#the prince's psalm

[m4el-1t0]

From Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Achilles and Patroclus and then David and Jonathan the most prevalent thing in human history we have been warned about are homoerotic codependent friendships and yet you keep talking to the guy you met at 19

[an-hypnos-dri]

something about eyes and souls

[anniflamma]

Had a little cute idea for a keychain or something. Only have made one of the sides so far.

[doc-davey]

Need to take a moment to talk about these books I have lol.

These books about David/Jonathan, I love and hate. Idk, like, I just can’t point out exactly, it’s probably the way David/Jonathan are depicted, but it really does frustrate me a little while reading this David/Jonathan trilogy.

It’s genuinely written well, like the writing isn’t corny or overly detailed lol. But it’s written with a Christian perspective, so David and Jonathan aren’t gay in this (sigh). 😞 But in these books, usually each chapter goes back and forth from Jonathan and David’s pov, and I love that.

The first two books are in David and Jonathan’s pov, but in the third book “My Father the King”, it’s in David and Mephibosheth’s pov. I get a lot of inspo for Mephi’s story from this book, but I actually have yet to finish the book because I’m too scared to finish 😭 (it’s literally just like my situation with the Prince’s Psalm atm lmaoo)

But just from reading the first two books, it’s so obviously written for them to be in love. The books are literally about their relationship. David and Jonathan meets, they connect, they share their deepest secrets and feelings, they fight side by side, and David even saves Jonathan from dying in battle!! Jonathan gets shot by arrows, and David wouldn’t stop visiting him. And you know what, Jonathan also saves David from dying in battle! And there’s a moment where David and Jonathan finds a waterfall, and Jonathan would playfully shove David into the water, and they would swim together on a cool night, just like the Simba and Nala water scene from The Lion King with “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” playing in the background if you know what I mean 😭 like AAAABABBAAAKSK, and throughout the books, even in the third book, David won’t stop yapping about how he constantly sees Jonathan in his dreams, as well as Jonathan who can’t get David out of his mind 😭 LIKE- NAHHH ☠️ hello??? Yeah, they’re definitely not in love or something… 🤔

But you know what, reading these books frustrated me so much.. The author made sure to constantly pull out the “we’re just friends!” card, so often 💀 it honestly doesn’t make sense to me ngl, from they way wanted to depict David and Jonathan’s relationship. Let me just say- if you’re going to dedicate an entire trilogy about David and Jonathan’s relationship only… there’s no fucking way you can pull it off as them just being “friends”, idk, it’s just not possible to me. The author would do this by, of course, “giving them a wife tactic”, but literally in the book, they cared more about each other than their wives LOL.

But yeah, my little review of this trilogy that I’ve been wanting to talk about. You can always check it out for yourself, I’d say I only recommend it if you like David retellings in general and if you want some Jonathan angst. Not kidding with the Jonathan angst 😭 he is so angsty in the books and a literal punching bag because every bad thing would happen to him. Like I would read about David going on some adventure, and when I turn to the next chapter, Jonathan is absolutely doomed by something 😭

And also, if you can handle the random preaching in the books where David breaks the forth wall and says that G-d is awesome or something and Jesus is coming, y’know, then perhaps you’ll enjoy the series 👍 (or maybe not)

[anniflamma]

I don’t blame authors for feeling afraid to create retellings due to the backlash they would absolutely face. But honestly, it would be fantastic to see straight people arguing, starting cancel petitions just to ending up accidentally tried to cancel the wrong person, and sparking debates on freaking news channels like this would lead to the end of civilization. It would be absolutely insane.

Also, this is so true. XD Though I’d say the opposite when it comes to Eric Swan Quinn's The Prince’s Psalm. Kinda?? Ish...?? David was twinkified to the maximum there. I mean, it makes sense to characterize him like that, buuut the sheer number of "David accidentally tripped over [insert any male character with a big chest and broad shoulders], and he was so small and delicate compared to the other’s big body!" moments.... I love it tho. Once I noticed it for the third time, mentioning another guy's large chest and how smol David was in the same sentence, I couldn’t unseen it. Aaand the book did indeed reduced David's problematic behaviors and made Michal the antagonist instead, to justify David's treatment of her, which is my biggest critic of that book.

Jonathan, on the other hand, started off as this dark, calm badass but eventually turned into the depressed damsel by the end. So, I guess the roles switched???? 👀

it’s really a waste that no one will publish a mainstream David/Jonathan novel because it’ll offend people when instead they should EMBRACE the discourse! do they know how much time gay people on the internet spend arguing about how TSOA ruins Homer’s characterizations? now imagine that but straight people actually never mind that sounds like hell

[peninsularian]

Tuff toasting, 1975

[anniflamma]

Can we see a crossover of all of the fandoms you are in please? (or at least the ones you are currently in)

Fun to make! >:D

[doc-davey]

I’m soaking wet sobbing

Been drenching my phone screen with my tears…

Right before my 10 hr trip to Louisiana.

Dude… I can’t.

David and Jonathan…

I don’t know if I can handle reading another David and Jonathan book 😭

Expect a review

[walkswithmyfather]

“TESTED BY GOD’S PROMISE”

“His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him.” (Psalm 105:18‭-‬19 ESV)

“The life of Joseph began with great promise. Earlier in his youth, the LORD gave him a dream that showed him that he would be elevated to a position of great authority. He would rule over his brothers. Even his father and mother would come bowing down before him. What happened next? The very opposite of what God had promised. His brothers betrayed him, sold him as a slave into Egypt, and, because he was faithful to his Egyptian master, he eventually ended up in prison. He was in fetters, his soul was in iron.

How did Joseph respond to that situation? Did he say to himself, “Everything’s gone wrong! The LORD’s promise will never come true”? No, I don’t believe that. It says, “Until the time that the promise came, the word of the LORD tested him.” How important it is to see that when the LORD gives us a promise, many times everything that happens next will seem to be the very opposite of what God has promised. It’s so important that at times like that we don’t give up on the promise, we don’t say, “God has forgotten; God has failed.”

You see, that promise that God gave us is testing us. It’s testing our faith and our constancy to see if we’ll hold on in the darkest hour. And when we pass the test, then, like Joseph, the promise will be fulfilled. —Derek Prince

© Derek Prince Ministries

Via: “The Spiritual Encourager” (FB)

[anniflamma]

It reminds me of David and Jonathan’s last meeting in The Prince’s Psalm. Jonathan has a full-blown emotional breakdown and begs David to help him. David's way of comforting him is to shush and start making out with him. To make things worse, David waited for Jonathan to fall asleep so he could sneak away and leave.

This pretty much sealed Jonathan's fate. He ‘chose’ to stay with Saul, which eventually led to him not running away during the final battle, even though he had the chance. From Jonathan’s perspective, he had no one to turn to, because David made it clear that he didn’t want Jonathan to follow him.

From David’s perspective, he was just comforting Jonathan with physical affection. His way was simply, 'Don’t think about it.' It wasn’t his intention to push Jonathan away.

I had a random idea of David trying to comfort those he loves.

with Jonathan when he’s in pain, Jonathan accepts the comfort as David hugs him and tries to tell him everything will be alright.

with Bathsheba, she swats away his hand when he tries to comfort her from her pain, calling him a murderer and monster, and David says nothing back. Nothing at all.

[wellthatsclever]

"Love one another, as I have loved you." Prince of Peace

Artist's Instagram

Artist's Facebook

[lettersfromgod]

"YahuShua HaMashiach Is The Fulfillment of all things, The Truth and Understanding you seek, The Meaning of Life…

HE is The Bread which came down From Heaven to feed those who hunger, The Fountain of Living Waters for those Who thirst, The Prince of Peace…

The ONLY Way, The ONLY Truth, The ONLY Life…

Says The Lord God."

📖 Source: https://www.thevolumesoftruth.com/Words_To_Live_By:_Part_Two#The_Prince_of_Peace

▶️ Video/Playlist: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6BiiWCGKo&list=PLE8FlkxQPQkPHgZ2CISXAJx3vpxyJ9MCr&index=8

[bookkats]

Throw Jesus Off the Cliff

Some days GodI feel likewe are throwingJesus off a cliff I feel likewe hear the words of prophecythat sayMake things easierhelp those in need It is amongst the cacophony of “Masculinity” “Capitalism”and “Christian Nationalism” Do you hear it under the cries forNazareth First?Jesus says: I am here for the immigrant widow, the strangers, the broken, the disabled,the weird,the LGBTQIA, and the…

[anniflamma]

Planned to make an animatic about these two for Pride Month but realized I won't be able to do one in time… So here is something cute!

+ the original

[sinceileftyoublog]

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg Interview: Poise, Levity, and Easygoingness

Photo Credit: James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg

BY JORDAN MAINZER

All Gist (Paradise of Bachelors), the third album of guitar duets from exploratory, thoughtful players James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg, sounds like what it is: two longtime friends and collaborators playing together, equal parts casual and focused. Since their 2015 album Ambsace, each has been busy, separately and together. Elkington's released three solo albums, played as part of Eleventh Dream Day, Brokeback, and Jeff Tweedy's live band, and recorded with Steve Gunn, Nap Eyes, and many more. Salsburg's dropped a bevy of albums and has played on records by Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Shirley Collins, and others. Meanwhile, the two have come together on four records by Salsburg's partner Joan Shelley, and Elkington produced Salsburg's Psalms, his 2021 album of arrangements of Hebrew psalms. Their duo records, however, are born of the most natural collaboration, each bringing to the table melodies they think--perhaps know--the other will respond to, combining them, and being open to feedback or changing gears entirely.

All Gist, specifically, carries the distinct quality of the Chicago winter during which it was recorded: You can picture Elkington and Salsburg sitting around the kitchen table, each culling from their vast repertoires and tendencies, creating something to warm their bodies and hearts and perk their heads and ears, unaware of any blusters outside. The songs are reflective of their shared artistic interests and inspirations, and they're rounded out by the presence of musical contemporaries with whom each has fostered relationships over the years. Opener "Death Wishes to Kill", which takes its title from T.F. Powys' Unclay, sports lilting guitar melodies that offer an affable sway, along with Wanees Zarour's violin solo. The minimal "Explanation Point" bounces along a groove that sounds bigger than it is, almost gestalt, as Jean Cook's strings and Anna Jacobson's brass shimmer. Moments of percussion come from other instruments like hand drums ("Long in the Tooth Again"), along with Wednesday Knudsen's woodwinds ("Nicest Distinction"), or as part of the sheer tactility of guitar scrapes and textures. The self-reflexive "Numb Limbs" gets its title from the physical aftereffects of playing a song that took forever to come together; you feel the spritely guitar picking and breakneck tempo in your own fingers.

Of course, All Gist has a few interpolations, namely a gentle, quiet, start-stopping version of Howard Skempton's "Well, Well, Cornelius" and a taut, concise combination of two traditional Breton dance tunes in "Rule Bretagne". Easily, the most unexpected song on the album is a version of Neneh Cherry's classic late 80s jam "Buffalo Stance". Oscillating and slowed down to an expanse, one guitarist plays Cherry's lyrical line, the other the song's instrumental melody, making something both recognizable and nostalgic as well as emblematic of the duo's adventurous nature. That combination, indeed, is the gist of Elkington and Salsburg.

Earlier this month, both guitarists answered some questions over email about All Gist, their creative process, covering songs, and their sometimes-overlapping, oft-diverging taste in art. Read their responses below, edited for clarity.

Photo Credit: Joan Shelley

Since I Left You: Why was it time again to make an album together? James Elkington: We’d been talking about it since we made the last one, but the truth is that we’ve both just been too busy. I started making solo records again after the last one, plus I got to produce one for Nathan, and we both help out with Joan Shelley’s records, so it never felt like we weren’t working together anyway. We were just working on projects in a different way. I think that Nathan and I both think there’s something about the duo’s music that is different from the other things we do, so we were keen to get back to it at some point. Fortunately for us, we got an invitation to play at a guitar festival in Chicago, and we used that as an excuse to start working on new material. I should also mention that our wives kept bugging us to do it again.

SILY: How was your collaboration on All Gist unique as compared to your other records together, and how was it similar? JE: We hadn’t played together like this for something like 7 years, so I was interested to see if we could even do it. But our writing together was as quick and easy as it ever was, and in that sense, it was really similar to how we worked before. Nathan has always worked with longer forms than me, but this time, I wanted to follow his lead a bit more in terms of writing longer pieces with less changes and more textures. We weren’t concerned this time with being able to play all of this stuff live, so we left more space for orchestration and overdubs. Nathan Salsburg: We’ve each lived through a world of experiences in the past ten years, musical and otherwise. Now that we’re each squarely into our middle age, I think the poise, levity, and easygoingness that should be attendant on this period of life show up in the music at [the] pitch they didn’t in the past.

SILY: Was there a lot of improvisation in the process of combining the different instrumental motifs you each brought to the recording session? JE: Because we don’t have a great deal of time to work together, we find things go much quicker if we come up with rough musical sketches by ourselves and then present them to the other. Nothing is ever written in stone, and the level of trust is very high. Anything Nathan suggests for one of my ideas is going to improve it. Both of us are more concerned with coming up with something that sounds cohesive and keeping the ball rolling than having any personal agenda for how this thing should be, and we always leave enough space for us to be surprised by what we end up with. I rarely have any idea what Nathan is playing, but I like how it sounds when it’s finished. We did experiment with recording something completely improvised and liked the results, but it sounded like a different record, so we didn’t use it. Maybe that’ll be the next one.

SILY: How or at what point in making each song do you determine whether it needs more musical accompaniment, from other instruments and/or players? JE: That’s a good question, and I’m not sure I have an answer, but the plan seems to be to write a piece that can stand by itself for the two guitars, record that to our satisfaction (which is nearly always the first take we can manage that has all the right parts), then start throwing other instruments at it to see what sticks. Most of that approach is me in my studio adding things and then taking them off again. There are certain pieces where, as were writing them, we can hear that a solo instrument would sound great in a certain part. Wannees Zarour’s solo in "Death Wishes To Kill" was like that. There are songs, like "All Gist Could Be Yours", where for a repeating chord sequence to have the effect we’re going for, its going to need a lot of support from other instruments, and we talked about that as we were writing it.

Cover art by Chris Fallon

SILY: Do you have a backlog of other people's songs you think might be fun or fulfilling to cover or reimagine as a guitar duet? What makes a song fit for a cover from your two artistic voices? JE: Well, I’m a little concerned that there’s a potential novelty aspect to our doing a lot of covers, but maybe it's okay. We certainly didn’t go out of our way to think of any for this record. Nathan suggested "Buffalo Stance" early on just because he loved the song and all the parts. I was resistant at first, just because I thought there wasn’t enough there for us to work with harmonically, but there’s so much good stuff going on with the synths and the bassline in that tune that it became more a process of picking and choosing what aspects of the song we wanted to shine a light on, at what time. Our Smiths cover from the last record is like that, too. It switches from the guitar line to the vocal depending on where we’re at or what seems to be most important, so I suppose we have a system for doing this. I think the only criteria we have for picking a song is whether one of us really really likes it and the other one can get their head around it.

SILY: "Death Wishes To Kill" takes its title from a T.F. Powys novel you both read. Do the two of you tend to recommend books, films, albums, etc. to each other a lot? Do you ever find you're about to recommend the same thing to one another? JE: I was going to write that we don’t have a huge amount of overlap, but I’m remembering going to his house when we hadn’t known each other long and being confronted with what appeared to be a wall of my own books. Its not as if we like exactly the same things, but there are some writers and records that we both like that NO-ONE else I can think of likes, so when Nathan suggests a book, I usually get to it pretty quickly. I think Nathan was reading the Powys novel, Unclay, and sent me a screen shot of one of the passages in the book with the caption "this is for you" underneath. He also sent me a link to an Australian liquor store commercial from the early 90’s because he knew it would make me laugh for a day and a half, and it did. NS: I remember we made common cause over Max Beerbohm not long after we met—Zuleika Dobson, maybe—but yeah, we each have some preoccupations that the other couldn’t give much of a shit about. Like, I can’t say mid-century British horror movies do a whole lot for me. I’m remembering when Jim spent the better part of an hour trying to explain the appeal of U.S. Maple, and I can’t say he succeeded. And Jim couldn’t care less about rural American string-bands of the late 1920s. But when we have an overlap—Unclay, say, or the totally under-appreciated Yorkshire singer-songwriter Jake Thackray, or Alan Partridge—and yes, these overlapping things do tend to all be English—it’s always stuff we’re super, super jazzed about.

SILY: Can you tell me about the cover art for All Gist? NS: The artist’s name is Chris Fallon, an old friend of mine from when I lived in New York City 20+ years ago. He’s a phenomenal painter, and I love his figures, his palette, and the scenes/settings that he dreams up. I asked him to create a portrait of us, and this is what he did. He’s never met Jim and hasn’t seen me in quite a few years, but I feel like he nailed something of Jim’s and my dynamic, equal parts earnest, bizarre, silly.

[dwuerch-blog]

A Beacon of Hope

Ah! Take me away….to Prince Edward Island! It was beyond fascinating and delightful. We were quite proud of ourselves for navigating the island on our own. I can see why so many travelers put PEI on their bucket list. Rugged coastlines, lush landscapes, and the iconic lighthouses. This picturesque haven, with those charming lighthouses, holds a wealth of metaphors that invite us to reflect on…