Everybody's a Critic

One of the side effects of the Internet has unfortunately been the provision of a forum for the proverbial "experts who can't do anything." It is said that those who can do, those who can't teach and those who can't teach become critics.  I think I may have been the one who said that.

In any case, with the rise of the "comment" thread it seems everyone or at least most everyone, has taken it upon him or herself to lay into every book, movie, song, restaurant, sports team, or work of art, act of Congress or noble endeavor that goes on. Used to be it was a rare thing to find fault with something artistic much beyond, whether we liked it or didn't like it. Now, with the free and unfettered forum provided by the Internet, we all seem to need to get a lick in at everything in sight.

It's kind of sad because people that never actually make anything beautiful or pleasant or fun, have taken up positions in the digital duck blind and make themselves feel important by taking pot shots at anyone who dares to make the effort to actually do something or make something. We're fast becoming a nation of grouchy old critics - Waldorf and Statler sitting in life's bleachers making smug snide comments at everything.

It's sad really because taking on the job of critic makes you feel like you ought to say something critical about a thing if you review it. I've tried doing reviews on Amazon. I always feel a little guilty because I don't find a lot of fault. I do a lot of first novel reviews for fellow authors and they usually get five stars and an attaboy. I know how it feels to get 3 stars or to have people find fault with what you do and I can't seem to muster the courage to poke holes in what I know was somebody's labor of love. It seems a pretty rotten thing to do. I try to be honest, but I much prefer to focus on what I liked about something.

What brought all this on was I watched a Christmasy movie of Disney's. It was a kids movie and I found the animation and the songs and the story just amazing. Commenters at the space below the movie on the Internet, however, lined up to find fault with the movie. Some were understandably sick of hearing the "Let it Go" song, but the reason they were sick of it was because everybody was singing it and it gets stuck in your head because the song is so well done. Retroactively hammering the movie won't make your kids love the movie or the song any less and you're still going to have to listen to your little princess sing "Let it Go" over and over and over again.

When they went after "Tangled" which is one of my more recent Disney favorites, they done stepped over the line. It was a lovely movie with an upbeat ending. Some dim bulb went on and on about how disappointed she was that it wasn't "darker".  That's all we need in this world - to show our kids sad and depressive movies. The world is plenty dark without post-modernist cartoons putting our kids on Prozac. 

A critic the other day criticized the movie, "Hacksaw Ridge" for not inventing a scene where Desmond Doss had to choose to let someone die because he refused to pick up a gun. Even though the movie is closely based on a true story and that scene never happened this guy was certain it would have been a better "story" if they could have had such a scene. Another critic claimed some of the story was unbelievable even though Doss actually did kick a grenade away from fellow soldiers and was permanently disabled because of it. The critic wanted the actual story fixed to better suit his worldview in essence instead of allowing the story to be told as it was - reality not being good enough for Hollywood and all. It left certain questions unanswered for the critic. So when did life have to answer all your questions, man? Get used to it. Life does what it wants to you. You write your own story from life as it smacks you in the face. And it's never the story you thought it would be in the beginning of it.

I think those of us who are members of the Internet generation should spend a little more time in the real world. We should examine our values and our ethics and decide whether or not we believe the whole Golden Rule thing as a way of life. Despite how much I love Disney movies, I also blame Disney to some degree for our current generation that seems to think everything can be solved by magic. To some extent, Disney's magical fairy tales have contributed to that unrealistic view of life. But Disney is not alone in that responsibility. I really blame parents who don't take the time to talk about movies and TV shows that their kids see. If you raise a child by setting him in front of a TV set all day, you shouldn't be surprised if they develop a somewhat distorted outlook on life. You also have to take them out in the woods, go camping, hiking, take them fishing or canoeing or to visit museums, historical sites and do things together if you want a kid to view life realistically and not as some contrived story.

And perhaps instead of picking and fault-finding with the hard work of others, we should look for what we like about that work and not only encourage authors, artists, and craftsmen to give us more of what we enjoyed about their work, but we should also go out and do a little creating on our own. We are, after all, created in God's image. We are born creative. It is how we are like Him. I really believe God made us because He wanted to see what we would come up with. I think God wanted children who could make Him smile.

So maybe let's lighten up on being critics. It's more fun simply diving into the amazingly creative things God's children have made and simply enjoying it for what it is. It's what our Father would have us do.


© 2016 by Tom King
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Life Should Be a Musical

McFerrin "Plays" an Audience

I saw this Youtube video the other day with the amazing Bobby McFerrin in which he demonstrated how to "play" an audience.  Go ahead and watch it.  I'll wait......

Wasn't that nice?  McFerrin showed how, as humans, our brains are wired up to respond to the pentatonic scale of music.  There is no evolutionary purpose for that. I believe that God has created within us all a shared ability to create art together by giving us shared basic gifts, like natural response to tone and musical organization, color sense, pattern recognition, kinesthetic sense, social perception and rhythm.

It's why, when we hear music in an elevator, we may be scarcely aware of it, but unless we suppress the instinct, we will soon find ourselves beginning to hum the tune, sing the words softly and sway in rhythm to the music. We respond to it quite naturally, as though we are wired up to respond to it in that fashion - to share and participate in the music around us.

I believed that God wired us up in such a way that we can instinctively respond to, create and participate in acts of spontaneous joy. That's why I like the flashmob things people do where choirs and orchestras and bands and dance groups suddenly come together in public spaces and create these wonderful bits of auditory, physical and social art.

I think musicals are a preview of heaven. I think that in the New Earth, we will spontaneously break out in song without any shame about it.  I, personally, don't think that we will sit in chairs to listen to the angel choirs "perform".  What I think is that we will, for sheer joy, break out in song and the angels will rush to our sides in order to be a part of the music.

I think that the music of the spheres will be with us wherever we go. I think we will break out singing and dancing, just from the sheer joy of being alive and for the love of God and each other and the things of all creation. I think we will make musical instruments and carry them everywhere with us, just in case music breaks out. I don't think it's an accident that the "Hallelujah Chorus" is one of the most often performed flashmob pieces on Youtube. It just seems right. The tradition of standing during the Hallelujah chorus began because a queen spontaneously rose in respect during one of the first concert performances of the Messiah.  When the Hallelujah chorus began, she rose to her feet and with her the entire audience. Today, standing up in the Food Court or a shopping mall and singing "Hallelujah" at the top of your lungs seems like utterly like it's the right thing to do.

I think, that in heaven and the new Earth, we will create art, simply because a bunch of us want to express our joy and gratitude to God. I think we will celebrate each other, for after all, is not man and woman also the creation of God. I don't see us all spending eternity sitting around on a cloud with harps. I see us singing and dancing, creating vast spectacles simply because someone goes, "Hey, I bet if we all started jumping up and down and waving towels over our heads while singing this new song I wrote, that it would look all kind of cool!"

And then several thousand of us would all get together and practice it till we had it down, then we'll sneak over to the next town and drift into the town square and do a flashmob kind of thing to make the people there smile.  They'd probably join us.

I am certain that eternal life in the new Earth will be exactly like that.

© 2013 by Tom King

Getting Old is Actually Kind of Fun?

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Wheat gluten "steaks" simmering in broth.

As I've gotten older, I've decided to do some things differently.  For one thing, we've almost entirely stopped buying meat of any kind and gone almost entirely vegetarian. It means more cooking time, but I find I enjoy cooking.  Who knew meal prep could be this much fun?

People become vegetarians for a lot of reasons.  Some hope to lose weight of to improve their health or live longer.  Others do it because the whole idea of eating living creatures is repugnant to them.  Some do it in order to feel morally superior to others.  Some believe it will help save the planet.

I do it for several reasons, not the least of which is my religion.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve evidently lived on fruits and vegetables.  Later God pitched them out of the garden and said here's some grain (carbohydrates).  Try this.  Then, at the flood He designated clean and unclean beasts and told Noah he could barbecue the extra clean ones during the voyage.  The human lifespan dropped precipitously after that. So I figure it's healthier to eat the plants.

But probably an even bigger reason for it is that I like vegetarian food.  I grew up eating both vegetarian food and meat dishes. My Mom and my Grandmother made wonderful dishes like peanut butter loaf, cottage cheese loaf and vegetarian hot dogs and hamburgers. We mixed it up with the real thing too and for economic reasons, I did eat rather a lot of baloney sandwiches as a kid.

To this day, I'm not terribly fussy to cook for, though as a practicing Adventist, I leave pork and shrimp and stuff like that alone.  If we're visiting or away from home, we eat what we're offered and don't demand others cater to our weird dietary restrictions. We feel that would be rude, but we are up front about being semi-vegetarians.

I'm doing more of the cooking now that I'm semi-retired and only working 12 to 14 hour days and since, I'm cooking, I can exercise my preference for vegetarian food over meat. It's safer, healthier and I like it better. Adventists as a group tend to live longer than other Americans by about 6 to 10 years according to some studies.  I figure it's the lifestyle - a lifestyle that includes an emphasis on vegetarianism and eating a good diet.

Don't get me wrong, I do like pie, especially the fruity ones that aren't too sweet and homemade ice cream is a weakness of mine. And I have to take my Sweet Baboo down for a steak once in a while or she gets cranky, but all in all it wasn't a hard thing for us to do.  We've always eaten lots of vegetables and vegetarian foods, and there are all kinds of vegetarian substitutes for meat.  You can order stuff made from tofu, soybeans, wheat gluten and other plant proteins and many of them like vege-dogs, artificial scallops, bacon and buffalo wings aren't bad. You used to have to buy them from SDA suppliers like your state's Adventist Book Center, but now you can order vege-burger and vege-chicken at Amazon.com. 

Also, if you don't mind a bit of work, a largely lacto-ovo vegetarian diet can be less expensive than buying steaks, fryers and chops. This week I made some gluten steaks out of wheat and white flour, some chicken seasoning and ten minutes or so of kneading by hand (my KitchenAid Mixer does the lion's share of the initial kneading of the dough).  I'll be posting a recipe soon at my Hubpages site with photographs and directions for making your own wheat gluten.  I'll put up the link here when it's done.

This summer I plan to go to some of those little pick-it-yourself fruit and vegetable farms they have up here in Washington and get some bushels of fruit and veggies to can for the winter.  We have a pressure cooker and I'm going to buy a bunch of those great old-fashioned Mason Jars.  Not only will we have good food prepared by ourselves without a lot of chemical ingredients, but we are also going to have some lovely decorative jars of stuff in our pantry this year if all goes well.  And we should have some very pleasant meals this winter. 

I've discovered that getting old gives you an appreciation for hand-made things, whether food or decorations for your house or even well-made kitchen tools. I'm collecting stuff for my kitchen the way I've been collecting tools for my workshop.

They say that in your 50s and 60s your right brain - the creative half of your mind - begins to grow again for the first time since you were a teenager.  It's kind of fun. Turns out the tools and telescope parts and all those unpainted toy soldiers I collected all those years may get turned into something after all.

Except for the arthritis, I'm enjoying getting to the age where I'm well-seasoned.  And even the arthritis yields itself to some creative solutions I've been trying out lately. I find I rather like ice packs and hot and cold fomentations to my joints.  And the exploration of herbal remedies has been like a treasure hunt.  That's how I found out that Aloe Vera juice and capsules help my knees work better.

How much fun is that?



- Tom