Songs of the Year…
December 10, 2010
If there is a single hallmark of 2010 in regard to modern music, it is that this past year saw vast advances in music creation technology at a rate that outpaces any year prior. Anyone with a smart phone, a microphone, and a bedroom can now record, edit, mix, and distribute their creations with both a quality and efficiency that have never been seen before. Artists are able to capture creative impulses as soon as they happen, lending an elusive immediacy to songcraft. We are only beginning to see the potential that devices such as the iPad will have as music creation tools. However, while the number of well-executed pop songs has ballooned, there were still but a handful in 2010 that managed to transcend mere creative indulgence; to be at once resonant, reflexive, and transformative. It is with these parameters in mind that Helicopter Seeds is counting down the 10 Best Songs of 2010…
9. Ben Talmi – “Scales of a Fish in the Sky”
7. James Blake – “Limit To Your Love”
5. Gorillaz – “Rhinestone Eyes”
Suggested Listening: Caribou – Swim
April 21, 2010
Caribou – Swim
If there is a constant to be found in the historical arc of American art, it is that themes of escapism always become prevalent in times of economic hardship. The most notable example of this is of course the classic film The Wizard of Oz which was dizzyingly successful upon its 1939 release while the US was still reeling from The Great Depression. The tension and uncertainty in the world just prior to World War 2 gave rise to comic book heroes such as Superman and to a pulp fiction movement in literature. The Vietnam War and the energy crises of the 1960’s and 70’s led to a rise in the prominence of Psychedelic Rock (which was often coupled with the use of Psychedelic Drugs…). When OPEC quadrupled the price of oil in 1975, a young filmmaker named George Lucas starting filming Star Wars. In the wake of the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble and the sobering reality of 9/11, The Lord of the Rings became one of the most successful movie franchises of all time. As individuals, and moreover as consumers, we crave reprieve from the banality or the futility of the everyday; we crave a different reality, we crave escape.
As a genre of music, dance music- or House Music, is inherently escapist. By combining ambient and rhythmic elements, it often achieves a uniquely transporting quality— with an effectiveness few other art forms ever manage to obtain. When the album Since I Left You by The Avalanches was released in 2001 (again, amidst recession) it combined countless musical samples in such a context-changing way that it altered the musical landscape entirely. As an album, it possesses fluidity unlike anything that preceded it and like few that have been released since. With his fifth album under the Caribou moniker, musician Daniel Snaith challenges that escapist ideal and redefines fluidity in music-making in the stunning new release Swim.
Snaith describes the creative approach to Swim as an attempt to create “music that’s liquid in the way it flows back and forth… the sounds slosh around in pitch, timbre, pan… dance music that sounds like it’s made out of water rather than metallic sounds.” The end result is a fascinating album that is simultaneously familiar and chaotic, as synthesized and often mechanical elements combine into surprisingly organic musical forms. Throughout Snaith’s musical career, this type of innovation and reinvention has become something of a hallmark but the most remarkable thing about his approach on this album is the way it totally sets itself apart from everything else in its genre.
Lyrically Swim makes an interesting statement as its principle narrative is that of a married couple on the verge of separation. The juxtaposition of such weighty subject matter against such a rhythmic musical backdrop lends a weird tension to Swim; and yet seems strangely fitting, begging the question: aren’t breakups and divorces the ultimate manifestation of escapist yearnings? The album opener ‘Odessa’ serves an expository purpose as the characters of Snaith’s House Music-opera are introduced- “She’s tired of crying, and sick of his lies / she’s suffered him for far too many years of her life.” Snaith’s escapism finds itself hitting quite close to home as hope and reprieve are stood alongside despair and loss.
‘Sun,’ the second track on Swim, further exemplifies Snaith’s aim to create music that “sounds like it’s made out of water.” Sonically, it is an engineering marvel and one of the strongest tracks on the album. Layers of sound pirouette around each other over a steadfast percussion track while odd sound bites of horns and of laughter lend the song a sense of warmth. It is like musical sculpture as Snaith’s compositions and engineering combine to form something utterly unique. The care and deliberation with which Snaith approaches his songcraft is immediately evident and reaffirmed throughout the album.
The track ‘Kaili’ further fleshes out Snaith’s failed relationship narrative with characteristically sharp songwriting: “And he keeps himself held back for both their peace of minds, but he’s no less quick than her to begrudge her what he finds.” The vocals carry the melody while the rhythms around it are carefully modulated and heavily decayed. These are starkly contrasted against a crystal clear alto-saxophone flair near the songs end. It is very reminiscent of Roger Waters’ saxophone work on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon; and fittingly so given Caribou’s psychedelic back catalog.
Serving as interludes within the album, the largely-instrumental tracks ‘Bowls,’ ‘Hannibal,’ and ‘Lalibela’ show Snaith’s versatility as a musician and his unmatched mastery of poly-rhythmic song construction. These are songs that are immediately accessible but belie an intense complexity. Attempting to unweave the layers of song construction has shown Swim to be consistently rewarding after countless listens. The amount of thought that must have gone into such intricate music creation is staggering but not terribly surprising considering Snaith’s background as a PhD. in Mathematics, having completed his thesis in modular mathematical forms and Number Theory. The closing minutes of ‘Lalibela’ carefully lay bare the sad flipside of Snaith’s escapist narrative as his hushed vocal laments “He won’t say it but he still needs her… when he gets home the house feels empty from the bedroom to the ground.”
The album closes with the climactic epilogue of ‘Jamelia’ featuring the soaring vocal of Luke Lalonde from the band Born Ruffians. A quiet and close-in vocal lies low in a mix of soft synth-loops before exploding into a fury of staccato synthesized strings, endlessly poly-rhythmic percussion and choral washes; in trademark Caribou fashion it is incredibly dramatic and effective.
Immediately listenable while dense and complex, Swim is every bit as career defining as Dan Snaith’s highly lauded 2007 album, Andorra. It is an album that further explores the possibilities of digital music creation and does so in a way that still puts songwriting at its forefront. It is an album that becomes at once self-aware and transcendant and as such is one of the most consistently rewarding albums of the year.
Suggested Listening: Citay – ‘Dream Get Together’
February 2, 2010
I was born in 1982 and thus formatively, I am a child of the 1990’s. Musically however, I am very much a child of the 70’s. One of my earliest childhood memories is of my dad setting an enormous pair of JVC headphones on my head as I sat on our brown floral print couch. He said, “This is ‘Frankenstein’ by Edgar Winter… it feels like the sound is traveling right through your head as it goes from one ear to the other.” He was right, it did. I vividly recall spending childhood evenings laying on the living room floor and listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. By the time I was ten years old I knew every word of “Roundabout” by Yes. The very first cassette ever played in my very first car was Aja by Steely Dan (followed closely by Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows… It was 1997 after all). As such, I was more steeped in the Psychedelic /Acid Rock of the 1970’s than most children should be.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the so-called “Hippy Music” or “Acid Rock” of the late 1960’s and early 70’s did more to perpetuate the role of the technical studio and engineering aspects of music creation than any other era or genre of music. The concept of in-studio experimentation was born during the sessions of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles further explored the potential that studio and engineering prowess could have on the final product of recorded music. By the time Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973, the recording studio was being utilized as an unmentioned additional instrument in music creation. The albums of this era from Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, or Electric Light Orchestra were for the first time using the limitless potential of the recording process to add previously unheard of dimension to their music and to combine orchestral movements with traditional rock song structuring. The studio had become just as elemental as the stage in the song development process. In the tradition of the psych-rock pioneers before them, Citay’s Dream Get Together waxes nostalgic, pays tongue-in-cheek tribute to, and further exemplifies the rock inclinations and studio deftness of the 1970’s; yet does so in a way that belies its constituent influences to create an album that is both refreshing and timeless.
Citay is the musical endeavor of San Francisco’s Ezra Feinberg and a revolving cast of up to ten other bay-area musicians. Their fourth album, Dream Get Together, manages to elicit a certain headiness and nostalgia simultaneously. Much like the Fleet Foxes release of 2008, they reflect their influences without apology and craft their songs with careful attention to detail and stellar musicianship. The end result is an album that hides its density and complexity well- with jangly guitar melodies, four part vocal harmonies, and proggy, meandering song structuring that never comes across as heavy-handed. Album opener ‘Be Careful With That Hat’ finds Feinberg wryly remarking with refreshing self-awareness, “It’s an homage, not a mockery I swear,” as staccato rhythmic guitars float around the mix, one sonic layer creeping atop another into something elaborate and anthemic—a sense that pervades throughout the album’s 45 minutes. The homage continues on the title track as Feinberg recreates a summer evening: “Two hands out the window, two hands shifting gears / Next thing you know we’ll be reelin’ in the years.” It’s an obvious nod to the band Steely Dan which comes just before Feinberg perfectly emulates Walter Becker’s crystal clear, reverb-less electric guitar noodling. The stunning chamber pop of ‘Mirror Kisses’ finds Feinberg marrying guitar riffing with dischordant squall in a way that immediately calls to mind that of Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Johnny Greenwood; just before fading into the sprawling and heavily Electric Light Orchestra indebted instrumental ‘Hunter,’ which begins with multi-tracked synthesizers and guitars over acoustic strumming before giving way to chugging Jimmy Page-esque rock riffing. The album closes with the fusion pop of ‘Tugboat’ which is heavily in the vein of the music of another psychedelic San Francisco band, The Grateful Dead. Over an airy mix of guitar strumming and tambourines, Feinberg remarks, “I don’t want to stay at your party, I don’t want to talk with your friends / I don’t want to vote for your president, I just want to be your tugboat captain.” It comes across in a way that’s so effortless and unassuming, Jerry Garcia himself would have been proud.
While it doesn’t exactly challenge any musical conventions, Dream Get Together affirms itself as a nostalgic joyride, a breezy and effortless rock record, and as a testament to the timelessness of careful songcraft and execution. At a time when so many are querying as to what the forthcoming decade will represent musically, one of its most satisfying albums thus far seems just as at home now as it would have forty years ago.
Variations and Fugue – A Short Story
January 20, 2010
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wally,” I say.
“I hope you’re right,” he calls out from the next room; shuffling into the doorway. He reads and re-reads the laminated piece of paper he had just picked up off the kitchen counter: Your dog’s name is Lady. The commands she knows are Sit, Lie Down, Stay, and Come. He turns the paper over and holds it out for me to see then says in a voice that is equal parts explanatory and apologetic, “I forget things sometimes…”
I nod knowingly. “You do alright Wally.”
“Let me show you something,” he says, and before I can respond he shuffles through the parlor and into his office, beckoning with his hand that I should follow. Lady, an extremely well-fed Black Labrador, creeps out of the kitchen and then under the enormous solid oak desk that sits in the center of the office.
“This dog will not bite you,” he says, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He then smiles warmly saying, “She’s a honey-pot… she’s a real sweetheart.”
His office walls are completely lined with books. The shelves extend from the floor to the ceiling and completely envelop the room, disrupted only by a window and a set of French doors opposite it. There are Bibles, countless Bibles. The Torah, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, giant leather-bound concordances and vast arrays of commentaries; their spines worn and pages yellowed. There are Greek and Hebrew dictionaries alongside an impossibly old Merriam-Webster that threatens to buckle the shelf it sits upon. Histories and biographies intermingle with memoirs and novels. On one shelf, Jack London’s Sea Wolf sits beside Robert Frost’s New Hampshire; above them is C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. The more recent additions sit horizontally atop the vertically arrayed older ones. Every shelf has been filled save one, which is empty but for a single framed photograph. He shuffles up to it and stands there silently. I can see his eyes come alive with pride. It is a picture of him from many years prior and next to him is a woman. They are laughing; they squint into the evening sun as the ocean rolls behind them.
“Elizabeth,” he says by way of explanation after prolonged silence- “My wife.”
My hip finds the edge of the immense desk and I lean against it. Sprawling across its top is a tattered but intact map of the Atlantic Ocean. There is a picture of a Navy ship; a young and familiar looking man stands at its helm. Next to it is a brass ship’s throttle, at its base is an engraved plaque- For our Captain- From the crew of the USS Augusta, July 1946. Just behind that is a framed diploma dated 1952 from the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. As I stand there, Lady crawls out from beneath the desk and lies down at my feet. She rolls onto her back as I kneel down to scratch her belly. Wally looks down as Lady’s contented tail thumps against his shoe.
“She’s a honey-pot,” he says. His eyes turn again to the picture.
“I would have loved to have met her,” I say for the lack of anything else. His eyes meet mine but seem confused and questioning. I gesture toward the photo, “Your wife…” I say; feeling awkward for the need to clarify and the uneasiness of the moment. He nods and gives a partial smile. His gaze is distant and he has the look of a man trying to find the elusive words to give voice to profound thought. At last he raises his hand as if about to give a recitation and says matter-of-factly, “Where there is the hope of Heaven, death is the most glorious part of life.” He turns and walks abruptly out of the room. I stand there for a moment, not sure what he is referencing, if anything at all.
The tinny peal of the grandfather clock in an adjacent room indicates it is 5:00. Lady lopes out of the office and returns to the kitchen. Wally shuffles across the living room to the bench of a very old and pristine grand piano. An ornate wooden cross hangs on the wall just behind him, next to it is a picture of him wearing a minister’s gown and holding a Bible. Just below them hangs a picture of a white country church; the lettered frame reads Hope Presbyterian Church, 1976. On a near wall is another framed photo: Wally sits at the piano- just as he is now but much younger, Elizabeth stands just behind him looking down into a songbook.
I sit in a small parlor chair in the corner of the living room as Wally begins to play Brahms’ Variation and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. On an end table next to me sits a worn King James Bible, the pages are curled from being thumbed through countless times. It is laid open to the 34th Psalm and there is a crisply folded sheet of paper standing up from the crease between the pages. I see him watching me as he begins playing the familiar melody of Greensleeves. Unfolding the paper, I begin reading-
Elizabeth-
I’m all too often at a loss
When I set down my compass and picked up my cross
I never imagined the changing tide
Would leave me without you by my side
I cannot for the life of me tell
Of the duality of love and of the spiritual realm
Where there is hope that causes so much pain
There is hope that keeps us alive
So death will never sway my faith
Even though it has taken my wife
Where there is the hope of Heaven
Death is the most glorious part of life.
Greensleeves becomes a lilting Amazing Grace. The grandfather clock chimes and it’s quarter past the hour. Lady walks out of the kitchen and to Wally’s side.
“She’s a honey-pot,” he says as they both watch me walk through the foyer toward the front door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wally,” I say.
“I hope you’re right,” he says.
Albums of the Year…
December 18, 2009
Helicopter Seeds is counting down the best albums of 2009…
Songs of the Year…
December 6, 2009
The first of the Helicopter Seeds Year End Music Features:
Top Ten Songs of 2009
Reflections on Family History, Painting Technique, Genetics, and Cancer
November 30, 2009
Tapping the ash from his pipe with the palm of his hand he leads
His gait is as proud and unmistakable as I have always known it
But the bags beneath his eyes are a deep evening red
Where the capillaries can no longer hold back what life remains
Above them, gray-green eyes; like mine, like my father’s, like his brothers’
That have not changed despite all the changes they have seen
Insomuch as in ourselves as in everything else, reflected out and taken in
The paintings line the walls, works in progress, works completed
We stop walking and form an obtuse angle to observe just one
Of the homestead by the fjord where a young girl met a boy
With gray-green eyes; like mine, like my father’s, like his brothers’
And they decided they would leave what life remains for the hope of another
He’s pointing and explaining and I stagger at how necessary this is
His hand is worn and calloused; like mine, like my father’s, like his brothers’
And I feel the importance, it is in this exchange that life remains
Looking at him I see so much of myself and of that at an end
And looking at me he sees himself and of that at a beginning
With eyes that have not changed despite all the changes they have seen
Gray-green; like mine, like my father’s, like his brothers’
Insomuch as in ourselves as in everything else what life remains
In loving memory of Harlan M. Estrem– My Grandfather
The Mountain Goats- ‘The Life of the World to Come’
November 9, 2009
It’s hard to overstate the compelling nature of The Bible. In addition to containing the Word of God, it is also a sprawling historical narrative which spans thousands of years. Passages of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, or the writings of Luke are widely regarded as some of the most accomplished writing in existence. For good and for bad, it is a collection of writings that has made an indelible impact across that span of human history; arguably more so than any other causal influence.
It remains a book that represents hope to countless millions. It instills wonder and dares its readers to embrace the impractical and believe the implausible and does so with powerful deliberation. Beyond that however, the true power and efficacy of The Bible lies not in the miracles and the audacities, but in the quiet minutia and its relatable subtleties. It is to this end that The Life of the World to Come, the most recent offering from Durham, NC’s The Mountain Goats excels. As a concept album it consists of 12 songs which are inspired by, corroborate, and are named after different passages of The Bible. It emerges as “The Gospel according to John Darnielle (singer/songwriter),” through which he imparts a careful and experiential realism to scripture; and in doing so finds that hope and grace are all too often tempered with pain and loss, yet remain the only things we can ever really have in this life.
The album opens with “1 Samuel 15:23” (“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry”) and Darnielle presents a deceitful “crystal healer” as a metaphor for his own rebellion. He sings with a trademark deliberate breathy diction over subdued guitars making the song seem as innocuous as Darnielle would have you believe his character is. Standing in stark contrast to the opening track is “Psalm 40:2” (“He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock and established my steps”) in which Darnielle paraphrases the title verse, “He has fixed His sign in the sky, He has raised me from the pit and He will set me high!” His strained vocals stretch over raucous drumming and frantic guitars as the verses cast our lives as a lawless road trip, seemingly to ruin were it not for the grace of God, “We will get there when we get there, don’t you worry / Feel bad about the things we’ve done but not really that bad / We inhaled the frozen air, Lord send me a mechanic if I’m not beyond repair.”
Lyrically, The Life Of The World To Come features the flawless merging of broad and personal themes, blunt assertions and lofty wonderings, high and low diction, tender narratives and cited verse. “Genesis 3:23” (“Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken”) is a seemingly light story about revisiting a former home until it is compared with its namesake reference and we realize the former home represents the biblical Garden of Eden, and the narrator’s leaving is synonymous with the fall of mankind. Contrasting in scope but similar in presentation is “Romans 10:9” in which the narrator deals with personal loss and searches for the strength to go on, finding cold but real comfort in the well known Bible verse—“I won’t take the medication but it’s good to have around, a kind and loving God won’t let my small ship run aground / If you will believe in your heart and confess with your lips, surely you will be saved one day.”
The climax of The Life of the World to Come comes with the song “Matthew 25:21,” (“Well done, good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things, I will make you a ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord”) an incredibly poignant narrative of someone traveling to be at the bedside of a terminally ill loved-one. Darnielle expertly creates a series of concise images with which he moves the story forward, blending observational writing with thematic weight and careful metaphor, much in the style of poet John Berryman, whom Darnielle cites as one of his primary writing influences—“Between the pain and the pills trying to keep it at bay lies a traveler going somewhere far away… The last of something brightly burning, still burning beyond the cancer and the chemotherapy / And you were a presence of light upon this earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth / It’s three days later when I get the call / And no one is around to break my fall.” Despite the hope and grace afforded to this ‘faithful servant’ there is still the sad reality of the pain and the yearning we are all subject to. The hope of heaven is all too often distant and untenable but it is all too often all we have.
The album concludes with “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” a somber and minimalist song, featuring Darnielle singing over sparse piano, “Drive til the rain stops. Keep driving.” It is a dark and depressing song, and when coupled with the vengeful text of Ezekiel 7 there is seemingly little grace to be found; save for the humble realization that we aren’t truly worthy of any of the blessings we receive in this life and anything short of the hope of Heaven is futile.
With its seamless blending of lyrics and liturgy, The Life of the World to Come manages to find hope in the hopeless despite the sorrow of human experience… and therein lies the true efficacy of The Bible.
A Morning Ponderance…
October 15, 2009
An impossible thing happens every morning at twilight. Assuming you’re awake and gazing eastward, as the first glimmer of sunlight begins to creep over the horizon an unknowable paradox begins to unfold. We know that the sun is about 90 million miles away, and we know that light travels through space at about 186,000 miles per second; thus it takes about eight minutes for the light leaving the sun to finally reach your sleepy morning eyes. Yet, we also know from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity that for an object traveling at the speed of light there is no passage of time… which means that if it were somehow possible to ride one of those photons of light with a stop watch in hand, over the course of that eight minute ride the time on that stop watch would remain at zero. More incomprehensible is the fact that since no time would have elapsed, over the course of that eight minute ride you would simultaneously occupy every conceivable point between the sun and the earth; you would in essence be stretched across the solar system, connecting the sun to the earth for eight minutes. Now, the concept of simultaneously occupying different points in space is something we know is impossible yet isn’t that hard to imagine. What becomes difficult is grappling with the actuality that those photons of light are also simultaneously occupying different points in time. It is seemingly untenable and yet it is a constant actuality that happens all around us.
It is a phenomenon with fascinating implications; consider the following thought experiment: Suppose that as you are looking at the eastern horizon at twilight there is a photon hurtling through space towards you. Having just left the surface of the sun, that photon will not be absorbed by the tissue of your eye for another 8 minutes. Having just woke up, you stretch and yawn audibly and then make a cup of coffee and a piece of toast before looking out the window… just as that photon hits you in the face and you see the first hint of the sunrise. Now suppose that that single photon somehow has eyes and a consciousness. It sees you stretch and yawn and make your coffee and toast and then look out the window; the difference however is that it sees those eight minutes of morning activity all in a single unimaginable moment. The photon of light simultaneously occupies the point in time where you stretched, the point in time where you yawned, the point in time where you made coffee, etc. Thus, it would ‘know’ (having an aforementioned consciousness) that as you were having your morning stretch, soon you would be yawning and making coffee then toast… as well as every other event that would unfold within that eight minutes between the sun and the earth. The reason the photon knows that a yawn will follow the stretch is not because of a particular foreknowledge on its part, but rather because the photon is already there.
From this we can gain a valuable insight into the theological doctrine of free will. When considering the notion of an all knowing God, a deity that knows everything that has happened as well as everything that will happen, it stands as an apparent contradiction to the freedom of will that each of us experiences. For a deity to know beforehand what choices and decisions we will make would mean that our lives are on a predetermined course that we are powerless to change. Contrarily, for us to have true freedom of will would mean that the future would always be uncertain and that it would be philosophically untenable that God could be all-knowing. For centuries philosophers and theologians alike have wrestled with this issue, often falling on one side of the debate or the other. Unfortunately this argument is framed poorly because it attempts to grasp the nature of God’s omniscience without regarding His omnipresence.
Our understanding of God is that not only is He all-knowing (omniscient), but that He is everywhere at once (omnipresent) as well. As such, He completely transcends our notion of space, but much more significantly He completely transcends our notion of time, He is an eternal being and as such the span of our lives, the span of history, the span of universal existence are to Him a single unimaginable moment. When understood in this way we can (and do) have a total freedom of will and God can (and does) have total fore-knowledge without contradiction.
Suppose I am walking down a road and one mile in front of me is a fork in that road. As I am walking, God knows (and has known since the beginning of time) that I am going to take a left at the upcoming fork in the road; not because I am predestined, or foreordained, or otherwise influenced to take a left, but because He is already there, at the fork as well as beyond. The experience of a God that transcends time would be much like that of the photon from our earlier thought experiment… He knows what lies ahead, not necessarily because He has predetermined it, but because He is already there. This of course is seemingly untenable and yet is a constant actuality all around us.
Even more difficult to grasp is the concept that an omnipresent God that completely transcends time and space would simultaneously occupy the beginning of the universe as well as the end of the universe, because He is quite simply already in both places. In this manner we can know that the universe as we experience it is a determined universe; which of course seems paradoxical since the notion of determinism is contrary to the notion of free will. However, the real paradox lies in the fact that free will is only possible within a determined universe. We as individuals are the products and culmination of the choices of all the individuals that have come before us, and our choices come as a direct result of their being. That said, the choices we as individuals make will directly influence those of the individuals ahead of us and a profound causality becomes evident… every decision we make has a direct effect on our own lives and the lives of those around us which in turn determines subsequent decisions. When viewed from a vantage point that spans the whole of time, Determinism emerges as a function of our independent and uninfluenced decisions. We live in a determined universe that God in His graciousness has given us the sovereignty to determine.
We know from 2 Timothy 2:4 that it is the uninfluenced will of an omnipresent God that we use that sovereignty to know Him:
“It is God’s will that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”
Secondhand Nostalgia – A Short Story
August 21, 2009
“I saw Virgil Hill fight when he was 15 years old.”
The old man spoke matter-of-factly as his worn fingers deftly maneuvered a cigarette from a hard pack to his lips. He struck a match, briefly closed his eyes and inhaled deeply; soon the smoke wisped and curled around his thick white beard.
“You know, Virgil Hill went to high school about an hour north of here and he came down to Barnesville to fight a local kid named Sam Andvik. I never forgot his name because he was the only colored kid I had ever seen fight in Barnesville.”
With a practiced and perfunctory motion he subtly tapped the first of the ashes from the end of his cigarette. They scattered grey across the stark black of the wrought iron café table at which he sat. His cigarettes and his matchbook lay atop a folded newspaper. He went on,
“That Andvik kid got cut above his eye and had to quit; back in those days if you got cut, you were done. He was a hell of a boxer, Sam Andvik.”
The cigarette glowed a hot orange as he took a long drag. His eyes followed some passersby up the street then quickly came back to meet my own.
“I saw him again in ’93. It was right before I closed my shop… right around the time that Muhammad Ali’s hands went bad and he couldn’t sign any more autographs, Virgil Hill fought in Fargo. I waited in line after the fight with a glove for him to sign. When I finally got up to him I asked him, ‘So, do you remember fighting in Barnesville?’ He got this big grin on his face and said, ‘No one ever asks about those days… no one ever remembers you when you’re a kid.’ He said he tried to track down that Sam Andvik to be his sparring partner right before the Olympics; he was a hell of a boxer. I told him I thought Sam joined a biker gang out in California. He said that made sense. We must have talked for twenty minutes while a whole line of people had to wait behind me.”
He let out a resigned sigh and stared through the thin line of tobacco smoke that rose and pirouetted in the breeze.
“I was there with my wife,” he continued, “She was a good looking gal… I’m not kidding, you should have seen her; she really looked sharp.”
There was a long pause as he tapped the ashes from his cigarette. He winced noticeably then shook his head and smiled to himself as an obnoxiously loud pickup truck drove up the street. A gust of wind threatened to unfold his newspaper but he paid it little mind. He suddenly sat up straight in his chair and leaned slightly towards me,
“There was a pitcher who used to pitch for Boston in the 70’s, he was a Minnesota boy originally, and I came to find out that he had moved back to Minnesota and was living just outside of Little Falls. For some reason I can’t think of his name right now… I know the sheriff down in Little Falls so it wasn’t hard to get the guy’s address. I sent him a couple of baseball cards to sign and a stamped envelope to send them back in… I’ve got a lot of autographs, you know. About two weeks later that envelope came back with a letter from that guy’s wife. It turned out that in the time between when I had first mailed it and when it got there, he had died. I felt real bad about it because I didn’t know… I didn’t know he was sick or anything and I’m sure they thought I was just trying to get him to sign a card at the last minute before he was gone. She sent back those cards and wrote a really nice letter saying that her husband would have been thrilled to sign them for me. She also sent along the program from his funeral…”
His voice trailed off and he sat looking down as he inhaled deeply from what was left of the cigarette. The last of the tobacco brightly glowed before being reduced to fragile smoke and cold ash.
“It’s funny, you know… all them guys want is to be remembered.”
He flicked the cigarette with his middle finger. It arched high into the air before landing soundlessly in a nearby trashcan.
“His name will come to me eventually,” the old man said.
