CLIP REEL: Quick notes on some movies I've seen recently.

Brothers: This is the 2005, Danish version which got an American remake. When the responsible brother is missing, presumed dead, in Afghanistan, the layabout brother becomes a surrogate father to his kids--and maybe something more, to his wife. This is a brutal, heartbreaking story with incredible acting. Some kind of tragedy is inevitable from fairly early on, but the specific nature of it is the result of choices by the characters. The daughters, in their grief and anger and attempts at solidarity with each other, are very realistic kids. I'd definitely recommend this if you are up for two hours of feeling awful.

Apartment Zero: Lurid, politicized thriller, very well done despite many cliches. A serial killer is on the loose in the aftermath of the Pinochet regime. Is it the paranoid man in Apartment 0?

There's a Tragic Transvestite, which is a trope I could really do without, but other than that this movie actually uses its genre's inherent insouciance about actual human psychology to great advantage. This is about as reliable a guide to mental illness--or post-conflict reconciliation, for that matter--as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but it hits the right emotional notes. Fans of The Talented Mr. Ripley might also check it out.

Death and the Maiden: A vastly more serious post-South-American-dictatorship thriller than Apartment Zero, and a vastly worse one.

Sigourney Weaver plays a torture victim who believes that the man she has trapped in her home is her tormentor. Ariel Dorfman's script is overwritten and often cops out; Roman Polanski's direction sexualizes Weaver's character in a way which really feels like the movie exploiting her rather than the character making choices; Weaver overplays to the point that she sounds like Katharine Hepburn's character pretending to be a gun moll in Bringing Up Baby. She's just way too chop-licking. If you want a look at the intersection of sexual violence and political torture, Closet Land is much, much subtler and better. The best thing about this movie was the Schubert.

Of Gods and Men: Now playing. The story of Algerian monks murdered in the mid-90s. It's hard to know what to say about this movie other than that it's incredible. The use of singing, as pointed out by the friend who watched it with me, is especially beautiful. It's a believable and gripping portrayal and all of the actors are doing exactly what they need to do at every moment.

My one interpretive note is that I loved the use of Swan Lake toward the end, in a Passion of Joan of Arc-like scene focusing on each of the monks' faces in turn as they enjoy a meal together in the shadow of death. I think this is the only secular music in the entire movie, which makes it the most poignant way of representing what it means to lose this life, the world, even if you gain Heaven.

Here's Victor Morton's review. I really can't recommend this highly enough.

I AM BOTH AUDIO AND VISUAL. I'm speaking in Pittsburgh this Saturday on Gay Catholic Whatnot. 6.30 pm, Doherty Hall at Carnegie-Mellon University, Room 1212. There will be food and drink! Sponsored by the CMU Newman Club; for more info contact frjoshua@pittsburghoratory.org .

Bring friends! Bring foes! Tell me what to do in Pittsburgh!

IT GETS A LITTLE BOUNCY HERE SOMETIMES: ARGH SORRY. This was supposed to be a note telling you to check out Arena Stage's production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But I didn't pay attention to the closing date, which was Sunday. I'm sorry! You should check out the rest of the Albee festival though, since this production was absolutely stellar. They made the show their own (despite the commanding Taylor/Burton/Nichols movie) without resorting to strenuous directorial choices. (I don't think they got away from the written, mannered quality of the last five to ten lines as well as the movie managed to, but those are literally the only moments which didn't completely work for me and they're really Albee's fault more than anyone else's.)

The theme [Marina Zoueva] had created for us with the Moonlight Sonata was that of man celebrating woman as the mother of all mankind. She said that Sergei should get on his knees before me, because only the woman can give birth, only the woman can give him his children. ...

The beginning of the program was very soft, and we opened our arms to show the audience and judges that we were opening ourselves up to them. We were showing them not a program, but the story of our life. If you listen to the Moonlight Sonata, the music can only represent a man and a woman's life together. It can't mean anything else. It can't mean a season, or a march, or a dance, or a storm, or an animal. It's more, even, than love. Romeo and Juliet, that music was about love. But the Moonlight Sonata is for older people who have experienced real life. It expresses what changes love can bring about in people, how it can make them stronger, make them have more respect for each other. How it can give them the ability to bring a new life into the world.
--Ekaterina Gordeeva, My Sergei: A Love Story

You can watch Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov do what she considered their best performance of their Moonlight Sonata program here. I also love this Moonlight skate, by the Protopopovs, very much.

"WITHOUT HESITATION THEY BEGAN TO DANCE." The 2008 movie Exam is basically a cheapened version of William Sleator's terrific novel House of Stairs.

As the comparison suggests, Exam's first half-hour or so highlights the way that contemporary job applications and economic pressures infantilize adults (much as the surrounding pop culture infantilizes people who, in a better world, would already be raising children of their own). The adults in this movie can be treated like the teens in Sleator's novel because their life-stage is so similar. The pencil-skirt precision with which they present themselves, the marketing ethos which leads them to accept the most reductive nicknames, all make college applicants look like careerist twentysomethings and make thirtysomethings look like children.

Exam is a really bad movie, with tons of overplaying and overwriting. I do think it's kind of amazing as a cultural document. The parallels with House of Stairs were startling, and the really boringly obvious AIDS references were harsh enough that I choked up a couple of times despite knowing that I was being manipulated. A B-movie, if not a B-minus--every single twist will be guessed well in advance--but this is a window into what job-hunting really feels like, and that makes it painful. I thought the twistiness of the "are we pro- or anti-Big Pharma?" plotline was also surprisingly thoughtful, though I have really intensely low expectations there.

You really should read House of Stairs though. It's a sad, compromised look at martyrdom and complicity, and its characters are incredibly memorable. Peter and Lola are one of the most memorable and unexpected teams in children's lit.

WAS YOUR LENTEN FISH DINNER CAUGHT BY SLAVES? (Perhaps esp useful for linking to the larger CNN series on contemporary slavery. Via Mark Shea.)

HOLY SNAKES.

The phenomenon of the Holy Snakes of the Virgin Mary has been occurring for centuries during the festivities to the Theotokos between August 5 and August 15 in the village of Markopoulo on the island of Kefalonia, Greece. The small black snakes appear at the church of Panagia of Langouvarda on the site of a monastery, established as a nunnery and dedicated to Our Lady of Langouvarda.

The myth about these snakes is attached to the year the monastery was attacked by pirates in 1705. The nuns prayed fervently to the Virgin Mary for protection and were subsequently transformed into the snakes to avoid being taken as prisoners.

The snakes have a small cross on their head and their tongues are also in the shape of a cross. They are known to belong to the Telescopus fallax species, also known as the European Cat Snake, and they appear in and around the courtyard of the church, on the walls and on the bell tower. The snakes show no fear while the services are held and are harmless during the festivities. As soon as the Liturgy concludes on the 15th of August, they become hostile and aggressive and disappear back into the wilderness of the area. The snakes cannot be found until the following year.

more (via TKB)

TOP SHELF: So I hate the title of my novel (New Wineskins). It's thematically appropriate but I realized that even I wouldn't pull it off the shelf to have a look, and I wrote it. Help me out here, people!

If you've read the thing and have suggestions for how I can get to a better title, email me. I've kicked around all kinds of variations on the book's themes and I've got exactly two ideas, neither of which I really like: The Future Tense of Flesh and Heartbreak in Political Theory. If you haven't read the book, do you think either of those titles would interest you if you saw them in a bookstore and knew nothing else about the book?

Thanks in advance....

You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
--from the middle of this poem by Adam Zagajewski, tr. Clare Cavanagh

DARK, DARK MY LIGHT: Lake Mungo turns out to be a Blair Witch-ified version of Pet Sematary--King's best novel, if you ask me and I know you didn't--a cruel and sad meditation on grief. We are so convinced that there must be reasons; and I loved Lake Mungo for its insistence that no reason could ever be as big as the loss.

Lake Mungo is also about proof. It's about the difference between knowing something happened and knowing what happened. (The imagery of linear streetlights along the highway vs. randomly- or divinely- or fate-placed stars is intentional, I think.) For a while I worried that the twists upon twists would solve the mystery rather than deepening it; that didn't happen.

This is a big, sad movie which uses every inch of its genre.

MY SOUL IS BEING DRAGGED TO UTTAR PRADESH! ...TO UTTER DESTRUCTION I MEAN. Diana Wynne Jones, RIP.

She is one of my most beloved children's authors. Everybody has a unique list of favorite DWJ novels. I'll talk a little bit about mine, here, and also try to indicate what made her writing so fantastic overall.

Fire and Hemlock. What's odd is that I've never managed to keep the plot of this retelling of the Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer legends straight, even as I started to consider it one of Jones's best books. It's longer and "older" than most of her stuff--shading into adolescence, rather than firmly embedded in childhood--and there's erotic tension appropriate for the age group. The girl, the "Janet," is self-dramatizing and unpleasant in a way I am pretty sure I was at her age! This is a much less moralistic tale than The Secret Garden (which I also love) but the exposure of the protagonist's flaws is equally unsparing.

Dogsbody. A bullied girl finds solace in her pet dog... who just happens to be the personification of the Dog Star, Sirius, sent to earth to learn humility and reclaim the weapon used by his beloved and treacherous Companion star.

DWJ is often at her best when she's showing a fractured and barely-mended family in which the children have to bond together despite one another. A lot of people have noted how self-absorbed the parents in her books often are, how neglectful or actively harmful. And here we get to see two "blended families": Kathleen and her cousins (her father is an imprisoned Irish terrorist), and Sirius and the cats of the household. We see how the "insiders" have become defensive and cold as a result of the father's neglect and the mother's bullying; we see how the "outsiders," Kathleen and Sirius, bargain for small concessions; and we see, I think, how even the ferocious mother is a real person, with real emotions, whose tragedy is precisely that she exists in her own world and doesn't understand what she's done to her children (and her cats!).

I love this book so much. I identified very strongly with Sirius, with his uncontrollable temper and his sense of how humiliating it is to have to relearn one's place in the world. This is one of the books which shaped me as a person.

Cart and Cwidder. Another patchwork family. Political tensions between north and south (I'm pretty sure those were the terms--?) force itinerant singer Clennen and his kids to make nice with bratty Kialan and his brother, sons of a northern rebel. Again I seriously overidentified with Kialan. He's just so awful!--and yet Jones seems to understand what it would feel like to be the kid who is always doing or saying the unhelpful thing, when everyone around you is being intensely responsible and you feel incapable of matching them. There's an immense amount of wonder in this book, as well, with mountains moving and ancient legends fulfilled.

Witch Week. One of her funniest--even though it includes scenes in which a child imagines what it will be like when he is burnt to death for witchcraft! The backdrop of this story is incredibly dark--it's set at a boarding school in which almost all the children have lost family members to witch-hunting, and all of them fear that they might be next on the fiery agenda--and yet the tone is "school story" and hilarious. Insightful (I used a diary code similar to Charles's when I was a teen) and bittersweet. The adults are unhelpful, but less actively-harmful than in most of Jones's books.

The Ogre Downstairs. Maybe her most forgiving book--although she's a forgiving author, in general. Stepchildren need to learn to work together to manage a magical chemistry set. Tons of fun (the bit where they gild the horrific wedding gifts is priceless), moments of genuine wonder in between things like chocolate bars wandering down the hallway, and huge amounts of sympathy for everyone involved, even the stepfather who is the "ogre" in the title.

Witch's Business. Published in the UK as Own Back, Ltd. A rare Jones with explicit discussion of class conflict! But again, kids band together despite intense personal dislike, and through compromise and sympathy they defeat the adult enemy. Plus, they run a revenge-for-hire business!

Power of Three. Children from three species (basically fairy/normal, human/Giant, and fishything) must band together to lift a curse. Includes some really powerful scenes of what it feels like to be waiting to be caught, as a kid; learning the weakness of the adults whom you love; and discovering that your place in the world is simultaneously more important and much more unpleasant than you realized.

The Homeward Bounders. Probably the saddest children's story I've ever read. Jamie "walks the bounds," crossing the lines between universes, and meets the ferocious Helen and the seemingly-servile Joris (Joris? can't remember how his name is spelled). Includes some of Jones's most horror-show moments, like Helen's cannibal hand or the mud-colored soldiers' uniforms. The awesomely funny bits, like the pantomime horse or the cricket game, only make the final lines more heartbreaking.

Howl's Moving Castle. This is just a confection. Young Sophie is cursed to live as an old woman; she goes to work for rakish wizard Howl, and becomes entangled in his bizarre puzzlebox of a life, as he tries to work free of a curse of his own. A charming, funny, magical book, with John Donne and a soap-operatic scarecrow and lots of hats.

Charmed Life. Typically absurd magic (the evil dough stuck to the floor is especially memorable) with a terrifying older sister who is willing to sacrifice almost anything for power. As always with Jones, childhood is no refuge.

PASOLINI IS ME: What's the difference between a stereotype and an archetype?

HUNGOVER OWLS. I have no words. Via TKB I think.

EASY READER: I'm pretty sure the Arena Stage production of At Home at the Zoo is about as good as it could be. Not entirely--the actress who plays Peter's wife can't quite get past how obtrusively written her dialogue is--but mostly this is as good a production as I can imagine.

It's also recognizably Albee. He wrote the second act as The Zoo Story, his first play. Decades later he wrote the backstory, which serves as Act One. First act is marital overcommunication, which is the same as miscommunication and anticommunication, with lots of male sexual inadequacy and passive-aggressive insistence on precision, and an overall sense that love is committee meetings punctuated by emotional violence.

Second act is... well, put it this way: My mother got in trouble for reading The Catcher in the Rye in school. I was assigned it. It's entirely possible that The Zoo Story would work, emotionally, for someone in the got-in-trouble generation; I'm not sure it can work for someone in the assigned-it generation. Its specific forms of rebellion have become predictable. The Zoo Story has been assimilated.

Edward Albee is ferocious, and he's been able to keep his edge--The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy is as fierce and challenging as anything I've seen, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I'll see the Arena production next week) is still razor-sharp despite being one of his earlier plays. I'm hugely grateful to Arena for doing an entire series of, I think, every Albee play there is. I'm so excited for the rest of them! This particular play is just not the right place to start with him.

ECSTASY AS SOLACE: I really liked this quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, found via Wesley Hill:

Secularism is a religion because it has a faith, it has its own eschatology and its own ethics. And it “works” and it “helps.” Quite frankly, if “help” were the criterion, one would have to admit that life-centered secularism helps actually more than religion. To compete with it, religion has to present itself as “adjustment to life,” “counselling,” “enrichment,” it has to be publicized on subways and buses as a valuable addition to “your friendly bank” and all other “friendly dealers”: try it, it helps! And the religious success of secularism is so great that it leads some Christian theologians to “give up” the very category of “transcendence,” or in much simpler words, the very idea of “God.” This is the price we must pay if we want to be “understood” and “accepted” by modern man, proclaim the Gnostics of the twentieth century.

For it is here that we reach the heart of the matter. For Christianity, help is not the criterion. Truth is the criterion. The purpose of Christianity is not to help poeple by reconciling them with death, but to reveal the Truth about life and death i order that people may be saved by this Truth. Salvation, however, is not only not identical with help, but is, in fact, opposed to it. Christianity quarrels with religion and secularism not because they offer “insufficient help,” but precisely because they “suffice,” because the “satisfy” the needs of men. If the purpose of Christianity were to take away from man the fear of death, to reconcile him with death, there would be no need for Christianity, for other religions have done this, indeed, better than Christianity. And secularism is about to produce men who will gladly and corporately die — and not just live — for the triumph of the Cause, whatever it may be.

Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely an enemy to be destroyed, and not a “mystery” to be explained.

more

So here are some random thoughts prompted by this quotation. Take home what resonates with you and discard the rest as the styrofoam peanuts of my stupidity!

One thing I like about this quote--I like a lot of things about it, but this is one--is that it may seem to contradict Augustine's famous line about how "our hearts are restless 'til we rest in Thee," and yet I really don't think it does. Just as the Desert Fathers often seem to contradict themselves (let alone one another!) because they're addressing very different seekers with radically divergent needs, weaknesses, and longings, so I think Schmemann is simply not addressing the same kind of person Augustine is. I suspect each of us is a Schmemann-addressee some of the time and an Augustine-addressee some of the time, although we'll sway more toward one end or the other (I'm much more an A-a, I think), so here are some scattered thoughts about Christ as comforter and as troubler of the waters.

First, Christ always stands against contentment. If you're satisfied you aren't a philosopher, let alone a Christian. Christ, like the James Bond franchise, tells us that The World Is Not Enough.

Sometimes we really need to hear that! Sometimes we are content to cultivate our gardens, to love the people we want to love and turn away from the shadow of death. An immense amount of basic, boring, necessary good gets done in the world by people who are contented... and yet that should never be enough for us.

Then there are those of us for whom the inadequacy of immanent beauty and everyday love is all too obvious. We're like the people in the AA slogan, for whom "one drink is too many and a hundred isn't enough." We're like the people in Chesterton's punchline, which was instrumental in my conversion: "The man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God." We're like the Bagthorpes, in Helen Cresswell's terrifically sardonic children's series, whose family motto might be Too Much Is Never Enough.

It's easy for those who can suffice themselves on the incredible loveliness of this life to look down on those of us who can't. They can accuse us of ingratitude and of pretension; who promised us a life in capital letters? And so they can remain where they are.

And it's easy for those of us who do feel that both ourselves and the world are radically insufficient to make do with "cheap grace," in the form of politics or alcohol or art or psychoanalysis, all of which are well enough in their own right and legitimate sources of insight and/or ekstasis but none of which are as big as the need. All of these possibilities are erotic in some sense, but none are as erotic as religious devotion. (But then, what is?) And so we, too, find a million ways to remain where we are.

Or to summarize this entire post in two sentences: A life without unconditional surrender is banal. Only in devotion to God can the ecstasy of surrender marry the solace of ethical love.

BYZANTINE FRESCOES OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS: Via TKB.

The town happens to be asleep right now, the mayor has problems with his heart and lies spread-eagled in his bed, his dentures in the glass of water beside him; in musty rooms omnipotent fathers sleep in nightshirts beside their wives. In the woods above town animals are waking. The actor is saying: Sad to say, you don't know real vodka. The real pure stuff turns everything you see a blue color.
--The Rebels

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: SPREAD THE LOVE. I had a ridiculously tasty lunch the other day.

Anyway, ingredients (use the amount that seems right to you): sourdough bread, garlic, fresh ginger, crimini mushrooms (button and shiitake would also work), cream cheese, olive oil, and a bottled sesame-ginger sauce I bought at the Whole Foods corporate-charity sale.

What I did: Finely chopped the garlic, peeled and finely chopped the ginger, and finely chopped the mushrooms. Heated olive oil in a pot. Put a big thick slab of sourdough in the toaster oven. When the oil was very hot, dumped in the garlic, ginger, and mushrooms.

When they were deliciously fragrant, I threw in a mess of cream cheese and some of the bottled sauce. This all got hit with the immersion blender until it was smooth and creamy with a few bits of mushroom still visible.

At this point the sourdough was nicely toasted, so I put it on a plate and topped it with the cream cheese mixture.

the taste: Incredible! Lush, with that ginger-mushroom medley I adore. I didn't need extra salt (although you might), given how many of the ingredients were premade, and I usually throw extra salt on everything. The only slight issue was that I found it very hard to judge how much cream cheese to use, so I ended up with at least 1 1/2 times the amount I really needed to thickly coat the toast. That's okay though--I really did not mind basically eating some of the spread with my fingers. It is that good.

STILLTASTY. Very useful website for letting you know how far past the sell-by date you can keep all manner of foodstuffs. Via YumSugar.

"Please be so gracious as to remember that the last days are here."
--Mr. Zakarka, in Sándor Márai, The Rebels, tr. George Szirtes

I WOULD NEVER SAY "I TOLD YOU SO," OH, BUT TONY... I TOLD YOU SO: Some aphorisms of Don Colacho, as I discover a blog. (...For the theological ones, I feel duty-bound to note that Christianity complicates everybody's aphoristic wisdom a.k.a. self-image, so if you want to argue with an aphorism it might be better to sit and let it steep in you and figure out the ways in which it might be true. Or to put it another way, I don't think "Don Colacho's" point is actually that he's right about Jesus.)

#2,966: Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.

#2,964: A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

#2,956: The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.

Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.

#2,953: Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.

Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.

#2,952: If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.

#2,949: Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.

#2,942: The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.

#2,938: Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.

#2,937: An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.

#2,936: The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.

#2,932: After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.

#2,931: Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.

[I'm stopping after one page, but this is fantastic stuff. Even the punchlines with which I actively disagree are fierce.]

RIOT CABARET: Really enjoying Sublimity Now's guide to acts similar to Tom Waits. Skewing farther toward the cabaret genre, I think she should try Agnes Bernelle ("It Was Me," maybe?) and the sublime Marc Almond.

Especially liked "The Man on the Burning Tightrope"--

He could have been somebody
He could have been somebody else
It could have been so much worse.

--and this quick refrain from "Old-Fashioned Morphine"--

Sister, don't get worried,
Sister, don't get worried,
Sister, don't get worried,
Because the world is almost done.

The so highly acclaimed “dominion of man over nature” turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

I can't believe I have evaded this author for so long. Huge thanks to Sublimity Now for the link.

>HOLY CATS THIS LOOKS GREAT. I was already kind of excited for this aliens-vs.-the-council-estates flick, but now I want all of it, right now.

THE FLYING MONK: Daniel Mitsui is running a series on "Early Catholic Aviators"--like, really early.

The first known serious flight attempt in world history occurred about a thousand years before the Wright brothers, in western England. Then, a young Benedictine monk leapt with a crude pair of cloth wings from a watchtower of a church abbey at the beginning of the 11th century. This monk, known to history as Eilmer of Malmesbury, covered a furlong - a distance of approximately 600 feet - before landing heavily and breaking both legs. Afterwards, he remarked that the cause of his crash was that he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail.

the rest of that entry!

and another!

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
releasing those bound unjustly,
untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.
--Isaiah 6-7

TRUST FALLS: My Inside Catholic column, on trust, mistrust, and conversion. I'm honestly not really satisfied with this one, but you all might find something interesting or useful in it--and there is fire, so hey. Please ignore the headline, which is a sardonic hangover from a completely different earlier draft.

While Noboru wandered through private dreams Tsukazaki stood at Fusako's side, and the heat of his body in the sultry chart room was beginning to oppress her: when the parasol she had leaned against a desk clattered suddenly to the floor, she felt as if she herself, fainting, had fallen.
--Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, tr. John Nathan

I SWAN TO MAN: Some thoughts on the Matthew Bourne Swan Lake, as viewed via Netflix.

First, I loved this. It had a lot of images I want to stow away in my mental Mombi gallery of heads. The look of this production is iconic for a reason! The opening dream sequence replaces the "bright boy called Death" with a mature swan/man, in a little boy's dreams--a really stunning, disturbing, enthralling image. Adulthood, aggression, masculinity, otherworldliness and the sublime are all offered as possible candidates for "the monster at the end of this book," all shifting and iridescently fluid, identified with one another and yet distinguishable.

The intense longing conveyed in the park/lake scenes was especially fine and poignant, and I loved the eye-patched woman in the final "society" scene. I've never seen a traditional Swan Lake, so I don't know to what extent matching the most iconic music to moments in which the lovers are parted or are yearning for one another is typical, but it was really amazing. The plangent, familiar music becomes eldritch when it expresses nightmare rather than dream, liminality rather than immersion.

I was strongly reminded of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Derek Jarman's Edward II. The "looks" of the two productions are similar. The faint hint of misogyny is common to both--though much more prominent in the Bourne show because he has so few roles for women. Both Jarman and Bourne don't present a madonna/whore dichotomy... more of a dictatrix/flapper dichotomy. (Did Margaret Thatcher really do so much psychological damage?) The roles for women in Bourne's Swan Lake are as follows: 1) Maria Motherissueskaya, 2) Ditzie Doritos, 3) Butterfly Ballerinas whose art is cheap and obvious (unlike the subtle work we're watching now!) and 4) Eyepatch of Awesome.

And the sense of thwarted erotic hunger is of course preeminent in both productions. Jarman's work is much better because he chooses to express anger rather than self-pity, and politics rather than pop-psychology. Nonetheless if you are glad you saw his EII you should probably see this show too.

Speaking of pop-psychology, this production was really swilling the cliché. The swans are coming from beneath the bed! He looks at his reflection and drinks from a flask to demonstrate his pain! I'm really conflicted about this, since a) ballet, like opera (like horror, like genre in general), is already stylized and so cliche is always imminent, and
b) I'm pretty sure I fell in love with figure skating in large part because it married actual artistry so completely with vaudeville tawdriness, sawdust and stardust. (Oh, why not, here's more Christopher Bowman.)

So if we're simply mining pop-psych for immediately compelling, intelligible hieroglyphics of melodrama, then I support that 106%. (Not just 100%, because I am beyond reason.) But the Bourne production seemed to me to swing occasionally into self-seriousness, an attempt at actually representing the inner consciousness of a conflicted gay prince, and this I found a bit Oprah-ish or insistent.

And so we return to our sheep (or our feathers)--there are so many sequences of this production which I found amazing. I loved the drunken staggering outside the bar. I loved the pursuing-retreating-captured dynamic after the ball.

But let me end by comparing this disc, unfairly, to two live performances.

First: I don't think I could have really understood this production before I became a fan of the Synetic Theater. Their provocative, intermittently tawdry, undeniably brilliant and idiosyncratic interpretations of classic works through dance helped me develop a modern-dance vocabulary. They were able to show me, as if teaching me sign language, how there is no one-to-one correspondence between dance and Shakespeare and yet a dance troupe can convey all the complexities and ornaments of Antony and Cleopatra. (This month their King Lear opens and I am LITERALLY JOE BIDEN bursting at the seams to see it!) Gestures aren't words, and yet a dance sequence can be a paragraph.

And second... a few days after I saw the Bourne Swan Lake via Netflix, I saw the Mariinsky Ballet (if you remember Reagan then you, like me, may know them best by their Soviet-era name, the Kirov Ballet) perform "Giselle."

Look, I know it's not fair to compare the Mariinsky to anyone. And yet the shocking precision of their movements--despite a radically silly storyline, despite sequences in which the ballerinas had to hop across the stage--the grace and the illusion of effortless gliding were simply unparalleled. They took us into another dimension, another kind of consciousness (I KNOW how foo-foo I sound! I can't think of any other way to put it!), simply through their razor-sharp control. Their technical prowess made them so alien that they didn't have to rely on their interpretation of the story for sublimity.

HOLY CATS! (Sorry.)

I haven't watched the linked YouTube video, since I'm pretty sure it would freak me out even at age 32.

APPARAT CHIC Can this be real? Via PES.

"Yes, I'm cured," she said sadly. "I shall never be green again. It was lovely while it lasted."

"It's nice grown-up, too," Grant said comfortingly, and went away down the stairs.
--Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise

ONE MAN SAYS NO TO HARSH INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES.

Matthew Alexander led the interrogation team that tracked down al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006.

Alexander, a critic of the harsh techniques employed by the military during the administration of George W. Bush, says he used strategic, noncoercive methods of interrogation to find al-Zarqawi, which he wrote about in his book How to Break a Terrorist.

In his second book, Kill or Capture, Alexander — a pseudonym for the author — recounts how his team of interrogators tracked down and captured another wanted man: a Syrian named Zafar, the leader of al-Qaida in northern Iraq.

But finding Zafar was not easy. Alexander says he conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised more than a thousand more while trying to track down a man who eluded security forces and had never once been photographed by U.S. forces.

In a conversation with Dave Davies on NPR's Fresh Air, Alexander details the interrogation tactics he used while conducting his kill-or-capture missions in the area of Iraq where Zafar was thought to be hiding. ...

To gain trust with the Sunni combatants he was interviewing, Alexander says, he would admit that the United States had made some strategic mistakes in its approach in Iraq.

"Almost every detainee that I admitted those mistakes to, they all were surprised that I was willing to admit that," he says. "And it moved many of them to hear that, because many of them had lost family members or friends because of these actions — because of allowing the Shia militias to run free. And so when they heard that apology followed by an offer to work together, it was very appealing."

More than anything, Alexander says, it was important for interrogators to understand the detainee and know exactly where they were coming from. Interrogators who believed in misguided stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs, he says, were the single most detrimental factor to undermining interrogations in Iraq. ...

On how he would start an interrogation

"Sometimes I would walk in with my copy of the Quran, and I would recite a line. Usually I would use the first line of the Quran, which is 'Praise be to Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful,' which would help me with compassion toward my enemy who's sitting in front of me but then also put in place an obligation of reciprocity on their part to show compassion toward me, by providing information."

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HOW TO MAKE A LASER OUT OF GIN AND TONIC. Via DLB. This is the only use of gin I approve.

POP-UP PULP: BOOK COVERS MADE INTO DRAMATIC 3D SCENES. Via Unequally Yoked.

As against a friend no shield is worn nor sword drawn in defense.
--a 1916 Iowa court opinion, quoted in Friend v. Friend

THE COLD WAR, FORGIVENESS, AND CHAMPAGNE BECAUSE OF AWESOME.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
--Zork I on the Bible

(hey man, not my joke, although it definitely sums up my feelings about sola scriptura)

WOOD WITHIN THIS WOOD: Last night I watched a recent adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set (with some condescension and religious illiteracy, but some bicycling fun) in late 19th-c Italy. Here are a few scattered thoughts. Overall I'm glad I saw this, but I'm especially glad it wasn't my first Dream. At this point I can easily cherish the good parts and dunk the stupidities in Lethe; that would be harder if I didn't have a few earlier, differently-flawed productions under my belt.

So, let's go: First, the cast is ridiculous. Kevin Kline is superb as Bottom. Dominic "Jimmy McNulty" West is entirely serviceable as Lysander. Calista Flockhart is surprisingly good as Helena, and Stanley Tucci is as fun as you'd expect as Puck. You've also got Rupert Everett, Sam Rockwell, and other people I'm forgetting.

This production is oddly cavalier about the horribleness of the protagonists. They're just all so awful before they enter the wood! I can understand that as an interpretive choice, but it's not a lot of fun to watch--and made all the harder because

this production ups the humiliation for Bottom significantly. His whole character arc is so complex--for the play to work best, he needs to be better than his reputation and surroundings from the beginning, and then taken into a fairy world which is finally big enough and sublime enough for him; and yet even in that world, where he should belong, in fact he's an enchanted ass. There's a huge amount of humiliation built into this amazing character. No need to ratchet it up by having local yokels pour wine on him as he (brilliantly!) overacts. It just made everyone else seem more horrible. Adding a Disappointed Wife similarly made Bottom way too much of a pitiable victim rather than a comedic-yet-sublime visionary--and I would caution against any directorial choices which shifts the Dream further toward misogyny. Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers of women ever, and I agree with Herr Doktor Professor Harold Bloom that his women are typically more intelligent and stronger than his men; but this isn't his subtlest work on that score, you know?

Speaking of Bottom and of Bloom, not even Kevin Kline could come close to the ecstatic experience of hearing Harold Bloom recite Bottom's "dream speech." I saw this in, I think, spring? of 1998, and it was like King Haggard's first sight of the unicorns: "The first time I saw them, I thought I wanted to die." I'm going to try to talk about what it was like, now, but my description is necessarily reductive and inadequate.

What Bloom did, when he recited for us, was to take us completely into the experience of someone who has finally entered into the world for which we long. Our whole lives, we have portrayed a Wall--a wall broken through by a monster. And at last, Bottom follows, through the hole, and finds the monster... and she is just as beautiful as he could ever have hoped. She is the key for his lock. She is the reality of which our entire lives are merely the shadow. She is the quiet hour, the sudden moment when we can be truly present to the crocus and the snow.

(One thing the movie got right: She gives the Nietzschean wedding ring of eternity.)

He was helpless and baffled and sorry, sorry and he didn't know why.

I can't blame Kevin Kline for being insufficiently mind-blowing! I mean listening to Harold Bloom recite the speech... there's a song, some whiny pop song, where the guy whines something which I consistently mishear as, "Being with you, girl,/Is like feeling sorrow." Very few people can carry us--especially through a screen, rather than in person--into that place where a comedic, endearing speech is like feeling sorrow.

That said, there are a lot of dumb choices in this movie. There's mud-wrestling, which I'm sure sounded better in theory than it played in practice. There's Tasteful Nudity which ditto. There's a sequence of a kind I'm usually primed to adore, in which an actor finds his confidence and his true self halfway through a disastrous performance and thereby rescues it (Slings and Arrows s1 had an especially fine example of this), which is robbed of emotional heft because it centers on the guy who plays Thisbe, about whom I didn't care enough, and because the music is horrible and insistent and easy. The music is horrible and insistent and easy throughout, actually.

Again: This is worth seeing! There are some very fun comic-timing moments, and if I were to rewatch I'd look for what I think are real parallels between the barely-named fairies and the lower-class humans. It's pretty and frothy and if you can get past the really painful treatment of the difference between Bottom's dreams and his reality, it's sometimes charming.

Man, I hope they put that on my tombstone.

ABORTION AND/AS/VS. HONOR KILLING. A pretty fascinating post, with no conclusions but some provocative questions.

I especially liked the description of how people can believe something is wrong, but it's the right thing to do--this comes up all the time at the pregnancy center--and the acknowledgment that contemporary American elites also operate with an honor/shame culture when it comes to women's reproductive capacities. The insistent, inaccurate identification of non-elite women's choices with shame, and elite women's choices with responsibility, was one of my least favorite things about Red Families vs. Blue Families. (I suspect the "Tiger Mom" fight/"mommy wars" in general reflect honor/shame culture around motherhood as well.)

And I really liked this point:

Volf, writing some guidelines for dialogue between Christians and Muslims, quotes another scholar saying that in any such discussion there are four participants: you and me, and your image of me and my image of you. Volf adds another dyad to that equation: my image of myself, and your image of yourself.

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Friendship is fragile because one may more or less freely disavow a friend; but the bonds are special, in part, precisely because we may walk away at any time. The freedom we all have to draw our own circle of affection does something to help explain why our friends are so precious: they are the chosen ones.
--Ethan J.M. Leib, Friend v. Friend

As you know, Bob, I think this is a simplistic way of looking at chosen relationships--I think very often we seek (or should seek!) to transform what Maggie Gallagher once called "You're mine because I love you" relationships into "I love you because you're mine" ones. My actual experience of friendship very strongly suggests a need and desire for friendships to become, over time, understood as given. Viewing friendships as endlessly-renewed choices may satisfy the Nietzschean, with his suspicion of mere promising and obligation, but I don't think it can truly satisfy the friend. (I acknowledge that this insistence on submission to the friendship and self-sacrifice for the friend, while entirely in line with Catholic philosophy, to some extent undermines the classical emphasis on friendship as a realm where love and equality kiss each other.)

Leib's whole book, in fact, is motivated by the understanding that friendship incurs obligations and constricts choice. So I'm not quoting this bit--from a much longer and more interesting discussion of criteria which mark true friendship--in order to criticize him. I'm just pointing out a commonplace, unexamined assumption that freedom is always the more romantic and admirable state than constraint.

DAY JOB, DRAW BACK YOUR BOW/AND LET YOUR ARROW GO: Now and then I try to sell you guys on following MarriageDebate or, if you want a digest version, at least subscribing to IMAPP's weekly top-5-marriage-and-family-stories newsletter. I do this because I think many readers would find the site fascinating and thought-provoking, not because I'm being paid for it. I think md.com posts a lot of stories which readers interested in gender, sexuality, and family structure would want to read.

So I'm telling you that right now we have earning more than your man, wrestling a girl, the dark(er) sides of oxytocin, High Fidelity vs. your heart, what is and isn't in his kiss, proposed revisions to Chinese law on marriage and adultery, bad stats in the UK, gay marriage in ditto, the best story I've seen so far on Ashley Madison (the adultery company), where have all the Presbyterians gone? (long time passing), and a pretty hardcore column about the emotional realities of a lesbian couple raising children with a "known donor."

Oh and happy belated Valentine's Day, via TKB.

Love is anywhere you hang your head....

UNTIL YOU KNOW MY HIDDEN SHAME, YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW ME: A speech at the Yale Political Union.

Not everything is a social construct. Some things are made out of wood.
--apparently Nicola Karras, on Twitter?

"NOBODY'S PERFECT": I realize none of you care, but I have spent the past five days watching every Christopher Bowman-related link on YouTube, so I have got to talk to someone about him. Internet to the rescue! Skip this post if you don't care about skating.

What I find most striking is the fact that while he definitely earned his "Bowman the Showman" nickname, and would often interrupt more introspective programs to play to the judges or the audience, he's as much an artist as an entertainer. His programs are often musical, sensitive, lyrical, and poignant. (The song "Maria" from West Side Story makes me want to punch puppies in the face, and yet he made a sublime, romantic purse from this saccharine sow's ear.) He spends a lot of time on his knees on the ice; and where unmusical skaters often try to make flailing arms compensate for random footwork, Bowman's feet and legs are usually where he really matches and carries the music. The replays here emphasize how lovely his jump exits often were, despite his struggles with the triple axel.

The more you watch him, the more you understand why Toller Cranston might have viewed him as a possible kindred soul--despite how horribly that particular coach/skater relationship crashed and burned. Bowman shares with Cranston his uniqueness, his angular positions, his musicality, and his straight-up weirdness. He was never the innovator Cranston was, but his style is unmistakable whether he's "going for Camera Six!" or doing a heartbreaking, introverted program (yeah, I saw the finger-gun; see above re: I don't care if he interrupts himself to be awesome).

In the great "Brian Orser or Brian Boitano?" debate, I'm pretty sure my answer will always be Bowman. I hope he's at peace now.

BELATED VALENTINE'S DAY LINK #1: Name a giant hissing cockroach after your Valentine!

I seriously would flip for this--while urban apartment living has made me loathe your common or garden cockroach, the huge Madagascar hissing variety might be my favorite insect. I got to hold one as a child, at the old Natural History Museum Insect Zoo. The hissing is like their equivalent of purring!

[Abba Nilus] also said, "Whatever you have endured out of love of wisdom will bear fruit for you at the time of prayer."
--Sayings of the Desert Fathers

"SCIENTISTS DISCOVER HOW TO MAKE SQUIDS GO COMPLETELY BERSERK."

A single protein found on the surface of squid egg capsules will instantly transform a placid cephalopod into a eight-armed undersea terror, scientists discover.

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To be fair, I was never that placid. Link via JWB.

A soldier asked Abba Mius if God accepted repentance. After the old man had taught him many things he said, "Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?" He replied, "No, I mend it and use it again." The old man said to him, "If you are so careful about your cloak, will not God be equally careful about his creature?"
--The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Well I definitely hope so.

GOD LOOKS OUT FOR FOOLS, CHILDREN, AND DRUNKS. EXCEPT WHEN HE DOESN'T. Speaking of Frozen, I've been fascinated by the reviews I've read online. I mean, it is not a great movie--it is not the Hamlet of being stuck on a ski lift. But in a way that makes it a perfect Rorschach test. Virtually all of the negative reviews I've seen point out how stupid these people are, how unnecessary their torment really was.

And... for me, that was actually one of the best parts of the movie. I loved The Descent in large part because outside of the central terrible decision, the women are hyper-competent. They're better than me. Seeing their terror was a reminder that no matter how amazing and competent you are, there are things in life you can't control, and that's genuinely horrifying and tragic. The best qualities of the people you love won't save them.

But I loved Frozen for the opposite reason. These people screw up the way I've screwed up about one thousand times in the past year alone--except that they get the consequences, and I mostly haven't. I was overdrawn late last year (don't worry, Mom, it's fine!) by my own fault. Last weekend I left my laptop unattended in a public place because it was inconvenient to take it with me while I went to get my cafeteria food, and it didn't get stolen. If it had been taken I would fully expect everyone to tell me that I'd been stupid--even though all of us take risks like that all the time. If you don't take major risks fairly frequently, I'm guessing your caution is the result of neurosis rather than prudence. We walk down dark alleys and we make snap decisions and most of the time this turns out to be either awesome or neutral.

And then one day it's not.

I love that Kindertrauma's review emphasized the "there but for the grace of God go I" aspect of the movie. While I genuinely think it's well-paced and beautifully-shot, neither of those things will mean anything to you if you resist identifying with the characters. And I identified with them not because I have ever skied (I can't think of a recreational activity I'd enjoy less) but because I've often taken my safety for granted, or taken dumb risks. I try to do that a lot less now, because I'm not twenty anymore and I care about the people who care about me, but I'm not going to cram my life into the two-foot-by-two-foot box of sanity and safety.

I know that a lot of horror movies bank on characters making dumb decisions which are really hard to fathom. I liked the kids in Jeepers Creepers a lot, but I thought the initial decision which put them in danger was inexcusably stupid and naive, and threatened more lives than their own. So I get that a lot of the time, "Why the $#@! did you go in the barn?!" is a valid complaint about horror movies! I just don't think it applies to Frozen very well, because the bad decisions are so normal and small, and because the stupidity of those bad decisions isn't glossed over by the narrative at all.

So yeah: The kids in Frozen are stupid. That's why horrible things happen to them. They made a lot of small, understandable bad decisions, each one of which drew them down toward destruction. And when horrible things happen to you because of your own stupidity--I can guarantee, this will happen--you will not want or need people to tell you you should've thought twice.

THE IMAGINATION OF MAN'S HEART IS EVIL FROM HIS YOUTH. A few more thoughts on Black Swan and its reviews.

First, here's Kindertrauma, with prose as OTT as the movie itself! Much love, but as with the movie, you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the review. I wonder if our mutual appreciation for this flick and Frozen (otherwise vastly different horror-shows) is because we were willing to watch two desperately flawed movies for what they did right? It's so hard to make recommendations, in general, because nothing is perfect, Nina, so it's a question of whether the misses will overwhelm the hits for any specific viewer. For me Black Swan hit hard. (Like this guy!)

Commonweal's review did one thing right, in comparing Black Swan to Repulsion. I wish I'd thought of that! But what's bizarre to me is that the review accused Black Swan of being cold, compassionless, unable to take the audience into empathy with a disturbed mind. And that's a criticism I'd make of Repulsion--despite its astonishing imagery--whereas I thought, as I tried to indicate earlier, that Black Swan actually has a lot of sympathy for all of its characters.

Repulsion also has a much more simplistic underlying psychological theory than Black Swan, I think. (Black Swan's dialogue appears startlingly on-the-nose, which is why I called it "crude," although I do appreciate that no one who speaks about Nina is actually right.)

AND THE MIDDLE AGES REALLY WEREN'T THAT BAD, WEREN'T THAT BAD! That Cato Unbound symposium on tradition(alism) has finished! You can read the whole thing from the top here. A lot of people really seemed to like this exchange, and it's definitely not the usual Cato fare (which I generally like!), so you might check it out.

OH, ROMANCE IS NOT A CHILDREN'S GAME: A review of Black Swan, finally. [lightly edited bc I initially posted an unedited version--fixed some typos and rhetorical fumbles, but substantively this is the original post--sorry! A bit more on this movie later tonight.]

I saw this movie I think more than a month ago, but had a hard time figuring out how to talk about it. So this is my flailing attempt to describe why it completely worked for me despite often being crude.

I think The Vault of Horror is really on to something in labeling the movie "expressionist." Black Swan is almost a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for women. I know some viewers were disappointed that the movie pulled its punches on "body horror"; for me, Natalie Portman looking at herself in the mirror was vastly more terrifying than any H.R. Giger-influenced scuttling creation. I explained it to a friend by saying I thought Black Swan had achieved balletic body-horror: camp, because camp is always the razor's edge where tragedy meets parody. Loveless, cruel, and longing: that's how Black Swan woos its audience, all femme-fatale.

Black Swan gives us both repression-is-horror and self-expression-is-horror. I'm not sure I can think of a horror movie which managed to stay en pointe so completely. (For example, and I get that other people have other experiences of this movie, I thought that the hippies [eta: pagans, but you know what I mean!] in the original Wicker Man were so gross and silly that the movie's central conflict never felt real to me. I almost think that a horror movie, to succeed, needs you to love two conflicting sides [cf Juno and Beth in The Descent, for a case in which the obvious enemy is, for the audience, really just a way of raising the stakes and illuminating the conflicts between the women?].) Anyway, I loved Nina, I loved her naive idiot director, I loved her rivals, and I think if I were a better person I would have even loved her mother. I thought TVOH's line, "Nina's startling transformation into the black swan is the transformation of an individual who can only find release in the acceptance of that within her which also has the power to destroy her," was exactly not the point of the movie. Free to Be You and Me was not what this movie is about. More like, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

One reason I didn't post about this movie before is that I wasn't sure how to talk about the fact that there are at least two, maybe three, scenes in which Natalie Portman simulates masturbation. And I'm kind of intensely ambivalent about that, even beyond the part where I did actually look away from the screen for certain moments of the movie. First, I was reminded of how censorship breeds creativity. If the makers of this movie knew they couldn't get an actress, a human person, to deploy her sexuality in this creepy diffused poly- and abstracted-erotic way, I think they would have found some metaphorical ways to make their point.

But that point would always have been masturbation, I think. Black Swan is actually aligned with Catholic sexual morality insofar as masturbation is one manifestation of Nina's spiral down into herself. Even her fantasies about connection with another woman are presented, by the movie, as masturbatory hallucination. Nina is never granted eros. All she has is self--the hated self, the perfect and exalted self, but never anything or anyone but Nina.

Soldiers, this solitude
through which we go
is I.

When you tell somebody, "Express yourself"--you'd better be pretty sure you know who she really is inside. Black Swan, with its rage against both repression and self-actualization, is a movie against our times.

REMEMBERED DUE TO PREVIOUS POST: For the Yale sophomore (?) who loves Anne Sexton--pretty sure this song is a tribute to her.

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS: A slightly edited email from a friend, who has traveled extensively in the Middle East and has studied the region (and who noted that these are "random disorganized thoughts," but I thought they were worth posting):

Random thoughts on the ongoing political-economic revolution in Egypt, some my own and others from Egyptian friends - of course things are happening very fast so all this could change:

1. If you have not been watching al-Jazeera English, you ought to give it a shot - their coverage is far better and more interesting than any of the American channels (where the analysis quite frankly borders on the bizarre) - live stream is here: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

2. The police were defeated by the sheer number of protesters last week, which nobody predicted, not even the organizers of the original "day of wrath" on 1/25/11. Of course the organizers hit a nerve when they chose Police Day as their day of protest, since hatred of the police has reached new heights since the Khaled Saeed episode last summer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Mohamed_Saeed and http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk

3. Nobody fears the 1.7-million strong police anymore after what happened in Tunisia. Tunisians showed Arabs everywhere that the secret police can be defeated, and Egyptians did that on the second massive day of protests, last Friday. The police then disappeared and were replaced by the army. There were lots of thoughts as to why the police withdrew from the streets: they allegedly ran out of tear gas because there were just too many protesters, some were going over to the protesters' side, and it was a regime plot to demonstrate what would happen if there was nobody to maintain security. And indeed, Cairo and other cities were chaotic, but much of the chaos was instigated by plainclothes policemen with police id cards found when they were arrested. Regime thugs also tried to loot the National Museum and burn cars in downtown Cairo. Some others tried to attack random homes to instill fear that would reduce the number of people out on the streets (since they'd want to protect their homes) - this failed too (see below). But the most important thing here is the absence of fear: the people know they can defeat one of the most corrupt and brutal police forces in the world (ranked by Amnesty Int'l as the worst in the world in use of torture).

4. The army is divided. The generals close to Mubarak are career officers and regime loyalists. They gave the orders to enforce the curfew, which proved impossible given the sheer numbers of people on the streets. The soldiers on the ground are conscripts and thus basically like the protesters, and lots of fraternization is taking place between the two sides - tea, sweets, flowers, giving children rides in tanks, etc. They've been told to enforce the curfew, are refusing to obey orders, and also refusing to mutiny. So in the army there is something of a standoff.

5. The Presidential Guard will probably show up tomorrow (today, by the time most of you read this) when the people march from Tahrir Square to the Presidential Palace. Naturally this force is loyal to Mubarak, and may open fire, but any massacre will only increase popular fury at the Pharaoh. Conversely, any concession on his part will be interpreted as a sign of weakness. He is finished - all these appointments of new ministers and a VP are just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The people know they can win, and it is only a matter of time, especially since the army has announced it will not fire on protesters.

6. The Muslim Brotherhood is definitely present on the streets, but it is not a leading force at all. A "Group of Ten" has formed in Tahrir Square to coordinate and includes only one from the MB. In any case, the organization is not extremist and its leadership is far closer to Erdogan than to Khomeini. So Egypt will not become Iran, as things are going now. Usually Muslim Brotherhood protests could get about 200K-300K Egyptians on the streets in all of Egypt. The current protests are far, far larger than this, suggesting that normally apolitical people who wouldn't stand for another extremist dictatorship are out marching (a thoroughly apolitical grandmother of a friend of mine went out to march in Alexandria). The Brotherhood will almost certainly be part of a new government, but it will be better for America to deal with it than to be seen as opposing the will of the people (again).

7. Lots of people say the Egyptians aren't ready for democracy and can't govern themselves, etc. This is totally absurd and even if it were true, Mubarak has failed abysmally at governing Egypt. In the last few days, the people organized neighborhood militias to guard against criminals and police thugs (this happened in Tunis as well), appointed a temporary parliament in Tahrir, guarded the National Museum and Library in Alexandria against fire and looting, directed traffic, and - most amazingly for anyone who's ever been to Egypt - actually cleaned the streets and organized garbage collection. In short, this is not Iraq post-Saddam. People know what needs to be done and are doing it.

8. The attempted shutdown of the internet and al-Jazeera was the regime's big mistake and an implicit acknowledgement of its lack of moral authority among the people. The word will always get out. In fact it pushed people onto the streets because there was no other way to find out what was happening. Even now, information is getting out electronically. The government cannot win this battle.

9. The best thing for the US to do is continue to offer messages of support for the protesters, endorse their rights, push Mubarak to step down, and otherwise stay out of the way. We should have used all our covert strength and will to push Mubarak out sometime over the last ten years, but I guess nobody thinks outside the box anymore in Langley. In the end we have far more to gain by supporting the Egyptian people and maintaining a legitimate democratic government than by supporting a hated and incompetent kleptocracy.

COLD FEVER: I would just like to warn you that Saturday Night Fever is one of the most depressing movies I've seen in a while.

No, really: At first you think you're just watching the story of a working-class shlub who has a bickering family and doesn't treat his girl very well. Kitchen-sink, sure, but not kitchen-Titanic.

What's interesting is that things start to barrel downhill right after Tony Manero's brother quits the priesthood. The family is devastated; everyone around ex-Father Manero still treats him like "the priest/he's the doctor/he can handle the shocks"; the disco becomes his confessional, and therefore his purgatory. After that it's just kind of a domino rally of abortion, race war, suicide, and other forms of despair.

Who won the sexual revolution?

I WANT ASSAULT RIFLES AS LONG AS THEY'RE FREE; I WANT YOUR LOVE: It's been many years since I've run a contest on this blog. But in honor of what's happening right now in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in every country where people watch those scenes and dream of freedom--especially those countries where the American mainstream media response is, "But we liked your dictators!"--I will print any awesome rewritings of "Bad Romance" in which the two parties are the US and her client states. I don't care who is whom.

(I won't, and I wish this were obvious, print anything which doesn't understand why Israel happened. Huge hint: It's about England and the USA at least as much as it's about the Holocaust. If you don't understand why Israel's existence as a religious state is the result of Christian Western NIMBYism from Hell, then I don't really know what to do with you.)

Joe Biden says, “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with – with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Lady Gaga says, "You're not a criminal as long as you're mine."

For my twelfth birthday my Aunt Harry gave me a one-thousand-dollar bill, a ten-foot-long boa constrictor named Calvin, and a five-year diary.
--Joyce Cool, The Kidnapping of Courtney Van Allen and What's-Her-Name

USE EACH MAN AFTER HIS DESERT, AND WHO SHALL 'SCAPE BEING ROLLED IN A SPIKE-LINED BARREL?

KALEIDOSCOPE OF COCKTAILS:

A chilled Martini is truly a work of art. But the chemist/photographers behind the company BevShots have taken that idea to the microscopic level. Research scientist Michael Davis, of Florida State University, crystallizes cocktails on a lab slide, then photographs them using a camera attached to a light microscope. According to Davis, the light is polarized, resulting in these wild images of, say, a Tequila Sunrise or a Margarita. Oh, and you can buy the photos to memorialize cocktail hour 24-7. (Davis also made the images into ties, in case you want to sport your Guinness at the office.)

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TWO MORE posts from me at Cato Unbound's traditionalism symposium: "Who Put the Tradition in 'Traditional Marriage'?" and "Tradition's Comedies of Error."

The whole discussion is available here.

THE SILHOUETTES OF CANA. A lovely picture; and the point Sullivan is making in this post, while I disagree with it, proves once again that he is basically an aesthetic thinker rather than a rationalist. Good for him!

...AND NEW THINGS TO HIDE: My review of "Hide/Seek," the *~*controversial*~* gay-themed exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, is up at the Commonweal website. I'll post some notes which didn't make it into the final draft in a bit. The exhibit runs through February 13 so you really, really should go if you're interested in the subject matter and you're in the area.

HOW A THRILL BECOMES A LAW: Something I drafted and then rejected for the Cato Institute symposium on traditionalism. Beneath this post you'll find a review of an unnecessarily good horror movie, and some very small kitchen adventures.


I want to know what love is. I want you to show me.
--Julie Ruin, “I Wanna Know What Love Is”

The most important fact to know about the law is this: Law proceeds by analogy.

Common law allows us to see this procedure most blatantly. Bathsheba Jones hexed the cow of Modesty Smith, and since that's obviously wrong to do, we deduce that it's wrong for Britney Jones to adulterate the butter of Madison Smith. Common law can only exist because we can recognize similarities between cases.

But constitutional or statutory law relies on analogy—and therefore on aesthetics, the red-headed stepchild of rationalist political theory—far more than common law does. Common law at least compares stories to stories, like tracking variant versions of “Cinderella.” Statutory and especially constitutional law, which by their nature must appeal to abstract principles, can seem like an astringent application of pure reason to the mess of human community. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How do I know what is equal, what is cruel and unusual, what is a rational basis? These abstractions gain flesh only through stories. Since I'm desperately Plato-damaged, I'll put it like this: It's through love that we approach the Forms.

We've been trained to view aesthetic questions as volatile, whereas rational questions are stable. We've been trained to think that there is no wrong answer to aesthetic questions, whereas social science and peer review can translate moral questions into syllogisms—even into algebra, where our only task is to solve for “unjust.” And so arguing that our legal regime rests on aesthetic assumptions seems like arguing that our legal regime rests on a preference for chocolate over Rocky Road; and every side of every political argument works to pile up slush-mountains of statistics, in which self-selection or self-reporting or even self-comforting are all ignored because numbers are prettier than people.

Think of the word “happiness.” Story tells us how much it's worth (not too much, if you ask me) and whose perspective we should take in assessing it. A society which assesses new reproductive technologies and family forms will likely take very different perspectives if its basic image is of a child longing for knowledge of her father, as vs. an infertile woman longing for physical, biological connection to the child she yearns to raise. Both emotions are stunningly deep and heartfelt. But they point in opposite directions, and a society has to choose—because stories inevitably become analogies, and analogies become laws.

A friend of mine once suggested that we're so fond of TV shows about “doctors and policemen” because these professions serve the only goods we can all agree on: physical safety and health. And yet I think more recent shows about doctors and cops attract us precisely because they force one of our deepest philosophical conflicts into sharp focus: Do we serve health and safety, or is there some greater good, like liberty or creativity or authority? Shows from House to The Wire focus on the obvious consensus goods, in order to spotlight the more controversial goods.

Political philosophy—especially the libertarian variety, I'm sorry to say—tends to view emotional identification as an obviously illegitimate basis for law. It tends to view aesthetics as a creepy haunted mansion, devoid of the possibility of agreement between rational persons of good will. (That possibility is obviously manifest in every other realm of political philosophy, where all the big questions have been resolved!) I would instead argue that love lets us know what our abstractions mean, and therefore discourse and disagreement about love is the primary purpose of contemporary politics. There is no argument about rights, equality, or liberty, without at least a partial prior agreement about human nature.

THE WORLD IS A FROST GIANT'S CORPSE: I Netflix'd Frozen because of Kindertrauma's glowing review, and I was not disappointed. This movie is so much smarter than it has to be, you guys. It's a horror flick about three college students (I think? twentynothings at the most) who get stuck on a broken ski lift, abandoned and freezing and alone, with no help in sight for days.

Both Kindertrauma and I expected popcorn, disposable entertainment; both of us got something memorable and frightening instead. I don't recommend that you read the comments until you've watched the movie (although I sort of agree with one of the criticisms a commenter raised), but I really liked KT's Unkle Lancifer's comment that if you can get into the "there, but [for the] grace of God, go I" mindset, this movie will hurt you.

KT notes the dialogue, which I liked well enough, but I want to call attention to the use of time and of nature photography. Frozen is a short movie which feels grueling, in the best way. You feel like time is passing with agonizing slowness even as you're held in suspense, literally cringing and covering your mouth. The manipulation of the audience (at least me!) was just masterful.

And the stunning shots of fir trees, and mist shivering over snow, were deployed expertly throughout the film. These lingering beauty shots actually added to the increasing weight of the characters' despair.

KITCHENETTE ADVENTURETTES: Two quick snacks.

Chocolate-covered pears. Procedure: Chocolate-covered strawberries, only a) with sliced (but not peeled) Bosc pears instead of strawberries and b) you don't have to refrigerate them for more than the time it takes to cool to get best results.

results: THE OM NOM NOMMIEST. I scarfed these down.

Spinach chips. Procedure: This recipe, only a) I covered my baking tray with parchment paper, and I suggest you do the same; b) it took me longer because I didn't lay my spinach leaves out properly and I don't have a very good oven--some leaves crisped up nicely while others were still clingy and flexible; and c) the seasonings I used were, in about this order, cumin, salt, and cayenne.

results: really yummy! Again, I devoured these. (I ate them in two batches, since I had to put about half back in the oven for more baking after the first half were already done.) However, I'll be honest and say that I'm not sure how often I'll make these given that they take noticeably more time than just sauteing spinach with butter and garlic and whatever.

"THE TWO ROADS TO COURAGE." Via DLB.

"It makes D.C. sense."
--a friend's cabbie, in response to a complaint that the quadrant system doesn't make sense

THE WANTS OF THE RAMONES VS. THE WANTS OF THE MISFITS. Via DLB.

CATO BOUND. My essay on traditionalism is up now.

The brothers praised a monk before Abba Anthony. When the monk came to see him, Anthony wanted to know how he would bear insults; and seeing that he could not bear them at all, he said to him, "You are like a village magnificently decorated on the outside, but destroyed from within by robbers."
--The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tr. Benedicta Ward SLG

TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY: This month's Cato Unbound symposium is on "Traditionalism in a Futuristic World." Russell Arben Fox kicks it off here, and my response should be posted sometime today. James Poulos and John Fea will also respond, and then we'll blog and argue with one another (and with you all, I expect) over the next week or so.

Warning you in advance that I stole the opening quote from Sublimity Now.

FASCINATING NEW BOOK FROM ETHAN LEIB!

Friendship is one of our most important social institutions. It is the not only the salve for personal loneliness and isolation; it is the glue that binds society together. Yet for a host of reasons--longer hours at work, the Internet, suburban sprawl--many have argued that friendship is on the decline in contemporary America. In social surveys, researchers have found that Americans on average have fewer friends today than in times past.

In Friend v. Friend, Ethan J. Leib takes stock of this most ancient of social institutions and its ongoing transformations, and contends that it could benefit from better and more sensitive public policies. Leib shows that the law has not kept up with changes in our society: it sanctifies traditional family structures but has no thoughtful approach to other aspects of our private lives. Leib contrasts our excessive legal sensitivity to marriage and families with the lack of legal attention to friendship, and shows why more legal attention to friendship could actually improve our public institutions and our civil society. He offers a number of practical proposals that can support new patterns of interpersonal affinity without making friendship an onerous legal burden.

An elegantly written and highly original account of the changing nature of friendship, Friend v. Friend upends the conventional wisdom that law and friendship are inimical, and shows how we can strengthen both by seeing them as mutually reinforcing.

oh how I'm ordering this as soon as I get my new debit card

Via JRB.

"AGNI PARTHENE"/"O PURE VIRGIN"/"REJOICE, O UNWEDDED BRIDE" in Arabic, Slavonic, Romanian, French, and English you can hear! Amazing stuff, via IP.

"Johnny, you're drunk!"

I wasn't drunk, just a cheap date. Galina let loose with a stream of insults, screaming at the top of her lungs about how disrespectful and shameful I was.

"How Russian can you get?" she said before pushing me inside. "Showing up at the ballet drunk, with a whore."
--Johnny Weir, Welcome to My World

I can confidently say that if you think you might want to read this awesome book, you definitely should. I want to rewatch several of his competitive programs now that I've read his thoughts on how they were developed and what it felt like to skate them.

A CHRISTMAS WISH LIST FROM GEEK CORNUCOPIA: "But there are things that are either in legal limbo or hard-to-find (even on the gray market or in archives) that I'd like to see...." Oh man, that second one sounds amazing.

My beloved is mine, and I am his; He feedeth among the lillies (Canticles ii.16)

Ev'n like two little bank-dividing brooks,
That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
Where in a greater current they conjoyn:
So I my best-beloved's am; so he is mine.

Ev'n so we met; and after long pursuit,
Ev'n so we joyn'd; we both became entire;
No need for either to renew a suit,
For I was flax and he was flames of fire:
Our firm-united souls did more than twine;
So I my best-beloved's am; so he is mine.

If all those glitt'ring Monarchs that command
The servile quarters of this earthly ball,
Should tender, in exchange, their shares of land,
I would not change my fortunes for them all:
Their wealth is but a counter to my coin:
The world's but theirs; but my beloved's mine.

Nay more; If the fair Thespian Ladies all
Should heap together their diviner treasure:
That treasure should be deem'd a price too small
To buy a minutes lease of half my pleasure.
'Tis not the sacred wealth of all the nine
Can buy my heart from him, or his, from being mine.

Nor Time, nor Place, nor Chance, nor Death can bow
My least desires unto the least remove;
He's firmly mine by oath; I his by vow;
He's mine by faith; and I am his by love;
He's mine by water; I am his by wine;
Thus I my best-beloved's am; thus he is mine.

He is my Altar; I his Holy Place,
I am his guest; and he, my living food;
I'm his by penitence; he mine by grace;
I'm his by purchase; he is mine by blood;
He's my supporting elm; and I his vine:
Thus I my best-beloved's am; thus he is mine.

He gives me wealth, I give him all my vows:
I give him songs; he gives me length of dayes.
With wreaths of grace he crowns my conqu'ring brows:
And I his Temples with a crown of Praise,
Which he accepts as an ev'rlasting signe,
That I my best-beloved's am; that he is mine.
--Francis Quarles