February 2023 in Music

All right, back again. Music that I enjoyed listening to way back in February.

Song for Dennis Brown and To the Headless Horseman, The Mountain Goats – I think that John Darnielle is the best lyricist in America, and I have listened to a great many of his songs. Maybe they appeal to me because they tend to be melancholy and seem to important aspects of life, but in extreme particularities and funny little details; maybe it’s because he’s so poetically fluent in religious language; maybe it just seems profound because of the gentle roughness of his delivery. Whatever the reason, I think the world of his work, and these are just a couple of minor samples – they aren’t even anywhere near the top of my list. But they are typical of his work, because they feel like the poetry of someone anticipating his own death.

Drive My Car (Kafuku), Eiko Ishibashi – This is the titular track from Eiko Ishibashi’s score for the eponymous 2021 movie, Drive My Car, a film essentially locked in a tie for my favorite film of that year. When I watched it, I admit I didn’t think about the music that much; like the movie itself, it sits quietly in the background, and is the opposite of showy. But once you do notice it, you realize that it’s perfect, in its quiet introversion. This music feels like being driven somewhere, fast along the highway, into the night, and while it’s peaceful, it’s also struck through with strange chords that mar that peace with doubt.

Songbirds, Homecomings – Songbirds is an attempt to catch some scintilla of remembrance, to crystallize a moment into nostalgia before it can flutter away. It feels warm, like the sunlight late in the afternoon in winter, caught in the glass. Homecomings are terrific at exactly this sort of warmth, sad, yet deeply contented.

I know Songbirds because it was featured in the best film of 2018, the extraordinarily quiet and restrained anime film Liz and the Blue Bird. The next three tracks on my playlist are all from the score to the film, two by Kensuke Ushio, a master of hushed tones that fit the quiescence of the picture, and the titular piece, Liz and the Blue Bird, composed by Akito Matsuda, which is the piece the film’s characters perform in band and practice throughout the film. It’s a tentative, questing piece, driven by woodwinds, and it successfully tells the story of both the film and the picture book at the center of its plot. As for Ushio’s work, so much of it sounds like the diegetic sound of the school the characters inhabit – in fact, much of that is incorporated into the score, and then echoed instrumentally. In a story where everything is tiny details, this is a masterful success at using score as a seamless instrument of narrative. As music on its own terms, it is so enormous in its tiny, restrained softness, like feeling the heartbeat of a sparrow, that it both places me in a trancelike state, while also bringing me to tears.

Golborne Road, Nick Laird-Clowes – this is part of the soundtrack to the excellent film, About Time, and there’s something about the way this simple piano piece that feels like it acknowledges melancholy while continuing forward undeterred, into the wind. Maybe it’s the quick repetition of notes where some stray into both minor and major – it’s always teetering on ridgeline between mourning and joy.

Since You Been Gone, Rainbow – I think I had another song used in a Guardians of the Galaxy trailer on my January list, and this one has the same story for me. I’d never listened to or even heard of Rainbow, but it’s another case of ‘70s rock that is big and fun and you have to bob your head along to it. I’ve nothing insightful to say about it, it’s just a good time.

Blue, Mai Yamane – Blue plays over the end of the show Cowboy Bebop, which I’ve mentioned before, and like its mid-season counterpart Space Lion, I found it immediately arresting and moving. The more I returned to it, the harder it got to move on from it. The song is an elegy, mixing a children’s choir singing Christian praises with operatic rock that presents the final sense of release from bondage experienced by a soul ascending from this sublunary world after death. I admit I am particularly sensitive to depictions of transcendent apotheosis, but this is beautifully executed, and achieves both sentiment and that most prized (by me) of musical achievements – maestoso.

Kazehi, Zmi – This is a great case of the Spotify algorithm handing me a good example of the sort of thing I listen to – gentle, brief piano from Japan. I don’t have that much to say, but of course this brings me to the last couple of songs, from my favorite musical artist, the prototypical master of that same genre:

The Story of Sky & Team, Takagi Masakatsu & Sakamoto Miu – The first track feels like breathing, in and out – not the breath of anxious struggle, but what one imagines actual peaceful breathing to be. The piano dances like seafoam around the vocals which carry us on our own journey through a garden of clouds. And Team is one of many demonstrations of Takagi’s power to make an uplifting and wild piece that in its energetic and vivacious spirit still fully retains the deep sentimentality that pervades all of his work. Where that sentiment is located, I can’t precisely say, I only know that all of his music moves me in some profound yet ineffable way.

Prague

From sepulchral Terezin I took the train south to vivacious capital of the Czech Republic, one of the most celebrated European cities, Prague. The city spans a great bend in the Vltava river, a major tributary of the Elbe, and grew up around a high fortress overlooking a ford in the river. Now the city seems flooded with tourists and partiers from all over Europe. Its place on the river crossing befits its history; Prague has frequently straddled the line between west and east, forming at one time part of the eastern edge of the Holy Roman Empire, and at another sitting as the western edge of the Warsaw Pact. The Czech Republic is the westernmost Slavic nation, but most of its history has been spent under German rulers as the kingdom of Bohemia, surrounded by German lands on three sides. Unsurprisingly, there’s an eclectic and rich variety of architecture.

While Terezin was cool and grey, when I arrived in Prague the city was in its October glory. The waterfront along the Vltava was in an almost constant sort of sub-magic hour glow, the air visibly suffused with honeyed light. Holidayers paddled on the river or crowded restaurant patios as children played under the leaves now browning in the autumnal oven.

Walking north into the old town, the lanes narrowed and the architecture intensified its gothic fantasies; but at the street level, the facades gave way to an endless carousel of trinket shops, weed shops, and one place claiming to only probably have the best burgers and hotdogs in town. It was as if Times Square had been poured into a maze of medieval lanes, seeping through the closes like syrup.

For the first time I saw a beggar kneeling, perfectly still. I’m used to beggars and panhandlers, but to see someone kneeling in what must have been an incredibly uncomfortable position for who knows how long still shocked me.

Then I came suddenly to the greatest attraction at the center of Prague; the ancient King Charles (not the one you’re thinking of) Bridge, and found its cobbles packed to bursting with every other tourist who had beelined there just like me.

In the square adjoining the bridge, a church bore this legend, another reminder that I was drawing closer to the part of the world still under the Russian shadow.

After a brief pause, I plunged into the stream of people and swam across the bridge, a salmon forcing its way upstream. Besides the magnificent towers and glowing views up and down the river, the Charles Bridge is lined with a panoply of stone figures, an outdoor statuary free to anyone willing to brave the crowds.

From the bridge, the road climbs through ever statelier neighborhoods, past domed cathedrals, up a great flight of stairs, to the castle square high above the town.

The second day I was in Prague, I passed the headquarters of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, which I believe is the only still-active Communist Party in a former Warsaw Pact nation. They don’t seem terribly threatening now; they haven’t managed to secure a single seat in parliament.

There’s a lovely big square in the center of right-bank old Prague, just past the Powder Tower (above), which features the place where the protestant rebels were executed after the battle of White Mountain; those sympathetic to the cause of either Protestantism or Czech independence from Habsburg dominance regard them as martyrs. Nearby, surveying the crosses which mark their deaths, is a looming statue of the proto-protestant reformer Jan Hus.

At the north end of the old city is the Jewish Quarter, which once had one of the largest and most flourishing Jewish communities in Europe. I spent a good part of the day wandering between synagogues and cemeteries, and learning about all the ideas and creative work that was done in the face of immense obstacles, by people whom popular history has often reduced to passive unfortunates.

That evening was Sunday night, and I crossed the river to the North shore. Wanting to be with others with something in common, I visited a small missionary church where English served as the common tongue for people from all over the continent and world. Refreshed, I walked back through the soft night of rustling leaves. There is a temperature that obtains in the evenings in temperate countries in the fall that has somehow the crisp freshness of cool air but also the spreading warmth of a humid summer night: it is exactly correct.

The park on the northern bank overlooks the city from a cascading wall of staircases and trees, and at the summit is a grand pediment, which now holds what is almost certainly the largest metronome in the world. It upheld the largest monument to Stalin, which was dynamited during de-Stalinization, and today the metronome bears the legend that “in time, all things pass.”

On the last day I spent in Prague, I visited the great castle. On my way up the hill, I encountered yet another reminder of the spirit of resistance still vital in what was once Communist Europe. From the balustrade of the castle square, you can see a reminder of that – the looming Soviet communications tower, now an incongruously picturesque artefact for nostalgia.

The gem in Prague’s crown is the Cathedral of St. Vitus’, which contains, among others, the tombs of St. John Nepomunk, a priest killed for upholding the seal of confession, who was then heavily promoted as part of the counter-Reformation, and the tomb of Duke Vaclav I, or as you may know him, Good King Weceslaus. He holds his place in the great European tradition of Saint-Kings who are revered as both the temporal founders and spiritual patrons of their nations, and which accrete all sorts of legends. He was supposedly murdered by his brother, Boleslaus the Cruel, and I’ll let you guess why we don’t sing any songs about him.

The castle also contained a much older church, a narrow lane filled with the homes (tiny!) of various craftspeople, particularly goldsmiths, the Crown of Bohemia (which was unfortunately not for sale, apparently), and, of course, the Window of the Defenestration, from which the Habsburg’s officials were thrown in the Third Defenestration of Prague (yes I know). They fell seventy feet, and were either saved by the Virgin Mary or by a dung heap, depending on whether you ask Catholics or Protestants. At any rate they survived, and the defenestration went down as both a nationalist and a religious rebellion, and one of the key inciting incidents of the terrible Thirty Year’s War.

Finally, I returned to the city, slept, and in the morning, I took the train to the East.

January 2023 in Music

Way back at the end of last year, I had planned to blog regularly about the music I listened to each month. To that end, I dutifully made one playlist at the end of each month, starting with January. However, I was immediately halted by two lions at the gate: first, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t actually know how to write about music. Anything I say on the subject tends to either become a stilted aping how more sophisticated aficionados write, or a repetitive yet genuine expression of the theme “hey, I like this, I like this a lot, you should too,” and so on.

The second lion was even worse: it’s easier and more fun to make a playlist than it is to write about it. Consequently, it is now September 23, and I am posting my playlist of music I enjoyed in January. In the past I would have just packed up and deferred the project to another year, but I’ve come to realize that if I don’t do something late, I probably won’t do it at all. So here we are.

Caveat – as I mentioned, I’m out of my depth. I’m not a music writer; I just gesticulate and riff.

Clarification – this is just some music I happened to listen to a lot in January 2023; it’s not actually music from January 2023, just to be clear.

All right, here goes:

Goodbye Stranger, Supertramp, 1979 – I had never listened to Supertramp before, but I ended up playing this constantly after it showed up in the Beau is Afraid trailer. Now, there’s a little bit of a spoiler here, but the trailer, while obviously indicating that the film will be dark and even upsetting (I mean it is Ari Aster), seemed to me to suggest some sort of catharsis on the other side of that, and the song’s optimism became entangled with my own fascination with any gesture toward transcendent catharsis – toward a revelation which makes emotional sense of a bad situation. It turns out that’s not really what the film is about, which is why I didn’t like it that much, though I respect how well-made it is and how well it does what it was trying to do, even if it wasn’t what I expected. But this song retains its earworm quality, probably because of the rising falsetto – there’s just not a lot of that out there, and it’s incredibly sunny.

Pandora, James Horner, 2009 – I went back and revisited the late great James Horner’s score for the first Avatar film on the occasion of watching its sequel. I’ve come to appreciate the franchise more over time, and I don’t think I had really paid that much attention to the music when it first came out – but I should have. Horner creates a vast space within the score, and uses it almost as an additional form of sound design, to place the listener in a world that feels vivid and exotic and, above all, fresh with promise. This feels like someone crossed Adiemus with a jungle version of Horner’s forest-sound score work on The New World.

Ocean Lights & Peace of Mind, Takagi Masakatsu, 2021 – I have said before, and here reaffirm, that Takagi Masakatsu is Our Greatest Living Composer, and I will be here for anything he does. I’ve listened to so many hours of his music over the years, it’s hard to even estimate how many. But Takagi tends to post proper albums sporadically – about half, or actually probably a bit more than half of what he posts are albums of marginalia, collages of musical notes – though those are also quite good. Recently, however, he put out a series of scores for a Japanese TV show I’ve never heard of and know nothing about. To be honest, it looks incredibly low budget, but if Takagi is writing music, I’m going to listen to it, and he does not disappoint here. Ocean Lights feels like the swelling march of the waves, proud and happy, carrying me along with no resistance. Peace of Mind is another collaboration with the singer Ann Sally, who featured on his greatest work, the score for Wolf Children. Sally has an incredibly delicate approach to each line, and it really does live up to its title.

Tank!, Rain, & Space Lion, SEATBELTS & Steve Conte, 1998 – I finally sat down and watched Cowboy Bebop, the ultimate classic space noir from the 90s, a show that I think sits at the center of a straight line from Star Wars to Firefly and then every single other down and out ragtag band of space misfits in contemporary fiction. Bebop has an incredibly soundtrack; it’s jazzy and big and totally unembarrassed by pretentions to restraint, and the first two tracks are great examples of that. But Space Lion is more than that – I kept coming back to it, because it really captured one of the emotional high points of the series, and held it, like starlight in a glass. There are a lot of big, emotional scores out there, but very few of their highlight tracks start with a hazy saxophone solo. But the moment the drums come in, and then the choir, the temperature shifts; it’s like the sun going down, and the aurora slowly unfurling itself, revealing that it was always there – you just weren’t looking.

Welcome Home, We Know What You Whisper, & Wakanda Forever, Ludwig Göransson, 2022 – Ok, so this score did come out right before January. I don’t want to go into a huge tangent about the Black Panther sequel, because I have so many thoughts about it (I think it’s flawed but still the most interesting Marvel project in a long time, and I generally liked it, certainly more than a lot of the recent output). So, without getting bogged down in all that interesting rabbit trail, let me just say that Göransson is having a fantastic year (I expect his Oscar will be arriving in a few months for Oppenheimer). I feel that in all the discussion of this movie, the score almost got neglected. People were really impressed and excited about the original Black Panther score, and rightfully so, but this is actually more interesting to me, because of how well the score shifts to not simply repeat the themes of the original in a kind of nostalgia (which I’m sure audiences were ready for). Instead, it swerves, not only into a darker vein, but one which reflects the environmental shift in the film; Wakanda Forever is colder, bluer, and there’s a marked shift toward the science-fiction aspects of the world. Just like the attempts to revive the herb by a synthetic process, the score takes the earthier beats of the original, and grafts them into a substrate dominated by cold electronic noise. These tracks are standouts, and my favorite is the one that shares the name of its film – it sets up a new theme that is synthetic and electric blue, and I remember when it played in the theater it felt like being in a vibrating prism.

Free Bird, Lynyrd Skynyrd – All right, ok, this one got in here because it’s a meme. But you know what? It’s a good meme. Zoomers rediscovering the power of classic rock through silly tiktoks is what intergenerational perpetuation of American culture looks like in the twenty-first century. But actually if I’m being honest, I had never listened to Skynyrd before either, so I’m in the same boat with the youths on this one.

The whole point of this one is the transition point where it switches from a lazy, mellow riff to a propulsive guitar solo, a bifurcation that reminds me of Layla (one of the best rock songs of all time). The thing that finally got me nodding along with this meme like a grinning Jack Nicholson was a video where someone posted nine minutes of a rocket sitting on the launchpad and then finally launching, with ignition timed to the song’s transition. To me, that is cinema.

I already talked about Friday I’m In Love (The Cure), and the main title from Andor (Nicholas Britell), and the music from The Rings of Power (Bear McCreary) in my post about music I listened to in 2022. That they still are on this playlist is endorsement enough. But I really want to emphasize the particular nostalgic sonic space created by The Cure in this song. There’s something about that moment at the end of the previous century that tinged music with an upbeat melancholy that’s hard to explain and impossible to fake.

Once in a Lifetime & Take Me to the River, Talking Heads – I finally watched Jonathan Demme’s legendary concert film Stop Making Sense, and I am very late to the party but I am happy to be here all the same. The sense of disorientation at the passage of time, the moment vanishing rapidly downstream even in the midst of endless repetition through time is only going to get more resonant as I get older, isn’t it? Oh dear.

Storm Is Coming, Junkie XL – The most iconic track from the mechanical tornado that is the Fury Road score needs no introduction to anyone familiar with the movie. It’s so easy for this sort of choppy, dramatic, overcranked score to slip into generic noise, but this transcends its genre to loom like the threatening sandstorm of the film, monolithic yet dynamic. Midway through the track, the wind’s dark melody overpowers the throbbing engines, and reminds humanity of our place.

The Visitors/Bye/End Titles from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, John Williams – I think this monster of a track can hold its own with any other example of Williams’ work. It mirrors the film in movement from darkened confusion, rising into clarity of vision, the apotheosis (which is exactly what the UFOs function as). This is as good an example as any of the classic Hollywood string sounds of outer space – climbing and spiraling ever higher. Finally it breaks into a majestic euphony of bells and horns and strings, rising upward through the clouds to touch the stars above, where it resolves into a tremulous choir. In the end, it feels more open than closed, not definitive, but posing a final, unanswered question: are we alone, or, not?

Balcony Scene from Romeo + Juliet, Craig Armstrong – This manages to mirror the tentative, questing, fearful-yet-hopeful feeling of the young lovers undone by a heaven glimpsed through the silly honesty of a teenage crush. I latched onto this song specifically because there’s a line that repeats over the end of the track, glancing up and down, which breaks like lightning over the melody, and smells like wet grass in spring.

In The Meantime, Spacehog – Like the first song on this playlist, I discovered this through its use in a movie trailer, in this case for the third Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s just a rollicking great rock song, impossible not to be carried along with, up through the atmosphere into the far out wilds above.

This Is to Mother You, Sinead O’Connor – When I made this list, the great Irish artist was still with us; I didn’t yet know that this was her last year, and in fact, I had just recently starting listening to her music. There are so many fantastic songs she left us with; this one has a certain redemptive, healing sense about it. It’s a gentle work of comforting grace – and don’t we all need just that?

Wild Horses, The Sundays – The Sundays, who only put out three albums over the first seven years of my life, have in retrospect become one of my most beloved bands. All their work has an echoing wistfulness, and this is a great example of that. It’s about the strength of affective attachment, paradoxically expressed through the unconstrainable nomadic strength of the horses.

Aettartre/End Credits from The Northman, Robin Carolan, Sebatian Gainsborough – This entire score is excellent, but the final track captures the wild breaking in of what is now an ancient, alien vision of the world and what lies beyond it, plucked strings drawing together, towards some fated collision with eternity.

Breakfast in America, Supertramp – We end with the same album with which we began. To be honest, this is an enormously goofy song, and it gets sillier the more I listen to it; but I enjoy that. A stereotyped, foreign caricature of America as a land of wealth, expressed with silly tubas yet in a minor march – there’s a lot here to enjoy, and who said music has to be serious to be good?

Terezin

Resuming my narrative of last October, I left the village of Konigstein by train, winding slowly through the sunny morning fog up the Elbe, and within a few miles I had crossed into the Czech Republic. Europe’s freedom of movement area, the Schengen Zone, is a masterstroke of policy, perhaps my favorite international agreement, and one that I hope is a template for us all to emulate. However, I was not going to a happy place that day. The train pulled into Litomerice, from which I would have to walk to the town of Terezin, known more famously by its German name: Theresienstadt.

Terezin is a perfectly-preserved relic of the Austrian Habsburg empire, built as a fortress in 1780 to control access points along roads into the Bohemian plain. Named for the Empress Maria Theresa, mother of Marie Antoinette, the town consists of an immaculate array of stellar fortifications enclosing a planned town designed to host a large garrison. But Terezin is not famous for any battle or siege. Instead, it is remembered as a concentration camp, or as the Nazis euphemistically called it, a “transit ghetto.”

Here in Terezin, an enormous percentage of Europe’s Jews, as well as many other political prisoners, were deported to live in a paltry act of propaganda theater – the community of prisoners was allowed to organize itself, and the Nazis made a great show out of Terezin as a sort of ‘humane’ Jewish camp, were children went to school and people lived in the town – a town which had of course had all of the previous inhabitants unceremoniously evicted. But of course the reality was that conditions of overcrowding and deliberate mistreatment were so great that thousands died here. And the euphemism was, in a certain sense, accurate. Most of the people sent to Terezin were only staged there temporarily, and trains left constantly carrying people to the East, with its extermination camps and death squads.

Today, Terezin is silent. The town has people living in it, and it seems like a perfectly friendly place, but for the two days I was there it was as quiet as can be. Perhaps that is because the fog never lifted for a moment. I stayed in an enormous and quiet flat, and in the day I wandered all over the town, a grid of battered buildings under a grey gloom. In the grassy moats I found sheep, and, oddly enough, invasive nutria rats.

I visited the Gestapo’s prison for political dissidents, as well as the barracks in which the Jewish community were forced to live. Terezin is filled with artifacts of the cultural life of the camp, which held all in one place many of the greatest minds and creative artists of Europe. One composer wrote an entire opera which has survived in full, commenting on the political situation. Many of these intellectuals spent their time teaching the children, who produced scores of drawings depicting their life in the camp, which now paper the walls of the barracks.

I found a graveyard shadowed by a looming menorah, and I even found a memorial set up by the Red Army to the Soviet troops who liberated the camp.

Finally, I walked across the countryside to read a train platform, only to discover there was no way to buy tickets there, so I had to walk a couple of miles in the other direction to get back to Litomerice. But this turned out to be a valuable and rare chance to get out of town and off the transit path and into the normal flat countryside of Czechia, with its quiet villages and green fields of vegetables.

I have gone to Alaska

I have gone to Alaska, and have not written in some time.

I regret the latter, and feel it as another example of me always being slower to reach the baseline goals I set for myself than I would expect – things I plan to do in a couple of days take a couple of months instead. I remember when I was a child, my Sunday school teacher drew a circle on a sticky note, and wrote “tu it” in the circle, and gave it to me – because I would constantly say I would get around to it (whatever it was that day), only I never did. But the more I talk to others, the more I feel this sense of chasing the asymptote of our own expectations is, actually, normal life in this world. At any rate, I am writing now, which is just as well.   

As to the former clause, I don’t regret it at all (though I shall miss those in Washington). I moved to Anchorage in June, and I am thoroughly delighted. Obviously Alaska cannot compete with the greatest state in the Union, but it’s immense and beautiful and filled with adorable bears. I’m still perfecting my own bear spray recipe – at present I’m leaning towards a cocktail of salmon oils, fermented berry juice, and honey. By applying this to myself like a cologne, I shall soon fulfill my ambition to receive the world-famous “bear hug.”

I began my trip north by getting a filling at the dentist at seven in the morning. As we all know, this is the ideal state of mind in which to begin a twelve-hour drive. By Canada, the novocaine had fully worn off, and I proceeded up the Fraser canyon, along the river my grandfather spent his whole career on. Once you get past the town of Lytton, currently a blank space wiped off the map by fires two years ago, and climb out of the brown desert of the Thompson canyon, British Columbia just sort of rolls out forever as a green plateau of trees and pastures. I know how to read a map and how to use Google, and yet it was still somehow always further to go than I had thought. By eleven PM it was past dusk, and was actually fairly dark, though I could feel, already, that I was chasing the sun north, and that the faster I drove the slower the sunset would come.

I stayed in Prince George, and turned west the next morning, driving through more pinefield flats and river valleys, until, near the coast, the mountains finally began to get dramatic. It was there, in the twilight on the road to Stewart, that I saw my first bear cub by the road. Unfortunately it darted into the brush before I could take a picture, but over the next couple of days I saw three more bears, two of which were cubs.

Stewart, BC, is a small and absolutely silent town at the head of a very long fjord. Only a mile away, just around the bend, is the southern tip of Alaska (and also the abandoned mining site where John Carpenter filmed The Thing, substituting for Antarctica). I stayed in a hotel that must have been almost as old as the town; the room I was in had definitely been intended as a rectilinear space, but it had since deformed so that the floor sloped in bizarre ways. Across the carless street I found a boardwalk that spanned the marshy estuary, and walked out into the still gloaming, and felt very still.

The next day was the most isolated of the entire trip – just a long journey up the Cassiar highway, past endless mountains. I had to think about where the gas stations were, and the trees grew smaller and slighter the further north I went. But, truth be told, it didn’t feel nearly as remote as one might think; there was no trouble finding services, and the road conditions were excellent given the area. I stayed at Marsh Lake, along the Yukon, and the next day I detoured south along the route taken by the mad rush of humanity that exploded from Seattle onto the frozen gravel bars of the Klondike, in the story which is the founding myth of Seattle.

From the interconnected long lakes and rivers which meet at Carcross, I drove the highway over the snowy mountains, and finally entered Alaska for the first time. Skagway was, unsurprisingly, still a boomtown, only this time the boom is the foghorn of the cruise liner. The place is absolutely filled with tourists, though I was obviously in no position to complain.

Hmmm….

Armed with sumptuous frybread, I briefly scouted the abandoned site of Dyea, which has returned to nature, and then headed back up into Canada, through Whitehorse, to Haines Junction – a tiny town with a good bakery on the edge of mountains so close and big that it feels like the edge of the world.

At this point, the light was continuous; at midnight it was silent, but light.

The next day I drove all the way to Anchorage. By Kluane Lake I passed a desert of dust blasted by the wind of an unseen glacier – a glacier whose recent retreat has completely altered the hydrology of the region, leaving behind a dry riverbed, as water that only a few years ago flowed into the Bering now cuts south through the mountains to the Pacific.

In the final approach to Anchorage, I saw the Matanuska Glacier laid out in the flat valley below the highway, and realized immediately just how different the glaciers are here than what I’m used to. It seemed to spread out utterly unbothered by the warmth of the low elevation, the greenery, even the towns and subdivisions built higher than it. Of course, we know this is an illusion, and I wonder for how long it will continue to hold.

At the end of the road, I made it to Anchorage, where I now live, thanks to the mighty chariot.

2022 in Music

I’ve never written anything about music before, and so I want to begin with a caveat, and a clarification. The caveat is this: I do not know how to talk about music. Now, I learned to read and play music as a child, and since then I’ve spent a very large percentage of my waking hours listening to music, but I’m a very simple consumer who is easy to please, and am neither a critic or an artist. Frankly, I don’t know genre terms for different styles of music, because I never bothered to learn, and I have nothing really to say about it, other than very loose emotional impressions. For me, this is an area of art which is the exact opposite of literature, which I actually can write about. So, why am I saying anything at all about music, if I can’t even hold an intelligent conversation about it?

Quite simply, I’m not attempting to do any criticism, or really to say anything about music. All I want to do is share songs that I like, to point to them and say “this is so good, isn’t it?” Some of that is driven by a desire for others to also listen, but a lot of it is simply a matter of self-expression, since I get very excited about liking whatever I like.

Next, the clarification. I’m not going to be posting about music released in 2022. While a couple songs from last year may sneak in, I didn’t listen to nearly enough music from 2022 to write even a short post about. What I’m doing is just posting about a selection of the songs I listened to last year and really liked. Some of them were already familiar to me, and some were not, but they were all songs I listened to repeatedly throughout the year. So you can think of this as a sort of Spotify wrapped post, except it’s not actually my Spotify wrapped because that ended up just  being all the songs on the Dune score occupying the top spots.

So, with the caveat that you really may not want to spend time reading this, unless for some reason you’re interested in a list of what music I liked last year, here is my 2022 year-end playlist.

The song that has most stuck in my heart all year is Art Garfunkel’s cover of Waters of March, a song originally written by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Unsurprisingly, I discovered this song due to its use in the film The Worst Person in the World, which is probably the best movie of 2021. That film speaks to a certain kind of quiet catharsis, of coming to terms with life and realizing things are going to be ok, and the song perfectly fits with that. There’s a sense of resting in the knowledge of reality, and accepting that things will work out. “It’s the end of the strain, it’s the joy in your heart,” as the song says. The list of little ordinary things locates peace and quiet joy in all of life, makes the light breaking through the background of the world immanent and present. This is the song that plays when the train leaves the station, and the end credits play, and there’s a sense of mundane closure. I used this song whenever I would take off on a flight last year – I hit play the moment the wheels left the ground.

I said that The Worst Person in the World is probably the best film of 2021, because Drive My Car is basically tied with it. This film stars Toko Miura as the eponymous driver, which reminded me of her appearance as the featured singer on RADWIMPS soundtrack for the 2019 film Weathering With You, and the song that most leaps out from that is Grand Escape. It builds, using the intrinsic melancholy of Miura’s voice as a grey ceiling of clouds, which the song finally pierces in choral ecstasy. It’s a song which seeks hope in a drowning world, and pushes further, constantly repeating “just a little bit further,” and “let’s go!” Escapism is a very good thing, properly understood, and the song is aptly titled.

Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is a famous classic, and it’s hard to know what to say other than to acknowledge its depth of honest feeling, and unaffected simplicity. As a professional sentimentalist, it’s exactly the sort of thing I love. Sometimes we need to be reminded of the value of the relationships we already have, and the need to cling tightly to one another. I feel I’ve lost touch with so many old friends over the years. I should do something about that.

It's hard to explain Shiro SAGISU’s what if?: orchestra, choir, and piano if you haven’t lived with the complicated saga of Evangelion in all the permutations it’s assumed since 1995. The important thing to know is that the series culminated in a mind-splitting conclusion in 1997’s film End of Evangelion, which left things in bleak and minor key. Since then, Hideaki Anno, the show’s creator, has found a greater degree of peace and happiness in life, and rebooted the show in a series of films, concluding last year in Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, and that’s where this song comes in. The film, and this song, provide a final resolution to the entire saga, ending at last in a major key. Personally, I find the song to be heavenly – it feels as though it bears the promise that all shall be made well, that there is some final hope. However, I struggle with hope, longing for it, but fearing I exclude myself from it. This song feels loving and relational, a final reconciliation, but lyrically it’s nostalgic and wistful, looking back at what could have been. But perhaps the great eschatological catharsis is about redeeming lost time, like the end of A Christmas Carol, when things can be made right. Perhaps the redemption Christianity promises is that there is hope, even after you have wasted your life. That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway.

I had never really listened intentionally to Elvis, but if you want me to pay attention to music, the way to do it is to have a director I love make a film about it. I was bouncing up and down in my seat in the theater watching Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, enjoying the gonzo maximalism on display, when midway through the film the 1968 Christmas special rolls around, and he begins singing If I Can Dream, and suddenly I was transported into a different sort of feeling than I had expected to have in this movie. Not only is this the high point of the movie, but the song feels like a full-throated echo of the cry of creation, groaning until it is delivered into a better world. There’s something very C.S. Lewis in the insistence, ingrained in every single human, that there absolutely must be a better world than this – that its existence is necessary, beyond any direct observational evidence. We have got to believe that there is “a beckoning candle,” somehow, somewhere.

I had never had any affection or connection to the carol Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, but when the original German version played in the film The Great Adventure, as a chorale heard amid the winter snows outside a little church in the woods, I was captivated. Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen is also a song of hope, invoking the Rose of the world (and the next), abloom in the snow. There is great hope here, though I have yet to understand the purpose of the thorns.

I’ve been a big fan of Mitski and her fascinating, drawn voice, and Working for the Knife is a great example of why. Musically, it has a really interesting song, flattened under low electric clouds. But lyrically, the song speaks directly to the experience of many in my generational cohort (Mitski is four months younger than me). It speaks to the sense of delayed adulthood, of loss of purpose and anxiety about that loss. Having left one career with no clear new direction, I find it incredibly resonant. And there’s the fear that things could have been different, “but I just chose wrong.” There’s a great need for hope among those who struggle in a society where identity is bound up in careers, and careers are fickle, delayed, contingent – or, even if successful, empty.

I alluded at the start of this post to the fact that objectively, I listened to the entire Dune score by Hans Zimmer more than any other song or album in 2022. There’s good reason for that: this is some of Zimmer’s best work ever, and a lot has already been said about its sense of immensity, and the strangeness of the instruments chosen. What I want to focus on is just the climbing riff of Leaving Caladan, which plays at the moment when the great hulking ships begin climbing out of the sea and into the stars. This fully sent me, and that’s why I became obsessed with it and played it on repeat for months.

There’s a youtube channel I love called The Beauty Of, which posts montages of gorgeous cinematography from films or just from directors, and I found one of their videos following the career of director Leos Carax. I’m not familiar with Carax beyond his most recent film, Annette, but I immediately fell in love with the song used in the video, Les Amants by Les Rita Mitsouko. I just like the sense of fluid, relaxed ebullience, bobbing up and down like a rubber duck in the swell of the sea.

ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION’s song, 子犬と雨のビート(A Lost Dog and Beats of the Rain) first came to my attention as the intro music to Masaaki Yuasa’s anime show The Tatami Galaxy, which is a masterpiece dealing with the sense of listlessness and disappointment in life. The song feels incredibly joyful and triumphant, an optimistic march for a despondent soul. As it says, “Even if nothing else changes, we will come across each other someday. Think about that and let’s go on one day at a time.” This is a real masterwork.

光るとき(Hikaru Toki) by Hitsujibungaku is also the intro song for an anime show, this time last year’s phenomenal adaptation of the Heike Monogatari by Naoko Yamada, and it’s hard to separate the song from the show’s themes of living amid times of change and suffering, and the acceptance of what fate must come, and persisting despite what cannot be changed. The entire song is ringing and thrumming with resonant sound, echoing the Gion Shoja bells that toll the beginning of the story.

I don’t know much about musical genres and periods, but I have learned from experience that I have a special love for a certain kind of British music from the early 80s, and it’s perfectly typified by Roxy Music’s song More Than This, which just washes over you with the terrific sense of contented melancholy which brings such specific nostalgia for a time in which I never lived.

I know I sound like I’m repeating myself, and I suppose I am – but once again, I fell in love with a song that speaks to a sense of quiet acceptance, a positive melancholy, and a sense of nostalgia and what could have been. In this case, I’m speaking of Masayoshi Yamazaki’s 90’s classic One More Time, One More Chance.

Team Me has been one of my favorite bands for about ten years, and last year they release a new album, Something in the Making. The whole album is terrific, but in particular I latched onto Should Have Been Somebody By Now, because it speaks to the sense I mentioned earlier, that I feel I have not really turned out quite like I expected I should have. In contrast, Every Little Dream looks forward, not back, and is pushing onward, driving forward with the sense that things may at last be about to change. It’s an optimistic album, helped along by Team Me’s trademark high sound.

This post is mainly about specific songs and albums, but one of the best discoveries the algorithm served up to me last year was an artist I had never heard of before: Emile Mosseri. I listen to an inordinate amount of movie scores, and so Spotify began slipping me song of his work, all from movies on my to-watch list that I have not yet seen – specifically, Kajillionaire, Minari, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco. There is something unique about Mosseri’s work that I can’t quite describe, but it just doesn’t sound like any other scores out there, and in particular parts of the The Last Black Man in San Francisco score are hauntingly elegiac. His work flows slowly, like a river of viscous sound.

As you can probably tell, I mostly listen to film scores, soft Japanese music, and certain specific kinds of indie and classic rock. I don’t listen to a ton of youth pop, but sometimes I stumble across an album that’s just an undeniably great bop, and Maisie Peters’ You Signed Up for This is one such album. It’s hard not to bounce right along with it, and why wouldn’t you?

There was another album released last year, this one by an artist I already knew and loved, and it’s a real banger. I’m talking about Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever. This has the same sense of clanging, windy, celebratory scope as all her work. For instance, it’s absolutely typical of her work that halfway through King, the song suddenly explodes into a full on wailing, but a sort of positive wailing. I’m not describing it well. The different musical elements are layered into the sound like the crunchy, juicy fibers of a good brisket. And I really love her song, Free, which speaks frankly to the experience of anxiety, while also fully embracing the celebratory joy implied by the album’s title. In another song she talks about placing chaotic feelings in the context of a life where nothing really actually bad has ever happened, so there’s a balancing act being carried out between speaking to the seriousness of these feelings for people, but also acknowledging how they may be insignificant in the scheme of other human experiences. And it’s reaching for the sublime, trying to claw it’s way out of anxiety. Also she put Bill Nighy, one of the most precious and wonderful actors we’ve got, in her music video, so there’s that as well.

And, on the subject of trying to claw one’s way up into the light, we have to talk about Christopher Willis’ incredible score for Armando Ianucci’s under-discussed 2019 adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield. As a Dickens’ novel, it is of course about an orphan rising into society, and this music is just barely containing that energy. It surges forward, like a rising tide, or a jubilant stream bursting its banks, glittering with grandeur. This is some of my favorite music to work to.

Not to keep going on about film scores, but they are a huge portion of what I listen to, and one I began listening to in 2022 was Joe Hisaishi’s incredible score for Isao Takahata’s final film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya. This is probably the greatest adaptation of a classical fairy tale, and the score reflects that in its own restrained classicism, while being extraordinarily sensitive and lyrical within that framework. In particular it mixes joy and melancholy perfectly; triumphant moments are scored in a way that evokes sad longing, as in Flying, and the ultimate threat of a final parting is scored in the most festive way imaginable, with music that sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before in The Procession of Celestial Beings. And the Song of the Heavenly Maiden speaks to both the center of sorrow and hope in the view of the world that is cyclical – the idea that all passes away, and all eventually returns – perhaps.

Staying in the world of Ghibli, I also became obsessed with Cecile Corbel’s score for Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s The Secret World of Arrietty, which is an adaptation of The Borrowers. This album is pure comfort food – it just feels hopeful and determinedly optimistic, down to its very bones, even despite its nostalgia. It also feels exactly like a rural British garden gone to seed, with cool dew fresh on green leaves, in the hour before dawn. It feels so profoundly hopeful, which of course makes me deeply sad in my own way.

Veering in a very different direction is Nicholas Britell’s electronic score for last year’s Star Wars series, Andor. This is notable for two things: it’s the first Star Wars score I know of to not try to ape John Williams iconic style, and also it absolutely rips. There’s an alien club mix (Niamos!), the main title feels like it carries within it the actual stress you would feel living under the Empire, and of course the finale of the show features a diegetic march, which is so specific and strange that it feels like something you couldn’t make up, but which is actually traditional to some observed culture. It also serves the story perfectly, embodying the implacable grim determination of the people to resist.

There were two dueling expensive fantasy prequel series last year, HBO’s House of the Dragon and Amazon’s Rings of Power. The former is better written, but while both have excellent scores, House of the Dragon’s feels very recycled from Game of Thrones, while Rings of Power gives us an entirely new creation from Bear McCreary, the man behind the fantastic score for the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which is now twenty years old, a thing I don’t really like to think about too much. McCreary’s Rings score follows the spirit of Howard Shore’s work, and really does sound like Middle-earth, but it’s very much its own thing, and it reaches some truly grand and sublime highs.

Sometimes a random songs finds its way from the algorithm into my rotation, and I don’t fall in love with it, or become familiar with the artist, but I just keep listening to it and enjoying it, and in that way it’s undeniable, while remaining the ordinary song in a list of extraordinary ones. Last year that inclusion was Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’ve not got much to say, but this one sounds different from what I usually listen to, but it has the sort of plaintive roughness that I do enjoy, and it swings gently through clouds of melancholy in a way I don’t mind.

If the previous song is maybe the least moving of those on my list, the next is at the other end of the spectrum. Last year I finally discovered The Sundays, and Here’s Where the Story Ends struck some kind of fundamental chord in me, and it hasn’t stopped vibrating since. I listen to it constantly and have done so for months, and it never ceases to make my face crinkle with feeling. As the title promises, it offers the hope of closure, and yet it is in fact open-ended, unresolved. And it’s incredibly nostalgic, burdened with the belief that the best thing to ever happen to you is in fact already in the rearview, and you didn’t realize it in time. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that idea, feeling it out. I don’t recommend it, and I don’t think it’s even really true, but at a certain point its hard to ignore any more. But the thing I like about this song, is that it seems to find a way to move on. Even if the story isn’t resolved, we’re calling a certain point the end, and moving forward. And even if you can’t get the past back, there’s a sense of something more than acceptance in the music – because it’s not a sad song. If you listen to the timbre of the music, it’s clearly smiling.

Suzanne Vega’s Cracking is a song in the same vein as the preceding song, not just because I found it around the same time, but because it also is enormously compelling. If The Sundays are singing about an ending, Vega is ushering in a new beginning. The whole song feels as if you’ve caught the quiet moment where the snowdrop springs above the surface. Something has shifted, very quietly, almost imperceptible, but it’s a fundamental shift, and soon the entire panoply of spring will follow. There’s a point at the end of winter where the ice first begins to crack, and this song somehow captures the quiet significance of first noticing that. Also, the way she sings the word “happens” is magical.

I’ve been increasingly obsessed by the TV series The Young Pope and its follow-up The New Pope, and while I feel like both have elements that don’t quite gel for me, the way in which they are executed and the depth of feeling crafted into them elevates them beyond their scripts and has made them some of my favorite television. One aspect of that is the soundtrack. 4.5 Bourrees, originally a Bach suite, now recomposed by Peter Gregson, somehow combines a satisfied sense of quiet contentment, the fulfillment of a silent smile under kind eyes, with a steady, unswerving forward motion. It feels like a funeral service that looks toward the future and affirms that all is going to be well, after all.

On the other end of the emotional scale is Black Math’s Lapse, used in the trailer for The Green Knight. Similarly propulsive, this song drives not into a sunny upland, but into dark clouds, with lightning flashing on the horizon, over the dead trees. It’s perfect for a film about a journey into the dark self, and when the music starts wailing it feels truly cinematic.

I picked Jerusalem sort of as a representative of all the Sinead O’Connor music I began listening to last year. I knew who she was, vaguely, but I’d never heard any of her work before, but I really got into it in the past few months. It’s exactly in the pocket of the period of music that I love, with that same sort of instrumentation and sound that crops up all over the 80s. I can’t really explain my weird obsession with an imagined memory of that time period, but this song feels like the perfect anthem of the end of history, invoking in its title the ultimate portent of transformation. You can feel the tension and elation of some sort of great Turning in process.

Maybe I like Andromeda because it flows smoothly like a colorless oil, or because it sounds like big old empty space, or because I can hear both organs and the sort of far-out twanging I know from the 70s. Or maybe I just like it because like Weyes Blood, I too have a heart that is lazy.

Arvo Part’s masterwork, Spiegel im Spiegel, has been used in so many films that shows that it’s hard to know exactly how I encountered it, though I suspect it was in About Time. There’s a reason it’s so widely used. There’s something beyond longing – the song is a perfect tincture of a gentle final parting from a very old friend. This is deathbed music.

I’m sure I’d heard it before, but I also became really familiar with The Cure’s Friday I’m in Love through About Time (which is itself a really lovely film). This is just a fantastic jam painted in the musical colors of the period I love most, and at the same time it almost compels a sort of hopeful outlook. 

In perhaps the ultimate example of elegiac music, Dario Marianelli and Jean-Yves Thibaudet created Elegy for Dunkirk for the dreamlike and astonishing Dunkirk beach scene in the film Atonement. The common voices of the soldiers pierce the somber waves of the strings as a sort of irruption of ordinary people into a moment of extraordinary nobility and sorrow. It really does sound like what it accompanies: the wreck of all time on the shore of eternity.

I feel sort of weird listing Kanho Yakushiji’s recording of the Heart Sutra in this list, considering that this is a chanted version of Buddhist scripture, sung by a Buddhist monk, and I’m a Christian who doesn’t really even get the appeal many people feel for the Buddhist worldview. In fact, if Buddhism (in my very limited understanding) is about detachment from desire, I view my Christianity as the opposite – I seek to pursue desire in a religion of attachment to a more real, material, and substantive world than the one we currently inhabit. But regardless of all that, I find this sutra so calming in its steady rhythm that I really love it. And I do think that even where there is disagreement, there are truths apparent in the sutra’s expression of the universal human longing for something beyond what we know now.

Sneaking in at the end of the year, Ludwig Goransson once again pulls off an absolutely fantastic score, this time for Wakanda Forever. While the whole score is excellent, I want to highlight the eponymous track, which made me sit straight up in my seat in the theatre. This is something unlike what we heard in the first film – a synthesis of traditional instruments with icy, jagged synths, running through my body like an electric current. It’s a brilliant way to signal the shift in the franchise into a colder, bluer, even more science fiction dominated direction, while retaining all that made the original so unique. And it sounds so good.

The final song I’d like to mention comes from one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, SEATBELTS’ soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop. I’m specifically referring to the track Space Lion, which begins as a loose jazz saxophone, sonically adrift in space, and then transforms into something amazing. In the context of the show, it’s an enormously powerful, meditative piece, which places you into a trance, and then brings out the stars one by one, each sparking like embers out of the purple dusk.

Well that’s all folks – that’s 2022 in music, at least for me. I wrote this for my own memory, but mostly I wrote it so others might check out some of this music, and hopefully find something you also find moving and meaningful.

Sächsische Schweiz

Having departed the miraculously-reborn Dresden, I took a train just a few short miles further up the Elbe, into the waning dusk of night, to the village of Konigstein in the hill border region known as the Saxon Switzerland, Sächsische Schweiz (a term the Nazis apparently banned for nationalistic reasons of an especially stupid kind). I had booked a hostel, which I quickly found in the tiny town, but the door was locked, with no one in sight to greet me. For a few minutes, I was left to contemplate the yellow lights reflected on the cobbles of the empty streets. Fortunately I ran into some of the Ukrainian refugees who were living the hostel, and they quickly connected me with my host.

The following morning I began climbing out of the town and up the wooded slope behind it. As I proceeded, the greenwood, flecked with autumn’s gold, stirred sleepily and shuffled off the fog of morning. Around me were great mesas, the rocky outcroppings which gave this region its nickname. And below me, the valley of the Elbe unrolled itself, with Konigstein huddled hard by a sharp bend in the river – downriver to Dresden, upriver to the Czech Republic only a couple miles away.

After passing through yellowing woods on leaf-strewn paths, I suddenly found myself in a carpark, under an immense curtain wall of unparalleled height: it was the Fortress of Konigstein, never once conquered. A cargo elevator lifted me the 140 feet to the top of the wall, where I gazed out over the most gorgeous green country one could possibly imagine.

Below, the Elbe carved its gentle way through the hills, carrying all the water of Bohemia with it on its way to the North Sea. From this height, the town might as well have been a model built to accompany a train enthusiast’s set.

After touring the fortress, I struck out overland through forests and fields along a series of wandering trails and tiny rural roads. I passed a bunker left over from the war, a flock of geese, and a herd of black sheep, before descending to the river to cross on the ferry at Rathen. This flat boat is forever held in place by a cable fixed upriver, and only swings very slowly from one side to the other, like a pendulum on the end of its cord. From the tiny one-street spa town of Rathen, I climbed with scores of others to one of the region’s oldest and most popular tourist attractions: the Bastei. These rocks, spanned by an observation bridge since the 1850s, sprout heavenwards like myriad fingers.

After recrossing the river, I walked along its bank back to Konigstein, hurrying a little because I had no flashlight and the dusk was fast descending. There is something about river valleys in rural mountains that makes them the most peaceful places in the universe. I am reminded of the Yulong River in southern China, which felt much the same way, though the climate and scenery were markedly different. If you can get to either place, go.

A Man Came Back to Life

I’m driving home through the rain on Maundy Thursday, and I’m listening to Peter Gabriel’s triumphant finale score for The Last Temptation of Christ, and I’m in my feelings about God. The air is full of water, but I can still see rows of cherry trees exploding silently in pink fire.

I never grew up calling it Maundy Thursday, and I wonder if I’m just using the name now because traditional liturgy is fashionable, or even if it’s because I want to wrap myself in the aesthetics of traditional religion, focusing on beautiful images and nostalgia instead of the substance of doctrines I struggle to accept. I wonder if my feelings are mere affect created to meet my own expectations. Yet all week I keep returning to this sense of longing for union with God, and relief when He finally cries that it is accomplished.

In the moment of catharsis, however, I recoil – as if I have re-veiled the holy place, and cannot safely approach. I remind myself of each thing in which I find myself unwilling to do what I feel I should, of each doctrine that I resent, or find upsetting, or too frightening to fully assent to. I feel I ought to do things, and immediately I feel that, I say no. But if I say yes, where does it end? I can’t even flip through the Gospels in order to read of the beautiful hope of the Resurrection, without glancing at the heading “The Sheep and the Goats,” and at once falling again into a pit of fear and angst.  If I proceed with catharsis and rejoice with everyone in the Gospel of Easter, will I merely delude myself into a false sense of union, eliding the need to repent and accord with all scripture? I am without, and gaze in sadly, yet even sadness feels illegitimate or affected for sympathy. What am I safely allowed to feel? No one agrees.

To be completely honest, I’m not sure I should write about my faith in this way. I’m not embarrassed, but I wonder if I will say the wrong thing and have a harmful effect, or that the act of trying to feed these doubts into the artistic process is an attempt to narrate a sort of emotional progress without any spiritual surrender. So this project is sabotaged from the word go – I cannot write a narrative with a satisfying conclusion that emotionally resolves into a major chord, just as I feel I cannot actually approach the Cross. But I also will not walk away, so I remain at the foot of the Cross, irresolute.

But however affected or trite this narrative turn may be, Christ did in fact make me and the sun and all the frogs croaking down in the ravine, and in that knowledge I have to trust that He is good and kind, and perhaps that can be sufficient – though a certain kind of stern religion seems to trouble that hope, citing the narrow gate and hard way. I am not sure how to answer that or live with it, yet I still believe in the fact of the Cross and the Tomb, and in that I ask for help.

That’s the thing about my faith that has always made emotional sense to me (not that that is the standard of truth, not at all) – the love of Christ expressed on the Cross has always remained as the final testament to the goodness of God, and the hope of the Resurrection. I am confused and mired in feelings and doubts, but the one thing I remain convinced of is that this world and everyone in it was created with love and by a person who cares about goodness and beauty, and that death was not intended for us. I wrote this because I wanted to share honestly about my faith, and there’s no way for me to do that without talking about the problems at the heart of my thoughts and feelings, which are the great trouble that I am in. But amidst all that, I honestly believe that there is a man who came back to life. Because of that, I continue to look toward the Cross and the empty Tomb for a way through this thicket, and into the sunlight of the coming dawn.

Leipzig & Dresden

From Wittenberg it was not far to Leipzig, an ancient market city whose name I still cannot properly pronounce despite hearing it said many times. From the hulking main train terminal, a bustling tram whisked me to an inner suburb, where I stayed with an apartment building where you hung your clothes up in the attic, in a climate so cold and damp it’s a wonder anything ever dries out.

Leipzig is a town filled with historical buildings, stone towers popping up at every turn, and yet one of the most striking building I encountered was this crystalline neogothic Paulinum, the oratory of the University of Leipzig, which replaced the university church which had been destroyed by the communist government of East Germany back in the 60s. As with every place inhabited this long, the beauty of the built environment is inseparable from destruction – but this building is very beautiful.

I did not come to Leipzig for the university, however, but to see the town’s favorite son: Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach spent much of his career as the cantor of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, shown above, and it was here that he composed much of the music that still pervades and defines our world today. He was buried at the church, but over the years as Bach’s fame grew and the church was rebuilt, he was moved incrementally closer to the altar, until things finally reached the point where it really should be called St. Bach’s Church instead of St. Thomas’, since he occupies a position more prominent than most monarchs in other churches.

After visiting the great composer and walking past the former home of Schumann, another great musician, I fell into a sort of arts and crafts fair at the applied arts museum, which I acquired a ticket to by accident, since I did not really understand what was being said. I don’t have any pictures, but it was a fascinating thing to see a modern day bazaar continuing in this ancient market town.

The next day I continued on to Dresden, a town only familiar to me as a place we destroyed during the war. The famous photograph of the city I had seen always depicted the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity’s gargoyles gaping out over the blasted wreck of the city.

I don’t know if I can really unpack my complex feelings about the bombing of cities during the war. If I think about civilians on the ground, I become very angry, and I don’t think that’s wrong, but I also think it can be a manifestation of a proud desire for moral superiority, a sort of arrogant purity. Then if you bring in the victims of German aggression, and factor in the righteous fury that seeks to blast a rampaging evil, it gets even more complicated. At the same time, I think that we have to hold ourselves to high moral standards in war, or else what’s the point of fighting – but there’s always the Sherman argument, which was once articulate by a very dear old friend, who had lived through the war as a child in his native Japan, and who was personally grateful that the planned invasion had bene averted by the bombing. But of course he did not live in Hiroshima. I also think of my great-great-uncle who navigated his heavy bomber into Germany and set the bomb targets, and who was ultimately killed by his own payload in April 1944. But today Germany is free and no longer a terror, and Dresden is peaceful and beautiful, and you would not know it had ever burned, were it not for the blackened stones.

Entering the core of the city I was struck by the enormity of this mural, the Furstenzug, which adorns the outer wall of the castle and depicts the many rulers of Dresden. These were the Electors of Saxony, and if you’re wondering why a powerful potentate’s primary title would simply be ‘Elector,’ allow me to introduce you to the insane political contraption known as the Holy Roman Empire. For centuries the land we now think of as Germany was a loose confederation of over a thousand principalities, ranging in size from vast provinces like Dresden’s own Saxony to small towns and abbeys. These were ruled by people with titles like Landgrave, Margrave, and even Bishop and King, but the few Electors held enormous power, because they inherited the right to choose the Emperor. But even this was not straightforward; you see, one of the traditional Electors was the King of Bohemia, which is now the Czech Republic. But Bohemia was neither a German-speaking kingdom nor really a part of the Holy Roman Empire (although I’ve read contradictory views on that, which speaks to the messiness of the whole situation), and its King was also elected by the local nobility. For many years what typically happened was that the Austrian Hapsburg Archduke would be elected King of Bohemia by the Czech nobility, and he would then turn around and in his capacity as king of a country whose language he did not necessarily even speak, he would vote to elect himself Emperor.

At any rate, some of these Electors of Saxony loved collecting, and in their palace you now can view their enormous trove of delights. Here are a very few of the many I saw:

Understand that these ivory spheres had to each be carved in situ within the outer sphere, from a single piece of ivory.

This is a sculpture of a real individual who was a very popular court fool in Dresden. Apparently there is a removable panel on the cart which reveals his bare bum. It’s fascinating to think about something like this being commissioned from a master craftsmen, all as a sort of crass joke celebrating in mockery a living person.

This depiction of an oriental court is one of the most lavish miniatures I’ve ever seen, and if you’re ever in Dresden you have to see it.

I was initially drawn to this weapon because it’s a massive sword, and I was once a child obsessed with swords, but on closer examination it suddenly becomes very strange and arresting, because of the shrieking demonic face above the blade. I’m not superstitious, but I would think twice about killing someone with this.

This is a sample of the Electoral drip. Just imagine when this was all the rage.

After my time in the palace, I strolled through a city bustling with life in the gentle October air. The squares were filled with people laughing and enjoying themselves. Along the Elbe the sky drew down a lush curtain, even as some sort of calm march made its way into the city, preceded by the cobalt flicker of police vans.

The next day I spent hours in the Old Master’s Gallery of the Zwinger, but I don’t have any pictures of that, because I don’t take pictures of two-dimensional paintings. Then, I crossed the bridge through a mist of wind-driven droplets, and caught a train for the hills.   

Mitteleuropa: Wittenberg

It’s been longer than I planned since I last wrote. It feels as though I write this at the beginning of every post, and it also seems as though I begin each one with a disclaimer that I have very little to actually say. In this case it seems to actually be true: the main thing I have to offer is pictures, so this blog will be little beyond glorified captions.

So, picking up where I left off in last October, I rose early one morning, slipped out of the hostel and onto the U-bahn to the hauptbahnhof, and then onto a train headed southwest. As the country slid by under the clear autumn sun, my disillusionment with Europe and anxiety about social interaction in a foreign tongue slipped into the background, and I was once more captivated by the physical idea of Europe, which of course provoked its own sort of anxiety – an anxiety of longing. Looking out over the landscape, I saw exactly what I expected, and yet could not quite wrap my head around how a place exists that is open and flat, and yet is only covered in copses of trees and fields so green as to almost be teal. I’m from the American west, a place of famously vast open spaces, but where I live, the flat land is largely developed, and even in rural areas, it’s just not that green. It’s fascinating to see a place so settled and physically civilized, and yet also so agricultural and wet and mild. I struggle to think of anywhere else in the world quite like it, and I want to live there, and worry that I can’t.

After a couple hours, I arrived at Wittenberg, which some years ago changed its official name to Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, just so tourists and pilgrims wouldn’t be confused about where they should go if they want to see Marty. The town is small, ancient, and possesses the idyllic charm that I just cannot quite articulate or ever seem to hold on to. It’s less to do with the town, and more to do with it’s setting in the countryside, with the sun on yellow leaves as you walk from the station to the town, or maybe even just nostalgia projected back five months and colored by the new wave song I’m listening to right now. I think everything I start writing after about a paragraph turns into a recursive loop of chasing that sense of very specific yet indefinable longing, and with it the frustration that I can’t live there, and the embarrassment that I’m writing in circles yet again. I want to think that surfacing this thought process is interesting or truthful or artistic in some sense, but I’m not convinced it is.

There are two main historical churches in Wittenberg, and both are closely associated with Martin Luther. To reach them, or really to get anywhere in the old town, there are only two narrow, parallel streets along which the city stretches in a line.

There is, of course, a great central square, starring statues of Luther and Melancthon, as well as buildings that look like Herr Mendels’ confections. Here is the Stadtkirche, while further west is the Schlosskirche, with its great drum of a tower.

It is here, in the side of the Schlosskirche, the Castle Church, that Luther is said to have nailed his theses to the church door. While the exact form of this original protest is subject to some historical debate, the door possesses enormous symbolic value, so it’s a shame that the original was destroyed in a fire centuries ago. It has since been replaced by a great metal door, with all 95 theses stamped into the door itself – a reflection of how the outsider revolt of the Reformation quickly became the dominant religious power in the area.

The interior of the church holds Luther’s mortal remains, and like all these grand churches, when the light is right, it is a place of great Mystery. For me, Luther is a figure that I took for granted growing up, despite my protestant faith. Perhaps it was my aversion to making too much of particular church fathers, in the same way that protestants can be skeptical of saints, that led me to not care much about Luther. Or perhaps I just was more interested in military history as a child. Now, as an adult, my feelings on Luther are more complicated. I’ve studied the medieval world that preceded him extensively, and I love it, and don’t wish to discount its traditions and insights; but I also am enormously grateful that I don’t live in that religious context, with the focus on fear and works and a hierarchy on earth. At the same time, my struggles with my own protestant beliefs extends to a caution around the reformers of the sixteenth century, a fear of what they said – though that fear gains power from my belief that they are right in many ways. So, coming to the epicenter of that revolution in faith is like approaching the center of a vortex. Only now all is calm there, and the storm has long since passed by to other climes.

From the tower, you can see the town that birthed this great turning of the world’s gyre that ultimately led to the particular faith I hold dear. It’s a small and sleepy town, surrounded by a land of green trees and fields, and white windmills, beating out the march of time against the sky.

Mitteleuropa: Berlin

I am always revolving plans and ideas of places I’d like to go, spinning half a dozen plates at any given time, because it’s fun to check out guidebooks and digitally stick pins on google maps, and because I need to convince myself I actually will go everywhere – even though increasingly I feel myself running out of time.

This past year I had been contemplating a return to Japan, but the prolonged closure of the country led me to change plans at nearly the last minute, and pivot to a region I that had long fascinated me, and yet which I knew comparatively little about: central Europe, or Mitteleuropa.

Now, the idea of there being a central Europe is a little bit contested, since traditionally everyone breaks Europe into west and east, but I prefer to think of it as having a central core around the old Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg domains, and, of course, Poland.

I had been fascinated by this area because of the images I saw from it, pictures of castles, of green firs, a dark and cold climate like my home, and cities that were entirely grey. I love all medieval history, but my studies skewed to the west, to France and Britain, and even south to Italy. I knew very little of the eastern half of Charlemagne’s empire and had no real sense of how the Hapsburg concatenation had ever agglomerated in the first place. But I was fascinated with Germany, with the old Hanseatic cities, and with the dark primeval forest in which my ancestors once worshipped stocks and stones. And it was also the site of the Iron Curtain, and in my mind an image of a grey, rain-clean Berlin in the 80s had become associated with a strange nostalgia I had for the Cold War, for the music of the time. This of course is very silly, especially since I have no experience of this time or place, but it’s been in my mind with nostalgia since I was a child looking at old pictures in encyclopedias.

So, with all of that strange and unreal baggage, I boarded a flight to Berlin.

On takeoff, I looked down on Seattle and could barely see the duskling city; it lay trapped beneath what looked like a black mesh, but it was really a veil of smoke, the malingering spume of summer. I was glad to be out of that black air.

After transiting through Charles De Gaulle, an airport that did its best to play up every French stereotype, stuffed with chocolateries and perfumeries, and yet still stuffed with Starbucks (they did their best to make them seem extra-fancy), I arrived in Berlin. Immediately I became stressed about the trains, compulsively checking to make sure I had the right ticket, in case I got caught by a conductor. In this mood, weighed down by a lopsided pack and self-conscious that my (perfectly-good) mask was not quite the exact standard for German transit (despite the fact that I saw many Germans simply disregarding the injunction to wear masks altogether), I slid into Berlin on an elevated S-bahn line just as the sun was going down.

In the morning I exited my hostel and found myself in an excellent example of the typical street in every city I visited on my trip. All of central Europe feels like this; flush mid-height apartments in either this style, or an even blockier communist style if the site had been sufficiently bombed, with ubiquitous graffiti at street level. I was immediately charmed by all the folks cycling to work, the children going to school – in short, the American’s European fantasy of the walkable, person-oriented city.

However, I shortly encountered a problem that would plague me for the rest of the trip: I became anxious about entering restaurants, self-conscious about my lack of German. Over the course of the trip this would push me to avoid many restaurants, to prefer coffeeshops where I felt more in control because I knew exactly what to get, or even fast food places. This sort of self-consciousness at not speaking the language, the fear of being judged as annoyingly out of place, has only happened to me on this trip and when I was in Spain and Portugal. The rest of my travels have either been in English-speaking countries, or in Asia, where I am obviously a foreigner and there’s no sense I will out myself as one by opening my mouth. I actually felt more comfortable and at home in rural Japan than in a European capital. At the same time as I felt this social anxiety, I felt anxiety that I was wasting my opportunity to try good German food, and betraying all the planning and research I had done for my trip. This is something that I struggle with – I make plans, and then when the moment to execute them comes, I don’t feel like doing it, for a myriad range of reasons, which then in turn makes planning feel futile, and creates a feedback loop of discouragement and self-loathing. And all of this just over where to eat!

That first morning I did find a nice bakery though, which was very good indeed.

I will say this – I’m anxious now, writing this, because I can feel that my memory has warped in exactly the way I knew it would. When I planned the trip, I was full of excited anticipation, and romanticized Europe; while on my trip, I was frequently stressed, tired, frustrated and critical of the places I traveled, and desiring to be home; and now that I am home, I romanticize it again and remember all the good things. I knew this would happen while on my trip, and it worried me at the time, that my view of travel is never aligned with my experience. What is gained by actually going somewhere if your memory of it aligns more with the fantasy than how you felt at the time, and how do I enjoy my hobby of planning more trips if I know that actually I experience them more negatively while actually traveling?                                        

One thing that hovered over the entire trip was the awareness that despite Europe’s advanced level of development and centrality in the western imagination as a hub of civilization, violence is always proximate. You could see it in the bullet holes on buildings left from the fall of Berlin at the end of the War, in the many physical reminders of the decades of Soviet repression and brutality, and in the constant awareness of the current war in Ukraine – not very far away. In America it’s difficult to reconcile the idea of a war that impacts civilians with our conception of first-world middle-class life, because for the past century and a half those wars have all happened overseas, and even when these wars happened on American soil they were tempered by the shared culture of the combatants – we fought ourselves, we fought the British and Canadians, and we fought (mostly) between the ages of razing cities.

I had my own personal struggle as well. Shortly after arriving, I decided to declare war on Europe over a single, all-important issue: the serving size of coffee. Everywhere I went, I found it nearly impossible to get a decent-sized latte. Even a puny twelve ounces were hard to come by unless I gave in and went to a Starbucks, which I was loath to do. The coffee in Europe is great, but we must have more of it, and I don’t mean watered-down Americanos – I mean a simple increase in quantity. At home I drink a minimum of two litres of coffee with cream per day, and that’s a baseline. I think it’s time for a new crusade, it’s time for America to reinvade Europe and upgrade their culture on coffee sizes to something approaching what might satisfy a human.

The vestiges of communism were everywhere in East Berlin, and surprisingly quite prominent. They seem to have been embraced as part of a shared history, integrating the disparate experiences of the two Germanys – or at least that’s what this foreign tourist made up in his head without doing any research. Still, I was genuinely surprised to find Marx-Engels-Forum still prominently featuring its namesakes.

After visited the medieval quarter and a superb statue of lionized violence, St. George crushing the dragon, I visited the Pergamon Museum, a building housing entire structures taken piece by piece from the near East and brought to Germany, presumably by some of the same guys Indiana Jones used to fight. (Ok, that may be a bit uncharitable – in some cases).

Here’s a good reminder that wars have always been with us. And I also found a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story in which a man of selfish violence seeks meaning in the wilderness of his life.

Speaking of the enduring power of words, I visited Bebelplatz, the square in front of the university, in which the Nazis held their infamous book burnings, philistine bacchanals born of the fear of the truth. Processing down the central street of Berlin, Unter den Linden, I was encouraged that things can be restored, and new growth can spring up: Hitler had cut all of the trees to replace them with dead stone eagles, yet here they are again in all their glory.

Next to the famous Brandenburg Gate is the vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, permanently impressed onto the center of Berlin.

Its sea of coffin-like blocks cedes an entire city block to the dead, and it draws you in, swallowing you. But now the memorial is full of children running and laughing, or silly teens on their phones, as tourists wander through it. Across the street in the Tiergarten is another memorial, much smaller and less prominent, to the many gay people murdered by the Nazis. A single block, cousin to those in the larger memorial, contains a tiny portal, within which a film of gay couples kissing plays constantly.

And, if you proceed through the Tiergarten, a vast and native expanse of green, you come to third, more shockingly incongruous memorial: the memorial to the Soviet troops who finally broke the Nazi regime at the fall of Berlin. Of course it makes sense they would have a memorial, not only because the Soviets occupied the city and built one, but because of their great achievement in defeating Hitler. At the same time, it’s strange to see a prominent and well-maintained memorial to an invading army who vengefully raped their way through Berlin. Even with the context of all the evil they were responding to, it still feels strange.

Nearby stands the center of German government, somehow still here after all the fire and blood that has washed over it: the Reichstag.

It stands amidst a beautiful stretch of park and Spree waterfront, surrounded by pristine modern government buildings erected in the postwar era of clean European architecture I have loved since I was a child.

Walking home, I found other shadows of the past: the New Synagogue of Berlin, for instance, and bullet holes outside a church whose leadership had been divided on the question of acquiescence to the Nazis, and which would later play host to Martin Luther King Jr. speaking for justice while in Communist East Berlin.

Over the four days I spent in Berlin, I visited a number of wonderful museums, and saw a vast amount of art and artifacts. If you view enough medieval art, you quickly become familiar with its memetic quality, as the same religious subjects and scenes are depicted again and again and again. This is one of the many many depictions of the deposition of Christ’s body I saw:

There were interesting figures like this one:

Strange relics like this Byzantine gambling machine:

And then there was, uh… this:

I have nothing illuminating to say about this one, sorry.

Above all, I spent a huge amount of time walking all over Berlin, ogling the architecture, which included a water tower that had somehow became an apartment building, and the many looming hulks of commie blocks.

And of course, here and there, I ran into bits of the wall, shadows of the line that once had cut lives in two.

This last image of the wall was taken from the boundary of a plot of land which now houses a museum, but which once contained a building that served as the shared headquarters of both the Gestapo and the SS. Inside, the exhibits detail the full, excruciating history of the Nazis arc in power, and constantly reiterate the message that their crimes would have been impossible, but for the acquiescence, on a variety of levels, of the German public. Germany had been, albeit briefly, a liberal democracy. These things can and do happen, and if you are not careful, you will be without excuse when they do.

I also visited a museum to the various German resistance movements, which is housed in the naval office building where the famous conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was concocted. Here, in the courtyard, the principal conspirators were shot.

That same day, I toured the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who kept files on every single person in the DDR. In their attempts to intimidate those they viewed as dissidents, they emulated the Georg Cukor movie Gaslight, which gave its name to the term gaslighting – in the case of one activist, the Stasi would enter her apartment while she was away and rearrange various household objects.

Finally, I ended my time in Berlin with a sunset walk along the Spree, along a section of the wall which has been reclaimed as a colorful canvas for the freed city. After all that has happened to Berlin, life continues and grows in beauty.

Ave 2023

Another year comes, and here we are, now.

I wanted to post in the new year, in lieu of writing a Christmas letter (although I have actually never written a Christmas letter). The rule with such things is to recap your year, and to wish others good cheer. However, I’m too melancholy and my year has been too uneventful for that to work. Also, I’m not sure if blogging as an act of self-expression even makes sense in 2023, both because it’s so old-fashioned, and because it seems selfish to trick good folks out of a couple minutes when I don’t really have anything much to say. Ah well.

In January I was fortunate to get a new job doing administrative work for a small company that tests backflows on water lines. The people I work with are lovely, and I’m very grateful to have steady work after the disruption of the last couple years. In the spring my church merged with another local church, which meant I got to know many new faces, which has done me good. Finally, this last fall I traveled overseas for the first time since 2017 (which for me feels like an interminable gap). I’ll try to post more about that later, but I visited a series of central European capitals and historical sites. Two themes dominated: first, the Habsburgs, and with them the history of the Thirty Years’ War, in which neighboring potentates violently intervened in Germany to shore up their own political positions. The second was the holocaust. I followed its trail, from SS headquarters in Berlin, to the so-called “transit ghetto” of Theresienstadt, and finally to Auschwitz. When I left the camp and headed for nearby Krakow in southeast Poland, I found Ukrainians there, fleeing their own violent terrors. To paraphrase Eliot, “history is now.”

For our world, then, the year has been anything but uneventful. American politics remains both chaotic and goofy, simultaneously (un)/serious, and as fractious as ever. Mired each in our narratives, it’s hard to say what direction anything is really going. In Ukraine, we see a more bald-faced aggression than we’re used to, although this is in some ways simply more high-profile, or more noticed in our media; there are other countries were this violence is nothing new (Yemen, Ethiopia, DRC, etc.). And there is the great silence from Uyghuristan. And yet we cannot disengage with each other: western Europe can’t seem to do without Russian gas, the US economy can’t disown China, and there can be no national divorce here at home. Yet selfish nationalism, if I can call it that, seems rampart across the globe, and if it remains unchecked, it will lead to more sputterings of violence, smoldering away at the seams of our community. I feel that we must try honestly, for once, to live up to a set of moral, liberal international principles in our foreign policy, or else it will just be universal hypocrisy, and there won’t be any decent alternative.

But I feel a bit hypocritical myself. I say that nations must be selfless, but I myself want to save up money for myself, while others are in poverty around me. And that speaks to the tension I live with – I remain deeply committed in my faith, because without it there’s no real chance of hope beyond this broken world, and yet I am conflicted about what exactly it requires of me. I find myself often struggling between more conservative, traditionally orthodox theology, which I believe intellectually, and more ‘liberal’ Christians (for lack of a better term) who I often feel much in common with. It’s difficult to make emotional sense of truth at times. I’m trying to work my way forward, but I’m not sure if I’m making progress, or where exactly I’m going.

That’s really the takeaway from 2022: I don’t know where I’m going. I plan endlessly, but doubt I will follow any of them to conclusion, either from indiscipline or simply because they were never achievable to begin with. Progress seems too slow, given the speed at which life passes, and I’m unsure if what I’m doing is worthwhile. I feel as though things have turned a corner from the sense of broad possibility I took for granted in my twenties, and now the uncertainty of the future feels less like opportunity and more like doubtful mediocrity. Still, bearing up hope in the praxis of small steps, I move into 2023. I hope that it will be interesting. I hope that you shall all be well.  

A Far Better Thing

[Spoilers for a forty-year-old movie]

Look, I’m not going to be able to say anything about this movie that hasn’t been said many times over in the forty years since its release. I’m essentially just pointing at it and shouting that it’s great and you should watch it – but in all candor that’s mostly what this blog is going to be as a whole.

In my judgment I simply have no alternative but to take this opportunity to write about it, however. I grew up watching five films every single time I was sick as a child: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the three Star Wars movies, and of those five, the first was always my favorite. In fact, I suspect I have seen this movie more times than any other in my life, although I cannot be sure – I can’t even remember the first time I saw it. Growing up, I knew it in its tape-recorded form, complete with fast-forwarded commercial breaks. On Sunday, for the first time, I saw it on a movie screen. But no matter how I watch it, it always holds up.

So, where to begin? Well, let’s start with the aesthetics. Of course, my feelings on this aren’t even in the same quadrant with objectivity, and so my aesthetic sense may actually just be a pavlovian response – for instance, the instant I hear that eerie, space-y sound come over the Paramount logo, I get chills. I react to the opening credits the way most people react to a Fast & Furious car chase.

Objectively though, the film looks amazing, which is impressive given how it was made on a reduced budget. There’s a very specific sort of dark-‘80s thing going on with everything from the lighting to the set dressing to the uniforms – weirdly exaggerated collars and jackets, but all in muted reds and browns. This film embraces the darkness of space, and I really enjoy the unusual choice to make our heroes always occupy the darkest, reddest environments, while cold, bright, blue light is reserved for the villain.

Speaking of the villain, Montalban is delightful, and he looks as if he crawled right out of Mad Max. People have made plenty of admiring jokes about his chest in this movie, but you kind of have to acknowledge the power of its rich Corinthian leather. Maybe I should get myself one of those Starfleet pendants.

The real star here are the ships. The Enterprise is of course a reused model from The Motion Picture, so the design aesthetic was set from go. Credit must go, then, to the production designers of the Reliant for coming up with a design that is both instantly recognizable as being made from the same Starfleet stamp as Enterprise, while also being instantly distinguishable from it. Many have pointed out that the Reliant looks intrinsically threatening, a squat boxer of a ship, with a compact bulk that gives it more weight than the Enterprise. Enterprise, on the other hand, is all grace, with the lines of a gothic flying buttress. I love spacecraft and space movies, and I’ve seen many, many spaceships. The USS Enterprise, as it appears in these six original Trek films, is easily the most beautiful spaceship to ever grace the screen.

Wrapping up the aesthetics, the film has a very disciplined color palette – everything is some variation of dark red or pale blue/teal. The liberal use of dark lighting and red alert make the rest of Trek look altogether too bright and clean during battle sequences. And my favorite bit of all is the Starfleet uniforms, which are better here than in any other Star Trek property. Even their 80’s kitsch is appealing, because it gives a certain sense of nostalgic innocence to this vision of the future.

Finally, the score (to which I am currently listening) is perhaps my favorite of any movie. That’s saying a lot, because film scores are the predominant genre of music I listen to. It’s just so rousing and propulsive, and it makes you feel ready to face even the Kobayashi Maru.

But there’s a great deal more to like this film beyond how it looks and sounds. For starters, as a former literature teacher, I love a movie that wears its literary allusions on its sleeve and essentially yells at the audience to go read a book. There’s a closeup of Khan’s bookshelf in the film, and we see there several familiar titles.

Inferno is obviously relevant to Khan’s personal situation on Ceti Alpha V, trapped in a hell from which he longs to escape. But Kirk is also feeling hopeless at the start of the film, and his catharsis is achieved only by descending deeper into pain, until he is able to pass through the encounter with death and see a new dawn, like Dante glimpsing the stars again. Paradise Lost is a reminder of Space Seed, the Star Trek episode this movie sequelizes, where Khan quotes Satan’s speech, framing Kirk as the deity casting him out of heaven. In a way, this only serves to heighten the contrast of Kirk’s loss of control in this film. He’s no longer the swashbuckling captain who laughs at death and always cuts a way through to victory in the end. Instead, Kirk is weirdly passive in Wrath of Khan, as the title reminds us – he is merely reacting to Khan, and ultimately the events of the film happen to him, and he lives through them, much as we live through things that happen to us. He doesn’t save the ship, and he doesn’t really even defeat Khan – Khan self-destructs out of sheer pride. Kirk is saved by being humbled, delivered by unmerited grace in the form of Spock.

Continuing, Lear is an apt choice for the shelf, although it applies to Kirk more than to Khan. King Lear is about growing old and losing control and having to live to see the consequences of your choices and neglect, all of which applies to Kirk. As Khan points out, Kirk never bothered to check on Khan, and thus bears responsibility for what ensues. Moby Dick is quoted several times and is a transparent matching of Khan to Ahab. But what’s not on the shelf is A Tale of Two Cities, which Kirk reads throughout the film. This work provides the poetry to explain the eucatastrophe of the film, how life the joy can emerge from tragedy and death. This redemptive turn is essential to Kirk’s story – it is how he comes to let go of his hubris and discover beauty and life beyond his own.

This is where I think the film really connects for me. It speaks to the feeling that catches up with almost all of us at some point or another – that we have made the wrong decision somewhere, years ago, and now our life is wasted, that our best days are behind us. Khan is trapped there, in his trauma and his past. Kirk, meanwhile, is on autopilot, just going through the motions of living. But Spock’s life-giving death, his dictum that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and his benediction to live long and prosper, all point to the reality, symbolized in Genesis: that beyond ourselves, even in our dying, there is new life and beauty and joy. When Kirk says he feels young at the end, he isn’t literally rejuvenated, and his circumstances aren’t changed a bit, except by loss. But he is not looking at himself anymore. He is looking outward, to new possibilities. That, I suppose, is the spirit of Star Trek: to search out new life-forms and new civilizations – to find life and joy and beauty beyond ourselves.

Live long, and prosper.

Futility & Futurity

Welcome back. When I started this particularly blog in December of 2020, I posted about how I had stopped and started blogging four or five times previous, and I felt this touch-and-go relationship would likely continue. I posted semi-regularly for about five months, and then stopped after April 2021. And now I’m back.

I have a checklist I use to track the status of various writing projects. It’s an artifact of the way in which I tend to plan constantly but execute little. Planning is more fun than actually doing – a theme I will return to. In that checklist, I marked this blog post as having been outlined, but in truth, I really don’t have a structure, and now that I’ve begun writing I feel the old anxiety – the sense that I really should stop and think about the organization of ideas, in tension with fact that I feel too lazy to do that. So instead, I’m acknowledging this part of the process here. This is something that some folks really praise in writers, a sort of meta-candor, but others find it insufferably pretentious. In my case, I think it may just be an excuse, throwing the aspect of intent over what is really just pure intellectual sloth.

But that tangent I just went on is in truth quite relevant to the rest of this post, because it provides a clear example of exactly the way in which I feel I am a barrier to myself ever accomplishing anything, both in the sense that I lack the discipline to push through, and also in the sense that I second-guess anything I do. And that’s what I want to talk about today: what my writing is and isn’t, and the relationship between what it has been, and what it will be.

I have never been very consistent. I show up to work and to church, to be sure, and I certainly never miss a meal, but when it comes to the creative projects I claim to hold as my dear priorities, my actions belie my words. In my defense, my life has not been terribly stable. After I stopped posting in April, I became busy grading final papers, and then I went through several part-time jobs in quick succession, moved back to Washington, spent several months looking for work, and then spent several more getting used to my new work schedule and learning the ropes at my current job. Now I’m at a place where I feel I have enough regularity in my schedule to get back on a schedule of posting. But I’m not very confident in that, because the truth is that I’ve always had plenty of time for this if I had made it a priority – I just seem slow about any project. At any rate, I suppose I should come to the point of this post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about futility recently. If I look at my life, I have made so many plans and so many beginnings, and most of them quickly trail off to nothing. There is a very real sense of futility haunting any creative effort, not because the work is too difficult, but simply because I have no faith in my future self to carry it to completion. This is based on long experience with my past. In some ways, I feel I have never really been a serious person in this respect.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about futurity, and where I want to go. When I was younger, I had a clear picture of what I wanted to do. Now, that seems much less clear, and the futures that seem realistic based on past experience don’t seem satisfying. There is, of course, probably quite a bit of both nostalgia and unrealistic expectations playing into this, and I know that it’s not a healthy habit of mind. Perhaps I will successfully unlearn this mental diptych of future desire and futile planning, but I’m not there yet. At the same time, actually posting here is at least a step toward writing more regularly, which is a healthy practice.

I do have other doubts. I feel that perhaps what I am doing is a selfish waste of time, both because I am spending time talking about myself, or about things that don’t really matter, rather than spending my time helping others or serving God, and because it seems unlikely that many people will read this, or that it will serve any useful purpose (I include beauty as a useful purpose, because beauty is an end to itself as well as a means of praise – but I don’t edit my blogging nearly enough for me to think it will be particularly great art). I’m also concerned that people will rightly point out that I am not saying anything original, which is true.

Originality, however, is not my goal. What I chiefly want to do is to satisfy the desire that led me into teaching in the first place – the desire to point people toward beautiful things that I enjoy and love. So, if I post about a movie I’ve only just seen for the first time, but which came out years ago and which people have discussed to death, I’m not even trying to be clever or original. I’m simply trying to set down my felt response to it, and to use that as a signpost to point others toward it. Frankly, and I know this will sound like an excuse, but originality is a very modern concept. Our ancient and medieval ancestors worried little about whether or not what they wrote had already been said before, and they by and large contented themselves with joining the long echoing hallway of human speech. So too with me.

I also worry that paragraphs like the preceding one are a symptom of pretentious narcissism, of spending too much digital ink and time talking about myself as if my perspective were particularly interesting or important. By the same measure, I am often driven to write about subjects I find compelling, but I am haunted by the sense that I have little to say about them. Some of these posts may end up very short. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the longest posts are those like this one, dealing simply with myself, and the shortest are about actual substantive things.

At any rate, I actually do have things I want to say, if I ever successfully make time to write about them. But I wanted to begin here, by acknowledging the sense of futility I feel about the future. But I wouldn’t spend time writing this, if I wasn’t looking forward to some kind of turn into hope. 2021’s two best films, The Worst Person in the World and Drive My Car, both left me with the same feeling – that despite whatever life we have lived, it is important to come to the realization that, in the end, all shall be well. When I think about my writing and my career, I feel a little like Julie, the protagonist of the former film, who had constantly changed life paths, drifting between different beginnings without seeming to progress further. But we do progress, whether we see it or not, and regardless of narrative fit, the story moves forward. So, I am trying to begin again, again. And as a start, I am announcing that I will finally write a book. This is me throwing my hat over the wall. We shall see how I follow after.

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The Sense of Falling

The first thing I noticed about Death Valley was the impression of falling. First there was the sense that I was falling down into it. This is exacerbated when approaching from Pahrump, Nevada, because you cross a two-thousand foot ridge before plunging directly to well below sea level. I went downhill so long that I thought I had reached sea level long before I actually had. This sense of disorientation is not helped by the fogs and clouds which form over the descent.

The second sense was that of everything falling into the valley. To feel this, one has only to look up from the valley floor, and it becomes obvious that the walls are not, well, normal. I’ve grown up looking at mountains all my life; I know what a rocky slope is supposed to look like. But in Death Valley, the slopes look wrong. They aren’t solid slopes, but slow-motion slumps. You can tell just by looking that instead of assuming the shape of a fixed mountain, the rock has adopted the shape of a sand castle mid-way through the process of crumbling into the surf. But in this desiccated defile, the process is frozen, creating a sense of suspense. The world above looms over you, and you begin to feel that the rocks and hills may literally fall on you.

Finally, there is the sense of people falling, inevitably draining like water to the bottom. At the lowest point, Badwater Basin, a procession of tourists files silently off into the salty distance - pilgrims to the bottom of the world. The place is eerie, and I couldn’t help but be preoccupied with that same draw to the bottom as I stared southwest across the valley, searching the opposite wall for the canyon into which the fabled and tragic lost Germans had vanished twenty years ago. Then I turned, and began the climb back up.

The Fear of Falling Rocks

From my base airbnb in Kanab, Utah, I entered Zion via the eastern portal. What this meant in practice is a harrowing drive through moderately icy defiles and a long, winding tunnel of darkness and nerves. I came back a couple days later for a second round.

Actually, I came back because I hadn’t realized the first time that you needed to reserve shuttle tickets in advance to really see Zion, so I had to postpone the sightseeing. By the end of the week, I had made the drive back from Hurricane to Kanab at least three times (it’s not short).

So, while I was waiting to see Zion’s main valley, I went to Kolob. Not the planet, the canyon - although it certainly looks extraterrestrial, with ziggurats of rusty stone looming at impossible angles over canyons plunged in gloom. While there I walked a couple of miles along a frozen creek, which the trail crossed innumerable times. Each ford was a bet that the ice - carved and knitted into writhing fibers - would hold firm underfoot. I turned back a little while past an old settler cabin, because I could look up and see the boulders perched loosely hundreds of feet directly above me, ready to fall - now or in a hundred years or so.

The next day I made my way up the narrow canyon of the Virgin River, avoiding the toxic water full of cyanobacteria. This meant sticking to the trail that hugged the cliff base, so once again I was confronted with the fear of falling rocks. Water dripped from overhanging ledges, and icicles clung to concavities, reminding me of the forces of winter prying away at the rock, all while thousands of tourists constantly cycled by below, many with small children in tow. It’s an interesting calculation in probability the National Park Service has made, or maybe we all make it for ourselves. I spent the whole time thinking, what happens if today the face detaches and the rocks fall?

Still, it was incredibly beautiful to visit the canyon in winter, with snow filtering down between the walls.

The Last Star Wars

The Last Jedi. This is the one I wanted to write about in the first place. Back in the day I made lots of notes about this film and what I should write about it. But I’m not sure they matter anymore (or maybe that’s my excuse for being too lazy to look through them). At any rate, when I first saw this film I really liked it, but parts of it didn’t work for me. Over the past three years, however, it has aged incredibly well. The fact that this movie actually has something to say elevates it beyond most other Star Wars films, into a beautifully cohesive picture, both thematically and aesthetically.

So anyway, I like this one.

The film is burdened by The Force Awakens’ incuriosity about galactic politics, and I used to count that as a weakness in this film, but no longer. Do I wish I understood more? Yes, but that’s on JJ. Maybe I’m biased because the backlash against this film rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I’m just falling in line with my tribe. Oh well. The movie is still great.

A big part of what makes the film work is the production design, which is gorgeously photographed. In particular I want to shout out the very clean First Order UI.

Actually the white and red of the UI is typical of the film, which deploys color to distinguish the various settings and plotlines. The island on Ach-To is green, blue, and above all, grey - it’s neutral, on the fence, like Luke and like Rey. The casino planet is, fittingly, golden; at one point Finn and Rose race the police through the space equivalent of a wedding inspo pinterest board of golden lights.

And of course, there’s the films two dominant colors, two of my absolute favorites: white and red. These are everywhere, separate at first, but exploding together as the film progresses. Snoke’s red chamber is one of my favorite sets in the saga, and tremendous color discipline is exercised to render the rebel ship’s interior pale and wan in every respect. But once on Crait, the red salt explodes onto the white surface of the planet, like so much blood being spilt.

As for beauty, the location scouts outdid themselves with Skellig Michael, which is as beautiful as anything the saga has seen.

Ultimately, this film is hard for me to write about because I had a hard time making notes about it, I was so distracted by enjoying it. I also, to be completely honest, haven’t figured out my process for writing this blog yet. I haven’t been putting in the time or energy to properly edit it, so everything just sort of emerges as transcribed notes, hence the weird aggregate structure of these posts. I’m not entirely happy with this, because it makes me feel I am lazy.

You can see this in my inability to transition smoothly between paragraphs, something The Last Jedi does brilliantly - see “Where’s Rey” and “Where’s Han”.

If The Force Awakens was about meeting your heroes, this film is about losing them - or more accurately, moving on from them. Poe’s arc is designed to prepare him to lead once Leia is gone; Rey must move on from Luke and Kylo from Vader; Finn has to learn to be the hero himself, in the absence of Han. And of course, in meeting Finn, Rose comes face to face with one of her own heroes. Rose is a particularly important addition to the saga, precisely because she is normal. The series needed a muggle companion, and Rose provides that. Otherwise it’s all endless aristocratic battles, wholly disconnected from the lives of the galaxy’s citizens.

After all, isn’t Star Wars always going on about how the force surrounds and binds together all lives and all life? This description of the force - as something immanent in each person and in every atom of creation may be a fictitious religion, but like other fictitious manmade religions, it reminds us of the real spiritual dimension of things. In other words, fans who identify as practitioners of the Jedi religion may be wrong and lost, but the concept of the force reminds us of the need for something immanent, omnipresent, and transcendent, through which all things have their being and meaning.

It is fitting that we end up in the realm of faith, because The Last Jedi is, at the end of the day, a text about first deconstructing and then reconstructing faith. Rey’s faith is troubled by temptation and doubt in the face of Luke’s flaws, but she ultimately decides to embrace the Light. Kylo sheds his faith in the past, but recommits himself to the dark side. And Luke, of course, loses his way only to find it again.

Yoda expresses this in his speech embracing failure. The film is about victory in defeat, and strength in weakness. Perhaps that’s why it’s so resonant with me, as a Christian.

The only other thing I have to say is the sheer delight I felt in the theater when Rey and Kylo turned and began fighting back to back.

It's a pity they didn't make any more of these films.

At the Top of the Continent

So, I’ve sort of let things get away from me the past month or two. Work has been unusually busy, and with it I’ve either had less free creative energy, or have been held back by anxiety. But I’m going to try to get back into the flow of writing, since I think it will be good for me, even if I am irrationally (or otherwise) afraid of mortally embarrassing myself somehow in the process.

Fortunately I haven’t traveled any since December, so I’ve not fallen further behind on travel writing - if I can use the term.

At any rate, last December I made the very silly decision to drive into snowy Colorado in my 2004 Camry. I had no trouble reaching the silent Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which has to be one of the more underrated sights in North America, given how little press it gets. Not that there’s much to do there in winter, but the stark towers dusted with snow are more than enough to justify the trip.

No, my decision to drive became silly once I had to go from Montrose to Telluride, elevation 8,750 feet. I crawled along the winding mountain passes, constantly aware of the annoyance of all the 4WDs behind me. Thankfully the road was mostly clear of snow, and entirely free of ice, but a screen of falling flakes descending on a pass made for interesting driving.

Telluride itself is a lovely town, if a bit expensive for the likes of me. There was a bookstore, which was good, but it would benefit from exchanging some of its boutique shopping for several more bookstores, in my opinion. The coffee was good, however, and the scenery cannot be beat.

The next day I repeated almost the whole of the same drive, only to continue on to Mesa Verde in time to catch the sun dying on the city walls.

That night I stayed in a tiny trailer refurbished as an airbnb. When I rose to leave at six a.m., I was amazed my car even started. It was three degrees above zero.

The Mouse Awakens

The Force Awakens has got something going for it that not even its ultimate successor can take from it: it got to be the film in which Star Wars became fun again. Younger people might not get this, but for a long time it looked like there really would never be any more Star Wars films (as ludicrous as that sounds in this Age of the Mouse). But prior to the Disney acquisition, I had no real expectation that sequels were ever coming. On the one hand, that was good, because they couldn’t mess things up more, but still, it’s always fun, in a very six-year-old way, to have more lightsabers on screen. So I remember the tremendous excitement I felt going to see this film by myself in the theater at Favore Mall in Toyama, which only grew as I enjoyed the film all the way through.

The trouble is, I really don’t have that much to say about this film outside of that nostalgic first viewing experience. Maybe I never had much to say about Star Wars in the first place. Maybe I shouldn’t have committed to doing a series, and should have just stuck to films I’m gushing to talk about. Or maybe, as much as I love film and adore the visual arts, maybe I’m just not that good at coming up with creative or interesting things to say about them, especially when writing with only the energy I have left over from teaching.

Or maybe that’s all this film is - a Star Wars ride. If you like Star Wars, you’ll have fun on the ride, but don’t try to do anything besides just enjoying the ride.

The film does have a couple things really going for it, besides nostalgia. For one thing, the core idea - that the film is about kids who grew up in the world of Star Wars finally getting to play at it for real - is a real mood that translates as honest. For another, the casting department knocked it out of the park. Finally, the film is just gorgeous to look at. I mean, look at these shots:

Especially the fight in the forest, which ranks as one of my favorite moments in the saga, mainly because of how it is lit.

The last thing I’ll say about the film is that I found Kylo talking his father into giving Kylo the strength to kill him compelling in a troubling way, because it reminded me of how I worry I talk to other people to get reassurance so that I can feel safe carrying out some sin (admittedly I have never done anything like murder a beloved character - it’s just an analogy).

A Strangely Small Finale

Return of the Jedi is clearly the weakest of the original trilogy, barring the throne room scene, and as such I probably have the least to say about this movie. Although as a child I loved it.

I’m not even going to comment on the most egregious changes Lucas made to the film.

I think the films biggest problem is shifting tones and the glue at the seems of scenes. To be specific, the opening sequence at Jabba’s Palace feels like a separate episode of TV, a prologue to the film - although maybe this is a situation they were stuck with coming off Empire. After that, the film diverges into parallel tonal tracks: on the one hand we have Yoda, Luke, and his conflict with the Emperor over Vader. And on the other hand, we have the ludicrous adventures of Han and Leia with the Ewoks. Shunted between these is one of the greatest space battles ever committed to film.

That’s really the extent of my thoughts on the film, unfortunately. Although I loved the introduction of the Emperor, and seeing it anew in the context of the prequels raises the question of which version is better: the Emperor as a mysterious, protean figure of darkness, or Palpatine as an upjumped politician with delusions of magnificence. I’m honestly not sure which I prefer.

I’ll also note that the Empire allows itself to be destroyed out of hubris, sheer unwarranted overconfidence.

The one choice that this film makes that I really love is that the stakes of the conflict between Luke and the Emperor are entirely personal - it’s just over Vader’s soul. The battle for the fate of the galaxy is won by the rebels without Luke. Tightening the stakes for the hero to just the personal and letting others win the war is a choice many other blockbusters are sadly averse to.