Some regrets, no apologies.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

So there's that verse in Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'," where he sings about the valley vampires moving West on Ventura boulevard, which strikes me as the touch that made the song better than a proto-"Meet Virginia" listing of quirks and failures between some guy and girl. A few layovers in LAX aside, I've never spent any time in Los Angeles, but "Free Fallin'" more or less defines it in my imagination: a harsh reception for hopeful innocents, some regrets, no apologies, and no particular depth.



And so I'm not sure if John Darnielle had any particular geographic setting in mind for "Damn These Vampires," the opening track on All Eternals Deck, but its muscle-car-in-a-Western imagery reminds me of the vampiric Los Angeles I pieced together from Tom Petty and, later, Joss Whedon. The press materials for All Eternals Deck describe it as a sort of cartography of hope and despair, and the opening song on the album hits a really unusual admixture of the two: the narrator's fighting his way forward, for no great reason, in a terrible and destructive life someone else has put him in:

feast like pagans, never get enough
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
and when the sun comes try not to hate the light
someday we'll try to walk upright

crawl till dawn on my hands and knees
god damn these bite marks
deep in my arteries

crawl till dawn on my hands and knees
god damn these vampires
for what they've done to me

It's a great opening track for this album.

Starting on Jenson.

“The gospel tells about Jesus as the future, and in doing so impresses him on the hearers as a future for which they may live, calls up and evokes the coming Lord as the Lord of their present. Therefore, the gospel can never be only statements about Jesus; the gospel depends on the creative, future-evoking power of language. Of course, our ordinary language — whether of words, gestures, purely didactic pictures, or whatever — is itself more than descriptive, and will, therefore, often suffice for the telling of the gospel. But the church seeks to intensify the future-pointing power of its talk about Jesus; as a result, the church finds itself singing, rhyming, depicting, dancing, and playing his story.”

-Robert Jenson, “Language and Time.” Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (4)

Essays in Theology of Culture is my first attempt to get into Robert Jenson's work. So far I'm finding a lot to like.

Tarantino, honor, morality.

FLG's trying to get ahold of Tarantino's major theme as a filmmaker, and settles on "savoring the moment you have with the people around you because, well, they might kill you the next second." I don't think this is quite right. There are all sorts of reasons that Tarantino likes these strange conversations that lead up to moments of intense violence, but they're not ends in themselves. FLG's right that the juxtaposition of trivial topics and looming violence serves to raise tension to unbearable levels, but the tension is the goal, not the moments leading up to it.

And FLG's missed the other thing in Pulp Fiction, which is that the arguments -- about foot massages, or what it feels like to kill a man, or the ethics of tipping waitresses -- these conversations reveal things about the characters that explain their actions in later scenes. Tarantino's scripts are really dense in this way. (Pulp Fiction is a good read in script form.)

Tarantino's writing has always made sense to me as a study of codes of behavior. Reservior Dogs is perhaps most clear on this point: every character has a different approach to the idea of honor among thieves, and, as I said before, you can get figure out the characters' positions on honor from the conversation about tipping in the first scene, though on a first viewing it might not be clear that this is what going on. Likewise, Kill Bill focuses on codes of honor, revenge, and obligation from Asian cinema.

I'd argue (and I'm not the first to do this) that the main thing standing between Tarantino and greatness is that he's interested in film-based codes of behavior rather than morality.