The National and Madmen Grow Up

What the National’s new record, High Violet and Madmen have in common

This past May The National released their new, highly anticipated album, High Violet once again impressing critics almost across the board, including The New York Times and Pitchfork (seriously, wow!) The Ohio based-currently-from-Brooklyn-band, has orchestrated some of their darkest music yet, as singer Matt Berninger throats chilling poetic melodies about sorrow, love, and the not-quite-so-darkly-imagined-reality of modern adulthood. “Sorrow found me when I was young,” Berninger writes, “Sorrow waited, sorrow won,” and you get the sense from his loosely flowing images and words that this is a man grappling with something gone wrong. On “Afraid of Everyone” Berninger goes so far as to say that, “I’m afraid of everyone,” and “I don’t have the drugs to sort it out.” On their single, “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” Berninger writes in the chorus that, “I still owe money/to the money/to the money I owe,” lamenting the current financial predicament of modern living. Though it would be foolish to constrain High Violet to a single theme, it would certainly be one concerning grappling with the reality of adulthood.
July 25th is slated to mark the beginning of the fourth season of the also highly critically acclaimed T.V. drama, Madmen. A show that, also based out of New York, gives us a more than terrifying view of what we thought the 50’s/60’s were all about. Shattering our preconceptions of the Cleaver family, what Madmen does great is transcend the boundary from the 60’s to the current, on the one hand making it easy to scoff at the characters misogyny and shortcomings, yet on the other, hitting us where it hurts, because we realize that we are not so different. We may not chain smoke with the tenacity that they do, but our lungs still feel the weight of trying to stay afloat in this world; and we may not have affairs, but it doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, or even act in certain scenarios; and we may not drink whiskey like water, but it doesn’t mean we cope with our problems any better.
Both Madmen and High Violet seem to be expressing characters disillusioned with their situation. It may be their identity, their family life, the stakes at the office, their desire for status or fulfillment; but both are about the hopeless reality of when life doesn’t quite line up like you thought it was going to—and what comes next. The men at Sterling Cooper are not satisfied with their family life, consider work a higher priority, therefore sending them to seek sexual or physical fulfillment elsewhere, leaving their wives emotionally distant, who take it like sick puppies, and man, we have come so far in the past forty years.

So what do these two things, a current album, and a current T.V. show, have to say about the state of the human condition in 2010? Are they both hitting on a dark theme we rarely like to discuss, or bring up? Are our expectations of what we thought the “real world” would be like, slowly crumbling? Have we gotten so independent and idealistic that the very real worlds of bills, parenting, maintaining relationships etc., are not the epic idea of life we had preconditioned ourselves for? Or are these just examples of the rare, and really we are quite content and happy with how things are going?

I think it’s a good possibility. There definitely seems a certain sorrow to it. A certain grappling.

Honesty, Hypocrisy, and Authenticity

It has been years since the scandal of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, four since we found out about Ted Haggard and three months since we witnessed another allegation against Evangelical George Alan Rekers who hired a gay “baggage boy” to do things like well, perhaps more than baggage carrying. There is a page on Wikipedia completely dedicated to a list of recent evangelical scandals of the past century— but these are just the big ones. There are the little ones that you may or may not ever hear about—the ones that happen in our own towns, which are whispered of in rumors like nightmares and a shake of the head. I have been given a second hand witness to two of these in the last four months in my particular city, and it is one thing to see the body count as a number on the bottom of a television—it is another thing to see bodies on your street.

It is easy for us who are obviously better Christians to begin to get angry and even hurry down the road to condemnation. On the one hand, it is our scream for justice, for the abuse and misrepresentation of the gospel we cling to. But on the other hand, while it is easy for us to look down on these people, there is a little part inside of us that squirms when we hear of affairs and rumors of affairs, because we realize we are capable of the same things. The recent affair I gave witness to happened because a man stopped loving his wife for nine years. He found out yesterday she had recently had an affair, and though he got drunk and passed out in a hotel, he awoke to the realization that he had been causing an affair for nine years. It was not just his wife’s hands that were dirty with blood, he checked out a long time ago. He had been having plenty of “emotional affairs” himself.

They have four kids, the ramifications of that alone are astounding. Even if healing and redemption happen, there will be an unbelievable body count.
My girlfriend Laura broke up with me last week. While break-ups are very complicated things, the reasons she listed on her end included “lack of emotional fulfillment,” obviously there was lack of communication as to what those were, and I like most guys, needs things spelled out in bright purple neon letters or I am just hopeless. But, regardless, I dropped the ball, I got lazy, she felt it. I realize now what I did wrong and what I can do better next time I am in a relationship, but this coupled with the previous affair I told you about, woke me up. Because If I do not examine the darkness in my own heart and have the ability to be honest, I am that guy in nine years if nothing changes. I am that guy already.

So the question always seems to come to: why? Why would someone do something like this? And every so often we’ll ask the question, “What do we do with this pandemic?” but not very often, because more than likely we sweep it under the rug, and exclaim “Too bad for them,” thinking that it has very little to do with us. I am suggesting that this is an issue that needs to be looked at, and not just thought about, but thoroughly examined with a huge freaking microscope. This should be a learning experience, because while we’d like to imagine that it could never happen to us, it’s foolish to live in some sort of self-righteous ignorance.

I would suggest that the main reason, especially with regards to Christian circles, is a lack of honesty. In many ways we have created a culture in our churches that breeds American meritocracy and superficiality rather than honest repentance and transformation. This culture bleeds into our own selves and while at first we find ourselves excited to climb the “ministry ladder” we soon find ourselves being to high up and now there is the thought that, “I can’t let people know.” I can’t let people know who I really am because if they found out that I, a leader, did such things, then, what would everyone think?

You know honestly what everyone would think? “Thank God someone here is actually a true Christian!” Have you ever felt yourself in a scenario where the most refreshing sermon or discussion you could hear involved someone stating, “This is what I struggle with, and I need help.” On the inside I weep for joy because I can’t tell you how encouraging it is to hear someone else say that they are struggling human beings too and in need of God’s grace as they stagger their way to repentance and transformation.

I think another reason could be true repentance itself. Maybe we are just pretending to be Christians. Maybe we aren’t. maybe we are those who when we get to heaven, God will say, “I never knew you,” because we are the ones that either think we are tricking God or earning our salvation on our own merits.

The true beauty of the gospel, of what we call the “Good News” is the brokenness of it. It is the broken parts inside of us realizing that we really don’t have it all together. It is coming to the end of ourselves, the ability to be fully honest, naked even, and in our drunken authenticity, find love.

New Article Published!

Check it out here:

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/poverty/blogs/21940-are-we-so-different-from-street-youth

Starting Churches’ as a terrible, Morally Failing Christian

My girlfriend Laura and I went to this bar the other night. It was called The Red Room. They served cocktails and had an image of Che Guevara on the back wall, looking through the patrons onto 200 South. The back of the bar was divided up into neatly sectioned wood panels where they put the alcohol and there were a few small tables, red couches on both sides and a jazz band setting up in the lower left of the bar. When we walked in the door, a hunky man with blonde hair asked us for our ID’s. We, of course, gave them to him. He was wearing a black t-shirt and looking super ripped. But what I noticed more than this was his nametag. It was white on black like Mormon name tags, and pinned to the upper part of his chest. Now, the LDS nametags say this: Your name, followed by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It’s pretty standard. The guys’ nametag at the Red Room said this: Church of the depressed, broken and morally bankrupt. And I about wept for joy because I think that might have been the most beautiful things I heard all day.

You see, moving out to Salt Lake City to start a church should involve have people of strength, people of moral fiber, people of great spiritual Christian character, people who would rather read the bible than watch T.V., who fast three times a week, can bench press a proverbial 300 pounds worth of Kingdom advancing, and I usually do not put myself in this category. I would like to, I really would, and it’s not like I’m not trying, but I really can’t.
I would put the other people who are involved in this church plant as those sorts of people. But not me, and I am really not trying to be like one of those guys who just moans and weeps and tries to outdo you by saying really how terrible he is, “Terrible! Terrible!” I am a terrible person he says, “You don’t even know! Seriously, you don’t even know!”
Oh, we know.

But really I feel vastly under qualified to be a part of anything religious, which is probably why I am a Christian. I have a list of vices a mile long almost all of which I partook in today, which is probably why I felt the need to write this, because I felt guilty and had to get this guilt out somehow, or maybe I’ll feel better by letting everyone know how terrible of a person I am so they will say, “No, you are not a terrible person! You are a great person!” thereby using the same ploy people have used for countless generations, which is the putting down of oneself so that others will build one up.

Since I moved to Salt Lake City to become part of a the church plant, my rate of smoking has doubled, drinking is one the rise, this girl at the coffee shop where I work offered to smoke me up and I almost took her up on it, without a girlfriend here I find myself having more of a propensity towards lustful things, I masturbate, want to look at porn, or do other things, have very little desire to get in tune with God, and I could go on, but you get the point. Not that these things are anything new, they’re daily things, but I find it somewhat ironic that they have all increased since I’ve been here.

So basically when I give into these things I feel like a complete moral failure and wonder why no one has put a restraining order on me from churches or something like that. I also feel like I serve absolutely no purpose, if anything am taking up space, so sometimes I think of the nametags.
And I think how beautiful a church of the depressed, broken and morally bankrupt would be. Not that we couldn’t use some good old transformation, but my transformation looks like shit right now on a line graph, and transformation also takes a very, very, very, very, very, very, long time.

Review Published

Just got an article published on the Jesus Manifesto website,

Check it out: http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/

Dave Eggers new book, Zeitoun, links superb writing with a profound emphasis on Social Justice

“In the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime,” says Cormac Mcmarthy in The Road, and is the quote that opens Zeitoun, the newest project from Dave Eggers. This strict nonfiction narrative account by Eggers is his first, and though different from some of his earlier work, remains equally astounding. Eggers, whose previous work includes What is the What and a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is also the literary mastermind behind McSweeney’s, which spawned such spinoffs as The Believer, Wholphin, and other creative literary venues, all proving that Eggers is more than just a talented writer—but a creator of a whole new genre of writing itself. His wife, Vendela Vida, and he just wrote the screenplay for the recently released film, Away We Go, and Eggers also wrote the screenplay for The Wild Things, released this past year. With, Zeitoun, Eggers picks up a familiar theme apparent in What is the What, and that is a humanitarian theme of justice.
Zeitoun chronicles the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the plight of a man named Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy. Though it is the true nonfiction account of this couple, it reads like a novel. Any research, outside information, commentary etc., is all told through the third person view of Eggers as he chronicles the plight of the Zeitoun’s. While the story centers on this couple, it is also the account of a city and a nation as a whole, a commentary on government, power, and humanity, in the midst of natural disaster. From the very beginning of the story we find out that Zeitoun and his wife Kathy are Muslim. Kathy is a local white southerner, but Zeitoun is an immigrant from Syria who moved to New Orleans in 1994. They run a successful painting company called Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC. Kathy handles the administrative work and Zeitoun, the workers and labor. They have four kids, are well connected and respected amongst friends and clients, and love New Orleans with zeal.
Zeitoun is a hardworking man, stubborn, determined and caring. This plays a huge part in the story as he decides to stay as Katrina approaches. As the storm decimates Katrina and passes, we find a worried Kathy, driven to near insanity as she awaits to hear from her husband. Already the reports are coming in. Of looting, of murder, of rape. But Kathy’s anxious disposition is marked in stark contrast to Zeitoun, who far enough away from the hub of downtown chaos, spends an almost pastoral couple of days paddling around in his canoe, rescuing people, saving dogs, remarking that he had “never felt such urgency and purpose,” and later that “His choice to stay in the city had been God’s will” He has contact with Kathy through one of their rental homes and assures her daily at noon that he is safe.
Fairly soon though, trouble meets Zeitoun as the violence escalates, and more and more armed personnel are sent into the city. And one day, Zeitoun never calls. As far as Kathy knows, he has disappeared. No trace. The phone still works and she calls endlessly, to no avail. Inevitably she fears the worst.
What happens next (Spoiler Alert!) is the heart of Eggers’ work as Zeitoun is shackled and unjustly imprisoned by the U.S. government. He is read no rights, he is read no charges, he gets no phone call. Zeitoun is thrust into a situation reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib. And this is where Zeitoun really works, as it expands into a dense commentary on natural disaster, foreign policy, racism, and governmental authority. But what makes it work is Eggers himself who refuses to engage in any taking of sides. He presents the story as is, and has neither side commentary, nor political agenda infused into the writing. The story tells itself, and Eggers lets the reader feel the rage of circumstance, rather than inserting his own voice.
When asked by Stephen Elliot in an interview for Rumpus, why he chose the story of the Zeitoun’s over others, Eggers remarked that, “their story intrigued me from the start, given that it’s at the intersection of so many issues in recent American life: the debacle of the government response to Katrina, the struggles facing even the most successful immigrants, a judicial system in need of repair, the problem of wrongful conviction, the paranoia wrought by the War on Terror, widespread Islamophobia . . .” Eggers has placed us into a story that is all of a sudden bigger than we could imagine.
Like What is the What, Zeitoun becomes the chronicle of those in the margins, the overlooked. Just as What is the What, examined the life of a refugee Sudanese lost boy by the name of Valentino Achak Dang, Egger’s becomes once again a “voice for the voiceless.” Thought it may not be obvious to a sensory glance, much of Eggers’ work is linked closely to his heart for social engagement and humanitarian work. Zeitoun itself was born out a Mcsweeney’s project entitled The Voice of the Witness Series, a nonprofit book series that “empowers those most closely affected by contemporary social justice. Using oral history as a foundation, the series depicts human rights crises in the United States and around the world.” Such topics in the past have included the world of illegal immigrants, prisoners faced with wrongful conviction, and Sudanese refugees. The Voices in the Storm issue included the Zeitoun’s story and Eggers felt that it was too rich not to be told in full.
Already highly known for his national youth writing centers, 826 Valencia, he continues with such stories as those of Dang and Zeitoun. For both books Eggers set up foundations for Dang and Zeitoun, with all author proceeds from Zeitoun going to the Zeitoun foundation, whose goal is to help in the rebuilding of Katrina and promote respect for Human Rights around the world. For Dang’s foundation an educational building complex was opened that serves 100 students.
826 Valencia is a non-profit tutoring and writing center for students 18 years of age and under and it often times shares the building of a McSweeney’s hub—the one in San Francisco is complete with a pirate store front. He won the TED (technology, entertainment, design) prize for his efforts with Valencia in 2008, all highlighting the creativity behind the writer that is Dave Eggers, showcasing that this is a man who cares about more than simply selling books.
It is refreshing to hear that such a powerful literary figure as Dave Eggers has a heart for the oppressed and the injustice of the world. It is refreshing to hear that it has always been on Eggers heart and that he did not suddenly pick up the “humanitarian banner” once he was famous. In fact Eggers even tried to give away the profits from a Heartbreaking Work (his first big book) but was sued by his agent. Egger’s rejects the literary rock star status and uses his work and platform to preach a message larger than self profit, even though his rejection of money and signing away of royalties caused him to go unpaid for four years.
Zeitoun, like many other endeavors of Eggers, yet again raises his esteem, yet not just as a spectacular writer—but as a proponent of justice in world that is filled with injustice. It seems very few writers have taken to writing about the staggering amount of social issues facing the world today, and it is nice to see a writer as talented as Eggers take up the cause. Perhaps it is just nice to see a writer who cares more about the world as a whole than how well their books sell, or perhaps it is refreshing to hear a story that is both justice oriented and redeeming. Regardless, Eggers has written as book that is equal in both literary and humanitarian merit. Zeitoun is a staggering portrayal of the human condition, human resolve, and the perseverance of hope through tragedy.

Positive and Encouraging K-LOVE?

My grandmother was dying in the room next door. She had sepsis. This was the third time, it wasn’t looking good. I flew in from Salt Lake City the night before to see her one last time.
My grandmother lay in a transported hospital bed, spending her last few days living under hospice care in her own house. The oxygen stuck in her nose like used pixie stick tubes. Her face moved, docile, up and down, soft and even. Every so often she would cry, feel the pain, and my mom would give her light drops of morphine, from a device that looked like a red candy stick. Then she would softly quiet back down.
It was time. We all knew it. It was a good thing.
What was not a good thing was the noise of the radio coming from the room I sat in. I say NOISE for a reason. K-LOVE was on. Do you know this radio station? Positive and Encouraging K-LOVE? Now, you may already think you know what I am about to say, but I’m not going to talk about the um, “quality” of this music station, because that would be purely my subjective, relative opinion which is really no better than yours, right? (Wink).
What I want to discuss is Christian rhetoric. On K-LOVE they were doing their annual, or bi-annual, hell maybe weekly, pledge drive. And these were the words they kept saying over and over: Twenty dollars a month! You can save a life! Make an impact across the world! You can introduce people to the healing power of Jesus Christ! If you just obey God and believe, he will bless you!
For only twenty dollars I can do all these things? I wish I would have known sooner. For one hundred dollars I could have saved FIVE people’s lives already!
I apologize for the sarcasm. I do not want to be divisive, nor do I want to be unkind. But, I can’t help myself. I am sick of Christian rhetoric. I am sick of people telling me that if I “have faith” and “obey” then God will bless me. I am sick of people asking for money for causes that I honestly don’t know if Jesus would support. Would Jesus support Christian Radio? Would he pledge a monthly twenty dollars? Would he support golf fundraisers and chicken cordon bleu banquets for the homeless?
Maybe. But at the same time, it’s hard for me to see.
Now if you listen to K-LOVE regularly, I think it is only fair for them to ask you to support the ministry and what they are doing. So fine. I just have a problem with how they ask. It reminds me of penance. It makes the gospel into a little more than a clever way to raise money. Now, if they came on and said, “Listen, we want to do this without commercials and we’d like your support because we really believe what we are doing is making a difference. If you give, it would help us out a lot.” I would be okay.
The fact is, though they are lightly guilting people into it. I say “lightly” because the way people talk on that radio station reminds me of way-to-happy televangelists and vacuum salesman. It’s hard to get too mad at them, but way-too-happy people scare me. I am skeptical of them. I don’t know how anyone gets that happy.
Yet it seems as if many times, organizations, not just K-LOVE, use Christian jargon to promise something to their donators. A promise that I would say more often than not, gives donators false hope.
My family loves K-LOVE. Whenever I go home, it’s there. Staring at me, waiting for me to walk in the door so it can push my buttons. And generally I forget all about K-LOVE when I leave, until I return, and there it is.
So I listened to these two hosts go on and on. And on and on and on. Until I got so sick to my stomach I wished I was watching the 700 club—and that’s saying a lot. Every two minutes they mentioned twenty dollars—twenty dollars, positive and encouraging, save a life, save a life, make a difference, and all I could really wonder is how much this really was making a difference.
Once again, I’m sorry. Please know that I am a hypocrite and I don’t want to engage in bashing because I realize that K-LOVE is probably better than the most, so granted.
Really K-LOVE was just a reminder to me how much we want to use the gospel to serve our own means. How we will manipulate, skew, promise, bless, anything to get people to support whatever cause we are a part of. And if this is part of the Kingdom of Heaven, great. But really it just seems like we can never get away from using the Gospel, scripture, etc. to back our own personal agendas.
I guess this is life. I do it. Almost every day.
But I wish this was not so. And maybe the darkness is in my heart rather than K-LOVE’s. Probably. But, I would like to see a Christian rhetoric that is based on more than cheap commercial sales gimmicks.
So while I sat in my grandparent’s living room, listening to K-LOVE, I finally got up and went to my grandma’s room. I decided I’d rather listen to dying woman and her death rattle than stand in a room, K-LOVE blaring, with no morphine to spare me the pain.

No More Poems About Darkness

No more poems about darkness
No more poems about death
The pain that’s left
Drowning, blood,
Your slit wrists,
hanging
No more.

No more poems about love,
about hearts
and dating emotional charts
the backslid kids of yesteryear
cheers.
The fears of our lonely years.

No more rhymes
No more late-night romance chimes and
song and dance moves that end
in nightmare monsoons.

Just you.
and Me.

In the dark
With a pen
And paper
Flicking ink on white
Flying kites on the blue

of living room blankets—
let’s melt beneath
the fabric

and live as lent.
Let’s live as cotton spent molecules
Clinging.

Lets lives as rent
paid in full
the refrigerator whole.

Lets live as if heaven is on earth and the dirt on hearth of the
fireplace—
is slowly burning away.

Let’s live as if we are cowboys
and Indians.
Playing peace in the woods
instead of fighting.

Let’s share a feast,
and eat till the least of our worries is the dishes
in the sink.
And the wine-stained rug beneath the dinner chairs feet.

Let’s meet beneath the dark and hold
the arms of uncertainty
until we are certain,

that the only curtain holding us in
is the fear of a dead litany.

There are giraffes the size of
marshmallows, licking eucalyptus leaves
hanging loosely from the trees,

Eat: This will pass
This is shadow

There are bears the size of
Sunflowers, drinking honey from
tall tipped vases
swallowing sun drops
of springtime
.
Drink: This is temporary
This will pass

There are bees circling like wings in a tornado of
birds. Forming vacuum funnels to carry us into
—.

Be Merry: This will pass
This is ash.

This is dark early morning shadow fog dissipating into morning.

The Hard Hearted

The Hard Hearted
Levi Rogers

There is a rock in my chest
Just next to my lungs
And when I reach inside
and touch
I feel only the cold steel
Of an abandoned warehouse.
The arteries in my arms are pumping steel
My veins are petrified petals in a vase:
Feel.
The only thing that could make this harder is a train
Barreling down in repeat. Until
The purple of
this petal becomes
As gray as railroad tracks.

When you hardened Pharaoh’s heart
Did he have any choice?
And when you reached inside and turned it cold
Was there anything to do but fold,
and let it go.
When he faced the Israelites
And more than wanting them to stay he just didn’t care at all.
And when his army died did he even blink an eye, or was the sea that covered them as red and dense as
the rock inside your chest?

Do you harden hearts to make a point?

Because there is the distance the size of Russia
between here (my mind) and here (my chest beating muscle)
and it forms like black nights of stars that sparkle planetariums on the
back of my eyelids.

I see pharaoh’s insides wrapped in iron
There’s a bullet proof vest on his ventricles
As Moses fires round after round—to no avail.
And if you lined him up,
Lined me up, only a firing squad would do, and even then (just barely.)
But I hear there’s a man who can turn these ice rocks into warm apple pies
And I’m wondering if you’re this man,
or the man who takes pies to form stones
Lodged like thorns in our bones.
a numb whole in my face that reads, “Insert Bones here” with an arrow.

When you hardened Pharaoh’s heart did you give him any choice?

And if so we’ll shout “escape is futile!” the only hope that’s left is a rock quarry.
Maybe we can find a softer stone.

But on eleven o’ clock on Wednesday night I saw the moon with a halo through the skeleton branches of a tree with the clouds stitched in the sky like patchwork farms. And the only place I want to be right now
Is home.

The Last Station—The Final Days of Leo Tolstoy, What happens when vision becomes more important than love, Saruman meets Mr. Tumnus

“Everything I know I know only because I love”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
This is the quote that opens The Last Station, a film based on the novel by Jay Perini. The Last Station chronicles the final years of perhaps the greatest writer of the 20th century, Leo Tolstoy. Featuring terrific performances by Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, it is a simple film and slightly specialized, but gives us a glimpse into the epic life and marriage Tolstoy had. As the film starts the renowned writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina has achieved an almost celebrity like status—he is followed by paparazzi, asked to bless children, and is the leader of a worldwide Tolstoyan movement, a movement of Christian Anarchism that attempts to spread the spiritual ideas of Tolstoy—mainly love, equality and non-violence—to the larger world. Tolstoy (played by Christopher Plummer, a.k.a Saruman) is trying to live out his final days in peace at the Yosana Polyana Estate, but is in constant strife with his wife, Sonya (a wonderful Helen Mirren) and family, as he continues to disown all wealth and possessions including his inheritance. Sonya wants the copyright to his books, therefore securing an inheritance for her and her family, but another character, Tolstoy’s right hand man and leader of the Tolstoyan movement, Vladimir Chertkov (played Paul Giammati) wants him to sign the copyright into public domain to progress the movement of radical love and passive non-violence. This is essentially the conflict of the story as Tolstoy is torn between two opposing sides, one side of him wishing to disown his privilege, power, and wealth; and the other wishing to love and care for his family.
His wife, Sonya, has never been easy to live with. She is drama induced, slightly manic, spies on Tolstoy, and occasionally falsely poisons herself for attention. She doesn’t like the way he dresses (like a goat-herder) and despises the way in which people look up to him (as does he). She causes Chertkov to remark at one point, “If I had a wife like you I would have blown my brains out. Or gone to America.” Chertkov on the other hand, tries to expand the Tolstoyan movement worldwide. He is the leader of a Tolstoyan commune a few miles away, but has taken the words of Tolstoy and transferred them into rules, essentially turning Tolstoy’s thoughts into a legalist structure. The commune therefore becomes a strict religious structure (ironic enough considering the works and thoughts of Tolstoy regarding religious structures) and we begin to see that Chertkov cares more about the “vision” of Tolstoy than those around him. Chertkov seems to be, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “More in love with his vision of community than the people around him.”
The main character of the film however, and entry point into the Tolstoy family, is a young man named Valentin Bulgakov (played by James Macavoy) who becomes Tolstoy’s private secretary. He too is torn between the wife and the Chertkov, as both Sonya and Chertkov use him for their own gain. Sonya wants information about the supposedly new will Tolstoy and Chertkov are writing up, and Chertkov uses Valentin to gain information on Sonya and her meddling. Also complicating Valentin’s life, is the fact that he is in love with a girl Masha, (Kerry Condon) a member of the commune, who is more free-spirited than its rules allow. Their relationship is another source of trouble for Valentin because sexual relations are not allowed in the Tolstoy community (testing his ideals and values), but really their relationship is a window into Valentin’s struggle to understand the words of Tolstoy as compared to the man himself.
Valentin is an aspiring writer and thinker who spends time with Tolstoy each day, attempting to learn from him, yet discovering a dissonance between the man of Tolstoy and the movement under him. As Valentin talks with Tolstoy about the influence his work, Tolstoy himself remarks that “I am not a very good Tolstoyan”
Eventually Tolstoy is so fed up with the drama induced by both his wife and Chertkov, that he leaves in the middle of the night to spend the rest of his days far away in peace. He makes it as far one of the last train stops in Russia before getting ill and spending his last days dying in this remote station (hence the title).
While the movie is a bit overacted and slightly too dramatic, what it presents most accurately is the disconnect between love and vision. Like Bonhoeffer remarked, every character is more in love with his or her particular vision than the people around them. The words of Tolstoy are made into a system and the system becomes more important than the individuals themselves. Tolstoy himself is merely used for his celebrity and power. The community and family of the Polyana estate crumble as each character ceases to love one another and instead focuses on his or her personal gain (Valentin perhaps being the only exception). We see the inspirational and progressive vision of Tolstoy preceding love itself, which, as Tolstoy remarked, is the highest meaning of life.
Another strong part of the film is the inherent fallibility of every character. We see the nobility of Sonya marked in contrast by her greedy and annoying personality, we see the yearning of Chertkov and his vision for a Tolstoyan world of peace and equality, in contrast to his devious schemes; we see the strength of Valentin in contrast to his at times, cowardice; and for Tolstoy himself we see the greatness of a brilliant man marked in contrast by his inner turmoil and his outward hypocrisy (Tolstoy, while living poorer than most aristocracy of his stature, still lives rather comfortably). Unfortunately, the film never delves too deep into the ideas of Christian Anarchism and spirituality that Tolstoy embraced, but nonetheless it is a brilliant portrayal of the struggle between ideas and their reality.
The Last Station is a true Tolstoyan film in the sense that each character grapples with the ideas of marriage, meaning, fame, wealth, and their own imperfection. It is a simple film, but aesthetically pleasing, thought provoking and with enough humor to leave you not feeling quite as depressed as one might, after having read, say, The Death of Ivan Illyich. If nothing else, it makes you think about the fatal importance we place on the “good things” of community, equality, peace and so forth which, really, mean nothing if love is not present.

My Top Ten Albums of the Decade

Radiohead-In Rainbows

David Bazan-Curse Your Branches

mewithoutyou-Catch for Us the Foxes

Thrice-Alchemy Index

Arcade Fire-Funeral

Brand New-The Devil and God are Raging Inside of Me

Bright Eyes-Cassadaga

Bon Iver-For Emma

The Decemberists-Picaresque

Explosions in the Sky-The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place

The Top 5 Lyricists of All Time (According to Experts)

1. Nickelback

2. Creed

3. DMX

4. Lady Gaga

5. That one guy who won American Idol

Reasons Why I want to be a Pirate

1. Keira Knightley

2. Gold

3. Rum

4. Johnny Depp

5. Treasure

6. Keira Knightley

Literary Things I like to Do

• Use the word "Ironical" in pretentious literary conversations

• Write comments on my book member groups novel's that say, "Wish this had more vampires in it."

• Keep a copy of Faulkner's Absalom next to Confessions of a Shopaholic.

• Ask my professor what the symbology of James Joyce's Ulysses is.