Lord, have mercy

The congregation at St. John's in Atlanta near-unanimously chose to call Brad Schmeling as their pastor in 2000. He told the congregation he was gay; he told the bishop he was gay. That was cool. Gay people are welcome to serve in the ELCA.

He also told everybody that if he met a special someone, he'd tell them about that, too. When he did, he did.

His congregation, which adores him, celebrated his commitment to his partner with a big ol' party. Then he told the bishop. And the bishop did his job and filed charges, because they violated the rules.

Gay pastors are allowed to serve, as long as they remain celibate. Because pastors have to remain celibate outside marriage, and gay people can't get married. See the beauty?

No, neither do I.

It's a sucky rule, but rules in the ELCA are voted on in General Assembly by clergy and laity alike. Last time around, rules that would have covered Pr. Brad and his partner passed a simple majority, but they needed a super-majority. It'll happen eventually, thanks to the brave witness of people like Pr. Brad and the congregation of St. John's.

Their actions are civil disobedience in its purest sense: I will openly violate this rule, and I will happily suffer the consequences, just to point out how stupid the rule is.

They're all taking a heeeeuuuuge risk. Pr. Brad could be turned out of ELCA and lose his rostered status as well as his pension, and St. John's could be cast out of ELCA and lose support from the synod. St. John's is like my church, the oldest Lutheran congregation in the city. Their current location is itself a rebuke to hatred and oppression.

If you're a prayin' wo/man, sign up for their prayer vigil.

Oh, dear

This is so embarassing. The lovely and talented MadPriest has given me a shout-out.

Well, that wasn't so bad, but he's added me to his blogroll. Oy. That means I have to, like, keep it up and add more stuff and shit.

I only started because I wanted to blog a mission trip to the Gulf Coast, but I couldn't afford to go, so it's just here.

But Lord knows there's some shit goin' down in my neck of the woods, so I should probably blog on that. Plus, I have a post in mind going beyond George Sanders to all the plummy-voiced British villains of the Golden Era of Hollywood. So there you go.

Overboard (1987)

Overboard is kind of like a mashup of a coupla Preston Sturges movies, with Capra's It Happened One Night thrown in.

The rich person forced into the life of a peasant is like Sullivan's Travels, even though John Sullivan never really has amnesia, but is temporarily out of it due to a blow to the head.

Then there's the spoiled yet spunky gal jumping off the yacht in full evening dress from, uh, Happened, I think. Clearly Edward Herrmann's upper-class twit in a captain's hat is an allusion to Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, only Herrmann's Grant Stayton III is a dickhead, and Vallee's character is actually very sweet, not to mention frugal.

I only got to thinking along these lines because I saw it as part of a double-feature on amnesia, where it followed I Love You Again, in which William Powell's tedious small-town Rotarian gets whacked on the head in the first reel, which cures his amnesia, returning him to his forner personality as a rakish con man, who impersonates the Rotarian on his return home, where he finds his wife ready to divorce his boring ass, and they fall in love all over again. Oh, and of course the wife is played by Myrna Loy, and it was directed by Woody Van Dyke.

I'd also spent most of the day exploring the life and work of Thorstein Veblen. I'd never heard of him before, but a passing reference to him in a Daily Kos diary led, as is the passing reference's wont, to Google, to Wikipedia, to.... Well, Google him y'ownself (I already gave you the link!), but suffice it to say I'd spent hours pondering the uselessness of the idle rich and the beauty of solid craftmanship and the evil of Calvinist thought, which produced the perversion that is Social Darwinism, which continues to fuck up our society to this day.

Canvassing is Hell

You go out knocking on doors, and you run into people you know.

And then you find out people you adored died two years ago.

And you want to die because you weren't there for their funeral.

Life sucks sometimes.

I Love This Dog

I'm going to marry him.

Look at that face. Does he not look like he's ready to start singing, "Nobody knows the trouble I seen...."

And his name is Job. His peoples did good.

God bless him for whatever put that pained look on his face.

Heaven Can Wait (1978)

My stepmom took me to see this movie when it came out, and I'm sure she explained how it was a remake, not of Heaven Can Wait (1943), but of Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

In the years since, I've seen Mr. Jordan, and Heaven a few times, and Mr. Beatty's remake is really well done. He hits all the notes of the original, while fitting the plot neatly into the film world of the then-present. Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin work the adulterous Mrs. Farnsworth and her lover neatly into the murder mystery farces that were then so popular. And should be again.

But anyway, everybody bitches about remakes, but they've been part of the movie picture since the beginning, and this a particularly good one.


And if you haven't seen the original Mr. Jordan, I would highly recommend it. It stars the fabulous Robert Montgomery, the father of the late Miss Elizabeth Montgomery, who we Space Race–Era babies remember as Samantha of Bewitched.

Any devotee of Bewitched or Ms. Montgomery in general can look at that photo on the right and see how much she looked like her daddy. And he was brilliant. It's a crime that he's largely been forgotten.

He started out playing Park Avenue playboys, but he wanted something more, so he took a role in The Big House, as yet another Park Avenue playboy who's been busted big-time, and accepts his fate.

It was his breakout role, and he went on to play an Irish serial killer and a PT boat commander.

He parlayed his stardom and WWII heroism into a chance to direct, and made fucked-up fantastic films like Ride The Pink Horse and Lady In the Lake, the latter innovative for its use of the camera as a substitute for the protagonist.

He was a Republican, but that meant different things back then. He was definitely elitist, if you've read the stories of the formation of the Screen Actors' Guild. But he really had been a PT boat commander, and his post–War work, like that of other pre–War pretty boys like Tyrone Power, belied a new seriousness.

He invented the entire concept of media training for Dwight Eisenhower, and smirked bitterly at the Nixon-Kennedy debate, saying that if Nixon had hired him, he woulda won.

He was probably right. And thank God Nixon didn't hire him.

Montgomery was so much smarter than Karl Rove. Because he loved people.

God love you, George Sanders

Note: Mr. Sanders's birthday was July 3. This is what I get for dallying.

Mr. George Sanders would have been 100 years old today.

I'm a bit fatutzed with TCM for not acknowledging him.

But I would like to remember Mr. Sanders on his birthday. He rocked the house.

He won an Oscar for his role in All About Eve, and rightly so. Who else could deliver lines like, "She's a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts" with such aplomb?

Mr. Sanders was a White Russian.

His family had to flee St. Petersburg during the revolution. He tells a story in his memoirs about his uncle lying in bed with a pistol and having a manservant smear the ceiling with jam so he could shoot the flies that gathered to lap it up. Mr. Sanders felt the communists robbed him of the chance to emulate such voluptuous indolence, so he was a die-hard anti-Communist all his life.

Mr. Sanders got the idea to dip his toe into the theatre because of this cute, red-headed secretary who turned out to be Greer Garson. But he never did like it. Louis B. Mayer got a look at him early in his career and got it in his head that Mr. Sanders could be developed into a leading man. So he set up a lunch meeting.

On the appointed day, Mr. Sanders got so caught up working on a telescope he was building that he blew off the lunch. In his later years, he was grateful he hadn't made it, as a character actor can keep working when the bloom of youth has faded.

Everybody quotes his famous suicide note about how bored he was, but he left a second note for his little sister, in which he expressed his fear of becoming incapacitated. He'd had a couple of strokes, and had recently seen his mother and his wife die long, agonizing deaths. He wanted to check out while he could still wipe his own ass, so he did.

Wherever you are, Mr. Sanders, God bless you. I run into lots of fans of yours on these here internets. You are still loved.