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Doesn’t take much to make me happy. The other day, my publisher and I were leaving a Thai restaurant in Nyack, NY, where we had pretty tasty lunch. We passed a little indy record store. My publisher stopped and looked in the window. “Hey! Hootie & the Blowfish Greatest Hits!” he said.

“Ooh!” I replied. “A new Zero 7 record!”

I hurried in to buy it. My publisher looked over the Hootie record and was disappointed to find that, of the 14 tracks, 8 of them came from the first album.

I, meanwhile, beamed over the prospect of hearing new music from Zero 7. Their first album is one of my faves of recent years, with a song that has muscled its way onto the non-permanent roster of my favorite songs ever (like the UN Security Council, 5 songs have a permanent membership, while another 10 songs get a temporary place on the list).

So pardon me if I chill out for a while.

They call it Super Tuesday, but it feels pretty ordinary.

It finally happened. Someone has hit upon a Google search for which Virtual Memories is the ONLY page to come up. The search terms, you ask?

methylenedioxymethamphetamine farted

Should I be worried that someone was looking this up at 2:30am on Sunday night/Monday morning?

Did the user have an embarrassing moment at a rave this weekend? Inquiring minds . . .

I don’t want readers to think I’m spending all my time worked up about Mel Gibson’s theology. In fact, I spent most of yesterday working with Vince on the rec-room in my house, which I’m trying to convert into a library/study of epic proportions. We made some pretty good strides with that reclamation project. Photos to come, when the room is finished.

Also, we managed to get The Heaviest Treadmill of All Time upstairs to my living room, so I can run while watching hoops, listening to the iPod or fulminating about Mel Gibson’s theology. Evidently, the makers of the LifeFitness Sport ST-55 thought it would be funny to incorporate dwarf-star matter into the construction of its treadmills.

While I did some final install stuff to the treadmill, Vince called me over to the dining room window. Three deer were outside, rooting through the leaves and grass (more leaves than grass, unfortunately). Two more wandered into view. He said, “You’ve got a herd of ’em!”

Then they heard a noise, and bolted for the woods, followed by four more. So, in total, there were nine deer meandering through my yard and looking for food. They move beautifully, like suggestions of motion, fluid then sharply zig-zagging. I continue to live a life of wonders.

Time to go sandpaper yesterday’s spackling work.

My coworker Jack liked the previous entry about the Passion, and wrote:

Jim has said well what so many of us try to say. I guess that’s what separates the men from the matzoh.

One minor observation in response to his comment about visiting Golgotha and feeling it, the weight of the slaughter. I was there a couple of years ago and there is no Golgotha. The christians built a church there. Actually, warring factions of christians built a pile of chapels there. No hill, no nothing. Just rooms with candles and incense and red and gold fabrics and every possible bit of religious crap you can imagine. So no, you can’t feel it there. What you do feel is your wallet, as you clutch it in a protective grasp.

It doesn’t seem like all of Christendom is mad at me because of that entry I wrote about the Passion flick. One guy writes:

You seem very passionate about the passion. Im sorry that you feel so bad about this movie but it is an accurate depiction of the life and death of Christ according to the scriptures. Before you take other peoples word about how bad it is, maybe you should just watch it. Or just ask someone who has what it was about. Maybe Mel Gibson was just an actor, but even Christ himself was the son of a carpenter and no scholar. Just my opinion.

This ignores the fact that I haven’t made any judgements about this movie being good or bad. I’ve argued that Mel Gibson’s interpretation of religion is irrelevant. Also, as my buddy Vince points out, “How can you have an accurate depiction of the life and death of Christ according to the scriptures? They contradict each other!”

Vince’s friend Jim of his wrote a review of the flick. I haven’t checked out his site yet:

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is not a film about Jesus. It is also not a film about history or figures that move through history affecting humanity and the events of history. It is a film about Christianity. More to the point, it is a clumsily packaged Hollywood depiction of 1,500 years of Catholicism. It is religious propaganda. And I do not use the term pejoratively. Every piece of art with a point of view is more or less propaganda, but let’s call a spade a spade: If Gibson, a devout traditionalist Catholic set forth to espouse his faith and depict the center of his own passion; mission accomplished. But this movie, like Christianity, has nothing to do with any Jesus of Nazareth.

Let me put it this way; Passion is not unlike Oliver Stone’s JFK. Not too much JFK in there, unless we see his head coming apart on his wife’s lap. No PT-109, no Harvard, no senator, no president, or Bay of Pigs, or Cuban Missile Crisis or Marilyn Monroe. His head coming apart. Over and over and over. JFK is about assassination theories. Passion is about the Christian obsession with sacrificial blood ritual.

Watching this film took me back to the days of sitting in church as a kid and expecting to see or hear anything about Jesus underneath all the ritualistic dogma. It’s damned frustrating, and hard to argue that the context of which has inspired horror shows like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust. But it also doesn’t mean it cannot be revisited as art either. Although, for me, it would have been more compelling had it not been more of the same damn thing.

Beyond the ultra-Hollywood violence – jacked up a notch for the video game generation – we get the usual stuff here. Christ dying for our sins. He comes. He dies. End of story. No back-story. No politics. No spirituality. No philosophy. No revolution. No mission. No life affirming usably enlightened theories about embracing empathy and discovering divinity. Suffering. Death. Good drama. Big box office, but no Jesus.

Once again, we get lifeless puppet characters playing their parts in a suicide pact with God, sufficiently answering the question, “Who killed Jesus Christ?” Because when viewed through the lens of Biblical faith – replete with the Lord killing innocents all over the place – and all the evidence in Gibson’s film, the verdict is clear: God killed Christ. Or, more to the point of Gibson’s way of thinking, we forced God to kill him. Kind of like the Jewish authorities forcing Pontius Pilate to kill Christ.

(place plaintive sigh here)

Admittedly, the thing is aptly named. After all it is The Passion of the Christ, although I would have preferred, Jesus Gets it for Opening His Big Mouth, or This is What Happens When One Love’s One’s Enemies. But it’s hard to argue that the very essence of the gospel’s enlightened Nazarene, a charismatic healer exalted by an inspiring philosophy leading a penetratingly gorgeous spiritual movement is sucked right out. In its stead we have a pawn for sadomasochistic mayhem; what I like to call the Euro-Christ.

But even two millennia of Christian rhetoric has yet to erase the impact of the historical Yeshua of Nazareth, from the Council of Nicea to Godspell. Yet this movie manages to do it. I didn’t think it was possible, but Mel Gibson actually succeeds in portraying a completely empty depiction of Jesus Christ.

Not that actor James Caviezel doesn’t capture the Catholic Christ pretty well; a vessel for torture and death set up as humanity’s sacrificial lamb by the sadistic Lord God of the Israelites. He portrays a great punching dummy and the make-up people did a bang-up job. Lots of pain, but again, no Jesus. Lots of blood and suffering and reams of Catechism, but no Jesus.

So, in a sense, Passion is the perfect Christian art, an animated version of Renaissance paintings, (Gibson claims he endeavored to recreate Caravaggio’s gruesome images) but not particularly good art at that; effective, in that it has caused a stir like most viable art, but poor in the literal sense. The way smearing a painting of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung is a sensationalistic artistic statement, but as a gripping, meaningful rendering, it’s lousy.

As a movie, Passion is bad. The acting is predictably stiff, the set-design sub par for a Biblical epic, the music surprisingly non-descript and the directing ham-fisted. I usually don’t like religiously themed films, but most give me at least a moment of chills or reflection, an uplifting of heart or a distinct feeling of something. This thing drones from the opening frame and settles into two-dimensional drudgery.

However, I cannot engage in hypocritical blather about “too much violence” here. You want to concentrate compulsively on first century Roman scourging and crucifixion as a means for redemption, fine; but its not going to be pretty. This kind of thing went on all the time in first century Jerusalem. Hundreds upon thousands slaughtered by Roman governors. Take a trip to Golgotha now and see if you don’t feel it. Not unlike, I’m sure, sitting in Auschwitz or Dachau today.

But I would forget theological debate and historical content when judging Passion. It is poor storytelling packaged as a religious tool. Period. This might be great for some, namely fanatical Christians, but as forceful narrative, it is disappointing. And it is certainly no “true depiction” of historical events in any way, shape or form. Gibson picks and chooses his gospel versions like mad scientist forcing a solution. He might have been better off from a theological stand-point to stick with, say, the Gospel of John, which dominates most of the storyline, instead of jumping all over the Biblical map to suit an agenda. Although, once again, a good framework for religious theory, but hardly accurate.

When I heard about this project some two years ago, I was finishing up the manuscript to my last book, a story based on my trip to Israel in search of the historical Jesus. I was excited about the prospect of hearing the gospel characters speak in their original dialect, and the promised “realistic depiction” of the ordinarily sanitized crucifixion scenes of earlier Hollywood efforts. But even I was left feeling I’d just seen the last ten minutes of “Scarface” for two hours.

Finally, Gibson nor the actors, or anyone connected to the making of this thing should feel badly. Based on concepts like “Jesus Christ was born to suffer and die for the sins of humankind” and “in suffering there is cleansing” all the participants can be nothing if not merely chess pieces in a fixed game. And that is how the characters in this film go about their business, like marionettes marching in step to a mystical slaying.

(place despondent wail here)

It is my fault for expecting to see anything else. The film’s popularity (beyond pure curiosity and pack mentality) speaks to the human condition to be drawn to signature moments that usurp the entirety of an event, or to miss it completely.

We read about a warrior for peace slain in his prime and choose to remember him with a gory effigy of torture and death.

More response to the issue about Mel Gibson’s flick, from my buddy Elayne. No word on whether she plans to watch Club Dread this weekend.

First, I am still stunned that Signs did not shut down all serious discussion of Mel Gibson, period. But since I was mistaken about that, I think we now must admit it: there are several “constant variables” in the world and one is that Mel Gibson is a wack-job. A full-on nutter, by the looks of it. The Catholic sect that his father runs is populated by a Holocaust-denying bunch of evangelicals and, as Christopher Hitchens points out, in the aforementioned film he plays an ex-minister who “recovers his faith after seeing little green men.” He releases this new and, from what I can gather, searingly sadistic exercise on ASH WEDNESDAY. The pretension of that alone gives one pause. So I am coming out as oppossed to Mel Gibson, and on principle.

The film itself: Who cares if the film is anti-Semitic? That isn’t the point, really. The point is that the conception of the film most certainly is. And, again with a nod to Mr. Razor [Hitchens], it appears anti-Christian as well. If you go around bemoaning the crucifixion, what kind of God-damned Christian are you? I am not Christian. If I died and woke to find myself in Heaven, I would puke. But it seems just ever-so-fundamental that the crucifixion is the central necessity for the continuation of that religion itself. So this is puzzling. I have a list of things to do this week… get my hair cut, give my friend Kelly a call, go shopping. Watch Christ die, in real time, is not on that list. Whose list is it on? People who still rewind their 9-11 videos for hours on end. People who go to the web looking for photos of the jumpers from that day–still. It is simply (?) an investment in “the horror” of man, of our never-quite-graspable attraction, no, drooling lust, for the bloodfeast. I don’t knock it, but I think that is behind it, at least in part. And so the “lacerating detail” of Gibson’s film is in an ideological cuddle with the alarming propaganda behind the entire project.

And people want Christianity to win out. They don’t like the fact that a significant sector of the world’s population believes they will get to fuck a bunch of virgins if they die a martyr. That freaks us out, and it should. But folks prefer to identify with the predictable o drama of hanging on a cross (cuz you have nails in your hands) so you can save mankind from the trouble that apple let fly. So The Passion is tapping into that, but only because of Gibson. The other films on Christ have mostly faded from view, and Scorsese’s film is only ever watched anymore so people can laugh at Harvey Keitel’s accent. It is Gibson’s persona that is selling the film. Whether or not he is well-suited to inaugurate this new dawn of aestheticized, vengeful, ignorant, and scared Hollywood worship is not a question Joe Six-Pack is probably asking himself. He is probably just glad it wasn’t Danny Glover.

I dunno. Maybe Hitch put it best when he said “If the Jewish leadership had any guts, it would turn on all those who taunt it with ‘Christ-killing’ and say, ‘Yeah, all right, since you keep mentioning it, we did you a favor. Judas too. Where would your faith be without us?’ This would have the effect, however, of giving away the open secret that religion is man-made. For some reason, we are assumed to need protection from such a revelation.”

When what we really need is to be protected from Mel Gibson. And ourselves.

By next week, I hope to get a “comments” function added to VM. Until then, I’ll post any e-mailed responses people have to the blog. This one comes from someone I don’t know. One of my coworkers has forwarded my Passion Play to some people, and it’s begun meme-ing around:

Mel Gibson is no more Mad Max than this guy Gil is Jesus Christ. Perhaps the “Kingdom of God within you” includes the tolerance and wisdom that acknowledges the human inside the actor. That wisdom would also allow that the relationship to worship starts with the idolizer — not the idol. Gil seeing these celebrities as idols and not humans is his problem — don’t you think?

And a long response just showed up this very minute:

Lighten up! It’s only a movie. Haven’t seen it yet but it’s on my list, especially after the crowds dwindle. Mel became MY theologian with the first Mad Max movie. The second Lethal Wepon solidified his position along side St. Augustine, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton.

And since when are whores a bad thing? Profitable business acumen, usually. Highly motivated, usually. And victimless, usually. Besides, who’s to complain if Brittany Spears wants to stick her tongue down the appropriately monikered Madonna’s throat? Certainly not the NASCAR Dads.

After all, the denial-of-sex-as-a-natural, biological function – especially as it pertains to the two women-twins concept – dominates the entire Bush Administration psyche. To wit, John Ashcroft’s throwing a sheet over the Statue of Justice. After reading the Patriot Act, that drapping, his first official act as Attorney General, is highly symbolic and evocative of his trampling on America’s civil rights, not to mention his part in the usurpation Christ’s Kingdom here on Earth.

Gil, I was born American with a French, Scot, and Native American heritage. I was raised Catholic (I’m Lapsed at the moment); I wasn’t born one and I’m horrified by ALL Born Again bigots. Never in my parents home did I hear ANYTHING that suggested that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death. To the contrary, what I was taught both at home and at the mandatory religious classes from first-through-twelfth grades was this: Jesus was a Jewish carpenter who died for the sins of mankind. True or not, what’s not to admire?

It’s clear that you — with the entire Bush cohort — have missed the point. For now, at least, we have the ability to view, read, hear, feel, experience — or not — pretty much everything. Choose as you will, rail against whatever you will.

My suggestion for you, Gil, is to focus on matters that really count: your loss of civil liberties under the guise of Homeland Security, for example. Or to understand what Junior (who should be tried in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity), Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, and sadly Colin Powell — are really doing. I do not want to live in a prison, even one as vast as the continental United States; for reference please read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

So, please don’t do anything harsh to my friend, [who forwarded your post to me], or anyone else for that matter. Whether or not my God is within me, I do my best to find the Almighty in a good glass-or-three-or-four of beer, as, apparently, should you. If, however, drinking to excess doesn’t work for you, perhaps another movie that opens this weekend may work: Club Dread. My daughter, who lives in Mexico where this was filmed, has a minor role in it.

Hasta manana,

Pablo Incognito

As my friend, who forwarded this over to me, writes, “I don’t think he’s read anything else you’ve written, Gil.”

And, in the midst of posting that e-mail, here comes one from a buddy I met back in grad school:

good entry.

couldn’t the same thing be said for celebs who become sociopolitical theorists and soapbox firebrands every election year?

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m hoping Club Dread (from the makers of Super Troopers) will dwarf what I like to call “the passion the of the christ” at the box office this weekend.

So it appears the jury is in! If Club Dread manages to bring in more box office than Mel Gibson, I’ll have somehow triumphed. I think. GodDAMN is this a confusing world.

Anyway, in response to Pablo Incognito, be assured that I’m all about frivolous entertainment. It seems to me that this movie (the Jesus one) doesn’t qualify as frivolous. It’s not a free speech issue at all. I’m not calling for the movie to be banned. I’m calling for people to find their interpretation of religion somewhere other than on a movie screen. And if watching someone’s flesh get flayed for an hour is your idea of frivolous entertainment, you should probably seek therapy.