Mr. Turner: Impressions of the Artist

The film Mr. Turner gives us the crabby little rotund man behind those expansive luminous seascapes of early Victorian England.  Embodied by actor Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner is a bull in the Victorian china shop, grunting and waddling through drawing rooms, sullen or abrasive in conversation.  Yet his eyes well with tears at amateur performances of music, and we see him animated with affection for his father and with passion for art.

Director/writer Mike Leigh skirts the well-worn arc of biopics -- from obscurity to fame -- by starting mid-life, when the artist and his eccentricities are already well-known.  It would seem that the only way to go is down through diminished reputation and declining health.  We do see Turner mocked in a music hall sketch, his work displaced in the gallery by Pre-Raphaelite kitsch; we visit the studio of a photographer whose technology both threatens Turner and fascinates him; we see the stiffening of the proud man's gait, hear the racking cough.

But Leigh leavens the story of decline, told in short episodes, with scenes that show other themes in the artist's life.    

Of course, art itself is a major motif in the movie.  Turner will travel to Holland or to a Scottish sea port, strap himself to a ship's mast during a storm, pay a prostitute to pose, or consult a scientist about magnetic qualities of the spectrum, all to capture the images he wants. He maintains fierce independence among other artists at the gallery, and defends a past master from the snide attacks of a callow John Ruskin: "That man," he says, "was a genius, an artist of his time."  When Turner's own time seems to have passed, his neglected works crammed in his shabby gallery, a discerning American offers a fortune for the lot, and we know that his reputation will outlast the fashions of his day.

Another sequence of episodes trace Turner's gradual discovery of love late in his life, set in counterpoint to scenes that show his callousness.

For callousness, Leigh shows Turner resist calls from a former mistress to support their desperate family. Turner loans fifty pounds to an impecunious artist who stubbornly antagonizes all who would help him, just to be rid of the man. Learning that the man's children have starved to death while their father indulged his pride, Turner's sympathy is aroused, extending so far as to forgive the debt and to denounce the man.  The longest single thread in the story, and a painful one to watch, is how Turner takes advantage of a housemaid, never acknowledging her devotion to him, not even noticing her dire physical decline.

But when he takes a room at the seaside home of a former slave ship's captain, Turner and the captain's cheerful wife begin a polite friendship that, in her widowhood, develops into a mutually nurturing relationship.

I wonder if Leigh intends for the movie to imitate Turner's own approach to art?  He does fill the screen with Turneresque skies that reflect on water.  Yet it's not the delicate colors that he emphasizes when he shows us Turner at work, but sudden jabs with the brush, impatient smearing with his fingers, even spitting at the canvas.  The film's spare musical score by Gary Yershon, played all by strings, seems an analog to Turner's work, sounding to me (on first hearing) like a wash of harmonic colors punctuated by sudden jabs with the bows.  The movie likewise is a portrait told in daubs that resolve into a design only as we get some distance.   

Someone's Still in There: Krista Tippett Discusses Alzheimer's

Often, Krista Tippett's radio program On Being offers thoughtful, generous guests whose ideas bloom in answer to her curiosity.  Today, the show featured clinical psychologist Alan Dienstag, who works with Alzheimer's;  As that disease has touched my family, I listened on headphones at the grocery store, pausing in the cereal aisle to cry a little.

Tippett's show used to be known as Speaking of Faith, and she asked this guest to opine on what his Jewish tradition has to say about Alzheimer's.   "God forgets, too," he said.  God isn't just the creator of awesome things, but must be in the pain, too.  In other answers, the doctor suggests that Alzheimer's gives us a concentrated vision of what we are all experiencing, i.e., being like a picture that's fading.  He's moved by the sight of his patients in writing groups, trying to set down who they are while they still can do so.

He offered some comforts.

Even in a late stage, a caregiver will recognize humor or sadness, "dispatches" from the person inside.  Sometimes, there's wisdom: the woman who struggled to answer why she loved the beach, before saying, "There's a kind of music always there." A wife was distraught that her husband couldn't say who she was, until one day he said, "I don't know who you are; but I love you," just what she needed to hear.

Memory, we now know, isn't brought up from a well, but pieced together from many different parts of the brain, a creative process.

When Krista Tippett asked the doctor how he'd feel getting a diagnosis of Alzheimer's now, he said he'd feel grief and loss, but not fear. For one thing, he explained, the Alzheimer patient isn't aware of the condition, and he told of a husband who told a support group,"I forget things sometimes, but I get by just fine," while his wife cried silently behind him. 

Tippett ended the program with a reading from a collection of poems that arose from the poet's workshop experiences with Alzheimer's patients.  The collection is Oblivio Gate by Sean Nevin.

The Last Five Years on Screen: Feeling is Enough, with Music

It's not the tale but the telling that makes the film adaptation of The Last Five Years wonderful.

Supple, expressive songs by Jason Roberts Brown articulate and enlarge the characters' thoughts and feelings in a variety of styles. The camera, directed by Richard LaGravenese,  also enlarges the characters' faces, expressive and appealing. "Jamie"(Jeremy Jordan) and "Cathy" (Anna Kendrick) fall in love, marry, then grow apart as his career becomes "the other woman" (actual other women being his accessories).

It's a familiar story made fresh by the author's manipulation of time.  At the start, "Jamie" has left to pursue his career, and "Cathy" is "still hurting."  We see her, tears in her eyes, take off the wedding ring, the watch, the bracelet. But then we see Jamie burst into an apartment with Cathy wrapped around his thighs, singing to his "Shiksa Goddess" about how crazy he is about her.   He's at the start of the relationship, moving forward, giving her along the way that bracelet, the watch, and the wedding ring; she's at the end, looking backward; we see their opposing trajectories in alternating scenes, meeting midway at the wedding. 

The most magical song of the movie is the story of "Shmuel," a song in Brown's best Fiddler-on-the-Roof  style, in which energetic "Jamie" tries to lift dispirited "Cathy" to see herself in a fable about a tailor who has a chance to use time in a new way.  Performing as husband, tailor, spirit, and old Yiddish narrator, Jordan performs the number with verve and precision, tugging "Cathy" out of her funk.  It's staged for "Jamie" to dramatize his whimsical story from cloth, lamps, and holiday decor found in the apartment

All the other songs are so honest that they make us smile and hurt.  The hurt is always there, because we know how it turns out, though we hope against hope that these sweet, well-intentioned, beautiful people with their soaring voices are going to somehow get back together.

I had mixed feelings about the stage show.  (Read reflection here.) The movie is able to round out the story in a new way, and I love it.

My only qualm is this:  Betrayal, by Harold Pinter, also told its story backwards, peeling layer after layer off the original impression we get of the affair.  Betrayal thus builds to a revelation that the situation was never so clear-cut as we thought.  In the end of this one, have we learned anything new?  I can't think of anything revealed by the criss-crossing of time, only an uptick in sympathy for the boy.  Feeling is the point:  At any given moment, we're feeling the exhilaration of young love and ambition, while we're also feeling sympathy with the loss of the same.

Well, with all the music, the lyrics, the acting, the scenery, the dancing and glorious voices to appreciate -- feeling is enough. 

[See my Sondheim page for many other reflections on matters relating to the composer that Jason Roberts Brown "worships" (his own word) Sondheim, his shows, and musical theatre more generally.]

Wisdom about Life from Songwriter Joe Henry

Not only have I never heard Joe Henry before, but I didn't even recognize any of his collaborators besides Madonna.  But in just a few minutes' talk with Krista Tippett on her radio program On Being, this guy tossed off some wisdom both profound and obvious. 

• Those "bumps" in the road of life are the road of life; ants at the picnic are part of what it means to have a picnic. I added to myself, "Difficult classes are what teachers are for!"
• He thinks of marriage as a verb, and, once you're married, you can never not have been married, any more than he could not be a brother, even if, "God forbid," he and his brother were to suffer estrangement.  Today's sermon by Fr. Daron Vroon at St. James' Episcopal Church concerned this same idea:  "covenant," unlike "contract," is a binding relationship, not just a transaction.  
• Songwriting is a process of discovery.  The song has a wisdom of its own; the creator has to learn what the song already knows.   Later, in another context, he said the same thing about relationships, esp. marriage.
• His beloved parents were devout Christians; he never identified with the religion, but felt his salvation in music.  His earliest memory was sitting under the ironing board, looking up at the foam under the cover, while his mother watched JFK's funeral.  He knew she was upset. He asked, "Does this mean you're going to die?"  "Yes, dear."  "Will I die, too?"  "Yes, dear." 
• A lyric of a song on his latest album tells us that "a blind man looks out of your eyes." 

The clips of his music did not appeal to me; but he sounds like a good, wise, healthy man.  

Leonard Nimoy, Gratefulness

Leonard Nimoy was remembered today on NPR for bringing gravitas to his role as Mr.Spock.  I treasure 48 years of memories of him in that role, embodying so many qualities I've admired.  I think he may have been a role model for this geeky little boy back in 1967.

But my favorite memory is most recent, when he joined the NPR comedy game show "Wait,Wait,Don't Tell Me." After lots of jokes, many at expense of uber-geek host Peter Seigel, Nimoy gave a heartfelt response to a question about the actor's famous frustration with his being so identified with one character.  (His first book was titled I Am Not Spock.)  "Not a day goes by that someone doesn't come up to me to tell me what a difference the character of Spock has made in their lives.  I can feel nothing but gratitude for playing that role."  (Paraphrased from memory.)

I tear up every time I repeat this anecdote, even now.  I'm not sure why.

Thrilling Conclusion to Kavalier & Clay

(I just finished reading Michael Chabon's wonderful novel, and know that I've got to catch up with everything else he's done since 2000.  I reflected on the first half a few days ago in Midway Through Kavalier and Clay. I've also rhapsodized about The Final Solution in an essay called Michael Chabon's Sherlock Holmes Novel: Short and Sweet.)

In our last episode, our reflective blogger had just written about how he loved the interpenetration of comic book fantasy and the "real" lives of the comic book creators.  Little did the Blogger know what lay in store:

Reality and meta-reality merge when we read how the arch-villain The Saboteur booby traps a gala where The Escapist performs on stage.  We can read between the lines to see that it's a sad sack would-be Nazi getting even with Joe Kavalier at a bar mitzvah.  The fun works both ways, in super-sizing the action, and in appreciating how plausible it all is.

Over-the-top events are made easy to believe when Sammy Clay does his patriotic duty to scan the night sky for panzers from atop the Empire State Building.  A storm is brewing, and clouds "like zeppelins" send forth lightning and sparks, on the occasion of his first kiss (ca. 372). In a novel about comic book creators, it fits.

Radioman Defeats the Nazis!  Joe Kavalier, motivated throughout the first half of the novel by anger at his impotence to rescue little brother Thomas from the Nazis, does his part for the war effort at the South Pole, with a ham radio, a crusty mechanic, and a one-eyed dog named Oyster.  In a way, it turns out to be every bit as miraculous as one of his alter-ego's adventures.  

It all fits!  Chabon contrives a comic-book climax with costume, human flight, police, orphans, every important character present.  As we approach that climax, tropes from other parts of the story double back again, as when Joe becomes magic teacher to young Tommy Clay, echoing both Kavalier's boyhood, and the origin story of the Escapist. 

After the climactic scene, Chabon takes a few chapters more to answer all the questions that have kept the story going forward, in ways that leave us feeling good, and warm, and happy to have known these guys (and the gal, Rose).

Chabon mixes in these last chapters a great deal of commentary on the relationship of the comic book world to the world of his characters.  All are "escaping" from guilt, from being "a fairy," from a loveless marriage (into Rose's romance comics).  Chabon incorporates the history of comic books here, saving for next-to-last the real-life Senate hearing on the depravity of comic books inspired by the real-life book Seduction of the Innocent by Fred Wertham.  He relays the observation that Super-heroes are all golems, all Jewish (Superman himself, from the old country, takes on a gentile identity). Comics are certainly "escapist" entertainment, as charged.

So, what's wrong with escapist entertainment?  Chabon throughout the novel demonstrates the idea that even a "cheap" genre can transform reality into art, and can be done artfully.  An earlier chapter is an essay on the topic disguised as the protagonists' attendance at the premier of Citizen Kane.  But among the most arresting passages of the novel are those in which Chabon describes an artist's work for us: all the rage that goes into Kavalier's painting of The Escapist giving Hitler a jaw-breaking punch; Rosa's turning the frustrations of her life into a romance comic about a wife at Los Alamos who discovers that "the other woman" in her husband's life is the A - Bomb, its mushroom cloud salaciously curved; Kavalier's magnum opus, a 48 chapter graphic novel about the Golem.  Nothing beats the early description of Kavalier at work drawing the naked woman (Rosa) whom he surprises in a showy leap from the fire escape through a window into her room -- so much feeling goes into the strokes of the pencil!

I read the acknowledgements with avid interest, recognizing so many of the names from my own years of comic book fandom.  Named last, and "above all," is the great comic book artist who, like Sammy Clay, finished the last years of his career working from the West Coast, who shares his initials with Joe Kavalier, the great Jack Kirby.

I must read more by Chabon;  I also need to look into the recently published bio of Kirby. [Link to my reflection on the biography of Kirby.]

Believing, Beloving: Diana Butler Bass, "Christianity after Religion"

Look to the roots of words to see how far the popular understanding of religious "faith" and "belief" have strayed from their points of origin.  Our English word "to believe" comes from belieben, "beloving."  Our word "doctrine" comes from the same root as doctor, and should have something to do with healing, not with separating goats from the Good Shepherd's flock.  Credo was chosen for the start of our creeds over the alternative opinor, the difference between "I set my heart on" and "I have an opinion."  The ubiquitous verse John 3:16 would be better translated as a promise of eternal life to all who entrust their lives to Jesus, not those who agree with certain statements about Jesus.

[Image: Thanks to Robert Talbert and wordle.net for the Creed, most-repeated words largest]

This etymology for our language of "faith" (itself related to fidelity, personal loyalty) comes from an excerpt of Diana Butler Bass's book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and The Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (2012).  She subscribes to Harvey Cox's idea that Christianity has passed from an  age of "faith in Jesus," when faith was the way a community lived, through an age of "belief about Christ" when adherence to dogma determined who was in or out, to the present age characterized by "experience of Jesus."  (excerpt 126).  "Fundamentalisms," she quotes Cox as saying, "turn out to be rearguard attempts" to stem a tide that has already overrun the battlefield, the way the last Roman Emperor tried to reclaim authority (127).

Bass bolsters the claim that Christians are moving beyond belief with a brief reference to polls and a little history.  Americans self-identify as "spiritual" more than "religious."  She looks at Jonathan Edwards' call for return to "affections" in worship as a start for this latest age, back in 1740.  She skips ahead to Pentecostalism's origins around 1900, at the same time that William James was concluding that "religious experience" is helpful to an individual's life, regardless of dogmas.  She tells about how reason "hardened" into rationalism, and how fundamentalism arose in reaction.  That's when beloving became believing in the sense of agreeing to a set of statements.


Bass tells us that the Creeds are an obstacle to those who think of themselves as "spiritual," today, but she offers a compromise to those like me who want to hold on to the Creeds.  Bass tells us that we encounter God through words, by which she means prayer.  She suggests that the Creeds, far from being Cliff Notes for a quiz in the afterlife, are actually prayer, when read, "I trust in God the Father...." (140-1).  She presents a creed remade to speak to the Maasai people, which describes Jesus as "a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe" who invites us "on safari" to look for good to do. "All who believe in Him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love...." (143).

Bass anticipates my uneasiness replacing the creeds and rites of religion with "spirituality" and "experience" when she relays worries expressed by her audiences.  Didn't Hitler's followers claim "experience?"  Can we be just "cafeteria Christians" who pick only what we want to believe? [For more on faith v. belief, and how to "believe in" hell and heaven, see my post on Meditations by Fr. Frank Wade]

Bass's answer emerges from an observation that no young clergy-in-training cited authoritative figures when asked how they go about dealing with important issues of faith. Rather than authority, these young clergy sought authenticity, by which they meant the sense of a broader community -- community found via internet, perhaps, but widely dispersed, nonetheless.

Reflecting on all this, I find that theater helps me to find my own balance between adherence to a set of credal statements and more fuzzy "experiential" faith.  For example, when a young actor of evangelical background was my choice to play Hamlet, we studied both Shakespeare's text and our own experiences to arrive at a living interpretation of Hamlet as truth-teller who attempts to bring healing to rotten Elsinore, neither madman, nor avenger.  Our interpretation emerged from engagement with the text and life, both; it required no distortions or elisions; it was consistent within itself; yet it was different from what others have done with Shakespeare's text.

This reading by Bass comports with "theological reflection" promoted in the rest of the book containing it, the Reading and Reflection Guide published by the Education for Ministry (EfM) program out of the School of Theology at the University of the South at Sewanee.   We are exhorted to use reason to consider experience, shared thoughts and feelings, connections to our religious traditions and texts, and what may be part of our culture.

Bass writes that "what" we believe is less important than "how" we believe.  Whether one "agrees" with the Creeds that "He rose again, in accordance with the Scriptures" or one claims personal "experience" of resurrection, the essence of "faith" is in Bass's paraphrase of Jonathan Edwards' question: how does the resurrection make a difference in our lives?  

Bass, Diana Butler. Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.  Excerpted in Education for Ministry. Reading and Reflection Guide, Volume B: Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World.  Sewanee, TN:  The University of the South, 2014.

Find links to many more of my reflections on the Episcopal church, scripture, and on others' perspectives of the same topics at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians! 

Midway through Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Halfway through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I'm as swept up by Michael Chabon's style as I am caught up in his story.

Will young Josef Kavalier, graphic artist who creates the panels for comic book hero "The Escapist," truly be able to redeem his promise, made as he escaped Prague, to rescue his little brother Thomas from Hitler's Europe?  Will his cousin and friend, American-born Sam Clay, stave off the selfish businessmen and corporate lawyers who have sought to cheat him and his partner Joe from the profits of their creation?  Has he found some kind of love at last in the radio actor who embodies "The Escapist" in both voice and form, named Tracy Bacon - epitome of Gentile All-American manhood?   Will Joe marry the lovely, spunky Rosa Luxemburg Saks, inspiration for Joe's character "Luna Moth?"

While these questions draw me onward, the style stops me time and again, just to appreciate the novel's texture.

Part of the texture is its underpinning of fact, legend, and pop culture references.  The ancient wish-fulfilling fantasy of the Golem, a clay man animated to avenge pogroms, is the ur-text for this novel about Sam Clayman and his partner Joe Kavalier, who has escaped Prague in a crate with the actual clay golem.  Subtext for the story is the sad real-life exploitation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, Jewish teens who waited their whole lives to receive more than a sliver of what their creation Superman earned for their publishers.  There's another real-life comic book connection:  When our character Joe breaks into the office of the American Aryan League, he discovers a comic book fan, reminding us of the horrible truth that Hitler and his closest minions were failed artists who drew the world into their adolescent revenge fantasies.

Chabon plays with the interpenetration of his characters' stories and the comic book universe they create.  The "origin stories" of the super-heroes mirror the histories and fantasies of Chabon's protagonists.  Sam Clayman has gimpy legs; his hero is lame, but for a magic key.  Rosa in her office job wears modest clothing and glasses, a female Clark Kent or "caterpillar girl" who will inspire "Luna Moth" (258).  One page after we read that Joe depicted "The Escapist" chained in a tank of electrified sharks, "the shark of dread that never deserted its patrol of Joe's innards rose to the surface" (180).

Chabon's narration manages to have the slightly ironic detachment of commentary on pop culture, at the same time that it exults in the purple, punning, wise-guy prose of the comics, pulps, and movies.  Here's what Joe sees from across a crowded room:

And yet in [Rosa's] eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared. (237) 

The scene that follows is what Hollywood calls "meeting cute."  Rosa's entourage of young men parts stagily for Joe and Sam, and then groan at the cliched dialogue:  "Have we met?"  "I am certain I would have remembered someone like you."  It gets worse, or better:  She takes a drag on his proffered cigarette before he reminds her that it hasn't been lit, yet.  Later, describing Joe's fingers preparing a magic trick, Chabon indulges happily in a pun about "prestigious digits" (317).

I'd say that I can't wait to finish the book; but I keep taking time out to savor its pages.(Read my post about the Thrilling Conclusion.)

Michael Chabon.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Picador, 2001.

"You have kept the good wine till now."

John 2.10   You have kept the good wine till now.

The parable of strangers at a banquet was Fr. Daron’s text, and his sermon made an important distinction between meaningful celebration and mere “partying," but we were distracted by one of our most grandfatherly parishioners leading a tiny girl by the hand down the center aisle back to her seat.  Grey heads everywhere turned, cooing aww. 

We older parishioners love to see the little children at St. James’.  The parade from Children’s Church at the “peace” is a highlight of our 10:30 service.  We like to see the younger adults, too, and the downward trend in average age among ushers, choir, and Vestry.

But I wonder what we with bad eyes and aching joints have to offer the young?  There are serious answers to that question in recent books by theologians Richard Rohr and Ronald Rolheiser. (Link to my reflections on those books.) They write that the first half of life is about defining our identities through the homes we make, careers we build, and principles we defend.   Popular culture promotes the fight to build our lives, but tells little about what should follow.  Many of us just keep fighting, to our detriment. Carl Jung wrote, "What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age.”

We can learn how to make a gift of the second half of life by considering that grandfather in our congregation:  give support, listen, tell stories of the ways it used to be good, laugh about the times we got through worse, and leave all the correction and criticism to the parents!  Let the young see us at church often for meaningful celebration. Rolheiser writes, “Live in gratitude.”

You readers who may still be fighting your battles, take comfort from the sign Jesus performed at the wedding in Cana:  with God, the best may come last.

Laughing Stock the Perfect Middle School Play

[Photo:"Mime" after show; "Psychic" behind]

Bradley Hayward's one-act comedy Laughing Stock is listed in Brooklyn Publishers' catalogue as 45 minutes long with flexible cast "from 24 to 72," making it very appealing to a middle school teacher with a drama club of around 24 mostly younger members.  After our performance last week, a mother said it gave lots of kids lots of chances to get laughs, and "just enough" bathroom humor to keep the boys interested.  It has a moral, "Life is only as boring as you make it."  She called it "the perfect middle school play."

I'd had my doubts.  Was it funny, or just "middle school funny?"  Would parents be shocked to hear the word "sucks" five times on the first page, or to hear a stereotyped rapper  say "dayum?"  Two-thirds of the script pass before our protagonist's life story advances beyond "I was born...."  But now I'm a believer.

"Michael" enters a black stage empty except for a stool, a cube, and a pair of smiley-styled drama masks for a backdrop.  To graduate, he must perform a play made from his own life story, but nothing's prepared.  "I don't even know any jokes," he apologizes.  A Writer from the audience -- in our production, played by a pert young woman -- offers to "spice up" his "humdrum life" with stock characters:  pirate, gunslinger, femme fatale, elves, cheerleaders, a pop star, psychic, lawyer, hillbilly, mime, mad scientist.... For the next forty minutes, twenty-some actors make grand entrances in colorful costumes, do their bits, and run back to the dressing room to prepare for their next entrances.   

Rehearsals were frustrating for the leads until the day that I dismissed the rest of the cast early.  I had Michael and Writer rehearse just their dialogue without the madcap interruptions.  We found a kind of "boy meets girl" drama:   Boy welcomes Writer's help, Boy begins to doubt the Writer's shallow approach to drama, Boy opposes Writer with help from William Shakespeare -- a young woman in our production, sporting a Shakespeare tee-shirt.  Our leads found new energy in each segment:  Michael's hopefulness at the start, Michael's swelling self-confidence with Writer's encouragement, then growing mutual hostility.

Just when the arrival of new stock characters begins to look like a formula, Hayward introduces the "Greek Chorus."  Enthusiastic sixth and seventh graders played "follow-the-leader" with their lines, experimenting with inflection and movement.  Over a few weeks, we rehearsed the chorus alone for over two hours to perform a bit that, in the end, lasted around three minutes.  The boost in energy and laughs made the chorus worth the time.

I came away pleased with what had happened offstage, too.  With so many kids, costume changes, and props, the show was virtually guaranteed to have distracting hubbub backstage and flubbed entrances.  We did have both during the last two weeks of rehearsal. But, without adult direction, the kids pulled their acts together and missed not one cue in the final performance (not counting curtain call:  no one wanted to be first one out, and they all piled up at the door).  This show made pros of them!

The Imitation Game: Finding the Man in the Machine

To learn how a machine works, you treat it as a puzzle: take it apart and see how the pieces fit together.  For The Imitation Game, screenwriter Graham Moore and director Morten Tyldum fracture the life of Alan Turing so that we can see connections between its pieces.  With understanding comes affection, humor, and pathos.  

One piece is the "code."  By now we've all heard how mathematician Alan Turing led a team of puzzle-solvers under cover at England's "Bletchley Radio Factory" to design a rudimentary computer that broke the Nazis' machine-generated "Enigma" code.  But in Moore's screenplay, schoolboy Turing, obsessive, inexpressive, bullied, asks Christopher, his one friend, about a book on cryptography: "How is code-breaking different from normal speech?  People never seem to be saying what they mean."  By his mosaic treatment of Turing's life, Moore has flanked this piece from the 1920s with other conversations from 1941 and 1952, so that we have ample demonstration of this genius's difficulty picking up sarcasm and social cues coded in normal speech.

Another piece is the eponymous "Imitation Game" proposed by Turing in a theoretical paper, much in the news lately as "the Turing Test."  A machine that successfully fools an interrogator into thinking its answers are human has crossed the threshold of "thinking."  The story is framed as the interrogation of Turing by a detective investigating an apparent break-in at Turing's home in 1952.  Bits of that interrogation are woven in and out of scenes that show us Turing's obsessive behavior at school and among teammates at Bletchley.  Through fine writing and actors with conviction, we also see schoolboy Turing struggle to express love that he feels for Christopher at school, and adult Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) learn how to be human from Joan (Keara Knightley), sole woman on the team.  Much of the humor in the film arises from Turing's mechanical imitations of jokes, flirtation, and kindness.

The other piece has to do with secrecy.  Even in youth, Turing knew to hide his love for Christopher;  in 1952, exposed by a male prostitute, Turing was convicted and sentenced to chemical castration under the United Kingdom's "immorality laws." The entire Bletchley operation was secret during the war, expunged from the record for another fifty years afterward.  Turing also learns that one of his teammates is spying for Stalin.  But the core of the movie is the irony that, once Turing's team could decode every Nazi plan of attack, their knowledge still had to remain secret, even from officers who could prevent massacres, lest the Nazis get wise.  Moore dramatizes Turing's dilemma when a convoy ship is sacrificed to secrecy.  Director Tyldun makes sure we see the human cost in lives and loss.  Later, we see a close-up of Turing's pencil marking his statistical analysis of how many Allies to sacrifice on a given day to keep Nazis in the dark.

Every piece of Moore's screenplay falls in place at one simple line.  Turing asks his interrogator, "So, now that you've heard my answers, do you think I'm human?"

Thanks to fine writing and fine performances, we all have our answer.

Saint Odd: "As it was in the Beginning..."

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." - Gloria Patri

 In Saint Odd, the affable young man named Odd Thomas returns to his small home town of Pico Mundo; and author Dean Koontz returns to human-scaled action, unencumbered by conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions that encroached on the later novels of his series.  The story is simple: Odd searches for clues to thwart a cult's scheme for mass murder while the cult's assassins pursue him. 

Being Odd, he can also ask the spirit world for a hint.  He sees (though he cannot hear) dead people; he has a sixth sense to guide him to any goal that he can picture; and he is haunted by prophetic dreams that give him a vague idea of the cult's plan.  He also has a premonition of his own death.  No spoiler alert:  Odd, our narrator, is up front about the end of his story. "I came home to die and live in death." 

More than a plot device, Odd's sense of worlds beyond this one gives substance to the story.  Otherwise, it could be just a video game, our protagonist picking his way through unfamiliar terrain -- a canyon, a derelict shopping mall, an almond orchard, a farmhouse -- trying to shoot bad guys before they shoot him.  But digital avatars don't climb down into the canyon "in Good Samaritan mode" to check on the faceless driver who just ran off the cliff trying to kill him (12): "I couldn't let him bleed or burn to death just because of his idiocy behind the wheel of the SUV."  On the brink of surprising the bad guys, in the grip of "cold, controlled fury," Odd considers that he is now two Odds:

...the fry cook who had written poetry for the girl he loved and wept at movies like Terms of Endearment, but also the ruthless killer who could shoot men in the back.  The darker Odd Thomas thought his violence must be righteous... .But the other Odd wondered if the claim of righteous purpose, exerted so often in the past two years, was always true -- or might be overused. (262)

In pain, expecting to fail, Odd lunges forward, believing that his efforts matter: "In this world, Evil works through countless surrogates.  Its name is Legion.  But Good works through surrogates, as well, and they are legion, too" (325).  

In an interview at Beliefnet.com, Koontz tells how Roman Catholic theology gives the world "shape and form and function and meaning" (Beliefnet interview, p. 1).  Odd's girl friend Stormy, lost in the first novel of the series, but ever-present in Odd's thoughts, is quoted often speculating that the universe has a structure.  This world is like a "boot camp," for a battle that continues in another world that she imagines will "out-Tolkien Tolkien" before arrival at final peace.  There's no need for a reader of the series to get hung up on the doctrine of Purgatory, just to share in Koontz's vision of good as eternal, creative, long-suffering, but destined to win over those who, cultists or not, are motivated by the thought, "Can't be me made a mess of my life, must be your fault, so you're gonna pay" (196).  The entire series has been a fleshing-out of that vision.

Asked if he weaves his faith into his novels consciously, or if it's second-nature, Koontz says it's both: 
"I would say it happens because of what your world view is. And it's going to happen automatically without your straining to do it. The way I sometimes begin a story is with a premise, just an odd little thing."  (Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Books/2008/10/Dean-Koontz-interview.aspx?p=4#UwUx5dfJOPqrud1E.99)  

For all the mayhem and dark ruminations, Odd's own humor and appreciation of beauty keep the reading light and uplifting.  "I have a tendency to hope always for the best," he tells us on page one, "even when I'm being strangled ...by an angry, three-hundred-pound Samoan wrestler" (3).   Kind and brave people leaven the story, and, late in the game, one dog that lays a benediction on him:

Muggs scrambled off the backseat.  Standing with his hind feet on the floor, he pawed forward between the front seats and came face-to-face with me.  I would have been fine with a dog kiss, as long as it was on the cheek; but Muggs had something else in mind. His eyes met mine, and he grew very still, his gaze penetrating, his demeanor solemn.  ...I thought, This is A Moment, stay with it.  ...Then the dog shook his head, flapping his floppy ears, and terminated our moment with a sneeze.  (302-3)

That little scene resonates with one early in Koontz's memoir of his dog Trixie.  In Koontz's world, inside and outside of book covers, angels are everywhere, in friends, strangers, and dogs.

Dean Koontz.  Saint Odd. (New York: Bantam Books, 2015).  
For an index of my reflections on other books in the Odd Thomas series, see the section on Dean Koontz on my Crime Fiction page at this blog.  

Beyond Being Right: Two Episcopal Church Services in One Day

We laughed when Father Daron Vroon said, "Proving that you're right and someone else is wrong always leads to peace and harmony."  He was preaching on I Corinthians 8, one of those where Paul embeds distinctions within clarifications within disputations. But Fr. Daron summed it up this way: "You're right; there's nothing wrong with eating meat leftover from sacrifices to imaginary gods; but don't do it."  That got a laugh, too.

Paul's letter turns on the word "knowledge," as in a "knowledge" of right and wrong.  But he tells us that anyone who claims such knowledge to lord it over others mustn't "know" anything:  for "knowledge puffs up; love builds up."  Fr. Daron Vroon's sermon took off from that phrase, applying it to something former Archbishop Rowan Williams recently said,  that most of today's public discourse is mired in controversy on technical issues that are beside the point of any policy.  For example, Fr. Daron pointed to emotional disputes over which set of standards to use in education.  Fr. Daron opined that we'd benefit from drawing back from our narrow focus on the right or wrong technical solution to problems, to see real people and relationships that are the real core of any social matter.  We don't have to get stuck just in the duality of right and wrong. 

As our liturgical calendar marks today for remembering the Presentation of baby Jesus at the temple, we had an evening "Candlemas" service, too, where rector Fr. Roger Allen preached on another duality, "body v. spirit."  He knows that the Church rejected dualistic heresies centuries ago, that we no longer deny that the Creator could and would participate in our lives, fully human.  But he warned that such dualistic thinking lives in us when we try to separate our spiritual lives from our daily work.

Our small, mostly over-50 choir reached a spiritual place beyond our own physical limitations in two anthems yesterday, too.  We sang settings of Latin texts Ubi Caritas and O Nata Lux by contemporary composers Gjeilo and Lauridsen.  Both works are like Renaissance motets, sung a cappella,  developing more from interweaving of independent lines than by chords.  But they are contemporary-sounding in the lushness and occasional dissonance of the harmony that results.  What makes them challenging is something beyond the notes on the page: both pieces change tempo and dynamics often, punctuated with breaths and fermatas.  We had to watch director Peter Waggoner all the time, not just at ends of phrases. 

Very intense, very lovely to be in the middle of it all:  When I was singing it, I knew that we were doing something "right" that transcended disputes, doctrine, and our individual limitations.

Find links to many more of my reflections on the Episcopal church, scripture, and on others' perspectives of the same topics at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians!  

Color and Lightness: Elegant Evening at ASO

[Photo: Cameron Carpenter (The Verge.com). Inset: conductor Jun Markl]

When the music started, we could forget all the hoopla about a fit young organist who likes to show off his fitness and youth and his custom-made high-tech organ.  It was a program of elegant French music, colorful and transparent.  Petit conductor Jun Markl conveyed clear sense of controlled momentum with firm beats from the baton and sweeping gestures to bring in waves of sound from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

First we heard L'Ascension: Quatre Meditations symphoniques pour orchestra (1933) by Olivier Messiaen.  Like so many of his pieces, it begins with a dry fanfare for winds, colorful chords that rise and fall in a stately pace.  I had to smile: though I'd never heard this piece before, I knew from that first beat exactly where we were in the majestic, God-lit terrain of Messiaen-land.  Next up, I thought, has to be bird song; and there it was.  Familiarity doesn't take the edge off this composer's idiomatic composition style, but makes me more appreciative of his effects. Mystical, synesthetic, theoretically rigorous, Messiaen is yet a showman with a sense of humor and a love for surprise, atmosphere, dramatic climaxes, and happy endings.. 

The star of the evening was Cameron Carpenter, pictured on our program in a wife-beater, glistening with sweat.  But tastefully dressed in a trim black suit, smiling, always attentive to the conductor, he seemed a modest team player, notwithstanding the Elton-John-spangled organist's pumps and the poofy Mohawk.  The organist gets the first word in Poulenc's Concerto in G minor for Organ, and that word is (I think) a joke:  it's a stereotypically doom-filled, room-filling G-minor chord that announces:  "We're going to play with big sounds, darkness and light, and we're going to put on a show."   Many portions sound like they might have been accompaniment for a car chase in a film noir; I loved it best when the sound and fury subsided subito a few times to gentle passages that sounded like sweet little hymn tunes being improvised at the keyboard.

Atlanta audiences are guaranteed to go wild over music that reminds them of church, so Carpenter was called back for a solo encore.   Naturally, he launched into that effervescent French showpiece, Vidor's toccata from the fifth organ symphony.  There seems to be so much going on, as the organist's feet play ponderous pedal, the left hand bounces in a perky little rhythm, and the right hand prances in a persistent arpeggio.  But it's  proto-minimalist music that rings changes on just one phrase - do, ti, la, ti.  When you  you think you've heard it all, Vidor surprises you again with a variation in the chord, or a sudden change in register, or a drop in volume.

After the break, Markl led Saint-Saens "Organ Symphony", a familiar piece that predated all the music in the first half of the program, but clearly rooted in the same creative soil.  Same mix of color, same attention to textures -- my favorite moment being the shimmering piano keyboard against luminous strings right after a stentorian organ passage -- and same sly showmanship.  For this number, Carpenter and his organ stayed discreetly off to the side, by the double-basses, only the tip of his Mohawk visible over the console. 

"You cannot be a Christian by yourself"

John 8.53-54  Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died?  And the prophets died!  Who do you claim to be?

[Photo: Fr. Dean Taylor, St. James' annual blessing of animals]

Can we know the living God by dead prophets?  In John's Gospel, the experts on dead prophets fail to recognize God when they see Him face to face.  "You can know the Father only by knowing the Son," Jesus tells them.  But where does that leave us, 2000 years later?  How can we today know the living Jesus except by letters from dead apostles?

Perhaps you, like me, keep letters and photos of family.  My mother and one uncle are all who survive of the grownups who nurtured and taught me.  Who will care for those family mementos when I'm gone?  To honor those who loved me, I must tell their stories to the younger generation.  I can't leave that work to artifacts.  I want today's teenagers to hear in my voice the inflections of my grandmother telling about her grandmother.  They can't know these people by words alone; it takes relationship.

Our Episcopal church passes on its traditions like a family.  You may remember when St. James' young deacon Joseph Shippen was welcomed into the priesthood.  He had studied scripture, passed the tests, earned the degree.  But then he knelt in our nave, where the Bishop in ancient regalia and all the clergy of the diocese gathered.  I'd not seen so many priests standing together, and I was struck by their obvious delight in welcoming their younger brother.  They laid hands on Joseph -- as clergy of earlier generations had laid hands on them, back to the time of John's Gospel.

To know Jesus, we don't have to rely on text alone:  Wherever two or three are gathered, Jesus is there, for we are the body of Christ.  That's what our Episcopal Church preaches.  In the words of a hymn we sometimes sing, "Here [at communion] we meet God face to face."  This is partly what Father Dean meant when he once told us, "You cannot be a Christian by yourself."  We should study scripture; we should continue private devotions in quiet time; and we should stay involved in the life of our church, where, like it or not, in ways beyond words, others embody Jesus to us, while we embody Jesus to them. 

Why I'm Episcopalian, Part One: The Prayer Book

I recently found a file where I started a list under the heading "Why I'm Episcopalian," then forgot about it.  The following thoughts about the Prayer Book are as far as I got:

Prayer Book:    In prayer, whether I’m alone or at church, my mind wanders, especially if I’m worried about arriving at some choice.  I’m inclined to rush to a decision, or else I make detours through scary options.   But the prayer book, with its familiar deliberate phrases, puts guidelines up and the brakes on:  invocation and praise of the Lord of the Universe certainly puts my little world in perspective, and a Scripture reading always injects something I hadn’t thought of in awhile.  By then, I’m ready for prayer, but even that starts way high and carries me through concerns for everyone else before finally, it says, “Let us pray now for our own concerns, and those of others.”  Then I can free-form my prayer, and by then, the message I’ve already received is, “This decision isn’t that big a deal, God supports you, and you have time.” 

Since I wrote that, I've posted many other essays lauding other features of the Episcopal church that I appreciate. See my page, Those Crazy Episcopalians!

Update, 25 January 2015:  Friend Kemper Anderson, recently ordained, sent this link to friends, for 11 Things I Love About the Episcopal Church.  Very well done!

Song Parody: "Camelot"

If I could write song parodies for a living, I'd be happy.  For the retirement of our Parish registrar Michael Campion this past Sunday, I took off from "Camelot."  Little did I know that Michael, just shy of his 90th birthday, met Richard Burton backstage within a couple of years of the actor's introducing this song.   To get some "in" jokes, you need to know that Michael immigrated here from England after World War II, that he was also the head verger, and that he directed the parish's theatre group "Polk Street Players."

Our registrar keeps up a little list, here
Parishioners since St. James' was begun.
He never gets his knickers in a twist, here,
Not Campion!

When you see acolytes are in a tizzy,
Or vergers in their vestments on the run,
They're freaking, asking everyone "Where IS he?
Where's Campion?"

Campion!  Campion!
We guess he's over sixty - four.
But for Campion, our champion,
Retirement's a bore.

Despite his age, he'd climb up high on ladders
To light the Polk Street Players as he'd like.
In short, there is no one
Who knows how things are done
More serious or generous than
Michael Campion!

I'm especially pleased that I could match Alan Jay Lerner's subtle inner rhyme on the syllables "Like" and "Mich-"

Paw and Order: Chet and Bernie go to Washington

Chet the dog narrates Detective Bernie Little's foray into political intrigue and espionage in Paw and Order.   The main fun in this series has always been Chet's own exuberant voice, but human interactions grab more of our attention in this story.  The sycophants, spooks, and hypocrites of the Federal City bring out deeper shades of noir than we've seen earlier in the series. 

It's a romantic whim that brings the pair to Washington, Bernie surprising his girl friend Suzie with a visit.  But the surprise is on Bernie, when he meets another man in Suzie's apartment.   In the back - and - forth between Bernie and Suzie, Chet feels an emotion new to him, jealousy.

But he keeps his spirits up, a model for us all.   "Nothing compares to the start of the day," he tells us, "except for the end and everything in between"(190).  (Note to self:  Keep the sayings of Chet handy next to my Bible and Prayer Book for morning inspiration.)

There's more fun in what Chet knows that Bernie can't detect.  At the crime scene, Chet alone notices the unmistakable aroma of guinea pig.  He knows before Bernie when someone's lying, because, "When humans are sailing along nicely, they've got all their bodily moistures under control, and when they start to go off the rails, the moistures rise up" (112).  Chet spots a weird "bird" hovering nearby, and we figure out long before Bernie does that he's under drone surveillance.  At one point, Bernie wishes aloud that Chet could talk.  Chet is incredulous, thinking, "I talk all the time!"  But Bernie doesn't get it.

Quinn skillfully sets out clues to a big revelation, and we follow Bernie all the way up the ladder, to find something we hadn't expected.

The story's good, and any time spent with Chet is a pleasure. 

Quinn, Spencer.  Paw and Order. Kindle Edition. Atria, Simon and Schuster, 2014.

I've written about other books by the same author:  

• A Doggie Treat covers Dog On It and Thereby Hangs a Tail
• The Dog Who Knew Too Much: Fun with Feeling
• Chet and Bernie Alone:  A Fistfull of Collars
• The Sound and the Furry:  Paws for Reflection
• Peter Abrahams' Oblivion: Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery  concerns a richly layered non-Chet crime novel by the writer who goes by the name "Spencer Quinn"
• Paw and Order: Chet and Bernie go to Washington

Tenor's Recital at Spivey Hall: Matthew Palenzani with Julius Drake

[Photo from Spivey Hall website: The hall, the tenor, the pianist]

"Chopsticks" was the first number on yesterday's program at Spivey Hall at Clayton College, Morrow, Georgia.  After applause, the pianist Julius Drake announced that they would perform Beethoven's extraordinary "Adelaide" (pronounced Ah - de - lah - EE - da), just as soon as Drake retrieved the music backstage.  To fill the time, Palenzani played a little piano, and chatted with the audience about his son's piano lessons. "I like this," he said. "Now you know we're just regular guys."

Regular guys should have such range and control!  The Beethoven, in four contrasting stanzas, gave the two artists chances to impress us with the softness of the sounds they could sustain, and with volume that shook our seats in the resonant hall.

But, more than a program of songs, a recital can also be a kind of theatre.  

The program called for a range of characters and situations, all mimed from the piano, center-stage.  For songs by Liszt, Palenzani seemed to be visualizing the images of the text -- swans, blossoms, a violent storm.  Another set of Liszt, all texts by Victor Hugo, gave Palenzani some characters to play, too:  the gentle lover,  the self-lionizing lover ("If I were God...") who reaches a sheepish conclusion, that he'd trade "heavens and the worlds" for a kiss.    Palenzani would adjust his stance, and set his eyes on some visualized image reflected in his face and voice.  Drake got into the act, too, leaning forward where "intensity" increased, bowing his head over hands at rest on the keys for a moment of solemnity, launching his right hand in a backward arch after snapping a note.

The composers and the poets were present as characters, too.  Erik Satie lightened things up with a song about a bronze frog, which Palenzani ended with a wry expression on the ironic line, "At night, the insects go to sleep / in his mouth."  Each of Satie's songs got a laugh.  Ravel's accompaniment for Five Greek Folksongs punctuated the text, and gave emotional depth that I didn't see in the translations before Palenzani performed them back-to-back:  Following a wedding song that ended with the exuberant proclaimation that "In our two families, [now] everyone is related,"  Palenzani, with Drake and Ravel, shifted into a different kind of place where families are reunited: the church graveyard.

The finale was a suite of "Hermit Songs" that Samuel Barber composed for Leontyne Price.  In an interview this week, Palenzani noted that some of the texts are clearly from the masculine point of view, while only one, "St. Ita's Vision" is clearly feminine.  In any case, we had no trouble believing Palenzani in the roles of various 8th century Irish monks, devoted to their faith and work, recording some of their stray thoughts in the margins of texts that they spent their lives copying.  One rues his own "heart, not softer than a stone," while another speculates about where a village lass might be sleeping that night.  Another imagines throwing a party in heaven, where he'd treat Jesus and the rest to a "lake of beer."  A meditation on the pain of the Crucifixion is intensified by the thought that Jesus would see the suffering he caused his mother.  Finally, there's "The Monk and His Cat," a translation by Auden of a monk's whimsical observation that he, trying to "catch" the elusive meaning of a text, is like his faithful cat Pangur, trying to catch a mouse.  (See my blog post about that text, Reading, Writing, and Pet Ownership ca. 800 AD)

Naturally, we rose to demand encores.  The artists were "in the mood," and obliged with three, the last being Ravel's only composition in English, a Scottish tune.  I'd come with my friend Susan because we'd both heard this duo perform "Danny Boy" on public radio's Performance Today;  Ravel's was similar in character, a little more rarefied, and very effective at conjuring what Susan called "joy in sadness."

A personal note:  at intermission, I recognized Dr. John Clum, who had taught me in many contexts at Duke University back in the late 1970s.  I've written about him on a page of tributes to my teachers.  Find it here. 

God's Trumpet: A Shock to the System

1 Thessalonians 4.17  We... will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

Pearl Harbor was attacked early on the first Sunday of December 1941.  Many parishioners remember the event, and the rest of us have seen it on film.  So when Paul imagines a trumpet call from heaven, the dead climbing from graves, and believers rising to the clouds, his vision of glory mixes with our memories of sirens wailing, enemy bombers clouding the blue morning sky, soldiers fallen, and fighter planes taking off from cratered runways.

Yet, in Scripture, isn't every call from God an alarm, a shock to the system, and the death of "life as usual?"  God called Israel to a land of milk and honey, but to reach it, Israel's people uprooted their lives, endured wilderness, warred, and erred.  A hymn reminds us that the apostles were "contented fishermen" until they followed Jesus far from home to martyrdom.  Following God's call, Paul himself suffered confrontation, ridicule, deprivation, torture, and execution.

Yet again, is there any agony in Scripture that does not also begin a process of redemption?  The crucifix embodies that notion.

This is not to say that every cloud has a silver lining.  It's distasteful to speak of "silver linings" in war, earthquake, disease, or unemployment.  It is rather to say that redemption has a cost:  Pearl Harbor roused the United States out of isolation to assume leadership against totalitarian regimes, at the high cost of blood and treasure.

So, in this season of down comforters, of gathering friends, family, and food, our Church reminds us that our faith has never been about sticking to what we have, where we are, and who we've always been.  Are we contented?  Then we must listen for God's call and must not, as Father Wallace Marsh once told us, "rationalize" ourselves out of heeding it.  Are we anxious?  Then we can take strength from the promise of redemption embedded in our faith. 

[This essay first appeared as the reading for the first Saturday of December, 2010, in a devotional booklet published by St. James' Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA.  Find links to many more of my reflections on the Episcopal church, scripture, and on others' perspectives of the same topics at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians!]