Craig Berry

The lovely and wonderful sesa777  took me to see the revival tour production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" yesterday evening.  I was very happy to accept her invitation, but also a little worried; the only other live performance of JCS I've ever seen was rewritten to be more Fundie-friendly, featuring such innovations as a troupe of demonettes tempting Judas at each of his spiritual crises, and (best of all) Jesus levitating off the cross at the end.  The latter made me and laurellady  laugh out loud, which earned us glares from about a hundred nearby audience members.  But I'm sorry...simultaneously ruining the dramatic punch of the end of the play and contradicting Christian doctrine, while you can almost hear the squeak of the pulleys hauling JC into the rafters...that, my friends, is comedy.

Well, last night was one for two.  No demonettes, thank goodness, but Our Savior Ted Neely drifted up off the cross at the end.  Then an image of the Shroud of Turin was projected onto a scrim.  How you get a shroud if the Son of Man goes airborne on Good Friday is a question beyond my theological skill to answer.

Speaking of Ted Neely, he can still belt out a tune, but I'm not sure the world is ready for Geriatric Jesus.  I kept expecting him to say "Oy gevalt, again with the Romans."  The rest of the cast was pretty good; I was especially taken by Herod, who managed to out-camp the movie version with a samba-influenced, flounce-and-bitch interpretation of his big number.  Pilate conveyed uncertainty, empathy, and scorn, sometimes all in one line, which is quite an impressive trick.  And Mary Magdalene had a sweet, pure voice, marred only by a tendency to swallow the ends of lines.

All in all, it was a good show and a fun evening.  I just wish I could sneak backstage and cut the ascension wires before the next performance.


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I just got finished reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Oh. My. God.

This is a Heinleinesque teenagers-save-world adventure story. It's also a stealth delivery system for some of the most interesting, thought-provoking scientific philosophy I've ever encountered. The key idea he introduces as an element of his fiction may actually be correct, and would explain a great deal. I'm not going to spoil it further than that.  Just go read this book.  Seriously.  It's a thousand pages long, and that's a good thing; he needs that much room to cram in all the good ideas.  It's a rare and wonderful thing to read a work of fiction that has forever changed the way I think about some of the most fundamental questions of science and philosophy.

A great deal of the book is focused on a system of monastic communities (the "Avout") who use music as a mathematical and spiritual tool.  A composer friend of Stephenson's tackled the challenge of imagining that music; the results are available for purchase here.  I suggest doing this after you read the book; some of the tracks literally sent chills down my spine.

Unusally enough for a novel, there's also a trailer video, which uses music from the source I just mentioned.  It contains no spoilers that will make sense if you haven't read the book.

For those of you who have read this novel, I hereby declare the comments to this post a spoiler free-fire zone.  If you haven't read the novel, go do that, then come back and read the comments.

We're gradually getting settled in at the new apartment.  I love the place, especially its roominess; 10 years crammed into our previous home has made me really appreciate room to swing my arms without knocking over a lamp.

I haven't had net access at home since we moved.  Nor have we had TV.  The all-in-one cable installation is due to happen on Saturday; meanwhile, we're living like our primitive ancestors, doing this odd thing called "talking with each other" to pass the time.  Well, actually madelineusher has found an open wifi link to leech, but I haven't stooped that low.  Yet.

This morning, I decided to try for speed on my trip to work, just to see what might be possible.  Door to door time was 45 minutes, and that was with an unusually long wait for the bus.  I'll never get my antique Masonic tomes read on a commute as short as that. :)

Speaking of which, I'm nearly done with Robert Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy.  It's a very typical "lone visionary" book -- he has one very good idea, and proceeds to apply it where it is appropriate, and then where it is not appropriate, exhaustively, stretching his argument well past the breaking point.  I also tend to distrust an author's views on sacred geometry when he can write "The radius of any circle is one sixth of its circumference" with a straight face.  Still, his core ideas are excellent, and the book has shed some intriguing and productive light on several symbols of special interest to me.  I recommend the book if you already know Masonry and astronomy reasonably well, and can thus spot when he's gone off the rails.

laurellady and I watched Fargo last night; neither of us had seen it before. Now I know why people have been pestering me to see it for more than a decade. What a weird, wonderful film! Frances McDormand in particular gave one of the most textured, beautiful performances I've ever seen; for once I agree with the Academy. Her "I just don't understand" at the end of the film was heartbreakingly honest. All through the story she came across as a brilliant but uncomplicated person trying to make her way through a world far stranger than she was ever built to handle -- and doing it well.

There are a couple of other Coen brother films I haven't yet seen; they've been moved to the top of my Netflix queue.

I keep forgetting to post that I saw Grindhouse with my family last Friday, and we all loved it.  If it's still in theaters where you are, see it.  It's the kind of movie that needs audience reactions to work well.  We saw it in one of the shoebox-sized theaters at the Beverly Center, but fortunately the fifteen people in there with us were in the right mood, and we all had a wonderful time laughing and cheering and groaning at the appropriate moments.  Any movie that features both a stripper flying through the air launching rockets from the giant gun that serves as her prosthetic leg and an extended homage to Vanishing Point is pretty damn good indeed.

While both the mini-movies that comprise this film were good, the fake trailers were the best part -- especially the one for the horror movie Don't.  I think I saw that one when I was a kid staying up way too late watching bad movies on static-heavy UHF stations.  I can only imagine how much fun the production team had making these films look and sound like cheap film stock that had been through about twenty too many projectors; the streaks and color cast changes and weird sound-quality shifts were both realistic and beautiful in a very strange way.

fraterviao is rapidly becoming one of my favorite poets. I'm lucky enough to be able to attend his live performances at LVX Lodge. His poetry and his delivery both harken back to the Beat poets, but with his own special sardonic twist. When he gets on a roll it comes out as something between recitation and chanting; you find yourself tapping your foot to his rhythm. If you're ever in LA on a night when LVXpresso Cafe is happening, be there to catch his mojo.

But even if you can't see him live, you can now enjoy his poetry. His book Fall from Prescopia is finally available; my copy arrived last week. I've been delaying mentioning it here, because I wanted to do a full review. But it's not looking like I'll have time for that, so I'll boil my planned review down into its two essential points:

1. Wow!
2. Go buy this, right now.

That makes two published authors in LVX Lodge, by the way. who's next?

Last night anubis75, lady_saffir, and I went to see A Scanner Darkly.  The evening started with jambalaya at The Gumbo Pot, which is the perfect way to start just about any evening in my view.  Then we went to the top of the parking structure and peered into the light-polluted sky expectantly for ten minutes.

You see, last night the International Space Station (and the shuttle Discovery, currently docked with ISS) made one of its rare visible transits across the skies of Los Angeles.  For this to work ISS has to be passing over LA -- at the northern limit of its orbital path -- long enough after sunset (or before sunrise) for the sky to be nearly or entirely dark, but close enough to sunset or sunrise that it's still illuminated by the sun as it passes overhead, a couple of hundred miles up.

I was prepared to be entirely disappointed, or (worse) for my companions to see it but not me, given how bad my vision is.  Lo and behold, right on time at 9:15 we spotted it climbing out of the southwest toward bright Jupiter.  They saw it immediately, but lady_saffir was able to help me find it as well.  It got about a quarter as bright as Jupiter as it slid due south of us; then I lost it in the glare of the moon further east.  anubis75 and lady_saffir tracked it until it faded out as its orbit carried it into Earth's shadow.

It was extremely strange thinking that there were nine people living on that dim little moving star.  Even stranger was pondering the idea that, in all likelihood, at least a few of them were looking back down at us; I've heard LA looks very nice at night from orbit, and the just-past-sunset geometry was probably quite beautiful from up there.  I felt the urge to wave.

Leaving our impromptu observatory, we headed down to the movie.  I had really been looking forward to seeing A Scanner Darkly, but in retrospect, that book just wasn't suited to be a movie.  The book is split into two halves; the first is mostly very dark slapstick drug humor, while the second follows the main character through mostly internal torments.  That second half is very talky, and worse for a movie, a lot of the talking is between the main character and himself.  (Read it if that doesn't make sense.)  The slapstick drug humor translated really well onto film, especially with the animation-overlay technique.  The second half fell apart, because there was nothing to show the audience, and not enough room (or audience patience) to tell the whole internal-struggle story from the novel.

All that being said, I'd still recommend that people see this movie; the first half is worth the price of admission, and the second is interesting even if it doesn't entirely work.

After a long dry spell, I saw two really good movies over the past three days.

The first, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, is only playing in four theaters at the moment; fortunately, one of them is within walking distance of my house.  Sometimes it really pays to live in Hollywood.  I went to see this Sunday evening with frater_pfdv, magdalena_lvx, and her daughter.  I'm a big Cohen fan, so my expectations were high for this movie, which mixes footage of a tribute concert by various performers with interview and archival footage of Cohen himself.  I wasn't disappointed.  The filmmakers are far too fond of cinema pseudo-verite, with lots of aren't-I-artsy erratic dissolves and choreographed camera jerking.  And they commit the cardinal sin of interrupting songs with interview snippets and other material; I nearly yelled at the screen the first time that happened.  But overall it was an excellent movie, with some amazing performances (especially from Rufus Wainwright and Nick Cave) and lots of intriguing, funny stories told by Cohen.  The finale was a studio performance of "Tower of Song" with Cohen backed by U2.  It was okay, but a little listless and "canned" feeling; I actually wondered if lip-synching was involved now and then.  They should have closed with something live, I think.

The second was Kingdom of Heaven, which the family watched on DVD last night, because nothing says the Fourth of July like the Holy Land in the 12th Century.  I had heard good things about this movie, and they turned out to be accurate.  First, on a purely visual level, it's gorgeous; shot after shot is beautifully designed, with light and shadow, colors and decoration all artfully composed.  The acting is uniformly good, with Edward Norton as the leper King Baldwin of Jerusalem putting in the best performance -- and that from behind a silver mask!  The movie stayed close enough both to history and to the legend of Saladin to satisfy me, which is saying something.  I was particularly pleased to see Saladin deliver the line "It is not I who offer you the cup" to a captive nobleman following the battle of the Horns of Hattin.  (Which I just noticed was fought on...the Fourth of July, 1187.  Go synchronicity!) 

My major criticism of this movie concerns the soundtrack; it is some sort of opera-influenced vaguely religious-sounding caterwauling that I found alternately annoying and merely distracting.  Something martial or middle eastern would seem more appropriate.  Also, Balian's secular humanism, while it led to some fun scenes, broke my suspension of disbelief on several occasions.  Overall, though, this was a great movie; I regret not having seen it on the big screen.

I finally finished C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the final book of his "Cosmic Trilogy".  My slowness in reading this was not due to lack of interest, but rather lack of time; I have become very frustrated over the last week as I was forced to read the last hundred pages in ten- and twenty-page increments during brief pauses in the general chaos.

I very highly recommend this trilogy, and especially this book -- though you really need to have read the first two to understand it.  Those who are not Christians, or even not Christians of Lewis's particular variety, may well be put off by his very Christian themes.  These are implicit (though obvious) in Out of the Silent Planet, but become overt to the point of annoyance (to me, at least) in Perelandra.  In That Hideous Strength, Christianity itself becomes a metaphor or echo of something deeper and more profound, and that deeper source is one I can recognize and accept.  In particular, there are musings on the nature of true will in this book that I will be pondering for weeks if not years.  There is also the best portrayal of a transformative religious experience I have ever seen in fiction; like the ones I know about, it comes not at a moment of great crisis or great beauty, but between one step and the next, under quite ordinary circumstances.  Lewis clearly knew what he was writing about.

There is a great deal of Arthurian imagery in this book (the leader of the "good" faction initially goes by the alias Mr. Fisher-King, just for example).  I ran across someone's English paper from 22 years ago which discusses Arthurian themes in That Hideous Strength.  Don't read it until after you read the book, as it reveals most of the plot.

I discovered that paper while doing web searches for Lewis's divine names for the planets, which I find beautiful and compelling:

Sol = Arbol
Mercury = Viritrilbia
Venus = Perelandra
Earth = Thulcandra
Mars = Malacandra
Jupiter = Glund
Saturn = Lurga

Someone should add this column to 777.  I also need to find some time to work with these names, and see what turns up.

I'm approaching the halfway point in That Hideous Strength, the third book in C. S. Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy".  My capsule summary of the trilogy:  "It's certainly evil to destroy the entire upland ecosystem of a world; and, yes, it is quite evil indeed to engineer a second and more devastating Fall from Eden on an as-yet-innocent planet.  But interfering with academic politics?  That is beyond the pale!" 

To be fair, it isn't quite that simple; this is the most complex book of the trilogy, with a richer cast of characters (including a rather nicely rendered woman in a leading role).  As usual, Lewis's greatest strength is in description; his portrayal of the sleepy English college town of Edgestow made me want to move there, and the passages concerning Mark's Kafkaesque wanderings through the political labyrinth of N.I.C.E. had my stomach clenched with sympathetic anxiety.

I'll do a more complete review when I finish the book.  For the moment, I will only add that my stupid brain insists periodically on parsing the title of the book with the emphasis on the middle word, in parallel structure with the sitcom title "That 70s Show".  I wish my brain were still under warranty at times like this.

I'm a few pages away from finishing Perelandra, the second book of C. S. Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy".  I read and loved the first book (Out of the Silent Planet) as a child, and thought I had read the other two; now I'm fairly sure I attempted and abandoned each of the latter after a hundred pages or so.  You see, Silent Planet, while it's filled with obvious Judaeo-Christian allegory, does a fairly good job of keeping that allegory in the background, as a theme running underneath the primary plot.  Perelandra, on the other hand, leaps out with a big Christian symbolism stick and systematically beats you over the head with it until you're ready to beg for mercy, divine or otherwise.

( Spoilers follow... )

We're safely home from our visit to the northern-California family for just-after-Christmas festivities.  A mysterious phenomenon occurred during our visit involving large amounts of water coming out of the sky, which was filled with strange grey-white objects the locals called 'clouds".  Pretty spooky!  Fortunately this "rain" stopped south of Salinas on the way home today.

We had an excellent visit, including some time with my five-month-old niece Kylie.  She was unfortunately a bit sick and very tired when we saw her, but we got to see some good smiles and playfulness in between the cranky spells and before she conked out entirely.  My sister is such a great mom -- it's wonderful watching her in action.  And her husband is no slouch, either.  I'm looking forward to watching Kylie grow up.

While we were there, we went to see the Narnia movie.  I enjoyed it; I was quite moved several times.  The Christian subtext that everyone is talking about is really more a generic slain-and-risen-god allegory, as applicable to Dionysos or Mithras as to Christ.  The cast is uneven and the direction a bit wobbly, but when it's good, it's very good indeed.

I'm currently suffering from an interesting side effect of my family's travel customs.  You see, we are incapable of driving more than 50 miles without playing a lot of music, very, very, very loud, and singing along with it even louder.  Thus, I usually arrive wherever we're going slightly hoarse, and today is no exception.  On this trip we reminded madelineusher that we had her in large part to take the third part on CSN harmonies, and she responded admirably by doing some excellent singing on those and other tracks.  She did especially well on a bitter Concrete Blonde cover of the Leonard Cohen song "Everybody Knows".  All that anime/video-game/RPG angst practice is clearly paying off.

Last night madelineusher, laurellady and I attended a performance of "A Mulholland Christmas Carol" at Theatre of Note in Hollywood.  Apparently this play has become a seasonal tradition, but this year was the first I'd heard about it.  Short review:  It was wonderful!

Any self-respecting Angeleno knows the story of William Mulholland, the brilliant water engineer who brought Owens River water more than two hundred miles from the eastern Sierra to slake the thirst of fast-growing Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century.  However, this massive water diversion also destroyed the once-fertile Owens Valley, leaving it a poverty-stricken dustbowl.  Later in his career, Mulholland's St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles collapsed and killed hundreds of people downstream; while it has long been rumored that this was an act of sabotage, he took full responsibility for the disaster and retired in disgrace.

Playwright Bill Robens has combined this epic real-life tale with the structure of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and made the whole thing into a musical comedy -- full points for dramatic brass balls.  (It actually reminded me of the kind of thing OTO bodies have been doing with Crowley's Rites of Eleusis.)  Theatre of Note is a tiny space, probably around 50 seats on risers facing a stage the size of a large living room, and their budget is clearly minuscule.  But they make brilliant use of what they have; there were several dramatic changes of sound and lighting (particularly during the dam collapse) that were really moving.

Best of all, the cast, the songs, and the dialog are all perfect.  Robens (and director Kiff Scholl) have a pitch-perfect sense of when to inject some seriousness into the humor, or vice versa, when to toss out an anachronistic allusion ("What, do they think Hollywood is about to be overrun by prostitutes and winos?"), and how to keep up the dramatic momentum without seeming hurried.  The songs in particular were beautifully crafted, ranging from the over-the-top poignant "L.A. River" to the long, complex, and menacing "Land Grab".

I was disappointed in my fellow Angelenos in attendance that laurellady and I were the only ones who applauded after Mulholland delivered his most famous quote, "There it is.  Take it."  Read your history, people!  They also used his second-most-famous quote, "I envy the dead" (in reference to the dam collapse), as the basis for the one truly heartbreaking song of the entire show.

Alas, "A Mulholland Christmas Carol" completes its 2005 run tonight, and the show is sold out.  But I imagine they'll be doing this again next year.  Be there; we sure will.

You can't swing a dead Christ symbol these days without hearing about the Chronicles of Narnia. I know many of my friends were addicted to this series as children, and I can understand the attraction. But for me, Lewis's earlier "cosmic" trilogy -- Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength -- held a far greater attraction. Some of this is because the latter have the trappings of science fiction rather than fantasy, being set on the worlds of our solar system and featuring spaceships and aliens.

However, the science in these books is thin indeed, and often quite spectacularly wrong, and I knew that at the age of nine nearly as well as I know it now. I think that the other reason I enjoy these books more than Narnia is that Lewis makes less of an effort to keep the pot boiling; there are long talky sections where characters simply learn from or argue with one another. At nine, I didn't recognize the crypto-Christian underpinnings of his story, which is as strong here as in the Narnia series. But whatever its brand name, I liked his cosmology. In fact, I'm fairly sure that reading these books was an early part of the mind-opening process that prepared me for instruction by the Jesuits in my teenage years, which in turn prepared me for the further theological and philosphical discoveries I've made during my adulthood. So I owe Lewis a great deal.

Being the contrarian I am, with the world abuzz about Narnia I recently decided to reread Out of the Silent Planet. As with any treasured book from childhood, I was rather worried it wouldn't live up to my memories of it, but I was instead pleasantly surprised to find myself getting more out of it now than then. There are some allegorical subtleties in there which will have me pondering for quite a while.

Now that I've confirmed that the first one is in fact a wonderful book, I'm going to obtain and reread the other two, which I read less often as a child and thus remember less well. Should there ever be a movie version of Out of the Silent Planet, I will reread the Narnia books the week it premiers.

I finished Silverberg's Roma Eterna, which I reviewed at just past the halfway point a few days ago. My conclusions from that review stand, only more so. I could go on at greater length, but fortunately I stumbled across this review, with which I agree entirely. Still, any dedicated fans of ancient Rome or of alternate history stories among my readers might want to pick it up. (And, to be fair to Silverberg, there was one scene that sent chills down my spine; I'm glad I read the book just for that exquisite moment. If only there had been more of them!)

I finally bought that old Steve Hillage album (Green) I've been wanting for a couple of years. Yes, I do move slowly at times. :) I needed to order a book for work from Barnes and Noble's online store, and it turned out they had the album in stock. My self-control was at a low ebb, so I bought it despite my current attempt at budget discipline. It was only twelve bucks; I'll eat cheap lunches for a few days to balance it out.

The one track on the album I'd heard previously is "Palm Trees". I taped it off my favorite radio show circa 1980 -- "Stone Trek", a prog-rock paradise hosted by the inimitable Greg Stone. That show shaped my musical taste more than any other influence. I had the tape through college, but it disappeared in some subsequent move, so all I had to go on was the memory of this song for about two decades. Fortunately, I like it now as much as I remember liking it then; what's more, the rest of the album is just as good. "Palm Trees" turns out to be the only track with vocals, which is a good thing as Steve's voice is a little weak. The rest of it is wonderful bass-driven trip music with fascinating keyboard work woven through it and time signatures I'm just starting to figure out.

laurellady liked the cover, featuring a geometric overlay of a vesica, a triangle, and a pair of circles in a sort of shimmery-laser-light style. She then flipped the case to read the track list, delivering a comment that sums up deep gnarly prog at its best: "It takes a lot of balls to call a song 'The Great Om Riff'."

I'm reading Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg; I'm currently just over halfway through.  I've had mixed feelings about his previous work, but I'm a big fan of alternate history, of which this novel is a notable example.  It postulates a world in which the Roman Empire never fell (and in which Christianity never developed), and takes an episodic trip through its history starting around AD 300, jumping 50 years here, 200 years there, each chapter providing a vignette about its era.

Silverberg clearly knows his history (better than I do, anyway; every detail he's used that I know about independently is correct).  He's also a good storyteller.  He paints intriguing characters with interesting conflicts to illustrate the crises and dilemmas of each phase of Rome's tempestuous progress.  The first third of the book left me thrilled.

Since then, though, he's fallen into a trap that captures too many alternate histories.  It's obvious that even a small change thousands of years ago would almost inevitably scramble all the details of the current world.  None of us would likely exist, just for starters; the contingencies involved in individuals meeting, mating, and having surviving children are too vulnerable to temporal disruption.  The famous "butterfly effect" of chaos theory (a butterfly flapping its wings in China can trigger a hurricane in the Carribean months later) applies with great force here.

But Silverberg, like too many alternate-history authors, acts as if there's some force pulling events and individuals back into the mold of our own timeline.  What's worse, he builds the middle chapters around these congruences.  So we get "Hey, look, it's a Roman Magellan!",  "Wow, he's just like Da Vinci, only Roman!",  "What if Louis XVI were Emperor of Rome instead of King of France?", and so forth.  I find this implausible in the extreme, but worse, it's very lazy to steal scenarios from our world rather than inventing new ones for his Rome.

I'm going to keep reading, just to see how he ties up some threads.  And who knows, the last third of the book may surprise me.  I'll do a second review if that happens.

I'm currently reading a book called Perchance to Dream, an anthology of horror and fantasy stories on the theme of dreams. I didn't plan to read this; I was late for the bus one morning with nothing to read in my bag, and grabbed the first vaguely promising-looking book off the shelf.

It's not a very good collection, so far; one story was fairly good, but the other three haven't been. Still, the one good one was good enough to keep me slogging forward hoping for another reward. Beyond the quality of the writing, though, what's struck me in this book is the horrid quality of the editing. My two favorite examples:

1. A character walks into a Mexican restaurant, sits down at the bar, and orders a Dos Equus. "Dos Equus -- La mejor cerveza para los que han cegado caballos!"

2. A character emerges from Hell into our world. During the preceding scenes in Hell, it's been established that damned souls never sleep, though they're always exhausted. On emergence, the author is at pains to mention that while the exhaustion is gone, the character finds that he still does not need sleep in our world. Three paragraphs later, he mentions that he had to sleep out of doors the first several nights after his return.

I don't read a lot of recent short story collections. Is this common? Doesn't anyone care anymore? Who pays an "editor" for work like this?

laurellady and I watched National Treasure last night on cable.  It was a fun little move, reasonably well put together and with some exciting situations.  Still, I'm glad I didn't pay to see it in a theater.  The plot is set up as a series of puzzles which our heroes need to solve, one of which relied on the scriptwriters' fundamental ignorance of how the sun moves across the sky over the course of the year.  Anyone who has ever built or understood a sundial could have corrected this.  Oh, and it was interesting to learn that, when exploring underground chambers, the Knights Templar were in the habit of wearing full chain armor.

The movie is largely set in Washington D.C., and includes many lovely shots of the Mall and its various monuments.  I was disturbed to find that these shots made me profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy; it was like unexpectedly seeing pictures of a recently deceased family member.  I hadn't realized the extent to which I have given up on the American myth until now.  I don't think we'll be watching 1776 this Fourth of July.  In fact, I think I'm just going to try to ignore the holiday.

I am currently reading Eating Landscape by Philip Arnold, a student of Mesoamerican religion and culture.  In this book he attempts to understand what little we know of Aztec ritual in terms of a ceremonial and mythological relationship with the Valley of Mexico, very much tied to the particular geographic features, weather patterns, and ecology of that small region.  He concentrates his analysis on Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, one of the two gods (with Huitzilopochtli) at the center (literally and figuratively) of Aztec ritual practice.

Unfortunately, the author is enamored of the language of postmodern deconstructionist criticism; if I had a dollar for every time he uses the word "hermeneutic", next month's rent would probably be covered.  I'm sure this jargon works extremely well for certain scholars, but for me it always feels like I have to decrypt every sentence before I read it.

If that's all there were to it I'd have given up 20 pages in.  But there are some nuggets of gold among the postmodern lead.  For example, he points out a fascinating distinction between "locative" and "utopian" religions (and religious elements).  Locative religions are bound to particular places; holy mountains, specific temples, sacred cities.  Utopian (in the original sense of "no place") religions are bound only to cosmic or ubiquitous principles.  Not surprisingly, settled and insular peoples -- agrarian cultures, in general -- tend to have locative religions, while nomadic or wide-spread cultures tend toward utopian religion.  Individual cultures can swing from one to the other over time; consider the Jews before entering Palestine (utopian), during the period of temple worship (locative), and after the diaspora (utopian).

The Aztec situation was fascinating in this regard in that the bulk of the Nahua population in the valley (including the Mexica after a few generations there) were very much settled agrarians, and practiced a religion very much localized to (and identified with) the features of the Valley of Mexico.  But the northern "Chichimeca" (nomadic barbarians), including the Mexica who came to rule the valley, worshiped utopian solar and stellar gods.  Thus, the religious practice of their empire blended the two, with the supreme symbol of this blending being the presence of two separate shrines atop the Great Pyramid: one to the locative fertility god Tlaloc, one to the utopian war god Huitzilopochtli.

This book is not a good place to start if you're curious about Aztec religion.  But if you're already familiar with the basics and want to dig deeper, this book is worth reading.  Just bring along your Postmodernese-English phrasebook.