The reason, or one of the reasons, I enjoyed Coldplay’s most recent album was that I found it spoke to me of the problem of human-perpetrated evil. The album is titled after two songs, and these are two ways of looking at the human experience: ‘Viva La Vida,’ (live – or long live – life), ‘or, Death and All His Friends’. But baby, it’s a violent world.

The album is musically bookended by Life in Technicolor as the opening, and the dénouement of Death and All His Friends, which mirrors the former and brings the album to a circular close. Between these two, the music ebbs and flows, with many hidden tracks and titles bleeding from one into another. It is a complete thought, a forty-five minute thought, which aims to cover as much ground as possible, and to show death in as broad strokes as possible.

The first lyrical song starts us off ‘at home’ – that is, for the British band, in London. And we find the album’s theme: death (obvious from the title, Cemeteries of London), the most universal aspect of life. And the side-themes are introduced as well: love (At night they would go walking until the breaking of the day); confusion or uncertainty (which is inherent to some degree in the lyrics, I would argue); and religion, both facilitator and abrogator of violence:

God is in the houses and God is in my head
And all the cemeteries in London
I see God come in my garden, but I don’t know what he said
For my heart, it wasn’t open, not open

It is impossible to detail the subtle ways the music adds to the lyrics, or look at all the lyrics in depth. But I will attempt to hit the highlights of the album’s theme, and its chief sub-themes.

Death is present not as a man’s release in old age with his grandchildren all around him, but as war, chief of the four apocalyptic horsemen. Death is ever-present from start to finish. It is only a reminder in Lost! (Every gun you ever held went off, and I’m just waiting ’til the firing’s stopped), Lovers in Japan (Soldiers, you’ve got to soldier on), and even in a song that is at its heart about love and life being good, Strawberry Swing (Everybody was for fighting). But while in these it is peripheral, in most of the album death is front and center. 42 is a mockery of traditional comforts in the face of death:

Those who are dead are not dead
They’re just living in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well

This ‘comfort’ only lasts as far as reality is suspended – and one can go ‘live there as well’ in the unreality of that answer. The first half of the song ridicules this secular comfort in death, but the religious comfort, which comes with the second half, fares no better. So we’ve rejected any solace in death, deciding that there is no paradigm and no thought to console us as we take a hard look at it.

Yes is unique within the album, and I think is best interpreted from the perspective of a soldier off to war, far from home, and in the throes of sexual temptation to the warm arms of a prostitute, or just a loose woman of the village. After all, how many soldiers came home to America after the Vietnam War with Vietnamese wives? Or what are the stories of WWII soldiers in France? This song explores the connection between violence and sex (not love, mind you – but sex), and why it is that those two so often go together. And the song’s title hints at what the answer to the soldier’s central question is. The music has a very eastern flair to it (the song has been compared to ‘I am the Walrus’), and steady percussive instruments throughout, making it very march-like, emphasizing the war in the background. With this in mind, the song begins:

When it started we had high hopes
Now my back’s on the line, my back’s on the ropes
When it started we were alright
But night makes a fool of us in daylight

There we were dying of frustration
Saying, Lord, lead me not into temptation
But it’s not easy when she turns you on
So stay gone

If you’d only, if you’d only say yes
Whether you will’s anybody’s guess
God, only God knows I’m trying my best
But I’m just so tired of this loneliness

Viva La Vida most of you are familiar with by now. It too explores violence, but from a different viewpoint: from that of a deposed dictator. I can very easily imagine it being sung by Louis XVI (and the album’s cover art blatantly depicts the French Revolution).

It was the wicked and wild wind blew in the doors to let me in
Shattered windows and the sound of drums, people couldn’t believe what I’d become
Revolutionaries wait for my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string, oh who would ever want to be king?

If we’ve looked at war as war and found it an awful thing, we’ve not asked the question of whether war may yet be a good thing when used to depose awful regimes. If we are indeed considering the French Revolution, the answer is decidedly no. Yet ‘Viva La Vida’ remains tantalizingly ambiguous and eludes any easy answer to the question.

‘Viva La Vida’ fades seamlessly into Violet Hill, which is again a song by a soldier, this time not in the middle of war, but at home looking back on it, and addressing his love, whom he knew before the war. The soldier deeply regrets going to war:

I don’t want to be a soldier
Who the captain of some sinking ship
Would stow far below

So if you love me
Why’d you let me go?

Death and war have filled his memory with unpleasantries, and destroyed his relationship with his love. The solid drumbeat of the song lets us know that while the war out in the world may have stopped, for this soldier it is a persistent reality and will not go away. And it has tainted everything.

Death is not death alone, but affects the sub-themes as well: and it makes love an intransient thing. Lovers in Japan (and also its hidden track Reign of Love, which I disliked), while a disorienting song, speaks directly about love, beginning with Lovers, keep on the road you’re on. But it’s a love under fire, it’s a love that is a joint-dreaming about escape from the present circumstances:

But I have no doubt
One day we’re gonna get out

Tonight, maybe we’re gonna run
Dreaming of the Osaka sun

And love is again, in Strawberry Swing (which sounds like an Irish jig), a wonderful thing: They were sitting, they were sitting on the strawberry swing, and every moment was so precious. But as in ‘Lovers in Japan’ there is an undercurrent to it, and here that love is alienating. Society is mentioned twice – above, I mentioned the hints of a society at war in this song; but the second mention is about the separateness of society from the lovers:

People moving all the time inside a perfectly straight line
Don’t you want to curve away, when it’s such,
It’s such a perfect day?

Why is it that the singer and his love alone see it as a perfect day? As in ‘Lovers in Japan,’ even within the rosy colors of love, there is something deeply wrong with the surrounding environment.

The perfect song to demonstrate the sub-theme of confusion, which may also be my favorite from the album, is clearly Lost! It is impossible for me to pinpoint a perspective that the song is sung from. This may even be impossible for the singer. The chorus is enough to demonstrate its inherent confusion:

I just got lost! Every river that I tried to cross
Every door I ever tried was locked
Oh and I’m just waiting ’til the shine wears off

And the singer sees no way out for anyone. There is no stop and no win:

You might be a big fish in a little pond
Doesn’t mean you’ve won
’Cause along may come a bigger one

And you’ll be lost!

As mentioned above, ‘Lost!’ alludes to war (Every gun you ever held went off), and even if it refers to a greater sense of disorientation besides war, there is no doubt that violence is one of the most disorienting factors in life. Violence may make us lost, but we know it always leads to death.

God and the concept of God come into and out of the experience of violence. I already quoted the mention in ‘Cemeteries of London’, but this is by no means the last of the album’s religious notions. The second half of 42 addresses the religious aspect of death, the afterlife:

You thought you might be a ghost
You didn’t get to heaven but you made it close

This is sung jeeringly, refusing to give in to an easy answer to death (and mocking it just as it does the secular answer). With more seriousness and a great deal more sadness, the dictator in Viva La Vida says, ‘For some reason I can’t explain, I know St. Peter won’t call my name.’ So heaven remains some unattainable thing, either through personal evils or as some sort of cruel illusion for those of us enmeshed in violence here below.

But there is more to God than varying thoughts on the afterlife. If Cemeteries of London listens to God (or fails to listen to God), the soldier in Yes cries out to God, lead me not into temptation (and as I suggested, he gives the song’s title reply ‘yes’ to temptation anyways). And so in the face of death, God remains elusive and distant, little or no help, perhaps through mankind’s own actions or inactions.

But there is more to God than the afterlife and divine-human interactions. There are human-human interactions, and how we invoke the name of God on one another. There is the cryptic biblical allusion in Lovers in Japan, Lovers, keep on the road you’re on, runners ’til the race is run – at least, I cannot figure what else the runners could refer to, and this is a Pauline metaphor deeply entrenched in Western thought. And much more negatively, in Violet Hill, God can be used to propagate war:

Was a long and dark December
When the banks became cathedrals
And the fog became God

Priests clutched onto Bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And the cross was held aloft

Clearly we are not expected to believe that this violence is what God, if there is a God, would want. But if there is some God, he seems notably absent in the face of wicked men speaking about him, and emptying out their religious icons for the purpose of perpetrating war and death, and nothing is said here beyond the farcical mask of God used by men.

The last song of the album, Death and All His Friends, begins with what I suspect is a lyrical coda to Strawberry Swing before beginning a full minute and a half crescendo to what is the album’s musical and lyrical climax. Starting at home in London and going abroad to view man’s many ills in war and death, and seeing how this affects our relationship with others, our sense of order and meaning, and our sense of religion, this climax is finally conclusion, reflecting upon everything that we’ve surveyed before. What possible reply could there be to all of this? The music reaches its highest point:

No, I don’t want to battle from beginning to end
I don’t want to cycle or recycle revenge
I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends

This is the only answer a sane person can have to the world, but it is hopelessly incomplete. How does one not follow death and all of his friends, given how entrenched we have seen violence is in the world? It’s a strong statement, but a statement by one man in one society among many societies, and its reach may not ever go beyond the man who speaks it. But he seems to realize this, because in the final tail of melody, coming off the album’s mountain where the denouncement of death is given, in the music reprising ‘Life in Technicolor’ and bringing the album to a close we hear the soft realization of this futility: And in the end, we lie awake and we dream of making our escape. In the end what can we do in the face of such death? But the force and intensity of the preceding conclusion is too strong to leave it willingly as a daydream, and I am left with a stupefying tension between the evil of death and war and the seeming impossibility of stopping it.

I have often spoken about these sorts of things with a friend of mine, and we both have realized that the problem is humanity. Humanity is the reason for violence and the manner in which death reigns in the world. And I, in my better moments, might say that humanity can also be the solution. Every once in a while I see in individual people and even in history the darker side of humanity put away and a side that is beautiful come out to demonstrate that a different world is possible, and that humanity can truly contribute to the good there is in the world. But the darker side is so much greater, and seems to have done so much more, and it is only in my better moments that I think humanity has anything in it worth saving or worth praising. The greater amount of time we just appear a sorry species that has managed only to bring damage to anything we have ever touched, and an even greater sorrow among ourselves. Is there really any solution? But I can at least say that I will not battle from beginning to end, I will not cycle revenge, and I will not follow along behind death, and all of his friends. But I am hopelessly fond of humanity, and I want to see them succeed.

Last Saturday I went to the prop 8 protest/rally kajigger in Austin, TX. I was debating whether or not to go until, that morning, I concocted the perfect compromise: I’ll go as a photographer, and if I find I don’t like what’s going on, I’ll distance myself through the camera lens. Besides, I don’t do enough people-photography, and this could give me the chance to practice a little. I’ve been wanting for a while to do a series on homelessness, but that would be a several-months long project (as I feel it’d be a great wrong to just take the pictures without getting to know the people in front of the lens), and I also don’t think my portraiture is up to snuff. This motivated me a bit more to start working to improve those skills. I will admit I did learn one important thing: having an SLR camera gives you amazing authority to move through crowds!

In general, there were some of the same faults with this that I find in many gay organizations, the chiefest being the loose use of ‘hate’ and ‘bigotry’, which is incendiary, unhelpful, and stupid. I don’t think that everyone who voted for California’s proposition 8 was a hate-filled bigot, and to paint the world in such clean strokes of good and evil is lazy and wrong. (You will see some of this in the pictures.) Another issue, one of the speakers was talking about how he met his partner at a Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) – at which point I tuned him out and started doing more photography (my litany of complaints about the MCC is too long to go into, but suffice it to say they are an almost-exclusively gay church combining all the worst elements of evangelical Christianity and gay pop culture). And there was another speaker from Soulforce – and I have a permanent allergic reaction to anything to do with Mel White. I also wonder how much good this actually does, separate from normal gay people living normal, honest lives in their community. Not much, I suspect – and it is why I hope one day the gay rights movement will die a peaceful, quiet death, as gay people are accepted into society at large – and this is happening, slowly.

On another aside, I am a bit astonished at the reaction to prop 8: true, it is a great first – the first time rights that had previously been given to gay couples was taken away. But there are nineteen states – Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida (new this election season) – that not only have constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage but also recognition of other kinds of same-sex unions (usually civil unions). Same-sex couples in California still have the same rights as marriage, but in many other states even those are denied. From a practical point, when gay marriage is politically unfeasible, one should be working toward basic legal protection and recognition, even if it is not ‘full’ equality – and the US does not start and end with the west coast.

Nevertheless, there was much good: one was my astonishment at how diverse the crowd was – gay, straight, young and old, religious and irreligious. A PCUSA minister talked about being a supportive, straight, religious person. And another, and one which I found particularly encouraging, is how many families with children there were (again, gay and straight). This was not some raunchy event from which children needed to be shielded (as the concept of gay pride parades which I grew up believing defined gay people – these parades which are another thing I am hyper-allergic to), but it was extraordinarily civil, and tame. The positive, palpable sense of families coming together is the best thing I will remember: kids ran up and down paths with parents in tow, keeping an eye on them, or were moved around in play-wagons, or clung to their mom or dad’s hand. It was as if the gay rights movement was growing up, and understood that it was, fundamentally, about family.

Andrew Sullivan, as is typical, has a very insightful post on the subject entitled Modernity, Faith, and Marriage. (Go read it.) Gay marriage means loosening (for everyone) what ‘marriage’ means in a governmental capacity. And this is necessary for a great number of government institutions in any pluralistic society. And my inner libertarian is happy to have the meaning of government diminished, for it is after all in the private sphere of sociality that meaning is determined for the individual.

Here are the pictures:

After a little over an hour of photographing, a friend called me and we went out to lunch (at Applebees, like the young old fogies we are). And that was that.

And that’s the last I want to talk about gay stuff for a while. Sheesh it gets old. I’d much rather be talking and thinking about virtue ethics or (the very racist) second-temple Judaism – as I recently remarked to a friend, I have looked into my heart and found a 4 Ezra-shaped hole (I need to go pick me up a Greek apocrypha – it’s a sick fascination I know). And I think this may in not very much time end up turning into a photoblog, but that’s okay with me. That is, after all, what I enjoy doing. I may retreat back into music or philosophy, but I’m finding that the former escapes words and the latter is much more fun with friends, and I have far too much thinking and researching to do before speaking. Photography is easier like that.

Last Monday (Nov 10) I took a trip down to the southern part of the Hill Country to Lost Maples State Natural Area, in order to get a bit of what counts as autumn in Texas. Unfortunately, peak color was the Thursday and Friday previous, but between class and having two out-of-state friends visiting that weekend (both of whom I was happy to see), taking a day-long excursion was just not feasible. On top of that, the night before I arrived, there was also a big gust of wind that came through the valley and knocked off most of the leaves. Alas!

Nevertheless, there was still color – much more, as I have said, than is typical in Texas – although a lot of it was on the ground. But I tried to take advantage of this, incorporating the ground color into my pictures.

While out and about I ran into some older gents who were shooting some fairly serious photography (you can just tell these things), and engaged in a bit of talk with them, getting a few pointers about what regions in the park to check for color. They seemed to notice and respect me as well, which was a bit exciting. I felt like I’d passed some secret rite for being noticed as a photographer. And as I thought about it, I realized there is at least one fairly obvious giveaway about whether you know what you’re doing or not: an unskilled amateur will not walk around his subject and take it in from different angles before he starts shooting away; a more skilled amateur or professional most certainly will. There were some other folks come to enjoy the color whom I also got to meet, and for those that had a camera, this failure to study or even look critically at their subject stood out to me. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – they’re not there for the photography.) There were of course fewer folks out toward the back of the park than toward the front – but it turned out that most of the color (with the exception of one brilliantly red tree) was not very far in. In any case, the Merry Band of Photographers went back to the parking lot and around to the other side, and I just hiked it. We later met again, passing each other near the creek on the other side.

Without further commentary, here are some of the pictures:

One of the best parts of this election (aside from Saturday Night Live, of course) has been the election-night and next-morning blog posts. You can probably guess my electoral sympathies from a few of these, and I’ll leave it at that. Allow me to quote some:

Will Wilkinson on libertarianism:

I usually do vote on big elections, and I vote expressively. I’m a bit disappointed to not do it this time around, since I would like to almost vote for Barack Obama before finding myself paralyzed by the Holy Spirit and then finally voting for Bob Barr.

D.A. Ridgely of Positive Liberty (before the election) on libertarianism and Barack Obama:

I won’t be voting, expressively or otherwise, in this election cycle. If I did, it wouldn’t be for Barr, whom I trust only, precisely and thankfully not to get elected. When the dust settles, he and his hyperactive snake oil salesman of a running mate will have harmed the Libertarian Party more than they helped it, but that’s okay. The Libertarian Party is almost entirely irrelevant to libertarianism and, like the good battered wife it is, it will undoubted find even worse candidates four years from now.

And yet he is, after all, a black man and his election does constitute an almost overpoweringly important symbolic moment in American history. Because of the importance of that history, I wish Barack Obama, personally, the best of luck even as I hope against hope that his administration will “accomplish” next to nothing.

Slacktivist (before the election) on bigotry at the Palin rallies:

We are not seeing a crowd of naive simpletons being led astray by demagoguery. We are seeing a crowd of people who have chosen to accept unreal ideas, and who are therefore forced to embrace The Stupid. Racism, bigotry and xenophobia are immoral, of course, but they are also, just as fundamentally, untrue. They are unreal. They provide a theory and a framework for living in the world that cannot be reconciled with the reality of this world.

Jason Kuznicki of Positive Liberty on Prop 8 and gay rights:

It feels like the beginning of the end for us. If our family can’t be protected in California, it soon won’t be protected anywhere. I’ve never really thought about moving to Canada, but if ballot measures like the Arkansas one continue to pass, it will become very difficult, at least for families, to remain. Note that gays who only want anonymous sex can get by just fine even when marriage is outlawed. It’s when we want to have families and ordinary lives that they hate us the most.

Brady on Prop 8:

This makes my heart hurt. I had never felt more defeated, demeaned, and disillusioned in my life than when I watched Texas vote 75% in favor of banning gay marriage in our Constitution. I literally felt physically ill when it happened. I had hoped for more from California.

Andrew Sullivan on Prop 8:

In the long arc of inclusion, we will miss our goals along the way from time to time. Today, we have full marriage rights in two states, we have many civil marriages in California that will remain in place as examples of who gay people really are, we have civil unions in many more places, and marriage rights in other parts of the world, as beacons to America. And this is a civil rights movement. It goes forward and it is forced back.