Vasquez Rocks

I never cease to be amazed by the variety of landscapes within easy driving distance of Los Angeles. Today, we decided to head north toward Antelope Valley to see Vasquez Rocks - a site that is recognizable from cult films like "Blazing Saddles" and "Army of Darkness," and from classic sci-fi television shows like "The Outer Limits" and "Star Trek."

Here is a view of the most famous section of the natural park area - a pass between two alien-looking rock formations. To get a sense of scale, zoom in and notice the hiker standing on the ridge to the right.

... and here's the view from the other side of the pass, where Captain Kirk's half-hearted battle with The Gorn (see below) took place.

Given how steep this section is, it's much easier to go up than to come down.

The view from the top, looking toward Saddleback Mountain.

A fellow blogger also visited Vasquez Rocks a few months ago, and posted some good comparison photos.

After the rain...

the Los Angeles River actually looks like a river...

the hills are alive (mudslide, anyone?)

clouds hover over the San Gabriel Mountains

approaching the Parker Mesa Overlook, you can actually see Santa Monica through the smog

view from the Parker Mesa Overlook in Topanga State Park

Thoughts on Religious Literacy

Religion and Politics - there's an explosive topic for a casual blog post. It would probably be safer to avoid both subjects while I'm in this public arena, but oh what the hell....

This week, I read Stephen Prothero’s New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t, which theorizes that the majority of Americans who call themselves religious (which is, in fact, the majority of Americans) are largely ignorant of theology. In America, Prothero laments, “faith without understanding is the standard.” He offers some depressing survey results, but for the most part assumes that intelligent readers will agree with him (and, having seen Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street routine and heard our president speak, I do), and quickly moves on to offer an explanation of how this happened.

Prothero’s book takes us back to the First Great Awakening (1730s & 1740s), when colonial Puritans “celebrated the doctrinal and experiential dimensions of religion.” He singles out preacher Jonathan Edwards (of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” fame) as the “grand synthesizer of Puritan thought” who saw Christian life as “a dance of the head and the heart, the intellect and the emotions.” This dual worldview, Prothero says, crumbled during the Second Great Awakening (1800 – 1830), when evangelical Christians started “a battle inside American Christianity between piety and learning – a battle that learning lost.” The Civil War amplified the trend: “Americans grew tired of theological controversies. Desperate for union in church as well as state, they gravitated – in churches, schools, and colleges – toward a lowest-common-denominator faith.” Over the course of the 20th century, the author argues, that lowest-common-denominator Protestantism morphed into a generic Christianity and a “generic moralism,” largely void of doctrine, resulting in today’s mainstream American Christianity – which he calls a “religion of ethics” rather than a religion of theology. The bottom line: most Americans don’t consider religious study necessary because they don’t believe that Christianity is a matter of knowledge; rather, it’s matter of “faith in faith.”

I’m interested in this perspective because it dovetails with my study of T.S. Eliot, who was born in Missouri a few years after the Civil War. Eliot’s family came from a Puritan background, but the poet was raised in the theologically-liberal Unitarian Church, where he was taught that human nature is inherently good and that the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity is bunk. One of Eliot’s Harvard professors, Barrett Wendell, wrote in 1900 that the Unitarian faith renders Jesus useless: “The moment you assumed human nature to contain adequate seeds of good, the necessity for a divine Redeemer disappeared.” In A Literary History of America, Wendell also writes about Ralph Waldo Emerson, another eminent American writer who was raised in the Unitarian Church. Emerson argued that American scholars should look for God in themselves rather than in ancient religious texts. According to Prothero, this Transcendentalist perspective was one of the many causes of the dominance of an “unsectarianism” attitude in America’s 20th century education system.

When T.S. Eliot arrived at Harvard in 1906, he was entering a university in which religious classics had been replaced by literature, and theology replaced by a “spiritual anti-intellectualism.” Though Prothero never names Eliot, he offers insight on the poet’s college-era outlook with his observation that “this spiritual anti-intellectualism – both highbrow and lowbrow, liberal and evangelical – drove a wedge into the Puritan synthesis of head and heart, forcing many Americans to make a Solomonic choice between the intellect and the emotions.” For over a decade after he left college, Eliot was unable to make a choice. He could embrace neither the spiritual anti-intellectualism of Romantic writers (like Emerson) nor the theology of more Classical writers (like his eventual hero Dante). He slowly gravitated toward Elizabethan and Jacobean writers and toward the Anglican Church, where head and heart, thought and feeling seemed to be equally valued.

Prothero sheds even more light on Eliot’s struggle by dividing American Christians into three groups: confessionalists (who encounter God via reason), experientalists (who encounter God via emotions), and moralists (who encounter God via will power). Most Christians, the author says, are a combination of all three, but he stipulates that “over the course of the last two centuries American Protestants and Catholics alike have migrated away from confessionalism to some combination of experience and morality, and in recent years the moralists have triumphed.” Some contemporary American scholars – according to their own religious background – may be inclined to view the converted T.S. Eliot strictly as a moralist. I tend to think of him more as a confessionalist, who would have agreed with Prothero’s argument that “you cannot really respect a religion that you do not understand” and “understanding a foreign religious tradition means wrestling with ways in which a religion is fundamentally different from your own.” In fact, this complex viewpoint is one of the reasons why Eliot remains such an important voice for Americans today.

How many times have we heard George W. Bush say that “Islam is peace,” trying to lump that religion into a generic moralism? It’s a well-meaning statement – encouraging us obey Jesus’ commandment to “love thy neighbor” – but it’s also an oversimplification. I’d respond the same way if he said that “Christianity is peace.” Didn’t Jesus also say that he had not come to send peace, but a sword? For the sake of tolerance and peace, generic moralism may be the best of all possible state religions at this time… but it is worth seriously considering the possibility that we can create a longer-lasting peace by recognizing the ways that others cultures and religions are distinctly different from our own, and trying to understand them on their own terms.

With this in mind, Prothero argues that we should consider re-instituting religion in our public education system. He proposes two courses at the middle school or high school level: a course on the history and doctrine of Christianity (since it is, after all, the dominant religion in western society) and a comparative course on the other major world religions. To be clear, he is not advocating a “return to America’s Judeo-Christian roots” – a battle cry that is as politically destructive as it is ignorant (see Susan Jacoby’s book Freethinkers: A History of Secularism in America). These courses must be designed to promote understanding, not to indoctrinate students into any particular religion or to encourage religious relativism.

I have mixed feelings on this proposal.

Like the author, I was raised in a Protestant church. I learned about the most famous Hebrew Bible stories in Sunday school and about the New Testament Gospels in Sunday worship. In my freshman year of high school, I also studied the Bible as literature. By then, I already had a sense of Bible stories as stories. I don’t remember having any strong belief or disbelief in their truth as the Word of God. The following year, I studied Western philosophy for the first time, and it was then that I realized that, instead of metaphysical belief, I had a desire for belief. In my junior year of college, I took a course called Theodicy in Literature. One of the key texts was Peter Berger’s 1967 book The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Berger wrote that traditional religion was hopelessly at odds with the modern, secular world. I drew the conclusion that I had a desire for a kind of belief that simply couldn’t exist anymore. That’s the main reason that I started researching Eliot – because I wanted to understand how he was able to accept Christianity after coming to the same conclusion.

Berger has since renounced his theory – his 1999 book The Desecularization of the World acknowledges that religion is very much alive in the social consciousness of modern America. But he argues that the nature of mainstream religion has changed from acceptance of a self-evident reality to the individual’s search for meaning. In other words, modern faith is an ever-changing reality – which many Americans tend to refer to as “spiritual” rather than “religious.”

This might explain why, a few years ago, I developed an interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. Vedanta teaches that people have very different religious temperaments, and recognizes the need for different types of religions and philosophies to satisfy those different temperaments. Just as Prothero divided American Christians into three groups, Vedanta divides religious seekers into four groups: Bhakti Yoga (the path of devotion), Gnana Yoga (the path of knowledge), Karma Yoga (the path of action), and Hatha Yoga (the path of compulsion).

I’m tempted to add that all paths lead to the same goal. The four paths of Vedanta seem to me to have a corollary in Jesus’s other basic commandment – that we should love God with all our hearts, minds, bodies and souls. But I think this kind of comparison is where we sometimes get into trouble. It seems that most modern seekers don’t generally know what they're seeking, and many (especially in a culture that encourages individualism) don’t want someone else’s goal imposed on them – they want to discover meaning for and by themselves. If seeking is more of a cultural norm in contemporary America than finding, then the most useful thing we can do to create an atmosphere of peace is to understand the need for many paths... and to have a basic knowledge of those paths.

Given the current climate of world politics, Prothero says that we should all make an effort to understand the major world religions so that we can understand politics. If our political leaders are going to use thinly-disguised religious teachings to justify their decision to (for example) go to war, while others are using religious teachings to justify their decision to attack us, shouldn’t we understand their reasoning? I'm not inclined to argue with Prothero's opinion that American students need to be better educated about religion, as a matter of social and civic responsibility. The problem, as I see it, is how well we can realistically implement Prothero’s plan of education.

I remember my high school philosophy teacher championing the Reason of Socrates to one devoutly Christian student: “If there is a God, then He would not have given us the power of reason if He did not want us to use it.” If religion becomes part of the curriculum, I think that all teachers would need to be equally diligent about developing their students’ powers of objective reasoning. In general, that means at least as much specific focus on critical thinking as on religion. This is a VERY tall order in a culture that emphasizes information over knowledge, faith over understanding. Can it be done?

In all likelihood, we won’t get to find out. The volatility of the subject of religious education in our current political environment almost guarantees that Prothero’s idea won’t be implemented anytime soon… which is not only ironic, but also a shame if it really is the most effective way to minimize the destructive ignorance of America’s current political environment.

The Unified Field Theory of Filmmaking

This week, I tried to watch David Lynch’s latest movie “Inland Empire.” For the most part, I knew what I was getting myself into – having seen all of Lynch’s previous films and having read various reviews saying that this was his most challenging film to date. I found “Inland Empire” to be relatively coherent (for a David Lynch film) for the first two hours…. Then it went haywire, losing all semblance of narrative logic. At the time, I wasn’t inclined to go along for the ride.

Three of Lynch’s films (“Eraserhead,” “Lost Highway,” and “Mulholland Drive”) are among my personal favorites, and I generally have no problem following the filmmaker into his dream world – it can certainly be frustrating, but it is also frequently inspiring. On first viewing, I usually come away from his films with a sense of curiosity and awe, which prompts me to watch them again in the hope of understanding what so intrigued me. (You can determine for yourself how well I have actually “understood” them by checking out the David Lynch chapter in my book.) There are only a few of the director’s films - more often than not, his short films - that have left me feeling cold.

Like all of Lynch’s movies, “Inland Empire” is at times spellbindingly beautiful, despite the fact that it was shot entirely on digital video. Nobody sets a mood like David Lynch. In just a few minutes of screen time, he can fill you with fear, sadness, and wonder – usually all at once. In this respect, “Inland Empire” is no exception… it immediately reels you into the director’s mind, and has an almost paralyzing effect. In the final hour, the film reels you into the main character’s mind, which is an even tougher place to be. Her world is chaos - an experiment in abstraction. The center does not hold.

I’m not interested in assessing whether or not the film is a success or a failure. For the time being, at least, I am less curious about the film itself than about the director’s process in making it. As it happens, David Lynch has given us an explanation of that process. In his recent book “Catching the Big Fish,” he writes that “Inland Empire” began with a 14-page monologue, delivered by Laura Dern in a 70-minute take. The director then spent the next several years building a film around that monologue. Every so often, a scenario would occur to him and he would shoot it, hoping that the film would congeal eventually.

The director used more or less the same process on his first film, “Eraserhead.” But that film, it seems to me, was more focused. Every scene was undeniably part of Henry’s world, the way he saw it. When Lynch shot something that didn’t belong to that world, he was sharp enough to realize it and adjust accordingly. However interesting a scene might be, he knew when it didn’t belong in his feature film. One example, which the director gave in a series of interviews with Chris Rodley, was a scene in which Henry’s neighbor tortures two women. “The reason I took that out,” Lynch explains, “was it was too disturbing to the film. I didn’t want anyone even to think about what was next door. It just clouded and disturbed it.” In other words: It didn’t belong in Henry’s world. The director had a desire for continuity of tone, if not for narrative logic. It seems to me that he applied no such filter to “Inland Empire.”

In his book, Lynch admits that initially he didn’t want to make any decisions about what belonged or didn’t belong in the film because he believed the ideas that were coming to him were connected in ways that he himself simply could not (yet) understand. He explains, in terms of the Hindu theory of a Unified Field of Life: “There couldn’t be a fragment that doesn’t relate to everything. It’s all kind of one thing, I felt. So, I had high hopes that there would be a unity emerging, that I would see the way these things related, one to another.” Halfway through filming, he says, “I saw a kind of form that would unite the rest, everything that had come before.” While there are certainly images and ideas in “Inland Empire” that interrelate, I’m at a loss to explain how the form of the story unites them.

I think that my grasp of Lynch’s earlier films owes quite a bit to what knowledge I have of Freudian and Jungian psychology. I have yet to get my head around the Unified Field theory. I know that it has been associated with the recent discoveries in quantum physics, but my knowledge in that area is extremely limited. Rather than attempt my own explanation, I must refer to the writings of Fred Alan Wolf (from his 1981 book “Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists”): “No clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we observe to exist outside of ourselves. Instead, reality depends upon our choices of what and how we choose to observe. These choices, in turn, depend upon our minds or, more specifically, the content of our thoughts. And our thoughts, in turn, depend upon our expectations, our desire for continuity.” In the case of Laura Dern’s character in “Inland Empire,” and the case of David Lynch as a storyteller, there seems to be a less-than-usual desire for continuity. Does that mean that the film is only worthwhile to those who also lack a desire for continuity?

Wolf says: “Imagination is that drive, that dream, that search for the unseen order we all suspect lies beyond the reality we all have grown accustomed to, the façade of life.” Lynch is undoubtedly searching. Whether or not he has found anything is, as with all of his films, open to subjective interpretation. Some viewers have compared his searching to a room full of monkeys banging on typewriters. Personally, I don’t think the situation is quite that grim. If Lynch’s monkeys (or rabbits, or whatever) have not yet produced a work with the universal appeal of Shakespeare, they have nevertheless consistently produced films that appeal to a very large audience. To some extent, Lynch's mind is our own. If the filmmaker has befuddled some of us with his latest work, it is worth considering the possibility that he has simply gone deeper into that mind than we can see at first glance, and that our appreciation of the film simply depends on how we observe.

Everything Everything

On Sunday night, L. and I went to see Underworld at the Hollywood Bowl. This is the first time I’ve ever seen them in concert, but it’s been a long time coming. Like most people, I first encountered Underworld in the movie “Trainspotting” back in the spring of 1996, and promptly bought their first two albums: “dubnobasswithmyheadman” and “Second Toughest in the Infants.” The music was deceptively simple, but like all great music it burned itself deep into my brain and became part of my soundtrack for life. With the first album in particular, I didn’t know how much I liked it until I had stopped listening to it for a few days, and found that the songs were still playing in my head.

When I saw U2 in concert that summer, the show was prefaced by the “Pearl’s Girl” EP, blaring from massive speakers. I found myself wishing that I had come to see Underworld in concert, instead of U2. I spent the rest of the summer listening to that EP over and over, everywhere I went. The title song still gives me chills whenever I listen to it, and I dare anyone to try and sit still while it’s playing.

In the spring of 2000, Underworld released their third album (and last with DJ Darren Emerson). “Beaucoup Fish” became part of the soundtrack for my summer in London – a place where it was impossible to ESCAPE the pulsing beat of electronic music. While I was there, I remember talking to one of my college professors – a jazz saxophonist – about the effect of the music. He derided popular electronic music because it was so predictable - most songs combining the basic four-count of jazz with the repetitiveness of pop music. There is nothing, he said, intellectual about it. I agreed, but frankly I don’t want all my music to be intellectual. To me, the most powerful effect of music is its ability to convey PURE EMOTION, completely detached from intellect.

Underworld is, pure and simple, the music of anticipation and exhilaration. I felt it on Sunday night as I waited for the musicians to take the stage. I felt it as their set list gradually built from slower tracks to faster tracks. I couldn’t sit still. Three days later, the music is still playing in my head.

I haven’t bought any of Underworld’s post-Darren Emerson music, but if the concert is any indication of what I’m missing, I will have to buy their upcoming album (due in October). The live performance of their new single, “Crocodile,” blew me away. I can’t help noting that the album version is more anti-climactic than the live performance… but I also know that Underworld is not the kind of band you listen to one song at a time. You listen until you’ve forgotten that you’re listening, until the apparent simplicity of the music has fooled your brain into believing that it’s all the same.

That’s when the music gets under your skin, and that’s when a very minor change can pull the rug out from under you – when the music, and by extension whatever you’re doing at the time, becomes completely new and exciting.

All the Colors of the Dark

I returned home yesterday afternoon to find a rather large piece of mail waiting for me. I knew immediately what it was: Tim Lucas’s already-legendary book on legendary Italian filmmaker Mario Bava. To understand my state of mind at that moment, you have to understand that I had been expecting this particular package for nearly six years. It was originally supposed to arrive around Christmas 2001… but there were a few delays. If it hadn’t been for frequent updates in the author’s monthly magazine Video Watchdog, I would have wondered if the book (pre-sold at a whopping $99 a pop) actually existed. VW readers, however, could reasonably trust that the delays were caused by the writer’s extreme perfectionism.

I will admit that, by January 2006, the elusive book had become – for me – a running joke. How could any book, assuming it ever arrived, live up to such hype? I must not have been the only one asking that question, because around that time Tim Lucas started a “Bava Book Updates” blog – to address patient and impatient readers en masse. At the time, Lucas and his wife Donna (who designed the book) were indexing and working on the “final layout.” In the following months, they explained that the book had grown a bit in scope: from 800 pages to 1,000 pages. You must bear in mind that we’re talking about an oversized, four-columns-to-a-page, thoroughly illustrated coffee table book… a coffee table book big enough to crush your coffee table. Tim and Donna debated the possibility of a multi-volume work. When they decided against it, they had trouble finding a printer that could handle the binding of such a massive tome. As if that wasn’t headache enough, Lucas was continually finding new material to incorporate into the book. He wanted to include every scrap of worthwhile information… and, perfectionist that he is, he had to make sure that every detail was accurate and consistent throughout the book. In March, he wrote on his blog:

“Now I know why other people don't write books of this size. The sheer mass of the Bava book, and the time it has taken to assemble, means that the main text has become a kind of quicksand, as far as adding to it is concerned. To add a single detail means getting bogged down in a complex procedure, in which that detail must be checked against many others. For example, it was only after compiling the index that we learned there was a Patricia Zulini mentioned on page 756 and a Patrizia Zulmi mentioned on page 830, so we had to determine if these were two people with similar names, or if one was correct and the other misspelled, and which was which. Multiply that example times several hundred and you'll begin to have an idea of what our year has been like.”

Of course, some of these changes were bound to cause ripple effects in the layout. The delivery date for the book was moved back to June, then October. Around Thanksgiving, Lucas reluctantly admitted that the book wouldn’t be published until 2007. Perhaps sensing that he was straddling the fine line between obsession and madness, the author finally committed himself to a text-lock, and the book was mostly in the hands of his wife – a one-person publishing powerhouse, utterly determined that the presentation of the book (with its roughly 1,200 graphics) met her own high standards. After many a day and night in front of the computer, the final manuscript was sent to the printer in Hong Kong, who promised to have the books delivered to them in July. After one final delay, the printer shipped the books – a print run in the “low thousands,” each copy weighing in at 12 pounds – to its expectant parents in late August.

On his blog, the author compared the stack of boxes in his home office to the pyramids at Giza – presumably a welcome alternative to the past months/years when the book must have seemed like a big fat albatross hanging around their necks. I can’t even begin to imagine the labor pains that Tim and Donna went through to produce this behemoth. I have always been amazed by their attention to detail in Video Watchdog – in content and design – but to apply their exacting standards to a work this size is truly astounding. Every issue of Video Watchdog features graphics and a design that are fresh and vibrant. The writing is always that of true experts, who are not only able to track minor plot points and different versions of a film, but who actually notice when the name of the key grip is misspelled in the credits on the Japanese laser disc. I find that there is usually more detail than I need or care about, but I nevertheless read the magazine with awe and respect – because it is the outcome of many people’s awe and respect for esoteric cinema. Every issue is a labor of love… and the Bava book is the ultimate labor of love.

Last night, I stayed up reading until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. After perusing the entire book to get a sense of what was in it, I set the 12-pound book on the floor and started to read the chapter on Bava’s best-known film “Black Sunday” (1961). This was the film that introduced me to Mario Bava – a brooding Gothic fantasy, with black-and-white visuals worthy of a fine arts museum. I first read about the director in Dennis Fischer’s book “Horror Film Directors,” but I had trouble tracking down copies of his films. More readily available were the (American edits of) films of his protégé Dario Argento, who quickly became a favorite of mine. Then, on Halloween 1998, AMC aired the AIP cut of “Black Sunday” as part of its Monsterfest lineup, with Tim Burton hosting. In his book, Lucas quotes Burton (twice actually) on why he loves the film:

“The vibe and the feeling is what it’s about… Bava was probably Number One that way, in telling you a story through the images and giving you a feeling. The feeling’s a mixture of eroticism, of sex, of horror and starkness of image – and, to me, that is more real than what most people would consider as realism in films, because somehow it bypasses your mind and goes straight inside of you.”

This is one of the reasons I love the horror genre – like dreams, the best horror films work on a viewer’s feelings in ways that simple narrative can’t. Tim Lucas obviously agrees. He examines “Black Sunday” from every angle in order to help define its elusive greatness – describing the pervasive influence of Russian literature (not only that of Nikolai Gogol, who wrote the source story, but also Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), revealing inside secrets of photography and special effects, contrasting the director’s use of silence with the accomplished Les Baxter score in the AIP edit. He also provides a great deal of interesting history – about the director, his cast, and the contexts in which the film was made and distributed. To top it off, the chapter is filled with graphics that have been beautifully (and, one imagines, painstakingly) restored. There is no better way to explain the power that actress Barbara Steele has in the film than with photos – not simply screen grabs from the film, but rare publicity photos in luscious color. At the end of the chapter, I was conflicted about whether to keep reading or to sit down and watch “Black Sunday” on DVD, then and there. I kept reading until I passed out.

So… was it worth the wait? Honestly, now that I have the book in hand, I don’t care much about the wait. I just have to find time to read the thing.

Heartfelt congratulations to Tim and Donna Lucas on their new baby. Here’s hoping the postpartum depression (in the prologue, the author admits that he's been working on the Bava book for so long that "I don't know what it's like to be an adult and not be working on it") is mitigated by good reviews.