You want to sue the Church?

[sovay]

And tonight I made a sautéed mushroom and black olive quiche for dinner, using the cheddar and the goat's milk gouda on hand. rushthatspeaks made the crust out of Emergency Biscuit. The quiche itself took at least twenty minutes longer to bake than expected because of the insulating properties of Emergency Biscuit, but fortunately the extra filling had already gone into a buttered cake tin on the top rack of the oven and therefore there was a quiche-like object available before people got so hungry that the cats were in danger. Overall, a success. We plan to use the biscuit crust for all relevant pies from now on. I was really happy with the mushrooms. I made them in the small frying pan, in three batches, while fending off a cat.

1. Courtesy of schreibergasse: what the Magdala Stone tells us about concepts of sacred space in ancient Judaism.

2. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: Julia Lillard's "The Alchemist." I saw it first without the title and thought it was a Tarot illustration of The Star.

3. nineweaving asked me what I thought about Thomas McCarthy's Spotlight (2015). My textbrick response, recopied here:

Worth seeing. It is a solid, genuine ensemble picture, meaning that all four of the Spotlight reporters get their own threads, no single character is the protagonist, and all sorts of recurring, significant supporting characters come and go and reappear as the story moves on. As a retelling of historical events, it gains a lot of power from its restraint, by which I do not mean that Spotlight is not an angry film—it's a very angry film—but the material is inflammatory enough that it would feel cheap if sensationalized and so I really appreciate that, as far as I can tell, there are no melodramatic twists and turns to confront the reporters with the awful truth; it is taking enough of a toll on them to live for months with the study of systematic sexual abuse and conspiracy, day in, day out, and worse every time a new piece of information comes to light. (In a quirk of statistical distribution, all members of the Spotlight team at the time were Catholic. Even for the most lapsed of them, there's an element of personal betrayal—and the subjectivity of being embedded in a system. In 2001, the new editor of the Globe was a Florida Jew who had no compunction about investigating the Church. He is played very well by Liev Schreiber as an undemonstrative figure with acute social instincts; he never gets a scene where he opens up, but by the end we trust him. He is the outsider; he can see some things more clearly than people who have lived in this culture all their lives. He has no affinity whatsoever for baseball.) It's a very good movie about silence and the ways that the factors in institutional complicity are not all malevolent, like the reporter who doesn't know how to tell her devoted Catholic grandmother who goes to Mass three times a week and whose heart will break as soon as she finds out about the child abuse; it's a very good movie about the hard work of speaking out, how the real trick is often not the willingness to speak, but the willingness of other people to listen and then to amplify. Some of the survivors have been trying to get this story out for years. Even the Globe brushed them off: it's awful, but is it news? I've seen the movie compared to All the President's Men (1976), but even that was more of a thriller. In its deliberate, almost documentary procedural pace, Spotlight reminded me more of The Naked City (1948). It starts when Marty Baron suggests investigating a story; it ends when the story goes to press. Anything that doesn't occur within that six-month window is not the movie's problem. One of the reporters is separated from his wife, living in a basement apartment while his colleagues drop by with pizza because otherwise he will patently starve to death on a diet of boiled hot dogs and beer; we never find out what happens to their marriage, because it didn't resolve before "Church allowed abuse by priest for years: Aware of Geoghan record, archdiocese still shuttled him from parish to parish" came out in January 2002. I like that sort of thing. I like that all of its characters are people, even the ones we see incompletely or antagonistically; I applaud the casting of Len Cariou as Cardinal Law, because as soon as he opens his mouth, all you can hear is Sweeney Todd. The cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Brian d'Arcy James, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery, other character actors I like. I don't have much to say about the cinematography or the music, but Boston is played by itself rather than Vancouver or mostly Toronto. I don't know if it's the best possible film that could have been made from these events, but I don't know what that would look like, either. I was not sorry to have seen it and I rather hope it wins some awards when the season comes around.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Thanks for the reminder--I have been forgetting that mushroom and black olive suit one another, even when they are not pizza toppings. (I haven't had such a pizza for more than a decade and have known that I'd better not for nearly four years.) Omelet sometime, perhaps.

[sovay]

Thanks for the reminder--I have been forgetting that mushroom and black olive suit one another, even when they are not pizza toppings.

You're welcome! I wasn't even thinking of pizza when I put them together. I should remember to do that the next time I order one.

(I haven't had such a pizza for more than a decade and have known that I'd better not for nearly four years.)

What is the obstacle to pizza?

[thistleingrey]

At Shakey's Pizza (a franchise), when I was a kid, someone usually ordered a sausage-or-ham, mushroom, and black olive pizza. Very salty, but palatable at the time. It went well (at the time!) with root beer of dubious quality.

Obstacles: cow milk (casein), wheat. :)

[sovay]

Very salty, but palatable at the time. It went well (at the time!) with root beer of dubious quality.

Man, I can't wait until I can drink carbonated beverages again. I am currently prohibited on account of the cement used to hold my braces to my teeth. I don't even drink that much soda as a rule, but right now I really miss ginger and root beer.

Obstacles: cow milk (casein), wheat.

Fair enough!

[thistleingrey]

A toast to come, then! (Carbonic acid disagrees with my stomach, but I agree with you about good ginger beer: occasional treat for me.)

[genarti]

Mmmmmm, sautéed mushroom and black olive. That sounds like a truly delightful quiche.

I hadn't even heard of Spotlight. (Which doesn't necessarily mean it hasn't been well advertised; that may be the case, but also I generally live under a rock as far as movies are concerned.) It sounds like a hard movie to watch, but a very good one, and a very responsibly done one too.

[sovay]

(Which doesn't necessarily mean it hasn't been well advertised; that may be the case, but also I generally live under a rock as far as movies are concerned.)

I feel like I've been under a rock for most of this year, putting my head up occasionally for unavoidable phenomena like Crimson Peak and unexpected delights like Experimenter. Spotlight is playing at the Somerville Theatre, so I'd have heard of it no matter what, but I also happened to read a Globe article interviewing the real-life reporters about the process of being researched for the screen right before the movie came out, which especially interested me. I was living in Boston in 2002; I remember when the news broke. I was curious to see what a period of time I was not just alive for, but adult and sentient, would look like onscreen. (Answer: basically like itself. Cellphones are not quite so ubiquitous and desktop computers are still the default. Printed material is important. The internet is the internet. I never paid attention to fashion, so people's clothes just looked like clothes to me.)

It sounds like a hard movie to watch, but a very good one, and a very responsibly done one too.

"Responsible" is a good way of describing it. I found it a less hard movie to watch than I had been expecting, but I think this is a case where mileage strongly varies—I would not recommend it to survivors of sexual abuse, for example, unless they really feel up for two hours of nobody talking about anything else. The difficulty of the material even at second hand really comes through.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I am most fascinated by the bit of the first article that talks about the altar motifs. The idea that we have a depiction of the fiery chariot on an altar makes my inner merkavah mysticism kink light right up. Also the idea that we have a depiction of symbolism that was on the pargod seems almost incredible (I would love to see the reasoning behind that, because the idea of a rose as an early Judaic symbol makes me happy for complicated reasons).

[sovay]

The idea that we have a depiction of the fiery chariot on an altar makes my inner merkavah mysticism kink light right up.

I did actually think of you.

Also the idea that we have a depiction of symbolism that was on the pargod seems almost incredible (I would love to see the reasoning behind that, because the idea of a rose as an early Judaic symbol makes me happy for complicated reasons).

I can't yet find any articles on the subject by Rina Talgam, but this post says "[h]er final report is awaiting publication." I would also like to know.

May I ask about your complicated reasons?

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I did actually think of you.

This is pleasing in and of itself. I am still chugging away on that novel, a bit at a time.

May I ask about your complicated reasons?

Absolutely.

The main thing is that it's the 12 petaled rose, which was a symbol of tribal unity. Given the massive splits in tribal territory over the course of the local dynastic rule it's interesting to see this symbol in use (it's largely fallen out of use, especially given that we both -wiped out- the tribe of Benjamin and split the tribe of Joseph to compensate ... and then we lost a bunch of tribes) but the rose then shows up in the zohar as the mystic symbol of wholeness and as symbolic of the combined divine attributes, which number 13, not 12.

Some say that this is a way of divine reflection showing us what we should do (restore the lost tribes, regain tribal unity) and some say that this is the heavenly reflection of what will be after the messianic era is established (insert here the lengthy argument about whether gathering the sparks will bring about the messianic era or whether sufficient failure to do so will accomplish it as a reproving measure). And there are a dozen or maybe thirteen other arguments that go along with that.

For myself, I am pleased to see conflated tribal (earthly) symbolism and merkavah (heavenly) symbolism on an object this old. It gives me a strong feeling of continuity for the Judaism I practice, which, given how much we've changed from a sacrificial religion to a prayer-based religion, makes me feel more hopeful about reconciling two very different Judaisms in my own work.

The rose depicted (though it is hard to see) seems to have four main petals with the rest in an outer ring. It's also possible that that branching was deemed too close to a depiction of a cross, though that's pure speculation on my part.

I would be fascinated to see if someone who knows more about it than I do has written up the transition of the rose from Judaic to Christological symbology. As I recall Rosicrucianism uses a five petaled rose that is not all that heraldically dissimilar from the one used for Judaic unity. I do wonder if that was part of why we stopped using it.

[gwynnega]

That quiche sounds excellent.

I liked Spotlight very much. I appreciated that it steadfastly does not Hollywoodize the story (i.e., shoehorning in a love story, etc.). It did remind me of All the President's Men in that both films focus on the unglamorous, painstaking work of old-school journalism.

[sovay]

That quiche sounds excellent.

I do not think it would be difficult to reproduce. For the filling, I used a cup of whole milk, about two cups total of grated cheese (cheddar, gouda, a smattering of already shredded mozzarella), four eggs, a can of black olives minus the liquid, about a pound of mushrooms that reduced in the usual way to a third of their volume after being sautéed with butter, and white pepper, nutmeg, and paprika to taste. We expected it to bake at 350°F for about thirty-five minutes and instead it took closer to fifty or an hour. The spillover in the heavily buttered nine-inch cake pan was done by the thirty-five minute mark. I was really pleased with the results.

I appreciated that it steadfastly does not Hollywoodize the story (i.e., shoehorning in a love story, etc.).

Yes. And when the story gets too close to home, it's not because any of the reporters are hiding repressed, abused pasts; the unease comes from less familiar directions. Nothing ever happens with the house full of suspended priests living around the corner from Brian d'Arcy James' Matt, but it's important that the discovery causes him to ask permission from his editor to tell the other parents in the neighborhood, because saying nothing for the sake of the story feels like furthering the danger. There's a strange kind of anxiety in retrospect when Michael Keaton's Robby realizes that one of his high school teachers was a predatory priest, because nothing ever happened to him: sometimes it doesn't. Rachel McAdams' Sacha never does tell her grandmother until she can hand her the first article. That mattered to me. Not everything needs to develop as dramatically as possible. Sometimes the ordinary difficulties are dramatic enough.

It did remind me of All the President's Men in that both films focus on the unglamorous, painstaking work of old-school journalism.

I agree with that and am glad to see the work recognized. I just remember All the President's Men playing out with more suspense, whereas in Spotlight the gripping sequences aren't the reveal of information, they're the methods of collecting it and the implications of the ways in which it is or is not readily accessible to the public eye.

[gwynnega]

Not everything needs to develop as dramatically as possible. Sometimes the ordinary difficulties are dramatic enough.

Yes, exactly. I wish more current Hollywood movies understood this!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for the Spotlight review. I like all those qualities of restraint, collaboration, insight; I like that Boston gets to play Boston.

I applaud the casting of Len Cariou as Cardinal Law, because as soon as he opens his mouth, all you can hear is Sweeney Todd.

Nice. Accusation by association--and he can't say that he's been slandered.

Nine

[sovay]

Many thanks for the Spotlight review. I like all those qualities of restraint, collaboration, insight; I like that Boston gets to play Boston.

You're very welcome. I'm not damning it with faint praise: I think it really is a good movie. Also it feels telling that even in a movie about a devastating coverup of institutional child rape, a Boston-area audience laughs when a character climbs into a taxi and tells the driver to avoid I-93.

Accusation by association--and he can't say that he's been slandered.

I can't remember if he's still in Rome or if he's retired. My parents always wanted to see him in jail.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Cardinal Law is still loitering in the outskirts of the Vatican, at last report, although I do wonder if the Pope occasionally considers having the Swiss Guards put him on a chartered plane for Boston without telling him where they're going.

[drwex]

Thank you for your commentary on "Spotlight." I've been wavering on whether or not to see it because I expected it to be sensationalized in typical "Hollywood thriller" fashion.

[sovay]

I've been wavering on whether or not to see it because I expected it to be sensationalized in typical "Hollywood thriller" fashion.

Very refreshingly, it's not. I know there's one supporting character whose real-life counterpart takes issue with his portrayal; the Spotlight reporters all found their presentations on film uncanny.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

therefore there was a quiche-like object available before people got so hungry that the cats were in danger. very good, very good :-)

I probably have told you, but the priest who married us had a history of sexual abuse. We didn't know that at the time (duh), but he had a vibe neither of us particularly liked. (We were married in your hometown, just a year before the priest died.)(story here)

[sovay]

I probably have told you, but the priest who married us had a history of sexual abuse.

I am not sure that I knew, so thank you for telling me. I can see that being very strange.