CINEMA PARADISO: So there's an atheist film festival. Reading about it, I found myself wondering how a movie could really represent one worldview over another. I think what a lot of atheism-vs-theism debates miss (more on this soon) is that you can work with the exact same evidence and come to radically different conclusions about the meaning of that evidence. And since film is such a visual medium, I'm fascinated by the difference between films which present a basically godless world and films which present a basically Christian world. (Only going with Christianity here because it's what I'm most familiar with, both because I believe it and because I've seen more movies which believe it.)

So I'm opening the floor to you guys: Which movies would you screen in an atheist film festival? What about a Christian film festival? Or other religions?

For me, Cube and the Orson Welles adaptation of The Trial would absolutely be a part of the atheist festival. Nobody Knows would also be there, I think. For movies which portray or make real a Christian world--movies in which, while the evidence is still open to interpretation, the obvious interpretation is Christian--I'd say Cavalier's Therese of course, and Of Gods and Men, and maybe even Donnie Darko. Looking at these lists, I think the distinguishing characteristic is how the movie presents our intense longing for suffering to have meaning: Is this longing simply the most heartbreaking kind of wishful thinking, or does it reflect something real about the world for which we were made, in the same way that thirst implies the existence of water?

I think that's my most common criterion. What are yours?

SHADES OF BLACK: Akashic Press has a demi-fascinating series of books called _________ Noir, where ________ is the name of a city or area. The idea is that each volume has stories which are in some sense "noir" and which capture some essential element of the setting. I've read almost all of Moscow Noir (didn't finish it because I somehow lost the book in a Whole Foods in Tenleytown, which is pretty much the least noir place in the entire world) and all of Indian Country Noir, so here are a couple thoughts on how those books differ. Wild overgeneralizations ahead!

Moscow Noir is basically roughed-up stories about roughed-up men, with the occasional girl in cheap lipstick. It has a lot of self-consciousness about its noir elements, a lot of explicit references to Hollywood. The men are all low-level thugs, life's losers, and the overall atmosphere is Tenement, Half-Drunk. I liked it a lot! Fans of LA Confidential might check it out.

Indian Country Noir is much more varied in tone. There are several revenge stories, and that revenge is often at least somewhat satisfying for the reader, as vs. Moscow Noir where revenge is always a failure which leaves the reader feeling thwarted and sad. The political elements, the specific nature of racism and oppression, are much more explicitly-named here than in the Russian book.

Native religion is a real, viable option for these characters, whereas Russian Orthodoxy is only mentioned in one story in Moscow Noir and is treated with a certain half-respectful acidity there. Several ICN stories are written as if Native religion is true, real, the actual story of the world. Sadly, I think if those stories received a contemporary genre classification they'd be called "magical realism," because mainstream lit-fic isn't allowed to believe in God or the gods anymore. On a perhaps-related note, peace is a more explicit theme in this book than in Moscow Noir, although I'm not sure it's ever presented as a real possibility.

You could say that the Moscow book is noir because what consistently fails is the protagonists' struggle for success or at least escape, and the Indian Country book is noir because what consistently fails is the protagonists' struggle to make peace. That's reductive, but I do think it might be a bit illuminating.

"I THINK THAT BAKING IS KIND OF LIKE... PARENTING." There's a new My Drunk Kitchen!

UPDATE: Oh yes, this "Mountain Goats of Base" video is immensely endearing. With hand gestures!

AND SOME WE DO FOR LOVE, LOVE, LOVE: Some brief comments by me on that NYTM cover story about Dan Savage and adultery-for-your-marriage. Let me know if you see any interesting commentary on the Times piece.

SOMEDAY ALL THIS WILL BE PICTURESQUE RUINS: Final Mountain Goats post (for now).

First, some links from others. Light on Dark Water talks about the gallows humor of Tallahassee.

AM suggests that Goats fans check out Wovenhand, and offers this ferocious, Soviet-surrealism video as evidence. (He says it "would fit well with your 'so far from God so far from the United States' tag.") Well worth your time. I haven't read this interview yet.

And both CR and HEAR pointed me toward this video of Darnielle covering Ace of Base. Awesome. I love watching people love things.

And now some short notes on albums.

We Shall All Be Healed: This grew on me. (Like a fungus, yes, I know.) At first it's scraps and postcards and bad broken memories from a really unpleasant time of life, a friend handcuffed to a hospital bed; and then it sort of comes together into the getting-clean album, cotton balls in the top drawer. The persistent punishment of not being trusted. There's a lot of resignation to consequences ("You're gonna do what you want to do, no matter what I ask of you," which works both ways, from the addict to the cop or from the lover to the addict). Man, this guy really tries hard to hope in a hard-up world.

The Life of the World to Come: Another entry in the death-haunted art of friendship, with song titles from Scripture, sometimes comforting and sometimes... the other things that Scripture is. "And if my prayer go unanswered, that's okay" reminded me of the Weakerthans' "I want to call requests down heating vents/and hear them answered with a whispered 'no'," and in general I could just point you to my Weakerthans review piece instead of writing about this album.

The title of the last song pretty much says it all: "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace."

All Eternals Deck: "Estate Sale Sign": Yeah, if you liked Everything Must Go you might check this one out too. Similar metaphor, similar meaning, similarly awesome, with the urgency acknowledged rather than denied as long as possible.

"The Autopsy Garland": "Deco cufflinks and cognac by the glass," REALLY nice use of hard consonants. "You don't want to see these guys without their masks on. Or their gloves."

I know the title of this song is the reason I had this thought, but it's still true: Fans of the MGs should read Kathy Shaidle's poetry.

I pose before a lined and numbered wall,
my head like shot-glassed whisky.

ALWAYS COMING HOME: The tally, Independence Day 2011:

Drunken renditions of the national anthem on the roof of our building: two. Plus another song I genuinely couldn't even understand, but the people singing it seemed very patriotic!
Number of people assigned to bring knives for the watermelon: two.
Number of watermelon-capable weapons achieved by our party: zero.
Number of heart-shaped fireworks: even one is too many.
Wine on my keyboard: not mine.
Books lent: ...I think, seven?
Books borrowed: one.
Things spilled on a book by Raymond Carver: salsa; rain.
United States policy choices denounced, current: only three in the conversations I heard; probable future: at least two; alternate-historical, one.

Happy Fourth of July, y'all.

ARE ALL THOSE YOUR GUITARS? Mountain Goats epic posting, part three in a series of I do what I want! (No, seriously, I'll try to finish up tonight.)

The Sunset Tree: I am so easy for those songs where some indie-rock guitar singer-songwriter dresses up his voice like he's some kind of sexy gumshoe. ("Dilaudid," "The Lion's Teeth.") Also, "Up the Wolves" made me choke up this time. This is a really heartfelt album, trying hard to forgive a lot of things. I also really like how place-oriented all of these albums are; this one is Southern California, insistently, some sunny noir place behind the Orange Curtain. ...I also liked "Love Love Love" better this time around. Already liked the opening verse a lot--this guy is notably good at openings.

Get Lonely: Ehhh, this is the first one so far I haven't really loved. It's very breathy and just... there.

Heretic Pride: It took all the way to track four ("Autoclave") before I liked something, and there it was mostly because I am impressed by John Darnielle's commitment to this house-as-home metaphor across many albums.

"In the Craters of the Moon" and "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" are more tough-guy-bleeding songs, though, so I liked them. "Woke up afraid of my own shadow--like, genuinely afraid!" That's actually a pretty great updating, the Valley Girl slang combined with "Rats in the Walls"-level urgency. I'm trying to think of ways Lovecraft could actually illuminate this guy's lyrics and obsessions, and all I can come up with is the belief that (or struggle against the belief that) origins define outcomes, the past controls the future, the Old Ones will always come back to destroy us even when we think they've been sated and killed and forgiven. I don't actually think that's what this song is going for, though, so I'd welcome other interpretations.

Is a "dragon spruce" a real kind of tree? If so, I continue to love this insistence on naming the exact plants of each song's setting, e.g. "Louisiana live oak." So far we're five albums in and home is the unstoppable cry of each one: the contrast between Eden, our model, the memory which makes all insight a form of recognition, and the temporal places where we all lived out our unskilled childhoods. ...OK, so I guess it's obvious that I would really like this guy.

And just in time to ratify my belief that unsettled and painful metaphors of home are one of the defining characteristics of this guy's lyrics, here's the line, "If I forget you, Israel, let me forget my right hand"--and cf. "This Year" with "There will be feasting in Jerusalem this year," too. Also, with the Israel line, it's basically the chorus, which is always pop music's way of signaling what it considers its home: You return there after each verse, and see the chorus in a new way.

OK, two albums left here.

"WHY BLACK MEN ARE WEARING PRISON JUMPSUITS IN CHINATOWN": The Museum of Crime & Punishment consistently has the most trivializing, jokey-worship-of-a-police-state advertising I've ever seen, so this is really not surprising. I suppose I've never seen them use a prison-rape joke so... that's something! But really, when a tacky tourist sinkhole like the Spy Museum outclasses you on a regular basis, you should rethink your choices.

Link via Racialicious.

"HOTEL CALIFORNIA":

A persistent and damaging national-security myth is that in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks a dispute developed between the FBI and the CIA over the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The intelligence agency was uniformly in favor, or so the story went, and the FBI was strongly opposed. What should have been a simple question about efficacy (what is the fastest and best way to gain reliable information from terrorists?) was transformed into a highly charged debate in which facts were discarded and emotions ran high.

In "The Interrogator: An Education," Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who retired in 2007, confirms what I knew from my own experience as an FBI agent at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and at so-called black sites: It would be a struggle to find a CIA operative who endorses the use of enhanced-interrogation techniques. The agency's supporters of such measures were predominately political appointees and desk officials, not professional field operatives. Anyone with actual interrogation experience knows that rapport-building techniques, which use knowledge to outwit detainees and gain cooperation, produce better intelligence than enhanced interrogation.

more, including explanation of the perverse irony and machismo behind this post's title

Via Mark Shea.

IF MY HEART WERE A HOUSE YOU'D BE FROM A BROKEN HOME BY NOW: The Mountain Goats, redux. I'll catch up with myself in the next post. (Really!)


All Hail West Texas: Yes, I know I already talked about this disc. I have a lot of feelings, okay?

This is an album about the American experience as, above all else, transience. Post-office boxes in towns we don't live in anymore. I wonder how much this contributes to our obsession with marriage--cf. Andrew Cherlin on European obsession with birthrates rather than marriage, for example. Home is anywhere you hang your head. Home is anywhere you hang my effigy.

The standard, effective guitar chords often serve in place of rhyme--a way of making simplicity seem more than sincerism. The chords make the songs rhyme in your heart, if you're an American raised on the "three chords and a hope" of rock'n'roll.

"Blues in Dallas" is a 25-cent hymn on a jukebox heard from the bottom of a bottle. "Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/If I don't see you there/I will run/a comb through my hair/and I will wait./I will wait./I will wait."

"And night... night comes to Texas." (last song on this album, quiet, shaky)

Tallahassee: "Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector"--this is the exact kind of expressionist metaphor which will always work for me. Art is more real, in our experience of life, than the raw experience itself.

"And I hand you a drink of the lovely little thing/On which our survival depends./People say friends don't destroy one another./What do they know about friends?"

I got really into Elvis Costello because of his lyrics. I don't know if that can happen with the MG (this is how it really happened for me) but maybe if I quote the lyrics enough you can find out for yourself.

"The House that Dripped Blood": the whole first verse is amazing, and that killing harmonica whine at the end just makes it. Dostoevsky had a spider the size of a marriage; this song has a mosquito.

"the cellar door is an open throat"

"dig up the laughing photographs"--wow, this really is a horror movie of a song. I bet this house has laughing windows, too.

And then that IV needle of a harmonica, which carries you all the way into the vein.

I hope I've already made clear what I think of "No Children." It's like getting punched in the face by all the girlfriends you never even got the chance to disappoint. It's what dripped into Loki's face all those years in the cave with Sigyn. It's like if the present and future and subjunctive tense ganged up on the past and beat it up in an alley and stole its lunch money--and then spent the money proving it right.

Oh hey, I seem to have crossed "This Year" with "Old College Try" even though they're basically opposites. Story of my life! "Things will shortly get completely out of hand." Wow, the contrast between the easy chords and bass and synth/organ here vs. the brutal, hope-in-a-hopeless-world lyrics really hit me in a part of my 1980s day-glo heart which will always be badly bruised. Fans of Diamanda Galas's poppier, more fluorescent songs might like this.

"Oceanographer's Choice": Disorienting, bitter, catchy, poppy, self-lacerating. Are we totally sure this isn't an '80s MTV hit with the synth stripped out? ...Seriously, not sure I could love this more unless it somehow incorporated the Reagan-era "it's happy hour in America!" day-glo swizzle-stick aesthetic.

"And night comes to Tallahassee." (not the last song, but ferocious and vengeful)

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: MONSTER MASH! ...Not quite, but still: a couple demi-successes.

Not garlic bread: First I did my standard roasting-garlic method. Everyone has one. Most involve roasting an entire head after getting the papery casing off but not the thicker casing around each individual clove. I find that approach messy and fiddly, plus it makes way too much for a single squid. Instead, I set the oven to 375 (as always, you should play around with times and temperatures before blaming me for your failures!) and put some foil on a tray. I set out another square of foil. I peeled a bunch of big cloves, sliced off the ends, halved them, and removed the green stemmy things. (I hate those guys!) Then I set the halved cloves on the top foil square, drizzled with olive oil, scrunched up the foil around them, and let 'em bake. I waited a time period which can be described as either "ten minutes" or, more relevantly, "when I could just begin to hear them sizzling and smell their delectable scent."

Then I took the pan out of the oven. I took about 1/4 of a baguette and sliced it lengthwise, and buttered it severely with this amazing sweet butter from the farmer's market. (So expensive, but so worth it. I'm gradually compiling a list of things where the flavors don't really improve enough to be worth it--milk [the Whole Foods whole milk is quite good and even cheaper than Safeway's, so I'm going for price here], onions, garlic, jalapenos--vs. things where the market makes a difference I'm willing to pay for, like tomatoes, mushrooms, cucumbers, peaches, and butter.) Then I chopped most of a tomato and half a large jalapeno (see prior parenthesis for the origin stories of these items, which I'm sure fascinated you!) and piled that on top of the buttered bread, with some salt. All of that went on the foil and into the oven, along with the garlic, which would finish cooking.

Another 10? 15? minutes passed, and the toasts came out of the oven and got a light topping of grated parmesan. The garlic--which varied from "divinely perfect" to "...burnt," unfortunately--also got shaken over the top. Once it had all cooled, I began to fill my face.

the verdict: tasty! Delicious, actually. My only regrets were a) no milk in the fridge to cut the intense heat--jalapenos vary a lot in amount of capsaicin, and this one was feisty--and b) that I didn't get roasted garlic in each bite, as I'd hoped. But this was a pretty easy version of spicy loaded garlic bread, and I'd definitely do it again.

Not a plantain mash: Okay, so I bought a plantain. I was all excited about doing this dish where you prick the peel with a fork, roast the thing until it's all soft and yummy, and then make it into a mashed fritter with various spices and veggies.

Then I got wary. By the time I actually approached the plantain to cook it, I was convinced this would be a disaster.

Good news: It wasn't a disaster!

procedure: prick very ripe unpeeled plantain with a fork. Place on parchment paper and bake in oven at 425 for... ten minutes-ish-ish. Slice a medium yellow onion, chop a whole mess of garlic and the other half of that intense jalapeno, and when your plantain is ready, let it cool and then scoop out the flesh with a fork. Avoid the weird yellow jammy bit right up against the peel. (I still don't know what that was all about, and I don't think I want to.) Mash the plantain with the chopped veg and saute with garam masala, cinnamon, cumin, and some salt. Eat with Greek yogurt to cut the heat.

verdict: Interesting! I really didn't like the task of prepping the plantain, I used too much olive oil in the saute pan, and some cilantro would definitely have helped here. But overall this was a good mix of sweet and spicy and vegetal, and my expectations were low so I was pleasantly surprised. I suspect many of you could make this dish better than I did.

"WELL IT CERTAINLY ISN'T OUR MISTAKE." Kindertrauma's "Stream Warriors" series continues to be a fantastic guide to overlooked horror/suspense gems, now available on Netflix Instant Viewing. Last night's movie was 1969's Games, a creepy, twisty little pleasure-cruise of a movie.

The premise: A plush New York couple live in the world's most awesome apartment, filled with pinball machines based on car accidents ("You're Dead, Man!"); pop art about infidelity; spirally things; crazy porcelain-and-gilt masks, and similar rich and strange flotsam. From the luscious jewel tones to the '60s seafoam and lavender, the colors in this movie are just a joy. Even the crocheted afghans are art-designed within an inch of their lives. Plus the entire movie takes place in the apartment, so although you get terrific lightning, rain, and falling leaves outside, you never really leave the glittering web.

The rich couple enjoys spooky dress-up games, living in a decadent playground free of any actual children. Then one day a mysterious European saleslady/con artist (Simone Signoret--!) rings the doorbell and insinuates herself into their lives. She holds their childish, American "games" in contempt, and begins to introduce some more dangerous varieties. There's simulated wife-beating... simulated adultery... but there's also a very real gun.

As Kindertrauma notes, several of the final twists are easy to guess if you've seen this kind of movie before, but the pleasure is in the journey and not the destination. There are a couple real scares, about a thousand stunning shots (including more meditative ones, like the wife dreaming in a garden chair as rain begins to spatter and leaves begin to blow through her long hair), a great ambiguous femme fatale in La Signoret, and a slightly vicious class-war angle. The fun of this couple's life is part of their problem (which gives a nice subtle edge of condemning the viewer for enjoying it so much!) because they have no sense of when the party needs to end.

THOMAS TALLIS FLASH MOB IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM! Via Wesley Hill. A nice description is here.

update: Unsurprisingly, the YouTube video doesn't have great sound quality. If you'd like to hear some really sublime music, though, check out the Tallis Scholars.

"The Slav is never subject, not even to himself."

and "Queen Natalija was chaster than snow, she was as chaste as sleet."
--both via TKB and from Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

UK EUCHARISTIC FLASH MOB! Your Corpus Christi link, not quite too late. The clapping is weird but watching the people come and kneel is pretty amazing.

I SWEAR I'M NOT ALWAYS GROSS AND BITTER. Sometimes I also listen to music?

The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas. It's kind of amazing how catchy he already is. I get these songs stuck in my head all the time now. Everybody needs to know "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" because we've all known those guys (...I hope?) and also I'll say that the one time I really did fly in to DFW they really did pretty much tell me, "Come on in; we haven't slept for weeks. Drink some of this; it'll put color in your cheeks." In general I think patient fans of the Weakerthans would like these guys, but then, if you like the Weakerthans you probably know that already so maybe I should run this recommendation the other way around.

Tallahassee. You know, finding out that John Darnielle is happily married was just like finding out that Philip Roth was a Gentile woman. (...Except for the part where the first thing happened.) "No Children" is one of the best and harshest songs about marriage ever written, and we've had a long time to enter that sweepstakes. There are other good songs on this album, which explores the divorce of a fictional couple, but seriously do you need more than one bullet through the heart?

The Sunset Tree: Apparently the only album which is definitely autobiographical, and it's just as bruised as you might expect. Ranges from the anthemic ("This Year") through the ambiguous ("Up the Wolves") to the randomly- (and perhaps unnecessarily; I like this song less than most people, I think) Dostoevskyan ("Love Love Love").

Next batch of albums in next post, as I am running out of Friday.

WHAT SHE SAID: "I SMOKE BECAUSE I'M HOPING FOR AN EARLY DEATH/AND I NEED TO CLING TO SOMETHING...." Out of all the songs on Meat Is Murder this is probably the one with the soundest political philosophy. It is anti-rationalist and it acknowledges that if someone does things you wouldn't do, she probably doesn't do them for the reasons you think she does. A surprisingly rare insight.

In an extension of my previous post about evo-psych fear of praising gender, I'd like to add that in general the reasons professors come up with for the things we do don't match up very well to our real reasons for doing them. A political philosophy based on rationalism will a) always place experts over subjects, placing those who can articulate their desires in contemporary jargon over those who insist on speaking like poor people or weirdos; and b) always turn mere experts into Pharisees, who believe that because they lead the lives their culture supports they are morally-equipped to tell the rest of us who we are. Or, as the current "nudge" political-philosophy fad would have it, they're equipped to structure our incentives.

Don't expect them to thank or forgive you.

SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS: I guess what's so weird to me is that evo-psych explanations expect that their readers prefer equality-first.

They often act as if gender is the regrettable fallback; we wish we didn't have gender, but oh gross, there it is.

And I guess I want someone to stand up for Antony. I really want gender differences. I don't know how art happens without gender.

The best-ever death metal band out of Blogwatch...

Real review of, seriously, maybe seven or eight Mountain Goats cds once I've finished listening to them. For now you get a blogwatch.

"How to Become an Author, In Five Incredibly Difficult Steps." The usual Cracked.com disclaimer, but I loved #2 a lot, and the point about needing a huge amount of research in order to write fiction is also really good. #1 should be skipped unless you really, really want to feel bad about your bank balance.

Guest posters at Megan McArdle's site:

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro made an important contribution to the social sciences. His unexpected declaration that the port of Mariel would be temporarily open to any Cubans seeking to flee the island served as a natural experiment that has helped labor economists understand the impact of immigration. In his now classic paper, economist David Card convincingly showed that the massive influx of 120,000 Cubans increased the labor force of Miami by 7% yet had almost no impact on the employment or wages of natives.

This result is probably shocking to many, and certainly runs contrary to the popular but unfortunate myth that immigrants "steal our jobs". But while this study is an important result in the literature, it is not an isolated one. Most research on immigration shows small or zero impacts on unemployment and wages. This, however, does present something of a puzzle: if immigration increases labor supply, then why didn't wages fall and unemployment rise? How was it that the labor market in Miami was able to absord so many new workers?

more; mostly interesting to me because I care about Mariel, but that of course raises the question: Does US growth depend on immigrants a) fleeing sufficiently-fleeable-hell and b) not assimilating to our awful demographics once they gain some economic success?

Sublimity Now:

While she was doing this, she went on for a while about how lucky she is, given that some people get shingles all over their bodies, and she only has to deal with an useless right arm, and apologized profusely for not being able to prepare a duck dinner for my brother before he ships out to Quantico.

Please remember her in your prayers.

it is okay she eats so slow--at least she eats!

and even moreso:

Point is, my father thought I was literally plowing a field instead of being vaguely emo. He is the best. May we all strive to think so well of our loved ones!

context, but why?

The Groom's Family:

This sentiment, i suspect, is due no less to the sheer fact of my being a Jew than to my personal biography. Any Jew, with the questionable exception of the generations born in Israel, is always an immigrant, caught in a complex relationship between a home from which he is distanced by both space and historical time, and a current residence from which he is separated by a paper-thin but surprisingly resistant mental wall. He has no choice but to be a cosmopolitan, and there are three general ways in which this cosmopolitanism may manifest. ...

The religious Jew, as the monk, is a cosmopolitan in that he makes do everywhere and belongs nowhere.

The progressive secular Jew is a cosmopolitan in a very different way. Like his religious brother, he never has the pleasure of belonging to a place; as the Nazi episode among others illustrates, his decision to treat a place as his home means very little to others and to history. Unlike his religious brother, however, he does not see his loneliness in the midst of the nations as a prelude to salvation; it is rather a source of confusion and often pain that he must learn to mitigate.

more; emphasis added because I genuinely believe that sabra Jews often carry the marks of displacement without the humility forced by the humiliation of needing to understand others' perspectives in order to survive--or, to put it more bluntly, I sometimes think that growing up in Israel is bad for Jewish children. Jews must raise their children in a Jew-hating world; ideologies of Jewish superiority are one obvious path. (And, for contingent 20th-century reasons, often an atheist path which leads to dissolution of Jewish identity in the later generations.)

The Rat:

It reminded me of some of the things we were taught in hospice training; and also of a line from Paul Claudel that MFB quoted to me in a letter well over a decade ago, but that's stuck with me ever since (even though I'm not Christian): "Jesus did not come to remove suffering, but to fill it with His presence." The principle holds whatever your religious affiliation (or lack thereof), and also seems to me one that might be particularly useful in this country, where even the most well-meaning people—Christians included—can often have trouble negotiating secondhand tragedy. We're a nation of fixers, and also of Pelagians—plus there's so little guidance out there about this kind of thing.

There are so few things we can ever really do for another person, however much we like to think we can, and however many fairy tales/Hollywood scripts/etc. are themed around rescue. If you know a survivor (esp. a recent survivor) of trauma, do have a look at this list, and others like it

.
more

"THE TACO IS THE MOST VERSATILE FRUIT." This series is so funny I actually started crying with laughter. Amazing. Rough language and, well, drunken cookery.

EDGE OF FIFTEEN: On a recommendation from Kindertrauma, I watched the 1969 suspense flick I Start Counting--and found a melancholic, adolescent movie, all elbows and knees and awkward longing for what used to be and what is still to come.

The basic story: In a small English town where the old houses are being torn down for redevelopment, a Catholic schoolgirl begins to suspect that her (adoptive? step-?) older brother, on whom she has a severe crush, is the local serial killer. The movie portrays England as a culture in its awkward adolescence, childishly trying on big-girl sexy clothes, unaware that its panties are showing. The mystery moves quickly and yet the movie itself feels quiet and lingering, with the girl going back to her ruined childhood home and swaying back and forth in the backyard swing, or bumping her way down the staircase on her bottom after her first encounter with pale ale.

The movie's portrayal of adolescent girls' sexuality is surprisingly sensitive, maybe because it's based on a novel by a woman. Wynne and her friend Corinne skitter nervously from tarting themselves up and enjoying boys' and men's attention to pulling away when masculine aggression goes from thrilling to scary. The movie shows, quickly and fairly subtly, how often men pass off their threats as "only protecting you." These teenage girls' skins prickle when they're around certain older men, but they're also still the kind of foolish virgins who brag about how many men they've slept with.

The movie's flaws pretty much all come in the actual suspense/killer narrative. The two twists are both handled somewhat clumsily, the main villain's Big Villain Speech is wrong-footed in several different ways (although his final line is unexpected and good), and the pacing is strange. I didn't feel much suspense by the time we start finding out what really happened. That's fine (and anyway Kindertrauma disagrees, so you might as well), since I was so invested in the characters and their emotional journeys, but just know that this is a thriller in which a shot of a bulldozer plowing over a sewing machine is much more intense than the reveal of the killer.

DC VIGIL FOR VICTIMS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS. Organized by GW Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, it looks like; tomorrow, 6/17, 8 - 9 pm in Lafayette Park.

"But in her memory, Jewishness was more a sense of a way of life and of community, rather than anything religious. Or maybe it was just the loss of memory. When people secularize, they don't really remember."
--quoted in Doubly Chosen

"SHAPING THE STORY." Via... DLB maybe?

"Sasha [Gelich] had a hard time coming to faith. He was a Jew, a member of the Russian intelligentsia, and the whole idea confused him quite a lot. Zoya proselytized frequently to him, but he could not quite come into the Church. Once, I remember, he had been drinking. He was a great fan of drinking, a beautiful 'drinking artist.' Zoya said: 'Svetik, show Sasha your cross.' And I showed him the cross. The very next day he went to the priest."
--quoted in Doubly Chosen--man, those are the best parties.

IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES.

IF WHISKEY WERE A WOMAN, HOW MUCH WOULD I OWE IN ALIMONY? Also last week, I saw Everything Must Go, now playing at the E Street Cinema and the AFI Silver theater. Will Ferrell gets fired for being an alcoholic mess, and comes home to find his wife gone, the locks changed, and all his possessions on the front lawn. He basically says, "Well to hell with it then," and lives on the lawn, holding an ongoing yard sale to get around local zoning laws. Based on a short story by Raymond Carver.

It's not a perfect movie. There's some on-the-nose dialogue and at least one over-easy plot twist, which I thought let our hero off a bit cheaply. Ferrell's character befriends a local kid who's played with a very flat affect, which sort of worked for me but was a bit distracting; I imagine a lot of people would chalk it up to bad acting even though I'm not sure it really was. It's certainly noticeable acting.

That said, this movie really struck me. It's cringingly funny and poignant, heartbreaking and almost-but-not-quite-defeated, a story about salvage. Ferrell is terrific, completely convincing, and his intensely public rock-bottom really brings home that Mother Theresa line, "There is no humility without humiliation." There's a certain relief to having hidden shames exposed, getting it over with--even when the people doing the exposure are staining their own souls through pride and cruelty--and that experience can also be a path toward redemption. I could've watched several more hours of this stuff. A different version of this is the closing song and it's well-earned. This is a bruised, forgiving, sorry-ass movie.

PLAYING TO THE GODS: Last week I saw Venus in Fur, at the Studio Theater through July 10. Basic story: Pompous playwright/director who thinks nobody really feels passion anymore is auditioning actresses for the role of Wanda in his adaptation of Sacher-Masoch's novel (i.e. the one masochism is named for). A blowsy New Yorkeress stumbles across his transom in hooker heels, too late for her audition (which isn't on the schedule anyway), but insists on reading for him. She is more than she appears! An erotic game of cat-and-other-cat ensues as power shifts from director to actress and each one struggles for the upper hand--or are they really fighting to be the one who submits?

So far so cliched, really. The whole "topping from the bottom" power-shift dynamic seems really played to me at this point. It's so often presented as sexy and edgy and challenging when it's really a rejection of the idea of genuine submission, suffering, or unwanted self-knowledge. Four things raise Venus in Fur--by the same guy who wrote that Spinoza play I loved so much--above the old joke about the masochist who says "Beat me!" and the sadist who says "No!"

1. It's very funny! And it doesn't rely on faux shock or spray-on sexiness. The laughs allow the audience to relax enough that the genuine danger can sneak up on us.

2. Studio found two superb actors. Christian Conn is convincing as the playwright, whose shallowness hides hidden depths of his own, and Erica Sullivan is just terrific as the actress. She gnaws the scenery with aplomb! I loved watching her.

3. The power dynamics do come to a resolution, and it's not one which simply affirms the usual American preference for individuality, self-control, and self-acceptance.

4. This play made me think about the gods in a slightly new light. It suggests, or at least it suggested to me!, that genuine submission can only be submission to divinity, for two reasons. First, with any human-all-too-human beloved or master, there's a moment when it becomes obvious that their judgment is no more intrinsically or universally reliable than mine. There's a sort of "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" moment--when O ditches Rene for Sir Stephen, for example, giving the lie to the personae all three are pretending to embody. No merely human woman is going to know this playwright thoroughly enough to devote herself completely to his education. Actual humans make mistakes, say dumb things, miss their cues, fail to suss us out when we wish they would, and have their own agendas which are often pettier than the agendas we project onto them.

And then, too, any mortal beloved will be conquered by death. Death can in turn be conquered to some extent by art--this is one of the subtler themes of the play, surfacing now and then like a gilt thread in a big dark tapestry--but for real mastery you would need a real immortal.

Anyway I do recommend the play if it sounds at all interesting to you; it's very well done and I feel validated in my decision to make David Ives a playwright I watch for.

"OBJECTS OF ART AND RITUAL OBJECTS." Hey, somebody's writing about the thing I wrote about in this InsideCatholic column! (Also, the National Gallery of Art's "Sacred Made Real" exhibit--sorry for subscribers-only link--included many "working" artworks which returned home to grace monasteries and get paraded through the streets on feast days.)

Stone Owl link via WAWIV.

During an extended visit to Soviet Russia in the Brezhnev era of stagnation, on several occasions I was asked by acquaintances of only a casual nature whether or not I believe in God. Why, I wondered, would anyone on the streets of Moscow in the 1970s care about my personal religious life? This had never been a topic of interest in the United States, except, if ever, among close friends.
--from the introduction to Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, The Soviet Intelligentsia, And the Russian Orthodox Church; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt says as much about where in America she lived--or rather, where she didn't live--as about Russia....

Since 2008, Mississippi has trimmed its corrections budget by about 5%, to $332 million. Reducing the prison population hasn't caused the state's violent crime rate to rise. In fact, the rate falling toward 1970s levels, and the state's recidivism rate has decreased to 30% in the last four years — well below the national average.

Mississippi's effort is being closely followed by other states. Ohio's Senate, for instance, is considering a potentially sweeping overhaul of the state's corrections system. There is, of course, the risk that the' inability of states to invest in rehabilitation programs for ex-offenders reentering a society that still bars them from jobs and housing will ultimately cause crime, and recidivism rates, to rise. Nevertheless, Epps believes his reforms will ultimately pay-off. "I'm proud to say we're moving Mississippi into the 21st century."

--Time, cited here, via WAWIV

SEND THIS, GUNS, AND MONEY. I have lawyers in the family already.

Via TKB.

LOSING IN FRONT OF YOUR HOME CROWD: I have watched neither Friday Night Lights nor Glee, but I have not been able to get this column comparing the two out of my head. FNL comes across as both better and more countercultural, which does not surprise me. (I do think it's bizarre that the author reads "everyone moves away from Dillon because it's a dead-end small town" as a rejection of solipsism--I'm pretty sure she means that since the characters we like get switched out for new characters, the audience's focus remains on the town as a whole, a community, but she makes this process sound a lot less tragic than the "meager chance of improvement earned at the price of leaving your hometown" storyline really is. Why shouldn't people "loom[] around Dillon forever"--why is staying home presented so negatively, given the author's other premises? Anyway that's just a bobble in an otherwise terrific piece.)

Link via Wesley Hill.

Given the findings in this study, it is tempting to idealize the working-class patterns of exchange and reciprocity in an overly individualistic society. But[] the flip side to the positive interdependence is conflict and resentment over whether someone owes someone else a favor. In addition, the concern over reputation and privacy among the working-class respondents was sometimes overwhelming. It is also tempting to idealize middle-class patterns of friendship if one is interested in self-development and the expression of individuality. But middle-class friendships sometimes left respondents feeling isolated and alone. For the middle class, times of trouble are times when friendship, whose focus is shared interests and leisure, may not survive.
--"'Always There for Me': Friendship Patterns and Expectations Among Middle- and Working-Class Men and Women," Karen Walker, Sociological Forum v 10 no 2 (Jun 1995) pp 273-296

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: SO CUTE! I had a wee little stuffed potato for lunch, and another for dinner. The basic how-to is here, and I didn't deviate from that, but of course you can make the filling from whatever you like. The new potatoes I used were about half the size of your basic russet, and the filling was tomato, jalapeno, basil, Greek yogurt, "authentic Mexican" Sargento shredded cheese blend (though I prefer their inauthentic Mexican blend), salt, a bit of cayenne for the second batch since I was low on jalapeno, dried oregano, garlic, and the innards of the potatoes. All of that got piled high on the cut and scooped-out potato halves. The result was delicious: tangy from the yogurt, comforting from the golden crispy-fluffy potato, and spicy. This took slightly more effort and noticeably more time than most of my meals, but it was much easier than I'd expected it to be.

"She reregistered the apartment in her own name. I'm like the heir or something."

"Then kill her! Have you forgotten how it's done? Make it look like an accident."

"I can't. I just got baptized. I made a vow, for the rest of my life." ...

"How about this," Maxim said, interrupting the silence. "I'll kick her out myself. Then you'll be off the hook. Where's your place?"
--in which someone volunteers to be a shabbos goy for murder; from Vladimir Tuchkov, "Pure Ponds, Dirty Sex or Two Army Buddies Meet," in Moscow Noir ed. Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen

"PHILOSOPHERS," 1917.

"Keeping your options open is like suicide in tiny, tiny increments."
– Rob Gordon in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity

Via comments here.

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

CANTERBURY TALES BOARD GAME. This seemed like the sort of thing you people might like! Via Mark Shea.

FLAILING: Can someone tell me how to be able to type in Cyrillic? I'm on a MacBook, running OpenOffice word processing software, and I have tried switching the language to Russian but all that does is make everything fail the spellcheck.

Your reward, which you receive in advance: Irina Slutskaya as Catwoman. You're welcome.

"CHINESE PRISONERS ALLEGEDLY FORCED TO PLAY 'WORLD OF WARCRAFT.'" Via Ratty.

NOW THIS IS POOR BUT HONEST. "And if the new job doesn't work out after you bet all of your chips, you're triple fucked. And at that point the world will wag its finger at you and tell you how irresponsible it was to move when you were so poor. 'Ha, you poor people are always doing stupid shit like that!'"

Cracked.com, so obviously the language and imagery are quite rough, but I am a huge fan of John Cheese and find his writing almost always worth my time.

ELSEWHERE: Figured I'd tell you all about a couple of new/relaunched blogs. First, you may already have noticed The Groom's Family on the blogroll. This is a blog dedicated to exploring the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, from the perspective of a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity. Hey TGF, this is your reminder that you promised to lend me Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church, by Judith Kornblatt, when you finished it! Gimme.

And I'm very glad to report that Alias Clio has started up again! The author, "Musette," is an artsy, fashion-conscious, romantic Catholic lady of French-Canadian extraction; the blog will focus on reviews of books related in some way to history. She opens with a review of the recent Henry VIII novel Wolf Hall.

UPDATE: The director's commentary for Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains is really unnecessary, but the actresses' commentary track is adorable.

HEY, JOE, I'M ALREADY THERE: Have you ever wanted to watch a John Hughes movie in which the Sex Pistols are played by Bikini Kill?

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains!

Look, it really is a John Hughes movie at its heart, so there are cartoonish racial/ethnic things which are clearly meant to parallel the class and sexual exploitation the moviemakers really understand, and which are therefore kind of attempts at empathy but which come across as gross funhouse mirrors. The class and sex issues are incredibly heartfelt though--the fluorescent colors are used to paint real, raw emotions. You can see it in the mother's-forgiveness scene but it's present from the very first scene.

It's a morality tale as well, and in no way a subtle one. Chasing fame and money is bad even when it's understandable due to a home life which led you to think that escaping your origins is an immeasurably-valuable and almost-unattainable goal. There's a bit in the liner notes for Chumbawamba's Shhh! album where they say something like, "Poor but honest just meant always having less than everyone else"; you're set up to fail somebody, sacrificing either your own integrity or your family's welfare. I see this a lot at the pregnancy center. People learn to work the system because where else can they work? So yeah... this movie knows why that happens, and also why the zero-sum game of "I've been jerked around so I can do whatever I want" is still cruel and disloyal. Again, it's a primary-colors morality tale, but not an entirely stupid or unsympathetic one. The "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" scene in this movie actually manages to be rawer than the true-life original.

Diane Lane, apparently just 15 when this was filmed, is perfect; actually all the actresses are perfect. The men not so much, but oh well.

The "professionals" song is pretty clearly based on the Raincoats' terrific "Off-Duty Trip."

The final MTV version of the Stains' big, stolen hit is so amazingly perfect that I could almost hear Casey Kacem introducing it. "Q-107, Washington's top 40! That was 'Karma Chameleon'; now here's the Stains!" Absolutely incredible pastiche. About to listen to the first of two commentary tracks.

"FOR MANY BLACKS, THERE'S ONLY ONE BIBLE, AND IT'S THE KJV":

On Sundays, C. Elizabeth Floyd, shows up for worship at Trinity Baptist Church of Metro Atlanta, with her Bible in hand.

But the large, black leather Bible with dog-eared pages and hand-written notes in the margins isn't just any Bible: It's the King James Version.

And Floyd, like many African-Americans, wouldn't have it any other way. It's more than mere tradition. A civil rights veteran called the KJV's thees and thous "romantic," and a scholar spoke of black churches' "love affair" with the king's English. ...

"It's the predominant version of the Bible that's used at Trinity." More than other Americans, African-Americans have clung to the KJV's 400-year-old elevated prose. According to a recent study by LifeWay Research, only 14 percent of African-Americans have never read the KJV, compared to 27 percent of U.S. adults overall.

The Rev. Cheryl Sanders, an ordained minister and professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, said the KJV's soaring language can uplift listeners, especially those who have been oppressed.

"It's a loftiness to the language that I believe appealed to people who are constantly being told, `You don't count. You're nobody. You're at the bottom rung of the ladder," said Sanders, who has written about black Christians' use of the KJV. "If I can memorize a verse of Scripture, it gives me a certain sense of dignity."

more (via GetReligion)

"NOW I'M A LAMP." A couple cheap or obvious ones, but most of these are great. Via TKB.

HIGH HEELS ON A WINDOWSILL: THE DEFINITION OF REVOLUTIONARY SUCCESS: I haven't got much to say about Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel's lush biopic about Cuban gay/dissident writer (the adjectives are interchangeable) Reinaldo Arenas. If you know the basic outlines of the guy's life, you know what to expect, really.

I will say that the one major objection I had at the start of the movie--why are they talking in heavily-accented English, rather than either Spanish or accentless English?--ultimately struck me as a really interesting choice. It started to make sense for me during the class in Russian, and then there was the scene with Arenas and the exiles speaking in French: Using heavy accents is a way to express the position of an island caught between America and the Soviet Union, with no sense that her own language is adequate to the political world of her times. The accents also, of course, make Cuba's global marginalization mirror the internal exile of the homosexual. If you don't speak Spanish you will miss some of the movie--although an English-speaker can probably guess the meaning of the mural of Castro, with the slogan, LA HISTORIA ME ABSOLVERA--but mostly I think the decision to make the movie in an inherently marginal and alienating accent was the right one.

The final moment of violence, well... if it really happened then so be it and I'm sorry. If it didn't, putting it in your movie seems to me like a gross concession to the American revulsion from suffering. I would say more but don't want to make it too obvious what happens; suffice it to say that I think the treatment of suffering-in-Cuba and suffering-in-America would have been much deeper and more complex had this thing not happened.

"WE LIKE LISTENING": The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or, in its American titles, A Girl in Love or Never Read the Comments! SPOILERS, obviously.

Katharina Blum lives in West Germany, and it's Carnival so everyone is loosened-up and in costume. She is generally considered quite prudish, but goes to a party and ends up taking a young man home. He's a terrorist of some unspecified Red hue.

The next morning the cops invade her home. The moment in which the lady cop balances herself by putting her hand on Katharina's naked buttock is especially harsh, almost defining the word "objectification"; and I'll also call your gendered attention to the moment which provokes it, when a male cop is startled by accidental gunfire and he responds to his embarrassment by yelling at Katharina to put on clothes instead of her robe. She is interrogated. Over the course of the next however-many days, she is interrogated (they note that she pays for her own coffee) and newspaper reporters collude in the destruction of her reputation. Her divorce, her parentage, her aunt's life are all dragged through the mud. The press explicitly works hand-in-glove with the government. (“Front-page story” appears to be an Englishism, as Schadenfreude is a Germanicism.)

Katharina's life has its shaming elements, as whose life doesn't?, and those elements are deployed for political gain. This isn't subtle; the "reporters" blatantly lie, and Katharina is excoriated for preferring money to virtue by people who are quite obviously choosing cash over kindness. This is a morality tale about the cruelties inherent in our reality-TV morality tales.

I'm also struck, of course, by how opportunistic we are in our uses of culturally-sanctioned hatred. Katharina's accusers rely on misogyny for exactly the same reason that Sarah Palin's and Hillary Clinton's accusers so often rely on it (and Paris Hilton's or Snooki's, really, while we're here--this isn't about politics so much as it is about publicly-acceptable scapegoatesses): because they can. Play by my rules and I won't call in the referee.

There's so much else to talk about: There's the role of photography in shaping our notion of "truth"; there's the vomit in the toilet of the first cell to which Katharina is led and her pathetic feminine attempt to clean it up. (I think this is somewhat echoed in her insistence in cleaning and caring for her mother's body after death. There's the same association of femininity with vulnerability and shame, and yet also with care and cleaning.) There's Katharina's aunt's reliance on the guest/host relationship in the face of the overwhelming twentieth-century state-vs.-individual bulldozing. There's Katharina's driving, “mostly when it rains and when I'm alone”; the interrogator's viciously dry invocation of scarcity economics ("Perhaps we can learn how to own an apartment"). Surrealism: The stain on the door (echoes of Barton Fink) which Katharina opens to find spies putting on their costumes of sheiks and whores. Carnival gives all kinds of opportunities, to all kinds of maskers. An undeclared life: her unexplained miles on the meter. The ladies' room as the place where alliances might be formed. This is a really intensely-observed movie.

Power is so attentive to the cruelties of detail. Detail gives us our facial features, our humanity, and it's so often the small brutal detail by which we attempt to remove that humanity from others. Power creates its own narratives the same way everyone else does, through the thousand little choices of where to turn the light and where to throw a shadow by which a person is made into a persona. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is as much an indictment of art as anything in Shakespeare. And then there's the anonymous letter-writer, telling her, "Learn to pray again." Absolutely horrible, and absolutely what would happen.

The smash-cut from “We live in a free country!” to the tabloid Joan-Jett-reformatory photos of Katharina is pretty classic. Libertarians often argue that culture will take over from government in sanctioning wrong behavior. I wonder how many of them really want the punishments of internet culture, from which there is no escape. (I know the counterarguments, of which the strongest is that the culture which shapes the non-legal punishments inevitably shapes the legal—government is in no way an escape hatch from the problems of culture, and in many ways compounds those problems, especially due to civil servants' elite status relative to the people they regulate. But I wish more libertarians argued that the government is like a market with guns, whereas corporations are merely markets vying for guns. Or, in other words, Tim Carney for President in 2014!)

“You're divorced. You have no ties.” This is spoken by an interrogator, and is patently false, as it is always false. Divorce is not rewind. Most obviously when there are children; but even when there are not, divorce is never control-Z.

The absolute betrayal on her face, the iron control and the broken trust, is just shattering when she realizes that the priests only let her come to their sanctuary in order to make her conciliate her ex-husband. Again she's forced to recognize that everyone wants to use her new vulnerability to their own ends.

And then the final scene, a speech in favor of the freedom of the press, is over-the-top villainous. All my sympathies are engaged, and yet I can't help but think, Do you really WANT to cut off the branch you're perched on? I don't know, I suppose you could argue that the greatest virtue of unshakable freedom of the press (which has happened where, ever?) is that other artists can point out the destructive effects of the press without calling for censorship.

CROATIA MUSEUM OF BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS WINS AWARD. Build your own poem. Via TKB.

"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.

Von Bayern sat down across the table from the two men. "I was an associate professor, working at the University at Alexandria. An Imperial official, a magistrate... well, she seduced me first. Or I allowed myself to be seduced. Or... There is not much blood involved, actually, not at one time, unless the person is driven to gorge. And infection is not inevitable. That is what a young man says to a young woman he desires, is it not? There is not so much blood, not so much pain, as she has heard, and no consequence is inevitable. Until one morning one wakes up, and is sick." He smiled, absolutely without humor. "Hungering for strange things...."

--John Ford, The Dragon Waiting, in a description of vampirism

ON DECK: Uh, neither of those were the real post I promised, which will be about The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. You'll get it tomorrow night. I'm sorry!

ONLINE YA FICTION DYSTOPIA GENERATOR. To create your own one-trick-pony novel where an all-powerful government has the same idee fixe that you do!

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS YOUR REASON, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A DOUBT.

CAMEL THORN TREES. Not a painting; via Rrrr. Real posting soon.

LIKE THOSE OTHER STICKY VALENTINES: A lot of people seem to view the killing of Osama Bin Laden as a symbolic victory. I think that's right in many ways. But at the same time I think it's something else; how do we know the difference between a symbolic act and a sentimental act?

I know part of my distaste for the celebrations of his death (beyond the basic fact that celebrating even the death of Hitler is very different from celebrating victory in World War II) was because it seemed to make war into sentiment. Mothers die in Iraq but we feel very good! That's an attitude which can only exist in the absence of the draft.

Anyway, since I'm constantly defending symbolic politics I thought I should note how easily it can serve as the vehicle for saccharine fantasy; vengeance fantasy, in this case.

MOSFILM UPLOADS CELLULOID CLASSICS TO YOUTUBE. Via TKB.

Russian film lovers can explore a treasure trove of Soviet films as legendary movie studio Mosfilm has posted dozens of its most famous films on YouTube for anyone to watch for free.

The films, legendary for many Russians but often little known in the West, include the comedies of Georgian-Russian director Georgi Daneliya, “Gentlemen of Fortune” and “Mimino”; “The White Sun Of The Desert,” a much-loved adventure story set in Central Asia that is always watched by cosmonauts before a space launch; and classic melodramas such as Eldar Ryazanov’s “A Cruel Romance” with Nikita Mikhalkov and “A Railway Station for Two” starring the late Lyudmila Gurchenko.

Every week, the studio will upload five new films onto the channel, the studio said in an official press release, and expects to have 200 by the end of the year.

Other films uploaded include “Andrei Rublev” and “The Mirror,” two works by one of Russia’s greatest art-house directors, Andrei Tarkovsky.

more

SOKOBLOVSKY FARMS: RUSSIA'S FINEST PURVEYORS OF MINIATURE LAP GIRAFFES. Via MTM I think.

eta: OK, I thought this was just random ridiculous satire of The New Russian Millionaires (TM), but it turns out to be an ad for DirecTV (which I don't know what that is, as Radar O'Reilly would say). That makes me a lot less okay with the intense, OTT Russian stereotyping.

ONCE AGAIN, I AM STARTLED TO FIND I ALREADY HAVE THE PERFECT TAG FOR THIS. Via... DLB maybe?

THE REAL WORLD: CHINESE GULAG. Last night we stumbled upon the Laogai Research Foundation's Laogai Museum, a very quick walk north from Dupont Circle. LRF was founded by Harry Wu, the fearless man who exposed the Chinese gulag system. We're visiting the museum soon, and if you're in DC, you should too. I'll tell you more about it once we've been inside.

(Post title is because of the bizarre coincidence that the museum is housed in the former Real World: DC rowhouse.)

THE DEAD FAITH OF THE LIVING... HOUSEKEY. Via DLB.

A LOT GOING ON AT BALKINIZATION. "Bin Laden's Greatest Legacy: The Surveillance State"; Deborah Pearlstein points out that even the merely strategic calculus on interrogation methods involves a lot more than just "Did we get a truthful answer to the question we happened to be asking this time?" (last paragraph); more on the role of torture in finding Bin Laden, with a bright glittering array of Newspeak euphemisms (second paragraph).

"ALL THE FROGS CROAK BEFORE THE STORM: DOSTOEVSKY VS. TOLSTOY ON HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS." Worth it regardless of what you make of the author's own position.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: SOCCA STAR. Socca (soccas? socci?) are fried chickpea pancakes, stupidly easy and tasty. I posted about them here and here.

Tonight, for dinner, I had THE BEST SOCCAS SO FAR. They came in three batches, which I will detail from least-awesome to stellar.

1. Thin soccas flavored only with minced jalapeno and a bit of salt, topped with habanero jack cheese and fresh tomato slices. I loved the thin crispiness--these were almost like quesadillas, really--and they were really tasty but not outstanding.

2. Slightly thicker socci, basically like slightly-too-large versions of silver dollar pancakes, flavored with "Moroccan mustard" (I still don't know what makes it Moroccan, but okay), minced jalapeno, salt, and some juice from a can of tomatoes. I let these cook in a very hot pan and was afraid I'd burnt them when I saw their very dark patches. Fortunately, they weren't burnt at all. The tangy mustard worked really well, although I was glad that these were the smallest batch as the flavor is strong. You don't need a lot of these to get the point.

3. THE BEST SOCCA. These were thicker than the "quesadilla" socca, and flavored with tomato-can juice, minced jalapeno and ginger, cumin, a tiny hit of cinnamon, garam masala, curry powder, a sesame-ginger dressing-type thing, and a bit of salt. These were ridiculously good, slightly exotic and spicy but not too hot (the chickpea flour is good at gentling the hot peppers) and just irresistible.

Once I'd minced the minced things, each batch took about 5 - 7 minutes I think, making socca a terrific choice for a quick, refreshing meal. Just be aware that the pancakes are a bit denser than you'd expect: Even small ones will fill you up fast.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN MODERN LOVE: I have a review in the current Weekly Standard of the Neue Galerie's "Vienna 1900" exhibit. It's a great show; go see it! It'll run until at June 27. The review is subscribers-only for now, but I'll let you know if that changes.

SOME LINKS ABOUT TORTURE, SINCE APPARENTLY WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THIS AGAIN. This Balkinization post mostly interesting to me for the intensely depressing poll data. I believe the children are the future!

Two takes on how the US got the intelligence which led to Bin Laden's death, in neither of which do we see an actual [ETA: by which I mean, admitted/confirmed] example of torture "working": 'here and here. Don't count on making up your mind on the moral issues based on these timelines, though; first of all, utilitarianism is evil, and second of all, the relevant information will probably remain classified for a very long time.

You people already know what I think.

A TRIVIAL POSTSCRIPT. While sometimes it is accurate to attribute actions you approve to "Obama" and actions you despise to "America," or vice versa, most of the time if you use that formula you're being a self-righteous jackass. Similarly if you can recognize either good or bad qualities in American culture but can't recognize these exact same qualities when displayed by Obama. As I think we should all be well aware by now, he is as American as anybody.

...Is this one of my meta-pharisaical posts again? "I'm so glad I'm not self-righteous like those other people!" Still, it seemed worth saying.

MAN UNWITTINGLY LIVE-TWEETS RAID THAT KILLED OSAMA BIN LADEN. In case you haven't seen this yet. Via PES.

I wish we were celebrating the end of a war. For more on that, my friends seem to follow and recommend Small Wars Journal, so you might check them out.

THE NEEDLE'S EYE AND THE DAMAGE DONE: In 2008, Walter Olson of Overlawyered recommended This Gun for Hire. So now you know how long it takes something to reach the top of my Netflix queue! Here are a few thoughts on this terrific movie.

First, Veronica Lake is extraordinary. Her sad, forgiving eyes and husky, hopeful, low-rent voice might be even more startling here than they were in Sullivan's Travels. She's a noir woman who is neither brassy nor slinky, with more future than past and more wisdom than sense.

Alan Ladd is also really good here. He gets all the sentiment of the show (based on a Graham Greene novel, which I suppose explains the brief suicidal-tendencies scene) but he makes a difficult part work about as well as it could.

The direction is classic noir, opening with Ladd, as killer-for-hire Raven, sweaty and off-kilter in his flophouse bed. We get venetian blinds, centered framing when the major villain is finally cornered, candles in a thunderstorm and searchlights raking a railyard, menacing opulence and magic tricks. This is a hugely engaging and entertaining movie.

Its characterizations also reminded me, unexpectedly, of Jamaica Inn, which I recently rewatched as part of AFI's Hitchcock retrospective. Both movies feature a smart, basically "lawful good," resourceful young woman whose sympathies are torn between a lawman and an underclass killer. In both movies compassion, guilt, and repentance are the provinces of those without much money; the rich are irredeemably cruel. I think This Gun for Hire glosses over its killer's opening violence toward a housemaid, whereas Jamaica Inn doesn't prettify the head wrecker's cruelty to his wife, but overall their characters and situations are surprisingly similar. In both movies, power corrupts--the power of the gun, but even more deeply, the power of money.

THIS IS YOUR LIFE: GENOCIDE EDITION:

I take This American Life for granted and often it can seem too familiar and predictable. Some of the more famous voices on the show grate on me, and the giggles, awkwardness and teenager-y cuteness can feel contrived; sometimes I just want them to sound like grownups. Yet, not so rarely they come through with something pretty great that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere. Jogging the other day I listened to this pretty amazing piece about a few episodes of This Is Your Life from the 1950s that brought the show’s usual approach to the challenging realm of atrocity survivors. TIYL was of course a hugely popular show with an audience of many millions; it was hosted by Ralph Edwards, who also taught Sunday School and was one of those 1950s reassuring voices of a benevolent status quo.

The This American Life piece (btw, it occurs to me that the show’s name must be indebted to This is Your Life — duh, I guess) is about a couple of jaw-dropping episodes in which Edwards brought (under false pretenses — guests were almost always surprised) on the show, to be confronted by friends and associates from their past, first, a Holocaust survivor (according to This American Life host Allison Silverman, the first person to discuss her experiences in the camps on American television), second, a Hiroshima survivor.

more, including footage from the Holocaust survivor's episode. Via Ratty.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE! You don't have to know Russian--just pick one option and go from there. Super-cute and fun, with great creepy bits--be sure to play around until you get the flies' Hamlet! Via EWC and MTM.

ARS LONGA, UNIVERSITAS BREVIS: Uh, sorry for the probably-mangled Latin. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about my Gay Catholic Whatnot talk for Carnegie Mellon U's Newman Center. The audience seemed intrigued. I could intrigue audiences on your campus! Why not invite me? If you're not on the DC Metro I'd need you to pay for my transportation plus a nominal speaking fee, and feed and shelter me if I'm expected to stay overnight, but I would be very happy to have dinner w/students, do an extended Q&A, stay after the talk to speak with people privately, or whatever else I can do to reach out to students with questions on all things romoerotic.

The one thing I did want to mention is that one student (not from CMU, I think) described the atmosphere on her campus in a way which made it sound, to me, pretty vulgar. A lot of campus Catholic groups seem to do Bible study, prayer groups, and corporal works of mercy for those already within Mother Church, and focus their evangelization efforts on discussions of controversial issues. I wondered whether they'd do better to give students opportunities to encounter beauty. Why not show Therese (this one), or do posters with poetry from St John of the Cross or Thomas a Kempis's reworking of the Song of Songs as a hymn to Christ crucified?

There's more than one way to be countercultural; and contemporary college culture is so often banal (not only at secular colleges, either) that offering an encounter with sublimity might be the most oppositional thing campus Christians could do.

DRIVING THE POINT HOME: It's entirely possible I just didn't get The Walworth Farce, part of Studio Theater's Enda Walsh/"New Ireland" series. It's about a violent, delusional father who forces his two sons to reenact, day in and day out, his version of the events which led them to flee Cork for London. Supposedly a comedy?

It got about half a standing ovation tonight and although all four actors are really good, I have no idea why anyone would offer more than polite applause to what struck me as an unfunny, strenuously written and obvious ("For what are we if we're not our stories?" and quite a bit more in this vein), and often boring "edgy" play. I almost left at the intermission, and while it did improve from there, I just... would like my mortal hours back, please. I'm sorry. The actors really were good, and I suspect the direction is really good if you overlook the decision to stage this thing in the first place.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: FAST AND FEAST! Two successful experiments.

First, the last meal I had during Lent: pasta with faked-up peanut sauce. I cooked spaghetti. While it was cooking I heated some olive oil in a pot. Chopped garlic and ginger and sliced onion went into the pot and got golden with browned bits. Then I added maybe two tbsps? of creamy peanut butter, some milk, and some bottled ginger-sesame sauce, and hit everything with the immersion blender. Added cumin, a bit of cinnamon, cayenne, and dried rosemary, and fresh basil, then buttered the pasta and topped it with the sauce.

This was really delicious, although I had the pasta-to-sauce ratio off (I'd intended to make this a very small bowl of food) so I had a bunch of leftover spaghetti. But I had been simultaneously intrigued by and fearful of this idea, and I was very pleased with how it turned out. I'll definitely make this again.

Second, the salad I had for dinner tonight: a random salad. The base of the salad was some thinly-sliced yellow onion, a little more than half of a round red farmer's-market apple (I don't remember the exact breed of apple, but it was described at the market as "good for lunchboxes"), two chopped cevapi sausages (pork and beef) leftover from dinner at Slaviya with Camassia, some shredded French sorrel, some shredded fresh basil, chunks and crumbles of chopped parmesan, and a toasted sourdough roll torn into roughly croutonish things. Then I whisked "Moroccan mustard" and olive oil with a fork until it emulsified and poured that as a dressing over the salad.

This was absolutely at its best when I got some of all of the ingredients in one forkful. The sausage and apple balanced one another perfectly. This is a tangy salad (apple + mustard + sorrel) so the parmesan and toasted bread really help create balance as well. I know the ingredients do sound a bit kitchen-sinky but I loved this.

"JESUS IS RISEN" BEIRUT FLASH MOB! I hate flash mobs as a thing, but I can make exceptions. Via Mark Shea.

Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful…Here are other signs, according to the files, that a prisoner is dangerous: attitude toward the Star Spangled Banner; having been caught wearing a Casio F91W watch (a common model); perceived support for fellow inmates who committed suicide (there have been five).And more: according to the Guardian, the “GTMO matrix of threat indicators for enemy combatants,” which runs to seventeen pages, also lists having a connection to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or I.S.I.; given how much money we’ve given Pakistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda, that detail alone is enough to make one’s head spin, if the Casio didn’t do it already…Is a Casio watch better than no reason at all? “It is undetermined as to why the detainee was transferred to GTMO,” the base commander wrote in a report on one of “three hapless Tajiks,” as the Guardian described them, who had been shipped there after being rounded up with others—not on what supporters of Guantánamo like to call the battlefield, but in the library at the University of Karachi, in Pakistan. They were held for two years.

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25 ABANDONED YUGOSLAVIA MONUMENTS THAT LOOK LIKE THEY'RE FROM THE FUTURE. I can't believe I already have the perfect tag for this.

(503):

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

IF ANY HAVE TARRIED EVEN UNTIL THE ELEVENTH HOUR: As someone who made what I think might have been my only Lenten confession on Holy Thursday (I know, okay?), I was struck at least as much by the paragraph quoted from St John Chrysostom as by the actual, and amazing, story in this post. Go to Confession! The lines are long, but you can think of it as the Disneyland of Purgatory--eventually you'll get on that rollercoaster!

...Fr. George’s remarkable story of faith and courage is vividly told in the exemplary book, Father George Calciu: Interviews, Homilies, and Talks. The book is primarily a first person biography taken from several interviews with Fr. George. But it also contains many of his sermons, most notably the famous, “Seven Homilies to the Youth,” a series of Lenten evangelical and anti-communist sermons Fr. George presented in defiance of the Romanian tyranny in 1978.

George Calciu was the youngest of eleven children, raised by devout parents as a faithful Orthodox Christian. Romania became communist in 1944, and the government soon began to crack down on the Church. Calciu was a medical student at the time, and his open faith made him suspect. He was imprisoned in 1948, where he was subjected to 1984-style mind control experiments—tortured until he denied Christ, and then forced to torture others toward the same end. “They wanted our souls,” he recalled, “not our bodies.”

Anguished over his “weakness,” Calciu vowed to become a priest if he survived. Released in 1964, he married, had a son, and obtained a doctorate in French. But the call remained, and when he took an ostensible French professorship at a theological seminary, he was secretly studying for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1973.

Fr. George and his family lived quietly until the communist government renewed its assault on faith. Heeding what he considered a divine call to speak out sacrificially, he offered seven homilies to young Romanians, one homily building on the next during each Wednesday of Lent. It was a rare moment of courage for 1978 Romania: When the church was closed to him by his terrified Patriarch, he preached from its steps. When the gates were locked, the growing audience of youth defiantly climbed the fence to hear him. ...

He spent years in solitary. He knew nothing of his family, and they, nothing of him. One night, Fr. George heard the joyful peal of many church bells: It was Easter. Early the next morning, the worst guard in the prison—who delighted in torture—entered the priest’s cell. He should have turned his face to the wall. Instead, Fr. George looked his tormenter boldly in the eye and proclaimed, “Christ is risen!” Rather than delivering a blow, the guard paused, and blurted out, “In Truth He is Risen!” and nervously backed out of the cell.

That was when Fr. George experienced a vision of what Orthodox theology calls the Uncreated Light...

more (via WAWIV)

NIETZSCHE PLAYS #OPERAPLOT. Via... I forget.

One should never know whom exactly one has married. [Lohengrin.]

Old corrupted females prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths. [Parsifal.] ...

It may have the direst consequences if one doesn't go to bed at the right time. [Lohengrin again.]

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POETRY OF WOMEN'S HAIR. Via TKB.

[Frame 1]
Linus. I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow

[Frame 2]
Linus. Maybe we should think only about today...

[Frame 3]
Charlie Brown. No, that's giving up...

[Frame 4]
Charlie Brown. I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better
--a Peanuts cartoon transcript, sent to me by Ratty

AND BECAUSE YOUR LOVE IS MEASURED WITH A PROTRACTOR/I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU... SWAN AND TRACTOR.

eta: Huh, for some reason I'd gotten it into my head that this was an English swan, when in fact it is German. Tags edited to reflect! Off to Pittsburgh!

MOONLIGHT ENCORES: I checked out My Sergei, Ekaterina Gordeeva's memoir of her brief, happy marriage to Sergei Grinkov, because I'd heard that it was a window on to life, marriage, and dating in the late days of the Soviet Union and especially the Soviet sports machine. The book is so focused and so simply, cleanly-written that it doesn't actually illuminate the cultural context as much as I'd hoped, but it's a limpid portrayal of true love and the journey toward adulthood.

It's also quite candid. To take maybe the most obvious example, Gordeeva describes her plans to abort her child. Her mother and her priest basically talk/manipulate her out of it, and Daria becomes her most precious and lasting reminder of Sergei after his death. Ordinarily I would wonder what it must feel like to read that one's mother seriously considered abortion, but Gordeeva's love for her daughter (as a person in her own right, not solely a memento of lost love) shines through so clearly. The message, to the extent that there is one, is not only that children are a blessing but that it's later than you think.

There are also really detailed, lovely descriptions of the emotions behind the programs of Gordeeva and Grinkov's last year. I can't wait to watch or re-watch them with the insight Gordeeva provided.