👋Hi y’all! I’m Ben. I’m a PhD student in art and theology, writing about Nick Cave and the power of pop music as a mode of “doing theology”. I’m pretty new to micro.blog, but already value the ethos and community I see here. I look forward to connecting with more of you in 2023!

16 Years

She is more beautiful to me—in every way—today than she was on our wedding day, which, as you can see, is really saying something…

🎵Now listening: Christmas - Low on Music.

🎵For your Christmas & New Year listening pleasure!

With my favourites for Christmas…

Happiest of Christmas wishes to all!

Angelo Badalamenti has died

His creative collaboration with David Lynch rendered some of the most truly sublime marriages of music and image in the history of cinema and television. I’ve spent countless hours being transported to places both wonderful and strange by his work.

On The Success of Art

Again, Sally Rooney:

This, to me, is the beauty—we might even say the magic—of the novel as a literary tradition: its ability to involve us emotionally in the relationships of its protagonists. This feeling is produced, of course, by meticulous technical construction, in the work of James Joyce just as much as that of Henry James or Jane Austen. But if we are to acknowledge that fiction has any effect on us other than what is strictly intellectual, then I think we have to admit that the feeling itself is important. Works of art don’t succeed or fail on their technical or logical merits: they succeed or fail according to how they work on their audience. Yes, the language of Ulysses is radically inventive; yes, its symbolic structure is dense with significance; yes, it destablilizes textual conventions; but it seems at least to me that it does these things so that we can meet all the more directly, the more vividly and beautifully, with Molly and Stephen and Leopold Bloom.