mattlumpkin

Can we hang out soon?

2012-01-17T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'd like to share a conversation with a dear friend with whom I'm not able to spend as much time as either of us would like.

Friend
can we hang out soon?

34 minutes ago

Matt Lumpkin

I'd like that.
However I am notoriously hard to schedule with.

Successful applicants will:

- withstand multiple rejected offers before a successful time is found
- have an awareness of the natural rhythms of parented life:
after work (5p) and before bed time (~8-8:30p) are sacrosanct family time unless you...
- join us for dinner and then occupy yourself while we get kids bathed and in bed, or better yet,
- supply dinner (this strategy has enabled Simon Castagna and I to work on music together on two separate and very enjoyable occasions). We welcome dinner guests are willing to join us in considering our children as humans worthy of room being made in the conversation.
- text after 9p or so with an offer to drop in and play skyrim beer & chips also help).
- understand that weekends are mostly set aside for focused family time. But Saturday and Sunday nights sometimes work.
- drop by my office (#305 in the Library) or invite me to coffee or lunch during the workday.
- join my family and neighbors for Friday night dinner and board games at 7p, every night.
- understand that I went to the trouble of typing this out because I really do value your friendship and would like to see more of you.

Favorite Albums of 2011

2012-01-01T19:16:00.000-08:00

1. @JamesBlake - James Blake: 22yo bends "dubstep" into something fragile and human with gorgeous vocals and complex synth-jazz chords.

2. @JoePug - Nation of Heat: powerful appropriation of the early Dylan folk tradition, lyrics that burn their truth into your memory.

3. @MountKimbie - Crooks and Lovers: more "post-dubstep" exploration beyond the wobble-bass into found-sound, acoustic instruments +synths.

4. @Mountain_Goats - All Eternals On Deck: As always, Darnielle's earnest, transcendent songwriting pulls back the veil, reveals the unseen.

5. Childish Gambino (aka @DonaldGlover) - Camp: Glover carves out space for suburban non-gansta rap but can still spit at blistering speed.

6. Wye Oak - Civilian: time capsule of all that was moody and wonderful about 90's grunge, lush with guitar and low female vocals to match.

Danielson: Or Why I'd Be Happy Paving the Way for a Sufjan Stevens

2011-12-25T21:40:00.000-08:00

The same day Elijah and I discussed the Program, we were actually there to discuss Danielson: A Family Movie.

I stumbled upon this film via Netflix and I couldn't stop thinking about it over a week later. Elijah watched it and then we had to talk. The conversation below unfolded from our need to unpack how profoundly we felt this film captured some aspect of our shared sense of calling, as people of faith, to do art.

A few months later The Danielson Family came to Los Angeles and Elijah and I had to go. I drew this sketch while standing there on the front row. That's not anger on his face I was trying to capture, it's Daniel Smith's blistering, vivid, precise intensity.

Download mp3

The Program: Or How Limits and Friendship Broke My Addiction to Illegal Downloads

2011-12-12T16:38:00.000-08:00

"The Program" was the name Matt Cleveland came up with to talk about our decision to stop consuming music like so many handfuls of chips and instead to focus on two albums (one each) a week at a time.

We took a year or two hiatus but now that #theProgram has revived through twitter and now Spotify (you can now join us without having to find the music yourself).

Below is a conversation I had with the insightful, red-bearded and talented, Elijah Davidson about where the Program came from and where it's going.

elijah

Download Here

What You Need to Record Music: Letters to a Young Musician / Artist / Creative (Part 2)

2011-12-02T20:48:00.000-08:00

So my dear friend, Matt Cleveland, has a younger brother named Seth who has started writing songs. We've been emailing for a bit and I though it would be fun to share the Q & A.

Last time it was very esoteric and conceptual. This time it's much more pragmatic and gear-based. But with me it always veers esoteric and conceptual. Seth has granted his permission for me to turn you all into voyeurs.
---

Ah, so it appears we wil just be late in replying to one another. No more apologies. No offense taken and none intended. I'll respond to your questions below.

I have been doing lots of writing. A lot. I have worked out a playlist of about 12 to 14 songs and have been thinking about putting together an album. I guess my first question would be, where do i go from there? Ive been looking at a preamp set at guitar center that includes speakers, a mic stand, a preamp, and a condenser mic. Would this work for recording?

Bedroom Recordings Aren't Studio Recordings and That's Fine

Send me a link to the set you're looking at and I'll give more specific feedback. It all depends on what kind of recording you want to do. I tell people who are doing home recording to no pretend you're doing studio recording and go crazy trying to make a perfect acoustic space. There are lots of great albums recorded in bedrooms (Iron and Wine's "The Creek Drank the Cradle" and Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" to name two). Let home recording be what it is. If you hear someone washing dishes in the background or birds singing, that's not neccesarilly a bad thing.

Having your own Personal Amplification (PA) with speakers can be helpful if you want to play gigs where there isn't anything but you don't need all that to record. All you really need is a good microphone (preferably a condenser mic but a Sure SM57 or SM58 are also good), a computer and some kind of software to record into and some kind of audio interface or mixer to get the mic input in the computer (they make condenser mic's that go straight into USB and they sound alright but I regret spending my $100 on one of these instead of getting a standard mic with an XLR input which I could use in recording and live settings).

Software Is a Big Deal But Doesn't Have to Break the Bank

The software is important. Audacity is free and does the job but it's interface is not the easiest and I don't like how it stores your files in its own special format until you mix them down. The simplest option would be Garageband for Mac. If you knew someone with an old Mac they weren't using anymore you could ask them to use it for recording. If it's from the last 7 years it will have some version of Garageband on it. It doesn't have to be super new. Other people like Apple's Logic. Lots of people swear by ProTools. I haven't used either. I use a software called Ableton live but it's really complex and most of the complexity wouldn't help you much.

That said, almost all audio interfaces (like a small mixer that has a USB out into your computer so you get clean audio in and out with no system noise) come with some kind of multi-track recording software even if it's a limited version. Almost any of them will work with an afternoon of fiddling.

Alternately, if you're clever with the computers, almost all professional audio software is available for free on the web illegally. But beware, if you want to sail the high seas of pirated software you will have to navigate between the Cylla and Charybdis of viruses and porn. Honestly, I used Ableton for 3 years before I bought a legitimate license and it was those years of getting familiar with it and needing it to be more stable than my pirated copy that motivated me to drop the $300 on it and never regret it (see the appended list for more detail of my gear/setup which may or may not be relevant to you).

It's Never About the Tools it's What you Make

Most importantly, don't get stuck on getting all the ideal gear in place. Use what you have, record what you're playing now. An imperfect recording that is done is much better than a perfect one in your head. I record a lot of song ideas and samples on my iPhone. Before that I had a mini-disk recorder and before that one of those tiny cassette recorders. I would be playing guitar and something would really be working and grooving and I would record a couple bars of it. A lot of that stuff ended up on recordings of mine or gets reworked and re-used. And a lot of it is trash! Use the tools you have when you have them. Make stuff now and don't worry if it's not perfect. The more you make the more you learn about what makes it better.

Also, after the initial recording, where do i go? How do i get people to hear it? How do I go about getting more sound into my recording? Other than the norm(i.e. Guitar, vocals, harmonica).

Do Good Work. Put it Where People Can See/Hear It

The short version is best summed up by Austin Kleon in his great essay "How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other things Nobody Told me."
The whole thing is well worth your read but he basically says that to succeed at any artistic endeavor you have to do two things:

1. Do good work.
2. Put it where people can see it.

#1 is as hard as it has ever been. #2 is easier than it has ever been because of the internet.

Once you record a demo or an EP of songs it's as simple as setting up a bandcamp or soundcloud page and you can link it to all your facebook friends and all their friends' friends. I do a lot of networking and connecting with people who are into the same kind of music I am on Twitter (@mattlumpkin) and when my EP came out a lot of them promoted it there. Twitter and facebook let you move beyond the networks of people you know so that people outside your immediate social circles can get a chance to hear. I would then hit up music blogs you like with links to your stuff. College radio stations might also be interested in a young indie folk prodigy.

Other than online and social media the best thing you can do is talk about it. When you talk about what your'e working on and what you're excited about, excitement is contagious and people who are interested in the same stuff will start to gravitate toward you. This happens much more rapidly in places with higher concentration of people and people who are interested in music and art (cities, college towns, etc.). This does two things: it makes it more real to you and you're more likely to follow-through and two it lets you connect with potential collaborators from whom you can learn and get inspiration from.

"There's A Story In Every Sound" -Chris Willits

As far as adding more sounds, exploring how differeing mic placements, different amps, different guitar pedals and different gear sounds differently when combined is half the fun of recording. I read a story about Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins putting a mic inside an angel food cake pan once and mic'ing his guitar amp with that to get a weird effect. I used to record thunderstorms and sample them. I recorded a song of synthesizers underneath two tracks of road noise and one of the washing machine running. If you have a mic and a way to get that audio into a computer you have a world to explore.

Sorry to bombard you with questions. I just have a bunch of them. Ha, ha.

Can you tell I like to answer them? :) With your permission, and in the spirit of sharing with others, I'd like to post some of our conversation on my blog. I get asked these questions and variations on them a lot and it would be nice to be able to refer people there. Of course if there are bits you don't want shared, you can just let me know.

Talk to you soon.

Thanks again,

S. Cleveland

--S. D. Cleveland

Appendix 1 - Matt's Recording Gear: Not an Exhaustive List but What I Use to Record With Mostly

Ableton Live: The main recording and mixing software I use. Complex but great for loop-based electronic music and fast song sketching

Behringer Mixer: I run synths, keyboards, mics and guitars (through the Line6) violins etc into this and use the tape-out to go into the audio in on my laptop. I'd like to replace this with an audio interface but it's hard to find one with so many inputs for so cheap.

Blue Snowball: USB Condnser mic. Weird shape, decent sound though I like it less and less. But cheap!

Line6 Pocket Pod: Guitar Amp Simulator and multi-effects box. Cheap, tiny and great. I love the Fender Twin and Marshall amp models and the delay is pretty useful too. It's not too bad to edit for only having 4 knobs and it has exactly the same guts as the normal sized 3X as expensive POD.

Shure SM57: I'm borrowing this from a friend but I love it and want one. It's great for guitar and vocals.

Sony MDR-750 Headphones: I've been through a lot of headphones but this is really key if you want to multi-track (play the guitar track then go back and sing over it). You don't need high end headphones but its nice and it helps.

As far as speakers, use a pair of cheap bookshelf speakers I got from a yardsale for $10 powered by an old stereo reciever someone gave me years ago (the output from the laptop goes into these).

Update: Seth wrote back asking about this package from Musician's Friend. I think this collection is a good value and great place to start.

Letters to a Young Artist / Musician / Creative

2011-11-23T15:36:00.001-08:00

A few months back my dear friend, Matt Cleveland, put me in touch with his younger brother Seth. Seth is in High School and is getting excited about writing songs.

Since a lot of this flows out of conversations I have with other artists, musicians and creative folk I thought it would be fun to share some of our conversation here.

---

Hi Seth,

we never were able to connect a few months back but I'm finished with school now so I have a bit more freedom to think and write and be so I wanted to catch up. I'm sending this to Matt too because I love him and I miss him and I want him in my life still and I figure he's a little interested in our conversation too. We can drop him if you like. :)

From Writing Perfect Songs to Sketching
Matt had mentioned that you are interested in recording. I started writing and recording a lot of music right about when I was your age and don't have much to show for it except a few dozen audio files I'm not really proud of. I struggled and struggled to write anything I was proud of as a song or more accurately as poetry. I gave up on that and focused on making music I could be proud of. I figured out how to do that and at the same time I messed around a lot with recording on computers and doing a lot of field recording of people talking and nature sounds and things and built this big sample library of stuff I've never used.

But I digress. In retrospect I don't regret focusing on learning recording techniques, but I do regret hating my own writing so much that I stopped doing it. This is mostly because you only get better by doing it. The thing that has really freed me musically is letting myself "sketch." That is, removing the expectation that what I am doing will result in a perfect, finished product. This has allowed me to make things and accidentally I end up being proud of. Both the albums up on http://mattlumpkin.bandcamp.com are a result of me giving myself the freedom to sketch instead of feeling like I had to polish everything and as a result, never produce anything.

How Other People Say It

Ira Glass puts it like this:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Tom Waits puts it like this:

Pitchfork: Are you someone who writes songs by making demos or recording things as you go?

TW: If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal. The drama around even sitting in the car and singing into a tape recorder that's as big as your hand-- waiting until it's very quiet, doing your thing, and then playing it back and hoping you like it-- is the same basic anatomy as when you're in the recording studio, really. Sometimes it's better that way because some of the pressure is off and you can pretend it's throwaway.

It's like what they say about Chinese food: All this preparation and it's gone in a half an hour. How do you think the people in the kitchen feel? Then you got the dishes. But there are dishes that go along with every project. Now, I'm not in the studio dancing around or writing songs, having fun. I'm doing the dishes.

Write As Yourself Even If That's a Moving Target
So I guess I'm saying write about stuff you really feel and think and don't be embarrased if it seems too young, or too unsophisticated or too anything. Just let it be what it is, your expression of something, on your way to becoming the person you are becoming. Work on your technique but don't stress about it. People can smell authenticity, earnestness, being "real." People can tell if you believe in yourself and they will believe in you too. People will overlook all kinds of failings if they believe you mean it.

I used to work as a hospital chaplain. It took me a year to learn that I had to stop trying to be the kind of chaplain I thought was a good chaplain and be myself. Once I did that, it got a lot easier and people started opening up and connecting with me in ways I never thought possible. It sounds weird to say but I think the same goes for any kind of attempt at human connection where there was none before. Whether that's a chaplain dropping by your hospital room or a singer busking across the street with his guitar case open, or an artist pushing a painting out into the world, or a writer...

The more yourself you are the better it will go. And this makes sense when you think about it. You're just being honest about who you are and what connecting with you and the art you produce will be like. This lets people decide if they want more of you or not. This sounds scary but it's really freeing becuase it means that the people who want more will really want it and they won't want a shadow or a husk of you. They will want the real you. And when the stuff that naturally flows out of you is stuff that people really connect with, well that's when things get fun.

Feel free to write back with specific questions whether they are navel-gazey and introspective (like this one) or whether they are practical and technical like: what kind of software, mixer, mics guitars, mic placement etc do I use.

Write back. I'll write back etc.

First 3 Weeks of All Seminary Chapel at Fuller

2011-10-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Paul C. Boles

2011-09-03T12:30:00.001-07:00

Sent with DocScanner

David Frere Sketch

2011-05-31T19:58:00.001-07:00

EP Bonus: "You Were Here" Wallpaper

2011-04-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

As a special bonus, I made a desktop wallpaper from my original watercolor painting used in the album art for th Bendlbock EP. All but the first few who downloaded can find it in the folder with their music, or you can just download it here.

If you haven't heard the EP or haven't shared it with anyone yet, please pass the link on via your favorite social media. Finding out how my art impacts people I don't know is one of the most fun parts of the process.

http://mattlumpkin.bandcamp.com

Bendblock - You Were Here EP

2011-04-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://mattlumpkin.bandcamp.com/album/you-were-here"&amp;gt;You Were Here by mattlumpkin&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p>

Lent as Ritual: Carving the Story of God into the Grain of our Everyday Lives

2011-03-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to preach at my church, Atladeana Baptist. I've been actively involved there leading bible-studies and small-groups for over three years but this is the first chance I've had to preach. It was a true joy to be able to share with a congregation that has meant so much to my family and I.

I usually draw while I listen to sermons so my wife, Melody, decided to draw me while I spoke.

I think she went a little heavy on the eyelashes.

You can stream the audio here or click the little black arrow to download the mp3. I talk a bit about my friend Ryan and one of his tattoos. You kind of need to see it.

Matt Lumpkin - Lent as Ritual - Altadena Baptist Church by mattlumpkin

Ritual Studies Final Paper

2011-03-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

Below you will find my final paper for Todd Johnson's Ritual Studies course at Fuller.

Rob Bell is presently suffering a great deal of controversy and meanness over something he felt was important enough to say. Despite all that, I'm reticent to post this piece of what I recognize is a controversial thesis I've been working on for some time now.

Controversial Thesis:
Basically, I think that what the Church has tended to lump together under the term "syncretism" is actually a wide spectrum of interpretive and integrative moves toward deeply integrating the Christian story into particular personal, social and cultural stories. These moves may be more or less faithful to the broad sweep of the Christian tradition, the Bible and the story of the Kingdom of God story revealed within it but we'll never know if we squash them before they've had a chance to grow.

In the paper below I attempt to show part of why I think this by looking more closely at how rituals emerge and function. In my introduction I try to lay out as clearly and broadly as possible what I'm trying to get at.

If you don't like to read on screen, click the link. You can download a printable PDF from Scribd licensed for Creative Commons sharing for non-commercial use with attribution.
Incubating Fetal Ritual

For more context on this argument in my other work at Fuller see the Scribd Collection below entitled "Re-Narration."

Wolverine Weeps

2011-03-18T21:54:00.001-07:00

What you can do with an Akai s20 Sampler

2011-03-05T23:33:00.001-08:00

This is a little synth riff recorded and sequenced live on an Akai S-20 sampler I found at a yard sale today. I've never had a proper hardware sampler so this promises to be fantastic fun for $20.

All sounds are from the microkorg except the sine wave that defaults to pad #1 when you start the device. I transposed it down a step or two to match the pitches I was playing with.

Akai-S20 by mattlumpkin

Update: 3-6-11
More you can do with the Akai s20. Note the clicky mechanical buttons. They aren't pressure sensitive but you can always tell if you've hit them or not. :)

Lots of Old Sketches

2011-02-27T00:25:00.000-08:00

Lots of sketches from old books, scanned in the past year.

Stanley Hauerwas at Fuller - Mental Illness: My Story

2011-02-16T15:03:00.000-08:00

Update: Complete, uncut videos of all three of Dr. Hauerwas' talks (my notes are from the first). Don't miss out.

Bedtime Story Creatures Illustrated

2011-01-29T10:06:00.000-08:00

Book List

2011-01-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

My brother, Andrew, recently asked me for a book list of good books to read. Here's what I wrote.

Mind Expanding Scifi:
Ursula Leguin: The Dispossessed
- Physicist from a desolate moon colonized by anarchists breaks the law to visit the earthlike planet filled with plenty and political intrigue trying to bridge the divided communities. Brilliant and deep reflections on what makes good life, good work and how the structures of our society help or hinder us in these goals.
- highlights here.

Willaim Gibson: Neuromancer
- film noir meets cyberpunk; fem fatalle with retractable steal claws; virtual reality hacking and emergent lifeforms born in the web.

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash
- Neal's take on cyberpunk with fascinating reflection on linguistics, speaking in tongues/glossalalia, samouri swords and skateboarding.

Neal Stephenson: Diamond Age
- Amazing story of a future of nanotech, self-selected cultural/linguistic enclaves, the power of story to shape imagination and building a giant underwater supercomputer composed of human minds spreading information via nano-machine viruses.

Neal Stephenson: Anathem
- Stephenson's most epic book of epic awesomeness (900 pages?). It's about everything. Specifically, what if scientists devoted their lives to learning with the discipline of a religious order? In the world of the walled maths students preserve learning and information despite the rise and falls of civilization outside. But when an extraterrestrial ship is spotted in orbit everything starts to fall apart and only the super-geniuses within the mathic order can save humanity.
- you can learn the entirety of western intellectual history (important ideas from plato to the post-moderns) from this book; unfortunately all the names are slightly off because it takes place in a parallel world that's very much like earth but somewhat different.
- this is in my top 3 books I've ever read. Simply amazing. Easily Stephenson's best.

Non-Fiction:
Alwyn Scott: Stairway to the Mind
- Amazingly deep but accessible study of how each level of science (physics, chemistry, organic chem, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology) is a step up in complexity in which the emerging properties of the subject of study at each level do things that the previous level could not have predicted.
- Fascinating look at current neuroscience by a neuroresearcher reflecting technically and poetically on where human consciousness comes from and all the simultaneous processes that run underneath it an enable it, below the level of consciousness.

Re: Confessions of a Former Worship Leader

2010-12-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

Comments in response to Confessions of a Former Worship Leader
Interesting reflections, but he doesn't even address the way this is just the latest permutation of the age old debate between spontaneous worship and planned worship. You might think of the mic placement as a kind of planned liturgy. It only seems phony in the context of a tradition that presupposes deeper authenticity for "spontaneous" worship and regards planning as manipulation.

Further, you could also see the reading of the law as a use of a new technology, the written word read aloud, used to manipulate the emotions of the people, in the same way some critique the use of video in worship today. His application of Ezra's response is good, but his sense of conflict and manipulation hint at a fairly myopic view of worship. Lets all take a step back out of the microcosms of our communities and look at how worship functions globally, for all humanity, across religious traditions and across history. Only then can we discern what are the key issues for our particular context. Once you recognize that worship is something humans do, on our own terms, by our own imaginations, as a means to reaching out to God, it becomes a matter of pragmatics. What works to help us connect to God and to provide contexts for transformative encounters with God? For some that might be reading the law all day, for others that might mean an emotional crescendo, for others that might mean a tent playing trance music with visuals.

As a low-church baptist this is an easy move for me to make, but I think it's a helpful one if we want to move past worship wars and into asking serious questions about how worship functions and shapes our communities.

Coopers + Johansens

2010-12-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving weekend was delightfully restful. We shared a good deal of it with the Coopers and the Johansens. Noel and Holly are sisters who live on opposite coasts and thought it would be a great chance to get some portraits together with their husbands.

We had a fun time in the seasonable chill and then had hot chocolate.

The Dispossessed

2010-11-23T21:13:00.000-08:00

This was the first book I read on a kindle. It's one of those scifi books which that works like a lens to focus new light on your life. The kindle is fun because it lets you save up all the parts you want to highlight and then export them as a text file.
----
The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 116-17 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 10:22 AM

He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 312-13 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 10:59 AM

He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new earth.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 557-58 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 03:36 PM

They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the new role now, it was playing them.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 597-600 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 04:22 PM

“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.” “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 607-15 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2010, 04:26 PM

Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson, and the image of iridescent jewels in the smooth hollow of women’s oiled, brown bellies had since recurred to all of them, privately. They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. “A famine in Bachifoil Province in the Nation of Thu,” the commenter’s voice had said. “Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels), women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the lotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class.” A close-up of dinnertime: soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands reaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. “Side by side,” the quiet voice had said.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1288-91 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 02:38 PM

He was alone, here, because he came from a self-exiled society. He had always been alone on his own world because he had exiled himself from his society. The Settlers had taken one step away. He had taken two. He stood by himself, because he had taken the metaphysical risk. And he had been fool enough to think that he might serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not belong.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1318-20 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 02:43 PM

And yet they always had a waiting list. However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture. Loneliness, watchfulness, danger, spaceships: they offered the lure of romance.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1396-97 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 02:54 PM

“Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1501-4 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 03:09 PM

Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1569-73 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 03:57 PM

Why had they stuck him in here? He soon found out why. It was the right kind of place for his kind of work. If ideas arrived at midnight, he could turn on the light and write them down; if they came at dawn, they weren’t jostled out of his head by the conversation and commotion of four or five roommates getting up; if they didn’t come at all and he had to spend whole days sitting at his desk staring out the window, there was nobody behind his back to wonder why he was slacking. Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1585-89 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:00 PM

The job was worth doing and he was doing it well. It was centrally functional to his society. The responsibility justified the privilege. So he worked. He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of physical labor, lack of variety of occupation, lack of social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom. He was the free man: he could do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it for as long as he wanted to do it. And he did. He worked. He work/played.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1592-98 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:01 PM

During that autumn and winter he got more and more out of the habit of sleeping. A couple of hours at night and a couple more sometime during the day were enough for him, and such naps were not the kind of profound sleep he had always had before, but almost a waking on another level, they were so full of dreams. He dreamed vividly, and the dreams were part of his work. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles. He got up and scribbled down, without really waking, the mathematical formula that had been eluding him for days. He saw space shrink in upon him like the walls of a collapsing sphere driving in and in towards a central void, closing, closing, and he woke with a scream for help locked in his throat, struggling in silence to escape from the knowledge of his own external emptiness.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1769-71 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:22 PM

“It’s all right, brother. It’ll be all right, little brother,” he muttered. Shevek heard him and felt his touch, but took no comfort in it. Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1800-1804 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:28 PM

They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to leu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1826-31 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:33 PM

At first all this seemed funny to him; then it made him uneasy. He must not dismiss as ridiculous what was, after all, of tremendous importance here. He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1831-32 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:33 PM

admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1850-53 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 10:37 PM

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 1962-65 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:10 PM

You picked the wrong people to try to make brothers of! And if—I have no business saying this. But it doesn’t matter. If you won’t come to us in Thu, at least don’t give your Theory to the Ioti. Don’t give the usurers anything! Get out. Go home. Give your own people what you have to give!” “They don’t want it,” Shevek said, expressionless. “Do you think I did not try?”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2033-35 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:21 PM

It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.” He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2112-15 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:31 PM

A person likes to do what he is good at doing…. But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2175-80 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:41 PM

At some moments Shevek liked Desar, and at others detested him, for the same qualities. He stuck to him, however, deliberately, as part of his resolution to change his life. His illness had made him realize that if he tried to go on alone he would break down altogether. He saw this in moral terms, and judged himself ruthlessly. He had been keeping himself for himself, against the ethical imperative of brotherhood. Shevek at twenty-one was not a prig, exactly, because his morality was passionate and drastic; but it was still fitted to a rigid mold, the simplistic Odonianism taught to children by mediocre adults, an internalized preaching.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2237-39 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:54 PM

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand—who might have understood—made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it was not possible.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2253-56 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 10:58 PM

Three years here, and he had accomplished what? A book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished papers; and a funeral oration for a wasted life. Nothing he did was understood. To put it more honestly, nothing he did was meaningful. He was fulfilling no necessary function, personal or social. In fact—it was not an uncommon phenomenon in his field—he had burnt out at twenty. He would achieve nothing further. He had come up against the wall for good.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2313-18 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 09:48 PM

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can’t, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2348-52 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 09:55 PM

communities—anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2355-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 09:56 PM

Bedap seized his advantage relentlessly. “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2395-97 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:00 PM

But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2470-74 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:09 PM

Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to say. Yet he could not join in Bedap’s criticism. Bedap had forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2580-84 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:36 PM

It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this city had all been part of his present great happiness, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now. Takver saw no such obscure concatenations of effect/cause/effect, but then she was not a temporal physicist. She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2610-11 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:40 PM

It had never occurred to Shevek that life could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exuberance was perhaps the essential quality of life.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2669-79 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:50 PM

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…. But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” “That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don’t want it! But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.” “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?” “Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!” “Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light—”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 2695-97 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 10:52 PM

He had been co-opted—just as Chifoilisk had said. But he did not know how to break down the wall. And if he did, where could he go? The panic closed in on him tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3434-37 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:03 PM

in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3461-66 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:09 PM

Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became conclusive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at all. Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.” There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3585-87 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:27 PM

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3618-22 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:33 PM

“Hell!” he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. “Oh, hell!” he repeated. He crumpled up Sabul’s grubby little note vindictively, and then brought his hands down clenched against the edge of the table, twice, three times, in his passion seeking pain. But there was nothing. There was nothing to be done and nowhere to be gone. He was left at last with the bedding to unroll, with lying down alone and getting to sleep, with evil dreams and without comfort.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3704-11 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 08:45 PM

“I’m a physicist, not a functions analyst,” Shevek said amiably. “Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst. You’re thirty, aren’t you? By that age a man should know not only his cellular function but his organic function—what his optimum role is the social organism is. You haven’t had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most people—” “No. Since I was ten or twelve I’ve known what kind of work I had to do.” “What a boy thinks he likes to do isn’t always what his society needs from him.” “I’m thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.” “You’ve reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment. First the Northsetting Regional Institute—”
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 3806-7 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2010, 03:55 PM

He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 4005-9 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2010, 11:42 PM

In peacetime he may sprout sentimental pacifism, but the grit’s there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It’s how we became the leader we are.” “By climbing up on a pile of dead children?” Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man’s feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro did not hear him.
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The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Highlight Loc. 4845-53 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2010, 12:08 AM

“Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”
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Face in Books

2010-11-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

I found some books for free the library was giving away. They had nice paper so I didn't want to see them go to waste. They were a series of periodicals on the discipline of "Spiritism." At the turn of the century what is now seen as fringe science was still being studied and was on the same edges with psychology such that even a Christian School of Psychology might want them in its library's collection.

No more. The current boundaries of the possible have little room for spirits. Charon makes an appearance because I was reading Dante's Inferno for Dr. James Bradley at the time I drew these. The more I read that book the harder I find it to take him seriously. It continues to fascinate me how natural an expression that work is of an attempt to reconcile a pre-christian "pagan" worldview with with the Christian present. It fascinates me all the more because I think this process of reconciliation and the blending of narratives and ascribing new meaning to old patterns is at the heart of how we change our minds and migrate from one life-world to another.

Why I Grieve It

2010-10-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

Elijah Davidson writes:

And so Bazan wrestles - with himself, with his audience, and with God.

And he grieves what he has lost. At the show Friday night, Bazan and band played the Pedro the Lion song "The Fleecing." The song used to sing,

I could tell you why I doubt it
And why I still believe it
And why I need it
And what the Pharisees don't see

Friday night, Bazan sang instead,

I'd tell you why I doubt it
And why I don't believe it
And why I grieve it
How I was blind but now I see

As he sang these words on the edge of everything in Silver Lake at Spaceland, many present cheered. Many others sighed - in confusion, in commiseration, in love.

///

Elijah, thank you for so carefully explaining the heartbreaking moment when, in changing the lyrics, Bazan stopped speaking for me and started speaking for the guy in the plaid shirt in front of me (pictured here) who cheered and clapped to find in Bazan such a kindred spirit.

I suppose it's only fair I have to share. I've been able to count on Bazan for the last ten years to give words to my own struggles, to the challenge to reconcile faith with the wrongness of the world and the suffering of so many at the hands of the church. And I couldn't want for anything other than the fierce honesty that has made Bazan's writing so strong. But it still makes me sad to loose him. I guess that's why my hand shot up when he asked for questions right after the song you quote and I asked: "How do you grieve it?"

"How do I grieve it? How do you grieve anything? You take the process seriously..."

You can only grieve what's lost. If "Curse Your Branches" was Bazan's break-up record with God, then this concert was my "break-up" with Bazan.

I think I'm grieving it.

New Beat, Feat. Zobrist

2010-10-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

Zobrist-vs-Lumpkin v2 by mattlumpkin

This is a collaboration with the best drummer I know: Joel Zobrist. He did the beat, I did the rest. Spot the ukulele and beat-repeater.

SPionic Keymap

2010-10-05T17:27:00.000-07:00

This is the keymap I use when typing with the SBL legacy font, SPionic for Joel Green. I hope it's helpful to my fellow-exegetes of Luke looking for that elusive rough breathing mark with circumflex accent.

Just drag it to your desktop or right-click to save.

Sarann's Glasses & Dan's Hand

2010-10-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

I shoot kids

2010-09-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

...Birthday Parties.

I haven't had a lot of time for photo projects for hire lately with my work and school. However, when Powell's mom, Bianca, emailed to see if I was available to do a follow-up to my shoot last year of her son's first birthday, I had such fond memories of the celebration last year that I couldn't refuse.

Biblifolk

2010-09-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://mattlumpkin.bandcamp.com/album/pentabook">Adam by mattlumpkin</a>

Here is a collection of 5 songs I wrote and recording in about a week as part of an assignment for a class on the first five books of the Bible (aka the Pentateuch).

I wanted to explore the humanity and emotional perspectives of the characters that first come into contact with the God of the Bible and are the first to meet him, in a manner of speaking. Each song is written in the first person as though they are telling you part of their story. The recordings are brittle and sketchy, but hopefully the stories on which they hang can bear the weight of repeated listening.

You can stream them in your browser right here (even on your iPhone) or you can click either of the links to download and share them (all of this thanks to the fantastic bandcamp.com).

Thanks to John Goldingay for encouraging me to think beyond Adam; to Melody Lumpkin for encouraging me to write a song; to Luke Wakefield, Jon Damiani and Matt Cleveland for your sympathetic ears and early, positive feedback.

Update (9/15/10):
I heard back from John Goldingay today. He is the Pentateuch Professor for whom I prepared these for class credit, and quite frankly, one of the best teacher's I've had. You can read what he had to say below. Needless to say, I'm pleased.

"These were great - A. I was afraid they were just going to be using the stories as jumping off points for modern thoughts, but I liked the way you kept reflecting things that were there in the text and making links I hadn't thought of before - like Noah and the stench and the wine. Well done. And accessing it was very easy, so thanks."

So, in Levar Burton voice, "you don't have to take my word for it!" Check out the songs and tell me what you think, even if you don't give me an A.

Lofi Video

2010-08-27T11:45:00.001-07:00

Daughter from Matt Lumpkin on Vimeo.

A joyful afternoon with my daughter who is growing into someone so complex and wonderful we can hardly bear it.

Lo-fi: Winner

2010-08-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Answer: We have a winner. Matthew Geddert guessed that I was shooting these using a digital camera to shoot the focus screen of an older, medium format film camera. In this case, a Richoflex, "Twin Lens Reflex" or TLR (as opposed to a single lens reflex or SLR).

The fun things about these cameras, sometimes known as "view cameras" (as seen in Julie and Julia, my wife tells me), is that you look down into them from above which makes them perfect for mounting a digital SLR or point and shoot onto them with an unweildy and unstable piece of cardboard. They use two lenses because the bottom one puts the image on the film while the top one puts the image on the focus screen. In your SLR, they get around this by having the mirror that reflects the lens image up 90 degrees to your focus screen flip up and out of the way when the shutter releases.

I'm having no end of fun with the grainy, dirty square images it produces. Even more fun is shooting video through it. The shallow depth of field and manual focus makes it feel like old super 8. Hopefully more video to post later.

Update: In the mean time Geddert wins his very own iPod refrigerator magnet. This is essentially an old, broken iPod with a large magnet inside. Impress your friends! I'll mail it or send it via mutual-friend post.

Lo-fi

2010-08-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

Photo riddle: figure our what's going on here and win a prize.
Hint: no digital post-process involved.

A Note for Americans (and for Christians) About the Proposed Manhattan Mosque

2010-08-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map

I don't generally consider blogs to be an ideal forum for charitable conversation, however, I feel so strongly about this I feel compelled to say what I think and offer to read your responses with the same grace and charity which I hope you will extend to my words.

For Americans:
Whenever people and nations go through traumatic times they face a choice. How do we integrate what has happened into the rest of the story of our lives? Do we let it make us angry and afraid? Bitter and reactionary? Or do we find a way to weave our hard and painful experiences it into the arc of who we have been and who we want to be?

After 9/11 all Americans faced this choice and we continue to face it today. I understand that the suffering, trauma and loss of both the families who lost loved ones and the rest of America is real and painful, even today. But we must choose not to be defined by that experience.

As we consider who we as a nation have been and would like to be in the context of the proposed Muslim Community Center in Manhattan, we can turn to the story of what America has been in the past: a place where, just up the coast in Boston and Providence people journeyed across oceans to carve out a space for themselves and their families to live out their faith in accord with their own consciences, free from the interference of the religious and political majority who had not let them worship as they wished or build churches where they wished.

This is why I agree with President Obama that this is an issue of freedom of religion that goes back to the core of who we have been as a nation. We now get to choose:

Will we let 9/11 change who we have been, because we still live with the scar of ground zero? Or will we remember who we have been, join our future to our past and demonstrate that we can live out what we claim to believe.

--
For Christians:
I have intentionally not made any arguments from within my own Christian faith. This is because I believe this question is a live one for all Americans, not just Christians. That said, we as Christians may want to consider what our Lord's command to love our neighbors as ourselves might suggest in this case.

Button Music

2010-08-04T17:14:00.000-07:00

Guitarish by mattlumpkin

Music is one of the great joys of my life. I started playing guitar when I was 12 and I started playing computer a couple of years after that. I got started with a terrible little multi-track recorder I found online but soon graduated the fantastically powerful Cool Edit Pro (for which I have still not found an equivalent in Mac OS).

I was in a terrible little band in high school and we had fun. But I didn't want to wait around for other people to show up to make music and growing up on a farm in rural Arkansas, there weren't that many people lining up to realize my visions of blending big-beat house with modern guitar rock. In 1999 I learned to program drums in Fruity Loops and began to genuinely have fun collaging beats and drum sounds I sampled from my own CD collection with found sound from High School and the ubiquitous doom-sayers of the impending Y2K apocalypse.

There's still a big disconnect between the music I make when I play my computer and the music I make when I play my guitar. But if you listen to the track above, you can hear me playing guitar sounds with my computer, (that is, with my budget "monome," button grid interface running a sampling program called mlrV).

Integration is fun!

Sign Your Name Please

2010-07-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

I was having a conversation last week with the editor of the Burner Blog about how much I dislike it when group-edited blogs use a generic signature on posts. I used the CTI blog Out of Ur as an example.

If I read your blog regularly, I develop a relationship with your editors and learn their voices, paying special attention to my favorites. This process of me bonding with your content creators is frustrated when you obscure their name from me. Also, it keeps me from finding other stuff on the web that they have written that I might enjoy and inhibits their professional development.

Finally it contributes to the notion many people have carried with them from the earliest years of the internet, that somehow what you write and who you are on the web are separate from who you are in real life. Most of us have changed our email addresses from goofykid1776@hotmail.com to something resembling our real name. I suggest that we carry the same idea forward in our blogs and sign our name to what we write, and if that feels uncomfortable, then it might be time to reconsider what we have written or where we are posting.

Guthrie - Jennings - Lumpkin

2010-06-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

Folk Set at Matthew Chern's "The Shape of Justice" Homeless Benefit Concert from Matt Lumpkin on Vimeo.

Thanks to Matthew Chern for organizing the event (and opening for me!) way back in February and Joshua Lim for shooting and editing. I picked three songs that were at least loosely related to the themes of homelessness and justice: Woody Guthrie's "This Land," Mason Jennings' "I'm Goin' Back to New Orleans," and one of mine called "West Coast Blues."

iPhone Stylus + Sketchbook App

2010-05-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

I discovered this great video today on how to make a simple iPhone/iPad stylus from Make Magazine. Being an art nerd I have been wanting to make one of these for a while in order to be able to actually draw using some of the great apps available (and to see how useful it would be to use the iPad as a drawing surface).

My stylus came out looking something like his and works great. I've been using it with AutoDesk's Sketchbook Mobile app which is wonderful. Its brushes simulate touch-sensitive operation and as you can see below, its line tracking gives you very natural curves and human lines. I'm going to have fun with this.

Charles Finney

2010-04-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

Saturday Afternoon Adventures

2010-04-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

Live Sketching as Meditative Worship: Good Friday

2010-04-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

Good Friday Sketch from Matt Lumpkin on Vimeo.

Glenn Molina and Altadena Baptist Church continue to invite me to experiment with live sketching as a practice of meditative worship. Our first venture into this was at Advent. It was particularly significant for me to be able to take part in this Good Friday service since it was last year's Good Friday service that woke me up to the power of imagery as an aid to reflective worship.

The service was simple but powerful. It was organized around five readings from Matthew's narrative of the crucifixion which were each accompanied by brief reflections from our pastors, selections from J.S. Bach's "Matthew Passion" and individual sketches I did in response to last year's service. Finally, I drew the piece above, live, projected on the wall for all to see while Bach's music seeped into our consciousness.

What I enjoy most about this is how it shifts the emphasis from product to process. The process of sketching is paradoxically both fast and slow. It is fast in that one is trying to apprehend and portray the whole form in its most basic and central elements. It is slow in that the sketching (or hopefully in watching a sketch) only one line can be drawn at a time. The necessary slowness of the process means that you cannot look away, as we are tempted to do, especially from the crucifixion.

Sketching with a 4 Year Old

2010-03-09T13:33:00.000-08:00

My four year old loves to draw and probably draws more than I do. Our neighbor once gave her a pad of old, yellow forms from work and it's her favorite medium. I drew these with her markers. The sketch on the far right vaguely resembles her. I find it a distinct challenge to draw people in my family. I think I know their faces so well that I always see the flaws that in sketches of others I would overlook.

"One of my favorite outside crafts to do"

2010-03-03T21:25:00.000-08:00

A Glimpse Into Our Life from m lumpkin on Vimeo.

This is a video of my oldest daughter drawing with chalk. She draws at least as much as she plays, if not more. In this video she says that drawing with chalk is "one of my favorite outside crafts to do." For her, a craft is anything involving drawing or making something. Often they involve messes but most days I'm happy this is how she chooses to spend her time.

Next week I'm helping a friend do a workshop on drawing with a particular emphasis on sketching. One of the ideas I hope to get across is that drawing, sketching and all kinds of art can be a wonderful part of life that fit in without demanding a lot of time energy and preparation. And, it can be a wonderful way to spend a breezy California afternoon on the porch.

Yosemite for the Weekend

2010-03-02T19:55:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite photo from my weekend trip to Yosemite. Cheers to the Gedderts of Fresno (soon to be San Francisco) for hosting all of us and for planning a wonderful weekend away.

You should look at the rest of the album here.

Justo Gonzalez at Fuller Seminary

2010-02-24T23:21:00.000-08:00

Justo Gonzalez spoke at Fuller's Chapel today. He articulated the way the process of translation across the boundaries of language and culture have been a part of the Christian story from the very beginning (Pentecost). This means that no one language or culture has a corner on the gospel message and all of us know it most fully when we are engaged in conversations across those boundaries. This notion is central to my understanding of the Christian faith and it was a pleasure to hear it stated so well.

I'm well past the honey-moon period with my studies at Fuller but I can still say with honesty that the seminary understands this fact and is further along the slow journey moving towards reflecting this reality than any other school I know of.

If you are interested in reading some of Justo Gonzalez' profound and profoundly accesible prose but are intimidated by his massive works of Church history, let me recommend the slim volume, Santa Biblia: the Bible Through Hispanic Eyes, which focuses on the issue of translation and looks within the Bible itself for guidance on how this process unfolds.

Open and Closed Case

2010-02-20T01:11:00.000-08:00

WHY OPEN MATTERS
Lately I've been having entirely too much fun playing with the real-time sample cutting/cueing software called mlrV (see it in action below here). mlrV was built to run on the monome (pictured here): an open source hardware project (all the specs and circuits are freely available and no attempt is made to protect intellectual property) that runs open source software written in a special audio-programming environment called MaxMSP.

The monome is hard to explain because it doesn't do anything on its own out of the box. It is a sound controller. It provides a physical interface to control what a computer does with sound. It's just a grid of buttons with lights under them.

But the open-endedness of the project is also its strength. mlrV is only one of dozens of powerful programs, written by scarily intelligent and talented music-nerds posted and supported for free here. Such is the power of open source software + open source hardware.

To make my point further, I don't even own a monome. They are in such high demand that they sell out in seconds after they go on sale despite their $500-$1000 price-tags. I couldn't find one to buy. But last November a British company called Novation built this sound controller called the the launchpad.

Look familiar? It's made to control another more comprehensive, expensive and wonderful software called Ableton Live. Also it costs less than half of the price of the cheapest monome because it's mass-produced in China instead of lovingly hand-crafted in the Catskills.

Days after the launchpad was released a clever hacker wrote a piece of code in MaxMSP that lets the launchpad use (almost) all the free open-source software written for the monome. The response of the people who make the monome? "Good work. We love what you're doing to expand the project."

This is open development at its best. Not simply because I got a powerful tool for free or more cheaply (though this is a common outcome) but because the creators were willing to let the cultural/creative process happen without trying to lock it down so they could make more money from it. There is a willingness to prioritize the broader cultural or community benefit over individual financial gain. You either love music more or you love money more. Apparently the people behind the monome love music more.

WHAT CLOSED MEANS
Also tonight, I was reading an a post (on my iPhone) from a blog called Create Digital Music. The author was arguing that Apple's new iPad while very shiny and cool, is ultimately a step in the wrong direction. I've heard these arguments before but tonight I became convinced. And it has everything to do with control.

First: control of the software. Apple's made no secret of controlling who gets an app in their store and often they block good apps for no good reason and let in thousands of bad apps. But it's the apps (like this life-changing one) that make the iPhone such a useful and interesting device. The size, connectivity and touch-screen have changed the way we use computers, despite Apple's capriciously run app store.

Second: control of the hardware. I have spent a good 3-4 hours total attempting to restore to working order a perfectly good iPhone a friend of a friend gave to me. The problem is that he tried to "jailbreak" the phone so he could run apps other than the ones Apple sells in its store. Normally if a computer's software gets messed up you would just reset the phone back to factory settings ("restore" in iTunes). But because of the escalating war between the people who find ways get around Apple's tight control over their phones, and the people at Apple who then create more ways to maintain control, this is no longer possible.

Now if you want to restore your phone in iTunes (even if you haven't attempted to "jail-break" it), iTunes has to check the software and your hardware against its records on a server somewhere they control. If they don't like the software you're using to restore it, or if they think you have restored it too many times, or in a suspicious way, they terminate the restore process remotely.

The net outcome is that I have a perfectly good piece of hardware on my desk the software of which is still being controlled by the company that made it, even though it has already been bought and has changed hands three times. The simple reason is that if they can retain control they can make more money. Apparently they love money more than they love the cultural/creative process that is the development of technology: hardware and software.

Speed Sketching Musicians

2010-02-17T16:52:00.000-08:00

Speed sketching is about catching the movement impact or emotion of a subject in as quick a time as possible and often with as few gestures as possible. Whenever I hear musicians performing it always makes me feel like playing along with them. Lately I've started trying to draw them while playing. Normal people are hard enough to draw but musicians are often in constant motion.

Here are a couple of sketches I felt got close to expressing some of the experience of seeing them live.

Paintings for a Wedding

2010-02-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

Dave and Tera are getting married tomorrow. They asked some of their friends who do art to paint some paintings of places they've visited to serve as place cards for the reception. I had fun picking a couple of places in Singapore I've actually visited. Once the wedding is over they will collect all twenty-something paintings and frame them as one crowd-sourced piece of art.

Bonus points for people who know the names of these buildings

Evinrude St. Sebastian III

2010-02-02T19:33:00.001-08:00

Last Summer my friend and colleague, Simon, was out of the office for a week or so and I decided to draw him a serial comic, spending a 5 minute break each day to draw a panel or two.

Protector

2010-02-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

Last Summer when I was taking time off from classes to rest up for the birth of the new baby, I went on a science fiction binge. One of the most fun books I read was Larry Niven's "Protector." It's about a man who gets exposesd to a catalytic enzyme that triggers a sort of metamorphasis transforming his body and super-charging his mind. This how I imagined him.

Recent Sketches

2010-02-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

Winter Quarter Schedule

2010-01-26T08:46:00.001-08:00

The Mysteries of Market Analysis

2010-01-24T21:37:00.000-08:00

I finished college with money left over from what my mom saved for me to go to college. I've kept that money invested in mutual funds with a company called Edward Jones since then. Lately my "financial advisor" (the guy who gets a commission from everything I

invest) has been sending me risk assessment reports like the one below. I read the intro and conclusion. It's like peering through a strange mirror.

It's hard for me to imagine the vast networks of humans whose job it is to take something like the election of Senator Brown or healthcare reform and distill it down to probabilities of how the medical sector will perform as an industry.

This probably just further illustrates how naive or isolated I am from the economic reductionism that drives so many crucial decisions in our society. But the contrast is so stark between this way of viewing the world and that of the Seminary world I am immersed in. This strikes me as either a problem or an illustration of the alternate vision of reality faithfulness to Jesus calls us to live. Either way, the manner in which this document strikes me as bizarre suggests that I need to get out more, if only to better know the dominant narrowness of scope I need to challenge.

Advent Sketches

2009-12-01T22:51:00.000-08:00

Haiku Hymn
by Tim Eby-McKenzie

Ears you need to hear
The Word softly crashes in
Silent song of joy

Kings and despots plot
The Word in timely splendor
Humbly awaits birth

Naked helpless babe
Swaddled nursed attached secure
In poverty rests

Absurd scandal's eve
Unrecognized miracle
Light not overcome

Word of God unveiled
Blind eyes look to be opened
The world knew him not

Joy set before him
Rescuer of wretched souls
Wades into the mire

Ignorance and want
Reckless, sinful - all condemned
Violent guilt and shame

Seated in darkness
Endless waiting for the light
Lame, blind, deaf, sick, dumb

Healing in His wings
Captive's freedom, sinner's joy
Come, Lord Jesus, Come!

This is a collection of sketches I did last Sunday as part of an Advent service at Altadena Baptist Church. I drew them in real time as a series of nine haiku s reflecting on Advent themes were read by their author, Tim Eby-McKenzie. The sketches were in response to the haiku's which you can read below, and a video feed of the drawing process was running so the whole congregation could watch the drawings unfold. As Tim read and I drew, our worship pastor, Glenn Molina improvised on piano in response.

The most significant part of the experience for me was the immediate connection the images evoked. Each different image (each completed in under a minute) seemed to connect with different viewers. I love the Advent idea of clarity emerging from uncertainty, and of the process of waiting, watching and a pattern starting to unfold.

I have been sketching in church for some time now but it wasn't until last Good Friday that I began to focus my drawing as a reflective and meditative, even worshipful exercise in the context of the congregation. It is a pleasure and a privilege to serve in a church where the richness of the gifts that God has given us can be celebrated and brought into service of the broader congregation.

Tree, Sky, Shadow

2009-11-17T20:59:00.000-08:00

This is what I saw when I went surfing with my friend Dan, last Thursday morning. He was good enough to let me delay our departure to shoot it. Now you get to see it.

John L. Thompson Sketch

2009-11-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

Another pencil sketch from class. People who are lecturing never notice if you stare at them.

Edit (9:00pm): It seems Dr. Thompson has found me out. In his gracious comment he alludes to this sketch a student of Calvin did in the 1550's.

Powell's 1st Birthday Photo Shoot

2009-11-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

I shot these a few weeks back for friends of friends who put on a lovely celebration for their little boy's first birthday. I had so much fun documenting this milestone with them.

Pretty Video

2009-10-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

René Girard from Michael Sugrue on Vimeo.

More Faces: drawing from life vs. from photos

2009-09-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at a little open mic concert hosted by Fuller's Coffee by the Books. The two performers (Dan Long & Kyle Megginson) didn't seem to mind my sketching and my daughter's interpretive dancing.

Drawing from live moving, singing, performing people is an altogether different experience than working from photos. It feels much more alive and collaborative. I move faster and make bolder choices because I have to. At times, especially when drawing musicians, I almost feel like I'm playing along. It nearly scratches the itch I always feel at concerts to pick up an instrument and join in.

And yet the outcome is almost always sloppier. The eyes or the the jaw or the lips don't come out quite right and I can't shake the feeling that it's harder for the sketches to stand on their own if the viewer wasn't there and doesn't have their own memories to complement them.

My "analog facebook" project has been an exercise in drawing exclusively from photos, often of friends I haven't seen in person for a while. Sometimes I find a great portrait that looks fun to draw. Other times I composite several photos into something that approximates my memory of the person. I usually have more time and the ability to do a pencil sketch first before working in the ink. Despite the overall greater detail and precision, I still almost always find a fatal flaw that just isn't quite right.

The reason I like drawing live so much is that I cut myself more slack about the precision and the mistakes and focus on capturing something of the feeling of being there.

Is California On Fire?

2009-09-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

Like the rest of LA, I have been transfixed by the station fire as it crawled visibly across the mountains above my house. It was eeriest at night when the flames filled the the smoke with an orange glow. In the daytime, I kept being reminded me of the Hebrews wandering in the desert with a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud by day.

***
http://www.iscaliforniaonfire.com

Free iPods to Good Homes: Deadline Extended!

2009-08-31T22:01:00.000-07:00

One week into the "Broken but Probably Fixed iPod" giveaway we have several folks in the running. I'm extending the non-existent deadline by an extra week (or more) for my own entertainment. Also, so that I can fix more iPods to keep up with the overwhelming response.

Below are quotes from some of the more entertaining attempts to garner my sympathy.

If you too need an iPod, there's still time. Click here and fill out the form, but please use your own name and address (Simon, this means you).

***

Quotes:

"I'm desperate. You're my only hope. I will probably go crazy worse if you don't give me an ipod now."

"You are participating in the sacrament of the most high God when you send me a free iPod."

This one begins a poem:

"A SEASON of missed songs - reliving them is bliss,
Close bosom-friends of this maturing son;
Conspire with him now to load and bless
Him with music from the tree that round Microsoft runs;"

Free Broken but Probably Fixed iPods for Free

2009-08-20T22:08:00.001-07:00

Analog Facebook Returns

2009-08-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

Same rules apply:
1. If you want me to draw you a profile pic it would be my pleasure.
2. Message (and friend if you've not already) me on facebook.
3. I'll snoop through the pictures of you on facebook and find a few I can use to draw you.
4. I'm drawing in order of request (and I'm nearly done with the first batch! Matt Cleveland and Justin Fung, you're next).

Check my album on facebook for the individual images. Don't forget you can use them for other sites that require a profile pic and if you need a higher resolution image, just let me know.

ps. Appologies to Jonathan. All I can say is I was trying out a different kind of paper. It didn't work.

South Pas Farmer's Market

2009-08-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

One of the many fun things a Summer at Fuller Seminary without classes has afforded has been excursions to fun things like the farmer's market. I rode the Metro fam and all. While the wife waited in line for dinner the kid and I watched and sketched folks around us.

I didn't know the internet could draw.

2009-08-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

I had an enjoyable few minutes this afternoon playing with odopod's sketch page. The above is a screen shot from it but you should click here to see the full sketch happen as I did it, triple time.

Give it a try. And when you get done, try clicking on some of the featured sketches to learn from the technique of people whose stuff you like. The internet is learning. And it's teaching.

Architectural Detail is Fun

2009-07-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

Here are some more in my ongoing attempt to get better at seeing things in light and shadow, breaking my twenty year addiction to drawing with just line. James Gurney got me started trying this. Fortunately for me Fuller Seminary and Pasadena are packed with fascinating architectural details to practice on.

BONUS! A free EBONY drawing pencil points to the first commentor who recognizes the first, unlabeled building.

More sketches forthcoming, I promise

2009-07-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

Full Eyes

2009-07-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

I dusted off the old camera today for some friends with a new baby. I love how the late-afternoon sunlit leaves reflected in his eyes like galaxies. Cute kid.
Ours is coming in two months.

Fuller Panel on Torture

2009-06-26T13:23:00.000-07:00

Getty Sketches

2009-06-22T21:41:00.000-07:00

We went to the Getty museum yesterday with family. I find that it is a place best enjoyed without a strict agenda. For my money the best art on display is the architecture. It is absolutely transporting. Also, all the blocks that make up the structures make notes if you knock them with your knuckles.

Castle Green

2009-06-08T21:15:00.000-07:00

Castle Green is a Historic 19th Century hotel turned high end condo/appartments in old town Pasadena, CA. I caught the Sping open house last Sunday thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor who either was feeling magnanimous or wanted to save me from further self-abasement as I tried to haggle my way out of the outrageous $20 entry fee. I had time for a half-hour sketch of one of the main towers. The detail on the exterior is simply exquisite.

The interior while interesting was hardly worth my anonymous patron's Twenty. The rather voyeuristic experience of roaming through the open appartments of current residents felt a bit like an estate sale with even less of a pretense for snooping. The sub-set of the extremely wealthy who reside there, as one might expect, show a preference for well designed and antique furniture as well as small dogs and cats. Some of their art was quite breathtaking though. I walked into the home of one employee of Dreamworks Animation to a life-size original Alfons Mucha lithograph worth hundreds of thousands. I never cease to be amazed at the vast range of humanity and expansive wealth that is concentrated in such a small space.

Update: I forgot to mention that I was surprised to see Fuller's own Islamics Scholar, Dr. Dudley Woodberry there deep in conversation with some of the residents. Though given his wide range of contacts among the power-elite and presumable interest in "moorish" architecture, I really shouldn't have been surprised to find him there.

From Castle Green

Face book. By request.

2009-06-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

Jon-Paul and Jennie. The first two portraits hand drawn from photos found on facebook by order of request. The queue is growing...

Face book. Or, a book of faces.

2009-05-21T22:22:00.001-07:00

Once Eleanor, my three year old daughter who is always thinking, opened my sketch book and asked me: "Daddy, is this your facebook?" I suspect she had heard us talk about the ubiquitous social network. It made sense. I like to draw faces, in fact they are mostly all of what I draw lately.

Fast forward a few months and I was in class, missing my brothers and thought, "It might be nice to draw them. Well, I know I saw that picture on facebook..."

Then it hit me: facebook is a near infinite source for new faces to draw.

You might remember Sean Michel from his rousing performance of Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut you Down"on American Idol two years ago. I remember him from Dr. Mwase's World Religion class and his home-made bell-bottoms.

Who's next? Any requests? They make great profile pic's. However, I make no guarantees that any of your facial features will be in proportion to any other.

In honor of the new David Allen Hubbard Library Openning...

2009-05-21T22:19:00.001-07:00

Cardinal Mahoney on Immigration Reform at Fuller Seminary

2009-05-13T15:23:00.001-07:00

Cardinal Mahoney, Archbishop of Los Angeles Diocese spoke today at Fuller on immigration reform. The video of him reading his position paper/theologial statement should go up at Fuller's iTunesU site within the week. For now you'll have to settle for what scant notes I could tap out on my phone while running video.

The portrait is from the Q&A afterwards during which Cardinal Mahoney showed himself to be an amiable and able speaker on the fly. I think we were all impressed when he countered the plan to submit written questions by note card so it didn't look as if they were filtering out hard questions.

As anti-institutional as I tend to be (baptist that I am) it was intriguing to hear about the pressure that one man through the structure of a something like the Roman Catholic church can exert to help give voice to the voiceless. Dr. Juan Martinez thanked him for his stand against a proposition that would have made it illegal to even help or offer assistance of any kind to an illegal immigrant. When Cardinal Mahoney spoke out saying he would disobey any such unjust law it cleared a path for many protestants of all kinds to do the same.

The most challenging question came from a young man who asked, as an employer, how he should behave in light of his conviction that the laws regarding immigration are outmoded and unjust when illegal immigrants come to him for employment. Cardinal Mahoney was balanced in reminding us that we do not want to become a nation of people who only obeys the laws they feel like obeying. He then offered the workaround used by some of his friends who work in agriculture who turn the buerocracy against itself by submitting the social security numbers for verification on the 59th of the 60 deadline after employment. Then upon recieving notification from the government office 90 days later that the number is invalid, they must terminate the employee (after 150 days of employment). If the employee comes back with another number the process can begin again.

While I understand that this might seem dishonest to some, I appreciate the way that it obeys the letter of the law and in so doing spotlights the way in which the current law and policy simply do not make sense in light of the current global and economic situation. We cannot put up a no trespassing sign on the border and help wanted window in our shops. We cannot have it both ways.

Notes:
-In catholic thought the economy exists to serve the people rather than the people to serve the community.
-Legal structures have not kept up with globalization.
-Migrants fill the role of turning capital into revenue.
-Us recieve the benefit of labor an taxes but do not have the burden of protecting them.
-This benefits both Mexico and USA
- Immigrants pay income, property, sales taxes and social security without benefiting from the latter. Studies have shown that immigrants in America pay in much more than they use into social support.
-Migrants are pawns in a system that preys upon their desperation and expropriates their labor.
-40% immigrants come on visas and just don't leave
-only 5000 visas each yr for unskilled labor

-The [Catholic] Church supports An overhaul of immigration law
-The pathway to citizenship would be:
Learn English, pay a fine, and work six yrs of work before earning citizenship
- This would be exacting a penalty for an offense (not amnesty) but injustice of law mitigates penalty exacted
-A comprehensive approach will help us secure our borders

Art for Credit - Part 2

2009-04-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

Art for Credit - The Ethics of Life and Death

Here's what Dr. Erin Dufault-Hunter's syllabus told me about how to do art for and get credit for it for her bioethics class last quarter:

Plan B in lieu of book review: An assignment we work out together
I understand that while linear argumentation is useful—and highly valued—in academia, some of you communicate and engage issues in non-traditional ways. These might include using the arts (e.g. drama, screenplays, poetry, fine arts) to reflect on these difficult issues. You must initially submit a proposal for approval by me, including reasons why you wish to respond in this medium rather than a research paper, how much experience you have had with this medium, and the project as you envision it including size (e.g., no. of pages or measurements of the canvas, etc.).

Evaluation of Plan B:
Such creative endeavors are extremely difficult to grade. Your grade will depend on two factors: the number of hours spent on the project and the quality of your reflection on the project (three full pages, double-spaced). Your reflection on your piece/project should indicate thoughtfulness and critical reflection on the topic in addition to being technically and stylistically sound. So, if you wish to exercise this option, you must contract with me according to the hours of work on the project to be eligible for grades as follows:
• 40+: A
• 35 – 39: A-
• 30 – 34: B+
• 25 – 29: B
• 24 – 28: B-
• 23 – 27: C+
• 22 – 26: C
• 21 – 25: C-
• 21 hours or less: not acceptable.

You must attach three documents to your alternative project: 1) Your typed-out, approved idea for an alternative project (signed by me); 2) a signed statement as to the number of hours you spent on the project; 3) a three-page reflection paper.

As you can see, her scheme forces the artist/creator to commit to a certain amount of time on the project and makes that the main criterion of evaluation. I found this difficult because of the way the image I painted came to me all at once (this is not usually how I work), so I didn't have to spend as much time hashing out what I would be drawing. That said, I appreciated the way this focused more attention to holding the student accountable to investing fully in the learning process rather than doing an art project as an easy short cut. It was also nice to know that the grading was going to be more objective. You do the time, you get the grade. With my first project for Dr. Goldingay, it felt like more of a gamble since the grade seemed contingent upon how the work hit him.

It was a joy to spend finals week last quarter laboring over a painting rather than struggling to fit 3 weeks of research into 1 week of frantic thinking and writing.

I used google image search and photo shop to cobble together something of a sketch to work from. The hands are central to the image I was going for but are always so tricky to draw well. I don't really feel like I got down the watercolor technique I was going for until the final pair of aged hands on top, pictured here.

This piece went up in the Catalyst (student center) for Arts Fest and had an abridged version of my explanatory essay of the painting that accompanied it as an artist's statement.

The central image of the child encased in needles is actually a piece I did during my wife's first pregnancy. Incorporating it into the center of this piece was central to the message I was trying to convey about the way the community of God transforms our experience of fear, uncertainty and danger, not by denying those things but by placing them within a larger story of a caring God whose hands are everywhere his people are.

"Welcome" mixed media, water color, 32"x 40" Matt Lumpkin

Art for Credit - Part 1

2009-04-24T15:11:00.001-07:00

Last quarter I had a couple of opportunities to propose and submit art projects in lieu of traditional written assignments for my Seminary class-work. This might seem strange for a graduate school. I suspect it owes a lot to the pedagogical open-mindedness of Drs. Erin Dufault-Hunter and John Goldingay who left room in their syllabuses for such things. It also owes a lot to something called the Brehm Center for Worship Theology and the Arts which is an institute on our campus, working to remind that God created us and thus we aught to see our own tendency and need to create as a part of our participation in His image.

Art for Credit: Writings

I first attempted this for Dr. Goldingay in his Old Testament Writings course. I learned a great deal about the way that scripture, particularly the Psalms teach us to pray with honesty out of our experience. This connected directly to several experiences I had working as a chaplain in the hospital.

Here is what Dr. John's syllabus says about how one might do such a thing:

"(3) You can do something “creative” (e.g., poetry, art, music) for the second paper. Here are the rules for that.

1. Check out with me what you propose to do.
2. Remember that what I have to judge is how/what you have learned from the scriptures we studied. Your project should be a means of discovering something about the scriptures and expressing it that you could not have done by means of a regular paper. You can turn in any form of art that enables me to see that.
3. Sermons, teaching outlines, and the like do not count as “something creative” in this connection, because they are more designed to communicate than to discover or express, and it is thus hard to tell from them whether they reflect sufficient graduate-level engagement.
4. Most forms of art need to be accompanied by two pages of interpretation. Poetry might be an exception.
5. An artistically profound piece has a head start because its artistic nature should reveal part of the answer to that question. A more amateur piece may need more reflection in the accompanying pages of interpretation."

There are a few more items but this is the core of the concept. So I set out to make a connection between what I was learning in scripture about prayer by means of painting a picture of an experience I had once of a profoundly honest and transformative prayer I witnessed in the hospital.

If you are someone who is involved in teaching people things, especially religious and spiritual things, I hope you will consider adding something like Dr. John's clause quoted above into your syllabus or lesson plans. It was uniquely challenging and a different way of seeing where my life and the Bible come together.

If you're concerned about whether there's enough evidence that learning took place, for "credit" then you can take a look at my explanation. Here.

"Family Room" Watercolor, ink. Matt Lumpkin 2009

Peter Storey on Prophetic Preaching

2009-04-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

Peter Storey was back in full force the day after the Preaching Summit, lecturing (preaching?) for Clay Schmit and Marguerite Schuster's Homiletics classes in the preaching lab. To say it was inspiring and challenging is an understatement. Storey's age, experiences and commitment to speaking the truth as he sees it make him an important voice that the church in America would do well to heed.

Stand Out Quotes:

"If you're going to worry about losing members you'll never be a preacher."

"Aparteid would have ended 10 years earlier were it not for cowards in the pulpit."

When he began confronting apartheid in the pulpit, and the subsequent loss of many church members,

"For the cost of 200 members we became the church of God. We became a real church."

"God's future is very disturbing to people who are comfortable now."

"People ask why the church [in America] has lost its voice. It's simple. It is too rich... Prophets are never born out of comfortable churches."

"The problem is our location. If we locate ourselve with the rich and powerful rather than with Jesus we will experience a tension between [our allegiance to the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world]."

Culture Making and Preaching with Andy Crouch at Fuller

2009-04-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

Fuller's Brehm Center hosted an evening "Preaching Summit" last night. It was interesting getting such a generationally diverse response to Crouch's observations of cultural change, though more often than not, the panel seemed resistant to acknowledge the truthfulness of his assessments. Still the group was a wealth of experience and wisdom for young people preparing to preach the gospel today.

Peter Storey was by far my favorite voice on the panel. I managed to catch him again this morning during a session on Prophetic Preaching for Clay Schmit's homiletics class. I'll try to have more from that session later.

Standout Quotes from the evening:

Renita Weems:
"Great preachers expose what was previously hidden."
"People change because of relationships, not eloquence."

Ken Fong:
Speaking of his experience volunteering in a drug clinic,
"I wish I had gotten out of the church earlier... to be with people stripped of pretense."
"People change when they face crisis. So we've been letting the gospel put them in crisis."

Peter Storey:
Speaking to the American church as a South African,
"Until you unwrap your gospel from the red white and blue you have nothing to say."
In response to Crouch's noting of the shift from Walter Cronkite to John Stuart as America's source for news,
"I have to say, I regard John Stuart as a prophet."
"What's in the sermon must be in the preacher first... Guard your devotional life... Who am I unless I have come from the presence [of God]?"

Faces

2009-04-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

"Obama Vows to Fight Somali Pirates"

2009-04-15T11:33:00.001-07:00

Useful Gmail Labs Tweak

2009-04-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

I have been using the "Multiple Inboxes" feature since it rolled in gmail labs out a month or so ago to keep track (using stars) of the emails I had read but still needed to deal with or address in some way. It was awkward though because the second inbox was displayed to the right of the regular inbox, squishing it and making subject lines hard to read on my smallish laptop screen.

Now you can display it above or below your normal inbox. It's a great way to keep important emails from getting buried. And once you're done with them, un-star them and they disappear on next reload.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Glen Molina at Altadena Baptist Church for a well planned, reflective good friday service. It made good use of the many images of the crucifixion in art. It was wonderful to be able to respond visually to the spectacle of the death of God.

Mike and Abbey

2009-04-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

I like to draw in church...

Tasty Quotes from the First Week of the New Quarter

2009-04-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

"God sets men at different angles to the truth, so that one may see what others cannot, and, thereby, more of her virginal beauty and perenial loveliness be revealed.... Pluck the fruits of controversy from the New Testament tree, and you have not only stripped it of its most precious growths, but left teh branches so bare that they cease to be a sheltering home for the wearied nations of the earth."

- John Clifford, 19th century English, Baptist preacher and theologian, quoted by
Sydnor Lorenzo Stealey, A Baptist treasury, (New York: Crowell, 1958)
cited in
Bill Leonard, Baptist ways : a history (Valley Forge PA: Judson Press, 2003).

More drawings and art stuff are on the way soon...

Tasty Quotes for Finals Week

2009-03-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

"There's no way of going through a day in this life neutrally... everything we do forms us."
-Lauren Winner, in "Lies the Church Tells About Sex," Fuller Seminary Chapel, 2006.

Songs of Experience

2009-03-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

It's finals week for the Winter quarter here at Fuller and people are stressed and sleep deprived and the campus cold is taking hold.
I'm not as busy as I have been previous quarters. I'm working on a paper for John Goldingay pointing out some parallels between the competing voices and perspectives in the old testament writings and in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. In my re-reading of the songs I discovered this exquisite poem. I've always like Blake --something I can relate to in a guy who doesn't want to separate image from the writen word.

The Voice of the Ancient Bard
From Songs of Experience

Youth of delight! come hither
And see the opening morn,
Image of Truth new-born.
Doubt is fled, and clouds of reason,
Dark disputes and artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze;
Tangled roots perplex her ways;
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night
over bones of the dead;
And feel--they know not what but care;
And wish to lead others, when they should be led.

Connect to everything you love in life... with Blackberry.

2009-03-14T14:56:00.000-07:00

After reading Amy Laura Hall's book, reviewed below, I have a renewed desire not to let the lies and crazy values propagated by advertisers go unchallenged (not least in the presence of my children). Some require a bit of effort to unmask. Others are such blatant lies or half-truths as to make me laugh out loud.

"Connect to everything you love in life... with Blackberry."

I don't remember where I first heard of the practice of some Christian parents who talk back to their TV's and radios when they are saying things they disagree with, but I think it can be a very helpful practice of re-orientation for those of us who live with constant current tugging at us in the media-stream. After I recovered from my laughter at the absurdity of this claim that came from my computer, I simply said, "No."

Conceiving Parenthood

2009-03-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

Below are some of the more interesting bits from my review one of the best books I've read since coming to Fuller:

Amy Laura Hall. Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction.

"Riffing on Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," Amy Laura Hall brings her own brand of penetrating sociological analysis to bear on important shifts in cultural authority during the last century. Using image exegesis of cultural artifacts as varied as advertising and women's magazines, Hall argues that the ascendancy of scientific authority in the domain of pro-creation (or "reproduction") brought with it a whole new narrative of justification for the old evils of racism, elitism, and the exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the strong."

"Hall's evidence for this subtle manipulation of public perception seems at first to be slight, even at times, overly imaginative or interpretive. The advertisements from last century over which she labors are, after all, from a "simpler era." Is it fair to impose upon them an interpretive agenda from today when they were only trying to sell their products? And yet as she stacks up example after example of at times humorous, at times deeply disturbing images, we begin to accept her point. While the intent of the ad-men may have been to move units of 7-up (to be mixed with milk for baby's bottle) or Lysol brand disinfectant (for the maintenance of "intimate daintiness dependent on effective douching") they are harnessing strong currents within the culture and in so doing, shaping and reinforcing public perception. A culture's ads, it seems, are an effective barometer for its values."

"It is in the breadth of materials she takes in and the insight she applies to them that Hall truly distinguishes herself. Rather than restricting herself to researching academic analyses of the era, she digs into the primary documents with an eye that sees through the surface to the large arcs of social pressure that lie behind both turn of the century soap ads as well as eerily subversive pharmaceutical ads. Both are animated by the creation of a story in which there is a desirable "normal" the consumer may achieve by means of Ivory or Ritalin in contrast to the shameful, abnormal child that is dirty, messy and less than expected."

"It might seem strange that such a book could help a beleaguered parent struggling to balance the demands of family, work, school and church but Amy Laura Hall's book has helped me to re-orient my own perspective of my role as a Christian parent. First Hall's book has reminded me that embrace of children is embrace of chaos. In contrast to the "normalcy" promoted by the ads she profiles, children are by nature, untidy, disorderly, weak and needy. And yet in that chaos there is also joy, love, creativity, and new life: pro-creation. The impact of this in my relationship with my three and a half year old daughter, Eleanor, is that I am reminded that her need for play, my attention, affirmation, patience and kindness are not simply an inconvenience, detracting from my worthwhile goals and pursuits. Instead they are an opportunity to receive her as a gift from God; to collaborate with God in the creation of this new being as she unfolds in all her vibrant life."

If you're intrigued you can read more of my review or better yet, the book!

Coke

2009-03-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

I started getting these smaller 8oz cokes to trick myself into drinking slightly less sugar-water. These are drawn with a Waterman fountain pen in water soluble ink and shaded a bit with a Niji waterbrush. Very fun, very mobile setup for sketches.

John the Baptizer

2009-03-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Michael Crosby for the inspiring lesson from Matthew 3 (and for not minding me drawing while you were talking).

Nebuchadnezzar

2009-03-02T00:32:00.000-08:00

NT Wright @ Lake Ave. Church

2009-02-26T23:04:00.000-08:00

Sketchbook 2

2009-02-23T21:09:00.000-08:00

Sketchbook

2009-02-23T20:54:00.000-08:00

Garland Anthony: Timber Baron

2009-02-04T19:26:00.001-08:00

...and my Great-Grandfather

MLK

2009-01-21T19:52:00.000-08:00

Watercolor Winter

2009-01-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

Winter in Arkansas

2009-01-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

Finals Week

2008-12-11T17:37:00.000-08:00

Ford Place House

2008-11-06T00:18:00.000-08:00

Playing with HDR photography.