"GRITTY PHOTOGRAPHS OF '80S NEW YORK." #6 is actually lovely.

ABSINTHE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER: The second video here is very, very fun. For TKB on the slight chance she hasn't seen it already.

THEY'VE GOT THE FINEST HOME MOVIES THAT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN: Did you know that Less Than Zero is a Christmas movie? It's festive and totally appropriate!

No, it's actually a 1987 adaptation of a Bret Ellis novel; Robert Downey Jr. plays a downward-spiraling coke addict, which was, let's say, a triumph of method acting. It's set in LA, it opens with this song, it's glossy and Swatch-colored from start to finish, its dialogue is on-the-nose ("Did you girls know that you have television sets between your legs?"), and all the players deliver their lines in a kind of actressy drunken rant. I get why people might watch this for camp value. But I loved it pretty unreservedly and found it genuinely painful to watch. Downey is terrific, and Jamie Gertz and Andrew McCarthy (I know!) worked really well because they always sounded fake--they sounded like people who weren't sure how to say the things they had to say. The movie hits very hard on something David Carr also writes really powerfully about in The Night of the Gun: When you've broken a sufficient number of promises, to yourself or to others, there's no way to speak words that can be trusted, and the attempt to do so only makes you more painfully aware of your own untrustworthiness.

The ending is OTT in a way I didn't care for (eta: it's really AfterSchool Special-ish), but whatever, I'm not trying to defend this movie to you. I'm trying to say that I got a lot from what it was doing.

AND THE RED DEATH HELD DOMINION OVER ALL! Christopher Coe's I Look Divine is a slender, self-consciously perfect little poison gem of a book. It's a novel about two brothers in the 1960s through the 1980s: the narrator is obsessed with his brother Nicholas, and Nicholas is enraptured by himself. The book begins as the narrator is preparing to clean out Nicholas's apartment after his untimely death, and so a lot of the glassy humor has a dark tinge.

This may be the actual gayest book I've ever read, which is really saying something. It deploys the imagery of homosexuality as narcissism. And yet in its final paragraphs this claustrophobic, folie-a-deux novel opens up into a kind of Dance of Death in which we see that Nicholas's ideal of personal victory through style and sexual conquest is not an exclusively gay pursuit. Across time and culture, humans assert and exalt themselves in the teeth of death.

This book is a perfect combination of brittle witticisms and haunted memorial. Like I said, the gayest thing I've ever read.

PERHAPS AS CLOSE AS WE'LL GET TO MY DREAM OF "MARC ALMOND'S 'DEATH IN VENICE.'" Via HEAR.

"IN PRE-RETROSPECT THIS WAS A BAD IDEA BUT WE'RE DOING IT ANYWAY." Pure poetry.

"THERE ARE BAD TIMES JUST AROUND THE CORNER." The Twilight Struggle proved to be a bit of a just-before-dawn Struggle, but if you ignore everything explicitly about Communism (...I know) this is a really great bracer. Everybody dies eventually; you might as well die ornery. There's no duty to retreat.

(503):

Pretty sure God shed a tear when I put 15 singles in the collection plate.
--Texts from Last Night meets the Desert Fathers

I THANK GOD THAT MY SINS ARE NOT AS THE SINS OF THIS REPUBLICAN.

I should really save that headline, you know? I've been saving it for years. And only Alan Wolfe's ostensible belief that evangelicals don't know the word "forgiveness" finally got me to use it.

THE SILLY PUTTY CHURCH: I guess you all already know exactly what I think of Nancy Pelosi's ardent-Catholic-abortion shtik. (more) It's "I'm a good person," it's We Are Church, and you know, if I'm church, I think maybe church isn't that great.

It's also how a nearly three-quarters majority of American Catholics (in that order, apparently) end up supporting torture.

I was once privileged to hear a discourse on the nature of conscience in the Church, in which the obvious righteousness of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was marshaled to support the potential okayness of gay sex. The Magisterium: so inconvenient!

"The creatures outside looked from Giuliani to Biden, and from Biden to Giuliani, and from Giuliani to Biden again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Me, I'm not devout. I have a rosary kicking around in my bookbag and daggone if I don't always find some excuse not to hike it out and spend twenty minutes fitfully contemplating my Lord. I'm not ardent. I am lucky if I pray twice in a day, not counting when the ambulances and the cop cars go by. I'm not a good Catholic. I don't say this with a kind of reverse pride. I think it's creepy, and you guys can point out that I've written for money about praying the rosary even though I do it much, much less than 99.99% of the people who do it for free. I say this as someone who needs to go to Confession, someone who (Ratty can attest) consistently puts off confessing until I've spiraled low enough that I can't ignore it anymore. I hang on by the fingernails and skate on thin ice and hope like hell--or, you know, I hope I hope like purgatory.

I'm completely convinced that the people who say they're good, they're ardent, they're devout, are people who try hard to do the right thing and believe what they say they believe and don't lie, and in many cases do a lot more concrete good in the world than I do. I just... I can't agree that what they support is Catholic--at least, not in the way that Morrissey is Catholic.