“Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged . . . and they're always wrong.”

Above quote from the recent flick Capote.

Lately I’ve been mistaken for a Harley-enthusiast with alarming frequency. Perhaps getting rid of some beard and some belly is in order.

S’posin

Suppose for a moment that you were to read about protests against the animus society directs toward arsonists. Perhaps it was started by some firefighters who like to set fires in their off hours. More than that, suppose some writers start acting as apologists for arson, encouraging us to celebrate the opportunities that result from arson and blithely ignoring the damages caused by arson – perhaps even explaining it away as collateral damaged caused more by the suppression of arson than by its practice. Suppose some folks take to criticizing those who keep statistics on the prevalence of arson and the damages caused by it. Eventually, even, opposition to the practice of arson is seen in some circles as being a more serious harm than the practice of arson itself.

Chances are you’d think the pro-arson crowd was dangerously loony and you wouldn’t want any of them near your house with matches. A multi-decade campaign to desensitize people to a particular crime can make quite a difference.

Just askin'

These fine ladies referring to a blog simply by the first word of its name made me wonder: if Howard Stern were to read that blog and keel over from a heart attack, would it be proper to observe that Video killed the radio star?

Irony

At an upcoming social event, I know I’ll be chatting with someone who’s involved in a schismatic group. In preparation for that, I wanted to look up a bit more about someone that I’ve been impressed with and have posted about here: Odon de Castro of the blog Gloria Olivae. It appears that Odon de Castro himself is in schism!

A judicial decision reads, in pertinent part:

Unfortunately, the Caryana Movement was denied canonical recognition and its spiritual director [Fr. Odon de Castro] was himself expelled from the Benedictine order and stripped of his priestly functions by the Archbishop of Manila, Jaime Cardinal Sin.

A 2002 news article includes this tidbit:

The re-emergence of the controversial principles being espoused by the Carian community of former Fr. Odon de Castro is not just a police problem. It is a matter that should be addressed by local and national Catholic leaders.
Several decades back, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines had already cracked down on De Castro and his Cariana community. It was rather surprising that it seems to have been operating sans ecclesiastical disciple and threatening again to wreck Christian families.

The news article indicated that Caryana/Cariana was in the diocese of Bacolod. The surprisingly good diocesan website lists neither Cariana/Caryana nor Odon de Castro, even though many orders are represented in the diocese.

It seems I need to look elsewhere for material for discussion.

Apropos the new year

Thanks to a better one than me, I have a special patron for the year 2006: St. Isidore of Seville.



A great quote attributed to this patron: “Prayer purifies us, reading instructs us. Both are good when both are possible. Otherwise, prayer is better than reading.”

Moviemania

We’re not the biggest movie-goers as a rule, so it’s pretty odd that we’ve been to three flicks in the past three weeks. Thoughts on each:

I. The Producers

Largely tracks the recent Broadway show. Biggest differences were the staging of the numbers “We Can Do It” and “I Want to be a Producer”. The former was neither improved nor diminished by being made into a Manhattan travelogue. The latter benefited from creative touches that wouldn’t have been possible on stage.

Some casting surprises: Will Farrell was very good; Uma Thurman was better than I’d expected; Jon Lovitz stole his scene. While Matthew Broderick was very good, I almost expected Nathan Lane to turn to the camera and say “This bit was much funnier the first three hundred times or so.” I wonder how much better this would have been if Lane and Lovitz swapped parts.

Big question: Why isn’t it a hit?

(1) Musicals haven’t done well on screen since about The Sound of Music; and
(2) When the play opened a few years ago, joking about stereotypical homosexuality was edgy, but tolerated; now that’s considered blasphemous by the dominant cultural influences.

It will be interesting to see if this movie is disappeared a la the original Manchurian Candidate.

II. Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

I loved the books when I was a little fellow. My better half had no knowledge of them. We both loved the movie. May even see it a second time on the big screen and I haven’t done that with any film since the early 80s. The lass who played Lucy was spot-on perfect. Jadis, while nothing like my mental picture of her, was great too. I’d have expected Aslan to have a deeper voice, but that’s a pretty minor quibble. Looking forward to the rest of the series.

III. Capote

The look of the movie suggested they may have expected to have gone to a cable channel rather than to the big screen. Only a few panoramic shots of the prairie necessitate the big screen. I’m glad it got the prestige and money of a wide release and hope this movie does very well.

As has been widely noted, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Truman Capote is eerie in the degree it captures every nuance of that once-ubiquitous raconteur. No one in his right mind, though, would sit through two hours of mimicry for its own sake.

The story is about the researching and writing of In Cold Blood. And what a story it is!

We immediately learn of Capote’s narcissism when he pays a railroad porter to say how much he enjoyed Capote’s latest book on the initial trip west. This narcissism grows throughout the film up to his nearly autistic conduct at the premier of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The contrast between Capote’s crowded sybaritic Manhattan and small-town Kansas couldn’t be greater. Capote’s relativism shines through as he introduces himself to the sheriff saying he couldn’t care one way or another whether or not the killers are caught! This is one of the few times when Capote is completely truthful in conversation.

We see how Capote comes to identify with one of the killers, to the point that he says “We could have grown up in the same house and one day he left through the back door and I left through the front door.” Yet Capote constantly manipulates and dissembles with this “amigo”.

Capote exemplifies the nascent motif of the sixties – if it feels good, do it. As he comes more and more to identify with the brutal killer, he is rightly horrified at their similarity. Unfortunately, he fails to take the next steps: to embrace meaningful moral standards and repent of his own sins. In a gesture that speaks volumes, Capote mixes scotch and baby food.

As he witnesses the dramatic conclusion to his book, he can’t think about the murderers who have been executed, nor of the victims, but only of how he will “never get over” the experience of seeing and walking away, free, from the gallows to fame and fortune. It’s all about poor little Truman. Tellingly, he never completes another book and floats through the rest of his life in anesthetic clouds.

Mr. O proves

some facility in Teutonic invective here.

Why do other cultures have such inventive forms of insult? Or, more properly, why are our insults so lacking?

Well, I have to go now. The jerk store called and they seem to be out of me.

BTW - using "Iss mal" (the imperative) in place of "essen Sie" (which is, after all the polite form) would punch up the referenced phrase a bit.

A thought for a happy new year

These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty.

The above comes from the remarkable Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae of the redoubtable Leo XIII.