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.

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.

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....

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.

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

ANTAEUS COMMISERATES:

This thread is like good theater: comedy, tragedy, pathos, an asshole getting thrown outdoors by someone in his underwear, and a cat who survived a fire.

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HOME IS ANYWHERE YOU HANG YOUR HEAD:

For instance, nineteen-year-old Christina says, “Oh, yeah, my dad had failed as a father, but he was my father. He loved me, and it’s been very hard for me to try to build a relationship with him. I want to have a relationship with him, because you only get one dad. Even if your mom remarries, to a certain extent you only get one dad.”

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(I don't think even adults really experience marriage as a "pure," free choice--nor should they. But even so, the difference between their choices and the terrified, dependent, sorry choices of the children are pretty notable.)

TYPICAL GIRLS... ARE SO CONFUSING: Here are two X-Ray Spex songs I'd never heard until tonight! "Good Time Girl"; "Peace Meal." The latter is... bubble-gum vegetariana plus Heideggerian "factory farms are concentration camps" awfulness. All I can say is that the X-Ray Spex were usually a lot better than that. Still, I'm a completist with them.

I still remember that August week in Rehoboth--the week I turned thirteen, or maybe fourteen?--when I failed to learn to ride a bike, uselessly called out a t-shirt retailer on his homophobia, rode the Ferris wheel, entered the Haunted Mansion (it still smells the same ten years later), won a neon parrot at Skee-Ball, had a half-donut with a cigarette stuck in it for my birthday cake, purchased the black lipstick I would need for the coming year from the Halloween store, and bought my first X-Ray Spex cassette. Also wore a stuffed frog on my head, if photographic evidence can be trusted.

BLOOD OF PALOMAR:

And although biology is obviously among Beto's primary concerns, destiny is the operative word. I don't think the Palomarians have the ability to escape the way the Locas do. Not all of them need to escape, mind you--there's a lot of really warm and adorable and hilarious and awesome stuff going down in Palomar--but whatever walks alongside them in their lives is gonna walk alongside them till the very end.

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EVERYBODY GOES HOME IN THE END.

THANK GOD FOR MISSISSIPPI: There is a fun meme called "red families vs. blue families." This Seussian formula may not be especially based on the book of the same name, which I haven't read and which I therefore don't want to assimilate to the sins of its followers. But the meme itself is not really new.

The idea is that families in "blue states" are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile "red states" produce children (they produce more children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say "this isn't new," I mean, "I got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago."

These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one's parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life's to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you're "stable," rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.

You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states--whether we're talking about Massachusetts or Italy--where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?

You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called "red state" cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how "red state" life works, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.

These are all things you could do.

The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame "red state" families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they're really promoting abortion, 'cause it's their fault they haven't adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It's not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It's about Baptists suck.

You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.

Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it's just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the "red vs. blue families" commentators sound.

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

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

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

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

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

DAUGHTERS OF IT'S-COMPLICATED:

In June of 1945, with memories of Nazi book-burning still vivid, a group called the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada excommunicated Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, after which they burned his newly published Sabbath Prayer Book. Although Kaplan is less known (and less read) today than his contemporaries Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, he was in many ways the most radical Jewish philosopher or theologian of his era. So it is good to see that his first book, the influential "Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life," has just returned to print. Published by Rabbi Kaplan in 1934, it is a masterpiece of 20th-century Jewish thought.

Although Kaplan grew up in an Orthodox home (he was born in Lithuania and arrived with his family in New York when he was 8) and served as a rabbi at Orthodox congregations, his increasingly un-Orthodox thinking led him in 1922 to found his own congregation in New York, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ). There, and at the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was a senior (and sometimes controversial) faculty member for more than 50 years, Kaplan continued to refine the ideas set out in his 1934 work.

As its title implies, "Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life" reflects Kaplan's effort to redefine how modern American Jewry thinks of itself. Judaism is not only a religion, Kaplan stated; it is a people with its own history, identity, culture and civilization. Moreover, like any civilization, to remain vital it must continue to evolve to meet and adapt to the challenges and needs of each new generation. It must be reconstructed, so to speak--or else risk losing its purpose. ...

A believer in gender equality long before the term political correctness became a cliché, Kapan in 1922 "invented" the modern-day bat mitzvah--in which 12-year-old girls (like their male counterparts, 13-year-old boys, at their bar mitzvahs) symbolically accept the religious responsibilities of adulthood—when, at Sabbath services one Saturday morning, he called his oldest daughter to the pulpit and had her read from the Torah scroll. Since then, of course, this then-unheard-of custom has become an accepted, even expected rite-of-passage among Jews in all but the Orthodox branch of the faith.

...Most controversial of all, he rejected the supernatural concept of God in favor of a naturalistic view of a transcendent power behind nature and within us that helps us aspire to the highest level of moral action and ethical behavior. Kaplan was no atheist (as his critics asserted), but his definition of God as "the power that makes for salvation" allows for a broader interpretation of the potential for goodness that lies within each individual.

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IT'S THE FEAST DAY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, protector of exiles.

What makes possible the psychic translation of the surgical incursions into the body into a poetics of healing is a kind of transsexual somatic memory. Surgery is made sense of as a literal and figurative re-membering, a restorative drive that is indeed common to accounts of reconstructive surgeries among nontranssexual subjects and perhaps inherent in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.
--Second Skins. This longing for and nostalgic memory of a home (a home in one's own flesh) which has never been experienced reminds me very strongly of Augustine's discussion of our memories of Adam's happiness. (Which... I only vaguely remember, at this point, your joke here. Am I making this up? It's certainly related to the Augustine-stuff I discuss here; the basic idea, as I understand it, is that we share not only in the legacy of Adam's sin but also the memory of his happiness, and it's this remembered happiness which allows us to long for goodness and to recognize it [when we do recognize it!] in this life.)

Operative in Sacks's and Anzieu's practice as clinicians is that same narrative drive held as most precious in transsexual autobiography: from fragmentation to integration; from alienation to reconciliation; from loss to restoration.
--Second Skins

LILAC SEASONS IN THE LAND OF DREAMS: I have a column in the new American Conservative. This one is about Shepherd Park, the DC neighborhood where I grew up: the language of masks and the silence of skin.

I don't think it's online yet, so check your newsstands!

THIS IS MY AMCON PIECE about Dupont Circle and bobos and rum and... rambling. This link actually works!

HEAVEN IS NOT A FARM. I have a piece in the current American Conservative--basically vignettes from Dupont Circle. You can read it here as PDF; I'll let you know if an html version goes up.

...AND BE FORGOTTEN WITH THE REST. Awful news from Mory's Temple Bar--a place I loved, but which had been showing increasing strains in the past few years as it struggled to cope with an ethos of not merely egalitarianism (you don't need to be a Weatherman to weather that one, at Yale) but health- and temperance-fascism.

I remember countless hangover hot chocolates and lunchtime soups bought from Au Bon Pain, the year I was working in a New Haven suburb after college. I would replace all of them with raw cauliflower and dirt, if I could have Mory's back the way it was when I was new.

Keep that in mind the next time you confront the choice between convenience and tradition.

And... the first day I worried about the future of Mory's was the day I learned that the Party of the Right could no longer count on them to wink at underage tippling. I very, very rarely saw anyone get drunk at Mory's--far less so than at parties on campus. Mory's provided a camaraderie of drinking, an ethos, even a "shame culture," which made drunkenness less appealing--and abusive drunkenness, whether in terms of fighting or of sex, even less acceptable. So it is especially gnawing that stepping up enforcement of our catastrophically stupid drinking laws may have led to the death knell for Mory's.

If I had Liddy Dole here right now, I'd be hard-pressed not to smack the lipstick off her face.