I've clearly abandoned this blog-child I raised from an infant

BUT!

I've started two other blogs that are less about the open-diary ramblings of NoFo and more about focused topics and CV. So if you're interested ...

TMIpolar: my bipolar adventures and essays on mental health in general

The One Who Mumbles: reviews and essays—mostly about the arts, natch—all collected in a place I can use as a writing portfolio

Read, bookmark and hopefully enjoy them at your leisure. And now that my mind is in blogging mode again, maybe I'll start posting here as well. Or not. 

New flavor. Do not recommend.

Unless you have an insatiable thirst for store-brand cough syrup poured into a melted Slurpee that’s sat in a hot car for five days. Followed by four hours of sweaty jitters, of course.

Also: My office bingo card is as winning as a trump spelling be.

That wide, inviting, super-comfy-looking banquette at the far end of Taste of India? DO NOT SIT THERE.

Under the table is essentially a big vinyl-covered mattress with zero option to put your feet on the floor or even bend your legs ... or, in my inflexible case, even get tucked under the table well enough to get anywhere near it.

Five stars for yumminess. Minus 597 stars for having to eat crisscross-creakysauce over my lap and spilling chickpeas all over my ankles.

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64: A concerto is a musical structure dating to the Baroque period (roughly 1600-1750) that features a solo instrument backed by a full orchestra. It’s traditionally composed in three movements with a fast-slow-fast structure. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (composed in 1844, which puts it squarely in the Romantic period) is a lighthearted delight that explores a range of happy, inarguably beautiful and requisitely contemplative musical voices in its first two movements. But its third movement--a bouncy, exuberant celebration of musical virtuosity titled Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace (starting at 22:06 in this recording)--is completely joyful and captivating and downright triumphant for any violinist who masters it. Part of its joy stems from Mendelssohn’s placement of the violin solo mere moments after the downbeat of the movement instead of letting the orchestra introduce the solo, as had been the convention for 200 years. Romantic music is about emotion--often extreme emotion--and the joyful emotions of this third movement leap at you with no room for impatience or distraction.

Clearance-Price Deodorant: A Review

As a longtime wearer of Cool Wave flavored Gillette Endurance 48 Hours of Protection Clear Gel, I was apprehensive about trying Undefeated flavored Gillette Scent Xtend Technology when I saw it wearing a clearance sticker at Target, but 75¢ SAVINGS, PEOPLE!

My verdict: It smells pretty much the same, except with generic-truck-stop-bathroom-cleanser topnotes. As far as efficacy: It’s too cold here to test its performance in a truly sweaty context, but using the word Undefeated in the world of sweaty, grungy odors probably should have been focus-grouped just a LITTLE bit more.

Well, I was SUPPOSED to see A Star Is Born tonight

But they must have mislabeled the theater we went into, because instead we saw Bradley Cooper: A Study In Blue Eyes, Distracting Abs And All Around Male Perfection And Oh Yeah Lady Gaga Is Freaking Awesome Too But We Already Knew That So Let’s Get Back To How Much I’m Going To Marry Bradley Cooper.

The movie really is pretty awesome. The singing, the beautifully intertwined rhythms of joy and humor and emotion and pathos, the creative range of camera work, the slightly dusty palette ... THE SINGING. My only criticism is that it feels a titch long toward the end, and I found myself ready for whatever was going to happen to hurry up and happen before I started losing sympathy for the characters.

Plus their puppy kind of got uglier as it grew into a dog. But that’s just a kibble.

I read Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham years ago in a book club in Chicago

Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then -- and still to this day -- preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And for some reason, something reminded me of it a couple weeks ago. Then I had an opportunity to bring it up in a conversation soon afterward. And now I want to devour it a third time. If I still own my original copy, it's currently filed away in one of more boxes than I can count in my climate-controlled storage locker across town. So I ordered another copy and it arrived last week. And I can't wait to devour it again -- and since I've decided to forgo being in shows all summer so I can focus on training for all the Running Away From Being 50 races I want to do, I'm also going to attack the piles of books I've purchased over the last few years but have yet to even alphabetize by author on my shelves. Because that's how I roll.

Anyway, in Flesh and Blood Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy -- mightily named Constantine Stassos -- eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

I’m just a Poe boy! Please have him call me!

I’m old enough to have seen the first Star Wars movie in theaters. And while I’ve missed probably the last 729 Star Wars movies, through great, thoughtful, tight storytelling — and probably through unavoidable cultural saturation over the last few decades — I was able to pick up all the backstory I needed to follow this movie ... and IT! WAS! AWESOME!

Plus seeing the movie (with snacks!) on company time was our post-holiday (because it’s all hands on deck through the holidays) company party, I! GET! THE! REST! OF! THE! AFTERNOON! OFF!

I am one with the Force.

Photoshopping in a cat as the Cowardly Lion is too self-congratulatorily meta and makes this whole thing ridiculous

It’s a yellow brick dud. I give it one bluebird.

Today is the anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire

... which historians are not opposed to believing actually could have been started by a cow kicking over a lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn -- though, to be fair, there are many other credible, though less historically charming, theories as to how the fire started. During the 15 years I lived in Chicago, I saw it as my civic duty to read and learn as much as I could about my city and its history. I was excited to start reading this book when I found it, but it turned out to be more of a lengthy essay on the cultural and sociopolitical Zeitgeist that framed the fire than on the timeline and geography of the unfolding inferno and the human-level experience of surviving it, which I would have found far more meaningful.

In any case, upwards of 300 people died and thousands were left homeless and impoverished 146 years ago today and tomorrow. I mark this day on my calendar every year so I'm reminded to think about who they might have been and the horrors they most certainly endured. And I encourage you to a moment today in their memory to celebrate what you have while you still have it.

Here's my review from 2012:
I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of conflagrant destruction, abject suffering and triumph over adversity peppered with tantalizing details about old Chicago buildings and neighborhoods that I recognize. Instead it’s a hyperwonkish examination of class inequality, political grandstanding, religious imperialism (particularly the emergence of “scientific” relief that favored distributing blankets and food and financial aid to the religious and the “worthy” newly homeless rich over assisting the chronically poor and the working class who were technically able to support themselves though there was little to no work available in the months after the fire) and the simmering intolerance toward (particularly German) immigrants in the fire’s aftermath. It does draw some timely parallels to America’s current obsession with “big” government in its discussions of Chicago’s post-fire laws against rebuilding with wood (which made rebuilding almost financially impossible for low- and middle-class fire victims) and its curiously detailed recounting of virulently sabbatical opposition to German-immigrant beer gardens serving alcohol on Sundays, which temporarily drove the mostly single-issue People’s Party into power over the status-quo Law and Order party of native-born religious privilege. The book does frequently refer to one concept that will amuse modern Chicago residents, though: the idea that fire victims “fled the city” northward to the neighboring community of Lake View.

CedaRound: Cedar Rapids History Center

The old Cedar Rapids History Center was built in 1935 as a Quonset hut encased in industrially horizontal blond brick for the Rapids Chevrolet car dealership and stood resolutely as what seemed to be a permanent, demoralizing architectural stain on First Avenue at the edge of downtown until after I was out of college.

It was an exceptionally dreary example of early 20th century prefabricated architecture that was probably seen as austerely noble in its day and was unfortunately built to last well past its visual expiration date a decade later as the architectural world rediscovered the soul-nourishing properties of ornamentation.

So you can imagine how the city aesthetes rejoiced with great jubilation when the building started to be torn down in the 1990s, and then we waited with surprised but hopeful trepidation when we realized that what had brought devastating visual and emotional blight to the city for over half a century was not disappearing entirely but was instead being partially repurposed into delightfully contextual architecture: Ghosts of chipped-away pillars, arcs of corrugated metal and jagged geometries of pre-war brick suddenly stood with beauty, grace and a touch of fun as part of the endlessly clever new Cedar Rapids History Center building. And I quickly learned to stop sighing and looking away every time I drove past it. The new concept was quirky and invigorating and created a meaningful architectural dialogue between antiquated visual efficiencies and modern plays on scale, material and embellishment.

Last year, the Cedar Rapids History Center began its move to Cedar Rapids' historic 1896 Douglas Mansion -- whose adjacent carriage house at 5 Turner Alley was transformed in the 1920s into an apartment and studio by "American Gothic" painter Grant Wood -- and the History Center building was slightly renovated to become the new Cedar Rapids Day School. I'm kinda sad that the History Center abandoned its delightfully contextual hybrid-architecture home, but I still rejoice with great jubilation every time I drive by it.

Beauty and the Beast: I'm FINALLY caught up on my Disney pop culture

1. This is perhaps the most visually gorgeous movie I have ever seen. I hereby volunteer to abandon my aging father, don a yellow gown and pretend that romance is somehow a legitimate theme in "Romeo and Juliet" in every beast-related literary discussion I have for the rest of my life just to live in that castle.
2. Speaking of the yellow gown, it's stunning. But why does Belle's hair look like it was combed by a distracted squirrel the whole time she wears it?
2.5. And what's that weird, distracting thing in her ear the whole time she wears the yellow gown? Is it some kind of wireless earpiece she had to wear because she couldn't learn her lines?
3. I love how this movie fills in some of the backstory that's not in the animated version. But if Belle was born in Paris and whisked away at a young age to what she herself describes as a French "provincial town" where she's so unworldly that she repeatedly sings in the abstract that "there must be something more than" it, WHERE DID SHE GET HER BRITISH ACCENT?
4. All the animated characters teeter precariously on the creepy side of the creepy/enchanting fence.
5. Speaking of, why doesn't Chip have a gaping head wound when he turns back into a human kid?
6. Yes, LeFou is played as a gay stereotype. And even though we've come a long way and we as a culture should have evolved past that blah blah blah yawn yawn yawn, the movie is a live-action cartoon of what was already a cartoon filled with clichéd, silly, delightfully entertaining stereotypes. It takes place in a cartoony version a none-of-us-was-there-to-even-know-for-sure-what-it-was-like historical culture where the men are fey and the women are helpless and this movie elevates the Zeitgeist with colorblind casting where black people are courtiers and interracial couples love and kiss each other so it's a world where everyone has a place and an existence and I can totally go full-stereotype sometimes and I'm a gay man with an unrequited and unacknowledged crush on a straight friend and it happens all over the world to all kinds of people so SHUT UP.
7. Meanwhile, back in the real world: We HAVE come a long way and we as a culture HAVE evolved, so if you think you are in possession of any anti-gay opinion about the movie or anything else that you're still desperately failing to justify with logic, reason or laughably-hypocritical-to-anyone-who's-actually-read-a-bible religion, SHUT UP.
8. Seriously. Did nobody notice through the entire process of auditioning and filming that Emma Watson has a British accent?
9. Best line: "Keep calm and think back to the war. And the widows."
10. Seriously. I call bullshit on the entire movie because Chip doesn't have a gaping wound in his head at the end.

Book review: Flesh and Blood

I read "Flesh and Blood" by Michael Cunningham years ago in a book club in Chicago. Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then -- and still to this day -- preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And for some reason, something reminded me of it last week. Then I had an opportunity to bring it up in a conversation this week. And now I want to devour it a third time. If I still own my original copy, it's currently filed away in one of more boxes than I can count in my climate-controlled storage locker across town. So I just ordered another copy. And I can't wait to devour it again.

In "Flesh and Blood," Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy -- mightily named Constantine Stassos -- eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

Oh, dear. That was a plot twist worthy of ... well ... Hollywood.

"La La Land" is still a gorgeous visual and musical and conceptual feature-length riff on jazz and life and chance meetings and go-everywhere story arcs and plot driving song driving plot and reverent visual quotes of classic musicals and everything that pretty much fills me with glee and makes me sit up and watch so I don't miss a single dance step or leitmotif or fleeting exterior shot or subtle emotion on a gorgeous closeup. It's filled with heart, it grabbed my heart and it will forever be my 2017 best picture winner.

So. Yeah. Manchester by the Sea.

I liked it. A lot. I didn't love it, though. And it wasn't the wellspring of emotional devastation I'd heard it was. I like to see movies and stage shows knowing as little as possible about them beforehand so I can experience their narratives organically as they unfold. Which can lead to some unexpected revelations; I somehow thought this movie was a Merchant Ivory-inspired tragic gay love story. And I'm confident that I won't be a spoiler by saying it is absolutely not that. It is, however, tragic. Profoundly tragic. And often in ways the director trusts you to connect the dots for using sometimes just a shadow of the narrative elements you're used to getting to reach your own conclusions and understandings. The movie's compounding tragedies are constructed in an almost casually layered story arc that mixes slow burn with operatic personal and emotional devastation.

Filmed in a palette of dried grays and browns and greens, the movie's visual vocabulary intersperses short, jerky cinéma vérité scenes that feel raw and improvised with sometimes bleak, sometimes pastoral B-roll that establishes locations, provides context or at times is there just because. And then there are the long pauses. They're slightly awkward and often uncomfortable, but they deftly frame key situations, propel the plot and speak volumes about the characters. And oh, the characters. They're complicated and tormented and messy and impossible to pigeonhole. But they're all foundationally good and decent people. Casey Affleck masterfully expands and contracts emotionally over time with sometimes hairpin turns and a spectrum of velocities as he process a hundred lifetimes of extremes. Lucas Hedges plays his 16-year-old nephew who faces tragedy and grief with the lashing-out confusion of a child tempered by the sobering resolve of an adult. They play off each other with a mix of familial love, cautious animosity and cultural stoicism that work both in unison and opposition as their characters orbit the circumstances of each others' lives.

I think the music is a huge distracting jumble of noise, though, jumping inelegantly from Handel to Ella Fitzgerald to quasi-religious choruses of oooing women. I assume the director was trying to mirror the jarring jumpiness of the cinematography with the same approach to the soundtrack, but it ends up belaboring the conceptual framework and ultimately just not working.

There are very good reasons the movie enjoys such critical and popular acclaim, though, and it's truly a revelatory, forward-thinking piece of cinema.

So. Yeah. La La Land.

One glorious four-act symphony of jazz riffs rendered in music, choreography, plot, cinematography, character development, set decoration, visual composition, movie-musical quotes, leitmotifs and relentless, thoughtful, loving attention to detail. It flatters its audience by trusting us to connect the dots, celebrates the unbridled joy of spontaneously breaking into song, and winks self-awarely at the adorably implausible plot holes that make personal finances fluid and Doris Day parking plentiful and tap shoes and story arcs and even gravity appear and disappear without regard for any scripted accountability. And though there are some wispy singing voices and some not-quite-synchronized soundtrack-to-visual issues and poor Emma Stone seems to walk miles and miles and miles in unforgiving stilettos, La La Land is hands-down one of the most glorious movies I've ever seen.

I'm sold! Again! On N! YC!

Sheesh! How long can a boy take to blog about his favorite thing in the whole wide world? (I mean besides Tool Academy.)

So the domestic partner and I went to NYC over Halloween weekend (remember Halloween weekend? it was like six months ago or something. back when I used to write blog posts.) to see multiple Broadway shows! He was there overnight for work and I had free airline tickets so I got to have a Big Gay Broadway Weekend for the cost of theater tickets, food and cab fare. Everyone wins!

Except.

New York City cabbies are a not-very-cooperative bunch. There, I said it. Every second cab that pulled over for us all weekend didn't want to go wherever we were going. And the one that took me back to LaGuardia on Sunday didn't even know where to drop me off. So the New York City cabbies were a big ol' Fosca to the Giorgio of my Big Gay Broadway Weekend.

Anyway!

I got to LaGuardia Saturday just before noon and I Clara-ed my way right to the theater district to get tickets for my target matinee. (We tend to operate on a hope-we-can-get-tickets theater plan in our family. So far we've never not gotten tickets to the shows we wanted to see, though we've been reduced to standing in return-ticket lines for a couple hours when we could have been spending our New York City time wandering around Times Square feeling superior to the other tourists who plan ahead for months to see Phantom of the Opera.) I got a ticket right away, ran to grab a bite to eat and then settled down for my first Broadway experience of the weekend. But more on that later.

Because first I want to talk about celebrities!

I apparently have horrible celebrity-dar. Because I saw my first show, waited in line right by the sidewalk for an hour for return tickets for our second show, enjoyed a long early dinner at a sidewalk cafe, and stood on the sidewalk watching people go by for another hour while I waited for the domestic partner to show up from work, and I never once saw a celebrity. Not even Evan Marriott.

But the moment the domestic partner showed up—the moment!—we suddenly bumped into—in rapid succession! right on the sidewalk! out in public!—Marcia Gay Harden, David Hyde Pierce and Tony Roberts. Either the domestic partner is the Celebrity Piper whose magical flute playing enchants celebrities right out of their hiding places everywhere he goes or celebrities walk by me all the time and I just don't notice.

But there's more! As we settled down in our Jake-waited-for-an-hour return seats for our evening show, Annette Bening sauntered down the aisle and sat herself a couple rows in front of us. Of course I didn't notice her until the domestic partner pointed out the merry jig she was dancing to his whimsical little flute canticle. But still! That's four celebrities in one night! If I had a celebrity punch card I'd totally earn a free Diet Pepsi!

But that's not all!

As I was sitting at a foo-foo gay sidewalk cafe in foo-foo gay Hell's Kitchen between foo-foo gay shows on Saturday, I saw a familiar face amble up the street toward me. My New York blogger friend David—of Someone in a Tree, which I can't look at at work because he booby-traps his posts with pictures of naked men whose bodies make me feel bad about mine—emerged out of the crowd on his way to perform in Brigadoon. And while it was fun to run into him so randomly in big ol' New York City, it was more fun to think how something like that probably wouldn't happen again for a hundred years.

And the coincidences keep coming!

Because as soon as David wandered off to his show, I saw a guy walk up the street toward me in a Rehobus shirt. Rehobus is a defunct bus company that shuttled gay people between DC and Rehoboth a couple summers ago, and all that's left of the company is its very cool shirts. And I have the same shirt this dude was wearing because the guys who ran the company are the friends I stayed with in Rehoboth twice this summer. So I chatted this dude up and, sure enough, he totally knew my friends. So he was a random-friend-on-the-sidewalk-encounter-by-proxy.

Anyway, let's move on to the important part of this blog post: where to find a free bathroom in Times Square. (Upstairs at the Marriott—turn right when you get off the escalator.)

Also: the shows I saw!

I tried to take a picture of myself in front of every show I saw over the weekend. Which is really hard to do with a cell phone on a crowded sidewalk. And not only because I–who can usually be counted on to feel no shame about acting goofy in public–was suddenly overcome with a rare case of the What Will People Think Of Me's as I tried to discreetly snap self-portraits from arm's length as bored tourists milled about me in their pleated capri pants and their purses crammed with money-saving sandwiches and maps of New York City landmarks. Plus, I had to wait 20 minutes for some damn tourists to move away from this sign so I could take a self-portrait I call "Next to Next to Normal" ... and once I got it out of my phone and blown up to readable size, I realized I had been in front of the wrong sign all along because this sign was obviously for a show about a girl who sat alphabetically beside Marilyn Monroe in grammar school:
(This is my Serious Face, by the way, worn in deference to the pain and suffering endured by the characters in the show. Poor Norma.)

In any case, Next to Normal—which I saw with the original Broadway cast, thank you very much—is pretty spectacular. For those of you not familiar, it's a rock opera about a family torn apart by mental illness. Tony winner Alice Ripley rips into the role of the family matriarch struggling to find a sense of normal in her haze of delusions and disorders. And she. gutted. me. The show is a roller coaster of chaos and despair and hope and challenge and absolute emotional destitution. I don't want to say much more about it, though, because the show's awesome powers are better discovered in real time. But I will say this: If you go to see Aaron Tveit—the family's son, who is so handsome he's almost a distraction—in his underwear, don't blink; the scene goes by pretty fast. And he's still pretty covered up. So it's best to come to the show for the show itself. (Also: Don't read any reviews before you see the show. The less you know, the better. Trust me on this.)

The domestic partner and I saw God of Carnage—with the original Broadway cast, thank you very much—on Saturday night. Which means I didn't have to take a self-portrait with my camera phone. I had been under the impression that the show was a dialogue between two couples that devolves into an apocalyptic collapse of Albee proportions. But I was only half right. The couples do say and do vicious things to each other, but the play is really just a dark comedy with a lot of slapstick. Including a gratuitous vomit scene that completely undermines what little verisimilitude the show clings to (if a character vomited that much vomit with that much force in the real world, she would at the very least be too sick to move for the rest of the show ... and the room that she sprayed would not be inhabitable by humans for another whole hour of exposition). But once I'd adjusted my expectations for the show, I laughed and giggled my way through it with the rest of the audience. Including Annette Bening! The actors are spot-on in their roles, particularly Tony winner Marcia Gay Harden, whose nuanced slide from uncomfortable gentility to even more uncomfortable vitriol is matched only by the fabulously horrible outfit she wears: a helpless explosion of patterns and textures in exactly the wrong proportions for her body type. The set—a riot of brilliant reds and winter whites accented by a scorched-earth wall hanging and two massive vases of white tulips—provides a plush boxing ring for the characters to attack and retreat for 90 minutes. (My only unformed opinion: I'm still trying to figure out the significance of the show's many visual and verbal references to African tribalism, though I'm probably just overthinking.) The original cast—Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden—is leaving soon, but the show opens with a new cast—Christine Lahti, Annie Potts, Jimmy Smits and Ken Stott—on the 17th.

So how random is this: Three people I know from my Iowa home town (and by "I know" I mean "I only very distantly know and have never even personally met one of them") are in Broadway shows right now. And two of them are in one together: Bye Bye Birdie—which I saw with the original Broadway revival cast, thank you very much. The show is not getting very good reviews—it has lots of energy and color and fun, but it doesn't gel ... particularly the relationships between some of the leads ... and the choreography is both show-choir-y and sloppy—but there were only four seats left when I walked up to buy my ticket. So what do the reviewers know? Before I went to the show, I left a note at the stage door for the two people I "know" in it: a girl I watched grow up while her mother and I did millions of shows together and a guy who was in my dad's scouting troop before I was even born. They both have some of the most fun jobs in the show: chorus people who occasionally get pulled out for featured numbers. And they're both pretty fabulous, which is not just the Iowa pride talking. I was hoping to meet them afterward for a drink and a possible moment alone with John Stamos, but I had to race to catch a plane with no help from the cabbie who couldn't find the right departure gate for me. Fun fact! Bye Bye Birdie was the first book musical I ever did, way back before I even realized I would grow up addicted to tattoos. And I still know every word and every note and it was all I could do to not sing along in the audience.

WHEW. So thank you for your patience while I've been busy worshipping the gods of weekday work and weekend exhaustion. Come back soon for reports of my next adventure. Which will also include pictures! And text! Just like a real blog post!

Christmastime is here

It’s funny how when you head back to work after a long holiday weekend, your bloggable stories dry up … along with your bloggable free time.

But! I did manage to kick off the holiday season on Monday night with my annual pilgrimage to hear Chanticleer sing in Chicago’s gothically fabulous Fourth Presbyterian Church.

Chanticleer—for those of you who are not shameless groupies who have seen them in concert at least 10 times like some people we won’t mention here—is a 12-voice a cappella men’s ensemble that is so awesome if they offered me a job I’d be all outta my way, bitches as I abandoned my current life and rushed the stage to sing with them. The group’s vast repertoire covers everything from early music (the stuff most people lump under the term Gregorian chant) to formal concert literature to modern jazz. And they are quite possibly the most pure, disciplined, beautiful singers you will ever hear.

Chanticleer's annual Christmas concert works through the history of vocal music chronologically, and it's really the only way to put me in the Christmas spirit. After my A Charlie Brown Christmas CD, of course. This year's concert started with 15th century three-part contrapuntal plainsong chants, stopped along the way to pay tribute to the German master composer Michael Praetorius and to explore a study in Russian dissonance, and then ended as always with a medley of Christmas spirituals.

Now, I'm what most people would describe as an atheist. I find atheism to almost be a religion unto itself, though—and not being a fan of any religion, I just tend to think of myself as extremely non-religious. So there is much irony in the fact that I loathe secular Christmas music while I love the sacred stuff ... at least the sacred stuff that would never be recorded by Amy Grant or anyone who has to look up the definition of antiphonal.

And one of my favorite antiphonal sacred choral pieces is Franz Biebl's transcendent Ave Maria. I've sung it a number of times in huge choruses, where I get to wallow in its lush chording and muscular 20th century dissonances. Chanticleer, being only 12 voices, reduces the piece to its bare harmonic essence ... and still sends tears down my cheeks when they sing it for me.

But! They also sang an Ave Maria on Monday night that puts the Biebl in a tight race for the #1 spot in my heart. This one, written by French Renaissance composer Josquin Desprez at the very dawn of the 16th century, is infused with clear, pure harmonies and simple, haunting melodies layered into a gauzy musical tapestry. And as it floated through Fourth Presbyterian's mighty stone sanctuary on Monday night, it stirred me in ways that some people might describe as ... religious.

By my count, this was at least my tenth Chanticleer concert. And at least my tenth Chanticleer closing gospel medley, which is sung in arrangements that rely heavily on the ensemble's male sopranos. While I don't hate gospel music, I don't love it either. And with all those male sopranos wailing on and on about What a Pretty Little Baby and Jerusalem in the Morning, the medley is quite literally the point where the mighty men of Chanticleer devolve into a chorus of screaming queens.

I went with my folks and my friends Matthew and Craig on Monday. Craig is Jewish (An atheist and a Jew walk into a Christmas concert ...) and while he loved the performance, he was thrilled to find a new personal Christmas theme song in the medley: Everywhere I Go, Somebody Talkin' 'Bout Jesus.

And if a borderline atheist and a Jew can find meaning in a sacred Christmas concert, then we should all kick everyone in the balls who tries to whine to the world about the supposed "war on Christmas" that the far right has trotted out in the media yet again this year. Especially if they use male sopranos like Bill O'Reilly to do their whining.

VERY IMPORTANT UPDATE TO THIS POST:
I got a comment from an honest-to-goodness member of Chanticleer! I feel kind of woozy. And fizzy. And funny. And fine. And a little disappointed that the comment didn't include an invitation to come sing the Biebl Ave Maria with them. Even though I know both bass part by heart. And I can totally sing words like tecum and muleribus without giggling inappropriately.

The Women: Two options at the cineplex

Option 1: Predictable. Hackneyed. Clumsy. Overacted. Wholly disappointing. Plus, there's a goddamn montage where a character undergoes a personal transformation to a rock soundtrack. There's no lower art form than a personal-transformation montage.

Option 2: At least it doesn't have a montage.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The domestic partner and I joined a book club! We went to our first meeting on Tuesday! It was fun!

But, most importantly, I read a book!

I got my degree in English literature in 1990. And I’ve read exactly two works of fiction since then: one that I’ve completely forgotten (it was about Southern women and I remember it being pretty good) and The Da Vinci Code. I’ve read tons of other books on history and social science since I graduated—along with my weekly fixes of Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker—but fiction has always seemed to be such a pursuit of secondary importance what with all this real stuff out there that I’d rather read about.

But no longer! I’ve read Oscar Wao! And I loved it! (See? Exclamation points! That means I’m serious!)

Actually, I loved it until the last few chapters. The story is only partly about Oscar, an obese, lonely Dominican-American man-boy who actually leads a conspicuously mundane life. The story’s jagged, meandering narrative spends the majority of its time focusing on the picaresque, soap-opera lives of Oscar’s mother, sister, ancestors and the omniscient narrator.

Author Junot Díaz has said he wanted the story to read like an animated jumble of conversations at a Dominican dinner table. So it jumps around in time and it even switches narrators. And it’s filled with lengthy meta-footnotes explaining how the Dominican Republic’s cultural and sociopolitical history influences—and a some points even drives—the narrative. It all works together beautifully, weaving a tapestry of rich, layered personalities struggling to navigate what may or may not be a family curse, three decades of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorial cruelties in the Dominican Republic, and the poverty, distemper and crushing ennui of the New Jersey Dominican diaspora.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize this year, which is one of the reasons the book club picked it. And while I loved the book—or at least most of it—nobody else shared my level of excitement. And we were all hard pressed on Tuesday night to justify that it was award-worthy. It’s a great story told in a fresh, interesting voice. But it builds up these fascinating, nuanced characters, sends them around the world and through many layers of hell, and finally reunites them in the Dominican Republic for a big cataclysmic … pfffffft. It’s like the check finally comes at the end of this beautifully animated dinner conversation and everyone suddenly looks down at his or her hands to avoid paying it. Loose ends get tied up clumsily, layered storylines become disappointingly linear and Oscar himself—who was never all that interesting to begin with—goes from tragically pathetic to irritatingly pathetic.

That said, I came to love Oscar’s mother and sister—and the narrator once he revealed his identity and his relationship to the family—and I was sorry to say goodbye to them at the end. Díaz is masterful at building rhythms, dwelling on small details long enough to keep them interesting, and skimming over huge spans of time in elegantly crafted asides that tell you exactly what you need to know to stay engaged in the story.

While the majority of my new book club disagrees with me, I heartily recommend it.