Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is a bad idea. It was playing two weeks ago at Carnegie Hall nevertheless, in celebration of what would have been the composer’s ninetieth birthday, had he not passed out of the human universe he tries so very hard to exalt with Mass. For two hours on a crowded stage most extant genres were blended (in skillful execution, let it be said) by an orchestra, a collection of rock and jazz players, and choruses both stationary and active. That activity was dancing, atop and around pews in what space was left available. There were also several taped sections, as if to emphasize the impossibility of the performance. Despite the almost limitless resources and traditions at its disposal, Mass seems to like only one of the things it does, and that’s accelerating Broadway melodies with every repetition until you’re bopping in your seat (as the lady next to me, older than dead Bernstein, did during every “Trope”). The rest is just there to telegraph importance.

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass has a big idea. Its combination of the major genres of music with actors dancing and monologuing (though not truly playing roles, in what never becomes a narrative) sums to a “theater piece” that was to birth a new spiritualism for the twentieth century. It prominently features a Celebrant, whose authority over the people is undermined by his inauthenticity, and his followers, who discover their own power to worship and lead him in a new communion—with each other in peaceful embrace, rather than with the Lord in physical miracle. “We await the Season of the Word of the Lord,” someone sings during Mass‘ Epistle: not the Age of Aquarius, but the real deal.

Such a lofty spiritual-humanist aim might sound a lot like Godspell, with which Mass shares an author, but Godspell it isn’t. For one thing, Mass assumes a greater degree of religious audacity and avant-gardism in its audience. Whereas Godspell updated the message of Jesus Christ to make it more digestible to the youth (updating quite literally in the film adaptation, by placing the Christ figure in contemporary New York), Mass seeks to lead the audience back into older structures of sound and worship in order to blow them up. The piece consistently departs from its organizing structure of a Catholic mass, rearranging the traditional Latin hymns, punctuating them with song-and-dance numbers, and concluding with the destruction of the chalice instead of the consecration of its wine. That Season Mass awaits, Bernstein would like you to know, is only just arriving; the legions of the already religious have been either wrong or wronged, and it is time for an art to enlighten and uplift them. The crowd with which Mass came—Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar in the very same year—must have been taken as further proof of its historical necessity.

A good evisceration of an institution as old and influential as organized religion requires a honest understanding and respect for the target, and that is among the things Mass lacks. The Celebrant is a profoundly weak character, insofar as we can call a person without a name or history a character, and not just a ragged thrust of allegory. His big moment, the inversion of the Fraction Rite, is too badly written to scan as genuine doubt; when he is shocked that the wine is “sort of brown and blue” and stumbles over its ontological status (“It’s supposed to be blood—I mean it is blood, his, it was”), he seems more stupid than insecure. The strings joke with us all the while, offering playful jabs until they swoon inarticulately along with his contrived crisis.

As a statement of righteously populist antinomianism, Mass might have been a fierce little performance with a brief half-life. That’s how the Fraction portion comes off, as well as the sections in which the authorities—I refrain from calling them “the Man”—are scolded in the second-person. It seems that Bernstein would not have been satisfied with a merely destructive legacy, however. In trekking back through musical and liturgical history only to insert brief string diddles and the newest platitudes, Mass wants to lay claim to the pieces of religious heritage it hasn’t deemed exploitive, establishing a successor experience both artistic and spiritual.

Besides its intellectual disqualification from such achievement, Mass finds too much pleasure in irony to fulfill any of its spiritual intentions. In the piece’s sermon, the creation story is retold over some jaunty percussive strings and a cute tuba: “God said let there be gnats… so that they may nourish the rats, making them fat, food for the cats.” The ‘g’ in ‘gnats’ is very far from silent, and the tongue is very far in cheek. In the same breath the sermon turns to a weakly sarcastic take on religious sexuality: “God said sex should repulse, unless it leads to results; and so we crowd the world full of consenting adults.” The creation story is reduced to a story-book, and sexual repression is a joke we can tell because it is no longer a threat: the common thread is an ironist’s assurance that none of this matters in the least, and yet by the conclusion of the performance we are asked to “go in peace” and spread the new spiritualism with a laying-on of hands.

Before it loses its head to sentimentality, I did find Mass‘ irony oddly and unintentionally fascinating. There is not enough fury or sharpness to wound; its laughter is more in satisfaction at its own late-historical wit and catholic interests than in sarcastic contempt of its influences. Bernstein can’t play it straight long enough for us to consider Mass anything like a spiritual argument: in its wide range of music, the most weight is granted to showtunes, and even the Bible gets jazzed up. We are asked only to delight in the piece’s verve, congratulate ourselves on having been born when such a careless ransacking of aged tradition is possible, and then just groove. The Celebrant of Mass, happy Leonard Bernstein, places his greatest faith not in God—that word lilts into the work like a flutter of strings after an overenunciated and heartfelt “moment,” just to pretend everything is meant in spite of itself—but in his own irreverence. We ought to take Mass as seriously as the cleverest doodle in the back of a schoolboy’s Bible.

The Town Car’s big dull lip became smaller and was fragmented by vertical chrome strips until finally, in 1998, it disappeared. It is in this or an even more recent model that you have been chauffeured at some point in your life. In the black standard model you were driven by black, Hispanic or Arab men, whom you paid with cash; in the white limousine model you were driven by Greek or Italian men, whom you paid with a check from your father, who had in turn been paid with the pooled cash contributions of your eight closest friends (not their dates; dates don’t pay, they reciprocate). This generation had conventionally contained taillights, without the red strip to connect them. Their flair was their peculiar triangularity, curving upwards with the trunk but coming nevertheless to a point. The fins had ceased to exist, except for the slightly raised strip of taillight on which the logo sits—centered, at least until it was phased out in 2003, and more elongated than usual by the ascending angle.

After 1998, the Town Car is a strictly professional automobile. You are driven in a Town Car when you need to be driven and you have time to schedule a driver in advance; you aren’t hailing a cab, you are scheduling a “car service,” one of those venerable service industries on the relative strength of which the American economy continues to exist. You enjoy the ample legroom in the back seat, as a subject for discussion on the way to the bar and a space to sprawl into on the way back. It was not always this way. In a promotional photograph for the 1981 Lincoln Town Car, a 30-something couple in beige businesswear walks out to their beige vehicle. It is somewhat less spacious than it is today, and somewhat more livable. Its latter half has a humble cloth top, and its trunk has that garish red strip, conservative achievable plastic. The couple is carrying luggage: two business trips, a businessman and a businesswoman, a long-term parking space in LAX or SAN. They are leaving a leafy bungalow with a Southwestern tiled roof and a sliding-glass front door. There is no crime.

This middle class comfort is now something for occasions: weddings, proms, trips to the airport, first or second dates, house parties. It is no longer quite so hideous; its new aesthetic is even respectable, in a way. The logo on the taillights would be laughably retrograde, except it is tastefully reminiscent of hood ornaments. The curvature and triangularity will seem awkwardly modern until every taillight outdoes itself in the early 2000s. All in all, it’s a material improvement over the blank red trim that, still but with more rarity, comes floating out of the highway dark. A clarity of form refined past ownership.

[This is the first draft of the first part of a series of critical pieces about taillight design that I may be writing for the Nass. I decided to try writing them when I realized that, in what seems to have been a rare hobby, I obsessively cataloged and criticized taillights as a child passenger.]

There is only one thing in the lobby of Firestone that is taller than a man, and that is the single column that stands near but not contiguous with the glass wall that separates the lobby and the Trustee Reading Room. The next tallest thing in the room is a white marble ‘O’ on a pedestal, a sculpture titled “White Sun” by Isamu Noguchi. A little lower are the guards who check your identity upon entry and search your bag upon exit, salaried substitutes for the seven-foot tall plastic rectangles in nearly every other library. These guards sit at a desk-barrier that divides the room in two. I could go on with this list, starting at about eight feet and concluding with the calf-high table-bench inscribed with a Historical dedication to the infinity of the written word, without missing more than one or two items of interest. It is a very horizontal room.

In its coloring the room is even more understated: there is only one thing not tan or brown or silver, and that’s that white marble sun. The walls and the unfortunate column are paneled wood; posterity’s coffee table is a lighter brown with bronze writing; the rows of card catalogs visible in the next room are a better-lit nest of wood, faded tan labels and metal grips; the guard’s barrier is trimmed with steel and divided into sections demarcated by off-white Helvetica signs—one of which is a truer white when, every now and then, it glows. It is a very brown room; it is that era when decorators considered metal in need of offsetting wood and wood in need of paneling; it is 1971.

I find a certain sweetness in the lobby’s aesthetic, a concern for the most human, even familial, instincts of the visitor. (I am going to resist using the adjective “seventies,” and especially its variant “so seventies,” to describe the lobby; in that resistance I would like the reader to resist conflating the lobby’s feel with the televised “seventies” aesthetic that rolled in earlier this decade—and has now already gone, as far as I can tell.) This concern differentiates the lobby from the brash cleanliness of modernist architecture or the ornate ahistoricism of collegiate gothic; it’s a design about you, and the places you’ve lived, and the comfort you’ve found in them.

The lobby’s dusk of browns is preserved by a noticeable weakness in the artificial light, and undisturbed by what natural illumination manages to shine through from distant windows in other rooms. The lobby’s own lighting has been recessed a foot or two behind some kind of plastic grating, in long strips that run along the joint between the walls and the ceiling. One imagines that the grating was overlaid to dim the inhumanity of fluorescence, and it does; it also throws the room in darkness and gives the wood closest to the ceiling a sickened whitish hue. It’s ugly but not severely, in a manner too well-intended to resent. This is the ugliness of your den’s overly shaded lamp and the maroon rug that, though quite fetching in the store, is all wrong in its sluggish light.

If you follow the bleached strip along the wall you will eventually reach, at a ridiculous fifteen feet off the center, a bronze clock. A frilled hour hand and a slim featureless minute hand rotate around a silver button, marking time against eight roman numerals and four symbols: a stallion with what appear to be several horns, 3; an eight-pointed star topped by a crown, 6; a cartoon fox, 9; a hand with a six-pointed star on the tip of its fingers and a heart carved into its palm, 12. Magnified and inscrutable, this trinket is the room’s weirdest touch, ugly in its unearned scale and grandeur.

Firestone’s lobby offers a few different types of aesthetic failure, unified only by their association with a decade I haven’t experienced. The lack of spatial aspiration, the metallically reinforced homeliness, the humanizing gloom, kitsch bearing too great a symbolic load. It’s as dense and cluttered and unintended as the final form of a lived-in home, and as touching as an uneventful accumulation of years. Temporally, it’s very hard to place; I’ve already mentioned the ready-to-hand “seventies,” but that doesn’t suffice. The card catalog is a 1948 original, as is the WPA-style “Federal Documents Depository” insignia outside the main doors—but the white sun is from 1966, the paneling 1971 and the clock another universe. Too many ideas and intentions have spilled over into the space, the legacy of generations of contributors united only by their disdain for revisionism and charitable respect for each other’s difference. It is a room doomed to ugliness and overcrowding by its tolerance, and all the sweeter for it.

There is still one more wonderful thing: a small history of Princeton University in a long glass case, totaling maybe five hundred words with twenty-five pictures. Its tone is whimsical, as such limitations require: there is a swatch of fabric worn by alumni during the “P-Rade”; a photograph of “[Former] Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld ‘54,” in a wrestler’s singlet pointing a victor’s thumbs-up; four postage stamps depicting Nassau Hall; a photograph of a 2003 Princeton University Players’ performance of “Pippin,” “one of many that year”; and, in what might be the longest section, a description of the plot and historical importance of the 1951 Cary Grant film People Will Talk, shot on campus. The notion of the thing is only slightly less absurd than a brief sociological snapshot of American life (bleachers, the Sharper Image, tax cuts), and slightly more than the scrapbook my mother kept for me with one page per year (thirteen: a photograph of my first communion; sixteen: khakis and sneakers and sun-squinting on a beach).

As I write this, the “BOOK RETURN” sign just came back on. It will burn for another twenty minutes, the uneven light behind the second ‘O’ upsetting Helvetica’s perfect weight, as hand-drawn as illuminated text could ever be.

The very fact of this magazine implies everything I want to say about it, but just check out the following ad and article, in that order:

Wealth continues on even as the chains of heritage are broken.

I  had a thought about the huge success and huge backlash against Vampire Weekend—it’s apiece with the hype cycle, of course, but more than that it’s because the band represents something so needed and simultaneously so ugly that it’s hard not to become as revolted as quickly as you are enamored: an earnest expression of wealth, convinced of its own innocuousness and carefree in its ignorance of the very serious attention people might pay to such matters. (”Why would you lie about how much coal you have / why would you lie about something dumb like that.”) It’s an ahistorical reincarnation of the very thing for which Connoisseur was proof of expiration, class secure in its modes of operation.

(Don’t pin this absurdity on me. Just look at Deacon’s slogan: “everything at once all the time forever.”)

The stubborn refusal to recognize, even now and after all, that the synthesizer is an instrument and not an end; the cleverness ignorant of the fealty its mash-up (let’s not dignify it with some successor term) of a cheesy piano riff from 2008 with a cheesy piano riff from 1970 pays to the hegemony of the soft weak heart.

WICKEDEST CENSORS—CNN
“Hey, can I call you Joe?” she asked. “[Off-mike],” he responded.

BEST MIXED METAPHOR—SARAH PALIN
“The barometer there, I think, is going to be resounding that our economy is hurting.”

MOST GERUNDS—SARAH PALIN
Gerunds are for the weak, remember that.

AN UNBRANDED RANGE ANIMAL—JOHN MCCAIN
That’s the definition of ‘maverick’, you know.

THAT ECONOMIC BAROMETER—THE OPINION OF ONE MOTHER AT A SOCCER GAME
Because Sarah Palin has more faith in the American people than they, secret criers and problem eaters, have in themselves.

WORST USE OF THE SECOND-PERSON—SARAH PALIN
“Government, you know, you’re not always the solution.”

WORST USE OF THE THIRD-PERSON—JOE BIDEN
“Gwen, no one in the United States has been a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden.”

CLOSEST APPROXIMATION OF THE WORD “VULVA”—SARAH PALIN
Palin, in her list of oil company executives, included “Mulva at ConocoPhillips.” We can assume that Palin is not so Christian that she has failed to explore and discover the secrets of the body.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PLACE ON MAIN STREET—THE KITCHEN TABLE

EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE—SARAH PALIN
“It is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner.” That business ownership, incidentally, was a twenty-percent stake in a car wash—which came to a close after three years, when her own Alaskan government was forced to dissolve it for failing to file licensing fees.

MOST ALCOHOLIC AND VICARIOUSLY VIOLENT POPULATION—AMERICA
Joe Sixpack and his Hockey Wife, you’ve get the candidate you deserve.

HAS FRIENDS AND RELATIONS WHO HATE GAYS LESS THAN HER—SARAH PALIN
“I have a very diverse family and group of friends, and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on [the gay rights] issue.”

ONE OF THEM MIGHT EVEN BE GAY THEMSELVES—SARAH PALIN
With whom she bowls once a month, and chats about all those areas of life unrelated to sex or love. And to whom, let’s be honest here, she probably responded during the coming-out conversation with, “Hey, it’s totally cool if you’re gay—as long as you’re not gay for me, hah, you know? I just love Todd, you know? Love him right up.”

TOTALLY STRAIGHT THOUGH—SARAH PALIN
“I will tell Americans straight up that I don’t support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman … I’m being as straight up with Americans as I can in my non-support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage. ” How can she say it straighter? Girl’s straight.

GREAT AMERICAN HERO—GENERAL PETRAEUS
Probably a great Dad, too. With a nice, easy laugh.

DOES NOT HAVE THE NAME “OSAMA BIN LADEN” IN HER ACTIVE VOCABULARY—SARAH PALIN
“And as for who coined that central war on terror being in Iraq, it was Gen. Petraeus and al Qaeda, both leaders there. … I would believe Petraeus and the leader of al Qaeda.”

MOST INTERESTING CONVERSATION PARTNER SARAH PALIN EVER HAD—THE WAR CRIMINAL HENRY KISSINGER
“I had a good conversation with him recently. And he shared with me his passion for diplomacy.”

CONVERSATION PARTNERS WHO INTERESTED THE WAR CRIMINAL HENRY KISSINGER MORE THAN SARAH PALIN—HIS BANK TELLER, THREE OR FOUR PEOPLE WITH WHOM HE’S SHARED AN ELEVATOR, TAXI DRIVERS WORLDWIDE

WORST TRANSCRIPTION—CNN
“That’s what it takes to reign in spending.” Sic as hell, guys.

SEXIEST SURGE—GENERAL PETRAEUS
“Clear, hold and build” is the secret to the Petraeuses’ famous delayed orgasms.

GOSH, THAT WOULD PROBABLY KILL ALOT OF PEOPLE, WOULDN’T IT?—A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
“[The use of] nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.”

ALWAYS MEANING SOMEONE ELSE—SARAH PALIN
“Well, first, [George B.] McClellan [b. 1826, d. 1885] did not definitively say the surge principles would work in Afghanistan.” His implementation of the surge principles in western Virginia, however, were integral to the early successes of the Northern campaign and the birth of West Virginia.

WILLING, WHEN PRESSED, TO ADMIT HE’S SAVED MORE PEOPLE THAN YOU WILL EVER EVEN MEET IN YOUR LIFETIME—JOE BIDEN
“My recommendations on Bosnia: I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives.”

YOUR STREET—A TOXIC MESS
“It’s a toxic mess, really, on Main Street, that’s affecting Wall Street.” If only you weren’t always sneaking out those garbage bags of empty whippets late on Sunday night.

DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HOW RIGHT SHE IS—SARAH PALIN
“You know, it’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider.”

JUST WANTS TO GIVE ISRAEL A BIG HUG WITH A COUPLE OF SQUEEZES IN THERE, LOOK IT IN THE EYES AFTERWARD, STILL GRASPING ITS SHOULDERS WITH HIS FIRM HANDS, AND ASK IT HOW THINGS HAVE BEEN, REALLY—JOE BIDEN
“Gwen, no one in the United States has been a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden.”

EXPLAINED EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH HER WORLDVIEW IN SEVERAL WORDS—SARAH PALIN
“Her reward is in Heaven, right?”

HOW YOU’LL SPEND YOUR SUNSET YEARS—SARAH PALIN
If Obama and Biden are elected, Palin implied that “we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.” Whereas if McCain and Palin are elected, we will all be napping, bellies full of meat, on a bright and warm New Christmas evening (New Christmas will be the day all the Mexicans died).