Nate Fleming's Blog, page 40

Thimblerig’s Ark Book Launch!

Thimblerig’s Ark will have its print version debut in Chengdu, China on June 16, 2014 at 1:00 PM at the Chengdu Bookworm.  If you’re in town, please plan to attend!

Thimblerig’s ART Part II

More images from children, inspired by Thimblerig’s Ark.   If you haven’t read the book yet, run over to Amazon, download a copy, and then draw some pictures!  Scan them, email them to info@thimblerigsark.com, and I’ll post them on the website!

 

Thimblerig’s Ark Book Launch!

Event Details

Come and celebrate the launch of THIMBLERIG’S ARK at the Bookworm in Chengdu!  Author Nate Fleming will be discussing the novel, talking about his writing process, and answering questions about both.

The Bookworm

Yujie East Road 2-7#, Ren min South Road 28# , （玉洁东街2-7号，人民南路28号）

Chengdu, China
Saturday, June 14, 2014 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM (PDT)

 

Meriam NOT to be freed after all. Maybe.

If this were any other situation,  I would think that perhaps the government of Sudan was angling for publicity, trying to keep itself in the news.  You would think – however – that they would want this issue to just go away, and that the best way to save face would be to joyfully release Meriam and say it was all a big mistake.

On Saturday, that’s what the world had thought was happening, when an official of the Sudanese government declared that Meriam would be freed within days, and the I joined the rest of the sane world in rejoicing this surprising turn of events.

But, today, the Sudanese government came out saying that the officials comments had been taken out of context.

Out of context, eh?  Let’s see.  On Saturday, Abdullah Alazreg, a foreign ministry under-secretary, told the media that Ibrahim “will be freed within days in line with legal procedure that will be taken by the judiciary and the ministry of justice.”  Okay, so they did leave themselves a loophole, because you could argue that the “in line with legal procedure” could mean anything.

So, we’re back to the first square.

Meriam’s lawyers have said that they see this as a positive thing – that the government has been “rattled” by the pressure being put on them worldwide.  So, let’s keep up the pressure!  If you haven’t signed the petition, then do so RIGHT NOW!  Write your government representative and demand that they take an official stance on this situation.  Does your home country have any companies that do business in Sudan?  If so, write to them and make the same demand.

And most importantly, continue to pray for Meriam and her family, that God would protect her and bring her back to her husband safely.

And on a sidenote, which is actually a note that should be up front and center in the U.S., why is it that when you Google Meriam Ibrahim, you don’t find any American news stories popping up, except for one Christian website, and a mention in U.S. News and World Report?  It’s overwhelmingly being covered by the British media, and shluffed aside by the American media.  Is that because the Obama administration is giving it such little notice?  They can release five of the most dangerous men in Guantanamo, but not actively and openly try to secure the release of the wife of an American citizen?

In the U.S.  News and World Report article, the writer mentions that Oklahoma senator James Inhofe has written to John Kerry, requesting that Meriam be granted political asylum, and asking Kerry to use the influence of the State Department to secure Meriam release.

This would be good move by the current administration.

 

Thimblerig’s ART

I’ve created a new page on the Thimblerig’s Ark website for readers to create and post original artwork inspired by my novel, Thimblerig’s Ark.  I’m proud to post the first three drawings here, and will add more as they are sent to me.

In the interest of full disclosure, the first one – with the big unicorn – was drawn by my precious 11 year old daughter.

But I’m happy to post all pictures I receive!  If you would like to have a picture posted on my website gallery, please scan it and send it to info@thimblerigsark.com.

Breaking News! Meriam to be Freed!

It’s still yet to be reality, but reports are coming out that the Sudanese government has committed to release Meriam Ibrahim, the young woman who was recently condemned to death for the “crime” of apostasy.

The story created world-wise outrage, and the sentencing was roundly condemned by everyone who has common sense and decency.  A few days ago, Meriam gave birth, which meant that the clock to her execution had started ticking.

It looks like the pressure put on the government of Sudan by most of the rest of the world was felt, and if the Sudan follows through, we may be celebrating Meriam’s reunion with her family in just a few days.

Now, we need to start praying for Meriam in some pretty specific ways:

1)  That Meriam will not be overwhelmed by the fame she will be given because of her experience.

2)  That Meriam will have wise counsel around her guiding her through the coming months.

3)  That God might use Meriam’s testimony and her story to bring glory to Himself and not to Meriam and her family.

4)  That He will protect her from anyone who may wish her harm because of the reason she was sentenced to death.

So, just because she’s (hopefully) being freed, we shouldn’t stop praying for Meriam and her family!

A Word on Artistry for Christians from Rich Mullins

On Sheila Walsh’s Heart to Heart show back in 1992, Sheila asked Rich Mullins what the point of his concerts were – what he hoped to convey.  Rich – sporting a real happenin’ hairstyle – answered:

You know what I think, mostly music.

A lot of people think that as a Christian musician, when I write a song I sit down and say, “What really spiritually significant thing can I say here?” and I really don’t believe in doing that. I really think that you just try to write really good songs. And if you are a Christian then your faith is going to affect everything you write.

So it’s not a matter of sitting down with a little agenda and coming up with a song that is very spiritual. I think if you’re anything like a spiritual person then your writing will be spiritual writing. If you’re a Christian that will affect whether you’re a carpenter or a plumber or a housewife or a secretary or whatever. If your faith doesn’t have some impact on your work, it’s probably because you have no faith.

This is a perfect response, and applies to those of us trying to write movies, books, poetry, plays, or any other art form as people of faith.

It’s a great interview, and you can watch the whole thing here.

A Ragamuffin’s Review of Ragamuffin

I finally had the opportunity to watch Ragamuffin, David Leo Schultz’s Rich Mullins biopic, over the weekend.  As any regular reader of this blog should know, I’ve been a self-proclaimed ragamuffin for many years now, and so I’ve been highly anticipating this film for months.  This is going to be a very honest and open critique, because I personally appreciate when a review of Thimblerig’s Ark is honest and critical in a positive way.  I am going to do the same for Ragamuffin, in the off chance that the review might make its way back to the filmmakers, in hopes that it might encourage them, and be a benefit in their next cinematic outing.

My review of Ragamuffin can’t begin without my mentioning the enormous amount of respect I have for David Leo Schultz, for the vision, passion, and endurance he brought to this project.  It’s appropriate that Schultz’s film company is called The Color Green, not only because of the Mullins reference, but also because this was a grass roots project from the get-go.  It is inspiring to see what he and his team accomplished, starting from an inspired idea, bringing it to fruition in a very professionally made, beautifully shot film.   You can read a great interview with David here, that gives more depth to the choices he made with this film.

Ragamuffin chronicles the life of Rich Mullins, the outspoken singer/songwriter who worked (reluctantly) in the Christmas music industry for several years in the 80’s and 90’s until his untimely death in a jeep accident on September 19, 1997.  With his open and authentic personality, his propensity to speak truth to power, and his bare footed concerts, Mullins made a huge impact on young Christians at that time.  You can read about an encounter I had with Mullins on a previous post here, but suffice it to say that he was a huge influence on my life as well.

I’d rather not take the time to summarize the events of the film, as I’m figuring most people who have read this far have actually seen Ragamuffin.  I’d rather just go ahead and speak specifically to the things that I thought were done well with this film, and the things I think could have done better.  But I want to preface this with the confession that it would have been nearly impossible for me to approach a biopic about Rich Mullins with no preconceptions, and without seeing it as a creative myself, imagining what I would have kept, and what I would have done differently, if I had been making this film.

That being said, let me start with the things I enjoyed about Ragamuffin.

1)  The passion of David Leo Schultz. 

I’ve mentioned this already, but I don’t think I can say enough how much admire that Schultz successfully took his vision from his imagination to the screen, against all odds.  He had to convince Rich’s family, his friends, raise the funds, put together the cast and crew, and then he took it out – church by church, just like Rich used to do.  I hope that everything else I say in this review will be seen through that lens of respect and admiration.

Screenshot from Ragamuffin

2)  The cinematography of Ryan Bodie. 

When I think of Rich and his music, one thing I think of is wide open spaces, and this film had no shortage of beautiful shots of windswept wheat fields, dusty plains, and stunning desert vistas.  Another great image is the swinging light bulb which we see first when young Rich has messed up his father’s tractor, and which comes to represent the broken relationship between Rich and his father.   For some reason, this technique made me think of the video for one of my favorite Rich Mullins songs, Hold Me, Jesus.

3)  The Evolution of Awesome God.  

I like the way we were teased with the development of this, by far the most well-known of Rich’s songs.  It was a good reminder that as talented a songwriter may be, songs take time, and often will sit at the edge of inspiration, just waiting for the right spark to be pushed over the edge.

4)  The choice of the father/son relationship as the anchor of the film.  

You can see threads of this relationship woven through many of Rich’s songs, and considering David Mullin’s involvement in the film (Rich’s brother), I have to presume that the portrayal was fairly accurate, if not perhaps heightened for dramatic effect.  Either way, Rich loved his father, admired his father, longed for his father’s acceptance, but didn’t feel it.  The film handles this nicely, and the resolution of the issue is what enables the film to end with Rich at peace.

5)  The unapologetically real portrayal of a famous Christian man who had very real struggles.  

The movie effectively hit three of the points I made in my article, What’s Wrong with Christian Filmmaking.  In that article, I said Christians should be freed to make movies that are not safe, movies that challenge the audience, and movies that ask difficult questions.  Ragamuffin certainly did these things in spades, and David Leo Schultz couldn’t have made an authentic movie about Rich Mullins without them.  I didn’t like seeing Rich smoking and getting drunk, but those struggles were a part of his life and needed to shown or the film wouldn’t have been authentically Rich’s life.  I think this was mostly effective because the filmmakers didn’t  glorify the struggles, and I doubt that anyone walked out of Ragamuffin thinking that they wanted to emulate those parts of Rich’s life.  I’ve struggled with addictions myself, and I found strength and comfort while watching Rich’s struggle.

6.  Rich making it rain in a concert.

I was so glad to see this included.  This was one of my best memories from seeing Rich in a big concert.  And, in the film, it was one of the rare times when Rich actually looked like he was having a blast.  Very, very cool that it was included.

—

Thus ends the part of the review when I discussed the things I liked.  Now to the things I wished had been different…

1)  Michael Koch as Rich Mullins.  

Koch did fine with the acting, and progressively well with the singing and playing, but I just couldn’t buy him as Mullins, as much as I wanted to, until the last thirty minutes.  I didn’t – by any stretch of the imagination – expect Schulz to seek out a Mullins doppleganger, but I just couldn’t wrap my brain around the actor playing Rich being this big, buff, handsome man.  On the outside, Rich was incredibly average, which made the deep power of his words and his songs and his story that much more powerful.  Every time I saw Koch’s broad shoulders squeezed into that white t-shirt, I thought he was much better suited to play Superman, not the everyman who was Rich Mullins.

2)  The nearly complete lack of joy.  

This was also something I had couldn’t overcome.  My limited experience with Rich Mullins was that he was a man who had his struggles, yes, but he was also a wickedly funny man with an often surprisingly sharp sense of humor.  This was part of the reason why he had young men like myself willing to drop everything to be around him!  Yes, he was wise and deep in his understanding of God.  Yes, he struggled with his personal demons.  But this is also the man who wrote a song referring to God as the maker of noses; who wondered if the little girls giggled when the young Jesus walked past; who considered the story of Rachel and Leah an awfully dirty trick.  This is the man who put the cup game on stage long before Anna Kendrick did it in Pitch Perfect.  The real irony for me in this is that director David Leo Schultz got his start as a comedian, and he somehow made Rich Mullins seem like he was only a tortured soul.  That is perhaps the biggest pity of all to me.

3)  The egocentricity of Rich Mullins.

I want to be careful about how I write this section, because the truth is I didn’t know Rich past the one time I met him with several other guys, but it really bothered me that Rich was so Rich-centric in the film, which made him pretty unlikable.  For example, did Rich really use the occasion of singing in a church to make the public decision that he was going to go to Nashville?  While Rich may have come to Morris’s funeral drunk, did he really come back into the room later to talk to the son of the man who died and use the occasion to only talk about himself?  Did Rich really insist that the young men who toured with him inform him on every little move that they made?  The answer to all of these questions might just be an unreserved “YES!  He did all of those things!”  But I have a real difficult time aligning the Rich Mullins of Ragamuffin with the Rich Mullins I came to know through music, interviews, and my one meeting over cake and Koolaid.

4)  Miscellaneous nit-picky things.  

These are smaller items, but they did detract from the film for me.  First, I didn’t buy the way the father cussed.  It seemed forced.  Second, Rich’s hair changed in illogical ways throughout the course of the film.  I do know that Rich had several different looks, but this came across more as an issue of when certain scenes were filmed rather than an attempt to convey different looks.  Third, I’m not a fan of narration in film, and I think the film would have been tighter if it had just been straight up narrative.

In Conclusion…

While I am genuinely happy that this film was made, while I know that it has touched many people in profound ways, and while I think that it was a giant leap forward in many ways for films made by Christians, it just wasn’t the film that I had hoped it would be.

Like I said at the top of this review, I approached this film with so many of my own thoughts about the life of Rich Mullins that David Leo Schultz had a pretty tall order to not disappoint me.  In many ways, this reminds me of when Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out, and people had nearly twenty years of anticipation built up.  How could Lucas not disappoint?

And so Ragamuffin receives three very solid golden groundhogs for being a risky film that challenges its audience and asks some hard questions. But it loses two golden groundhogs because it is so obviously made for the church that I don’t think it would play well out of the Christian subculture, and – in my opinion – while Rich Mullins’ story is compelling, Ragamuffin could have benefitted from a bit more script doctoring to make the story tighter, especially in the second act, which seemed to drag.

A Memory of Rich Mullins

This evening I finally had the chance to watch Ragamuffin, a biopic of Rich Mullins that came out earlier this year, and want to assemble my thoughts about the film before I write my review.

But watching the film brought up a favorite memory of a time when I had the opportunity to sit down with Rich over cake and cups of cherry Koolaid in a little church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Please allow me to fill the time between watching the film and writing my review by doing a bit of reminiscing.

Was it the spring of 1996?  I believe it might have been.  A student at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, I was in my mid-20′s, single, and a huge fan of the music of Rich Mullins.   One afternoon I was sitting in the computer lab at school when a couple of friends rushed in and asked if I wanted to go to a free concert that night at a local church.

“Who’s performing?” I asked.

“Rich Mullins,” they answered, excited.

I laughed.  “Guys, I listen to WDJC every morning on my way to school, and if Rich Mullins were coming to Birmingham “Buckle of the Bible Belt” Alabama, I would know about it.”

“It’s sort of a secret concert,” one of my friends whispered conspiratorially.  “It’s only for people who work with youth, and so the church didn’t advertise it publicly.”

In the end, I decided to go, even though I figured I’d walk into the church to find some overweight, middle-aged, southern gospel evangeli-singer who happened to share a name with my favorite Christian artist.  But being young and single and in seminary, I didn’t have anything better to do.

About five of us piled into a car and drove to an unfamiliar part of Birmingham where we parked in the lot of an innocuous Baptist church.  The dozen or so cars already there confirmed to me that we would not be seeing the Rich Mullins that evening.  But, of course, we couldn’t come this far and not make sure.

We entered the nearly empty church, introduced ourselves to the woman at the door as seminary students and youth workers, and sat down to see what would happen.

About ten minutes passed, and then the door at the front of the sanctuary opened, and a short barefooted man walked in, followed by a tall, lanky blonde guy.  I’m sure we were all sitting with our mouths wide open as we saw that it was not – in fact – an overweight, middle-aged, southern gospel evangeli-singer.

It was the real deal.

It was Rich Mullins.  The Rich Mullins.

We were sitting in the third pew, just a few feet away in a church with about twenty other people, as Rich and the blonde guy (who turned out to be Mitch McVicker) walked up to the mic, slung on their guitars, and Rich started talking.

He sang and told stories, he talked about the need for Christian music to actually be about Jesus,  and it was about ninety minutes of mid-20′s single seminary student heaven.

But the best part was yet to come.

When the concert was over, we approached him cautiously, not exactly sure how to talk to our hero.  As we approached, he turned and smiled and stepped over to us with a smile on his face.  After telling him that we loved the concert, one of us nervously stammered that we were all in seminary (which I’m pretty sure he called cemetery, but I could be wrong), and so then he asked us our church background.

Since Samford is a Southern Baptist affiliated university, most of the guys were from that denomination, and they said so.  When they told him, he laughed and said, “Hey, do you know why Southern Baptists don’t have sex standing up?”

Time stopped.

Did the guy who wrote Awesome God and Sing Your Praise to the Lord really just ask us about Southern Baptist sexual positions?

Of course, we just sort of shook our heads, not sure what to say.

With an impish twinkle in his eye, Rich Mullins delivered the punchline.

“Because they don’t want God to think that they’re dancing!”

The woman who had greeted us earlier walked up, probably wondering what brilliant remark Rich Mullins had made that had caused the five nice young seminary boys to break out into laughter, and told us that we could join Rich for cake in the fellowship hall, if we would like.

“Yes ma’am, please and thank you!” we enthusiastically responded, and then followed them down the hall to the fellowship hall where we were able to sit on folding chairs and enjoy cake and cherry Koolaid with Rich Mullins.

We each took turns asking him questions, and he was incredibly patient and personable, talking to us in turn, telling more jokes as the night went on.  It didn’t occur to us that this was the man’s life – sitting with fawning 20 something Kid Brothers of St. Frank wannabes – answering the same questions over and over again.  But it probably didn’t occur to us because he seemed to enjoy it so much, too.   He was overflowing with good graces, authenticity, and openness.

What a night.

Looking back on how we left that evening, I can see why he always had so many young guys gathered around him.  From that brief time, I could tell that he was the kind of person you wanted to hang out with, because he was so inviting, so full of humor and wisdom, so full of life.

My review of Ragamuffin will come in the next couple of days.

Thimblerig’s Kitchen Tip!

Thimblerig’s going domestic today.  Do you know those irritating little gnats that show up whenever you have left some fruit out, or if you’ve not thrown away your garbage quickly enough?  Well, here in Chengdu, China, we get them A LOT.  So I went hunting for a natural way to get rid of the little bugaboos, and found this great idea on the internet.  And the best part?  It works like gold!

 

 

I hope this will be as useful for you as it was for me!  Happy hunting!