Nanarama

With the below, I don’t want to give the impression that I think my friend should walk into the long dark night (or the bright white light, depending on your point of view) before she’s ready. I only mean that it’s a lot easier for someone to decide that she is ready if the surrounding people admit that it’s her decision, her best interests, her timeline that matters. Not theirs.

Personally, I would love a miracle. But what I want isn’t important in her case. That’s all I’m saying.

One of my friends is dying. She is no longer battling a deadly disease, at least from the reports that I hear. She’s dying. But on the surface, the emails that I get (not from her, I’m sure she’s too exhausted and in too much pain to be reading or writing much of anything) are full of awe of her fighting spirit, and make it sound like she’s still going to “beat this thing.”

Unfortunately, I know how awful it is to have to acknowledge that you’ve hit the point of no return. In the year before Karl died, I was told roughly every two months to be prepared, that this was going to be the weekend when he didn’t make it. But always he pulled through, and I know one reason, not to overestimate my power, was that I wasn’t giving him permission to go. When he asked me if I was ready for him to die, I would always say, “No, please don’t.”

Finally, 48 hours after he’d passed into what seemed like the final sleep, he woke up and asked me for some Fig Newtons, about the only food he could keep down. I wanted to scream. I had been ready, believed this was the end….and it wasn’t. I asked him what he was fighting for, and he said, remarkably, “I still want to beat this thing.” I said, “You weigh 80 pounds. What are you going to beat it with?” He looked at me really carefully, the first clear look I’d gotten from him in days. He said, “Do you want me to die?” And I said, “Yes. I want you to die. I love you. It’s time.” And he said, “OK. Let’s watch TV.” And that was it.

It took another 36 hours. They were some of the worst ones of my life. At one point, I completely lost my voice. I had this bizarre feeling my trachaea had collapsed down so that I could barely get any air in, much less make a sound, just enough air to live. Mom got me through it. She and the hospice nurse took care of him, because I couldn’t watch him die, it was too horrible. I didn’t even see Karl until about an hour before he died, when I crawled up next to him on the bed and took his hand. He squeezed it very, very softly. I fell asleep.

The moment that he died was truly amazing. I woke up; I probably heard that last breath. I looked at him and saw my mom standing in the doorway. I said, “Look. He’s so beautiful.” She said, “Honey, he’s gone.” I said, a little bewildered, “Where did he go?” And she said, “Honey, he’s gone.” I put my head on his chest and said, “No. His heart’s still beating.” She said, “Honey, that’s your heart.”

The amazing thing was that later, when Mom and I talked about it, I said, “He looked” and then we said at the same time, “like he’d won.”

He needed me to say it was ok. He needed me to say Goodbye.

My friend needs that now. Saying Goodbye absolutely sucks. You feel guilty. You feel a little mean. You don’t want to say, in fact, you’d give anything to not say it. But you have to say it. Because some people stay because they love you so much they don’t want you to have to go through that pain, even when it means they’re in horrible, horrible, much worse pain. Because you love them, you have to say it.

In a different way that should be easier but feels almost at hard, I’m having to say goodbye to the Eldest. I’ve realized lately, bizarrely given the evidence, that the relationship we had is dead. It doesn’t mean that we have no relationship. It means the new one, the one with her as an adult, is being born. I hate saying goodbye to my little girl. But as devastating as it is, I know that I have to in order to say hello to my beautiful adult daughter.

It’s really, really hard. It hurts. But I can’t, out of selfishness, keep insisting that things are the same any more, or that we’ll ever go back to the time when she ran to me as soon as she saw me, when she cuddled up to me and we’d read together, when she’d ask me to sing her just one more song and stay for just 5 more minutes before tucking her in for the night. I loved every minute of those times while they were happening, and they never really go away.

That’s the thing. Goodbye doesn’t mean something or someone never existed. If anything, it means thank you.

Nothing will ever make it less tough. But, said with love, it’s hard to find a word more filled with grace.

Those are the first 3 words of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” but you’ll never hear them in Tim Burton’s adaptation of my favorite musical of all time. Don’t get me wrong, I find much to love in Burton’s Sweeney Todd, particularly Alan Rickman and Johnny Depp. So I was tickled when the spouse brought it home from the video shop the other day. For purely selfish reasons, I hoped that the movie would at long last woo him over to my Sweeney love (especially of the score, which I like to listen to fairly often), but alas, ’tis not to be. This is my version of vintage SNL and Fridays, which the spouse cannot get me to love no matter how he tries. C’est la guerre….

Watching the movie with him - his first time, my second - I noticed how completely shredded the score is. While I didn’t mind the excising of the Ballad the first time, I realized on second watching how much it’s needed. “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” is a masterpiece, beginning with a dark, scuttling undercurrent in sixths under a reedy tenor’s voice. Strings squeeze in at the top of their registers, almost as spine-tingling as chalk screeches. The music builds. A women’s trio comes in over the men chanting “Sweeney, Sweeney,” then suddenly the entire chorus is relentlessly chanting for Sweeney, the sixths now galloping like the horses of the apocalypse, ending in a disastrous, gorgeous atonal fortissimo chord right out of Schoenberg - and Sweeney rises out of an onstage grave and begins to sing, with the backing vocals so high at this point the sopranos are virtually screaming.

Now that’s theater.

Burton keeps the orchestration, which has its own weird beauty without the vocals, but the sense is missing. Sweeney was the musical where Sondheim went for broke with repeated motifs, which either make his music great fun to listen to repeatedly or, in the case of this movie and the spouse’s novice take on it (which echoes Sondheim’s detractors), a bit maddening and loopy.

So I’m convinced spouse’s reaction is based on the fragmentation of the score, as well as the generally poor singing that plagues the movie. I loved Helena Bonham Carter’s acting, and didn’t even mind her singing all that much other than on the comic numbers, “The Worst Pies in London” and “It’s Priest,” both of which are dreadful and simply don’t work. Why she wasn’t coached to do the full-bodied belting that she does in the severely truncated “God That’s Good” is a mystery; Mrs. Lovett isn’t easy to sing, but the singing doesn’t have to be beautiful to work, just gutsy.

It’s a problem in adapting any play to film. Watching a good play is such an intense experience that you need crazy comic relief; that’s why “Officer Krupke” comes after the rumble in the stage version of West Side Story (Sondheim’s first, of course, lyrics only). On film, the suspension of disbelief is less, and while the characters bursting into song here generally comes off pretty well, it’s not introduced quite so easily as it is in, say, the film version of Fiddler on the Roof (an underrated movie, by the way; Jewison’s understanding of how to make such a schmaltzy over-the-top musical work on film is spot on, pulled off largely by Topol’s beautiful performance). On the other hand, Sweeney absolutely needs comic relief, and probably in all the same places that it does onstage. So maybe more powerful singing from Mrs. Lovett would have done the trick. We’ll never know.

That said, Depp and Rickman’s vocals work just fine, showing that Sweeney is an actor’s piece as much as a singer’s. Depp is the second best Sweeney I’ve seen; the first was Jonathan Nolan, who was extraordinary. (He did the City Opera production in the mid-80s, which was generally great, but not perfect. Rosalind Elias was a great Mrs. Lovett, but the young lovers were awful; they almost always are.) And there are marvelous bits in the movie that couldn’t possibly be executed on stage; for instance, when Pirelli (nicely done by Sasha Baron Cohen) recognizes Sweeney’s razors, or when Mrs. Lovett realizes that young Toby knows too much and he’s going to have to be sacrificed. The “By the Sea” number, generally dreadful onstage, is truly funny in Burton’s version, with HBC mincing about a catatonic Depp. And changing Toby from a weird, overgrown child into a regular child was a great move.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to pull of a musical these days (with the exception of Dreamgirls, which I think is an absolutely great adapation). Sweeney is a much better movie than Across the Universe, and both are better than Evita, but there’s still something just a little too hokey about people singing their way through a plot. (Like Cabaret, Dreamgirls ‘ numbers arise almost entirely in performance situations, so it’s a different kind of deal.) Maybe directors and actors are too conscious of that possible hokiness to commit themselves completely into the audience’s hands. When Rita Moreno snaps her head around in West Side Story right before she belts out, “Puerto Rico, my heart’s de-vo-tion,” you know, and more importantly she knows, that she’s about to sing the hell out of something. Directors now seem to want to ease you into the song as opposed to just saying, yo, it’s time for the song.

Nonetheless, I’m glad that people keep attempting to bring stuff like Evita and Sweeney to the big screen. Neither show is flawless, but both have pretty spectacular cumulative effects. While neither movie is wholly successful, there are some glorious sequences in both. Antonio Banderas, clearly in his element in the over-the-top realm, is sensational throughout Evita, particularly on the razor-sharp “Good Night and Thank You,” and Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker belts the HELL out of the Rainbow Tour number; what a treat to hear that voice after so many years. Depp and Rickman do a beautiful job on “Pretty Women,” a gorgeous piece of music that really doesn’t work outside the context of the show, and Depp’s “Epiphany,” always a tough number to pull off, totally works.

I don’t feel a huge lack as far as musicals that never made it past Broadway, but I still love the movie musical genre, and I hope people keep giving it a shot. It may not be possible to pull them off entirely ever again. But….why not try? After all, there are only so many Judd Apatow comedies we can take….

It would be foolish for me to try to stay on top of politics to the degree that the spouse does, but I still try to have a tenuous grasp on what’s going on in the world - which is why I picked up the latest Nation (we were given a subscription by a saucy friend who wanted to plague the spouse).

In doing so, I began to understand why Spouse is so bilous toward mainstream liberals. The magazine at this point is a big old yawn. Even in the mid-90s it was better, and I used to actually look forward to reading it. And of course, this is nothing compared to it’s glorious past. But then, how can anything live up to its glorious past? Sigh.

This little gem caught my eye, in a piece by someone named Eudora Smith talking about Jeremiah Wright/Obama’s church:

“In the sanctuary these days, there are many new white faces…These visitors are friends and supporters for whom the media controversy has inspired a journey of understanding. On a recent Sunday, [Reverend] Moss warned them that Trinity is a ‘hugging’ church, and when the congregation paused from the service to greet one another, the visitors were swept into Trinity’s collective embrace. Their presence is treated like the rainbow sign God sent Noah after the Flood.”

White people: the real rainbows!! Golly, is there anything we can’t do??

Now earlier in the piece, Smith does say, “At Trinity church, which I often attend.” So she could be black or white for all I know. But the above is a real stretch. I’ve gone to black churches for years and I’ve gotten hugs at every single of one of them, long before Jeremiah Wright made visiting a black church a stop on the cultural tourist map, one of those “must-tries” that one does to prove one is open-minded. Rainbows, my ass. This is simple hospitality, a welcome extended to any visitor - and call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure there are no color lines. That’s right: black visitors are getting hugs, too! So why does Smith feel the need to throw in the “rainbows” line? Is she reassuring white liberals that scary bla–African Americans (white liberals never say “black) will welcome them? Is she doing her bit to emulate old school Jesse Jackson? Is this a vicarious experience so that people never have to step out of their comfort zones and actually experience a black church in the flesh?

That is, after all, how she completes her essay, with a brief rhapsody that has some nice turns of phrase, including a bit about the choir trying to “pierce heaven” with their singing. But it’s pretty boiled down to the trappings. After all, that’s all that a religious experience can be, isn’t it? Trust me, I know the smug white liberal party line on God, religion, and church: stupid, childish, superstition at best, insanity at worst (Mencken’s argument resurrected for big bucks by Richard Dawkins). But….what a liberal nightmare….having to acknowledge that, for many African Americans, God, church, and religion are something much more than one’s uncompromising intellectual superiority can conceive of. Damn, I been saying for years that anyone who believes in that crap is a moron. Now what do I do? Oh, this nice piece in the nation does the work for me. Thank ….something… now I don’t have to actually go and experience it myself! Or actually engage with any African Americans, because I don’t really know any, except that one guy in the office who…oh, I can’t remember his name, but I know him! Though actually, I don’t really need to know him! I read Bob Herbert! What’s up, dawg?

For all I know, Smith may be trying to get people to acknowledge that there’s more to Jeremiah Wright, who’s been toiling away on the front lines for years, than a sound bite - an admirable goal. But it didn’t strike me that way. Honestly, the report’s not hard-hitting enough to say much of anything. Maybe that’s the state of The Nation. At any rate, I shan’t rescue the next copy from the recycle pile quite so readily. Give me Harper’s. Or for that matter, Lucky, any day of the week.

I Heart Rednecks! I’m a Redneck, Too! – Hillary
Rednecks are more to be pitied than scorned. – Barack
Possum cooks up real nice on your car’s radiator. - John M.

Aside from the media farrago, about which I could give a rat’s ass, and fairly coincidentally, I got closer to any of the dreaded R sensibility than any of the aforementioned political geniuses will, at least this week. While waiting for a store to open, a supply truck for the store next door parked with the radio blaring. What a treat! Two songs which I’m sure are at the top of the Country Western Hit Parade hammered at my eardrums full blast:

“My kid’s in his booster seat, eatin’ his Happy Meal,
  He knows no toy ‘til the nuggets get eat, he’s Mama’s real deal,
  Then I heard my 4 year old say a 4 letter word,
  Started with ‘s’ and ended with ‘t’….”

That last line was the one I really appreciated. A four letter word starting with “s” …sail? sand? sari? In that brief second, my mind was fairly awhirl with possibilities. Whatever could it – oh, ends with “t.” Thanks!

Yes, the tyke wants to be just like daddy and so, in addition to eating his way to a four-year-old paunch, is also mastering the earthier additions to the lexicon. But the fun was just beginning, for next I heard a gem called “American Soldier:”

“American Soldiers,
  Fighting when our liberty’s at stake,
  Giving their all, sisters and brothers,
  We owe our lives to you!”

In other words, “You’re over there in Iraq so I can live in my McMansion and write some pandering lyrics about how much I appreciate what you’re doing so I can make even more money and drive an SUV and listen to myself on the radio and get invited to the White House and talk to George Bush about how awesome we are for recognizing how awesome you are! It’s better than jerking off! Thank you, soldiers!” Asshole.

I have detested “country” music forever and always, particularly being transplanted from California to a region, Idaho, where no one listens to anything else – not that my bill of fare in San Jose was a marvel of fine listening; I believe I may have purchased a Bay City rollers album at some point. But pop country, even then, was too twangy and lugubrious for my taste as a 14-year-old. Dad and I used to joke about songs he heard on the car radio (Mom stuck to her tapes of Broadway musicals): “I cheated on my wife, I love my pick-up, I ran over my wife with my pick-up when she cheated on me, I ran over my dog by accident when I was trying to run over my wife who cheated on me and now I’m really bummed out cuz he was the best friend I’ll ever know and I may have to get the pick-up’s wheels realigned,” was his summation of the lyrics to basically every country song. (Thought I must admit, that sounds downright Proustian next to the crap I heard this morning.)

It wasn’t until the spouse turned me on to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash that I realized country music, the real thing, hillbilly soul, is awesome. But Williams and Cash and…there, unfortunately my knowledge ends, as I am not terribly adventurous in this area – wrote lyrics that, while simple, cut through the b.s. right to what it means to be human. There’s a Biblical sense of justice and retribution, which is just as often self-directed, behind “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Ring of Fire.” Hank Williams writing about MacDonald’s? Happy Meals, for Lord’s sake? Please. Even something as light and silly as “A Boy Named Sue” has a world-weary intensity that the good old boys I heard today couldn’t get close to if they spent a year penniless and barefoot with signs saying, “Will Not Sing for Food.”

Pop music in every genre is basically crap, but the stuff I heard today was SO manipulative, so platitudinous, so Idol Cares, I lost my customarily sunny demeanor (OK, maybe not sunny, but cloudy and bright) and felt like the spouse isn’t caustic enough as he slashes and burns his not-so-merry way through the American zeitgeist.

It’ll pass, don’t worry. In general, I’m all about the hope. And of course, the bright spot is, Hillary has to listen to this shit until she drops out of the race. I do believe, deep down, she’s very smart. At some point, the cognitive dissonance has to cause a crisis….

How I love the library, and how I love to read. Going to the library takes me back to the first one I ever went to, the Saratoga library in that city in California. For an introverted bookworm, it was heaven: labyrinthine oak shelves to the ceiling bursting with zillions of books. It was there I discovered the section “children’s plays,” there where I first realized there was a form called a script, and probably there as much as our parents’ house, which also had tons of books, that the writer was planted.
In every city I’ve lived in, the library has been one of my primary sources of solace. The Ann Arbor library is one of the best in the country (it’s even better than the Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn library, if only because there are no limits on check-outs; it’s hard to beat the Brooklyn’s ambience), and we as a family tend to have between 80 and 100 books, DVDs, and CDs checked out at any given time. Roughly 10 of those are musical scores for the Eldest to sing when she gets a singing jones; another 20 are books for the Youngest, covering everything from Michigan animals to Jackie Robinson to John Muir to Garfield comics. (I would like to boast about him reading the much classier Tintin books, but he’s read them all at least twice. There are 50 Garfield comic strip anthologies, so alas, he has a way to go.) About 20 are the spouse’s various interests of the moment, and the rest, easily 30 or more at any given time, are mine.
I love surrounding myself with books, and it’s a bit of a problem, but at least I don’t buy them any more. The library lets me indulge in my annoying habit of tackling lists (I love book lists; actually, I love almost any kind of list except a to-do list), and the spouse, ever tolerant, rarely grouses about the pile of books lying open on and near the nightstand.
Right now, I’m going back and forth between 2. The first is The Road to Mecca, an autobiography by Muhammad Asad, who converted from secular Judaism to Islam in the 30s. Asad grew up with the century, and his description of Jerusalem in the late 20s and early 30s is fascinating, as are his insights into Zionism, Christianity, and empire: “The West’s main argument [for its "interventions" across the Middle East and North Africa] is always the political disruption and economic backwardness of the Middle East, and every active Western intervention is sanctimoniously described by its authors as aiming not merely at a protection of ‘legitimate’ Western interests but also at securing progress for the indigenous people themselves.” Having lived as a westerner for the first half of his life, Asad’s insights are unique and nicely observed. I’m only halfway through, so can’t judge if his clear enchantment with Arab peoples and their way of life is a bit over the top, but certainly so far it’s no more than all those writers who wax on for pages and pages about various Mediterranean countries.
I found the book as part of a syllabus from Colgate university in a course on the Middle East; it’s one of a half dozen on the list, which is rounded out by a dozen or so Edward Said essays (necessary in my case as I’ve always been intimidated by the spouse’s weighty Said collections). More later if worth reporting, but I’m learning a lot, not that I’ll ever be able to catch the spouse, but at least I can add a little something to the conversation. (The Middle East is frequently discussed at our house, though it’s mostly me listening given the spouse’s years of study on the subject. One of my favorite jokes he ever told was when he introduced Laura Flanders by saying that before she spoke, he was going to explain the Arab mind in 30 seconds.)
The other book I’m trying to blast through this week is Then We Came to the End, a novel that made lots of year end lists, including, of course, the Times. It’s basically an extended version of The Office, though set in an ad agency, which is naturally easy to relate to. The thing that the writer, Joshua Ferris, does that’s most interesting is keep the entire thing in a faceless first person plural, a nice way of getting at the sort of collective office personality that develops among a group of people who spend the better part of their lives together. I still, when referring to Criterion, say, we did this, we did that; it’s a persona I am loath to let go of. And props to Ferris for making the book very hard to translate onto film, because that point of view is what makes the book so interesting. I find it generally easy to read, though I’m not dying to get back to it and see what happens next. But it’s compelling enough that I’ll bother to finish it.
Anyway, just a little of the flotsam that’s crossing the old transom today.

One of the pleasures of my life as a mom has been to share books with my kids. I read to the Eldest even when I was pregnant with her. I probably heard that it was a good idea somewhere, but I’ve also always loved reading aloud. In fact, that was why I wanted to act, because basically that’s what you’re doing (and there are those who would argue that that was all I ever did when I acted, hence my career as a writer). I love escaping into narrative, I love the power and force of language, and I love good stories. Since my parents were both great storytellers and had a knack for language themselves, it all fits.

I still read to the Youngest, nightly. We just finished a book called Bud, Not Buddy, about a kid growing up in Depression-era Flint, looking for his dad who, he’s convinced, is a great blues musician. It’s the best novel we’ve read in a while, after a spate of fair-to-middling. I try to do a fair amount of classics, but there’s an awful lot of good kid lit out there, esp. the Newberry winners (this is one).  And of course, the kid gets to pick some books as well. We’ve both unearthed some real dogs; the most recent was a bloviated prequel to Peter Pan that Dave Barry added a bunch of jokes to and that desperately wanted to compete with Harry Potter and…..ugh. Typing is not writing.

Whatever novel we’re reading, we always read from the Bible as well, something we’ve done for as long as either of us can remember. We’ve been through two illustrated kids’ Bibles twice each, and I figured it was time to start on the real thing this time through. I like the anchor of one book and one tradition, and since we talk a lot as we go through the stories - that a lot of people don’t feel the same way, that this particularly story is in lots of other places, etc. - it’s a pretty active reading. I’ve been so grateful over the years that my parents did this with me; aside from it’s being the cornerstone of the church of my choice, the Bible is threaded through all of western art, and a good working knowledge has really helped me in any cultural studies. It’s also very nice to be extremely familiar with the often-misquoted book to counter the myriad wackos. And, just as opera contains some of the world’s most gorgeous music, the Bible has some pretty amazing prose and poetry. So you can decide you’ll never go near either one, but you’re missing out. I’m just sayin’….

It’s interesting to read anything with a kid because you do see it through completely different eyes. Genesis is a very strange book, quite honestly. I first learned about the four writers theory in college, and I dunno if I quite go there, but there are at least 3 very distinctive voices at work. I noticed this time that the way the creation story unfolds is quite different between chapters 1 and 2. That actually makes a lot of sense. Whether or not Moses wrote the whole thing down as God breathed the words into his stylus (this is the party line from a lot of Christians), the stories were being kept alive orally long before the Genesis writer ever unrolled a papyrus. It makes perfect sense that people would have different versions of the same story.

What’s fascinating to me about the Genesis creation is the personality of God, especially when you compare him to all the other gods of the time. We don’t have a ton of Egyptian literature, but the gods definitely seem 2D, like Egyptian art: towering figures that, if they even register humanity, don’t think much more of it than they would a bug under their majestic feet. The Greek gods are ultimately cruel and petty; they contain both the greatness and absolute worst of human nature on a monumental scale, without a whole lot of subtlety (at least until you get to Euripides).

O.T. God - and God is the main character of the old testament, no question - is complex, and it’s shown beautifully in those first few chapters of Genesis. The chaper one narrative, with its gorgeous prose (the King James translation rules here) is rich, exuberant. God is tickled with his creation, like an artist who gets so immersed in the work that it takes over every waking thought. It’s like God makes one set of things on one day, then the next he realizes something else that will make it even better. He enjoys his work immensely, improvising like a bebop artist. In the other creation narratives that I’m familiar with, there doesn’t seem to be the same kind of innocent joy at the sheer process of making stuff. The Greek gods build their subsequent races of men like bored, spoiled kids, doing a half-assed job because they know they’ll probably toss most of what they make anyway. There are gorgeous American Indian stories, but for the most part animals do the heavy lifting, and you don’t get quite as invested as you do in a person. O.T. God is having a blast. In my making God in my own image (come on, we all do this), I imagine him looking at something in a little disbelief and saying, “Wow. That’s really good. Not sure where that came from….” That, at least, is my interpretation of the frequent line throughout chapter 1, “And God saw that it was good.”

Chapter 2 is interesting because the tone is so different, less grand, more practical. There’s also a time disconnect with chapter 1. God decides to make the man earlier: “no shrub of the field had yet appeared.” It’s only after the man appears that God makes him a home, the garden of Eden, and after he puts the man in the garden he adds some trees. And not until then does he add the woman, because “it is not good for the man to be alone.” See, he actually likes us - a radical shift from all the other gods. He cares about us enough that he doesn’t think it’s good if we’re lonely. This God, at least according to this writer, gets us, and more importantly, bothers to get us.

I think one of the images I have always loved more than any other in the Bible is that after the fury following the forbidden fruit episode, God sews clothes for Adam and Eve. The thought of this homey, comforting, loving act following the anger and amidst agonizing sadness - God weeping must be a terrible thing indeed - touches me every time. They can’t stay in the garden: they haven’t yet eaten from the tree of life, and to live forever with the dreadful knowledge of good and evil is too harsh a punishment. That’s why vampires are so miserable. So God sends them away, not because he doesn’t love them, but because he does.

 The Youngest has lots of questions. Where are the dinosaurs? Since the first people came from Africa, how come the garden of Eden boundaries are in Iraq? How does evolution fit into all of this? So we work our way through it together, the best we can, and sometimes I have to throw up my hands and say, “You know, kid, I don’t get it either.” What I think is important is that the kid feels safe and right questioning the weighty tome.

Religion/spirituality is a decision, not an edict. You can’t make someone believe something. But life is so much richer with the possibility of magic, miracles, and story, which maybe in a way are all the same thing.

While not gobsmacked like the spouse, I do enjoy our satellite radio. I flip around between Broadway (mostly a disappointment unless Seth, the gayest DJ in the universe is hosting, at which point it becomes grand fun), Strobe, which features old disco tunes I’d forgotten I owned, Chill, ambient techno that calms me down, and Spirit, gospel that occasionally gets rockin’.
But my standby is Symphony. Early mornings, when I’m headed out to Washtenaw to teach, there’s often some early 20th century piece; Ballet Mecanique and Charles Ives New England Songs were on not long ago, and my trip to work featured Barber’s Medea’s Dance. Thanks to a great book (and it came from the Times 10 Best list; who knew), The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross, I have started to soak up as much music from the period as possible and Ross has helped me appreciate it at long last. (I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Just go buy it and read it.)
But today, I jumped in on the 2nd movement of the Beethoven 5th Piano Concerto, which I haven’t listened to in years. I love Beethoven. My favorite thing about him is that he broke pianos as he tried to force them to do things they hadn’t been asked to do up to that point. The 20th century stuff wouldn’t have been possible without him. Listening to that superbly melodic piece of work, I was still amazed at how he introduces dissonance via key changes that nobody had attempted up to then. Some people attribute the dissonance to his loss of hearing in later life, but I think this is bunk. If anyone knew exactly what he was doing, it’s Ludwig B.
I’m guessing that all musicians, when they hear a piece for their instrument, think when they hear certain parts, hmmmm, I could play that, and then, Nope, not that part. The 5th incorporates all the basics: scales, lots of trills, lots of jumps from bass note to chords in the left hand. But it’s the execution of those basics that’s so extraordinary. I can’t imagine playing the last movement without a big old grin on your face; it’s so joyful, the melody is so effortless, and yet it takes so much practicing to get it right. It must be absolutely amazing to nail it.
The bad thing about a lot of satellite is that, when there’s no d.j. on Symphony (the regular guy is Preston Trombley, who is really wonderful), you don’t know who’s playing. So I don’t know who was responsible for the concerto this morning. I can only say that it was the second thing to make my day beautiful (the first was the spouse, making me laugh). And then I sat in conference with some of my students, and, well, dammit, I just love life today. They’re young, they’re working hard, and I get to try and help them and encourage them and maybe give them a little bit better shot at communicating through the written word.
I am extraordinarily either blessed or lucky, depending on your point of view. I realize it can all disappear in a wink, and I am always amazed and a little guilty that I’ve got it so easy. I haven’t earned this. So all I can do is say thank you.
Thank you, God, for all of it. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for all the music lessons. Thank you, Beethoven, for being awesome. Thank you, Alex Ross, for a great book. Thank you, students, for showing up. Thank you, spouse and kids, for being you.
And for anyone who found this a bit too positive, go drink some Dr. Brown’s Celery Soda. That’ll learn ya. Because that stuff is nasty.

This recent article was a lot of fun to write, and though several entries had to be cut – most notably Goodfellas, which contains a memorable scene where garlic is shaved into sizzling olive oil with a razor – it’s still pretty fun to read as well. I’m particularly pleased that Can’t Stop the Music made it in. My food editor gives me fairly free reign, bless her, but I did think that might be a little over the top for the Ann Arbor News. I sneak in what I can…(I also don’t write the titles. Just sayin’.)
As art or whatever reality TV really is imitates life, Top Chef contestants were given a challenge on the last episode to make a meal based on their favorite movie. A contestant who I thought had a lot of potential, a quiet guy from Mexico who made a great-looking taco in one challenge that didn’t even rate any comment, was sent home.
I don’t spend a great deal of time on Top Chef challenges in my head, but this one was up my alley. I wish I’d been paired with that chef, who really hasn’t had a chance to shine (this was a team challenge). What better movie to translate to a plate than West Side Story? One could have concocted a great fusion dish, maybe shrimp with black beans and fried plantains, with a little frisee in a sherry vinaigrette to add some nice sharp acid.
Alas, I was not consulted. And doubtless, my efforts are never quite reverent enough about food, which, face it, all ends up in the same place anyway, for Top Chef. As is so often the case, the food reaches a little too high to really inspire anyone in a normal kitchen. This season’s batch of cheftestants is particularly annoying and dull, and I still haven’t been able to latch on to any particular one since absolutely zero have so far displayed any sense of humor. I feared as much when I saw the fauxhawks – can there be a stupider, more universally unflattering hair style? The group collectively has 2 expressions: consternation when one’s food choices are questioned and smug smiles when those choices are rewarded somehow.
Of course, the best thing about Top Chef is knowing that host Padma is completely baked for 90% of her camera time. Like watching ET listening primarily to Drew Barrymore’s lines – “I’m only pretending to be a princess,” she says earnestly when trick or treating – the experience of watching Top Chef kicks up a notch as you wait for Padma to observe that her sorbet is too cold or that “you could DEEP FRY my TOE and BATter it and it would TASTE deLICIous” (caps indicating that stoner problem with volume control). I’ll keep watching, but like Grace Slick, just want somebody to love. Come on, show.

Watched 3 Iraq war feature movies recently: Stop Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted. The spouse did an excellent summary of the first over on his blog, and nicely disguised me as a nameless “anti-war” type. We left the theater in a fairly heated discussion; I muttered, “what a cheat” at the end of the movie. He didn’t agree.

Now I have to give the man his props; as a vet and a native Midwesterner, he understands the folks portrayed in the movie better than I ever could with my California childhood and first marriage to a guy whose mom sent him to Portugal to avoid the draft. In fact, DP’s summary helped me appreciate the movie a little more, as a portrait of blue-collar kids without any real options, at least in their own heads, other than to buy into the Bush machine’s bullshit. I did find the movie’s use of music to be almost as pernicious as that of There Will Be Blood. Had the director, or the studio, trusted the audience to makes its own emotional decisions, the acting, which is uniformly decent, would have conveyed the futility of the ending much better. As is, a sappy guitar or something (I don’t remember much beyond it being sappy) gives you the feeling that the main character is going off to fight the good fight yet again.

And ultimately, especially after viewing the second two movies, the director/writer/s let the characters off the hook too much. The moral dilemma in Stop Loss is about the illegitimacy of the stop loss policy, which, while disgraceful, pales next to the immorality of what we’re doing to the Iraqis. The protagonist’s concerns are immediate - how do I save my ass from doing something I don’t want to do? - and barely touch on the bigger questions, such as what we’re doing over there in the first place, and what business we have maiming soldiers whose families only get green cards if they die. Now, the spouse has pointed out that this is all part of the dialogue, which certainly hasn’t been written for my benefit; Stop Loss’s softer take on things, that these are basically good kids who don’t have any choice, isn’t written for me but for people who somehow are still able to support the U.S. occupation. And, as he says, any dialogue that casts uncertainty on the proceedings is good. Maybe Stop Loss will sow a little seed of doubt somewhere in the Heartland. One hopes.

I wanted to see In the Valley etc because of Tommy Lee Jones. I found him so great and easy to watch in No Country etc. that I really looked forward to this movie. I wasn’t disappointed. Jones is fascinating; he plays the same thing, with his harsh Texas twang, beat-up face, and opaque eyes, the quintessential Hard Man haunted by bad dreams. And yet the two performances are extremely different, which I think is much tougher to pull off than the kind of vanishing act that someone like Jeffrey Wright does effortlessly (not to discount how tough it is to do what Wright does). The No Country character doesn’t have the Valley’s demons; the Valley is so good at repressing his that they’ve worked their way into his very fibre, surfacing in brutally terse dialogue and occasional savagery. Yet, the character retelling the story of David and Goliath, simply and without any embellishment, moved me to tears. Wrapping the movie around a detective story is a nice touch pulled off with surprising subtlety by Mr. Unsubtle, Paul Haggis, who crashed into us again and again in his last directorial effort. In fact, the ending is beautifully ambiguous – the spouse’s military explanation pointed this up – yet still delivers a gut punch that will take a while to recover from.

The bravest, darkest movie of the bunch is Redacted, clearly the greatest movie DePalma will ever make and probably the one that will be seen by the fewest people. Strung together from bits and pieces of “real” footage, from a soldier’s video blog to a pretentious French documentary complete with the mournful Handel Sarabande blasting away in the background to footage on insurgent sites, the movie is so hard-hitting I had to leave the room twice and cover my eyes over the final sequence. Like Elah but to a much starker and more frightening degree, Redacted shows what war uncovers in the human psyche, and it is unbearably ugly. Soldiers without a whole lot going for them – one would likely follow his brother’s fate, a violent death in prison, if it weren’t for the army – can justify their brutality and thuggishness by the extreme conditions they live in, where no excuse to butcher is too lame. Perhaps worse, soldiers who believe in the damn war, who truly just want to do their job, are haunted and destroyed, their best hope to become a Hard Man who sends his boys off to fight in the next senseless combat. In the movie’s stunning penultimate sequence, one of these is asked for a war story. He tells it, breaking down. His barmates, clearly pushed beyond the awkwardness Americans despise – is anything a surer outward manifestation of loss of power than the lack of a pat answer? – bursts into applause after some seconds of his broken sobbing. That willful blindness is one of the most stomach-churning actions in a movie that is, as I said, very tough to watch.

Ultimately, all 3 movies get at the horrible cost of war. It is impossible to justify. I don’t give a shit what anybody says, there is no such thing as a good war. All of ‘em are too goddamn expensive.