Aphorism of the Day

I didn't make this one up, but it comes to mind at certain moments...

God always forgives. Man sometimes forgives. Nature never forgives.

Why, yes...

...we do just happen to have mass quantities of company just now. Thanks for asking. Posting will remain scarce for a bit. Anybody want to take the helm?

In the meantime, my four favorite kids' t-shirt slogans from yesterday's trip to the zoo:

Gimme Gimme Gimme

Ask me if I care

Homework sucks

On a Mission to Play Video Games!

Catholic Sex Blog

From Cluny: In Search of God's Lost Empire:

"The driving force behind monastic reform was an iron determination to cleanse the Christian world of its impurities...Regrettably, in accordance with chruch teaching, the most telling factor in this cleansing process was the conviction that one of these impurities from whic the world needed to be cleansed was female sexual temptation...the spectre of women's sexual power over men haunted the medieval church with a terrible passion, as any number of sadistic stone carvings testify all too nakedly. The church had inherited from the desert fathers, and above all from St. Jerome, the conviction that the female sex represented all the snares of the world, and that the only pure way to live one's life was to remain celibate...It remains one of the overwhelming contradictions of the Middle Ages that an ethos which was so dogmatic and doom-laden, so misogynist, so puritanical and disapproving of all the sensuous pleasures of day-to-day life, should yet have succeeded in creating so much that is the very opposite of those attitudes. What Cluny bequeathed to us is far from being the product of a hair shirt culture - in a great many fields, it is a legacy of serene beauty and sophistication that we still admire a thousand years later...it is the art of men who have seen the light, and are glorying in it."

Discuss.

Today in Porn, Songwriting Edition

Will Ferrell gives us the truth behind some of Neil Diamond's greatest hits.

Grumpy Old Godsbody

Just about every rock and/or roll station in San Diego seems intent on beating Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" into my brain via that bing-bang chiming beat that runs under the whole song, and the more I hear it, the more it seems like The Sensitive Teen's Guide to Getting Laid:

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

[Translation: Let's just lie down here. We don't have to do anything. I promise.]

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

[I know your Mom wants you to wait until you get married, or at least until you go to college, but it's very important to me that you take off your clothes right now.]

All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see

[See, I really, really love you. You complete me. It's like we're soul mates, and that's why our having sex is so much more than just physical.]

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all

[Of course I'll respect you in the morning. Our love is everlasting!]

Because even if you're at work, you ain't working...

...here's a link to the 50 Greatest Cartoons, YouTubed up and ready to go.

The picture doesn't do it justice...

...but trust us, the Honored Dead have the best view in San Diego.

Exchange

"Well," said First Son Christmas Eve, "I have to become a priest. It isn't even a choice now."

"What do you mean?" asked The Wife.

"When you sent me over to wish Father a Merry Christmas, he asked me, 'When I die, will you take my place in the priesthood?' And I said yes." (We later learned that he asked Second Son the same question, and got the same answer. But when he reported it, it wasn't in the context of "have to" and "no choice.")

The Wife teared up - it was Christmas Eve, after all, and Father was not a young man...

Later, First Son said, "I guess if I have to become a priest, I better start having all my fun right now while I still can."

Event

Second daughter, all of 11 months, toddled into the kitchen, got the whisk, toddled out to the living room, and proceeded to beat our little stuffed Grinch, the one in the Santy-Claus suit, in the face, smiling broadly as she did so. You can't be mean and green and put on that uniform. The kids will know, however young they are.

Exchange

First Son: It's better to have no religion than false religion. False religion can mean human sacrifice.

Me: Well son, I can see why you might say that. Yes, if your false religion led you do things that displeased God when you thought you were pleasing him, things like sacrificing humans, then false religion would certainly be a problem. But there is something in the human heart that senses that this world is not the ultimate reality, that there is something greater than all this, and that leads us to search for God. And so even if you have a skewed picture of God, you're still responding to that human impulse, and that's a good thing. So in that way, it might be better to have a religion which was wrong about some things than no religion at all.

First Son: I like the way you can always take the opposite view.

(I didn't get into the notion that human sacrifice echoes the Christian notion that a human sacrifice was indeed necessary for atonement - it's just that our human was also God, and so was able to suffer the penalty and also overcome it. So in some sense, those human-sacrifice types were on to something, maybe...the blood of bulls just wasn't going to cut it...)

Godsbody - Yesterday's Book News Today

Just got word that the little book was spotted in a Borders wearing its brand new paperback binding. Many thanks to Loyola Press for giving it this second chance at life. Of course, it's too late to order the thing for Christmas, but this being Godsbody, that's to be expected.

Well, Scoob...

Casey Kasem, voice of a generation. Amazing.

Inspiration?

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's home to me and I walk alone
I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams...
- Green Day, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams

"'...cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams.
Here I go again on my own
goin' down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone...
- Whitesnake, "Here I Go Again"

Who knew?

Christmas letter...

...from a priest I know, an old-timer fond of promising suffering. It included this delightful tidbit:

"In the meantime, all the enemies of the past have ganged together to eviscerate the Catholic Church, the only physical and spiritual unity in the world. When the last priest is strangled in the entrails of the last king, the world will end, for the world cannot go on without the priestly sacraments of the Eucharist, Penance, and the oils of healing."

He may have been quoting someone else; I'm not sure. But it's certainly a change of pace from "Buffy and Tad are doing fine at Harvard, and little Mergatroid is excelling everyone at the conservatory. Wendell and I have finally started that foundation we always talked about." He signed it,

"Get ready to be crucified!
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Father X"

Exchange

First Son made some comment about what people deserve.

Me: No, son. There's a line from Shakespeare: "Use every man according to his dessert, and who should scape whipping?" It means if we treated everybody the way they deserved to be treated, we'd punish everyone. Everyone has sinned. Everyone deserves death. That's why we live by love instead. Love covers a multitude of sins.

First Son, picking up on my choice of words: So love just covers over the evil?

Guest at table: Luther!

The Wife: No, son, love transforms.

Me: It heals.

Found while cleaning my office:

A paint-stirrer, upon which I have scrawled, in oddly neat letters, "Religion is not life."

I wonder what I was thinking, he said to himself, his consciousness spiraling in on itself...

Abandoned Slogans From The Campaign to Increase Observance of the Sunday Obligation Among the Faithful

Get your ass
To Mass

God wants you
In the pew

Add your own in the comments!

Back to the lists...

Today's entry: absolutely most hated Glory & Praise hymn (and why). I'll start with "Gather Us In," for using "light years" in a religious hymn, or at least, using it the way it does. "Not in some heaven, light years away..."

I don't get out much...

...so no, I haven't seen Apocalypto yet. But these people have, and I for one was very intrigued to hear the thing was dedicated to Abel.

Francis Thompson, Lucky SOB

How come the Hound of Heaven doesn't chase me down all the days?

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat -- and a voice beat
More instant than the Feet --
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

One of the reasons I love The Sopranos...

...even in these dread latter days of Season Six, is the way the show gets at the rather universal question of whether it's all about family or all about money. The rhetoric occasionally strays into the "family first" realm, but again and again, when it comes to it, money is what matters. The latest iteration: when Johnny Sack cries after the U.S. Marshalls ruin his daughter's drive-away from her wedding, even his right-hand man regards it as weakness. The great fear: if he'll break down over questions of family, what else will he break down over?

Make It New

I'm happy to admit that I was a sucker for Dave Matthews Band way back when. "Ants Marching" and all that. But time passes - I mean, even Dave Matthews isn't that into himself any more. Then, driving home tonight, I heard him do a live cover of The Zombies' "Time of the Season." "What's your name? Who's your daddy? (Is he rich?) Is he rich like me?" Fantastic.

Gawker Drops The Facade...

...and writes a straight-up love letter to one of my favorite films: Metropolitan.

The Christmas Story...

...a great occasion for frank discussions of human sexuality!

"So, Mom, what exactly is a Virgin?"

Yes, the burgers are good...

...but In 'N Out still has me a little worried...

I suppose it's pretty much common knowledge that In 'N Out puts scripture references (book, chapter, verse) on the packaging for their delicious burgers, crispy fries, and quite possibly, even their scrumptious shakes. I don't know how often they change those references, but last I checked, we were offered Revelations 3:10:

"Because you have kept my message of endurance, I will keep you safe in the time of trial that is going to come to the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth."

And a bit from Nahum (can't remember whether it was verse 7 or 8; was overwhelmed by burger pleasure):

"The LORD is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him, but with an overwhelming flood he will make an end of Nineveh; he will pursue his foes into darkness."

Does my fast-food provider know something I don't?

Woulda, coulda, shoulda

Talked to this fellow a little bit ago. He asked me why I made such a public confession of my life with the little book. I gave an answer. But it wasn't the whole answer. Why confess publicly? Because if the Christian story is to have any traction, it has to start with the fact of sinful man in need of redemption. If my story was to be any kind of witness or carry any kind of weight, it had to dig into the dirt (if only a little) and it had to have my name on it.

I got nothin'

And when you got nothin', you go to the lists.

Heard "Urgent" on the radio yesterday. Started compiling a list of long-lived (and secretly much-loved) power ballads. "Faithfully" is perhaps the granddaddy of them all. But I'm curious as to what y'all have got.

Today in Porn, Spam Edition

Just received this piece of spam, which somehow got through my provider's generally excellent filter:

[Subtly misspelled graphic sex act redacted]

Making the world safe for hypocrisy. Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

[Web address redacted]

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.The educator must above all understand how to wait to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

****

Fascinating to get a lesson on the importance of self-denial in a piece of pornspam.

Penance

A classic example of the way we prefer the penances we choose to those we must accept:

I say three Hail Marys under cold water at the end of my shower as a mortification, a tiny death-to-self. But as hard as it is to swtich from hot water to cold, how much harder to endure the gradual cooling as the hot water slowly drains away because you've run the tub and a bunch of laundry?

Guts

I have never been an especial fan of Dr. Laura, but I absolutely admire her for sitting down for an interview with Radar. It's more interesting when the opposite sides discuss. Come to think of it, they did the same thing with Dawn Eden last week.

Sloth

Another bit from Book Two...

It is one thing to have confidence in the intellectual tradition of the Church – that even if I cannot answer a particular question, the question has more than likely been answered by someone, somewhere - someone far wiser than myself. It is another to treat confidence in this tradition as an intellectual anesthetic, suitable for numbing a troubling doubt. Too often, I am guilty of the latter.

On the blog Plato’s Stepchild, I found this bit from Cardinal Newman: "I want a laity who know their religion and who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity. I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the base and principles of Catholicism." In short, Newman wants people who are Catholic because of their learning, rather than in spite of it. It reminded me of why I envy those who have read their way into the Church, and it recalled in me that immortal line from Homer, patriarch of The Simpsons: “Lord help me, I’m just not that bright.”

Dimness isn’t the whole problem. Part of it is a perverse willingness to live with apparent contradiction...And at the very worst, I sink into what my friend Michael calls Christian Self-Hypnosis. “We can make for ourselves our own version of Plato’s cave,” he once said. “It has the trump card of eternal life, but it’s a cave, nonetheless.” We can refuse to see things as they really are; we can insist that what we see must somehow be otherwise. We can simply ignore things that don’t fit. And when perseverance in the face of doubt is held up as a virtue, it can be hard to engage the things that might weaken perseverance.

Comic Relief

I was First-Team All-League in soccer my senior year of high school, MVP of my team. In college, I slowed down - chronic sitting will do that to a person - but I still had a little of the old mojo. I mention this to highlight the delicious humor of last night's indoor soccer game, during which I juked a defender, broke right, started thinking about my shot, and was taken down - I mean, really taken down - by...the wall. A crafty devil, the wall. Waits for you to make a mistake, and then, POW.

It was rich. I was laughing even as I went down. It wasn't until later, at home, my knees skinned and bleeding from the artificial turf, my jaw aching from stopping a shot with my face, that I found myself saying, "18 was a good age to be."

Not that anybody asked...

...but if I were going to make a back-in-the-day religious movie, I'd make it about John the Baptist. Plenty of source material in Scripture, lots of conflict and drama, the issue of his rather special cousin present from the very beginning, and a great ending - finding fulfillment but losing his head (or perhaps that should be rendered, "losing his head but finding fulfillment.") So many great scenes come to mind...

But as I say, nobody asked me. Instead, let me pass along this little morsel from Cubeland Mystic (who got it from Pauli over at Contra Crunchy):

Barbara Nicolosi penned a script about the founder of Opus Dei, and it's in pre-production. Writes blogger (!) Deal Hudson:

"The film is being produced by my friend Heriberto Schoeffer who has signed on big-time director Roland Joffe, best known for directing 'The Mission.' The title of the film, thus far, is 'The Work' and the first draft of the screenplay was written by another friend of mine, Barbara Nicolosi. The film will dramatize the years of Escriva's life during the Spanish Civil War."

Or maybe y'all knew that already.

The Dangers of Homeschooling

First Daughter, jumping on my back during a group wrestle:

"Time to have some fun with Uncle Dad!"

So - I guess we need to get out more.

Your Daily Dose of Bach

Segovia, via Terry.

Book Two...

...still the source of curious tidbits:

And if the embrace of faith is not a cure-all, neither is its practice. The longtime Catholic cannot say with confidence that he is free of vice simply because his guilt has been removed in confession. Often, the vice remains; often, it endures. There should be no wonder in this. “Don’t ever be surprised by sin,” one of my teachers once told me. “Rather, be surprised, delighted and grateful when sin is overcome.” The wonder, it seems to me after just thirty-odd years of living, is that there is any hope for change, that nature and grace may so conspire as to lift a man out of the ruts he has dug for himself. The movement, if my own attempts are any indication, can be as dramatic as any conversion. The difference is that there is no moment of transformation – no waters of baptism, no graceful words, no welcoming community of faith. Just ground reclaimed, gradually and painfully, from the unsleeping enemy.

Quotes of the Day

"Life slips by, Abrams, life slips by."
- from Chariots of Fire

"Your name is mine!"
- from Quiz Show

"That's not hypocrisy, that's sin."
- from Metropolitan

"The Mediterranean mind is happiest during burning, rape, and pillage. They tend to be indifferent to which side they are on. A small blessing."
- from an email I received yesterday

Today in Porn, Catholic Edition

Via Eve, Bishop Loverde weighs in on pornography:

"In my forty years as a priest, I have seen the evil of pornography spread like a plague throughout our culture. What was once the shameful and occasional vice of the few has become the mainstream entertainment for the many – through the Internet, cable, satellite and broadcast television, cell phones and even portable gaming and entertainment devices designed for children and teenagers. Never before have so many Americans been so tempted to view pornography. Never before have the accountability structures – to say nothing of the defenses which every society must build to defend the precious gift of her children – been so weak."

Fiat Lux

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It is the birthday of poet Thomas Lux, born in Northampton, Massachusetts (1946). He grew up on the family dairy farm. He started writing his own poetry in high school by imitating the poems on the back of Bob Dylan's albums.

He's become known for his often humorous poems on a wide variety of subjects, with titles such as "Commercial Leech Farming Today," "Traveling Exhibition of Torture Instruments," "The Oxymoron Sisters," "Walt Whitman's Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor," "Institute of Defectology," and "Pecked to Death by Swans."

That link on his name will lead you to a poem of Lux's from The Cortland Review, an online magazine which saw its birth in my hometown. Further, Lux was a regular contributor of cover stories for the day job.

Small, interesting world.

CCH

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Spirit draws the flesh
The whoremaster dies alone
Sinners save the church

But oh, what a soundtrack. Leonard Cohen can make your brain spin.

Great line from The Wife: "Oh, those playful mining town whores."

Season Six Is Out On DVD...

The Wife, discussing her back trouble: I woke up this morning...

Me: With a blue moon in your eye?

Even she had to laugh.

SWP

= Sherwin-Williams Paint?

OR:

= Soviet World Population project?

You be the judge.

The Tragedie of LiLo

Sometimes I feel just a wee bit guilty-silly about my slavish attentions to the movements of the rich and famous. (Seriously, did anybody manage as brilliant a response to La Lohan's most recent tirade as the Fug Gals? No, I don't think anybody did.) But then I remind myself that there's a reason why Shakespeare wrote about kings and queens and gentleman from Verona: these are lives writ large. And while Paris Hilton may lack something of Ophelia's poetic heft, it's what we've got.

Today in Porn, Catholic Literary Icon Edition

Andre Dubus, in his book of personal essays Broken Vessels, writes about selling a story to Penthouse, unaware of what exactly it is that Penthouse publishes besides short stories. After he finds out, he goes to talk to a friend about it.

"I don't think it's immoral to publish anywhere," says the friend. "What do you care if some guy wants to look at those pictures?"

"I don't. I just don't know if it's any place to put a story. But it's not that simple. The New Yorker advertises twenty-five-hundred-dollar gold ballpoints. I don't know if that's any place for a story, either."

"You know what your problem is? You know how you feel about those gold ballpoints. And in your personal life, you're closer to Penthouse than you are to gold ballpoints, but you don't want to be public about it. I'd say take their money and forget about it."

Dubus continues: "So I almost did. I bought a later issue and tried to read it, but mostly had to deal with an erection, and I decided the magazine wasn't dumb so much as useless."

The piece concludes with his decision that he prefers to publish in quarterlies. There, "the story, no matter what its worth, has been given a dignity I can see. On those pages it lives alone, untouched by paper genitals, diamonds, and gold."

But seriously - can there be art without decadence? Art is, in some sense, a luxury. Can it hope to flourish without a culture of moneyed indulgence? Wealthy patrons are getting harder and harder to come by...

On the Eve of Apocalypto...

...Godsbody pauses to wipe away a nostalgic tear over the only movie we know that actually made human sacrifice funny...

Help!

(Which, by the by, included this astonishingly prescient image of the Beatles in disguise - or rather, in the looks they would adopt in the coming years.)

Dept. of License Plates

MSLG83

Miss Large, 1983?

Dawn and Gawker, sittin' in a tree...

...seriously, we haven't seen a crush this heavy since Calvin & Susie.

Today in Advertising, Cheerful Obscenity Edition

Billboard for Scion along the 8 Freeway: "*@#$% The Joneses." Class. All. The. Way.

But clever, no? I mean, in the way it quietly acknowledges just how much the Joneses matter. Whether you're trying to keep up with them or *$#%# them, it's the Joneses who have your eye, you status-conscious fellow, you.

Speaking of fancy Manhattan lawyers...

...they also know where to turn for insightful explanations of the great mystery that is Marmaduke. The lesson: be careful before you dismiss the familiar and seemingly mundane.

Today in Porn, Christmas Edition

We don't know what fancy Manhattan lawyers do all day, but apparently, it involves sending fabulous links to Godsbody...

Pornaments:

"Officials at Spencer's headquarters had no comment on the items. However, the back of the boxes say, 'Unlike those other elves, we know everyone on the list (even the naughty ones) needs to have a smile and a laugh this time of year.'"

First, who know Spencer's was even still around? I thought it had gone the way of Chess King...

Second, how do I get that reporter's job? More importantly, how do I turn Today in Porn into a regular segment on The Colbert Report?

Kidfood

Campbell's Tomato Soup: because there's nothing so good that corn syrup can't make it better.

Onan on the Airwaves

So JACK-FM is spreading 'round the land, with the rather self-loving motto: "Playing what we want." But the local campaign, at least, is taking the self-love thing to a whole 'nother level: "Everybody's Jackin'!" "Where do you Jack?" And so on. I'm thinking there can't be many precedents in history for this sort of thing - masturbatory euphemisms being used to make things attractive from a marketing standpoint. But I could be wrong.

Grounded...

...is the new blog from the Sister-In-Law:

"I burned all my adolescent diaries in my early adulthood. Who am I, I thought, to think that anything I think should survive my own pathetic mind? This is an argument against blogging. But, then, I also wonder what John the Baptist thought--perhaps he resented his mission to be a voice crying out in the wilderness. But he cried out all the same. I can't compare to him, I know, but I have my own infinitesimal mission...

So, here it is: crazy, maternal, anarchic, Catholic--you be the judge."

Title source:

"Grounded:
1. stuck at home with my children (subject of last blog)
2. with my hands in the earth
3. looking for my center"

"Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here..."

So Bright Young Catholic Thing Dawn Eden went and wrote a book, which in turn nabbed her an interview with Radar, which not only earned her a gentle ribbing from Gawker, but also ruffled some feathers among the faithful:

"One of the dissenters is an aunt of mine, and the other is a writer on a Catholic blog who does not appear to be very familiar with me or my writings apart from that interview. They make similar points — that in the interest of modesty, I should take the high road and not pander to an interviewer who is baiting me with questions that are unabashedly prurient."

The horse, I'm thinking, is out of the barn on this one. It seems Eden thinks so as well:

"With regard to the dissenters' main concern — what they see as unduly explicit answers — I know why I answered the way I did. It was a similar interview that I did for Gawker in August 2004, where I spoke somewhat salaciously of my journey from rock journalist to Christian blogger, that caught the attention of the New York Observer's George Gurley. And it was Gurley's article that in turn caught the attention of W Publishing Group, which is how my book came to be.

In other words, if I hadn't painted Gawker a graphic picture of a woman who found fulfillment in chaste Christianity that she never attained when living a sordid secular lifestyle, The Thrill of the Chaste would not be making the news right now. Perhaps I might have gotten it published by a small publisher who could get it into specialty Christian stores, but it wouldn't have been the exciting, countercultural news story that it now is to mainstream publications like Radar (and many more media outlets to come)."

She has more to say on the matter, but this is enough for me. It's not a matter of being shameless. It's a matter of meeting the world where it is.

Jukebox, Questionable Imagery Edition

So I'm driving home and I stop at the nostalgic spot on the dial where Casey Kasem's deathless voice is telling me about "the most listened to songs in America!" Number four: Lips of an Angel. Song about a guy on the phone with his ex, for whom he is still hot, and with whom he has to be quiet, lest his current gal overhear. Chorus:

Well, my girl's in the next room
Sometimes I wish she was you
I guess we never really moved on
It's really good to hear your voice saying my name
It sounds so sweet
Coming from the lips of an angel
Hearing those words it makes me weak
And I,
never wanna say goodbye
But girl you make it hard to be faithful
With the lips of an angel

Just imagine if she had the lips of a devil.

Tool

Boy do we feel silly. We used to take such delight in ribbing our friend the California lawyer about the Tool CD in his car - though, to be fair, he could have just called our bluff and put the durned thing on when we asked for it - and now it turns out that Tool's frontman is all thoughtful 'n stuff:

"I don't know what the solution is, other than just hoping that we can weather the storm, and then looking to places like Europe, post-World War I and II, where the communities that survived are the ones that were already surviving: They had their own little localized economy and farmers and trade, just to get through the winter. They're the ones that survived, and have survived, and will survive. So that's kind of the positive. [Laughs.] That's my silver lining in the cloud: starting a wine community in Arizona, hoping that the United States [will go] through an entire saturation of winemaking, and then level out to where it ends up being a cottage industry and people are just surviving locally, no matter what happens with the clowns running things."

Why, he's a crunchy! But my favorite bit is this, where he has to consider his public:

AVC: Do you feel out of touch with your audience?

MJK: For the most part, I have no idea who those people are—especially when we're traveling through Europe. And it's not all our fault; it's a whole series of events. [You play] heavy music, and your record company, which has never owned an album anything like what you're doing, immediately markets you to the obvious stinky kid with the dreadlocks and the B.O. and the urine on his shoes because he's been sleeping in his own filth in a festival in the middle of the rain. They basically market right to that guy. And then you realize the only people showing up to your shows are those primates—these weird, cretin people… Then, let's say you're at a coffee shop, and you've got a friend sitting next to you, and you've been reading some Noam Chomsky, or you're reading The Onion, and you look over and see a bunch of kids [who] look like they could be made of cheese, because there are flies everywhere. And you go, "Hey, you want to go where they're going?" and everybody goes, "F-ck no." And they're wearing Tool shirts. Why would you want to go there? Why would anybody other than those kids wanna go see Tool if that's our representative in that area? So it ends up being a no-win situation. Of course, that's a completely extreme example.

CCH

Little Children

We want what we want
Until, broken open, raw
We want something else

Evidence

The Wife, pouring freshly-made raspberry preserves into a jar:

"Matthew, look at me. There is a God."

Nativity

My friend the Manhattan lawyer/Brooklyn denizen sent me this spectacular review of The Nativity, which is also, it should be noted, rather free with the blue language:

"This time around Jesus is being pursued by the ancient world version of a Bond villain, simply named Herod, who, knowing of Jesus’s amazingly bad assed ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ (I mean, really, he’s like Roman era John McClane) that he’s gonna try to kill him before he’s even born. So he sends out an army of Roman soldiers to try and find the unwed mother pregnant with the savior of humanity.

I know, I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking. I liked this story a lot better when it was called The Terminator. I guess someone at New Line thought that it would be better with Roman soldiers instead of killer robots. Which is exactly why James Cameron is a genius. Everything is better with killer robots. Especially the story of Jesus."

[snip]

"This feels in every way like a 'YOU’VE READ THE BOOK, NOW SEE THE MOVIE!' kind of film. It’s not going to make you look at the Nativity story in a new light, it won’t cause you to re-examine or strengthen your faith. And to anyone not of the faith, it’s probably gonna bore you to tears."

As he notes - say what you will about The Passion, but it had a genuine vision behind it.