On Easter Day, I had a chance to sit back and watch Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961) again. I usually spend time to watch this Hollywood Christ epic for the sacrilegious motive of seeing an utterly desirable Californian surfer boy acting as a saint (complete with his Malibu tan on the cross). Nonetheless, is my desire for the image of Christ as a handsome muscular body as sacrilegious as I thought?

As a Russian saying goes, the new is just the well-forgotten old. Let us look at a relatively current debate on universalism. A case in point is Judith Butler's contribution “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism” in her exchange with Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek entitled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Verso, 2000). Traditionally conceived as a pure tool of white supremacy and colonial domination, u...

Somehow I missed the whole Science Fair thing as a child; my only experience of them was via American film and television shows, and I imagined them as a staple of an experience that I was glad not to have. Every other time I tried to make something for a class presentation a combination of not being a very driven student and a poor attention to detail led to embarrassment, as in the time I gave my geometry class presentation (this in ninth gr...

I saw Ted Leo and his band play recently at a converted movie theater in South Philly. Leo crouches before a down-tilted mike and aims his voice up at it, spraying his sine wave vocals out like Silly String. When he's not singing he comes up with a few sideways leg spasms that don't look much better on him than they did on Pete Townshend thirty years ago. Between songs he really wants to talk but the crowd isn't having any.

Recently in the American Scholar, Thomas Mallon challenged readers with 10 questions about American intellectual life today. As our regular readers know, the gang at Printculture thought we should rally the troops and try to actually answer them. The one that interested me in particular was #7.

Matthew Miller was a Jewish stoner who dropped out of high school in upstate New York to follow the hippie jam-band Phish around the country. He grew his hair in dreadlocks and listened to Grateful Dead tapes. After finishing his studies at a wilderness school in Oregon, where he rapped at open mikes and practiced beatboxing in his bedroom, he moved to New York to attend college at the lefty-alternative New School. Sometime around 2001, he ...

At some point during my childhood, I realized that I had an inordinate fondness for voices. Certain people would speak, and I would find myself lulled into a blissful, anodyne trance. I first noticed it while watching Bob Ross on TV, that hippie painter with the red afro on PBS’s “Joy of Painting.” I must have been eight or nine.

In a world crammed so chock full of stupidities that some days it seems ready to burst, one in particular which has been annoying me for literally decades is a lyric from Bob Geldof’s 1984 famine-relief benefit track which goes, Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

The other day I put down the Brie I was eating and, heedless of whether or not it meant the terrorists were winning, roared around the corner to get the family Volvo (1996, 140,000 miles) its periodic oil change. Like most public places in the country nowadays, the waiting room in the quick-lube place has a loud TV pinned to the wall. You might try to read the paper, but the noise will break through. And the talk-show controversy of the day wa...

At the risk of sounding like one of them there deconstructionists: in order to be like 9/11 the next 9/11 cannot be like 9/11. What has become essential about 9/11 is not the facts of what happened, as terrible as these are, but the shock and awe of them. A repetition, in other words, wouldn’t do. Partly as a belated comment on last week’s excellent pieces by E Wesp and S Shirazi, I float a diagnosis of the meaning of terror five years and ch...

A week ago, like a minor celebrity, the St. Matthews Church Prayer Rug appeared at our house. And by prayer rug, I mean a sheet of paper with a picture of Jesus on it.

In October of 2001, a month after the attack on the Towers, the U.S. National Security Advisor asked the networks not to air al-Qaeda footage and the White House Press Secretary asked newspapers not to publish transcripts of bin Laden’s speeches. Today when bin Laden issues a statement, the press focuses its reporting on whether or not it is authentic in a way that downplays its content and draws attention away from the fact that he is still ...

By and large I’m in favor of the libertarian spirit reflected in yesterday’s decision to allow a small religious group to use an otherwise illegal hallucinogenic drug. In unsophisticated terms, I like the notion of telling people that they can do what they want as long as they don’t make a nuisance of themselves. And that characterizes, by and large, the discussion around whether or not to make an exception in the drug laws for O Centro Espí...

The sequels of the Danish caricatures of Mohammed seemed to me a made-for-Printculture moment. See here for some good round-the-kitchen-table action. An issue on which reasonable disagreement was rather lacking, IMHO, until our crew got busy on it. For a dismaying—because at least partly reasonable—take on the situation, see the "We Are All Danes Now" article in the Boston Globe the other day,

Some baroque churches have painted ceilings that look as though some kind of happy bomb had torn through the building, revealing a blue sky full of gesticulating saints, glowing clouds, sometimes a skewed beam or two of the exploded building you are still in, and of course, filling every corner, hundreds of smiling winged babies. &nbsp The theme of these ceilings is always a “Triumph”: Saint Ignatius vaulting into heaven, applauded by the ange...

I recently went into the city to see a fiftieth anniversary performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I had read the play as a student but never seen it performed. At intermission I tried to explain to my friend what was bothering me about it, starting with the title.

The first time I played “Separation Sunday,” I only got two songs in before quitting. The guy can't sing, they don't write real songs, and some parts sound so much like Springsteen you wonder if the guy owns any other albums, or if he might have been kept chained under a table at The Stone Pony as a child. Normally I listen to music at dinner time, hoping for something bright and peppy before my shows come on; this mess wasn’...

It took me a long time to find my way to the blues. One of the first things I did when I started making my own money was go out and buy the complete Robert Johnson, but it somehow didn’t take. The deluxe box set had been padded out with alternate studio versions that followed immediately after the ones from the album, which made listening to it an unrewarding academic exercise akin to comparing the A and B editions of Kant’s Transcendental ...

In 1969, a young British woman named Vashti Bunyan recorded a modest folk album called "Just Another Diamond Day." About 25 years old at the time, she had dropped out of art school at Oxford to try to become a pop singer, hooked up with the Stones' manager and released a few decent singles that went nowhere, including a Jagger-Richards cover. I thought Vashti was a Hindu name, but it is in fact an Elamite name from the Book of Esther. Queen ...

This morning when I stepped out of my apartment to head down to campus I noticed the imprint of a solitary and apparently naked foot in the snow near the bottom of my steps. Though a balmy 31 degrees out this morning, the shoeless footprint struck me as an odd occurrence. Riding the bus it continued to perplex me, and all my thoughts of the day ahead were replaced by a curiosity about the foot. My mind assembled a variety of associations dur...

The title of Harold Bloom’s recent paperback “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” is somewhat misleading. The book is his search for the wisdom of the West, taking both religious and literary texts as sources, but the seemingly promising title is actually just a rhetorical question; it's a quote from Job lamenting that there is no wisdom, and for the most part Bloom seems to agree. Bloom makes a distinction between the prudential wisdom he finds i...

In a short essay first published in 1953, now appended to the 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach defends his book against its critics with wit and verve. In a section devoted to defending his choice of figura as his major trope for medieval realism, he remarks that his project depended at some level on what books were available to him in Istanbul. He then offers this fabulous footnote: I was able to write the works on figura ...

I have to admit I’ve been watching (well, reading) the spectacle of the Pope’s death and the election of the new one with a curiosity that has surprised me. As spectacles go, this has been one of medieval proportion and character. It seems like a thing from another time. In the days after John Paul II died, traffic in the streets around the Vatican ground to a halt as pilgrims gathered by the thousands to mourn and later to watch for the wh...

Religion has been on my mind this week, too, and not just because of Pope John Paul II’s death (which E Hayot discussed here on Monday). Two articles I read last week make an intriguing pair against the furor over Terri Schiavo, and now in retrospect, against the Pope’s passing. The first, a Salon piece by professor and blogger Juan Cole, reminds us (and we do need reminding) that despite what the media’s slavish attention to...

Pope John Paul II was a disaster for the American Catholic Church, and for liberal Catholics more generally. His major achievement--beyond the cartoonish "pilgrim pope" notion currently being lavished on him by CNN--will prove to have been the destruction of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, which from 1962 to 1965 had radically opened the Church to the contemporary world. John Paul retained some small portion of its promise, particula...