Jazz music (and art in general)

"Jazz music is like real poor people in the country on Sunday. People get dressed up and they don't have any money, but just that little hat with a flower on it. Just what that flower represents. Just a little something to make you special and make you sweet. That's jazz music." ... Wynton Marsilis

I just wish you could hear him say it.

Thank you all for helping me find good love songs! I am very slow in the creative department (probably finding the time once a month and usually then, I don't think to go back and work on something old) ... but I do have a vacation coming up pretty soon, so who knows? If something happens with my essay, I will share it with you all.

My list

To inspire more input ... who doesn't like reading these lists ... I thought I would put what I had going into all this. (PS I talked with someone the other day who said he likes heartbreak songs ... that totally counts as a love song! Those are some of the best love songs).

Van Morrison - Old Old Woodstock (the whole family makes it into this one) & Tupelo Honey
Leftover Salmon - Lovin in My Baby's Eyes (this is the only song I know by them)
Nathan Mayberry - Nine Pound Hammer
Old 97s - Valentine
Nick Cave - Are you the one I have been waiting for? & Into My Arms
Bob Dylan - Visions of Johanna
16 Horsepower - Coal Black Horses ("just as sure as that dogs gonna whine, in my heart no longer will I pine, just as sure as by evil you are torn, the sky will open up and an angel blow his horn and down comes Jesus, lookin so fine, just as sure as that gal she is mine)
Innocence Mission - Going Away


There may be more ... but that is all I have for now ...

Best Love Songs

For the last 2 years (off and on ... ok really just once or twice) I have been trying to write an essay called the Transcendence of a Love song. I began it when I heard the Nick Cave's spoken word essay called the Secret Life of a Love Song. I really didn't agree with some of what he said, but I love how he thinks and talks. One of the great lines was that a love song is our attempt to throw a blanket over God so we can see his face.

Anyway, in order to write this thing ... which is about how real transcendence and meaning has almost completely been lost in our kitch, temporal, tinsal age and one of the only places left where we are actually hit upside the head by such things is in radio love songs. Not that this works everytime.

But, in order to write this, I need to get some help with finding these gems. They can be as old as the blues, as old as jazz ... or as new as indie rock. If you can burn them on a cd, that would be amazing. My plan has always been to write the essay and burn a cd of the greatest love songs ever ... put them together and give them away. That may still be a ways off ... but since I finally have a blog I wanted to get some help.

SO, at the least ... comment with your favorite love songs of all times (track titles and band/artist name).

thanks

PS ... here is the start of the essay ... I have more that is even better, but I will hold back.

"There are many things missing in our tiny modern days. These days feel like walking on shattering glass and hoping to stay ahead of the breakline. So many things have been discarded there is grave danger that our sheet of time won’t hold much longer. Or speaking of glass in another way, one might say that our time is one where a plate of glass has been laid over life, so as to preserve it and display it before our eyes like old dead things in a museum. Either way, one of the many things missing is transcendence and without it our society will continue to shatter into meaninglessness antiquity.

The absent transcendence produces in us a stiffening business that restlessly moves about without encompassing ideas or purpose. “Nothing large can be true or we couldn’t know it if it was,” we say with a cold rationality as we commit vivisection to another helpless animal, hoping to see the electricity of life so we can bottle it and drink it in our Rock Stars and Gatorade. But we at least still sing about something that lifts us from this empty economy of modern life. It is love. There is a little transcendence left in love."

Plantiga is good

Here is another quote from a different book (the last one was the one he wrote for students at Calvin College where he was president and it was called "Engaging God's World. This one is from his famous "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin".)

"All idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile. [Idolatry is best described as anything our "heart clings to" whether its fame, success, happiness or whatever]. Human desire, deep and restless and seemingly unfulfillable, keeps stuffing itself with finite goods, but these cannot satisfy. If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed and undernourished, and we find that day by day, week by week, year after year, we are thinning down to a mere outline of a human being."

Jason's mind: "Well, that's something to think about, Jabez." [my new nickname for my heart]

Mind rental

This is from a book by Cornelius Plantiga "We ordinarily think of a prostitute as someone who rents her body. But a person can also rent her mind for a high hourly rate, and she perverts it if she rents it because she wants to feel superior to the people who bag her groceries and park her car." Whoa to us in our world ... doesn't the vast majority of America prostitute their minds for just these purposes? By foregoing any ambition to education of character, isn't this all that we are left to do ... educate prostitutes who will be willing to pleasure the modern day kings. Ok, the image is getting to graphic for a normal blog post.

God help us incredible creations to accept and understand our highest purpose ... serving the one and only King of the whole earth. May our minds and bodies and hearts be given to you and used for beauty, justice and right relationships. Arm us with prudence, courage and self-control so we might see justice done and thank you that because of Jesus there is faith, hope and love.