"... honestly, I don't think our movies should be watched. I have no idea why we make them. All I know is this: we keep coming here after school every single day, and we just keep doing it, and, I don't know -- it's just, and then, we just do it, and I guess it feels like we should just be doing it, I guess. I don't know."

- Brendon Small, on the final episode of Home Movies (absolutely the best TV show he and/or Loren Bouchard have ever made, Bob's Burgers included)

“If you love looking at photographs, you figure out how to make them. If you love reading books, you figure out how to make those."

- Chris Walla to me in a Seattle coffee shop in maybe 2003

I don't know why I write.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

This summer I did an interview with Todd Burns, who writes the extremely interesting newsletter Music Journalism Insider, which I commend to you. He's given me permission to re-run it here, which I'll do below, after a few more brief notes, such as:

I was on some more podcasts: I talked to Chris Marchand of Post Consumer Reports in a wide-ranging conversation about, among other things, taste, criticism, and having to admit that the Dave Matthews Band and Phish might be good, despite everything. I also was on the very fun Magnified Pod, a podcast about 90's Christian underground music, which is absolutely my wheelhouse, on which we discussed the bands Morella's Forest and PFR, among many other things.

I wrote a thing about trying not to be embarrassed about my work on music stuff in my academic life for the Research Hub website at SFU's Faculty Education (where I work).

Ahoy! This is an extended version of the piece I published in early August, an interview with the Anacortes, WA- based "Christian" (scare quotes for many reasons, see below!) musician John Van Deusen, formerly of the Lonely Forest. It's a bit more sprawling and less edited than the published piece, which you can find here.

I hope you're well! - JHH, Vancouver, BC

John Van Deusen’s music feels like the apotheosis of Northwest Christian indie rock, and his recently completed four-album series, (I Am) Origami, will feel instantly warm, familiar, and right to anyone who’s spent time in the Venn diagram that envelops large swathes of the Pacific Northwest’s independent rock scene and its evangelical churches in the last thirty years. Put it all in a blender – or probably more appropriately, an oak barrel in a craft brewery – Tooth and Nail Records, Mars Hill Church and the Paradox Theater, Damien Jurado, Pedro the Lion, the Teen Dance Ordinance and all-ages clubs in suburbs, The Stranger’s music section, KEXP, church basement shows, the DIY scenes in Olympia and Anacortes, Sunday morning worship at any church in Vancouver (either one!) or Bellingham or Spokane – and you get these four albums that together form both a portrait of the artist as young Christian musician, and a map of the myriad influences that have shaped this region’s unique religious culture. 

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

For several years, I've been really into the song "Dear Coach's Corner" by the Canadian punk band Propaghandi.

PropagandhiDear Coach’s Corner

It's a dark, hardcore punk song about militarism and sports, and it unexpectedly made me super emotional when I first heard it. Unlike the other things that stir my Canadian immigrant patriotism (e.g., Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire commercials, Canadian Olympians excited about finishing a respectable fourth), this song isn't sentimental about Canada, but bitterly angry at the way something many people find uplifting and beautiful in my adopted country (the game of hockey) is co-opted by military ritual: the song was inspired by the singer's attending a game with his young niece, the pre-game ceremonies of which featured soldiers rappelling down the sides of a stadium, and ends with the haunting line "How do I protect her from this cult of death?"

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

OK, first: here's a 40% off discount code for my new book!

Go to the publisher's website here (https://wipfandstock.com/9781498293822/dancing-about-architecture-is-a-reasonable-thing-to-do/) and use the code Image40 at checkout.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

Most of you already know this, but I just wanted to share that MY NEW BOOK IS OFFICIALLY OUT. I'm really excited about this book, but it's a weird kind of excitement, because I wrote most the stuff in it anywhere from ten to 22 years ago. It's a kind of personal greatest hits for me, so I'm excited to share it with you, but I'm also at the point where I've been living with it for so long that I don't know what to think of it any more. I hope you'll like it and consider recommending it to your friends.

Anyway -- below is some info about where you can buy it in various formats, plus information about the launch event next week.

The LAUNCH is happening on Zoom next Thursday, March 24, at noon Hawaii/ 3 pm Pacific/ 6 pm Eastern / 7:30 pm Newfoundland/ 10:00 pm GMT. It's sponsored by Image, which is so cool to me, because not only did they publish the essay this book is based on, but they sponsored my first book launch some 10+ years ago, and I was an intern for them in college. It will feature me in conversation with my friend Mischa Willet, who is a poet and professor at Seattle Pacific University, and musical guest John Van Deusen, who you might know from his former band the Lonely Forest or his amazing series of solo albums, I Am Origami.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

Hey! I hope to have news about my new book soon, but until then: let's listen to some music!

--

Welcome to Reasonable Things!

(Warning: This is going to be a long one.)

Earlier this week I spoke to Aaron Weiss, the singer of the band mewithoutYou, for t For reasons that may be obvious if you know the band (a punk/screamo juggernaut with a multi-religious, existential vibe) and the magazine (America’s biggest evangelical publication, founded by Billy Graham), I had some trepidation about this piece. Probably I needn’t have worried; Weiss is such a warm and engaging (if verbose) person, and thus our conversation was simply so delightful, that I decided it would be worth it to share the whole thing rather than a few choice quotes for an article about the band.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

My pre-sabbatical summer of no teaching has been pretty crowded so far. So here are some highlights of stuff I’ve done lately!

• I submitted the manuscript of my new book to the publisher (more info later this year!)

"Everything I feel now as an adolescent is true. This is who I am. Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal." - Stephen Fry, age 16

I remember feeling this way as a teenager, too. This feeling is powerful, but it can, with the benefit of the intervening years, be shown to be demonstrably false. Yet its power can be a force for good. This is partly why I love the music of the 90s, still, so much. There are good, true things that can (still) be accessed via the music one came to in one's youth. Through it, you can remember things that truly matter: the thrill of discovery, the shock of finding like minds, the joys of love and friendship, the beautiful superfluousness of art.

This is probably why I keep writing about the 1990s. The theme of most of my music writing since about 2010 has been "guys, 90's Christian rock was actually good."

Many of the bands I discovered in the 90s were absolutely revelatory to me, and I've written about many of them over the years. I've found it difficult to write about Luxury, who -- I hate to exaggerate but I don't mean to -- might actually be the best rock band of all time.

Chinese Satellite

When Judee Still introduced her song “Enchanted Sky Machines” at a 1971 concert in Boston as “a religious song about flying saucers coming at the end of the world to take all of the deserving people away till the holocaust is over,” a brief, muted round of applause breaks out before she finishes explaining the song and begins playing it. I think about the people who applauded there quite a bit. There were maybe ten? Twenty? Forty? who applauded in a crowd of, presumably, a couple hundred. Who were these people? Why did they applaud? Elsewhere, Sill said of the song, “When I wrote it, I think I believed it more literally than I do now, although I still believe poetically that deserving people will be spared.”

I see a clear line from this song to Phoebe Bridgers’ “,” from her 2020 masterpiece of an album, . Over a soaring string section, Bridgers sings:

Ahoy!

I am done with grading for the semester and here to share some stuff I've been writing, reading, and listening to.

WRITING

I wrote a piece about what it has been like to teach university during COVID called "The End of the World, One Year In: Notes from (Off) Campus." It's maybe the most personal thing I've published in years, but it felt good and necessary to write. It was published by Breaking Ground, which is a joint venture of Comment and Plough magazines that focuses on the pandemic moment, if you will, and "seeks to offer a creative lens borne out of two thousand years of Christian social thought and the witness it has inspired time and again."

The first time I was really blown away by a radio DJ was when I heard KEXP's DJ Riz, on a dark and rainy weekend night in Seattle in the early 2000s, play the instrumental version of Jeff Buckley's "Dream Brother" and segue it seamlessly into the original version. The sheer audacity to repeat the whole song recontextualized the instrumental version as a six-minute introduction in service of the overall atmosphere of the whole four-hour set. The vibe was incredible.

My own forays into college radio DJing were marked by attempts to find the perfect segue -- I've often bragged of the day I went from the Barenaked Ladies' "Be My Yoko Ono" into Dar Williams "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono" into John Lennon's "Oh Yoko" -- and I still feel there is something electric in the creative juxtaposition of pop songs. Something wholly other emerges when they are put into overlapping conversation -- a meta-meaning happens; songs somehow are opened to each other and themselves in ways they could not be in solitude. Each song becomes another's exegesis.

Anyway, this weekend I spent a little time with Audacity and Mixcloud, the results of which I offer here. Follow this link to listen, and read the notes below.

https://www.mixcloud.com/jthhhhhhhh/stars-earth-and-ether/

I've found it almost impossible to read and write since about March 15. Did you know that anxiety plus a global pandemic generally -- in my experience anyway -- equals more anxiety? So the manuscript for my forthcoming book continues to languish, papers in need of grading continue to pile up (summer term, during which I've been teaching, ends today), and I continue to spend my free time mostly fretting. Thankfully, though, I've managed to read and listen to some pretty great things here and there, which I heartily recommend below:

NoMeansNo

I got really into the BC-based punk band NoMeansNo, who broke up a few years ago and whose work around the late 80's is just astonishingly good -- apocalyptic, prophetic, fun. Check out their 1989 album Wrong. I read a short biography of the band by Mark Black, which I'd recommend reading as you listen to their first few albums.

DC Talk's Jesus Freak (the book)

I love Effectively Wild. It’s my favorite podcast, and it helped rediscover my love of baseball . But I take issue with something that comes up on the show from time to time, which is the notion of baseball as a distraction from our mortality. The show's co-host, Sam Miller, once said this of the game's purpose:

The point of this entire enterprise is to entertain us with baseball games. The point of it is not to decide who is the best team. The illusion that that is what we’re doing has long been a powerful draw to sports. But it is ultimately not the point. There is no scenario where the universe will care or remember who the best team was out of this collection of collections. It only matters inasmuch as we create this illusion that it matters.

If you lose even the illusion, then it becomes problematic. But the point is not to have the illusion: the point is to entertain people and make them forget that we are all dying right in front of each other — that this is just this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis, that we are going to lose everybody we know, that we are going to lose everything we have and the only way to distract ourselves is by separating our day into distractions.”

And sure, it sort of doesn’t really matter which team is the "best," but is Miller serious about this notion of “distraction?” I don’t have much patience for today’s brand of “ha-ha, nothing matters, LOL” nihilism – unless it’s truly jokey and surface-level, deployed ironically as a way to do some brush-clearing so we can get to things that really matter. I’m not sure which way Miller is deploying it here, and maybe he’s not even attempting to be nihilistic in a true sense.

But of course baseball matters, because people and our stories matter, and because everything matters. We could get into some kind of existential debate about whether God exists or whether, as Thornton Wilder wrote in Our Town, there is “something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being” or whether there is ultimately a kind of intelligibility to all of existence, and whether that is solely inherent in the human mind or somehow transcendently outside of it. I do, mostly, come down on a particular side on most of those questions.

Hi!

I'm Joel! This is my email newsletter!

I have been inspired by friends and writers I admire who seem to be pushing against social media, getting back to something a little more personal and relational by starting newsletters about stuff they are working on.

What do I work on? The thing I have been mainly doing for the last ten years is academia, and most of the academic stuff I do is related to language and writing in higher education. That is my "real career." I work at a university and grade papers and stuff.