jonathan stegall

I’ve been thinking, recently, about why I dislike American Idol so much. I’ve wondered, “Is it just me being cynical?” “Is it me being afraid of user-generated content?” (what a geekish question to even ask) “Is it just because I don’t like the style of all the stuff they perform?” And so on. Today, though, it finally hit me.

Art - a creative discipline

First of all, I believe passionately that art should be done with creativity, or it shouldn’t be done at all. This includes music, film, design in all its manifestations, television, literature in all its manifestations, and so on and so on. Understandably, this means that I don’t like a lot of what culture puts out as art.

In American Idol’s case, you have a show. Its contestants are, in all likelihood, performing works that:

• They didn’t create in the first place.
• The person who did create them probably didn’t do so out of a great love for art.
• Are not particularly unique, original, or beyond the status quo.
• And the contestants performing them aren’t either.

Mediocre Art

If one were to discuss American Idol with someone who is known for being a virtuoso vocalist, or a voice professor, or someone who understands music theory at all, it’s very likely that that person would not have a high view of the musical skills of the contestants, or of the musical knowledge of the American people.

And here, we get into one of the problems with MySpace. We have the general population creating “webpages,” when they’re not qualified to do so. On American Idol, we have the general population judging musical talents when they’re not qualified to do so. Logically, we’re going to end up with the musical equivalent of moving pink backgrounds with white text on top of them.

I’m all for user generated content, to an extent. I just feel like it should be generated by users that have some knowledge of what they’re generating. I think this is why niche sites like Digg and countless others end up with, on average, items that are more relevant and more intelligent to the people using them.

I think those are my major issues with the show. I could rant about the idea that this art is being performed for the wrong reasons, but that may occasionally not be the case. And even if it is, there’s a great deal of amazing art that’s been produced throughout the ages by people who really don’t have any interest in the subject matter they’re dealing with.

I have tried to stay somewhat quiet about the recent passing of Jerry Falwell. Initial reactions and thoughts aside, I think I have some comments on surrounding issues at this point.

I’m not a fundamentalist. That is, very possibly, obvious. I don’t even agree with all of the fundamentals, much less all the other things that tend to follow the movement. I may blog a bit on my thoughts about the fundamentals, and the other attachments like dispensationalism, dominionism, and so on at some point in the future. These are very powerful theological ideas, although many who hold them don’t know their names.

Now that that’s out of the way, the developments that fundamentalism has taken in its roughly 100 year history in our country are very interesting. The movement began as an attempt to counter liberal theology, to an extent to counter secular science, and to continue the Protestant tradition of bashing Roman Catholicism. In doing this, it lost its presence at major seminaries and universities, and became an object of ridicule in the public eye after ridiculous episodes such as the Scopes trial. Perhaps because of events like this, and perhaps as a cause of events like this, fundamentalists were known for separatism from culture as a whole. The idea is, roughly, that “culture is going to hell, so we’re going to hide over here so that we don’t go to hell with it.”

During the time around World War II, evangelicalism broke from fundamentalism, deciding that Catholics and liberals could indeed be Christians, and could indeed have things to offer. Billy Graham is the prime example of this, receiving massive criticism for allowing non-fundamentalists to help in his events and other things in the 1940s. As this occurred, evangelicals began to form their own seminaries, and return to major universities such as Harvard and Yale to teach with, discuss things with, and work with various other types of theologians. They also began to question the fundamentalist practice of separatism, leading to an interest in social justice, among other things. The idea with this is, again roughly, that “we don’t want culture to go to hell, so we’re going to try to do some things to help it.”

This divide between the two roughly conservative camps continued, for the most part, until the time of Jerry Falwell’s decision to take America back from secularization. His idea was, from the 70s until the present, again roughly, that “culture will go to hell unless we change it back to the way it used to be.” You see the difference here, I’m sure. This may help explain some of the ridiculous comments he’s known for having made over the years, relating to everything from presidential elections to natural disasters. As this idea developed, it merged, in a lot of ways, with evangelicalism. Often, it is difficult today to tell the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

The legacy that is left from things like this is very strong on several fronts. For one example, we can ask nearly anyone who’s not a Christian what thoughts these things bring to mind. For another example, we can look at the close ties that the Republican Party has enjoyed with evangelical Christianity, and the endorsement it has received as the party of morality. If we think about it, or view the countless evidence, Republicans are not necessarily more spiritual or moral or anything else than Democrats, or Independents, or Communists, or Anarchists, or whatever else.

But we don’t think about it, and that’s the legacy of modern Christian fundamentalism. We don’t think about whether or not it’s a good thing to throw prayer at non-Christians in schools, or whether it’s a good idea to post 10 out of 613 commandments from the Old Testament in courthouses, and we don’t think about whether or not a man who said “God helps those who help themselves” really would approve of us using him as our support for a Christian America.

And then, we don’t think about whether or not specific wars are good, whether war in general is good, whether or not we should try to protect the environment, or whether or not it’s bad to lie. Our agenda has been set, and we won’t allow ourselves to see anything outside of it. At that point, we’ve lost something of the nature of God.

Carnegie Mellon University has created a new version of the ever-present CAPTCHA that many of us use to sign up for accounts all over the web. We all hate it, but most of us understand that spammers would be worse than they are without it. reCAPTCHA is a program that requires the user to enter two words. One word is a known word from its database, and the other word is a scanned image from a book. Massive numbers of books are being digitized every day. Saved for posterity, and all that.

Computers can’t always read scanned pages very well. Often they make a valiant attempt, but they’ll read the word wrong. This reCAPTCHA method allows computers to get new words. If the user enters the correct first word, great. If they enter the second one, whatever book that word is from is one step closer to digital existence, and they can pass the word around a bit to make sure it’s right. That’s awesome.

In the last month or so, I’ve been able to see a few great shows. The Chariot and Becoming the Archetype had great CD release shows. Norma Jean and With Blood Comes Cleansing played awesome shows.

I have greatly enjoyed myself learning about how the scene functions in Atlanta. I enjoy the fact that, being new to the area, there are many great bands that are from around here. The Tampa area, where I went to college, used to be much better than it currently is, if one enjoys the underground. It was once the American home of death metal, and it used to have a decent Goth scene as well, but neither are particularly lively at this point.

At this point, Ybor City (a neighborhood in downtown Tampa) is a corporate, commercial dump. I’ve heard that it was once an extremely artistic neighborhood, with Bohemian style coffeeshops, small, independent bookstores and other businesses, and all the other makings of an area like Little Five Points appears to be in Atlanta. Although, Little Five does now have a Starbucks.

In the event that visitors would like to know what is happening in my current web endeavors, I thought I would summarize current projects that are happening outside of work.

The Underground Railroad redesign

This is at least the most satisfying thing that’s currently happening. I can’t remember how long I’ve been working on this site, as there was a long period of time where I had very little spare time to do that kind of thing. Now, though, I feel like it’s a few solid weeks away from being finished. It will certainly have more room for growth and expansion and all that, but the site will be ready to go live, and hopefully without being a disappointment.

The Refuge of St Petersburg

The Refuge site has been on hold for a bit, due to the same reasons the Underground Railroad took so long. However, the benefit of spitting out the Underground Railroad will be that much of the programming is flexible enough to be reused, and get the structure and functionality I need for the Refuge. Hopefully, it will be a bit faster.

design of jonathanstegall.com

And yes, this blog. It desperately needs a design. I’ve been pushing different things about in my head from time to time, and have a few good ideas. I plan to work on this, and create a custom theme based on what I want out of WordPress, rather than basing it on an existing theme. This may cause it to take a bit longer, and I’m okay with that.

Other stuff

There are a few other projects that are either just beginning, or still floating around in the head of myself or my wife. I hope to be able to share more about these in the near future, as well.