Among adults, the right to love whom you’re moved to love — and to express it through sex and maybe, yes, marriage — is surely as vital to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a Glock. And it’s a lot less likely to cause injury, if that’s a deciding factor: how a person’s actions affect the community around him or her.

I USE the words “moved to love” in an effort to define the significant, important territory between “born this way” and choice. That solid ground covers “built this way,” “oriented this way,” and “evolved this way”; it incorporates the possibility of a potent biological predisposition mingling with other factors beyond anyone’s ready control; and it probably applies to Nixon herself.

“Nixon” is Cynthia Nixon, who upset people on the Internet who care about such things for treating sexuality in a flippant manner. To which I respond: Yay! But well-meaning gay liberals, protecting the lives they’ve created, view Nixon’s remarks as a threat: if sexuality looks like a “choice,” then opponents to gay rights have a stronger case.

If humans have made any progress the last hundred years it’s dismissing the implications of determinism. What offends opponents is ambiguity, not clarity. Identity is as recombinant as DNA. Embracing its inherent frivolity adduces our commitment to treating existence as seriously as so-called heterosexuals.

The immediate pleasure offered by A Dangerous Method is literate dialogue. Adapting his own play, Christopher Hampton makes Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) not a pillar so much as a stalk of rectitude and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) a droll ironist addicted to cigars and ascending octaves. A reputation for gore, high-toned or otherwise, has shadowed David Cronenberg’s talent for rendering jargon, the excitement of meeting another person who understands you. He makes scientific badinage kinky. Like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, and William Lee in Naked Lunch, Fassbender is attracted to a female partner’s sympathy and professional intelligence, here represented by neurotic and future psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein and played by Keira Knightley. After an uneasy start, in which she writhes and aims her jutting lantern jaw at any moving target in the Oscar-honored manner of playing wacko women, Knightley actually improves: I could believe that she would meet Jung on a bench in Vienna to swap theories about the connections between sex and death.

A good thing too, for I didn’t feel the supposed warmth between Jung and Freud to which their letters allude. For every smart editing choice (i.e. cutting from Knightly’s astonishment at seeing hymeneal blood on white sheets to Jung’s family playing in his plush quarters), Cronenberg elides much. A Dangerous Method could have benefited from an extra half hour or three quarters of an hour. Why do Hampton and Cronenberg make such a fuss about Freud and Jung’s trip to America only to film two scenes aboard ship? Why does their friendship fray when we’re barely introduced to them? One of the film’s strengths is its unsentimentality about human relations. Barely a personal remark passes between Freud and Jung. The latter’s wife Emma (a subtle Sarah Gadon) tolerates his philandering as long as he keeps her pregnant. But Cronenberg and Hampton haven’t thought through this paradox. A Dangerous Mind just stops. Still, it’s a movie of smart, quiet grace, none more so than when Mortensen’s Freud, easing back into his leather chair, surrounded by African kitsch, drinks in his young colleague’s flattery like aged port.

Songs graded on a ten-point scale. Click on links for reviews.

Faith Hill – Come Home (6)
Nicki Minaj – Stupid Hoe (6)
Jason Mraz – I Won’t Give Up (5)
The Shins – Simple Song (5)
Tyga – Rack City (5)
B.o.B ft. Andre 3000 – Play the Guitar (4)
Wonder Girls – The DJ Is Mine (4)
Nelly ft. T.I. and 2 Chainz – Country Ass Nigga (4)
The Maccabees – Pelican (2)
50 Cent ft. Tony Yayo – I Just Wanna (2)
DJ Fresh ft. Rita Ora – Hot Right Now (2)
David Guetta ft. Nicki Minaj – Turn Me On (1)

Each season, the writer’s balance gets worse, and sometimes he falls. He no longer cooks for himself but microwaves widower food, mostly Stouffer’s. If he flies to do a poetry reading, his dear companion Linda, who lives an hour away, must wheelchair him through airport and security. New poems no longer come to him. Generation after generation, his family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later. After a life of loving the old, by natural law the writer turned old himself. Decades followed each other and then came his cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years he travelled to another universe. However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying, but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial.

When people call his son the “Rombot,” think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father’s fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy’s left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts’ healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

He’s still inauthentic – but with, I think, an exception. Every time he opens his mouth on the subject of capitalism, he says what he sincerely believes, which happens to fit neatly with present-day Republican ideology: that rich people deserve every penny they have, and if people complain about anything rich people do, it’s only because they’re envious.

Bill Murray in his prime couldn’t have played him.

In which sandpapery-voiced political consultant Steve Meyers (Ryan Gosling) realizes that the Democratic governor and candidate for president (George Clooney) is a louse, and, as a bonus, realizes that he’s a louse too. That’s all that’s at stake in what Tim Robbins’ louse of a Hollywood executive in The Player would classify as a cynical political thriller with a heart. The dialogue, written by director Clooney, Grant Heslow, and Beau Willimon, based on a play, is recognizable to anyone seduced by the chipper chihuahua excitement of Mark Halperin monologues on the cable talk shows, which I suppose adduces the film’s verisimilitude: it’s as shallow and “process”-driven as any “issue” hot enough to raise a tingle up Chris Matthews’ leg. Clooney as director errs in showing Clooney the actor’s point of view (e.g. the Sensitive Moment between the candidate and wife in the car); for this thing to work at all the candidate has to remain in the shadows, a smirking non-entity. At least Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, ladling irony like cold soup, offers a few rancid bon mots. I was especially offended by how Evan Rachel Wood exists to get seduced and abandoned for the sake of a gross and obvious plot twist in the sort of film for which the just as gross buzzword “homosocial” exists.

Clooney The Actor is the problem too — an example of a performer famous for what makes him least interesting. Called upon to express warmth, he’s merely self-absorbed; when he gives himself a blackguard moment he projects TV-actor malevolence. After Up in the Air, The Descendants, and this, Clooney better watch out: William Holden got trapped in the same place by the mid sixties. Would that he and Gosling have switched roles.

A few conservative concessions to liberalism’s strengths were made without qualification; others were begrudging. Nonetheless, in the conservative assessment, common themes emerge:

Liberals recognize the real problems facing the poor, the hardships resulting from economic globalization and the socially destructive force of increasing inequality.

Liberals do not dismiss or treat as ideologically motivated scientific findings, especially the sharpening scientific consensus that human beings contribute significantly to climate change.

Liberals stand with those most in need, and believe in the inclusion of such previously marginalized groups as blacks, Hispanics, women and gays.

As I sifted through the responses, it became clear that a widely shared view among contemporary conservatives is that liberals are all heart and no head, that their policies are misguided — thrown off track by an excessively emotional compassion that fails to recognize the likelihood of unintended consequences.

Or, as Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison reminded us in JFK, “We’re through the lookin’ glass, people!”

A close to definitive oral history of Disco Inferno, a band about which I knew little until last year. I’ll need this: even after listening with growing pleasure to the reissue of The Five EP‘s last fall my reservations still stand. Ian Crause’s vocals, wry in the undistinguished way of a funny political science adjunct at a public university, don’t reward concentration, so I’ll have to take Ned’s word about the intelligence of his lyrics. Learning how, like New Order, they produced haunting sounds from a less than adroit grasp of sampling technology validates a method, not the results. As creators of ambient musics, however, these men are first-rate – dig the rattling dishes, whooshing train effects, and heard-from-the-woods piano in “From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sky,” or “Love Stepping Out,” which sounds like the offspring of Orbital and Steve Reich. Essays in shoegaze (“A Rock to Cling To”) and jangle (“The Last Dance” and its better produced successor “The Long Dance”) are as compelling but impossible to imagine on any college station. Disco Inferno were meant for studious concentration on headphones; they reward the attention.

One of my favorite guitar songs of the nineties.