Next Year in Jerusalem Saturday, May 07, 2005

Two reviews of Kingdom of Heaven, similar points. First, James Bowman (link at right):

Sir Ridley Scott’s Crusades movie, Kingdom of Heaven, though visually impressive as we might expect, is shockingly unhistorical. ... But because most of the anachronisms he deals in are moral rather than material they will probably pass unnoticed. ...

The most hilariously idiotic of the film’s many historically stupid moments comes at the climax of the battle for Jerusalem in 1187 when Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), the commander of the city’s Christian defenders, has a parley with the leader of its Muslim besiegers, Saladin, here invariably given his more authentic moniker, Salah al-Din (Ghassan Massoud). Nice that they insist on accuracy in something. Balian tells his adversary that he will surrender the city if the Muslim army will give its Christian inhabitants a safe-conduct to the sea, where they may take ship to return to Europe. The terrible alternative, Balian tells him, is that he will give the order for all the religious sites in the city to be destroyed: "Your holy places, ours — everything that drives men mad." It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of Hollywood’s view of religion — or of a thought that would have been more unthinkable to the person supposedly uttering it.

Such words would have been sheer gibberish — evidence of madness themselves — in an age in which "religion" was inseparable from the culture. Another character says "I put no stock in religion" and generally speaking we are to understand that neither does anyone else who is in the least sympathetic here. The only true religious believers, at least on the Christian side, are thugs and murderers. But at the time of the Crusades "religion" wasn’t the optional Sunday-morning pastime it has since become. It was a matter of identity. For someone to say "I put no stock in religion" would have been as nonsensical as saying "I put no stock in being my father’s son." People’s religion wasn’t just what they believed, it was what they were. In other words, like so many movie-makers before them, Scott and Monahan have looked into the past and seen nothing but their own silly faces looking back at them.


And then John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard (link at right):

Kingdom of Heaven attributes to its heroic Christian and Muslim characters a cosmopolitan skepticism about faith, and a healthy tolerance for other cultures, that would have been literally unthinkable in the 12th century--an era in which there was absolutely no frame of intellectual, historical, hermeneutical, or philosophical reference for cultural relativism or agnosticism. God was an almost literal presence in the lives of the real people we see fictionalized on screen here. But rather than acting as though their duty in life is to do God's work, or to subjugate themselves to God's will, the good folk of Kingdom of Heaven tell each other that all they need do is keep an open mind and follow their hearts.

Our hero, young Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), is taught this lesson twice in the course of the movie, once by his Crusader father, and
once by Baldwin IV, the saintly leper who is the ruler of Jerusalem. There was an actual Balian of Ibelin. He was a remarkable man who was forced by the dictates of his chivalric code to lead the defense of Jerusalem against the conquering army of the great Arab general Saladin in the late 12th century, even though he had personally guaranteed Saladin he would not do so. Rather than tell Balian's stunning story--which included writing a chivalrous letter to Saladin begging the Muslim's forgiveness, an apology that Saladin accepted from a fellow man of honor--Scott and Monahan have thrown out most of the real details of his life in favor of a misbegotten plotline that turns Balian into a lowly French village blacksmith.


I hadn't planned to see this one anyway; these reviews seal the deal. The Crusades are a topic I come back to, morbidly, every few years. Nobody comes out looking out good, except for Sts. Francis and Louis, and Marco Polo. The best face you can put on things, from a Catholic or European perspective, is that the wars were a comprehensible response to a long series of provocations. But the conduct of them--not just the atrocities on both sides but the broken treaties, back-stabbing and missed opportunities--makes me want to crawl under a rock. If I were in the Eastern Church, I wouldn't forgive the sack of Constantinople either.

Enough of that. A nice day; I made Mrs. WTJ a pre-Mother's Day banana cream pie (a mock one, anyway, with Cool Whip and Fluff) and we took the morning off: a long laze, then some Loony Tunes on DVD ("I Wanna Singa!"). In the afternoon, we headed over to the next-to-last Homely Louse in Jersey City for some low-key gaming and general raucousness. Good to see everyone; still trying to find a vibe for gaming with babies in tow; still trying to find a vibe for friendship, actually. With Wrong Turn Jr., our little world is getting larger every day--but the world outside is getting smaller.

To put that another way, Mrs. WTJ and I are growing to fill our responsibilities, and Wrong Turn Jr. is, well, just plain growing. That means a lot of external constants are getting crowded out of our lives: regular visits with friends, movies, even just reading books. Spending an afternoon with old pals, I almost feel like I'm gorging on the good feelings in the room, and I come away reeling. I haven't found a way to adapt (or at least juggle). Working on it.

Oh, one more thing: The quotes above remind me of one of the songs at our wedding, a Jacques Brel number translated (I think) by the late great Mort Shuman:

If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn

If we only have love
To embrace without fears
We will kiss with our eyes
We will sleep without tears

If we only have love
With our arms open wide
Then the young and the old
Will stand at our side

If we only have love
Love that's falling like rain
Then the parched desert earth
Will grow green again

If we only have love
For the hymn that we shout
For the song that we sing
Then we'll have a way out

If we only have love
We can reach those in pain
We can heal all our wounds
We can use our own names

If we only have love
We can melt all the guns
And then give the new world
To our daughters and sons

If we only have love
Then Jerusalem stands
And then death has no shadow
There are no foreign lands

If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns

If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again

Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.

(To sidetrack for a moment: One of the few clangy notes in Shuman's translations is "The hymn that we shout"--wrong verb by a wide margin. But that's nitpicking.)

A friend of mine, who has no blog to link to, lent me the soundtrack to the movie of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris many years ago, and I played it till the tape wore through. This tune is somewhere between Marlene Dietrich and Hair: an art song for hippies. On record, it's just fabulous: Elly Stone (I think) keeps raising the bar with every verse, until she just blows the roof of with the last line: She honest to God reaches the stars.

Anyway, the line about Jerusalem always chokes me up: five thousand years of blood and dust in my throat. What a gorgeous image, especially with the Grail hot on its heels. Brel was about as religious as Hercule Poirot, but he was an immensely wise and evocative lyricist. He knew that, at the end of the day, everyone's heart, and everyone's hopes, are buried in that old desert fortress.

Thinking about it closely, of course, the message doesn't work: "If we only have love" is an excellent starting point. I can almost believe that he's prepared to share his big Belgian heart with everyone in the world. But he doesn't save anything for the Man Upstairs. And you can't leave out that part of the equation.

Actually (to turn this into a tremendously long p.s.), an atheist friend commented recently, after reading some Chesterton, that he didn't buy the argument that you need God to have morals. He argued that Chesterton (and religious commentators who followed him) have looked at Darwinists and other extreme types and tarred all atheists with that brush.

I know my correspondent is a decent guy, and most people I know have the same spiritual trajectory: atheist or seriously agnostic, but willing to give you the shirt off their back. So who am I to say something is lacking in their moral vision without God? Would I, Mr. Nicea himself, give everyone I know the shirt off my back?

To sum up nicely, a favorite quote from Dr. Percy:

Ellen, though a strict churchgoer and a moral girl, does not believe in God. Rather does she believe in the Golden Rule and in doing right. On the whole she is embarrassed by the whole God business. But she does right. She doesn't need God. What does God have to do with being honest, hard-working, chaste, upright, unselfish, etcetera. I on the other hand believe in God, the Jews, Christ, the whole business. Yet I don't do right. I am a Renaissance pope, an immoral believer. Between the two of us we might have saved Christianity. Instead we lost it.


At any rate, here's my best attempt at squaring the circle. I would argue that to the extent that any of us do right, it is because we are hearing the distant echoes of God's voice--whatever tradition we come from. We may not recognize it as such, we may think we're just following good Ethical Culture mandates or common sense or what have you. But our best instincts are the whispers of God.

It's late, and I'm fading. Any of my religious correspondents--and you know who you are--have a better handle on this than I do?

Pax as ever.

@ 10:12:00 PM, ,

We Are All Going Down Together Thursday, May 05, 2005

Speaking of Billy...memories of 9/11...

I had tickets for a Laurie Anderson show a few days after the Event in Question. The new album was not my speed, and I didn't really feel like making the schlep into Fortress Manhattan, but the tickets had cost about seventy-five bucks each. Laurie was surprisingly sympathetic, stopping the show at a couple points to talk about how brave everyone was, including the mayor (!). Then it seemed every lyric from her back catalog had some special resonance: Sometimes I feel like a burning building, etc. (Not sure if she did We are about to attempt a crash landing.)

A thoughtful, avant-y night, exactly what you'd expect from L.A. A few weeks later, I watched the "Concert for New York" on PBS, the one performed for a crowd of firemen and cops. (Who heartily booed La Clintons when they showed up onstage. The Miramaxers, who threw the party, apparently edited that bit out for the DVD. More time for Opera Man!) The night had a wonderfully creepy beginning, with David Bowie doing a supremely eerie cover of Looking for America (which I think I've written about before. In fact, I'm sure I've written about all this stuff before. But if I don't remember it, what are the odds anybody else does?).

At any rate, after the strong start, the proceedings settled down into what you'd expect: Bowie doing a Frippless and dickless version of Heroes, the teasingly virile man-god described below essaying Little Pink Houses, James Taylor cranking out yet another Fire and Rain, Jon Bon Jovi doing whatever the hell he does (I think, in this case, that "o-e-o-e-o-e" song). In other words: balm.

Then out came Billy Joel, that jolly old elf--and he took things into prophetic-referential territory Laurie Anderson could only dream about. Which is to say, he sang Miami 2017--a song about the destruction of New York that he wrote God knows how many years ago.

That was wonderful enough. But his pre-song schtick gave me the Lawng Island shivers all over again. I will get some of this wrong, so forgive me: "When I wrote tiss, I thawt it was a science-fiction sawng. I never thawt it would actually happen. But now dat it did, unlike the sawng, we ain't goin' no-wair." For that, I can almost excuse For the Longest Time.

Anything else to moan about? The new Aimee Mann record is pretty darn good. She took a while. I put up the force fields when everyone tagged her as an unheralded genius--but she just seemed to be doing the same relationship-suckage songs as everybody else. Plus her version of The Other End of the Telescope, which she co-wrote with Elvis Costello, has some tremendously clunky lines that are clearly hers (since they don't show up in EC's recording).

Then, Magnolia, which offered an irresistibly hooky tune, Momentum. Then, Lost in Space, with an even more listenable hit, Pavlov's Bell. Now, The Forgotten Arm, a strong record from top to bottom. The hits are tremendous and the stuff in between is solid. Plus, produced by Joe Henry, whose lyrics I have written about on a couple of occasions.

Not much worth remarking on in real life today. We're starting from square one with the house search, and nothing popped up on the MLS. Wrong Turn Jr. had a daylong fit of the grinnies, which really has to be seen to be believed. Mrs. WTJ gets lovelier every day. And, for lack of anything better to do, I ate about half a pound of pistachios in one sitting.

More later. Pax as ever.

@ 8:48:00 PM, ,

Stomp the Presses

From the Current Affair Web site. A Bigfoot expert is quoted regarding a new video of the creature:

"It leans toward being not a human, and when it's not a human and it does not fit the description of things people see in other places, then it's more likely a Sasquatch."

@ 2:41:00 PM, ,

Authority Always Wins Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Trawling the comments...I can appreciate BeK's bemusement over the Bruce/Billy thing. I still "throw up in my mouth a little" when I remember how a co-worker compared Steely Dan to 10cc. And I don't dislike Springsteen; the fault, if anything, is mine as a listener for not penetrating the fog of expectations around his music. (He could help dispel the haze, though, by losing the soul patch and the Nicolas Cage faux-hillbilly accent.)

Happy to see Aaron is a fan as well. I didn't know if Billy resonated west of the Hudson (the "River of Dreams"?); after all, parochialism is part of his appeal. I fell in love with him, I think, when I saw a concert of his on HBO way back when--live from Nassau Colisseum. He closed the show with, "Goodnight, Lawng Island. Don't take no shit from nobody!" On TV! Yikes! It was more electric than the Who's farewell show...

OK, let's move onto the next Bruce comparison, a special treat for all you Red Staters in the audience: this teasingly virile man-god:

@ 7:15:00 AM, ,

Houses in Motion

Well, we didn't get the place. We kept our hopes low on this one, but it was a real peach and it's tough to see it go--especially after we bid every penny that we could afford for it. Mrs. WTJ observes that we're trying to keep our monthly payments low by front-loading on the down payment and keeping the mortgage small. Other buyers might not care about a high monthly payment (e.g., if both spouses are working full-time) and so they can borrow up the yaz. At any rate, the search goes on.

I will console myself with a scoop. I would expect the diligent folks at Outside the Dome to make with an early review of the new Go-Betweens record, but it looks like they're sleeping on the job, or too busy writing wack rhymes, something like that. So here's my two cents, based on one listen: It's a fine piece of work, punkier than the last couple, and very Forster-heavy. Lots of fun turns of phrase and low-key acid. Very Aussie. Tasmania gets a shout-out.

Life goes on otherwise. A compelling Nanny 911 the other night shamed us into trying new approaches to Wrong Turn Jr.'s bedtime. He needs Mommy like mad to make the transition; Daddy can only get him through the gates with a half-hour's bouncing on an exercise ball. (If you haven't been to the Secret Volcano Base, it's quite a sight to see.) So last night we laid him down and ganged up on him, trying to wear him out with games, songs and subterfuge. Two hours later...

A brief evening; a long morning to come. My head is full of houses.

@ 6:49:00 AM, ,

The Trouble With Classicists Monday, May 02, 2005

I forgot to mention in the post below that one of the great sidebar pleasures of Hitchhiker's was the theme music, Journey of the Sorceror, which if memory serves was lifted from the Eagles. Adams, I think, also mentioned that he played One Trick Pony nonstop while writing Restaurant at the End of the Universe. A guy with excellent tastes. I don't really begrudge him his atheism; I just don't think it sings to me anymore, which makes me a little sad. Those were nifty books. Drifting away from them is like losing an old friend.

Speaking of which...I've been looking back at some of the posts from the heat of the campaign last year and I'm not happy with them. I don't regret the sentiments; I regret posting first drafts and not taking one last critical look at how I was expressing them. Most of the entries never rise above High Snark, and browsing them quickly, many of them don't even make sense.

I bring this up mostly because an acquaintance, who I have mentioned often before, told me that he had read around the site a while ago and it made him "angry and sad." I figured de gustibus; but looking back on the stuff he most likely read, it made me uncomfortable too. Those were not the most relaxed times in your correspondent's life, and it came through in the prose. Strangely, most of the stuff I wrote while working in New York--on five minutes' sleep every night and twelve hours' stress every day--is positively pastoral. Go figure.

At any rate, if I came off like a boozy brother-in-law, my apologies. Apparently I also misquoted my acquaintance; I took what he said as best I remembered it. Apologies for any harm done.

Pax again. We find out about our house (or non-house) tomorrow. Apparently, six people bid and we were in the top three. Here's hoping we have the privilege of signing over every penny we have to people we will never know!

@ 10:07:00 PM, ,

They Said That Queens Could Stay

Monkeying around with the template (you like?) a little last night, I discovered the Archives feature actually works now--after almost two years of bupkiss. (The Google Search toolbar still doesn't, so everything evens out.) At any rate, I started tooling around in the early days of this blog, and was a little bemused to see how clenched it's gotten. This started out as a journal, and somewhere along the way turned into a soapbox. I'm not going to abandon the high-fiber postings, but I'm going to try to fit them into a gentler context of day-to-day stuff. So if you want to know where I stand on abortion, you have to read about what I had for lunch.

On that note, holy Christ almighty, am I tired. I set myself up for it with a Diet Pepsi yesterday afternoon, which kept me bopping well past midnight. I recognize that Diet Pepsi will not only give me cancer but tastes like it too; but, hey, I could win an iTune under the cap! Every penny counts.

I don't think I've described my commute these days. Since I went on unconscionably about riding the light rail to Manhattan, I should give the Turnpike its due: forty-five minutes in the dark, with lunatics rimming your bumper to get you to move right. To stay awake I play little games: Can I get down to Exit 11 before the news comes on WFUV at 5 a.m.--and then switch to WXPN in Philly, so I get uninterrupted music the whole way? I used to try to time the Stern show that way: get in the car just after a commercial break and then hit as few of them as possible on the drive down. The tortures of the abyss are nothing next to sitting through ten minutes of steroid powder and premature-e cream. ("I came rubbing the stuff on!" --Groucho Marx)

No train means no time to read, but it does mean time to think. It's depressing not to be excited over the prospect of a Hitchhiker's Guide movie. I loved those books as much as anybody, way back when; they were my early teens as much as Monty Python, Star Wars and Steely Dan. Now those icons--with one notable exception, of course--just don't signify anymore. Hitchhiker's started to seem smug and overly cute, identical in tone to too many spazzy sci-fi fans I had known over the years. Yours truly included, of course. So when I tried to get past spazziness, I started distancing myself from a lot of that Anglicized Irony Lite.

The movie, then, already had one strike against it. Then a pair of conservo-reviews reminded of something: Adams was a hardcore atheist, and the humor of the books is impossible to separate from that worldview. Conservos, of course, can be as hypersensitive as any deconstructionist when it comes to sniffing out verboten tropes. But I think they're onto something here. To a thirteen-year-old suffering under Jesuits, "42" is sophisticated, hilarious and transgressive. Now it seems like the kind of joke a thirteen-year-old would make.

Thinking about Springsteen, too...he got a lot of comparisons to Dylan, of course, as well as Tom Waits, who is a rough contemporary of his. But does anybody ever stack him up against Billy Joel? I've been realizing lately how fond I am of the schmaltzy old guy--and realizing that he did a much better job at capturing the "ordinary guy" vibe than Bruce ever did. Springsteen's teenage songs are all West Side Story: operatic, stylized, phony names and huge emotions. Joel's teenage stuff...de gustibus, I guess, but Scenes From an Italian Restaurant sounds true and targeted in a way that Springsteen doesn't. Right down to the names, and pronunciations, of "Brender and Eddie."

I know that this seems like the Ream the Boss blog sometimes. Honestly, I don't go out of my way to bash him. It's just that over the years, he's accumulated lots of extra-artistic baggage and it's really tough for me to get past all that and hear the music for what it is. Sometimes that's my fault as a listener; sometimes it's the Music Machine; sometimes it's Bruce himself. If you present yourself as a Down the Shore Woody Guthrie, you tend to invite comparisons. Sometimes they're not flattering.

Let me put that in a nicer light: Springsteen raises tremendous expectations for me, many of them unfair. I genuinely want to believe his billing, and hear an artist who can pull off all the stuff that he and the Machine promise. He does tremendously solid work; but a lot of it falls short of the heights, by my ears. I like him best when he does something at a kooky angle, something that doesn't have the weight of the Man of the People suffocating it: My favorite songs of his, which I will lose lots of credibility for, are Atlantic City, Tunnel of Love and Darlington County.

At any rate, Billy Joel. He's never going to save the world, as Springsteen just might. He's never going to be operatic. But I think when he's at his best, he has an unparalleled flair for the demotic. I knew Brender and Eddie; on the Magic Rat, I am agnostic.

@ 9:33:00 AM, ,

Toot Toot, Beep Beep Sunday, May 01, 2005

I'll throw this one out there to all my l33t readers: Does anybody know how to fix the template coding so my links and such on the sidebar show up at the top of the page (instead of squished down past all the posts)?

Thank you.

@ 9:19:00 AM, ,

Rock the Microphone

I would call your attention to this new blog by a frequent commenter and kibbitzer to these pages. Be warned: It is hardcore.

@ 7:12:00 AM, ,

I'm a Lucky Guy to Live in My Building

Big Step #2: Today we bid on a house. The only reason I didn't include this as a stressor in the equation below is that process of looking and prepping has left a swath of dead tissue across my brain. At any rate, it's a swell place but we're trying not to get too attached or excited: We're putting in a bid at the top of our price range and may get beat by some faceless yuppie jerkoff. If it works out, it'll be a great place to live. ("We'll be safe here," as Robin Williams said in the Garp movie. Was that a creepy book, or what? Jesus Christ.)

@ 7:06:00 AM, ,

Sucking in the Seventies

Big steps today.

Last night, I sent the final--barring any editorial freakiness--draft of Damnation Decade to my editor and good buddy. To give you a sense of the relief I'm feeling: I pitched this game about two years ago. I spent the first year writing it as a futuristic sci-fi game with some gritty 1970s underpinnings and came up with about 260 pages of material. In late December, my editor kicked that draft back to me, saying (constructively) that the thing didn't work and needed a complete overhaul. (The rules editor, who I've just met through this process, had similar, again constructive, reservations.) Four months later, Damnation Decade is now a gritty 1970s game with some futuristic sci-fi underpinnings, clocking in at 220 pages. Almost all of the material is new.

I think it's a vast improvement over the first draft. If my editor had accepted the first version, somewhere down the line one of us would've woken up in the middle of the night realizing the game should've been done this way--and we'd be kicking ourselves forever. At least I would.

Forgive me if I crow a little; it's been a rough couple of years and probably the most work-intensive four months of my life. New baby + harried Mrs. WTJ + 220 pages to write from scratch - sufficient time does not give you One Happy Papa. The end result, though, is one of the better things I've ever written. As usual I have Mrs. WTJ and Baby WTJ to thank for their patience, my friends for their advice and general kibbitzing, and my editor and good buddy, who once again took the camel through the needle's eye. Pax and amor to all.

And now it's on to Secret Thing #2, which I've been putting off for three years now. To my collaborator, who knows who he is: Put on that ripped undershirt, and get yourself a pail and a radish--it's go time.


@ 6:40:00 AM, ,