Confiteor

Speaking of the Godsbody correspondents, The Manhattan Lawyer sent this one along. Thinks me it's worth fisking:

A woman kept her secret for nearly two decades. Finally ready to confess, she turned not to a minister, but to her computer.

[I'm thinking that's cuz her minister has never asked to hear her confession. Maybe because he would refer her directly to the Mercy Seat of Jesus. Also, maybe, because her minister can't offer absolution - the forgiveness of sins through action in persona Christi.]

''I am sorry God for not keeping that baby,'' her anonymous confession reads. "I had an abortion and had kept that secret for over 18 years. I feel so ashamed. Please forgive me!''

[Can I just say that there is no small amount of comfort in Jesus' promise about holding sins bound and loosing them (at least in this instance)? If the priest tells me I'm forgiven, I don't need the pleading note of "Please!" Not trying to sound all Catholic triumphalist here, just grateful. It's almost like Catholicism makes a certain amount of psychological sense.]

The confession appears at ivescrewedup.com, a website launched by the Flamingo Road Church in Cooper City. It's one of a growing number of such sites across the country -- some secular and others church-sponsored -- that offer a place to spill out ugly secrets or just make peccadilloes public.

[Of course, the desire to spill out ugly secrets is hardly restricted to the religiously minded. Post Secret knows this - and while we're mentioning Post Secret, here's a particularly chilling entry. Confessing doesn't always have more of a point than simply getting something off your chest, but in a religious context, perhaps, just maybe, it ought to?]

''I think it helps people understand . . . that we're not here to point out people's screw-ups, that we're here to help them,'' said lead Pastor Troy Gramling, whose nondenominational church launched the site on Easter weekend. "The church is made of skin and flesh and people that have made mistakes.''

[Just as an aside, and not at all snidely - isn't it amazing that this has to be pointed out?]

The 6,500-member church created the site as part of a 10-week series on the ways people mess up -- in marriage, parenting, finances and more. The goal of the series is to help congregants learn from their mistakes.

[And anonymous online confession helps congregants learn from their mistakes how? Again, not trying to be Catholic triumphal, but it sounds a little like trying to give meaning to confession without granting the meaning proposed by the Church - the meaning that endured for not a little while. "No, no - it can't mean that. But it clearly had some worth. Maybe as a teaching tool? Yes! Helping folks learn from their mistakes!"]

So far, more people are reading the confessions than posting them.

[No!]

The site gets about 1,000 hits a day, with about 200 online admissions.

Lust, pornography and a litany of sexual transgressions top the sinners' hit parade. Theft, lying and alcohol abuse also make frequent appearances.

[No! Alert the Today in Porn people! Oh, wait.]

One person confesses: ''I have done enough drugs to make Keith Richards envious!!!!!'' Another admits wishing death on her enemies. The posts are poignant and heartbreaking and occasionally frightening, like the accounts of teenagers ravaged by eating disorders and others who have contemplated suicide. A 23-year-old man who posted on the site told a reporter in a telephone interview that he was struck by how many people wanted to spill their "dirty little secret. I think there's a feeling that you're not the only one that's out there that has messed up before and there's other people,'' said the man, who declined to reveal anything about himself or his confession.

[Ah, human solidarity. The final title for Book Two, just before it got axed, was The Communion of Sinners.]

The Miami Herald contacted the church, seeking confessors, but found none willing to be identified in print. The 23-year-old who gave the interview said he is a Protestant who doesn't belong to the church but was turned on to the website by a friend who is a member. ''It was very cathartic,'' he said.

[Which cartharsis, of course, need not have anything to do with anything religious.

The anonymity of the site is key to its appeal. He said he hadn't turned to anyone in his church about the confession he posted and wasn't sure whether he would feel comfortable. ''When you don't know someone, you can't trust them; it takes time,'' he said.

[That's why we have the screen! Sort of.]

Online confessionals are a natural outgrowth of Internet chat rooms ''where people have this habit of telling secrets to strangers,'' as well as blogs and MySpace pages, said Janet Sternberg, associate chairwoman of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York. ''Online was made for this stuff,'' Sternberg said. ``It's the perfect environment for people telling secrets anonymously.''

[Where it doesn't really mean anything, because there's no real person-to-person contact. It's all just a bunch of ghosts. Confession emptied of significance. Online confessionals may be a natural outgrowth of this world, but they shouldn't be. There ought to be a point to telling someone this stuff. Something more than providing grist for the anthropologists. Or maybe I'm just being grumpy.]

LifeChurch.tv, an evangelical church that broadcasts services to 11 locations, including one in Palm Beach County, started the site mysecret.tv nearly a year ago. More than 6,000 people have posted confessions and millions more have logged on to read the stories, said Bobby Gruenewald, pastor and innovation leader at LifeChurch.tv. The church has received some criticism, Gruenewald said, from people who think that "we're trying to encourage people to confess to a computer instead of God. We just believe it is a catalyst to have people open up to family and friends and God. I think sometimes it can be misunderstood.''

[Okay, now I'm being snide. Do these people really believe that it's a catalyst to get people to open up to family and friends? Do teens come to their parents with the same stuff they put on their MySpace blogs? Again, this just sounds like trying to lend significance to a thing once the original significance (absolution, etc.) has been rejected. Because if you're already forgiven, you don't need to seek absolution...]

The Catholic Church is among those who reject the idea of confessing online. Confession is ''the opportunity to confess sins to someone ordained as a priest who is a representative of Christ,'' said Mary Ross Agosta, a spokeswoman for the Miami Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

[Well, thanks for that. The Catholic Church - bastion of human understanding and psychological sympathy. But you'd never know it from the newspaper.]

The websites, with their voyeuristic appeal, may fulfill people's need to feel better about their own behavior or moral values.

[Love the honesty.]

"What makes it so popular is not so much the people confessing but people going to read all these things, saying, `My life's not so bad,' '' said Greg Fox, who runs the site dailyconfession.com.

[Again with the solidarity. Again, not criticizing. But is it enough?]

"It's kind of the car wreck you're driving by. You can't help but watch. It's kind of the car wreck of life.''

[No comment.]

Fox started the site in 2000 while he was working as a writer, producer and director for The Walt Disney Co. The launch was ''my therapy,'' he said. ''Everything was pixie dust and fun and nice and nothing bad ever happens,'' he said. The site, which averages about 1.3 million hits a day, was ''my way of getting back in touch with reality,'' he said. People have written on the site about contemplating suicide and abusive relationships, and Fox said he has tried to give those people the resources to get help. Others have threatened the president, prompting Fox to call the U.S. Secret Service.

[The Secret Service? We're a long way from I Confess.]

He reviews all of the posts before they make it to cyberspace and has a backlog of about 4,000 confessions. Fox said the confessions are completely anonymous and that he has no way of tracing them. "What I hear is it's a lot easier to tell the `truth' in complete anonymity. You can get feedback and find out you're not so weird. You're not the only one who feels that way or has this phobia.''

This Just In

Thank heaven for the Godsbody correspondents. This is from the Poet:

Flannery O'Connor's letters to be opened

ATLANTA --After two decades of waiting, Emory University is unsealing its collection of hundreds of letters between author Flannery O'Connor and one of her longtime friends.

The collection was given to Emory by Elizabeth "Betty" Hester, who began corresponding with O'Connor as a fan in 1955. The relationship developed into a close friendship lasting until O'Connor's death in 1964. Hester donated the letters to Emory in 1987 on condition that they remain sealed for 20 years.

Edited versions of some of the letters were published in a 1979 book, but this is the first time the public will be able to read the entire collection. The letters will give fans and scholars of the famed Southern writer a glimpse into O'Connor's feelings on religion, society and culture, said Rosemary Magee, vice president at Emory and an O'Connor scholar.

"They engaged in a theological and philosophical conversation," said Magee. "To get further insight into her as a thinker, as a person and as a writer is just an amazing opportunity for anybody who has read her literature."

O'Connor, a Georgia native, lived much of her life in Milledgeville, Ga., on her family's farm, called Andalusia. She graduated from Georgia State College for Women -- now Georgia College & State University -- and received a master's degree from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Her work includes the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. She also produced numerous short stories, including A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Hester, a file clerk in an Atlanta credit bureau, lived a reclusive life, but she was an avid reader and intellectual. She also corresponded with British writer Iris Murdoch. Her identity as one of O'Connor's confidantes was kept secret until Hester's death in 1998.

"I think Betty Hester was the most important correspondent in Flannery O'Connor's life," said Steve Enniss, director of Emory's manuscripts, archives and rare books library where the letters are housed. "These letters help tell with great fullness the story of O'Connor's own life that is so intertwined with her stories."

The collection of 274 letters will be opened to the public May 12.

A Day in the Country

In Julian, to be exact. Second Son found some Wild Turkey feathers, and spotted a snake. Meanwhile, Daddy found the Wild Turkey...

Okay, now THAT I didn't need to see...

Is The Wife in cahoots with the spambots? You be the judge:

Today in Porn, What Could Possibly Be Left After This Edition

"I know! We'll profile 'what is arguably the country's most successful fetish porn company!'"

And hey! There's a Catholic hook!

"Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. 'He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,' Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. 'So I basically just ripped off that idea.' Acworth has since built what is arguably the country’s most successful fetish porn company, Kink.com — a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. Kink has 60,000 subscribers; access to each site costs about $30 a month."

Nothing very clever at all, indeed. Almost banal, even. Sigh.

It's Saturday...

...so I'm thinking we can dispense with the intellectual pretense, and get right to the celebrity worship...

I'm thinking that we're just going to have to forgive the Go Fug Yourself girls for not being comic geeks. If they WERE comic geeks, they would understand that Ms. Dunst's alarming dress in this photo is a carefully-planned homage to the alien symbiote costume that makes its cinematic debut in Spider-Man 3:

Mitchell Stephens has a blog...

...called Without Gods:

"The blog I am writing here, with the connivance of The Institute for the Future of the Book, is an experiment. Our thought is that my book on the history of atheism (eventually to be published by Carroll and Graf) will benefit from an online discussion as the book is being written. Our hope is that the conversation will be joined: ideas challenged, facts corrected, queries answered; that lively and intelligent discussion will ensue."

Along the way, he has a few instances of "Jesuses" - which I'm guessing are striking accounts/descriptions/considerations of Our Lord. And bless his heart, he brings Flannery in on the project:

"'His black eyes, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus.'

That's one heck of a Jesus (or at least one that casts one heck of a shadow), from Flannery O'Connor.

And then O'Connor writes (I was led to these quotes by Garry Wills) that Jesus moves:

'from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark..."

Got to understand, I guess, if you're in the religion-eradication business, that a lot of the attraction -- beyond the charity, the community and the meaning, beyond even the rapture and the rupture of physical laws, the rupture of history -- is in the 'wild ragged,' 'bleeding stinking' madness of it all.

Where is the atheist who jumps 'from tree to tree in back of' the "mind"? Do nonbelievers -- Shelleyans, most of them -- spend too much energy switching on lights? Who whispers -- Sade?, Ivan K.? -- 'come off into the dark'?

Is the point that you become -- inevitably -- the opposite of what you are falsely accused of being? Are nonbelievers so concerned with not being seen as dissolute that they seem dull?"

Not an uninteresting query, that. And give the man credit for looking at what Team Believer has to offer, including this from Benedict:

"The latest to join our dialogue on the nature of disbelief is Pope Benedict XVI. Unfortunately, his comments are a bit obscure:

'Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God's image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe....

Only this can free us from being afraid of God which is ultimately at the root of modern atheism... Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life.'

His Holyness -- at least as interpreted by the New York Times -- seems to be aiming for something here beyond mere lucidity. I guess the point is that our fear of God keeps us from accepting His assistance in overcoming our anxious fear of the world and of the emptiness of life.

It's hard to argue with the Pope on this 'anxiety before the emptiness of life' thing. God knows we've all had days when stuff seems more than a little random. No doubt a bit of supernaturally imposed good/bad, right/wrong believe that the Son and the Father are consubstantial/don't belief the Son and the Father are consubstantial might help. Problem is -- and maybe this is part of the reason Benedict seems to be having difficulty making himself clear -- God Himself often seems more mysterious, shall we say, than clear on matters such as the proper relationship between religion and reason and what we should be doing about Darfur. 'Who can straighten what He has twisted?' Koheleth wonders in Ecclesiastes.

And Benedict must be hanging out with a weird bunch of atheists. I can imagine a some haunted sinner running from God and his alleged judgement. But, rather than being afraid of God, the atheists I know are just unimpressed with Him as a concept (or Concept)."

In the words of Not-Ted...

IT'S ON LIKE DONKEY KONG.

The phenomenon that is Korrektiv has taken as its summer reading club text Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Percy's greatest? His greatest folly? We shall see. Everybody knows that Catholics Don't Read - least of all, Catholically-tinged nonfiction parodies/exemplars from thirty years ago - but really: why not spread the news across the Catholic blogosphere? See if we can get something approaching a literary community? I'm thinking five people read this blog: if those five pass the word on to another five, and so on and so on, we could end up with three or four or even seven people reading this book at the same time. Hoo!

Catholics on the Bench

Much has been made - elsewhere and more intelligently (and, it should be added, less intelligently) - of the significance, in light of the Supreme Court's upholding of the ban on partial-birth abortion, of the Catholic presence among the judges. I'm not about to try to contribute anything verging on intelligent comment. But I do think it worth noting this bit of afterparty conversation reported in The Observer:

"The Beltway media elite was at least able to hear itself talk at the Hitchens gathering a few blocks north. But that just made the evening’s bitter reference tones resound that much more distinctly. A pair of women (one of whom, I should disclose, was my wife, Time.com Washington editor Ana Marie Cox) pounced on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to give an accounting of the court’s controversial ruling upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions. The justice initially demurred with the expected ex officio disclaimer, 'I don’t discuss those things.' But the women—who I have good reason to know can be fearsomely persistent, especially when in their cups—wore down his resistance. They insisted that the procedure is performed in exceedingly rare instances, usually when a mother’s health is in jeopardy. When the justice yielded no ground beyond the recommendation that Congress would be the best venue to pursue a more constitutionally hale effort to keep the procedure legal, things got a bit personal.

'Do you have any daughters?' one of the interlocutors demanded.

'I have four,' Justice Scalia replied, noting that the eldest was 28.

'Well, what do they think of abortion rights?' the woman’s companion wanted to know.

The justice explained that not only had he refrained from voicing is general views on the subject, but he had never discussed it with his adult daughters. Then he added that since they were raised and educated as Catholics, they would honor the church’s moral teachings on the subject.

Don’t you think that one of the main reasons they don’t discuss it with you is that you’re a justice on the Supreme Court?' his questioner continued, her voice rising in rhetorical emphasis at the end.

Justice Scalia smiled a bit coyly. 'You don’t know my daughters.'”

I'm thinking that was a pretty excellent response.

Sangria

Every now and then, someone asks after the recipe for Casa Godsbody's House Sangria. We're all about sharing the love. Here 'tis:

6 bottles red wine
1 bottle brandy
1 bottle triple sec
12c ginger ale
1 quart orange juice (I like Trader Joe's fresh-squeezed)
1 can lemonade concentrate (optional)
Lots and lots of sliced apples, pears, oranges, etc.
Mix and let stand overnight.
I use a food-grade plastic bucket - you can get 'em at the donut shop. I cram mine into a cooler and pour ice around the sides.
Oh, and feel free to tinker. Last time, I substituted Hansen's Mandarin Lime soda for the ginger ale, omitted the lemonade concentrate, and added a little Port and an extra bottle of wine. The bucket ran dry before the party ended.

Cheers!

Christianity vs. Celluloid

One of the reasons it's so hard to put Christianity - the thing itself, as opposed to allegory - on screen is that it really is, in many ways, a B-movie faith. The personal devil. The total Deus ex Machina quality of miracles, and even God's answer to prayer. The emphasis on blood (even if it's only the cleansing blood of the Lamb) and death (to self, but also ordinary physical death) - I can imagine someone making a case for The Passion as B-picture. The real threat of hell, and the real promise of heaven for the faithful. Sure there are complexities going in, but after judgment, you're either saved or damned, and that's that. And perhaps especially - or at least, right up there with the devil - the freaky stuff that goes on when you get a saint in your midst. The stigmata? Visions? Mystical Ecstasies?

Take, for example, the recently released Teresa: The Body of Christ. It's one thing to admire Teresa in Ecstasy when it's depicted in the cool safety of white marble (though even there, it's perhaps a tad unsettling); it's another to put it in full color.

UPDATE: Okay, I removed the link and the suggestion that you go check out the trailer, at the behest of a priest-friend of Godsbody whom I hold in high regard. Here was his reason for asking me to do so:

He thought the trailer promised "a prime example if not of malice, at least of of the inability of those who have not been chaste to understand that the sexual language used in describing mystical experiences is adopted precisely because these experiences transcend expression, and so must be expressed poetically by a kind of recapitulation/sublimation to the analogy of the sense of touch which is the beginning of conscious experience. This means that the sexual language is
used simply to express the immediacy and intensity of the experience, NOT to make union with God like intercourse with demons, a kind of illusory experience of sensual exaltation, which unfortunately does occur among those so depraved as to seek such things. Yes, Our Lady is stunningly beautiful in her glorious and prelapsarian body: but she does not appear to even her most passionate devotees as a succubus. Christian mysticism is not Tantric eroticism. And it ought to
be hard for a Christian to view the wounds of the Savior with the detached speculation of the film director.

I think we have here a film that combines the Da Vinci Code gone Spanish baroque, with a strong overlay of Name of the Rose Monastic grotesque, and some plain blasphemy."

I don't know if I quite agree with him on the last bit, and I suppose there is an interesting discussion to be had with regard to his point about sexual language and mystical experiences. So bring on the comments. In the meantime, I will take his counsel on the link.

The Christian Mythos

"I tried. I tried to come back. I'm just too old, too Web 1.0. Godsbody is archaic, a relic - finished."

"Nonsense. People need Godsbody. You need Godsbody. The Church Militant needs Godsbody. Western Civilization..."

"Okay, that's about enough."

Ah, but what to post? Thank God for the New Mexico Nurse and the Manhattan Lawyer. The former gave me the Brawling Buddhists, the latter, this story about that new Tolkein book:

"Tolkien is a writer of greater theological depth than his Oxford colleague C S Lewis, in my judgment. Lewis is a felicitous writer and a diligent apologist, but mere allegory along the lines of the Narnia series can do no more than restate Christian doctrine; it cannot really expand our experience of it. Tolkien takes us to the dark frontier of a world that is not yet Christian, and therefore is tragic, but has the capacity to become Christian. It is the world of the Dark Ages, in which barbarians first encounter the light. It is not fantasy, but rather a distillation of the spiritual history of the West. Whereas C S Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a children's masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the work of our hands and the hone of our swords must avail us."

I'm not ready to go all the way with this piece in its assessment of Lewis: I think the Narnia allegory serves to reveal, not simply comfort. But there's stirring stuff here, all the same:

"Tolkien's popular Ring trilogy, I have attempted to show, sought to undermine and supplant Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle, which had offered so much inspiration for Nazism. With the reconstruction of the young Tolkien's prehistory of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose: to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is the pagan's tribal identity. Tolkien saw his generation decimated, and his circle of friends exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace the cult of Christ during World War II. His life's work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West."

Do go read the whole thing. Heck, you might even want to go ahead and read the book. I've heard that some people are into that sort of thing.

(Image courtesy of John Murphy, available for purchase here.)

The monks learn something from Pai Mei...

"Once upon a time in China, some believe, around the year one double-aught three, head priest of the White Lotus Clan, Pai Mei, was walking down the road, contemplating whatever it is that a man of Pai Mei's infinite power contemplates - which is another way of saying "who knows?" - when a Shaolin monk appeared, traveling in the opposite direction. As the monk and the priest crossed paths, Pai Mei, in a practically unfathomable display of generosity, gave the monk the slightest of nods. The nod was not returned. Now was it the intention of the Shaolin monk to insult Pai Mei? Or did he just fail to see the generous social gesture? The motives of the monk remain unknown. What is known, are the consequences. The next morning Pai Mei appeared at the Shaolin Temple and demanded of the Temple's head abbot that he offer Pai Mei his neck to repay the insult. The Abbot at first tried to console Pai Mei, only to find Pai Mei was inconsolable. So began the massacre of the Shaolin Temple and all sixty of the monks inside at the fists of the White Lotus. And so began the legend of Pai Mei's five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique."

- Bill, Kill Bill Vol. 2

Lucky Number 13

Some weisenheimer has gotten and written a fake biography of Millard Fillmore, the only President (as far as I know) to hail from The Paradise That Is Upstate New York. Hence, he has, near the place where he was born, what I will wager is the best State Park of any President: Fillmore Glen.

Exchange

"Lessee, we've got a little bit of fresh squeezed orange juice, a little bit of fresh squeezed lemonade, and some vodka."

"Sounds great."

"It's a pretty general formula: a little x, a little y, and some vodka."

"Goat's blood, chocolate sauce - and some vodka! Sounds great!"

***


"What do you think of the new cocktail? I'm calling it the St. Clements. Oranges and lemons... Plus I'm adding a squeeze of lime."

"The orange juice is a touch overripe, but the vodka helps."

"'The vodka helps.' That'd be a great name for a blog."

"You could use it for anything. 'I'm losing my faith. The vodka helps.'"

Dept. of License Plates

PRESHSZ

Near as I can figure, this is a phonetic rendering of Gollum's "Preciousssssss." On the back of a Lexus. The question: is the Lexus "My Precioussss"? Or is it the driver - the most prized possession of the fellow who gave her the car? Or is it something else altogether?

Dept. of Rejected New Yorker Cartoons...

Title: Activity Corner. A playground scene - something you might see in a coloring book. Caption: "There are 15 Freudian Anxieties hidden in this scene. Can you find them?"

I will leave it to my brilliant commentors to guess at the picture's details...

Oh please, oh please, oh please...

I can't quite bring myself to wish the dissolution of a marriage, I don't think - especially when there's a child involved in some way. But neither can I say I don't welcome the prospect of a little drama on the Cruise-Catholic front:

"The wife of the 'Top Gun' star is shooting a film, 'Mad Money,' in Louisiana, and while she’s away from her reportedly controlling spouse she’s 'quietly reclaiming parts of her past,' according to Life & Style. The mag reports that Holmes is reconnecting with family and friends and even secretly talking to Catholic priests. Holmes was raised a Catholic, but since her marriage, has embraced Scientology, her husband’s religion."

Gotta love "The wife of the Top Gun star." Like the man hasn't made any movies since the mid-'80s. Heh.

Today in Porn, The City Edition

Porn enjoys rather a privileged cultural perch - mainstream enough to be written about in a fairly blase business story for the New York Observer, but edgy enough to make people who might not otherwise read business stories sit up and take notice. "Hey - porn in New York! What a rebel!" The me-too tone is actually a little touching.

Of course, this being the Observer, the reporter can't help but poke a little fun at his subject:

"Ms. Angel’s purported attachment to New York is a big part of her shtick. After admitting that all aspects of filmmaking are much easier in L.A., she described how this city gives her work qualities that can’t be reproduced anywhere else. 'Think of a movie or TV—like Seinfeld is filmed in New York; you can tell,' she said, rather inaccurately."

And he doesn't even comment on this one:

“I’ve always appreciated good scripts, because I’m an English major." (Ms. Angel, er, Mostov, is a Rutgers grad.)

But really, the most notable thing about this piece is the story of How She Got There, a very gentle sliding:

Before moving to Brooklyn in 2003, her porn career began at Rutgers University, when one of her college roommates—cinematically named Mitch Fontaine—bought a digital camera and started snapping photos of Ms. Angel, sans vêtements. “There was like 10 people living there—you know, the kind of house where you’d wake up one day and somebody was living on the couch or sleeping in the bathtub,” she said. “I was working out of my laptop that was buried under a heap of clothes, but it wasn’t much of an office, it was more of a hobby …. I wasn’t really a sexual person. I was really kind of shy, and I was somewhat of a political activist in college. I wasn’t going down this road at all.”

That road apparently took a hairpin turn, because her platonic partnership with Mr. Fontaine wound up carrying the pair deep into a realm of hard-core pornography at break-neck speed. Mr. Fontaine, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has remained Ms. Angel’s confidant and business partner, though he doesn’t star in any of the films. “In the beginning, we were like, ‘This isn’t porn, it’s art’—which is really stupid,” Ms. Angel admitted. “And then I had met someone who offered me a pass to go to the big AVN [Adult Video News] convention in Vegas [in 2005]—it was a porn expo where every company had their booths and all these porn girls are signing stuff,” she said. “I was looking around, and I kind of liked it—I thought it was pretty f*ckin’ cool!”

Today in Porn - Scooped!

Amy got there first - a story about Jenna Jameson:

"...the 33-year-old devout Catholic (and author of How to Make Love Like a Porn Star) tells Us Weekly that she’s made peace with her heartbreak. 'If the pregnancy would have lasted, I wouldn’t have had the surgery,” she says. “So it was all in God’s plan.'"

Dept. of Rejected New Yorker Cartoons...

Another one from First Son...

Father speaking to son: "Someday, son, you'll be old enough to do anything you want. But you won't have the time, money, or energy."

First Son, Theologian

"If I didn't think there was a heaven, I don't think I could stand to go on living."

God, Sex, Death...

...pretty much a Godsbody trifecta...

Okay, so this is really pushing the whole Yesterday's News Today, seeing as how Hostel 2 is hitting theaters, what, this summer? But yesterday, I stumbled across ("stumbled across" has got to be the greatest Internet euphemism ever) this interview with writer-director Eli Roth, shortly before the release of the first Hostel. (The film, of course, was purest torture-porn, with a generous dollop of sex-for-sale. No, I didn't see it. But an interesting cultural marker, I think.)

The God part is a trifle muted, so let's get it out of the way, shall we?

UGO: Where do you get your ideas?

ELI ROTH: Seven years of Hebrew school will make you think of horrible, sick s**t. It really does.

I mean, of all the answers he could have given...

The beauty part of the interview is that the next two categories, sex and death, can't be treated separately. Throughout, they're bound up with one another, starting with the intro:

"For writer-director Eli Roth, horror movies are a sure-fire way to romance. 'You're sitting in a movie theatre, girls are grabbing you, they're touching you, they're scared,' says the up-and-coming horror auteur. 'Then they don't want to sleep alone so you're like, 'Come back to my house' and you put on Willie Wonka and that's when you close the deal.'"

Gotta love the use of "romance" up there. Also, the mercenary treatment of both art and women: art is a tool for manipulating women's emotions. Fear to get them relying on you, then laughter (Wonka) to get them in a good enough mood to have sex.

So, back to sex and death and the way they get intertwined. Roth is recalling his fondness for classic and not-so-classic horror films:

ROTH: ...IIf it had good deaths in it, we loved it. And I have a real soft spot for '80s sex comedies like Zapped and Screwballs and Joysticks and Porkys.

I mean, he just brings it up, all by himself, answering a qeustion about his favorite horror films. The one follows the other out of his psyche.

Now, on to some fun talk about the difficulties of his profession - one of his female stars is also in on the interview (language alert!):

UGO: How do you convince the girls to get naked?

ELI: You can't! Once, the girls pulled me in the trailer and I was like, "What's wrong?" and her and Jana [Kaderabkova] are crying.

BARBARA: We were not crying.

[Apparently, the girls were less than eager to go for full frontal nudity on-camera.]

BARBARA: I said I wasn't going to be all naked, but you tried [to convince me] again. A few hours before we start shooting, he comes like we never had a conversation [about the nudity] and I was thinking it was a joke, but finally we realized he's really serious.

ELI: I wasn't serious.

BARBARA: You were serious.

ELI: You know how it is, you just gotta be like, "Okay well, I'll give you that to get that." No, we discussed it up front. On Cabin Fever I ran into a problem, there was a role of a girl that was suppose to walk in on a couple having sex and the girls signed release forms then they show up and start crying. And suddenly they make you feel like you're the pornographer. I'm going to get girls drunk before sex scenes. I heard they were drinking in the make up trailer.

It's a tough business, but it's all for art, right? Or at least, helping guys to get some action.

Now our interview decides to get serious:

UGO: Why do sex and horror movies go together?

ELI: Well, I think that sex creates life and horror is about death, we can be philosophical like that, but I think that those are the two things that people want to see most in movies. When you see beautiful people on screen you kind of want to see them have sex. Sex and violence those are two incredible rushes, they're two great extremes, one is the greatest, most wonderful thing you can feel and the other is the most horrible upsetting thing.

"We can be philosophical like that." Eros and Thanatos, together at last. Oh, wait...

Junkies

Okay, so I haven't bought a Cowboy Junkies album since '96's Lay It Down (then again, I haven't bought much of anything in the Contemporary Music Department since then, because, well, I'm old), but thanks to The Trinity Sessions and a couple of tracks off The Caution Horses ("Sun comes up, it's Tuesday morning...") and Black-Eyed Man, they'll always have a place in my heart. (If Margo Timmins' voice doesn't tear you up just a little bit inside, I'm pretty sure your heart is lined with sandpaper and aluminum foil.) So it made me a little sad to see them getting hated on over at Defamer the other day. It made me wonder, "I wonder if the Cowboy Junkies have a website that will tell a curious public what's been going on in the world?" And lo and behold, they do! And lo and behold, they've made a bunch of albums since '96. And one of them includes this little tidbit:


"'Bread and Wine,' a mid-tempo rocker, follows. It's got a great bass line and the startling lyric: 'The one that I'm with is not the one that I'm dreaming of.' Bluntly, says Michael, it's 'your standard mid-life crisis adultery song.' He notes the religious images: 'I guess that's the guilt brought on by my Catholic upbringing. I can't even write about these types of things without feeling like I've sinned.'"

I guess I should have known.

Elsewhere

Yeah, back only three days, and already shunting folks off to parts more interesting...

Has everyone read this bit from Outer Life? If not, you really should. One of the finest condemnations ever of the Lifestyle Nightmare.

And the great souls at Korrektiv have a marvelous poem from back-in-the-day Updike.

Meanwhile, Debra Murphy is asking folks to pray for a Catholic literary revival. Which makes me wonder: do people really want a Catholic literary revival? I mean, other than the hardy souls who want to write Catholic fiction? Do people want a body of work that seeks not to preach the Good News, and not even necessarily to build up, but sometimes, to tear down, to expose, to tell the ugly truth? I dunno. I sometimes wonder if it's easier to admire O'Connor because she wrote mainly about Protestants, and J.F. Powers because he wrote about an ecclesial world long past...

What Godsbody Did on His Lenten Vacation

Lest you all think it was just prayer and fasting and good works during my days away from this blog, a brief summary:

Short story sent to Image Journal: rejected

Same short story sent to The New Yorker: rejected (I know, I know, but I had an in, and it actually made it into the hands of a senior editor. Keeping up the proud Godsbody tradition of being told "no" by only the very best...)

Essay submitted for Catholic anthology: rejected (when will I learn?)

Same essay reworked and submitted for NEA Fellowship: been rejected twice for this one, but who knows? We'll find out in December.

Movie treatment submitted (upon request!) to Hollywood dude: who knows?

TV movie treatment submitted to TV writer: kind words, but who knows?

Children's book proposal submitted to Catholic publisher: a nibble! We'll keep you posted.

Godsbody: Failing on Many Fronts

Now back to the day job...

The Cultural Conversation

Hey, you know what's fun? Reviewing Black Snake Moan and Million Dollar Baby for a Catholic website. Check out the comments!

Bookmark

"At the end Janine's eyes had gone out just like that, the turn of a page."

- All Saints by Karen Palmer

Today in Porn, Billionaire Edition

Warren Buffett on financial reports:

"I have an enthusiasm for reading reports. It's like a teenager reading Playboy. At 76, you have to get excited about something."

Analogies attempt to explain the less known through reference to the more known. Playboy = more known.

It's Easter...

...so how about a Christmas joke?

This one is mostly First Son's:

Santa on a psychiatrist's couch. Psychiatrist says: "Your problem is you just don't believe in yourself."

Happy Easter, all. Resurrexit sicut dixit!

The Harrowing of Hell, the Raiding of the Fridge

So, did anybody else celebrate Christ's descent into hell to release the souls of the just on Holy Saturday by staying up until midnight, cranking out some carne asada/chicken quesadillas with roasted tomato salsa, and shaking up a couple of Manhattans?