If you live in New York City and you need to hire some movers, I highly recommend Rabbit Movers. We’ve used them twice now, and they did a great job each time. What makes them unique is that all of their employees are artists or other creative types. If you think that means they’re scrawny and don’t know how to lift heavy objects, you’re wrong. They’re efficient, attentive, careful, and friendly. We decided to splurge a little this time; we paid them not just to move our stuff but also to pack most of it the day before instead of doing it ourselves. It was totally worth it — nothing broke, and they carefully wrapped everything that needed to be protected.

Also, one of the movers on Friday was gay. He first set off my gaydar when I mentioned all the dust bunnies set loose by moving the furniture around, and he responded with a Quentin Crisp quote about dust. Then he walked with me to our new apartment because there wasn’t enough room in the moving truck, and along the way he mentioned his boyfriend.

So I totally endorse these guys.

Sitting here thinking about moves, my mind turns to the craziest move my family ever had. It was when we moved to Tokyo, Japan, in September 1988. We moved there for my dad’s job. I was 14 years old, and my brother was 10.

We moved from our suburban American house into a big Tokyo apartment, and our belongings came over in three stages. First, each of us packed two or three suitcases to go on the airplane with us, filled with all the clothes, valuables, etc. that we would want or need immediately. (I wonder how much the airlines would charge us for that today.) Second, we sent a separate air shipment, which took a week or two — I think this included our dishes, more clothes, other stuff. Finally, there was the rest of our belongings — all of our furniture, everything else — which was shipped by sea.

Oh, and there was also our dog, Blondie, our 2 ½-year-old collie/retriever mix. She got sedated and put into a dog carrier, and she flew in the cargo bay of our airplane along with the luggage. After our 14-hour flight to Narita Airport, her crate came down the conveyor belt along with the rest of our luggage. She barked like crazy when she saw us — she must have been totally confused and scared. But our reunion was brief, because she had to be quarantined at the airport for two weeks, like all imported pets. I’ll never forget her loud, frantic barking as we left her in the quarantine area — almost as if she were saying, “Come back! Please! Don’t leave me here!” We felt so guilty and sad about it.

From the airport we went to our hotel. On our first night in Japan, my dad and my brother and I had dinner at マクドナルド (pronounced ma-ku-do-na-ru-do — McDonald’s). We ordered our food and carried our trays up to the second floor of the restaurant. As we were walking, my dad lost his footing and knocked over his Coke, which spilled everywhere. Isn’t it weird what you can remember sometimes?

The next day, our first full day in Japan, still feeling disoriented and jet lagged, we went to a big furniture rental warehouse where we picked out temporary furniture for all the rooms in our apartment, an apartment that my parents had picked out a few weeks earlier on their own separate trip to Tokyo. We chose kitchen furniture, bedroom furniture, living room furniture. I was in no mood to pick out furniture for my bedroom.

School started two or three days after we arrived. The American School in Japan is on the outskirts of suburban Tokyo, and my brother and I traveled there from the hotel for two or three days. We were late to school almost every day. Then the temporary furniture arrived at our apartment and we moved there and settled in.

Two weeks later, we drove back out to the airport to get our dog. We were so excited to see her, and vice versa. On the way back to the apartment, we let her have a few licks of ice cream. Having our dog in our apartment made the place begin to feel like home.

For the next two months we got acclimated to life in Japan. My brother and I figured out how to get to school by train. I tried out for the Fall Play (M*A*S*H — I got the part of Radar) and made friends. Emperor Hirohito was dying of cancer, and it rained almost every day.

In early November we performed M*A*S*H. The following weekend, we had the cast party at a friend’s house. And when I got home that evening… there in our apartment was our furniture. Our real furniture. It had finally arrived from across the ocean.

I had gotten so used to our rental furniture, and those two months had passed so slowly — as time does when you’re experiencing brand-new things every day — that I had almost forgotten it was coming. I don’t know if I can convey how wonderful it is to be living overseas and to suddenly have your own bed, your own desk, your family’s own comfy couch and living room furniture show up from seemingly out of nowhere.

Anyway… tomorrow we’re just moving nine blocks, not half a world away. But it’s neat to reminisce.

I’m working from home today as our movers pack up our apartment for tomorrow’s move. I’m thinking about the place we’re moving into, and I’m also thinking about the place we moved out of before we moved into the place we’re about to move out of. If you think about it, every place you ever lived in your life is linked, one to another. All the apartments and houses and dorms. If I try, I can probably visualize almost all of my moves — except for a few, such as moving in and out of dorms every year during college, which tend to run together (especially when I moved in and out of the same place more than once). There are some weird linkages, too, such as the time I moved almost all my stuff into storage while biding time at my parents’ house for a few months. But really, I can probably visualize everything all the way back to the earliest move I remember, when I was three years old and we moved from Queens into the New Jersey suburbs.

The 2010 U.S. Census has me peeved.

Matt and I received our census form in the mail yesterday. But we’re not supposed to fill it out. The census is supposed to be a snapshot of the U.S. population as of April 1, 2010, and by April 1, we will have moved to a different apartment.

So what’s the big deal? Can’t we just fill out the census form for our new apartment? Yes, but… we’re moving into an apartment on a college campus — one of the perks of Matt’s job. And if you live in a university residence, you don’t fill out the regular census form; instead, you fill out the Individual Census Report. The Individual Census Report is for people who live in dorms, nursing homes, shelters, and other group residences. Unlike the regular form, which is for everyone in the same household, the Individual Census Report can accommodate only one person — hence the name. So everyone fills out their own form, and there’s no way to indicate whether you’re in a relationship with someone. Therefore, there’s no way for me and Matt to tell the Census Bureau that we’re in a relationship together.

I think this is really stupid. I’m disappointed and annoyed, because I was looking forward to having me and Matt counted as a same-sex couple, which the Census Bureau is doing for the first time this year. Either the Census Bureau assumes that nobody in a university residence, nursing home, or shelter is married or in a relationship, or it doesn’t care. I think this is dehumanizing to people in nursing homes and shelters, and it’s a dumb assumption about people in university housing. Why doesn’t my relationship count to the census? I’m unfortunately used to my relationship being treated differently because I’m in a same-sex couple, but to be treated differently because we’ll be living in university housing? That’s ridiculous.

That was the below-the-fold headline on a newspaper page featured for a split second on 30 Rock last night (right below “TRACY’S CLAPS-GIVING YAY HA-RADE!”). We are chronic DVR pausers, so we saw it. Oddly, I googled the phrase just now and nothing came up:

I am working from home today and I’m taking a lunch break and I have the screen paused on the TV, so I know that’s the exact wording. I found one reference to it online with the wrong wording, but that’s it. It kind of weirds me out that there are no other references. (Until this post goes live, I guess.)

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing my college men’s chorus, the Virginia Glee Club, perform in Manhattan as part of their spring break Tour of the Northeast. It was a great concert, and I got to meet a couple of other alumni and chat with both my old conductor John Liepold, who was in the audience, and the current conductor, Frank Albinder, whom I met the last time the group was in NYC.

The thing that really struck me — which I learned from talking with Frank — is how much gayer the group is now than it was when I was a member in the ’90s.

When I joined the group in 1993, I was very closeted. I didn’t even self-identify as gay, and I wasn’t sexually active; I knew I liked guys, but I chose to put off dealing with it until some undefined future moment. Joining the Glee Club was, in part, a way to seek refuge from these issues.

It might seem odd to have escaped my sexuality by joining a group of men who sing. Years later, when I would tell my gay friends about this group, they would say something like, “A bunch of guys who sang and they called themselves a glee club and they weren’t gay? Yeah right, LOL.” But it was true. There had apparently been a time in the ’70s and ’80s when there was a larger gay presence in the group, but when I joined, there was only one gay guy whom I knew of. Club was pretty masculine — at heart, it was a brotherhood of song, a throwback to nineteenth-century male fellowship. We had a house and threw parties and got drunk and people farted on the tour bus and talked about hooking up with girls. Being in Club was one of the first times I felt truly accepted by a group of straight guys, and it was the closest thing to a fraternity I’ve ever experienced. I’ve often thought that I must have needed to go through that kind of male bonding experience, to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance from other guys, before I could begin to deal with being gay.

I continued to sing with Club during law school, and by the time I graduated in 1999, I had come out, and there were four other gay guys in the group besides me, two of whom were out, and two of whom were closeted. I knew things had begun to change in the fall of 1998, when we were riding the tour bus back to Virginia from a trip to New York. The ride home was always “story time,” when anyone who had gotten lucky with a girl during the trip was supposed to talk about it. One of the gay guys and I had gone to a gay club the night before, and he had gotten a little bit lucky there with another guy. And the group encouraged him to tell his story. He was too embarrassed to tell it, so I told it for him, and most of the guys cheered. It was such a weird, different, heartening moment.

And then last night, Frank, the current conductor, told me that gay guys are now a substantial minority of the group. He said that out of about 45 to 50 guys, about 10 to 15 of them are gay. And several of the last few presidents of the group have been gay. So we’re talking about a much more gay-friendly Glee Club than the one I was in — not that Club was hostile to gays when I was in it; it’s just that everyone was assumed to be straight, and a gay guy would naturally feel uncomfortable coming out in such a hetero environment.

So things have apparently changed in Club. It’s tempting to see this as a result of growing societal acceptance of gay people in the last decade. But I bet it’s also due to the random evolution that occurs in any group with a changing membership. I imagine that as Club has come to contain more gay people — particularly in some key leadership roles — other gay people have felt more comfortable joining. I don’t think it’s an issue of more people in the group being out, because I don’t really know anyone who was in Club with me who has come out since graduating, except for a couple of guys (it’s possible that there are more, of course — I don’t keep in touch with very many alums); I think it’s simply that more gay guys join Club today. Gay guys are still a minority, but, again, a much more sizable one than when I was in the group.

I can’t help but compare this with the issue of race. I think there was only one black student in the group in all my time in Club. (He was also the one out gay guy in the group when I joined; coincidence, or not?) I often wondered whether the reason virtually no black students tried out for Club was because they didn’t see any other black guys in the group, or because the music we sang was too “white.” Most black students who sing at UVa are in a chorus called Black Voices, in which virtually all of the members are black, and in which the repertoire is largely gospel and spiritual music. Meanwhile, the Glee Club has always included a few gospel numbers in its repertoire, but I often felt that these numbers shone an awkward spotlight on our near-uniform whiteness. (Most of the non-white members have been Asian. And this is also true of the gay men’s chorus in which I sing today.)

Anyway — Frank and I were discussing the gay issue after the concert last night, and I said, “Wow, I was in Club in the wrong decade.” He said, “Well, it’s not like the gay guys are all having sex with each other.” But that’s not quite what I meant. What I was thinking was, would I have come out sooner had there been more gay guys in my Glee Club?

I’ll never know. But it’s great to see how much things have changed.

I don’t know what my problem is, but I’ve been having regular bouts of insomnia for the last few months. I’ll sleep fine for a few weeks, and then I’ll have a night or a couple of nights where I can barely sleep at all. This seems to be one of those weeks — Sunday night I couldn’t fall asleep until about 4:00. On Monday night I slept fine, but then last night I spent most of the night awake. I didn’t look at a clock once, because clock-watching supposedly just stresses you out when you’re trying to fall asleep, so I don’t know exactly when I slept, but I know I did for a little bit, because I remember dreaming. But I didn’t sleep much. It was a peaceful insomnia, though. For the most part I lay in bed, not feeling particularly tired but feeling very relaxed.

Except today I feel like crap.

I’m pretty sure one of the culprits is our bed. Our bedroom is tiny, not really big enough for a queen-size mattress, so we have a full-size. And the mattress sucks — it’s basically poor-quality foam, so anytime one of us moves around in bed, the other one feels it. There are plenty of nights when I sleep fine, though, so I don’t know.

At any rate, we’re moving next week (same neighborhood, a few blocks away), and our new bedroom is big enough for a larger bed. Our new queen-size bed, with a more stable mattress, is already set up there. I look forward to sleeping on it.

The Oscars are always my favorite TV special of the year, regardless of how good or bad the ceremony is. It makes me feel connected to the golden age of Hollywood — although this has been less so in the last 15 years, as icons have passed away and we’ve lost our living links to that time. (There are so few of those icons left: Lauren Bacall, Mickey Rooney, Kirk Douglas, Doris Day…) I always enjoy the historical film montages by Chuck Workman, such as this one from 1994, called 100 Years at the Movies:

As for last night’s show — it had its moments, but the directing sucked. In no particular order:

— Terrible camera angles. The camera shot kept changing at exactly the wrong moment. Someone would be making a presentation or a speech, and suddenly the camera would cut to a sideways shot of the person. I want to see the speaker’s eyes — I don’t need to see him or her from the side. And when several actors came out to pay tribute to John Hughes, the camera stayed on a wide shot from an overhead angle so we couldn’t see anyone’s faces.

— The “In Memoriam” segment: for the second year in a row, we missed the first few people in the montage because the camera lingered on the screen in the auditorium rather than cutting to the actual feed of the montage. Really — after screwing this up last year, it happened again? And I don’t like seeing someone perform during the montage; just use instrumental music so I can think about the people who have died instead of about James Taylor.

— Terrible pacing; a winner would be walking off the stage, and there would be a full four or five seconds of music before the announcer said the name of the next person coming out. Four or five seconds is a long time on a TV show. I kept thinking they were having technical difficulties.

— Worst of all: the god-awful individual tributes to each of the Best Actor/Best Actress nominees. It takes forever, and we’ve already been watching for more than three hours. I know who these people are — just show film clips and hand out the awards! As a commenter elsewhere said, “Take the most uncomfortable, fawning, vapid wedding toast you’ve ever endured, and multiply by 1000.” They did this last year and it didn’t work then, either. It needs to go.

There were some good things about the show. Although Neil Patrick Harris’s song wasn’t memorable and he seemed to be struggling with it (I think he stepped in at the last minute for Martin Short?), and although the original score/dance montage was just… bizarre, an Oscar telecast just isn’t an Oscar telecast without cheesy production numbers. They seemed like throwbacks to the Debbie Allen days, and I liked them.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what was up with the woman who pulled a Kanye during the short-documentary speech, here’s an explanation.

Now to add some stuff to my Netflix queue. Among other things, I’m going to give The Hurt Locker another try.

My old college men’s chorus, the Virginia Glee Club, is apparently blogging its way through its spring break Tour of the Northeast. This brings back memories. My Glee Club spring break tours (rolls, as we called them) were some of the best moments of my life.

I’ll be seeing Club here in NYC on Tuesday night. Can’t wait.

Okay, this is fascinating. In a new publication called The Jewish Review of Books, a writer named Michael Weingrad asks, why is there no Jewish equivalent of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis?

So why don’t Jews write more fantasy literature? And a different, deeper but related question: why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Christian? Why no Jewish Lewises, and why no Jewish Narnias?

Weingrad has garnered some criticism for this essay, because his argument is circular: he either ignores existing Jewish fantasy writers (Michael Chabon, for one) or he excludes their work from the definition of fantasy (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Siegel and Shuster). Basically, he’s saying, why aren’t there more Jewish writers of Christian allegorical fantasy?

That’s like asking, why don’t more rock bands play classical music? The answer is (1) because then they wouldn’t be rock bands, and (2) some of them are playing the equivalent of classical music — music that is complex, structured, melodic — but you refuse to see it as classical music because it doesn’t fit your definition of it.

Similarly, Abigail Nussbaum critiques Weingrad:

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with introducing Jewish window dressing to traditionally non-Jewish genres… but that’s not Jewish fantasy, and Weingard… does not seem to acknowledge this, or the fact that… there are already plenty of Jewish writers producing the kind of fantasy he’s talking about.

In Weingrad’s defense, I think he means his essay to be not a polemic but an open-ended exploration. Here is one of his own answers as to why there aren’t more Jewish fantasy writers:

[W]e should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

Another blogger, Samuel Goldman, agrees with him:

In the first place, the landscape of most fantasy novels is essentially the numinous forest of the Teutonic Dark Ages. It is not so much a Christian world as a world on the cusp of Christianity: a pagan Götterdämmerung.

I like this. And “the numinous forest of the Teutonic Dark Ages” is particularly evocative of the possibly antisemitic Wagner, specifically Parsifal or the Ring cycle (speaking of Götterdämmerung). Or perhaps it evokes those other German fantasists, the Brothers Grimm: Hansel and Gretel, say.

But of course, Jewish European folklore has mystical beings and supernatural occurences; Isaac Bashevis Singer was fond of this kind of thing, wasn’t he? And Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay features a golem early on.

Goldman goes on to say:

Jews can, of course, appropriate this setting for literary purposes. But I don’t think it has the same imaginative gravity that it does for Christians. Similarly, the warrior values that animate a lot of fantasy are not traditionally Jewish. One could, I suppose, write a story around around a learned rabbi -– but surely that would not be as interesting as one focused on knights, errant wizards, and chieftains of mounted hordes.

One of his commenters disagrees, pointing out that biblical history contains numerous Jewish warriors. But, I say: what about those wizards? What’s more stereotypically Jewish than a scholar of ancient lore who casts ingenious, mysterious magical spells to make up for his physical weakness? Isn’t Merlin kind of Jewish? Isn’t Gandalf kind of rabbinical?

Going back to Abigail Nussbaum:

Weingard touches only lightly on the real-world factors that discouraged Jews from exploring the fictional avenues that Tolkien and Lewis did. To put it bluntly, there is no way that a Jewish writer working in the early decades of the twentieth century could have produced The Lord of the Rings, a work steeped in a yearning for a lost pastoral world that Jews, who have for various reasons tended to congregate in urban and commercial centers, would have had little or no experience of.

I don’t necessarily agree with this: Fiddler on the Roof and, again, the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer are surely “steeped in a yearning for a lost pastoral world.” But her larger point is valid: “A Jewish Narnia… will be nothing like Narnia.”

Another reason Weingrad says there are so few Jewish fantasy writers is because Jewish philosophy doesn’t contain a very strong concept of good vs. evil, or dualism:

In general, Judaism is much warier about the temptation of dualism than is Christianity, and undercuts the power and significance of any rivals to God, whether Leviathan, angel, or, especially for our purposes, devil. Fantasy literature is often based around conflict with a powerful evil force—Tolkien’s Morgoth and Sauron and Lewis’s Jadis and the White Witch are clear examples—and Christianity offers a far more developed tradition of evil as a supernatural, external, autonomous force than does Judaism, whose Satan (or Samael or Lilith or Ashmedai) are limited in their power and usually rather obedient to God’s wishes.

Or, as Ross Douthat puts it:

Tolkien’s Sauron makes sense in a Christian universe; he makes less sense in a Jewish one.

I think that’s rather brilliant.

(Speaking of Douthat, I found out about this whole discussion through his blog post, and now I’m kind of curious about a sci-fi writer he mentions: China Miéville, who apparently writes novels that are “a kind of Marxist critique of Tolkien.” I don’t know if I’ll get around to reading him, but that idea intrigues me. I like the idea of literature that comments on other literature. I guess I’m a fan of postmodernism.)

[via Tim]

This led me to — Jesus Christ — this, and this, and, finally, this, which I enjoyed reading because I’ve always liked Choire. Background on Sally Quinn here.

Part of me is laughing my head off at this whole thing, part of me is shaking my head at it, and part of me wishes I could get the last 15 minutes of my life back.

Jesus, it’s been snowing nonstop for more than 24 hours. There have been very light periods and pretty heavy periods, but precipitation has been falling since early Thursday morning.

I love falling snow. I admit that I might feel differently if I had to shovel it or drive in it, but living in a Manhattan apartment building I don’t have to deal with any of that, and since I can telecommute I can stay at home and watch it through the windowpane. The only difficulty is when you’re outside and you have to try stepping on or off a curb without plunging your feet into a few inches of liquidy slush, but that’s not so bad.

I think I like falling snow for the same reason I love autumn leaves: it’s so fleeting.