L'Chaim to All Friday, April 02, 2004

L'Chaim to All
On the eve of Passover, a nice thought from Michael Novak:

There is an important asymmetry between Jewish and Christian faiths. Christians must of necessity accept the essential truth of Judaism, for without Judaism Christianity does not make sense in its own terms. The Catholic worship service, the Mass, is a rite whose backbone is the sacrifice of Abraham, Melchisedech, and the Passover Seder. It is replete with prayers taken from the Jewish liturgy. The daily Office of the Hours that spreads that central worship over the whole day, from Matins before dawn until Vespers at twilight, is composed by a measure of some seventy to eighty percent of Jewish prayers, most notably (but not only) the Psalms.

By contrast, Jewish faith is not at all dependent on Christian faith. It may (or may not) have respect for Christian faith, the faith (as it were) of a problematic daughter, and it can scarcely avoid judging Christian faith to be seriously erroneous. One of my Jewish friends chides me that Christianity is "far too optimistic" about man, far too unrealistic about so many things...Pretty perhaps, but not really, he says, a livable faith.

Yet the whole world tends to pair Christianity and Judaism, as in some mysterious destiny fatefully intertwined. ... We are in fact, blessedly, linked forevermore. For Christians, it is very good--it is even essential--that until the end of time there should always be a vital Jewish religious community, alive with intellect and knowledge and wisdom, for without such a community from whom to be nourished, we could never come to understand accurately our own earliest and deepest heritage. Spiritually, it might be that Jews could get along quite well without Christians; but the reverse is not true.

I would only add that, when your birthday is Christmas Eve, and you are canvassing for people to go out to dinner, you discover who your real friends are: Jews, pagans and Rich T. To broaden the theme a bit, the people who have been closest to me in my life, people with whom I've shared my best times and leaned on in my worst, oftentimes haven't had the singlest bit of philosophy in common with me. And I couldn't get along without them.

Like I said, l'chaim to all, my Jewish friends especially. If he's reading this, here's hoping the one who left comes home this year.

@ 9:26:00 AM, ,

Stop the Presses

Missing phrase in second graf: xxx tit for tat. xxx

Dennis Franz's ass should have been referred to as xxx the face of the Gorgon. xxx

And in Stuttering John sentence, make it rede xxx Muhammed Ali xxx, not xxx Jackie Robinson xxx.

@ 8:49:00 AM, ,

And What Is Kansas For?

You want politics? We've got politics.

The issue underlying the FCC and Miss Jackson's nipple (which is nasty) seems to be the old Mencken problem of tweaking the booboisie. If you're going to define yourself, as MTV and much of popular culture has, as opposing middle-class values, you have no right to act wounded if occasionally the middle class bites back. I am aware that there are already penalties for this sort of thing, and the new fine structure seems punitive more than anything. Again: If you define yourself, and your art, as opposed to the values of a large part of the country in which you live, you can't pretend to be shocked when it causes a reaction.

Look, I'm an adult and, theoretically at least, a right-thinking aesthete. I can take the occasional tit on television; I've even seen Dennis Franz's prodigious embonpoint uncloaked. I don't come away from pop culture feeling dirty--just weary. The offense in Janet Jackson's act was not the nip-and-teat, but the fact that it was a crummy artless song written, sung and staged by jaded nobodies. The mam was just, as it were, the cherry on top: a pro-forma "shocking" end to a demonstration of numbskull aesthetics.

Should that be fined half a million bucks per? Damned if I know. What I do know is this: Whatever Janet Jackson did, and represents, it ain't worth defending. (I can hear the cry already: First they came for Janet Jackson's nipple and I said nothing. To which I can only answer: Whoever came for that nipple has better eyesight than I do.)

Stern is a tougher case. To approach this from an angle: My one extended brush with celebrity was an interview with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. At one point, I asked them about the well-documented contrast in their songs between the smooth melodies and the dissonant lyrics. Becker replied, "The better question is, why do we [Becker and Fagen] like the smooth surfaces?"

That, I think, is the question for Stern as well. I think he's a riot. He's as funny as he is dumb, which is no mean feat. I can listen to him dump on anybody, from his staff to his callers to people and ideas I respect, and laugh from the guts on up. His take on the Catholic Church--two thousand years of posers and pederasts--is breathlessly funny. As is his constant ridicule of people's speech impediments, and I've had one most of my life. (After watching hapless, saintly stutterers in movies and on TV for years, John Melendez looks like Jackie Robinson.)

But he's relentlessly nihilistic. His jokes about religion and the religious aren't just about the peccadilloes of one faith or another; they're about the impossibility of belief. His haranguing of hypocrites proceeds from the assumption that if you're not gratifying, or at least expressing, your deepest desires at every moment you're being dishonest. And his take on no-strings sex versus love and marriage is as depressing as it is seductive--again, no mean feat.

So I'm going to dodge the main issue and repeat: I don't know if any of it is worth a half million dollars. But I have to ask myself, as I think we all do, the Walter Becker question: Why do we like it? What's the bottomless appetite in us that Stern speaks to?

Could it even be--orchestra cue--a signpost?

@ 7:19:00 AM, ,

Sail Away! Monday, March 29, 2004

I've had this in my head all morning. Randy Newman's The Beehive State (as sung by Harry Nilsson):


"Since you're the delegate from Kansas
Will you kindly take the floor
And tell us what Kansas is thinking
And what is Kansas for?"

"Well Kansas is for the farmer
We stand behind the little man
And we need a firehouse in Topeka
So help us if you can"

"I see the gentleman from Utah
Our friendly Beehive State
How can we help you, Utah?
How can we make you great?"

"Well, we got to irrigate our deserts
So we can get some things to grow
And we got to tell this country about Utah
`Cause nobody seems to know"

@ 10:18:00 AM, ,

Jesus Was a Capricorn Sunday, March 28, 2004

I have to say, since I wrote that last entry I have never felt less like discussing politics. By the time I know enough about a subject to have an opinion about it, I've read fifty thousand blog entries and op-eds, so I can't come up with anything original to say. Honestly, I haven't been in much of a mood for discussing anything: The biggest chunk (or so I am deluding myself) of the game is done but there's a lot still to go and I feel like any free moment I'm not writing it or thinking about it is time wasted.

More at some point.

@ 7:03:00 PM, ,