Kings of Leon = Alchemy

Scott Payne over at The League of Ordinary Gentleman has penned a multi-layered review of a live KOL concert he attended that presents a thoughtful, deconstructed examination of music in general, but Kings of Leon specifically.

Scott's thesis revolves around alchemy, which he (using a Wikipedia entry) defines as "both a philosophy and a practice with an aim of achieving ultimate wisdom as well as immortality, involving the improvement of the alchemist as well as the making of several substances described as possessing unusual properties."

That's heavy stuff, dude.


The concept that struck a chord with me - pun intended - was articulated in this passage:

As a musician, you can’t really think your way into music that divines wisdom and immortality, it must be a project of feeling and intuition. So too, as a listener, are you incapable of rationalizing the power of a song that cuts to the core of the human emotional experience, it something that, in moving you, must be felt and to which you, if you are to be moved, must open yourself to.

The whole process is one of surrender, on both sides. That surrendering is, when I step back to look at my own experiences, an acknowledgment of the end product to point beyond the processes used to create it and, intrinsically, transcend the parameters of  knowing that define the banalities of life lived by rote. By surrendering you allow an opening of freedom, to taste life lived in a truly creative and novel fashion, which, in part, explains the strength that music displays in our modern lives.

The philosophy of surrendering in order to project your deepest, most meaningful parts into the universe while opening up to receiving what others have sent your way is a concept that I've come to later in life, at least when it comes to admitting and embracing it as a positive thing.

Scott's perspective leads me to wonder if my lifelong love of music was, in some subconscious way, an attempt to connect and reconcile with the giving and taking of emotion, since it was a pretty stunted slice of my upbringing.

Regardless of what it means to me, if you're a music aficionado, an emotional cripple who finds joy and release in melody and syncopation, a concert-goer, or a closet alchemist, you won't find a better way to start your weekend than by reading Scott's entry.

Plus, Kings of Leon rock.

Singapore's Health Care System

One of the more forceful arguments being put forth by those opposed to reforming the American health care system is that the United States has the best health care in the world. Anyone who raises the question of whether this is true or not is quickly shot down as unpatriotic or an American-hater.

But numbers mean things, even when we don't like what they say. Do we really have a better system, which leads to us living longer, in better health, with top rankings in most of the key performance indicators that other countries also use to measure how they're doing?

No so much.

Via The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a look at how we compare to Singapore:

Here are some comparisons: Life expectancy at birth in the United States is 78 years; in Singapore, 82 years. The U.S. infant mortality rate is 6.4 deaths per 1,000 live births; in Singapore, just 2.3 deaths per 1,000. But the United States has far more caregivers: 2.6 physicians per 1,000 people, compared with 1.4 physicians in Singapore. The United States has 9.4 nurses per 1,000 people; Singapore, 4.2. And it has six times as many dentists as Singapore and three times as many pharmacists.

Perhaps the answer lays within the concept that Singapore doesn't view people's medical care as a profit-at-all-cost model and actually focuses on doctors and patients.

Image by Christopher Chan via flickr

Being a Man

Over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Scott H. Payne details some of the angst he endured in the days leading up to his recent wedding, and thinks out loud about what's he's learned and how it factors into what it means to be a man.

Payne posits that we men have been knocked down a couple of rungs on the hierarchical ladder, and deservedly so. Similarly, women have quite logically become more empowered to make up the gap.

Amusing as the Homer Simpsons, Jim Belushis, and Kevin James’ of the world might appear on the surface, not only do I find them an offensive and unnecessarily inaccurate depiction of my gender, I also think them thoroughly destructive to our overall cause. An empowered and strong woman is, at least in my experience and estimation, ill-satisfied and paired with a dullard as a counterpart, and if we are to address many of the pressing issues that face us today, we are best suited to have everyone — male and female, man and woman — firing on as many cylinders as possible.

I remember when I made the decision to leave the workforce and stay at home with our newborn son for his first year, my male peers acted as if I was resigning from the human race.

So clearly branded with the mistaken concept that men are defined by their careers and not by what they bring to the family dynamic, co-workers warned that I would either go insane from lack of interaction, or I would effectively be committing career suicide.

None were willing to concede that perhaps there was a greater calling in life than meetings, lunches, and a paycheck.

It is in this regard that I think the women of the world have as much at stake in encouraging a productive discussion about what it means to be a healthy man in this twenty-first century as we males ourselves do. The outcome will, in part, determine how we choose approach and cultivate the next generation of sons (and daughters) into will-be fathers and husbands. The conversation needs be seen as a forward moving dialogue that does not seek to brush aside the daming critiques of patriarchal dominance, but rather takes those truths to heart and seeks to find ways of discerning an equal strength in manhood that is augmented by its sensitivity to those truths. We might seek to build a platform of manhood that lifts all of the benefits of classically pragmatic male sensibility and marries it with the requisite softness of soul to feel into the spaces we deserve to live, breathe, and be.

On Being A Man , via The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Waterboarding - WWJD?

Via The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, there's finally an answer for those conservatives who have posited that Jesus would have been in support of waterboarding.

So let’s just ask the question right off the bat: should Americans use torture–sorry, enhanced interrogation techniques?

Jesus Christ: Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword