DECADENCE AND THE A.M.E. CHURCH: A few thoughts, not a review, about Passing Strange. It's the story of a young black man from LA who seeks himself, or meaning, or something, through Amsterdam and West Berlin and finally home. ETA: It's at the Studio Theater through August 8.

1. I loved this! I loved it well beyond reason. I loved it in part because it really connected with the audience Friday night. I get that it's easy to be cynical about whitefolk toe-tappin' at musicals about black identity. But that isn't what happened here. What happened was more like when I went to see Marlon Riggs's film Black Is/Black Ain't, and at the end credits we heard the opening strains of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"... and the whole theater, black and white and read all over, started to sing.

If this city is your heart then this play will take you home.

2. The insistent decadent aesthetic was amazing! I don't know if I've ever seen such a complete assimilation of decadence to the American experience, which is so often presented as sincerist, outside a specifically gay narrative... with one exception. The fact that the exception is Invisible Man should tell you how thrilled I was by the way this play and this production negotiated the ways in which masks melt into the skin, culture can but can't be rejected (one of the characters makes the point I made somewhat idiotically here!), and America is an absent but inescapable parent.

I loved that even the complacency and hypocrisy of the mainstream black church was presented as a possible vehicle for becoming "real." It didn't work for the narrator, but I genuinely didn't feel like the play blamed Mr. Franklin (the PK, who uh... maybe I think plays the organ, if you see what I'm sayin' here) for being a halfway house rather than a home for the narrator. There was just a lot of generosity in this script. Everyone's masks were honored even though the show also acknowledged the genuine poignancy and power of the rhetoric of "realism."

It's really fascinating to compare this play to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which I also saw at the Studio. Christianity is a named thing here, a live option in a certain sense, which it never is for Stoppard's characters. And yet the specific form of Christianity is kind of intriguing: Words like identity, meaning, and love are very much central to the Christian possibility, but words like sin, grace, redemption, forgiveness, and salvation are totally absent. That's in no way a criticism of the show! I mean it says so much and works so well.

3. Oh Lord, the pastiches were so perfect! This is a musical, so yeah okay it gets sentimental in the end. But before then, the pastiches of bougie church life ("Baptist Fashion Show") and '79/'82 punk (wow I don't even know which song this was, but the lyrics "I'm a business motherfucker" probably help you remember it!) and '80s West German punk style are just so loving and forgiving.

4. Rock 'n' Roll is much more cross-generational than this play. There is no next generation here. There is no pregnancy, no child, no humiliation as our own rebellions are deployed against what we really do think is now our greater wisdom as adults! There's no need to show what it feels like to grow up.

And yet unchosen obligation is still the throbbing heart of this show. When it gets sentimental, which believe me, it jumps into with all its musical-theater gross Grizabella make-it-cute heart... even so it's at least sentimental about unchosen loves. In fact, the play is adamant that the most blunt forces in love are most powerful, love without understanding, mother and son beyond any kind of intellectual or even intelligible connection. She is his and at last he is hers and and no one can tell anybody why. Motherhood is handcuffs locked on both ends. (There's no mention of the protagonist's father. I honestly didn't notice this until at least the intermission, even though it's my actual job. I think that speaks to a level of realism in the play itself; it isn't playing to the skybox.)

But yeah, I kind of missed the depiction of what might happen to this guy, with his complex relationship with unchosen obligations in general and parenthood in particular, if he became a parent. Why is this play so contracepted? Aren't there more interesting stories to be told in the unchosen future?

DISCO PURGATORIO: I have finally listened to all of Janelle Monáe's Metropolis: The Chase Suite, and I can tell you what I was pretty sure I'd tell you: You need this. Monáe is an opera-trained lady nerd who's created an amazing pop album centered on the story of an enslaved android who falls for a human, endangering both their lives.

"Many Moons" is still the standout, unstoppable song. You can get a taste of the song, with amazing video, here; the album version is actually better, believe it or not. But "Cybertronic Purgatory" is beautiful and haunting, and in general, Monáe's versatility of style makes this album a unique history of the past fifty years. ("Smile" I like mostly for the quick Elvis "thank yuh" at the end, but that gesture retroactively reshapes the whole song, makes it even sadder and even more obviously an attempt at reclamation of and reconciliation with the American past.)

"Mr. President" is a classic of retrofuturism, as if the 1970s had time-traveled into the Obama administration. I'm not sure it succeeds as a song, rather than a document, but Lord how it made me ache--and ache, also, for Obama himself, who is called upon to be "Moses" and who is generally treated, here, like a Shakespearean king and not an American president.

Anyway, I'm about to order the new album, "Archandroid," about which I've heard nothing but good. "Metropolis" is an amazing reinterpretation of more or less everything I love, Metropolis itself crossed with Invisible Man (the Ellison one) crossed with BET's Gospel programming. Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler and Q107, Washington's Top 40!... and the black man at Union Station with the saxophone, playing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

I'M DANCING AS FANCY AS I CAN: I really loved the movie of The Business of Fancydancing. I mean, I loved it more than I loved The Toughest Indian in the World; I loved it more than any description could really justify, I think maybe.

One big part of my love was the star: Evan Adams. He's got a cocky, vulnerable, punchy grace. If you like Robert Downey Jr. but thought, "What if he were brown?" then I think this guy will push your buttons. The supporting actors are also really lovely but this movie is carried by its star.

But also. I know I missed a lot in this movie. I only listened to part of Sherman Alexie's commentary track, but even that short bit emphasized how many nuances I missed. What I saw was a movie about how we negotiate our unchosen identities, especially those identities which our surrounding culture lies about and tells us not to love. I saw a movie about the inevitable betrayals of the writer: Philip Roth territory (is "Agnes Roth" a callback? it must be), only with even more dead people in the wake of the writer. I saw a movie about loving someone with privilege you don't have, and how you can love him and reject him and evade him, and how he doesn't know what he's doing. (I've been on both sides of that maypole dance and I recognized both.)

By now you want to know what this movie's actually about, and I can't blame you. A gay American Indian writer who has transformed his, and other people's, reservation experiences into pricey lit (Quality Paperbacks with bright white pulp) returns to the rez for a friend's funeral. It's an experimental movie with some Marlon Riggs touches. I don't think the camera needed to swirl quite so voraciously during some of Seymour's (the author's) interview with a combative black inquisitrix.

But overall... this movie showcases the way the given order breaks your heart, only the movie has better pacing and more consistent acting. I don't know if I'd call it subtle. I'd definitely call it brilliant, and that matters a lot more.

THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE: I've added what I hope is a clarifying paragraph to my bitchy post about reviews of Andrew Sullivan's books. I think the para. is really about whose eye we're supposed to take as our lens.

ANTI-IRONY CHARMS: Some rambling thoughts on "sincerism" and why it's no fun. So a couple times here I've growled at sincerism, without ever telling you what it is! Which... is certainly not the sincerist way, so props for consistency, but I do think at some point I might explain myself. Here are some partial notes.

Sincerism means--probably among other things--requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions. It opposes irony, misdirection, self-protection (which, to be fair, I also oppose in most cases!), exaggeration, agent-provocateur behavior, unspoken understandings, WASPish complicity in one another's secrets, and your mouth writing checks your ass can't cash.

Think of it as American newspapers' claim to "objectivity," by which we mean mainstream conformity, vs. European newspapers' tabloid partisanship. Think of it as realism vs. "genre."

Sincerity, as a mode, has its good points. If anything, I think I tend to be much more sincere than I should be! The world does not care about the sparklyhearts authenticity of my feelings; nor does it really need every idea chewed into obviousness and pablum. But there are times when withholding sincerity from another person is prideful and/or cruel. If they need you to say, blatantly and without regard for your own self-image, "I love you," or, "I think you're amazing," you should do that. You don't always have to disclaim it or quote it ("I've known you longer than anybody, Eddie, and anything you do is all right by me--can I borrow the car?") or make them work for it.

But here are just a few of the many problems with sincerism.

* It's a genre which thinks it's the whole of art; it's a perspective which won't acknowledge its contingency. If I speak in aphorisms or jokes or provocations, I am actually conveying something about both myself and my view of the truth, just as much as if I *~*bared my heart*~*.

* It's the privilege of those whose beliefs are basically mainstream to think that "realism" and sincerity are good ways of conveying the truth. Only those whose experiences and interpretations line up with mainstream culture can be guaranteed that their sincere heart-baring tales will be believed; and they're the ones for whom this language of sincerity was made. To take the boringly obvious example, if I want to talk about Gay Catholic Whatnot, I need to somehow entice or bully straight people (and non-Catholics, for that matter) into learning my language; I can't convey what I need to say in theirs. And I strongly suspect this is also true of other kinds of privilege, which is why Invisible Man is one of the greatest American artworks ever created.

It's never joking all the way down.

* Sincerism is the opposite of camp. Camp, as far as I can tell, only works if the thing parodied has some real emotional and personal resonance. Camp is never loveless or rationalist. Sincerism divides the world into "serious" and "oh but you don't really mean that"... when our actual hearts and lives are much more conflicted, complex, and complicit than that.

If I can think of more to say, I'll say it; and I do apologize for the deeply sincerist nature of this post! It's a Mobius strip of ridiculous.