourmet food exists, because some people see food not only as a necessity, but as a possibly to create and invent. Just as a gourmet dish is not simply a response to hunger, Apple was not just a response to the market. As Jobs said, “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.” Like all great innovations, Apple products go beyond what we need. They might be something we did not even know we wanted. But they feel right when we have them, because they appeal to very human sensibilities and appreciations of beauty.

Jobs certainly wanted to make something above average, something that would make people ooh and ahh. But can this be called art? Can true art even be useful in the way that computers are useful? In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis said that “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.” But Apple products are  all about the self, so they can hardly be called art by Lewis’ standards. Yet they are pleasing to the eye, designed with aesthetics as a priority, and made in pursuit of excellence.

Apple products are a new kind of art, art that requires a user instead of a viewer. Apple is an art form that requires participation and commands instead of appreciation and surrender. We do not study Picasso to make our lives easier, and we do not buy iPads to discuss and interpret them. But there is still a connection between the two – a spirit of striving for the excellent and rebellion against the precedent. For these reasons, Apple deserves to be called art.

One of the inspirations behind Apple was the real estate developer Joseph Eichler. In the sixties and seventies, Eichler brought elements of the high brow design and expensive genius of Frank Lloyd Wright to everyday families in California subdivisions. Isaacson quotes Jobs as praising Eichler, “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much.” Jobs goes on to sat that this “was the original vision for Apple….That’s what we did with the iPod.”

Apple’s design was also inspired by calligraphy classes that Jobs audited at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Because Jobs was so focused on the appearance of his products, he was not satisfied with the already complex algorithm needed to create circles and ovals on the Mac’s screens. He demanded that his star programmer, Bill Atkinson figure out a way to draw rectangles with rounded corners. Jobs wanted the new shape because he said “rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!” The appearance of the Mac’s screen could not be something alien and removed from real life. Jobs wanted the Mac’s design to reflect its surroundings, thus making the machine more human and more aesthetically comforting than its counterparts. Jobs also insisted on having a whole new collection of fonts for the Macintosh, making it further stand out. The Mac was not a new product, but a new prospective.

Jobs was perhaps most heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus was a German school in operation during the mid-twentieth century. Modern design, especially architecture, has been heavily influenced by the Bauhaus idea of bringing all arts together into a “total” art. Bauhaus followed the ideals of William Morris, one of the movement’s earliest influencers, who exhorted “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Bauhaus, also known as the International Style, sought to marry form with function. Isaacson described this look as emphasizing “rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms.” Jobs embraced the International Style, following its teaching that “design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit.”

As a Zen Buddhist, Jobs loved the idea of harmony between an object’s design and its function. There was a practical, customer-friendly aspect to Apple’s Bauhausian spirit. “As with Eichler homes”, notes Isaacson, the “artistic sensibility was combined with the capability for mass production.” One of Apple’s earliest slogans ran “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This design maxim illustrates the way Apple is geared toward making technology straightforward and easy to use. A true child of the Bauhaus movement, Apple is a combination of form and function.

Jobs wanted Apple to be useful and appealing, even whimsical. When asked about his company’s name, Jobs explained “Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ ” Isaacson said “The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie. There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. And the two words together–Apple Computer–provided an amusing disjuncture.”

Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. said of Jobs, “His design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it’s playful. He embraced minimalism, which came from from his Zen devotion to simplicity, but he avoided allowing that to make his products cold.” The result was something highly competitive but equally accessible. Apple products are clever but not intimidating – attractive to both business executives and graphic designers, college students and seasoned professionals. Speaking on Apple’s radical accessibility, Jobs said “Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.” Accessibility was not the norm in computers at the time. Terry Oyama, part of the Mac design team, said “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

In Jobs’ view, creating something necessitated making it excellent. He denounced Sony’s design not only because it was ugly, but because it was “not great.” If he was going to do something, he wanted to do it to the best of his ability. He called Mac computers beautiful. If the design was anything less than aesthetically excellent, Jobs wasn’t satisfied. Once, infuriated by the dullness of the Mac title bar design, Jobs yelled “Can you imagine looking at that everyday?” This is just one example of how Jobs believed that beauty was a necessity, not a luxury. As an artist, Jobs thought beauty should be part of our daily diets. Aestheticism is as vital to a piece of technology as functionality.

In Culture Making, Andy Crouch proposes four questions for understanding the impact of cultural artifacts: what does the cultural product assume about the way the world is, what does the product assume about the way the world should be, and what does the product make possible? Applying these principles to Apple illuminates its meaning and impact within our culture. The first question asks: what does Apple assume about the way the world is? Apple says that we need accessible technology that appeals to more artistic, creative people.

The second question asks how Apple proposes the world should be. Steve Jobs was saying that the things we use everyday should be beautiful. Instead of merely making what was needed, Jobs took what we needed and expanded it into something we did not even know we wanted. He created this new sense of identity that comes with owning Apple products.

In December of last year, CNN Money ran a story called “10 Ways Steve Jobs Changed the World” explaining what kind of technology Jobs believed to be ideal. “For Jobs, how a product looked, felt and responded trumped raw technical specifications. While PC makers chased after faster processor speeds, Jobs pursued clever, minimalist design.” An ad for the iPad 2 declared “This is what we believe, technology alone is not enough. Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things, but when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful, even magical.”

The iPhone makes possible magic like “War In Hipstamatic” published by Foreign Policy in July of 2011. The project, which features images by embedded journalist Balazs Gardi, is a documentation of the war in Afghanistan, told through the lens of the iPhone with the app Hipstamatic. The app is available for only $1.99, making such a project possible for anyone with an iPhone and a story to tell. In 1984 Apple called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” The ad proclaimed that “the real genius of Macintosh is that you don’t have to be a genius to use it.” Technology attempts to make our lives easier, and Apple attempts to make technology easier to use. In the words of another ad, Apple makes possible  “the delight of doing things faster and better and easier.”

Not only does Apple make technology easy to master, it makes status easy to acheive. Apple products are cool, sophisticated, relatively expensive, but not out of reach. According to AppleInsider, “Apple products appeared in 30% of all top movies in 2010, more than Ford, Nike, and Chevrolet.” Mac designer Esslinger confirmed that, like most best-selling products, Apple’s DNA was inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” Apple products are spotted in the hands of the hottest icons of our day. Ethan Hunt uses an iPhone to discover each mission, should he choose to accept it. Edward Cullen uses a Mac. We feel a resemblance to them – Ethan’s grit and Edward’s glamor – if we too own something stamped with the effortless half-eaten logo.

As if sex-appeal in a computer was not enough, Jobs thought he was actually making innovation possible. Isaacson said “Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil.” Jobs said “If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.” In the ancient world, a warrior’s pursuit of glory was called aristeia. If a warrior achieved aristeia, he would be remembered in songs and legends. What makes Steve Jobs stand out as a visionary and culture-maker is his pursuit of excellence. Jobs constantly aimed at something higher than the goals of his contemporaries. That is why he had such an impact on our world. Creating Apple was Jobs’ own version of aristeia. In combining form and function, the world of technology has been changed. Along with this change, our technology-infused and obsessed culture is being taught to love something radical. Apple envisions a new branch of art – one that favors being used on an office desk over hanging in a museum, yet retains a soul of aesthetic sensibility. Apple is a new hybrid kind of art that defies the selflessness Lewis attributed to artistic appreciation. Apple serves the individual. Apple invites us in, making it impossible, even counterproductive to remove ourselves from the picture. And yet, there is a transcendence about Apple that refuses to be categorized with the rest of modern technology. Steve Jobs’ picture of the good life – ease, beauty, even whimsy in the things we use everyday – has permeated our culture. No image of city life is complete without the iconic white earbuds of Apple’s iPod. A college campus would seem naked without the glow of Apple’s logo illuminating every other corner as students write Pages, talk on FaceTime, create iMovies, edit iPhotos, listen to iTunes, share pictures on iCloud, and organize iCalendars.

Beauty and utilitarianism, two concepts that once seemed incompatible, were united in Jobs’ vision for Apple. The result is an almost religious following – something that can be seen from the notes, flowers, and namesake fruit left outside Apple stores across the world after Jobs died on October 5, 2012. Why? Because Jobs gave us a new vision of the world, a fresh philosophy that resonates with our time. He gave us a picture of the good life that we desire, and a promise of the good life that the average American can afford to buy. Apple gave us something we did not think we needed, yet cannot live without. Identity, status, beauty, power, security. Apple gives us all of these, or at least appears to. So not only is Apple a new art, it is perhaps the most shamelessly human kind of art that exists right now. Apple casually caters to human weaknesses and insecurities, while claiming an almost spiritual appeal. Jobs “created these gadgets that changed people’s perceptions of machines,” said a mourner in Shanghai, “but he did not manage to witness the last step in which, through his gadgets, people’s lives can be effectively fused with these machines.”

Faith Not By Sight

The whole room is an eerie blue-green, invoking a mysterious or sinister sea-myth. But the man in the painting would never know. He is blind. His thin face is tilted pitiably to the right, letting light fall on his pointed profile. In place of his eye, there is an abysmal bruise. Judging by the man’s emaciated yellow skin, the room could be a prison. The man holds a meager loaf with a hand that could belong to an alien or a corpse. His other hand feels gently for his wine jug. Fluid brushstrokes create a smooth, watery motion on the canvas, emphasizing the Neptunian color palette.

The Blind Man’s Meal (1903) is part of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, which lasted from 1901 to 1904. Picasso painted prostitutes, beggars, and drunks in the Blue Period. Their bodies are disproportional, but somehow beautiful at the same time. Picasso depicted a beauty that is not straightforward, not immediate, not explicitly visual.

The Blind Man’s hands and ears are highlighted with lighter yellow and green paint. The emphasis on the hands and ears combined with his placement at the dinner table show us his limited sense of the tangible world. His oversized shirt and beret are almost the same color as the dark walls. But against his sickly skin he is wearing a rich blue scarf. Because he is blind, he does not need decoration or variety of color. Yet, the blue around his neck signals that he still has appreciation of beauty and creativity beyond what is visual. Perhaps the scarf is connected to a memory from his past before he went blind.

The bowl on the table is also decorated. Picasso probably chose this to show that creativity is not merely functional and appreciated by the senses, but also inevitable. Stars and whole planets exist where no one on earth can see them. Our “blindness” or ignorance does nothing to diminish beauty that insists on being alive.

Probably the most recognizable product of the melancholic Blue Period era is The Old Guitarist. The disorienting, angular musician looks like spirit in Dante’s Inferno. Like the Blind Man, the guitarist is also painted looking toward the left, with a sharp chin and nose. But the Old Guitarist looks even more decrepit. If the Blind Man is starving, at least there is hope for salvation. The guitarist is singing about the life that has already left him.

A year after The Blind Man’s Meal, Picasso painted The Frugal Repast (1904). This painting features another blind man and his wife. The set up is almost exactly the same: wine jug, cloth laid out on table, bowl, and bread. This blind man’s head is also turned to the left, his face like a knife. Again, Picasso gives the blind man a scarf around his neck.

What the blind man needs is something that cannot be seen. He is seeking more than physical sustenance as he reaches for the bread and wine. He is grasping for what is truly essential. This is what sets him apart from The Old Guitarist. In the bare darkness, strange and hollowed beauty survives. Like most of the figures in the Blue Period, the Blind Man looks like a wraith. But unlike the guitarist, the Blind Man may belong in Dante’s Purgatorio instead of his hell.

Search for Purpose: Fleet Foxes’ most recent album is also their most honest

Fleet Foxes were popular by 2007, thanks to MySpace and Napster. Lead vocalist and songwriter Robin Pecknold attributes this early attention to illegal music file sharing. But the music of the baroque pop/folk band seems otherworldly enough to atone for these painfully mundane sins.

The Seattle-born band released their first EP, Sun Giant, in 2008. A self-titled debut album followed, called simply Fleet Foxes. Their second full album, Helplessness Blues, serenaded the public in May of 2011. Although Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop/Bella Union) lost the Best Folk Album Grammy to The Civil Wars’ Barton Hollow, it was listed as one of the year’s best albums by both The Rolling Stones and Entertainment Weekly.

Pecknold calls the album “a synthesis of folk rock, traditional folk, & psychedelic pop, with an emphasis on group vocal harmonies.” Pecknold also lists Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Brian Wilson, and Van Morrison as inspiration. The music feels folksy. It sounds like the mountains. The harmony of Pecknold, Skyler Skjelset (Pecknold’s highschool friend), Christian Wargo, and Casey Wescott sounds like plaid shirts and foggy sunrises. The lyrics explicitly invoke apples in the summer, tar seeping up from the ground, the bloody reaper, and rotted fingers.

While Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were more like recitations of old legends – a subdued, peaceful collection of stories – Helplessness Blues is clearly a journey. It is a combination of deeper poetry and fuller sound. Pecknold’s voice is ethereal but also raw and hauntingly honest. Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes were closer to hymns, but Helplessness Blues is a supplication, a search for atonement and purpose.

The album uses instruments ranging from a 12-string guitar, zither, and fiddle to a hammered dulcimer, and even Tibetan singing bowls, whatever those are. Maybe it is the mixing of so many instruments and ethnic sounds that makes the album feel transcendent.

The rawer edginess in the latest album allows our relationship with Fleet Foxes to be more personal than before. We have a sense of the present, not the past. “So now I am older than my mother and father / when they had their daughter / now what does that say about me?” sings twenty-five-year-old Pecknold.

The album is clearly about maturing. “Guess I got old,” exclaims Pecknold with half whimsical, half biting simplicity (“Lorelai”). The poetry is woven out of the struggle that comes with growing up and seeing the world in different colors.  “I have borrowed all my loans from life / and I can’t, no I can’t get through / the borrower’s debt is the only regret of my youth.” Helplessness Blues is full of questions, from personal identity struggles (“Montezuma”) to beautiful contemplations of the universe (“Blue Spotted Tail”).

The title track speaks to coming out of disillusionment with hope and a plan: “I’d rather be / a functioning cog in some great machinery / serving some purpose beyond me.” These realizations bring a fresh intensity that will intrigue new listeners and allow Fleet Foxes to endure long enough to give fans what they really want: another chapter in the odyssey.

True Grit: Unlikely Redemption

The Coen Brothers like to redeem the most unlikely people. Their characters are always believable, but seldom people you would want to be. The main characters of  O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Raising Arizona are both ex-convicts. In keeping, True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is a one-eyed U.S. Marshall with a less than savory past. His life of bizarre showdowns and drunkenness is interrupted by a 14-year old girl on a mission. Maddie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) wants picture-perfect revenge for her father’s killer, and she wants Rooster to help her see it done.

When the movie first begins, it feels too slow and rambling. There is little to like in the gruff, carelessly violent Rooster, or the rather aloof Texas Ranger LeBeouf (Matt Damon). Even Maddie could seem like an annoying little girl who doesn’t know her place. But as the roads get tougher and the dangers nearer, all three characters emerge with an increasingly endearing display of grit that is not unlike the gradual and halting evolution of their own relationships.

True Grit received ten Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture, but the movie is anything but showy. Joel and Ethan Coen convey a sense of dusty sparseness that is both realistic and alien. They almost deglamorize the wild west. Everything about the movie flees sentimentality and emotion.  The only sense of intimacy we feel with the characters is during the moments of humor that flawlessly dot the script. All of this, including the formal speech (it is instead of it’s) used in the script seems to separate us from the characters, as if we are supposed to focus on something else.

What is beautiful about the film is that the central theme of revenge morphs inconspicuously into something like salvation. In saving Maddie’s life, we get the feeling that Rooster is trying to atone for his failures. The directors aptly capture the realism of such a story in the lack of a triumphant victory. There is nothing about the revenge in the end, it is about the friends made on the journey.  The film does not build into a neatly packaged climax or conclude with all the loose ends tied. The ending is abrupt and pragmatic, as if Maddie herself had written it; for as she says, “time just gets away from us.” So it does, and maybe the Coen Brothers are doing their best to focus on the things that are really worth the time we have.

Downward Spiral: Dave Eggers’ Chilling Apocalypse

If you truly “love” your friends, you won’t allow them to keep secrets, not when millions of viewers deserve the truth. This is the world of The Circle. Dave Eggers’ chilling novel explores a future where humanity has eradicated mystery, become truly transparent, and finally knows everything. Published by Vintage in 2013, The Circle proves Eggers can do just about anything because he understands human nature. He gets the glory and the ugliness, the potential for beauty and the tendency toward devastating selfishness. He gets our tendencies to yearn for the transcendent, our penchant to both deny and become god. Eggers creates a society that self-suppresses humanity’s most beautiful qualities. He explores how our obsession with the self puts us at risk of losing it.

It’s that insight that leaves us astonished and wary of our phones after completing The Circle. What began as a series of brilliant social experiments and technological innovations morphs into The Circle – a social media company whose goal is collective social omnipotence. “To heal we must know. To know we must share,” say the Circlers. Echoing 1984, obsessive monitoring systems are praised, and communication is only understood in terms of public sharing that makes Facebook look archaic.

The main character, Mae Holland, loses her identity in a gradual Faustian bargain that includes a lot of smiles, frowns, zings, and likes ­– split-second substitutions for real relationships. In her hobbies, relationships, and view of life she slowly replaces her spirit of adventure with a compulsion to control. In an eerily familiar world, “unsubscribe” means betrayal, secrets are lies, alone time is escapism, leaving work after hours is treason, quality time is inefficient, tardy responses are attacks, and experiencing a moment but failing to live-document it is cheating humanity of information. “All that happens must be known” is The Circle’s mantra.

Mae is eventually unable to accept uncertainty. The Circle exists to put control at the Circler’s fingertips. Enamored with her popularity and influence, Mae goes “transparent” ­– a new experiment that allows viewers around the world to watch participants through a 24/7 live feed and comment on the participant’s activities. It’s The Truman Show meets Facebook under the guise of building trust and honest communication. Secrets are lies, after all. Such a system, say Circlers, could provide accountability for everyone from spouses to politicians. Information will thus produce peace; the death of privacy will benefit the public.

Predictably, “transparency” creates more problems than it solves. Like the soma of Brave New World, systems and practices meant to prevent the undesirable results of human passion actually suffocate passion itself. This insatiable need to know spawns an invasive apocalypse, though most of the characters are unaware. It isn’t natural resources that are scarce in this catastrophe, but individuality. On the verge of knowing everything, society has replaced God with the self and replaced the self with something viscerally sickening.

The terrifying part of the story is that it feels real. It cannot be dismissed as implausible – like other apocalyptic scares that can be ignored until evidence for zombies arises and so on – but seems to be looming at the other end of a thousand little choices we have the power to make. Perhaps in this way, The Circle is a moral tale. Egger’s point seems to be that this apocalypse is easily achieved. The Circle’s promises to do good and the cozily mundane settings shock us when we realize they were the foundations for paranoia and devastation. Eggers recreates the exasperation we endure when friends scroll Facebook during important conversations, and the jittery frenzy of people who are offended if we don’t reply in seconds.

Despite its credibility, sometimes the construction of the world seems a bit weak. Eggers uses words like “web” and “PC” to denote a primitive past. It might feel more natural to use “iPhone,” “Instagram,” or an invention we could believe emerged before his creations like CircleSearch, and TruYou. But perhaps the generic history makes the doom even more impending because it isn’t contained in specifics. The progression – or digression – of The Circle is uncannily natural. Eggers implores us to get off of our phones at the dinner table, not because he is old-fashioned, but because he is forward-thinking.

When I finished The Circle I wanted to go out on a kayak unobserved, to think about how little I know and how that is okay. Though tempting, it is difficult to categorize the book as science fiction. The Circle isn’t an alternate world, but one we must deny every day for it to stay fictional. Eggers describes a precipice – it is our choice to jump or not.