This is marriage equality week at the Supreme Court: the Court hears arguments on Prop 8 on Tuesday, and on DOMA Section 3 on Wednesday.

I’ve been paying lots of attention to these cases, of course. Matt and I are getting married this year, so we will be directly, concretely affected by the DOMA decision. In fact, I can’t think of another Supreme Court case during my lifetime that has had the potential to affect me so concretely and directly. Lawrence v. Texas affected me symbolically as a gay person, but it didn’t affect me directly, since I already lived in a state where gay sex was legal. This is different. It’s a weird, cool feeling.

It’s interesting that depending on where you live, you may be paying more attention to one case than the other. Gay Californians are likely paying more close attention to the Prop 8 case, although they are the only ones who will likely be affected by both the Prop 8 and DOMA cases.

I don’t think the Court is going to issue a broad, nationwide right to marriage equality. It has never overturned so many state laws at the same time. Roe v. Wade overturned at least 30 states’ laws on abortion; Loving v. Virginia overturned 16 states’ laws banning interracial marriage; Lawrence v. Texas overturned 14 states’ laws banning sodomy. Currently 41 states ban same-sex marriage.

It’s too early to tell what the Court will decide at the end of June, since we haven’t even had the oral arguments yet. But it seems most likely that the Court will get past the standing issue in DOMA (there’s an issue over whether the parties have proper standing before the Court in the first place, but I don’t think it will be a problem) and overturn it on federalism grounds. If the Court can get past the standing issue in the Prop 8 standing issue, I think it will find a way to strike down Prop 8 without affecting any other states.

No matter what happens, though, marriage equality is coming to California. If the Court upholds Prop 8, California will probably hold another referendum in 2016. (I don’t think marriage proponents would risk a referendum in 2014 — midterms are when all the crazies come out.)

And it’s coming to every other state, too. As Frank Bruni points out today, and as many others have said, and as the polls show, things are moving in one direction, and one direction only. This isn’t like abortion, where people argue over whether it’s murder. More and more people are seeing that letting two competent adults decide to get married hurts absolutely nobody. Not only is public opinion chaning; it’s changing quickly, as all the arguments against it fall apart like so many paper tigers.

In that case, why would the Supreme Court be so reluctant to overturn so many state laws at once? Because the Court cares about its reputation. The three or four conservative activists have no problem angering the public by twisting the law to overturn democratic decisions (see Citizens United, Obamacare, gun regulation, Bush v. Gore). But the others, despite what they might feel personally, do have qualms.

So I think we’ll see halfway, moderate, but hugely important decision in favor of more equality in this country rather than less. At least five, maybe six justices. Maybe even seven. (Or even eight – I could see Thomas being offended by DOMA on federalism grounds. Scalia will be a holdout no matter what.)

But that comes in June. This week are the oral arguments. Tuesday and Wednesday will be fascinating.

I did it on the plane yesterday on the way home from a business trip: I watched Brave, thereby completing my quest to see all 53 of this year’s Oscar-nominated films. From A (Adam and Dog) to Z (Zero Dark Thirty), from under 2 minutes (Fresh Guacamole) to 2 hours 49 minutes (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), from nine months ago (Marvel’s The Avengers) to yesterday; from movie theaters to Netflix to Amazon Instant Video to iTunes downloads to Youtube to… “other,” I did it. Foreign films, documentaries, documentary shorts, live-action shorts, animated films, animated shorts…

Of course, it doesn’t take any talent to do this. Watching movies is very passive. Even paying close attention to a movie is mostly passive. It requires no physical exertion, and it probably takes less energy than reading. Yes, a boring movie can be an endurance test, and sometimes you have to read subtitles, but mostly you just sit there and… watch.

I decided relatively late that I was going to try and do this. First it was just going to be all the Best Picture nominees. I thought I’d try some of the other major categories too. But then I saw that @mattiek (former old-school blogger Cows in the Barn) was working his way through all 53 nominees, and I realized it was something I could try to do as well. There were a few days where I watched three or even four feature-length films. I ventured out to some movie theaters I hadn’t been to in ages. But I managed to check everything off my list.

What’s next? I might start working my way through Sight & Sound Magazine’s 2012 critics’ poll of the top 250 films of all time. It’s supposed to be the most respected list of movie rankings, and it only comes out every ten years. Even among the top 10, I’ve only seen two.

At any rate, tonight for the first time I’ll get to watch the Oscars without asking, “What the hell is War Witch?” or “What is Kings Point?” or “That movie looks interesting.” Because I’ve already seen them all.

I’ve been having a bit of Oscar mania this year. Usually I don’t even get a chance to see all the Best Picture nominees, but for some reason I’ve taken on the goal of seeing as many 2012 Oscar-nominated films (and nominations) as I can. For the first time I can remember, I’ve seen all of the Best Picture nominees (and there are nine this year!).

Today I saw The Impossible and The Master, which brings my total to 93 of 122 nominations seen, and 30 of 53 films. And with these two films today, and The Sessions and Flight earlier this week, I’ve knocked off all the acting nominations and have completed 13 of 24 categories total.

I find myself wondering why I’m doing this. I guess at heart I’m doing it because it’s fun. I love going to the movies, and I love watching the Oscars.

I guess part of me also hopes it will make me better somehow. More knowledgable about movies, or smarter, or something. But the thing is — sitting in a theater passively watching a movie takes no talent. To read a tough book you have to be smart, but anyone can watch a movie. So what do I really hope to get out of this? Do I really feel like I’m a more knowledgeable moviegoer? Not really. I haven’t seen most of the films on the Sight & Sound poll of top 250 movies ever. But I want to.

Also, why the Oscar nominees? I’m wary of just checking things off a list so I can say “done.” And the Oscars are fallible. Not everything is great just because it was nominated for an Oscar.

Still, this project is exposing me to movies I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I don’t think I would have seen The Impossible if not for Naomi Watts’s Best Actress nomination. A movie about the death and destruction of the 2004 South Asian tsunami? Count me out. But it turned out to be more engrossing than I’d expected (partly because my family used to go on Asian Christmas vacations when we lived in Tokyo, so it evoked memories for me and made me wonder what would have happened if my family had been in a tsunami). It was a bit hokey toward the end — I found my eyes welling up even though I totally knew my emotions were being manipulated. And I felt guilty that the movie focused on rich Western tourists as opposed to the native Asians who were killed. But I’m still glad I saw it.

I can get something out of a movie even if it’s flawed. Matt often says he can find something worthwhile in even the worst piece of theater; perhaps the same is true for me of movies. Well, maybe not pulp movies like the kind Quentin Tarantino famously used to love seeing: pulp westerns, blaxploitation, kung-fu, horror — those aren’t my thing. Not really into the teenage summer blockbusters either. Actually, maybe it’s just the serious arty-type movies I’m into — movies with a vision.

I guess I’m thinking too much. (Guilty!) As my therapist has been telling me, stop worrying about the point of doing things that seem fun, and just do them.

OK then.

I’ve seen a lot of Oscar-nominated movies lately — it’s that time of year — and something is bothering me.

I can’t seem to tell whether a work of art is good or not. I only know whether or not I liked it.

Does this mean I’m stupid and unsophisticated? Or does it just mean I like to think for myself instead of just accepting other people’s judgments about art? I honestly don’t know.

This year I’m really making an effort to see as many of the Best Picture nominees as I can. As of today I’ve seen eight of the nine (!) nominees: Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty. The only one I haven’t seen yet is Django Unchained. (That last one will definitely be an effort, because I’m not a fan of Quentin Tarantino or Jamie Foxx and it’s 2 hours and 45 minutes long. But I’ve come this far; I can’t give up now!)

Of the eight I’ve seen, here’s what I thought of them, from most enjoyed to least enjoyed:

Lincoln: Enjoyed unabashedly. Entertaining, moving, politically relevant, and fun. Two and a half hours flew by for me.

Argo: A great popcorn movie. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it except that the climax was a little too 1980s Hollywood adventure-y. Did Affleck mean it as an homage to 1980s popcorn movies or did he just get carried away? Either way, it was well made and exciting.

Zero Dark Thirty: Long, but intense, and riveting.

Silver Linings Playbook: Great characters and acting and an enjoyable plot. Parts of it were too conventional and neatly tied up, but I forgave that because I felt affection for this movie. I just liked the people. I guess that’s a good thing. But I can’t tell if it’s Best-Picture-ish. (That sentence kind of sums up this whole blog post.)

Life of Pi: I liked this more than I thought I would. Technically brilliant, narratively exciting. I think Suraj Sharma (the teenage lead) should have gotten an Oscar nomination.

Les Miserables: Didn’t really care for it. Bombastic, and too long. (I’ve never seen the stage production but have never liked the music all that much.)

Beasts of the Southern Wild: This is one I have trouble with. I feel like I was supposed to like it more than I did. But it didn’t really move me. I feel like I was impressed with it rather than liked it.

Amour: I saw this one today and it’s the one I have the most trouble with. Jesus Christ, what a depressing, severe, constricting, claustrophobic film. It’s about an elderly husband and wife, one of whom is slowly dying, and the whole film takes place in their apartment, except for one scene near the beginning. Many of the scenes are long single takes, with the camera staying in one place. At one point I looked at my watch because I got bored, and there was more time remaining than I’d hoped. It picked up a bit at that point, but still. All the critics seem to say this movie is a masterpiece, but I can’t figure out why. This is the one that most makes me wonder if I’m stupid, or at least if I just don’t know enough about film. Why is this a good movie? What do I know after seeing this movie that I didn’t know before? I already knew that growing old and infirm is terrible and ugly; do other people not know that? Is that why the movie is supposed to be good?

My point is this, and it’s true about movies and paintings and books and plays: if I can’t appreciate a work of art unless a critic — and I mean that in the best sense of the term, someone who is knowledgable about the art form and writes well — tells me why it’s good, am I dumb?

As Sondheim wrote, art isn’t easy. But shouldn’t I at least be able to figure out if something is “good” without a critic telling me so?

The reason this bothers me is because art is one of the great joys of life, and if I can’t appreciate a piece of art that I’m supposed to appreciate, am I missing out on one of the joys of life? If you have to be an expert on a particular art form to enjoy something, then what’s the point?

I can’t figure out how to resolve this. It just really bothers me. I have lots of unanswered questions and I’d be curious to know other people’s thoughts about art and “good”-ness.

I recently finished reading The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a new biography by David Nasaw. It’s a good read, and it made me reconsider Kennedy’s pacifism, isolationism, and reputation for “appeasement.”

Previously, all I knew about Joe Kennedy came from biographies I’d read of his sons, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, as well as from random pieces of lore. I knew he was rich, probably antisemitic, smarmy, possibly corrupt, and maybe even a Hitler supporter.

I didn’t realize what a remarkably full life Kennedy led: an industrialist during World War I, a movie mogul during the 1920s, the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom at the beginning of World War II. (He resigned before the U.S. entered the war.) Nasaw debunks the myth that Kennedy was a bootlegger during Prohibition; he finds no evidence of this.

There are two things any biographer of Joseph P. Kennedy must deal with: his antisemitism, and his desire to appease Hitler.

Nasaw clearly shows that Kennedy was antisemitic. Like most antisemites, Kennedy thought that Jews controlled Hollywood and big business and had undue influence in government. He believed, with no evidence, that Jews were pushing FDR toward war. He also thought there was a Jewish conspiracy to tar his good name, even though one of his closest media allies was Arthur Krock of the New York Times — who was Jewish. Kennedy’s antisemitism is a stain on his life that can never be removed.

Nasaw perceptively relates Kennedy’s opinion of Jews to his identity as a Catholic, another religious minority that faced bias in the first half of the 20th century. Sometimes Kennedy wished Jews would do a better job of assimilating into American life, like he thought Catholics had. But when his son Jack ran for president, many influential Catholics opposed his candidacy. Kennedy wondered why American Catholics couldn’t get more organized, speak with one voice, and rally around Jack like he thought American Jews would do for a Jewish candidate.

In Kennedy’s favor, he did make some efforts to rescue Germany’s Jews and try to find a place for them in the British Empire — not out of humanitarian concern, but because he thought it might remove a cause for war against Hitler, a war Kennedy deeply feared.

Kennedy has gone down in history as a traitor, a Hitler-lover, an appeaser. This is a bit exaggerated; he wanted to prevent war because he loved his country. He thought Hitler was a man one could deal with, but so did many other officials. When he lived in Britain as U.S. ambassador, he supported Prime Minister Chamberlain’s attempts to make peace in Munich. He wrote ridiculously histrionic memos back home to the State Department, urging the U.S. to stay out of the war and predicting terrible consequences, such as worldwide economic devastation and a fascist American economy, if the U.S. went to war against Germany. It times it seemed like his greatest concern was keeping his eldest sons — Joe, Jr., and Jack — from having to fight and possibly die in a war. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened to his oldest son, Joe, Jr., who became a naval aviator during the war and died during a bombing run.

Of course, we won the war — World War II is seen as the last “good war” — and Kennedy is seen today as extremely wrong-headed and bizarrely pessimistic in his isolationism. But his pacifism continued into the Cold War; he opposed President Truman’s containment strategy against the Soviet Union and feared what it might do to our country.

When I read about his views on the Cold War, I started to think that maybe Kennedy was prescient. In a sense, he predicted what President Eisenhower would call the “military-industrial complex” in 1961. As Nasaw writes of Kennedy:

The depression that he feared would result from escalating military spending overseas did not come to pass in his lifetime. The American economy would be transformed, as he predicted, but money spent abroad, much of it on military projects, would not destroy “economic well-being,” but rather stimulate growth and increase per capita income at home. Only over the long term would it become apparent that this Cold War spending spree might have had other, perhaps less positive impacts on American “economic well-being” by diverting capital from infrastructure, nonmilitary industrial modernization, and social welfare projects.

It’s easy to look back and say that Joe Kennedy was an idiot for opposing our involvement in World War II. But look at Darfur and other places in modern times: many Americans, including myself, would like to “stay out of it.” Of course, we live in a different era, when the United States has overextended itself across the world. It didn’t have to be this way, but that’s what happened. If I were alive in the 1930s and not Jewish, what would I have felt about the idea of fighting the Nazi empire? I can’t know. I’d be living in a different time, with different memories, and different assumptions about the world.

As for the Cold War, Kennedy certainly seems prophetic. By the time the U.S. escalated its involvement in Vietnam, ostensibly to fight communism, Kennedy had suffered a debilitating stroke that kept him from communicating complex thoughts to anyone. It seems likely he would have opposed (or did oppose) that war, and he would have been right.

There’s more to this book besides antisemitism and isolationism and other “-isms.” Nasaw brings Kennedy to life as a person: his marriage to Rose; his affairs; his pride in, and concern and love for, his nine children (at times it becomes hard for a reader to keep track of them all); his great wealth; his influence; his ego. After reading this book, I don’t like Kennedy more than I used to, but I don’t dislike him any more either. I just feel like I understand him better — which is what a good biography should do.

I just realized, with less than 90 minutes to go, that today is my blogaversary. I started blogging twelve years ago today.

What are my secrets to continuing to blog after all this time? One: even though I don’t blog as much as I used to, I never decided to shut it down. (Well, except for that time I quit blogging for a year.) Two: I never publicly promised to rededicate myself to blogging more frequently, so there was nothing for me to live up to and therefore no reason to think I wasn’t blogging enough. I just blog when I want, about what I want.

That’s pretty much it, and that’s what I’ll continue to do.

And on we go.

Last night I returned to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA. This was my third visit; I first saw it at the Lincoln Center Festival in July, from 3:15 p.m. to 6:33 p.m. Here’s what I wrote back then. It’s now at MoMA, and I had to go back because it’s so mesmerizing. Last Friday I saw it from 10:35 a.m. to 2:32 p.m., and last night I went yet again. On weekends it runs 24 hours, and I really wanted to see midnight, as well as 10:04 p.m., when lightning strikes the clock tower in Back to the Future, which I’d read was included.

I got to the museum last night around 8:15. There was just a 10-minute wait to get into the theater; not bad at all. I entered at 8:33 p.m. I worried I’d have to go to the bathroom in the middle of it and thereby forfeit my seat and possibly miss midnight, but I wound up being OK.

Here’s some seating advice for The Clock. The viewing area consists of rows of low white couches. At MoMA, there are three couches per row, forming two interior aisles (in addition to aisles on the sides). I’ve found that the best place to sit is on an interior aisle, on one of the side couches. If you sit on the aisle you get an armrest, and if you sit on a side couch, your view doesn’t get blocked as much if a tall person sits in front of you as it does if you sit on the center couches. It’s something about the way the viewing angles line up.

Anyway, this was by far my favorite visit to The Clock. Every time of day has a different feel, and there’s something about The Clock at night that is just cooler than during the day. There were scenes of people at restaurants, at bars, seeing shows. People at parties. A few people lonely at home watching TV or movies, which was kind of meta. Many creepy nighttime mansions. And many, many bedside clocks: people getting into bed, then, later at night, people getting awoken by portentous phone calls.

As 10:00 p.m. approached, I knew the Back to the Future scene was coming up. At 10:04, lightning struck and Marty McFly traveled through time. The clip was about 20 seconds long, but among the vastness of The Clock it just came and went, and then we were onto the next movie. Kind of anticlimactic.

Then eventually it was 11:00. You could feel people begin to pay more attention as the witching hour grew closer and closer. At 11:30, the minute hand began its final upward sweep. Then it was 11:40, then 11:45, then 11:50, as the angle between the minute and hour hands began diminishing toward nothing. The tension and excitement in the room grew enormously.

11:59. “Get me the governor!” Then: the final seconds before midnight. Each. Punctuated. By. A throbbing. Beat.

And then midnight.

Big Ben exploded in a glorious flash. Clock after clock struck and chimed 12, one after the other, second by second. Orson Welles got stabbed on a clock tower. Mayhem on screen.

During the next few minutes, lots of people left, having gotten what they came for, and other people replaced them. I stayed a while longer. Just after 12:15 there was a long stretch of quiet scenes with no dialogue. A slow panning shot of people asleep on train station benches. A 1940s woman in a mansion welcoming her bleary-eyed husband through the front door. It began to feel late.

I simultaneously wanted to stay and leave. But at some point your brain starts to turn to mush and you just can’t take any more of it. It was time to go home and go to bed. So at 12:45, I left. And it was still full.

The weird thing about The Clock is that it’s playing when you arrive and it’s playing when you leave, and there are people already watching when you arrive and people watching when you leave. You always arrive after the beginning and leave before the end. There’s no other way.

So I have now seen noon and midnight. Noon was really cool, midnight was even better.

This morning I asked Matt if he could help me make a chart of my visits. He created the chart at the top of this page, with my input.

I’ve barely seen the morning hours. I hear the middle of the night has lots of dream sequences and creepy happenings. I’d love to see that, but I don’t see how I’d be able to stay up that late.

Marclay insists that The Clock be shown only in real time. I hope at some point he decides to livestream it online. I don’t know how it work for different time zones, but maybe he could figure that out.

At any rate, the film is at MoMA through January 21, including two more 24-hour weekends. I may have to go back and catch more of the morning hours. I love this film.

I’m dealing with some post-holiday blues today.

I’m sure I’m not the only one. But I am feeling a little bit sad, and I’m missing the good times I had over the last week and a half.

A year ago, in 2011, I had a pretty bad holiday week. I was just depressed and bored and frustrated. I don’t think I felt that way the whole time; there were some nice moments. But overall, the week felt depressing. It resulted in me bailing on my old psychotherapist after 11 years and finding a new one, who I’ve now been seeing for a year.

I don’t know if it’s because of my new therapist, or because I learned from the previous year’s holidays, but this past week and a half went a lot better than in 2011. I decided not to try so hard to have a good time, and instead I just did things I wanted to do. There were also some nice moments that just sort of happened.

Highlights, which I wish I could freeze and go back to forever:

Christmas Eve — Matt and I went out to New Jersey to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant with my family. There were twelve of us sitting around a big table with a lazy susan in the middle. My sister-in-law’s father wound up ordering an enormous amount of food. There was something really lovely and warm and cozy about being in a boisterous Chinese restaurant with family; usually on Christmas Eve, Matt and I go out for Chinese in our neighborhood, and it’s quiet and sort of desolate. This was so much better. It was wonderful to be with a group of people.

When we walked out of the restaurant, it was snowing. Matt and I spent the night at my parents’ house; we sat on the couch watching TV while my parents’ dog snuggled up against me. The town was quiet and snowy, and “It’s A Wonderful Life” was on TV. I know that Jews aren’t supposed to care about Christmas Eve, but I do love it sometimes.

The next morning, we lingered over breakfast at my parents’ house for a couple of hours, which was also really nice.

Another highlight: Matt and I had dinner on my birthday. Instead of trying to find someplace new, we decided to go to a place we’d been to before – Glass House Tavern – and had a terrific meal. Afterwards, our friend Mike met us at the downstairs bar for birthday drinks.

Another highlight: dinner with Matt and my parents a few nights later for a belated birthday celebration at Joe Allen. It was lively and fun and Mercedes Ruehl was at the next table.

Another highlight: New Year’s Eve. That was actually the one time I started to get antsy, because New Year’s Eve never lives up to what everyone says it should be. Matt and I went to our favorite local restaurant, which we’ve done for the last few years. Then we went home and watched the ball drop on TV while drinking some champagne. It was low-key, but that’s OK.

I also went to the movies, sometimes with Matt and sometimes by myself. Matt and I also watched some movies at home. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art twice, once by myself — it’s one of my favorite places in the city. I saw The Clock at MOMA. I went clothes shopping.

And now it’s a new year, and it’s back to work, and time marches on.

I tend to wallow in nostalgia and feel apprehensive about the future. It’s just something I do. So I want to hold on to the nice memories. The thing is, there are always future good memories waiting to be made. You need to have stuff to look forward to in life.

Happy 2013. Hope there’s more good stuff along the way.

Here is a list of books I read in 2012, in chronological order. As usual, lots of history. There were several books I stopped reading partway through. The only novel I completed this year was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, a highly entertaining read for 1980s geeks. I started another novel but I gave up halfway through.

I always enjoy looking over my annual list of books read — it reminds me where my mind was at any particular time in the past year. In the spring, I looked forward to the newest installment of Robert Caro’s LBJ bio; in June, I got interested in the Beatles and read Jonathan Gould’s terrific history of them; in the fall, I read a book about Paris before we went to Paris. And so on.

Here’s the list:

• A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, Amanda Foreman
• What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Richard Ben Cramer (first 1/3)
• Eisenhower: The White House Years, Jim Newton
• Eisenhower in War and Peace, Jean Edward Smith
• Watergate: A Novel, Thomas Mallon
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Robert Caro
• Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, Robert Caro
• Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, Jonathan Gould
• Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick