“Tainted Love” and a Winter Break

As I’ve written before, I’m leaving journalism. There’s a magazine profile of me coming out at some point, and it’s a good time to head to the beach.

I hate the media, but I’ve known the author of the article for many years so I hope it’ll be fair.

However, there’s one thing that a friend of mine who was interviewed mentioned, and I want to address it before going underground. Apparently the author of the profile was taken with the concept that I’m “a man out of time”—that I belong to a different era, perhaps the 1950s. (I also suspect the photograph they take will make me look like an asshole, but that’s a different story.)

If this is a theme, it’ll be wrong. I grew up in a liberal, artistic, JFK Irish-Catholic family in Maryland. We loved modernism. We read challenging books, listened to avant-garde music, and saw experimental plays. My father was a journalist for National Geographic and my brother was an award-winning actor.

And yet I’m a political and cultural conservative. The explanation for how this works is provided by Jed Perl in his book Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts. Perl argues that the “lifeblood of art” is the tension between authority and freedom. “Authority is the ordering impulse,” he says. “Freedom is the love of experimentation and play.”