May 5, 2009

If it is a little difficult to find your way into Holy Nativity Episcopal Church in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, it isn’t because there are too few doors, but because there are so many.

Conventional wisdom holds that when times get bad, people turn to religion. But that’s not the case in religion publishing. Like other business executives in the current economic doldrums, religion publishers are cutting expenses in the face of declining sales.

I got this problem. There’s this guy I want to be better friends with. We’ve been out with other people for drinks, talked at professional events and had a few laughs. But when I ask him out on a man-date (strictly defined: lunch or drinks after work) he’s always busy. Should I take a hint or try some other approach?

The world’s most popular rock band lives in constant contradiction. As U2 itself put it in the 1988 hit “God Part II”: “I don’t believe in riches, but you should see where I live.” The group at times proclaims Christ with power and passion, but it seems equally capable of cunning calculation. In 2004, U2 sold Apple the rights to “Vertigo,” which was subsequently played to death on iPod ads. While the hit invoked higher love (“The girl with crimson nails has Jesus ’round her neck”), it foundered from its ties to a ubiquitous gadget.

The romantic drama Two Lovers is the perfect small movie. James Gray and his co-writer, Ric Menello, were inspired by Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights” and especially by the exquisite 1957 movie version by Luchino Visconti.

In Visconti’s version, Marcello Mastroianni plays the restless young man who falls passionately in love with a woman he meets on the street (Maria Schell). Emotionally, she’s out of his reach, in thrall to an absent lover to whom she’s waiting to be reconciled.