http://www.therevealer.org/ en-us the.revealer@nyu.edu 2008-07-20T20:24:44-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003075.php Sharlet: The liberal blogosphere will soon be a-twitter over James Dobson's announcement that he's reconsidering his once absolutist opposition to McCain. Evidence, say Dobson's and McCain's critics, of the Christian Right's hypocrisy. But I've long maintained that Dobson, despite his... 3075@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-07-20T20:24:44-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_003074.php Who doesn't want to read Heavy Metal Islam, a new book by UC Irvine scholar Mark LeVine on rock and revolution in the Middle East? If you don't, you shouldn't be reading this blog. Is the book good? Hell if I know. LeVine had me at the title. But Howard Hampton's review in the New York Times Book Review, intended as a rave, dampens our anticipation just a bit. Writing on LeVine's explorations of metal scenes in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iran, Hampton declares, In lands where playing “satanic” music or even attending semi-clandestine concerts can get you thrown in jail (actually charged with things like “shaking the foundations of Islam”), there’s something truly heartening about the Moroccan thrash girls Mystik Moods striving to break through centuries-old sexist taboos, or Hate Suffocation trying to carve out a niche to play music and “be left alone by both the government and society.” Given that the metalheads I grew up with thought they, too, were shaking foundations -- starting with those of the high school and moving on up to the "War Pigs" in Washington, Hampton's Cold War-style vision of totalitarianism in the Middle East comes across as more adolescent than the distinctions between "death, doom, and black" metal that matter so much to Cairene headbanger "Marz." (Marz insists that LeVine make clear that his band, a hybrid of death and black metal, is most definitely NOT "blackened death metal.") Would that Hampton, or at least one editor at the Book Review, take as subtle a view of the Middle East, where subversive and bohemian subcultures predate even Lemmy's pre-Motorhead days as a Rockin' Vicker. This is to take nothing away from the courage or artistry of Hate Suffocation. But Hampton is overstating the level of state persecution they face -- they're not the Plastic People -- and in so doing he reinforces the orientalist cliche of all-seeing, authoritarian Islamic regimes Heavy Metal Islam is evidently meant to subvert. Hampton closes with a rebuke to LeVine's optimistic view of metal in Islamic lands: Metal, he says, is dystopian, not revolutionary. This is an inadvertent echo of the "culture of death" cliche with which conservatives condemn all of Islam as a monolithic "civilization" incapable of even imagining democracy. "Don't confuse [metal] with 'If I Had a Hammer,'" Hampton warns. "Unless it's a hammer of the nihilistic gods aimed at your forehead." That's unfair to metal -- and to the brilliantly fierce "Hammer Song," as it was originally known. (Disclosure: I'm writing a book about it.) No, "If I Had a Hammer" wasn't dystopian, though it implicitly acknowledged the darkness its authors, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, saw in the coming Cold War. But it wasn't about mild mannered civil society, either: "If I had a hammer," sang Seeger, "I'd hammer out a warning." Sounds like metal to me. --Jeff Sharlet 3074@http://www.therevealer.org/ main_story 2008-07-20T15:24:50-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timeless_003073.php Artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky brings the war home by photographing reenactments of Iraqis at prayer or in reflection in American "backyards," ordinary settings which reveal to us the depth of the grief that photojournalism portrays as part of a naturalized landscape of suffering... 3073@http://www.therevealer.org/ timeless 2008-07-15T13:51:58-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003072.php Every now and then, two great faiths converge. Such meetings transcend the ecumenical impulse; indeed, they may lead to new religions. That nearly occurred at Windsor Hill Baptist in Oklahoma City. The church decided to promote a special youth weekend... 3072@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-07-13T11:52:49-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timeless_003071.php Awesomed By Comics isn't, technically, about religion. It's about comics. Totally awesome comics. Not so much the kind of graphic novels that get reviewed in The New York Times or the elegant "funnies" serialized for yuppies in the Times Magazine as the pulps: Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Hulk (and Hulkling), Avengers and New Avengers and Young Avengers and old Crusaders. The comics that resist that ol' disenchantment of the world, the trash-lit underside of secularism, chronicles of de facto clergy in capes, matters of ultimate concern addressed with super strength, power blasts, and lots of explanatory dialogue... 3071@http://www.therevealer.org/ timeless 2008-07-11T14:54:54-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003070.php "The beacon of the Catholic church to immigrants has rarely shown more brilliantly" than in Postville, Iowa, writes Samuel G. Freedman in The New York Times. Freedman, one of the great religion writers at work, is referring to a tiny... 3070@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-07-11T14:31:18-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003069.php Couldn't resist:God arrested for selling cocaine.... 3069@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-07-02T13:28:16-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003068.php The universe is in balance, George Carlin once said, because Jesus has a little statue of a middle-class American hypocrite on his dashboard. In a bold move, NBC pays tribute to the dead comic with an old Saturday Night Live... 3068@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-06-29T22:52:42-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_003066.php Killing the Buddha.com -- god for the godless, cheaper than church, Allah in the family -- rises from the grave, again. The website Peter Manseau, Jeremy Brothers and I founded in 2000, declared dead once and for all after numerous resurrections during the last two years, marches back onto the internet like a zombie in search of fresh brains. And KtB has found them: three Revealer (and NYU journalism grad school) alumni, Meera Subramanian, Ashley Makar, and Marissa Kantor-Dennis, have revived the anti-tradition of Buddha-killing. 3066@http://www.therevealer.org/ timely 2008-06-28T19:02:59-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timeless_003065.php In the late 19th century, the biggest political movement in Jewish America was anarchism, equally opposed to church and state. One of the offspring of that movement was a Yiddish paper called Freie Arbeiter Stimme, "The Voice of Labor," lovingly documented in this hour long film available for a free download here. 3065@http://www.therevealer.org/ timeless 2008-06-28T18:46:21-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003064.php The NYT delivers news of The Shack, a gi-normous bestseller of a Christian novel, to the secular world, comparing its sales to Eckhart Tolle's new age blockbuster, A New Earth. But the paper misses the more interesting connection between Tolle's... 3064@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-06-24T20:23:11-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_003063.php Sharlet: I'll be discussing my new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, on The Diane Rehm Show, from 11-noon, east coast time.... 3063@http://www.therevealer.org/ today 2008-06-24T07:41:21-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_003062.php And Family news. 3062@http://www.therevealer.org/ timely 2008-06-16T06:59:04-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_003061.php Sharlet: Bob Smietana, religion reporter for the Tennessean and occasional Revealer contributor, responds to my Friday post on the most overlooked religion story of last week, the change in leadership of America's biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.. 3061@http://www.therevealer.org/ timely 2008-06-16T06:47:39-05:00 http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_003060.php What Rick Warren, a founder of modern advertising, and the dirtiest word in politics don't have in common. Adapted from The Family, by Jeff Sharlet, and excerpted here from CounterPunch. 3060@http://www.therevealer.org/ timely 2008-06-14T18:09:09-05:00