Removador Recordings and Solutions

So, this guy called Yim Yames starts a record label to produce and promote undiscovered music. No news there.

Only "Yim Yames" is Jim James of My Morning Jacket, and the music is "Some of the coldest music you ain't never heard!"

This is Removador Recordings and Solutions, a roster of six acts that, with one exception, deliver on the label's promised obscurity. Well, one and a half. My Morning Jacket is, of course, on board, as is James himself, under the aforementioned Yim Yames moniker.

It's interesting stuff. For me, it's made all the more interesting by James' involvement in the Monsters of Folk collaboration last year, which was beautifully profiled by Under the Radar magazine.

Here's a guy who's an accomplished musician in his own right fighting the good fight for a collaborative ethos and promoting obscure talent, only because it's what he likes.

Cool. Cool.

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Netflix: Me Likey

Our family has used Netflix for five years now, with one brief interruption. At our most avid, we maintained a queue of four DVD's, two for me and two for mon amor. For over a year, however, we've been on the one DVD at a time plan, a plan that, since we don't have a t.v. or DVD player and therefore watch everything on our laptop, makes a lot of sense.

What makes even more sense is the option to watch Netflix content online, which we do as often as we can find something that doesn't suck. Just the other night we watched Doubt. The week before that The Princess Bride. Somewhere in the middle I spent a rib-tickling 90 minutes with SNL: The Best of Jimmy Fallon.

But the vast majority of online viewing content on Netflix is not worth the time it takes to watch. Perhaps that's about to change. From CNN:

In a groundbreaking deal for online movie rentals, Netflix and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced Wednesday that they have expanded their licensing arrangement for streaming movies, and Netflix now has licensing rights to more of the studio's catalog content.

I've long maintained that I would gladly pay subscription fees for online television content. Netflix is a model that works but that has been hampered by little quality in the content until now. If Warner Bros. can demonstrate that opening its catalog to Netflix subscribers makes money, then who knows what studios might come running to the table?

Of course, the catch is that Netflix has agreed to not offer Warner Bros. new releases on DVD (or Blu-ray) until 28 days after they go on sale. But I rent fewer-and-fewer DVD's and I consume more and more content "in the cloud" online, so I could care less about that.

Kudos, I say, to Netflix.

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The Use of Doctrine

A colleague in ministry expressed doubts today about the doctrine of the Trinity. His squabble with it is the way it's used, which he's found to be inevitably heretical. It is very difficult to speak of God as three-in-one, to teach and preach intelligently as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit without lapsing into any number of "misstatements" of God's nature (insert obligatory nod to the provisional character of all of our God speech here; also insert here the qualification that the use of language is only one part of an equation that also includes its truthfulness or faithfulness).

Modalism is the heresy my colleague hears every time Trinity talk takes place. It is inevitable that people will talk about the different "jobs" assigned the unique members of the Godhead (the Spirit empowers; the Son saves; the Father creates; and so on), whereas one of the marks of Orthodox trinitarianism is the maxim that if one member of the Trinity does something, the other two, by participation, also do it.

For my colleague, this hangup is cause to rethink using Trinity language at all. He gets the doctrine. He can explain it to you all day long; he's just tired of having to. My on-the-fly reply was that just because something is difficult to explicate doesn't mean we should abandon it. Perhaps it means we should use it all the more.

I've thought about this throughout the afternoon and evening, now, and it's clear to me that I use lots of theological language not because it speaks to me personally, but because it's what I was taught. My teachers, though, were faithful men and women who had years behind their convictions and had been taught them by faithful teachers who had themselves been taught, and on and on down the line. I'm okay with that. I'm not sure if I should be, but I'm okay with affirming something I can't explain beyond, "That's the church's traditional teaching," or "That's our best understanding of it." I'm programmed to doubt that contemporary humanity could do it any better than the Patristics who hammered it all out so many centuries ago.

I'm not compelled to find different language because what we have is programmed for confusion. Is that a shirking of my ordination vow to "serve the people with . . .imagination . . . and . . . intelligence?"

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Year-End Music Review: The Albums

Road To My Love - Ana Egge

I started this quest for a musical genre with the album as the most basic unit of musical biology in mind. This post, the "album-of-the-year" post, is exactly what I had in mind last January.

Adult Nights - Wild Light

As the year took shape, though, and my musical discovery habits evolved, the album became less and less prominent. When you're looking for music all the time, starting from the assumption that you know nothing and seeking to discover new artists, then you don't spend very long on any one album. Instead, you obtain the album, stash it away, and move on to finding more.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix - Pho...

There were a few albums, though, that I came back to throughout the year. At pretty much any point, I could put one of these albums on and listen to it from beginning to end without feeling compelled to skip anything.

These Four Walls - We Were Pro...

Another way of putting it is to say that I would buy these albums and pay full price for them, and I would recommend anyone do likewise. And when these artists put out their next album(s), I will most likely buy them before hearing them.

Middle Cyclone - Neko Case

These albums paint a picture of a music listener drawn to the reliable conventions of pop music. That recognition disappoints me, even though these albums stand on their own and, in some cases, can't be confined to any one genre.

The Briar Patch - Freddy & Fra...

My albums-of-the-year list is what it is. I think this project, rather than creating new musical tastes and sensitivities, simply brought what was already there out into the light. And I'm fine with that.

Love At the End of the World -...

It's interesting to me to note that only three of these albums contain a song that made my "songs-of-the-year" list. In the case of "Middle Cyclone," "Love at The End of The World," "Road To My Love," "Time to Die," and "Adult Nights," the total package is greater than any one of its components. And that's an achievement in itself.

Time To Die - The Dodos

Listen to these albums. Add them to your collection. They're good.

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Year-End Music Review: The Songs

My quest for a genre nearly ran aground in the last quarter of the year. Family and work responsibilities mounted, and, frankly, I started to question the maturity of such an endeavor. I have satisfied myself on the latter point. Enough said.

Yet a certain fatigue set in as well, owing to the sheer volume of content that comes out every week (always on Tuesday). The online media landscape allows a neophyte like myself to sit in the presence of indie music's high priests, but nothing can replace time and experience as the arbiters of quality in music. My blunt tastes are being formed every day.

I plan a couple more year-end posts, lifting up the albums I liked the best and the blogs I used to find them. I'd also like to share some thoughts about the vehicles I have used to acquire music, since what I'm using today is not what I started with, and may not be what I use six months from now.

But without belaboring the point, here is a random collection of the songs I discovered in 2009 that I listened to the most, shared the most, and sit atop my playlists entering 2010. To qualify, a song on this list has to have been sought out for its own sake repeatedly during the year.

This is no countdown; more like a cloud. A cloud of musical goodness. What it says about me and my genre I can't say. Maybe you can.

Best Songs of '09

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Cutting HIs Losses

Last November I defended Royals' General Manager Dayton Moore in his acquisition of Mike Jacobs, a move roundly panned by baseball writers reputable and obscure alike. "Dayton Moore isn't stupid," I scolded. While I stand by that assertion today, I also am forced to acknowledge that those writers aren't stupid either. The Jacobs trade clearly stands out as the worst move Moore has made since taking over as GM in June of 2006. Anyone could have seen this as early as May of last season.

Including Dayton Moore.

So now the Royals have released him. Unconditionally.

Thankfully, his contract was only for one year, so it's off the books. But that's little consolation to Royals fans who watched a Leo Nunez-less bullpen give away 7th and 8th inning leads all summer while Nunez (Jacobs' trade opposite) racked up 27 saves for the Marlins.

I'll still defend the trade on the grounds that Moore was trying to inject some power into a woefully weak major league lineup, and Jacobs appeared, if not an unlikely contributor, a potential one. Moore's behavior this off season indicates that he's given up on the major league roster; he knows it's going to be awful in 2010, and he's willing to take his lumps in exchange for amateur players filed away in the minors (see the team's acquisition of 19 year-old Cuban defector Noel Arguelles).

Moore is entering his fourth full season as a major league GM. I'm comfortable with acknowledging that he's still learning the job. It's an impossible balance, with a small market team like the Royals, between cultivating a healthy long-term farm system that won't produce big league results for three-to-five years down the line and actually improving the big league roster. I think last year showed Moore that the worst of the best free agents available in any off-season are still worse that the best of the worst players in the farm system.

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Rushkoff on Tiger

In the latest Daily Beast:

in spite of our increasing familiarity and comfort with the Internet, most of us still have pitifully little idea of the fossil record of data we leave trailing behind us every day, all the time. Until, of course, it is too late.

Read the whole piece here.

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