Gloria

I've had a handful of chances to record music with a group in my life. Of these few recordings, the one I'm most proud of is a song called "Gloria."

"Gloria" is a new arrangement of "Angels We Have Heard on High," crafted by Dave Smith. Dave was the worship leader at Erin's and my church in Clemson, dcf, and I played with him nearly every Sunday morning for five years or so. At the time of this recording in 2007, the dcf band was comprised of some of the best musicians (and friends) I have ever played with, and they each added their own unique pieces to the tune. The whole thing was recorded and mixed by the illustrious Robert Boyd, who has since begun his career as a sound engineer.

Every Christmas since, I've probably listened to this recording fifty times. I love everything about it; from Dave, Natalie Boyd, and Monica Perez's gorgeous vocal harmonies to the electric guitar magic of Austin Booth. I encourage you to give it a listen below, and if you like it, click the link and download it for your own music collection. If you're like me, you might just find yourself coming back to it every December and a few times in between.

Dave Smith and the dcf band – "Gloria"
(right-click the link and choose "save as" to download)


The Lineup: Austin Booth – electric guitar / Natalie Boyd – vocals / Robert Boyd – recording, mixing / Jared Buchanan – banjo / Andy Heck – drums / Monica Perez – vocals / Michael Sawyer – bass / Justin Scott – keys / Dave Smith – vocals, acoustic guitar

Merry Christmas!

Image: Contemplative Imaging

Stories from the Police State

One summer I worked closely with an African American kid about my age during an internship. We were talking with a guy who worked in the office next to ours one day when he made the statement that one of the differences between our races was that white people generally trust the police, while black people do not. To prove his point he asked us if either of us had ever had a family member who had been harassed by the police. I said I hadn't, and I generally trusted the police. My coworker said he had, and he generally did not.

Before and since I've always felt that in general, most cops are good-natured folks who accept a great deal of risk in service to their fellow man. But in the last few years I've come across several stories which have changed this feeling a bit. I'm less likely now than I was before to jump to the conclusion that the cops are not to blame when I hear a story about suspected abuse by the police. I remember the conversation with my coworker and wonder if I haven't been too quick to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.

Here are some of them, for your consideration.

This American Life – "Bait and Switch": A couple in Texas begin to get nervous about an unclaimed car which has been sitting on their street for weeks. They call the police, who do nothing. Eventually the couple attempts to open the trunk of the car to see if it's hiding anything, and when they do, police swarm the car and take them to jail. The car is revealed to be bait in a police sting operation. The experience seriously damages the couple's lives.

Amy Bach – Ordinary Injustice: Lawyer Amy Bach discusses corruption in the American court system in the linked radio interview, including judges who set extraordinarily high bails for minor crimes to elicit guilty pleas as well as prosecutors who stall cases and practice racist gamesmanship to win convictions.

This American Life – "Right to Remain Silent": The story of an average Joe who is arrested for posting a questionable Facebook status, as well as a cop who recorded his fellow officers seventeen months, exposing corruption which included supervisors who downgraded real crimes into lesser ones and enforced arrest quotas to make the precinct's statistics look good.

The Atlantic – "The Wrong Man": From 2001 to 2008 the media and the FBI destroyed the life of a man falsely accused of sending letters laced with anthrax to politicians.

This American Life – "Inside Job": The story of Barry Cooper, a former crooked narcotics cop who decided to create a reality show about busting crooked cops called "Kop Busters." His plans were quickly shut down by the police.

The New Yorker – "Trial By Fire": The story of Todd Willingham, a Texas man who was executed in 2004 for starting a fire which killed his three daughters, based on evidence which has been widely disputed.

Image: KDfromRichmond

Bo Bedingfield

I have a conflicted relationship with country music. While pop country like Alan Jackson or Garth Brooks makes me want to take a crowbar to my radio, I remain a huge Johnny Cash fan. I love artists who straddle the lines between country and folk, who capture the raw musical talent and three-chords-and-the-truth storytelling that is at the heart of country music, without the over-production and the sappiness and the terrible twang.

One such artist is Bo Bedingfield. Bo's college band, Uncle Jed's Oil, has a special significance in my story which I'll tell another time. Since UJO disbanded, Bo has drifted in and out of different groups and I admit I've stalked him the whole way, buying or downloading his tunes whenever I could. Below is one of my favorites, "Alone," written while he was recording with The Wydelles. If you turn off your prejudices and let yourself hear past the slide guitar, I promise there's raw beauty waiting for you.

Bo Bedingfield & the Wydelles – "Alone"


Bo Bedingfield & the Wydelles – "You Should Never Go To Paris"

Image: Mike White

What is Selfish

Every once in a while I run across someone with a stoic view of unselfishness, someone who believes that  experiencing any positive feeling about an act makes performing it selfish. In their view nothing, not even positive feelings, should be gained by someone performing a selfless act.

This is far too restrictive a view of selflessness, and requires a stoicism that is nearly inhuman. I do not think we should laud someone for donating to charity without feeling good about the decision. In fact, I doubt seriously that praising anyone for experiencing no emotion is ever a good idea (which of course excludes me from several of the world's religions).

We must understand that selfishness is exclusive concern for oneself. It is doing something which is good for yourself without regard for its effect on others. It is not selfish to feel good about helping someone. Win-win situations are not selfish.

Many of my views on selfishness come from John Piper's well-known book, Desiring God. If you've never read it, I highly recommend the first chapter; the book is more repetitive than "99 Bottles of Beer," but that first chapter is excellent stuff. I don't agree with Piper on everything, but his views on selfishness, duty, and love are dead-on. Piper's central point is that it is not a sin to desire your own pleasure or good. God makes it quite clear in the Bible that he desires what is best for you, and there is no reason you shouldn't desire it too. And what's best for you is him. This desire should run through every aspect of Christian life, from prayer to evangelism to worship.

Piper goes on to present an analogy about buying flowers for his wife on their anniversary. He explains that if he takes no joy in this act, his wife won't appreciate it very much. Who wants to receive flowers with a card reading, "I present these flowers to you because it is my duty to do so?" No girl I've ever met. We want gifts to be given to us out of love, and love means taking joy in others' happiness. To call this selfish is just silly. And our attitude towards God should be similar. We act dutifully towards our spouse and our God because we love them—which greatly benefits us.

Of course this whole idea was presented long before Piper wrote his first word by ol' Jack Lewis, in the greatest sermon I've ever heard or read, The Weight of Glory. Back in 2005 I posted the first paragraph here, which provides Lewis' beautiful thesis: our problem is not that we desire too much, our problem is we desire too little. The notion that earnestly desiring our own good is a bad thing has no place in the Christian faith.

Debt and Taxes

I come here again an idealist with a broken heart. I can only hope I'm providing entertainment for the older folks who read this blog and have lived this all before.

Last week the president's bipartisan deficit commission failed to get the votes needed to bring their proposals for how to solve our nation's debt crisis to Congress. This after the Senate failed to create its own commission in January and Obama was left to create a weaker one himself. I could analyze the details but it all boils down to this: Republicans refused to raise taxes by one cent. Democrats refused to cut government programs by one cent. The end.

Now if you're a Republican like me, you are tempted to respect the Republican's position. You want taxes lower. You want programs cut. The Republicans did what they were sent here to do.

But in my view that respect is going to be lackluster comfort when America no longer has far and away the largest economy on the planet and we're trying to get people to lend to us so we can fund our monstrous Medicare and Social Security payments to legions of retired, aging baby boomers. The GOP's primary goal should not be to keep taxes low—not if they wish to claim with one ounce of sincerity that they are concerned about fiscal responsibility. The goal is comprehensive deficit reform. It's solutions, and solutions are going to require compromise. And compromise is going to require allowing some tax raises. There is no glory in remaining true to your no-tax-hike or no-progam-cut stance if you never solve the deficit problem you created.

It doesn't help to watch Obama freeze pay for federal employees, or Jim DeMint try to rally the GOP around a ban on earmarks in the last month. These areas account for less than 1% of the federal budget which is just pandering as far as I'm concerned. It also doesn't help to watch the same party who said they had learned their lesson about big government and fiscal irresponsibility from the Bush years win an election and then turn right around and extend $700 billion worth of tax cuts (in effect, a second stimulus package)—not to mention a president who thinks a PAYGO law from which Social Security, Medicare, appropriations, and the stimulus package (to name a few) are exempt is hard-hitting deficit legislation. We need tax reform. We need entitlement reform. We need discretionary spending cuts. We need compromise. We need resolve. We need change.

Image: Michael Ramirez, Investors.com

Quotes: Democrats, Tinkerers, and Infamy

"Democrats are the only reason to vote for Republicans." Will Rogers

"I am always amazed by scientific possibilities. Electricity, steel, microprocessors, vaccines and other products are possible only because of our efforts to understand the world and how it works. The scientists and tinkerers who investigate these mechanisms are engaged in a profound process of discovery. Without their curiosity and creativity, no amount of exchange would have produced the world in which we now live." Bill Gates

"In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable." Lionel Shriver

Free Culture

Earlier this year one of my favorite independent bands, Modern Skirts, had a chance to release a couple of their songs in the Rock Band store, where they could be downloaded and played in the game. Everything was set to go when they got a call from Viacom. Someone had figured out that one of their guitar solos was based on the song "Pure Imagination" from the movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." This represented a possible breach of copyright law, and the band was forced to retool the solo so it could be released without fear of litigation.

This is a story which is becoming more and more common in America, driven by many factors. Digital technology has given millions of people the tools to slice, mix, and remix bits of recorded material into new pieces of art. The corporations who regard this material as their intellectual property are working hard to protect it from being remixed through our legal system. In the process, culture is being cramped.

I discovered this idea in many places, which eventually led me to lawyer turned copyright activist Lawren Lessig's 2004 book, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. As you might expect, the book is in the public domain and available for free on Lessig's website. I read it on my phone.

In Free Culture, Lessig explains how intellectual property law has grown. When Congress first enacted copyright law in 1790, works entered the public domain after 14 years unless the author chose to renew. Congress extended this deadline so many times in the years since that the average work now enters the public domain after 95 years. While everyone is able to use the works of Mozart and Shakespeare for any creative purpose, it will be a very long time before any 20th century artists' work is freely available.

In 1790, copyright law only applied to commercially published works. Commercial and noncommercial derivative works (such as the Modern Skirts' solo or countless YouTube video mashups), as well as any original noncommercial work, were not governed by copyright law. Today, copyright law extends to every original and derivative work, commercial or noncommercial. The fear and cost of litigation by powerful copyright holders has squelched the "fair use" right.

To make these points, Lessig fills Free Culture with stories from the tangled history of law, media, and technology. He tells how RCA ruined the life of the inventor of FM radio in an attempt to keep his invention from toppling the AM empire. How a farming couple tried to exercise their right to property to keep airplanes from flying over their hen houses and scaring their chickens. How Walt Disney borrowed the idea for Mickey Mouse from a Buster Keaton character named Steamboat Bill and built its empire on transforming public domain works from "Snow White" to "The Jungle Book." How the RIAA sued a college freshman for $15 million for creating a file-sharing program. How copyright law has shut down hundreds of collectors who are trying to archive historic books, music, and film online.

I know at this point it may sound as if Lessig is a radical, but he's not. The central argument in his book is not that we should do away with government and let all intellectual property be "free," nor should we constrain corporations so they cannot use the law to fight people who steal their property. Lessig believes there is a balance between "all information should be free" and "all sharing or transforming of intellectual property is stealing." He believes that anyone who believes in the free exchange of ideas can recognize that our legal system is cramping the cultural revolution technology has enabled in the last thirty years, and there are reasonable reforms we can make to change this. Notable among Lessig's many solutions is Creative Commons, a corporation which provides "free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof."

There is a wealth of stories and information about this issue on the internet. Here are a few of the more interesting ones I've found:

A Spiegel article in which a German historian argues that Germany's rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century was due to an absence of copyright law.

A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell which details his change of heart regarding a playwright who was accused of plagiarizing his work.

A New Republic article by Lessig about Google's attempt to scan, index, and make available on the internet over 18 million books.

The following TED Talk from Lessig, outlining many of the ideas in Free Culture (this one is great too):

TED: Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity 

The following TED Talk from Johanna Blakley, who explains how the fashion industry makes much more money than the media industry in a culture free of copyright:

TED: Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture

This TED Talk, in which YouTube's Head of User Experience, Margaret Gould Stewart, explains how copyright and DMCA works on YouTube in ways that both help and hinder creativity.

This in-progress video series, which explores how "everything is a remix."

"I was an electrical engineer; I guess I still am. I just use it mostly for art now."

Jim Campbell – "Scattered Light" via Steve Simmons