After a long post-Thanksgiving, post-Thanksgiving-leftover-lunch nap this afternoon, I woke up in the disorienting gloom of an early fall evening to the sound of piano music drifting through the thin bedroom wall. As I slowly regained consciousness and listened more attentively, I realized, with some surprise, that the music was coming from an actual piano, not a recording or a TV. It was some kind of ethereal, slightly saccharine opus in the minor key, the kind that might accompany a particularly reflective scene of a B+ Hollywood melodrama -- a cold off-season beach, wind blowing through the skeletal scrub grass, a woman with a colorless face and an oversize knitted sweater sitting on a sand dune, staring reflectively at the droning surf while loose strands of hair whip across her face.
Whoever was playing the piano was competent but either rusty or uncertain, because the longer the melody continued, the more frequently a jarring misplaced note necessitated the restarting of each coda, breaking up the swell of emotion that might otherwise have led the audience to wipe away a sympathetic tear for the lady with the colorless face and the comfort sweater (perhaps there is also an incongruously cheerful dog at her side and a wedding ring or a small ringlet of a child's downy hair dancing nervously in her hands -- Meaningful Symbolism).
What amazed me, though, laying there in the encroaching darkness, was the inexplicable power of those notes, played not by a tiny system of pulsing electronic signals but by human fingers, which I envisioned with uncanny clarity as they fumbling over the polished ivory keys. It didn't matter that the melody was a little sappy, or that the anonymous player was less than a concert-grade performer. There was something infinitely relatable in that sound, in spite (or perhaps even because of) its faults. It was fragile and almost too painfully real, but protected from over-saturation of awkward too-human humanness by the darkness and the thin plaster wall.
The feeling I got from hearing that music made me remember something from the night before -- a quiet moment before the turkey came out of the oven, before the bottle of bourbon and the game of drunken charades. All it was was me, tipsy, happy, sipping wine in a dark warm living room with happy drunk friends hovering nearby, listening to an old record player lovingly work over some 70s hair metal, first an early T.Rex and then Led Zeppelin. It was the perfect distillation of distance and proximity, joy and melancholy, camaraderie and solitude, and all those other slightly banal antitheses that make life so amazing and dynamic and interesting. Those peaks and valleys that are worth savoring, before time smooths everything over like flat, colorless sand.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Walker: Zombie Ranger
The night before last, Ryan and I discovered that the season premier of The Walking Dead was available on Hulu. Consequently, I spent the rest of the night and early morning in a feverish dream delirium, watching my very own 7-hour original zombie series projected onto the unwitting twin movie screens of my inner eyelids.
You'd think I'd learn my lesson about going near anything zombie-related anywhere near bedtime (genre and quality are of no importance -- I had nightmares after both Shaun of the Dead and the terrible Aughts remake of Day of the Dead "starring" Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames -- but obviously I haven't, because we downloaded and watched episodes 2 and 3 last night, with the same nightmare-riffic result for me. Tossing and turning, awaking every couple of hours and punching down the damp cavern that my head had worn into the pillow, and, the minute my eyes were shut again, returning to an elaborate dream landscape of abandoned, boarded up houses and complex moral quandaries: to kill an infected person in order to preempt inevitable zombification? To put down a zombified loved one or leave them to their gleeful flesh-eating ways? To hunker down or keep moving?
I keep trying to think through why I both love and am utterly eviscerated (graaarrr... zombie pun want braaaiins) by this particular genre, and I keep coming back to the extreme loneliness at the heart of most zombie movies -- the feeling that you, as the audience, are watching what may very well be the last remnant of humanity pathetically trying to hold its own against an encroaching horde of mindless, bloodthirsty brutality. The fact that there's rarely a happy ending to these stories suggests we as a species are all too aware of our limited lifespan and our paltry hope of combating entropy. Perhaps there's some cathartic moment of peace that comes with knowing that we're all going to die anyway, so we might as well be glad that it probably won't be such a horrible death as the one reserved for those poor souls about to wear their intestinal tract as a squishy necktie.
Which is weird, because the two specific dream plots I can remember from the past two nights have started with all the expected gruesome zombie mayhem, but ended in uncharacteristically optimism... after a fashion. The first night's dream cast the zombie apocalypse in the appropriately moody post-Katrina New Orleans (of course), with me hiding in one half of a grimy pink double shotgun house through wave after wave of zombie onslaught. At the end of the dream, with order slowly returning to the city and black-clad national guardsmen silently patrolling the streets, I remember walking down a twilit block somewhere in the Touro vicinity and looking at all the FEMA markings scrawled on the ramshackle houses -- representing not the number of people who were dead in the house, but the number of undead still trapped inside. It was a weird moment because on some level both interpretations of the cryptic markings were active in my mind, and I felt a simultaneous swell of sadness for the (un)dead and a counteracting surge of hope for the rebuilding of society from the ground up, a utopian dream of a social tabula rasa that rarely appears in conventional zombie cinema... unless we're talking about terrible remakes starring Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames (srsly, do. not. watch).
The other dream, the one from last night, took place on the set of my Mississippi high school's production of Anne Frank. Conveniently, my mind had conflated "hiding in an attic" with zombie apocalypse, producing the Nazi/zombie amalgam that Hollywood has clearly been waiting for (Jerry Bruckheimer, call me). Again, the dream ended with a strangely hopeful liberation-cum-rebirth-of-man scene, with paratroopers swooping in like puffy angels and sniping at the undead from the sky. I believe there may even have been a Victory Day parade, though the lack of nail-biting tension in the dream also meant that I was more relaxed and, subsequently, uh, slept through some of it.
I suppose I should be happy that my subconscious finds positive ways of dealing with a topic that it obviously finds so terrifying, but that still doesn't explain to me why that grain of terror gets under my skin so easily to produce these kinds of pearls. Perhaps it's that strain of loneliness after all, reacting with my natural antisocial tendencies and literalizing a deep-seated fear of The Other...
... or maybe, in the immortal words of Arrested Development, I'm just a giant pussy.
You'd think I'd learn my lesson about going near anything zombie-related anywhere near bedtime (genre and quality are of no importance -- I had nightmares after both Shaun of the Dead and the terrible Aughts remake of Day of the Dead "starring" Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames -- but obviously I haven't, because we downloaded and watched episodes 2 and 3 last night, with the same nightmare-riffic result for me. Tossing and turning, awaking every couple of hours and punching down the damp cavern that my head had worn into the pillow, and, the minute my eyes were shut again, returning to an elaborate dream landscape of abandoned, boarded up houses and complex moral quandaries: to kill an infected person in order to preempt inevitable zombification? To put down a zombified loved one or leave them to their gleeful flesh-eating ways? To hunker down or keep moving?
I keep trying to think through why I both love and am utterly eviscerated (graaarrr... zombie pun want braaaiins) by this particular genre, and I keep coming back to the extreme loneliness at the heart of most zombie movies -- the feeling that you, as the audience, are watching what may very well be the last remnant of humanity pathetically trying to hold its own against an encroaching horde of mindless, bloodthirsty brutality. The fact that there's rarely a happy ending to these stories suggests we as a species are all too aware of our limited lifespan and our paltry hope of combating entropy. Perhaps there's some cathartic moment of peace that comes with knowing that we're all going to die anyway, so we might as well be glad that it probably won't be such a horrible death as the one reserved for those poor souls about to wear their intestinal tract as a squishy necktie.
Which is weird, because the two specific dream plots I can remember from the past two nights have started with all the expected gruesome zombie mayhem, but ended in uncharacteristically optimism... after a fashion. The first night's dream cast the zombie apocalypse in the appropriately moody post-Katrina New Orleans (of course), with me hiding in one half of a grimy pink double shotgun house through wave after wave of zombie onslaught. At the end of the dream, with order slowly returning to the city and black-clad national guardsmen silently patrolling the streets, I remember walking down a twilit block somewhere in the Touro vicinity and looking at all the FEMA markings scrawled on the ramshackle houses -- representing not the number of people who were dead in the house, but the number of undead still trapped inside. It was a weird moment because on some level both interpretations of the cryptic markings were active in my mind, and I felt a simultaneous swell of sadness for the (un)dead and a counteracting surge of hope for the rebuilding of society from the ground up, a utopian dream of a social tabula rasa that rarely appears in conventional zombie cinema... unless we're talking about terrible remakes starring Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames (srsly, do. not. watch).
The other dream, the one from last night, took place on the set of my Mississippi high school's production of Anne Frank. Conveniently, my mind had conflated "hiding in an attic" with zombie apocalypse, producing the Nazi/zombie amalgam that Hollywood has clearly been waiting for (Jerry Bruckheimer, call me). Again, the dream ended with a strangely hopeful liberation-cum-rebirth-of-man scene, with paratroopers swooping in like puffy angels and sniping at the undead from the sky. I believe there may even have been a Victory Day parade, though the lack of nail-biting tension in the dream also meant that I was more relaxed and, subsequently, uh, slept through some of it.
I suppose I should be happy that my subconscious finds positive ways of dealing with a topic that it obviously finds so terrifying, but that still doesn't explain to me why that grain of terror gets under my skin so easily to produce these kinds of pearls. Perhaps it's that strain of loneliness after all, reacting with my natural antisocial tendencies and literalizing a deep-seated fear of The Other...
... or maybe, in the immortal words of Arrested Development, I'm just a giant pussy.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Magic eye
Everyone always talks about how New York City seems so huge and overwhelming to the casual interloper, how the mile-high skyscrapers loom over you and hammer home your infinite smallness in the world. Well, San Francisco does the same thing on a different axis: through the perpetual telescopic effect of the hilly topography, you can follow a street as it rises up into the sky, ten, twenty times more imposing than any skyscraper. Instead of just seeing what's immediately surrounding you on your block, you can also see, with stunning clarity, blocks that are miles in the distance, blanketed with dense rows of shoulder-to-shoulder houses that follow the gentle swells of the terraformed hilltops. Trying to locate yourself in relation to these floating urban islands is like trying to suss out a Necker cube -- squint and focus as hard as you might, you will still see only one facet at a time, either the forward-projecting or the backward-projecting one. But, in spite of the futility, your mind aches to put them together into a coherent picture that captures both.
It's tempting to make an analogy to the human perception of present and past. The mind, when confronted with people and places from the past, strains to perform the impossible mental operation of reconciling two perspectives. One of them is concrete and tangible, and the other is a glimmering road snaking upward into the horizon -- and while you can see it unfold with surprising detail, much more detail than the blunt close-up face of the present, you know that stretching your fingertips out to touch it would be entirely in vain.
I know it and I try anyway, because my mind loves puzzles and paradoxes, because life in just three dimensions is never quite good enough.
It's tempting to make an analogy to the human perception of present and past. The mind, when confronted with people and places from the past, strains to perform the impossible mental operation of reconciling two perspectives. One of them is concrete and tangible, and the other is a glimmering road snaking upward into the horizon -- and while you can see it unfold with surprising detail, much more detail than the blunt close-up face of the present, you know that stretching your fingertips out to touch it would be entirely in vain.
I know it and I try anyway, because my mind loves puzzles and paradoxes, because life in just three dimensions is never quite good enough.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Post/riposte
Update to the Great Cougar Saga of Twenty-Ten:
Two days after the incident, I noticed a handmade sign and a small cluster of flowers in jars arranged in a shady bus stop niche. Predictably, the good people of Berkeley were saddened and/or outraged by the killing, and they'd erected a miniature shrine to mark the occasion, complete with an expression of their disappointment with the Berkeley P.D., as well as what looked like a 5th grade homework assignment on cougar facts. Being the perpetual cynical jerk that I am, I chuckled and snapped a photo with my iPhone, to be shown to friends in the crude vein of "LOL, hippies."
But when I passed the shrine the next day, there was a new addition -- a typed letter, presumably from a fellow cynic, lightly chiding people for being so foolish and quick to splash moral outrage over a fairly cut-and-dried situation (cougar in burban neighborhood = dangerous). Every time I passed by the area on subsequent days, there was some new development in the shrine discussion: notes jotted on the typed letter, both approving and disapproving; more facts sheets and print-outs of National Geographic-style cougar photos; a prayer for peace and harmony with the animal kingdom; and even a second typed letter, this one riddled with arrows pointing to facts from the original shrine decor, calling them out as specious and then arguing vehemently for "critical thinking" -- a lost art, according to the anonymous writer.
At first, I was simply amazed by how virtual-looking this discussion was becoming, with its hyperlinks and follow-up threads, and how well-represented every facet of Internet commentator was in the fracas. There was the OP, the snarky respondent, the peacemaker, the fact-finder, the critic of the fact-finder... all that was missing was the obscene troll and the inevitable comparison of the California law enforcement tactics to that of Hitler's Germany.
But then I remembered something I'd read while researching for my undergrad thesis on dissent and revolution in communist and post-communist Eastern Europe. In the 80s, a shrine to John Lennon instantaneously materialized in the middle of Prague right after the announcement of Lennon's tragic death. The communist police were miffed at first and tried getting rid of it, but the plethora of flowers and candles and teary notes reappeared in the morning after each clandestine midnight sweep, like mushrooms after a rainfall. Eventually, the police gave in and, pun intended, let it be. Seizing the opportunity, the dissident community appropriated the shrine as a symbol of their resistance movement, as John Lennon and The Beatles had already been for the disgruntled East European youth for the better part of a decade. To the flowers and candles and teary notes were added more overtly political messages on the subject of Peace and Freedom. Dissidents even began to use the shrine as a bonafide message board, posting locations and times of their next meetings in the middle of the traditional mourning accouterments. Eventually, the police were alerted and became more vigilant about pruning the shrine of political content -- but by then it was already the late 80s, and a real revolution was just around the corner.
Clearly, the people of Communist Czechoslovakia already had some germinal concept of message boards in their heads, and it only took a few more years for technology to catch up to the idea. What really makes me giddy is the continuity not only of the theoretical aspect, but also the concrete implementation, the blow-by-blow of how this public discussion plays out. Whether it happens in the street or in the comments section of the New York Times, it's the same kind of discourse, built on digression and marginality, fixing on some highly public, emotionally resonant event in history, and then pulling together people's preexisting political agendas, performed personas, and various other axes that need grinding. It's at once centripetal and centrifugal, generating the weight that gives importance to the event, while simultaneously threatening to pull the solidity and homogeneity of communal interpretation in a dozen different directions. Both modern and primal, just like a cougar roaming the back-alleys by one of the world's most distinguished restaurants. People: truly the world's most fascinating beasts.
Two days after the incident, I noticed a handmade sign and a small cluster of flowers in jars arranged in a shady bus stop niche. Predictably, the good people of Berkeley were saddened and/or outraged by the killing, and they'd erected a miniature shrine to mark the occasion, complete with an expression of their disappointment with the Berkeley P.D., as well as what looked like a 5th grade homework assignment on cougar facts. Being the perpetual cynical jerk that I am, I chuckled and snapped a photo with my iPhone, to be shown to friends in the crude vein of "LOL, hippies."
But when I passed the shrine the next day, there was a new addition -- a typed letter, presumably from a fellow cynic, lightly chiding people for being so foolish and quick to splash moral outrage over a fairly cut-and-dried situation (cougar in burban neighborhood = dangerous). Every time I passed by the area on subsequent days, there was some new development in the shrine discussion: notes jotted on the typed letter, both approving and disapproving; more facts sheets and print-outs of National Geographic-style cougar photos; a prayer for peace and harmony with the animal kingdom; and even a second typed letter, this one riddled with arrows pointing to facts from the original shrine decor, calling them out as specious and then arguing vehemently for "critical thinking" -- a lost art, according to the anonymous writer.
At first, I was simply amazed by how virtual-looking this discussion was becoming, with its hyperlinks and follow-up threads, and how well-represented every facet of Internet commentator was in the fracas. There was the OP, the snarky respondent, the peacemaker, the fact-finder, the critic of the fact-finder... all that was missing was the obscene troll and the inevitable comparison of the California law enforcement tactics to that of Hitler's Germany.
But then I remembered something I'd read while researching for my undergrad thesis on dissent and revolution in communist and post-communist Eastern Europe. In the 80s, a shrine to John Lennon instantaneously materialized in the middle of Prague right after the announcement of Lennon's tragic death. The communist police were miffed at first and tried getting rid of it, but the plethora of flowers and candles and teary notes reappeared in the morning after each clandestine midnight sweep, like mushrooms after a rainfall. Eventually, the police gave in and, pun intended, let it be. Seizing the opportunity, the dissident community appropriated the shrine as a symbol of their resistance movement, as John Lennon and The Beatles had already been for the disgruntled East European youth for the better part of a decade. To the flowers and candles and teary notes were added more overtly political messages on the subject of Peace and Freedom. Dissidents even began to use the shrine as a bonafide message board, posting locations and times of their next meetings in the middle of the traditional mourning accouterments. Eventually, the police were alerted and became more vigilant about pruning the shrine of political content -- but by then it was already the late 80s, and a real revolution was just around the corner.
Clearly, the people of Communist Czechoslovakia already had some germinal concept of message boards in their heads, and it only took a few more years for technology to catch up to the idea. What really makes me giddy is the continuity not only of the theoretical aspect, but also the concrete implementation, the blow-by-blow of how this public discussion plays out. Whether it happens in the street or in the comments section of the New York Times, it's the same kind of discourse, built on digression and marginality, fixing on some highly public, emotionally resonant event in history, and then pulling together people's preexisting political agendas, performed personas, and various other axes that need grinding. It's at once centripetal and centrifugal, generating the weight that gives importance to the event, while simultaneously threatening to pull the solidity and homogeneity of communal interpretation in a dozen different directions. Both modern and primal, just like a cougar roaming the back-alleys by one of the world's most distinguished restaurants. People: truly the world's most fascinating beasts.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Big game
Last night, in a state of restless half-sleep, I heard the sound of two gunshots going off, seemingly right outside the bedroom window. Throughout most of my solidly lower-to-middle middle class existence, I've been fortunate enough not to hear gunshots all that often -- the exception being the W.T.O. riots in Seattle circa my sophomore year of high school, and I'm pretty sure those were rubber bullets -- but the sound was unmistakable: like the swat of a rug-beater on a dusty carpet, but amplified tenfold, with a sinister reverb you never hear in the movies. Idly, I wondered who on earth could be firing a weapon in the middle of downtown Berkeley, but at that point, I was too far gone with sleep to care.
Turns out, the shots were from a police officer tasked with gunning down a wild cougar that had inexplicably wandered into our quiet suburban neighborhood. When this story was related to me the following day, what surprised me wasn't so much the cougar prowling around the organically stocked dumpsters of Chez Panisse. That much seemed perfectly reasonable to me, given that mountains are close and "twice-cooked kid goat with cumin, ginger, eggplant, and chickpeas" is enough to draw in the most skittish and reclusive of carnivores. What surprised me was that, even in this hippie/yuppiefied town, the only effective method the local law could come up with for dealing with a wild animal was extermination. Weren't there some tranq darts lying around in their Black Marias, or some tear gas left over from 60s student protests?
I kept thinking about this as I heard about the crazy Discovery Channel standoff that also happened today. Obviously, it's dangerous to compare the killing of a wild animal to the killing of a person, but even without PETA-style intellectual convolution, the logic from the point of view of the trigger finger feels exactly the same to me: This is a wild, unpredictable creature. It may harm someone. It needs to die to let others live. Viscerally, I'm uncomfortable with this logic. I don't like imagining myself in the situation of the police officer whose job it is to make that decision and, pun intended, execute it. I don't like the place a mind has to go in order to dispassionately, instantaneously make that choice. And I certainly don't like the dark stain that inevitably remains imprinted in some corner of that mind after the dust has settled and the body of some unfortunate hunted creature lays prone and motionless like a limp rag. One would say, then, that I'm clearly on the side of deontological ethics, favoring process and means over and above any ends they enact. Thinking deeper about the situation, though, I suppose that's precisely what draws me to utilitarianism. It's not a visceral, passionate reaction, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder for a human mind to make sense of it. But maybe we as a species need to put ourselves in more difficult situations, and to avoid solving them with meely-mouthed platitudes about kindness and love and sanctity of life, especially when it's so clear that our entire society is built on anything but.
Turns out, the shots were from a police officer tasked with gunning down a wild cougar that had inexplicably wandered into our quiet suburban neighborhood. When this story was related to me the following day, what surprised me wasn't so much the cougar prowling around the organically stocked dumpsters of Chez Panisse. That much seemed perfectly reasonable to me, given that mountains are close and "twice-cooked kid goat with cumin, ginger, eggplant, and chickpeas" is enough to draw in the most skittish and reclusive of carnivores. What surprised me was that, even in this hippie/yuppiefied town, the only effective method the local law could come up with for dealing with a wild animal was extermination. Weren't there some tranq darts lying around in their Black Marias, or some tear gas left over from 60s student protests?
I kept thinking about this as I heard about the crazy Discovery Channel standoff that also happened today. Obviously, it's dangerous to compare the killing of a wild animal to the killing of a person, but even without PETA-style intellectual convolution, the logic from the point of view of the trigger finger feels exactly the same to me: This is a wild, unpredictable creature. It may harm someone. It needs to die to let others live. Viscerally, I'm uncomfortable with this logic. I don't like imagining myself in the situation of the police officer whose job it is to make that decision and, pun intended, execute it. I don't like the place a mind has to go in order to dispassionately, instantaneously make that choice. And I certainly don't like the dark stain that inevitably remains imprinted in some corner of that mind after the dust has settled and the body of some unfortunate hunted creature lays prone and motionless like a limp rag. One would say, then, that I'm clearly on the side of deontological ethics, favoring process and means over and above any ends they enact. Thinking deeper about the situation, though, I suppose that's precisely what draws me to utilitarianism. It's not a visceral, passionate reaction, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder for a human mind to make sense of it. But maybe we as a species need to put ourselves in more difficult situations, and to avoid solving them with meely-mouthed platitudes about kindness and love and sanctity of life, especially when it's so clear that our entire society is built on anything but.
Monday, August 23, 2010
RE: Fighting like a girl
To follow up on my continuing series of posts on girls and the fascist patriarchy contemporary pop culture, I'd like to mention a little film called Kick-Ass, which not long ago was the subject of intense debate for film aficionados and feminists alike. The problem? The film stars 10-year-old Hit Girl, who mercilessly stabs, kicks, shoots, and disembowels bad guys in the name of justice, and utters a stream of colorful Tarantino-esque language while doing so.
Personally, I didn't actually find this all that problematic -- though I should mention that I'm not a very strong believer in the ethical duties of art (I'm also a hypocrite.). Furthermore, The Professional (very different movie, very different genre, but drawing on a similar concept and drawing in similar outrage) is one of my favorite movies of all time, precisely because it pulls back the soft, frilly curtains of girlhood and exposes the wrathful steel rod at the center of anyone who has ever felt small, weak, and defenseless. Of course, where The Professional was more or less anchored in a realistic portrayal of the damage done by a vicious cycle of vengeance and violence, Kick-Ass goes the way of gratuitous wish-fulfillment, allowing the small, weak individual the chance to actually fight back. What both features have to offer, I would argue, is, first of all, a revealing look at the nuanced and often contradictory patriarchal relationship (the young female protagonists of both films are enthralled with the "stronger" male, not the "weaker" female side of the father-daughter equation -- precisely the side that is unequivocally glorified as the hero in any major Hollywood production). And, second, both films present a counter-narrative not just to the popular misconception of young girls as delicate little princesses, but also to the other popular portrayal of young girls in Hollywood, the demonic dead-eyed Scary Child. While both Natalie Portman and Chloe Moretz are involved in some pretty monstrous activities, neither of them is herself a monster whose demise we cheer, precisely because these are, at heart, deeply recognizable, deeply sympathetic human archetypes.
What was interesting to me in the critical fracas about the film was the way that the pro-Kick-Ass camps were split: on one side, those who loved it and found within it an empowering feminist message, and those who were okay with the (stylized) murder and mayhem but objected mainly to the word cunt coming out of the mouth of a 10-year-old. What everyone seemed to agree on, though, is how cannily the director managed not to sexualize Hit Girl... because, presumably, that would take away from the whole feminist empowerment thing. While I'm certainly no fan of the rote approach Hollywood takes when presenting a woman onscreen (hot, skinny, white), something about this abhorrence of sexuality made me do a double take. It seems that while we've crossed some boundaries in our ability to imagine a fictional reality in which a pre-teen girl can take down a roomful of aggressive armed thugs, we obviously feel differently if that girl were, say, posing as an underage prostitute to do the same thing. That movie simply could not be made in any of today's major film studios, because... a 10-year-old seeing a penis is so much worse than a 10-year-old seeing the decapitation of a drug dealer?
The visceral cultural ick-factor was also in play during the release of The Professional, which had to be split into an American version expunged of all suggestive content, and a European version called Leon, featuring a controversial and highly suggestive scene in which Natalie Portman discusses her blooming love/lust for the titular foreign hit-man. Again, I didn't really see the problem -- the scene added meat to the exploration of the dark side of patriarchal relations, problematizing the squeaky-clean father-figure role and adding a nice Aristotelian edge to the drama. But, again, to reiterate the most boring and overused criticism of Hollywood -- violence is okay, sex is not. And the younger the protagonists of films get, the more that formula seems to hold true, with no real critical self-reflection. To quote the director of Kick-Ass: "She wasn't sexualized, it wasn't gratuitous, it was fun and she comes off as a great, fully realized female heroine." Hmm. "Fully-realized" indeed.
Personally, I didn't actually find this all that problematic -- though I should mention that I'm not a very strong believer in the ethical duties of art (I'm also a hypocrite.). Furthermore, The Professional (very different movie, very different genre, but drawing on a similar concept and drawing in similar outrage) is one of my favorite movies of all time, precisely because it pulls back the soft, frilly curtains of girlhood and exposes the wrathful steel rod at the center of anyone who has ever felt small, weak, and defenseless. Of course, where The Professional was more or less anchored in a realistic portrayal of the damage done by a vicious cycle of vengeance and violence, Kick-Ass goes the way of gratuitous wish-fulfillment, allowing the small, weak individual the chance to actually fight back. What both features have to offer, I would argue, is, first of all, a revealing look at the nuanced and often contradictory patriarchal relationship (the young female protagonists of both films are enthralled with the "stronger" male, not the "weaker" female side of the father-daughter equation -- precisely the side that is unequivocally glorified as the hero in any major Hollywood production). And, second, both films present a counter-narrative not just to the popular misconception of young girls as delicate little princesses, but also to the other popular portrayal of young girls in Hollywood, the demonic dead-eyed Scary Child. While both Natalie Portman and Chloe Moretz are involved in some pretty monstrous activities, neither of them is herself a monster whose demise we cheer, precisely because these are, at heart, deeply recognizable, deeply sympathetic human archetypes.
What was interesting to me in the critical fracas about the film was the way that the pro-Kick-Ass camps were split: on one side, those who loved it and found within it an empowering feminist message, and those who were okay with the (stylized) murder and mayhem but objected mainly to the word cunt coming out of the mouth of a 10-year-old. What everyone seemed to agree on, though, is how cannily the director managed not to sexualize Hit Girl... because, presumably, that would take away from the whole feminist empowerment thing. While I'm certainly no fan of the rote approach Hollywood takes when presenting a woman onscreen (hot, skinny, white), something about this abhorrence of sexuality made me do a double take. It seems that while we've crossed some boundaries in our ability to imagine a fictional reality in which a pre-teen girl can take down a roomful of aggressive armed thugs, we obviously feel differently if that girl were, say, posing as an underage prostitute to do the same thing. That movie simply could not be made in any of today's major film studios, because... a 10-year-old seeing a penis is so much worse than a 10-year-old seeing the decapitation of a drug dealer?
The visceral cultural ick-factor was also in play during the release of The Professional, which had to be split into an American version expunged of all suggestive content, and a European version called Leon, featuring a controversial and highly suggestive scene in which Natalie Portman discusses her blooming love/lust for the titular foreign hit-man. Again, I didn't really see the problem -- the scene added meat to the exploration of the dark side of patriarchal relations, problematizing the squeaky-clean father-figure role and adding a nice Aristotelian edge to the drama. But, again, to reiterate the most boring and overused criticism of Hollywood -- violence is okay, sex is not. And the younger the protagonists of films get, the more that formula seems to hold true, with no real critical self-reflection. To quote the director of Kick-Ass: "She wasn't sexualized, it wasn't gratuitous, it was fun and she comes off as a great, fully realized female heroine." Hmm. "Fully-realized" indeed.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Gender troubles
While I was out riding the other day (for the past week, everything in my life has been structured around motorcycles), I remembered I needed to pick up some deodorant. On a gas break, I stepped into the gas station convenience store and quickly scanned the aisles for something other than livid polythene bags of processed carbohydrates. I found a small shelf of personal medical and hygiene products and spent another few seconds searching for deodorant, which I finally located in two varieties: Arrid(tm) For Men and something called Ladies Choice(tm) Invisible Solid. Hesitating slightly, I settled on the cloying pink Ladies Choice and headed to the check-out. An elderly black man with bloodshot eyes and a blank expression swooped in front of me and placed a 40 of Olde English on the counter, then asked the salesgirl for two packs of Kools and a lighter. When she swiped the age-restricted items, the scanner emitted a startled "uh oh!" in a prudish robotic voice. Somewhat bashfully, I stepped up to the counter with my pink tube of deodorant, wishing I'd gone with the Arrid. Equally impassive to purchases of ridiculously named deodorant as she was to purchases of malt liquor at 10 in the morning, the salesgirl scanned my item. The prudish robot remained silent.
Stepping back out into the blaring Texas heat, I popped the frosted cap off the top of the deodorant and gave it a skeptical sniff. It looked and smelled exactly like a giant Elmer's glue stick. Whatever a lady is, I decided, she would probably not choose to slather this stuff on her pits.
Later that day, while my husband and his brothers sat shirtless on the living room couch and played endless rounds of Call of Duty, I retreated to the home gym for some cardio and push-ups. Every now and then, I'd catch a pungent whiff of the floral-cum-paste smell of Ladies Choice emanating from my body. As a distraction, I turned on the TV: Pitch Black, probably my favorite Vin Diesel vehicle, was playing, and as I did sets of push-ups, I thought about how great the character of Jack is in this screenplay -- a (spoiler!!) budding adolescent girl who pretends to be a boy, and who spends the entire movie idolizing and emulating Vin Diesel's space-age killer cowboy persona. What really struck me was how differently this was interpreted in the higher-budget, higher-grossing sequel, Chronicles of Riddick. There, Jack grows up, grows her buzz cut out into an appropriately luscious mane, and transforms into the sexy spitfire sociopath love interest -- the sci-fi version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Unlike the relatively nuanced discussion of sexuality and gender generated by Pitch Black, the sequel is the Ladies Choice of Hollywood's take on women: commodification masquerading as self-assertion. Ladies, you can choose your choice! You can be strong... and sexy! Smart... and sexy! A sociopath... and.... whatever, as long as you bring in that 15-25 market with cleavage and tight leather pants!
I was so caught up in my seething feminist outrage that I barely noticed my arms turning to jelly from the frenzied pace of my workout. I got up and examined my biceps, which, even after years of regular weights, push-ups, and yoga, were no match for the slovenliest male couch-potato. Is that why I identify so strongly with Jack?, I wondered. Am I just a scared little girl at heart, playing dress-up and acting tough to gain the respect of some distanced, abstracted, quasi-paternal figure -- who's actually just waiting for me to get over this awkward tomboy phase and act like a sexy lady?
Pitch Black ended and 27 Dresses, the Katherine Heigl rom-com about a perpetual bridesmaid, came on. I watched -- sweaty, breathless, half-dazed -- as Heigl paraded across the screen in the titular 27 hideous bridesmaid's dresses, none of which she had actually chosen for herself, but all of which she inexplicably loved too much to throw away. I mashed the power button on the remote, leaving a greasy slick of sweat on the molded plastic. Next time, I'm getting the Arrid and the 40, goddamn it.
Stepping back out into the blaring Texas heat, I popped the frosted cap off the top of the deodorant and gave it a skeptical sniff. It looked and smelled exactly like a giant Elmer's glue stick. Whatever a lady is, I decided, she would probably not choose to slather this stuff on her pits.
Later that day, while my husband and his brothers sat shirtless on the living room couch and played endless rounds of Call of Duty, I retreated to the home gym for some cardio and push-ups. Every now and then, I'd catch a pungent whiff of the floral-cum-paste smell of Ladies Choice emanating from my body. As a distraction, I turned on the TV: Pitch Black, probably my favorite Vin Diesel vehicle, was playing, and as I did sets of push-ups, I thought about how great the character of Jack is in this screenplay -- a (spoiler!!) budding adolescent girl who pretends to be a boy, and who spends the entire movie idolizing and emulating Vin Diesel's space-age killer cowboy persona. What really struck me was how differently this was interpreted in the higher-budget, higher-grossing sequel, Chronicles of Riddick. There, Jack grows up, grows her buzz cut out into an appropriately luscious mane, and transforms into the sexy spitfire sociopath love interest -- the sci-fi version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Unlike the relatively nuanced discussion of sexuality and gender generated by Pitch Black, the sequel is the Ladies Choice of Hollywood's take on women: commodification masquerading as self-assertion. Ladies, you can choose your choice! You can be strong... and sexy! Smart... and sexy! A sociopath... and.... whatever, as long as you bring in that 15-25 market with cleavage and tight leather pants!
I was so caught up in my seething feminist outrage that I barely noticed my arms turning to jelly from the frenzied pace of my workout. I got up and examined my biceps, which, even after years of regular weights, push-ups, and yoga, were no match for the slovenliest male couch-potato. Is that why I identify so strongly with Jack?, I wondered. Am I just a scared little girl at heart, playing dress-up and acting tough to gain the respect of some distanced, abstracted, quasi-paternal figure -- who's actually just waiting for me to get over this awkward tomboy phase and act like a sexy lady?
Pitch Black ended and 27 Dresses, the Katherine Heigl rom-com about a perpetual bridesmaid, came on. I watched -- sweaty, breathless, half-dazed -- as Heigl paraded across the screen in the titular 27 hideous bridesmaid's dresses, none of which she had actually chosen for herself, but all of which she inexplicably loved too much to throw away. I mashed the power button on the remote, leaving a greasy slick of sweat on the molded plastic. Next time, I'm getting the Arrid and the 40, goddamn it.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Potentialities
In the interim between moving out of Boston and moving into Berkeley, Ryan and I are spending a week at his parents' rural Texas lakehouse, which to me is pretty much the best way ever to ease into a terrifying and potentially demoralizing transition from academia into The Real World. Ryan's parents have the infinite patience and bottomless pantry of a well-regulated military machine and/or a big family, with a refreshing lack of that obsessive, passive-aggressive neediness that passes for love in most Slavic families I know. Plus, they drink every night, go on impromptu motorcycle or camping trips around the country, and still manage to run two highly profitable small businesses, making them the model of adult success in my eyes.
Yesterday, we found out midday that a friend of ours was coming to visit. Ryan's mom dutifully bought sackfuls of burger fixins at Wal-Mart and made up the spare bedroom, just in case. Robbie, the friend, was one of the dudes who'd made up our Tokyo spring break group four years ago, and he'd loved it so much that he went back to teach English there for two years. Last we'd heard from this kid, he'd found himself a pretty, older Japanese lady, brought her back to the States, and gotten hitched. Given the delicate nature of such matters, Ryan thought it imprudent to ask whether he'd be bringing his wife on this visit. I was out on the deck reading when he arrived, and when I walked into the house, the first thing I saw was a tanned, smiling Japanese girl wearing a flowy floral sundress over an enormously pregnant belly. Robbie grinned goodnaturedly and didn't say anything, as if he were just as surprised by the whole thing as we were. "Hiromi," the girl introduced herself, giving me a barely material handshake and fixing me with her beautiful almond-shaped eyes. She didn't look a day over twenty.
As we all stood there awkwardly, trying to find something to say that wasn't immediately obvious, Hiromi spotted the lake beyond the sliding glass doors in the living room, and she headed straight for the deck. "Will we go swimming, Robbie?" she asked gently, her voice radiating the pure joy that also lit up her face. We changed into bathing suits, and I tried not to ogle the arresting spectacle of Hiromi in a black string bikini and a floppy denim sun hat. Before she got into the water, she did a quick round of calisthenics, stretching her thin limbs and torso and showcasing a strange juxtaposition of prominent ribcage and plump, perfectly gourd-like stomach. Ryan's brother offered her some foam pool noodles, which she eagerly accepted. "These are great! We don't have these in Japan. We have some things like this for kids..." she trailed off and bobbed happily in the warm Texas lake water.
Robbie made for the small square dock a couple dozen breast-strokes from shore. For a gangly, nerdy white boy, he was impressively skilled at small-scale water acrobatics. Last summer, I'd watched him do sets of front and back flips off that dock, so I was expecting another show this time around, especially since he now had a wife to impress. But after his first modest flip off the edge, which dappled Hiromi's sun hat with dark blue wet spots, she protested. "Roooobbie..." she cooed, never changing her honeyed tone or losing the glint of joy from her eyes, "I've already seen you do this." With the same bashful grin on his face, Robbie swam obediently back to Hiromi and, instead, began blowing into one end of the hollow foam noodles to make water jet out of the other end. Hiromi observed this activity with a mixture of maternal love and childlike amusement. "Like a whale!" she said, and, try as I might, I couldn't detect any hint of patronizing in her voice. I watched the two of them float together, exchanging quiet words in a mixture of English and Japanese, and I marveled at the strangeness of a world that could bring these two people together and put them in a lake in Texas. Then again, when I thought about it, it was no stranger than a world that could bring a girl from rural Ukraine and an all-American boy from Texas together and deposit them in that same lake. And who knows how strange and serendipitous things will get for Hiromi's unborn daughter, or for Ryan and my as-yet only hypothetically conceived kids. But it's nice to think about, and -- as seems to be the theme of this interim time in Texas -- a good way to put things into perspective.
Yesterday, we found out midday that a friend of ours was coming to visit. Ryan's mom dutifully bought sackfuls of burger fixins at Wal-Mart and made up the spare bedroom, just in case. Robbie, the friend, was one of the dudes who'd made up our Tokyo spring break group four years ago, and he'd loved it so much that he went back to teach English there for two years. Last we'd heard from this kid, he'd found himself a pretty, older Japanese lady, brought her back to the States, and gotten hitched. Given the delicate nature of such matters, Ryan thought it imprudent to ask whether he'd be bringing his wife on this visit. I was out on the deck reading when he arrived, and when I walked into the house, the first thing I saw was a tanned, smiling Japanese girl wearing a flowy floral sundress over an enormously pregnant belly. Robbie grinned goodnaturedly and didn't say anything, as if he were just as surprised by the whole thing as we were. "Hiromi," the girl introduced herself, giving me a barely material handshake and fixing me with her beautiful almond-shaped eyes. She didn't look a day over twenty.
As we all stood there awkwardly, trying to find something to say that wasn't immediately obvious, Hiromi spotted the lake beyond the sliding glass doors in the living room, and she headed straight for the deck. "Will we go swimming, Robbie?" she asked gently, her voice radiating the pure joy that also lit up her face. We changed into bathing suits, and I tried not to ogle the arresting spectacle of Hiromi in a black string bikini and a floppy denim sun hat. Before she got into the water, she did a quick round of calisthenics, stretching her thin limbs and torso and showcasing a strange juxtaposition of prominent ribcage and plump, perfectly gourd-like stomach. Ryan's brother offered her some foam pool noodles, which she eagerly accepted. "These are great! We don't have these in Japan. We have some things like this for kids..." she trailed off and bobbed happily in the warm Texas lake water.
Robbie made for the small square dock a couple dozen breast-strokes from shore. For a gangly, nerdy white boy, he was impressively skilled at small-scale water acrobatics. Last summer, I'd watched him do sets of front and back flips off that dock, so I was expecting another show this time around, especially since he now had a wife to impress. But after his first modest flip off the edge, which dappled Hiromi's sun hat with dark blue wet spots, she protested. "Roooobbie..." she cooed, never changing her honeyed tone or losing the glint of joy from her eyes, "I've already seen you do this." With the same bashful grin on his face, Robbie swam obediently back to Hiromi and, instead, began blowing into one end of the hollow foam noodles to make water jet out of the other end. Hiromi observed this activity with a mixture of maternal love and childlike amusement. "Like a whale!" she said, and, try as I might, I couldn't detect any hint of patronizing in her voice. I watched the two of them float together, exchanging quiet words in a mixture of English and Japanese, and I marveled at the strangeness of a world that could bring these two people together and put them in a lake in Texas. Then again, when I thought about it, it was no stranger than a world that could bring a girl from rural Ukraine and an all-American boy from Texas together and deposit them in that same lake. And who knows how strange and serendipitous things will get for Hiromi's unborn daughter, or for Ryan and my as-yet only hypothetically conceived kids. But it's nice to think about, and -- as seems to be the theme of this interim time in Texas -- a good way to put things into perspective.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Hearts, brains, and guts
While watching Zombieland the other night, I had a minor revelation on the subject of danger and fear. In the film, Jesse Eisenberg (doing his best version of a poor man's Michael Cera) plays a nerdy college student who claims that his innate obsessive fearfulness is what helps him survive the zombie apocalypse. Since he's always been a Warcraft playing shut-in, he argues in a voiceover dripping with geek pathos, it's easy for him to follow the extremely antisocial, risk-averse lifestyle necessary to avoid becoming a "human Happy Meal" when every human around him has been zombiefied. Yet within the first five minutes, his character is paired with Woody Harrelson (doing his best version of a poor man's Clint Eastwood), who sprays the air with bullets just for fun and generally expends a shocking amount of his energy on putting himself at risk. To hammer home his extravagantly superfluous bravado, the main motivation of his character is not, as for the others, to find a zombie-free zone, but to locate and consume what may soon become the world's last remaining Twinkie. Predictably, though quite delightfully, the rest of the film deals with the navigation of these two poles -- extreme risk aversion and extreme risk predilection -- as they relate to life, love, and zombie survival.
What I realized as I was watching all the silly yet surprisingly smart zombie-killing action go down was that the character played by Eisenberg (and made infinitely more famous in pop culture by Monsieur Cera) has a lot to say about the psychological makeup of my generation in general and me in particular. And not just because he's a Warcraft playing shut-in (substitute Diablo and I'm guilty as charged), but because his major phobias are not the rational fears you'd expect for someone in his situation (violent, cannibalistic hordes of zombified humans), but completely irrational, moderately ridiculous ones (clowns, bathrooms, dirty dish towels). As someone also raised in a world hermetically sealed off from any actual danger, I feel a lot of empathy for this kind of abstracted second-order fear, as well as the impulse to refashion it into some kind of bizarre self-definition-cum-self-affirmation.
Last summer, on a bet, I had to learn how to ride a motorcycle, and while jerkily zipping around a dusty strip-mall parking lot in first gear, I realized that my biggest fear wasn't dying in a fiery crash on the highway, or even experiencing the sensation of skin scraping against the grit, gravel, and broken glass that littered the concrete. My biggest fear was not being very good at riding the damn thing -- not being able to master turns, or leans, or figuring out the rules of the road, and thus letting down the well-intentioned boy I'd made the bet with, as well as his father, who was patiently trying to teach me to shift gears as childish tears of frustration and shame streamed down my face. I kept trying to explain to the confused Texas boys in attendance to my paltry performance that I just didn't like dangerous things, that speed wasn't fun or exhilarating for me. Maybe, I tried to suggest to them, and even more plaintively to myself, maybe I'm just a scared little girl who needs to remain locked in the safety of esoteric anxieties and neuroses. But as soon as I framed it that way, in exactly the same pathos-ridden inner monologue performed by Eisenberg, I balked. Like Eisenberg's character, I had existed in a solitary, essentialist framework for a long time and, like him, I wasn't entirely happy in it -- not the least because it was a framework dominated by a secret obsession with heroicism and machismo (see: every video game and comic book, ever).
Because the thing is, the Eisenberg-Harrelson duality is actually a singularity. No matter where the members of my generation fall on the spectrum, we almost certainly want to be at least a little bit more Harrelson, and I'm certainly no exception. Any time I've dealt with fear and danger in a public setting, I found myself working through the complex performative possibilities and coming up on the Harrelson side. Eighth grade gym class comes to mind, when I was one of the only girls to make it to the top of the climbing rope (the reward was getting to sign your name on the gym ceiling with a Sharpie) but made the mistake of wrapping the rope around my leg when I slid down, sloughing off a third of the skin that covered my left tibia. The school nurse nearly keeled over when I limped into her office dripping with blood, but I was totally stoic about the whole thing, eying the raw, red tissue with clinical interest as she proceeded to scald it with alcohol and swath it in gauze. I'd never broken or sprained anything, and I decided that this moment was going to define my relationship to pain from that day on. Walking through the deserted hallways to get back to class, leg bandaged and bloody gym clothes in hand, I felt absurdly proud, like Indiana Jones returning roughed up but triumphant from yet another legendary quest. Whatever pain I'd dealt with struggling up the rope and then using it as an accidental skin grater seemed completely immaterial in comparison to this euphoric victory march. For the first time in my life, I felt like a genuine certified badass.
The point is that bravery does not exist in a vacuum, just as fear doesn't. It all comes down to the performance of a type, and the reason the Harrelson character in the film isn't the lead and dorky, neurotic Eisenberg is has everything to do with Zombieland's savvy handling of this basic social fact. Harrelson is an archetype, a comic book character, while Eisenberg is the real mirrored representation of the film's audience: a geeky, avid comic book reader, video game player, zombie movie watcher, precisely for the reason that Harrelson is who he secretly wants to be.
The main takeaway from all of this is that there are two options:
1. Be Eisenberg and make risk-taking antithetical to one's perception/presentation of self. Be pretty much safe from failure and pain but remain dominated by secret dreams, yearnings, feelings of inadequacy, etc.
2. Be Eisenberg trying to be Harrelson, possibly fail and/or look ridiculous, almost certainly get eaten in the metaphoric zombie apocalypse that is the modern world, but at least go down in style.
Well, long story short, I may be a scared little girl at heart, but at least I'm a scared little girl with a motorcycle license. And if worse does come to worse, I'm also an organ donor.
What I realized as I was watching all the silly yet surprisingly smart zombie-killing action go down was that the character played by Eisenberg (and made infinitely more famous in pop culture by Monsieur Cera) has a lot to say about the psychological makeup of my generation in general and me in particular. And not just because he's a Warcraft playing shut-in (substitute Diablo and I'm guilty as charged), but because his major phobias are not the rational fears you'd expect for someone in his situation (violent, cannibalistic hordes of zombified humans), but completely irrational, moderately ridiculous ones (clowns, bathrooms, dirty dish towels). As someone also raised in a world hermetically sealed off from any actual danger, I feel a lot of empathy for this kind of abstracted second-order fear, as well as the impulse to refashion it into some kind of bizarre self-definition-cum-self-affirmation.
Last summer, on a bet, I had to learn how to ride a motorcycle, and while jerkily zipping around a dusty strip-mall parking lot in first gear, I realized that my biggest fear wasn't dying in a fiery crash on the highway, or even experiencing the sensation of skin scraping against the grit, gravel, and broken glass that littered the concrete. My biggest fear was not being very good at riding the damn thing -- not being able to master turns, or leans, or figuring out the rules of the road, and thus letting down the well-intentioned boy I'd made the bet with, as well as his father, who was patiently trying to teach me to shift gears as childish tears of frustration and shame streamed down my face. I kept trying to explain to the confused Texas boys in attendance to my paltry performance that I just didn't like dangerous things, that speed wasn't fun or exhilarating for me. Maybe, I tried to suggest to them, and even more plaintively to myself, maybe I'm just a scared little girl who needs to remain locked in the safety of esoteric anxieties and neuroses. But as soon as I framed it that way, in exactly the same pathos-ridden inner monologue performed by Eisenberg, I balked. Like Eisenberg's character, I had existed in a solitary, essentialist framework for a long time and, like him, I wasn't entirely happy in it -- not the least because it was a framework dominated by a secret obsession with heroicism and machismo (see: every video game and comic book, ever).
Because the thing is, the Eisenberg-Harrelson duality is actually a singularity. No matter where the members of my generation fall on the spectrum, we almost certainly want to be at least a little bit more Harrelson, and I'm certainly no exception. Any time I've dealt with fear and danger in a public setting, I found myself working through the complex performative possibilities and coming up on the Harrelson side. Eighth grade gym class comes to mind, when I was one of the only girls to make it to the top of the climbing rope (the reward was getting to sign your name on the gym ceiling with a Sharpie) but made the mistake of wrapping the rope around my leg when I slid down, sloughing off a third of the skin that covered my left tibia. The school nurse nearly keeled over when I limped into her office dripping with blood, but I was totally stoic about the whole thing, eying the raw, red tissue with clinical interest as she proceeded to scald it with alcohol and swath it in gauze. I'd never broken or sprained anything, and I decided that this moment was going to define my relationship to pain from that day on. Walking through the deserted hallways to get back to class, leg bandaged and bloody gym clothes in hand, I felt absurdly proud, like Indiana Jones returning roughed up but triumphant from yet another legendary quest. Whatever pain I'd dealt with struggling up the rope and then using it as an accidental skin grater seemed completely immaterial in comparison to this euphoric victory march. For the first time in my life, I felt like a genuine certified badass.
The point is that bravery does not exist in a vacuum, just as fear doesn't. It all comes down to the performance of a type, and the reason the Harrelson character in the film isn't the lead and dorky, neurotic Eisenberg is has everything to do with Zombieland's savvy handling of this basic social fact. Harrelson is an archetype, a comic book character, while Eisenberg is the real mirrored representation of the film's audience: a geeky, avid comic book reader, video game player, zombie movie watcher, precisely for the reason that Harrelson is who he secretly wants to be.
The main takeaway from all of this is that there are two options:
1. Be Eisenberg and make risk-taking antithetical to one's perception/presentation of self. Be pretty much safe from failure and pain but remain dominated by secret dreams, yearnings, feelings of inadequacy, etc.
2. Be Eisenberg trying to be Harrelson, possibly fail and/or look ridiculous, almost certainly get eaten in the metaphoric zombie apocalypse that is the modern world, but at least go down in style.
Well, long story short, I may be a scared little girl at heart, but at least I'm a scared little girl with a motorcycle license. And if worse does come to worse, I'm also an organ donor.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Naturalized
Mechanics Hall in Worcester, MA wasn't exactly what I was expecting. What I thought would be a bland warehouse with long neon-lit corridors and waxy linoleum floors turned out to be a grand, quasi-historic monument of a building. The foyer boasted red plush carpet and a curved twin stairway hugged by gold side-rails that led up to a mysterious second level, where glittering chandeliers hung from the cavernous ceilings. Unfortunately, all the glamor was somewhat tarnished by the addition of cheap aluminum folding chairs lining the walls of the entranceway, and the veritable Babel of foreigners gradually filling them and all the empty space around them. The foreigners were all well-dressed, perfumed, clean-cut and professional-looking. I cast an eye at all the tailored suits and stiletto heels and, in my denim skirt and thrift-store collared button-down, felt uncharacteristically underdressed. But there was a discernible note of nervousness in the air, a hint of desperate anticipation that soured the atmosphere, a cross between an opera house and a dentist's waiting room.
Like a plucky artisan in a sea of disinherited nobility, I acted cool and disinterested. I took a seat in an empty chair and opened up Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (volume one, chapter one: The Origins of Dialectics). There was still a good hour-and-a-half until the time printed on my invitation, but already the foyer was beginning to fill to capacity. Ushers dressed in suits and pastel ties flitting through the crowd, instructing people to have a seat and wait. Most did, either sitting placidly with their arms crossed or fidgeting anxiously with their invitations. A small but tenacious contingent, though, strode boldly up the stairs, as if they expected a second, higher tier of administration in the balcony above the rabble. "Why are people going up the stairs? Do we need to go up the stairs?" someone called to an usher. "No, no... they're just going to use the bathroom. Please stay here and wait," the usher said, a note of frustration creeping into his overly polite voice, and then went to chase down the upstart stair-climbers.
More and more people drifted in, and the noise level in the foyer rose steadily. When the ushers finally announced that we were to form two lines, left staircase for guests and right staircase for oath-takers, there was hardly any room to move. A thick snake of bodies began pushing itself up both staircases, forcing the ushers to chirp in barely-contained panic: "Careful, please! No pushing! Please, be considerate of those around you. There's plenty of time. Please, please -- proceed slowly." The snake did not relent. It just kept churning steadily up the steps, only narrowing at the very top, where two ushers were checking invite letters and green cards. I began to feel sorry for the ushers and their desperate politeness, as if they'd somehow been transported from their modern-day office jobs into the 18th century to act as slave-overseers and were really apologetic about it. They all spoke clearly and distinctly, drawing out every syllable like adults addressing well-mannered children. To break the officious atmosphere, they would ask how we were doing, or which countries we were coming from. I imagined there were quite a few people with actual titles here, well-educated dignitaries, respected professionals who examined the ushers with world-weary eyes. If they'd been more comfortable with the language, they'd certainly have knocked these provincial bureaucrats down a peg or two, but for now they were forced to nod and murmur deferentially. When I reached the top of the stairs, the usher took my invite and flipped it over to make sure I'd filled in the "Signed at____" portion correctly. "Excellent!" she said, her stern face breaking into a warm, motherly smile because I'd written "Worcester" instead of the popular mistaken answer, "Boston." She had the same smile on her face as my third-grade math teacher. "Yeah, thanks," I said acidly, snatching the letter back. Her grin faltered, but she had to move on quickly to the next person in line. "Worcester. Change that from Boston to Worcester. Do you understand me? Do you speak English? Where's your interpreter?" I heard her saying to the wizened old Asian woman behind me.
Before going into the main room, I went through a small convention hall, where a conveyor belt of teen volunteers handed out packets of citizenship information ("Learn About Our Flag!", "A Citizen's Handbook," "A Welcome From the President") and miniature American flags. A quiver of panic ran through me when I saw the flags, and my mind flashed back to high school pep rallies. Trying to suppress my tenth-grade instinct to run and hide in the girl's bathroom, I went to find my seat.
The auditorium was even more regal than the entrance. Elaborate marble balustrades lined the walls, along with framed oil paintings of the Founding Fathers, and the ceiling was a richly-stuccoed neoclassical confection dotted with pink and blue frescoes. But the centerpiece of the room, hanging in the front and covering up an ancient brass organ, was a giant screen with a moving graphic of a billowing American flag, with the caption "Celebrate Citizenship, Celebrate America" emblazoned in the center. The young man next to me -- mid-twenties, slender, dressed in all black -- took a picture of it with his phone and started texting rapidly. There was something familiar about the wariness in his gray eyes, the slightly defensive hunch to his bony shoulders, the ironic smirk on the corner of his lips. Russian, I thought and knew he was thinking the same thing about me. True to the iron-clad law of "Slavic brotherhood," neither of us said anything or looked at each other again.
We waited. For ages. For three hours, while the auditorium filled up with over 700 people. I read about dialectics (from Plotinus to Hegel) until my eyes started to glaze over, then closed them and nodded off into fitful half-sleep, waking up every time the loop of patriotic music broke off, paused for a moment, then restarted. The thought crossed my mind that when airlines hold people hostage in cramped quarters with no food or water for hours on end, it's a scandal, but when the Department of Homeland Security does it, it's a celebration. In the balcony above us, the "guests" were snapping pictures, waving homemade signs, playing with their toy flags. At noon, the ceremony finally started. The PowerPoint projector switched from the billowing flag slide to a five-minute film on the importance of immigration in this country (presumably assembled before the whole Arizona debacle). Amid the kitschy stock footage, I noticed an archival clip of immigrants arriving on Ellis Island, the same clip I'd watched over a dozen times in Yuri Tsivian's Soviet film class and analyzed for coded ideological content. I was still trying to remember what Tsivian had said about the peculiarity of the camera angle, the way it made the static ship look like it was moving, when somebody got on stage and led us in the oath. Just like in school during the pledge of allegiance, I couldn't bring myself to repeat it. I mouthed some of it -- "...bear arms," "without any reservations in my heart," "so help me God" -- and blah blah blahed the rest. A judge came in and officially approved the motion to make us all citizens, and everyone started clapping. Some people waved their flags. The PowerPoint presentation moved to the final slide: a rousing rendition of "Proud to be an American" over video clips of happy children running through wheat fields. I desperately fought off the urge to crawl under my chair.
Afterwards, we had to wait some more, this time for the elderly, pregnant, and disabled to come get their citizenship certificates first. There was a small commotion in the row behind me; somebody had lost their invitation, which it was necessary to have in order to receive the certificate. The Indian man sitting behind me found it on the floor and handed it over to its owner, who breathed a huge sigh of relief.
"Now that would be funny," the Indian man said, "if you lost it at the very last minute. They'd probably put you in the back of the line, and you'd have to start all over again. Another ten years."
The owner of the invitation laughed goodnaturedly, then said in lightly Arabic-accented English, "Yes, no kidding. It really has been ten years for us. We started before 9/11, and then after that, you know... everything slowed down. I can't believe it's finally over. It feels so good."
And, just like that, I didn't know what I hated more -- the overblown ridiculousness of the ceremony, or my own smug, entitled detachment from it. I hadn't waited ten years for this moment. I hadn't even waited ten months. I didn't really give a damn, because as inconvenient as it was to carry a Ukrainian passport, I never really had to worry about being searched at airports, or having the wrong skin color or accent, or being threatened with deportation to a country where I'd be arrested just for thinking half the stuff I think, let alone writing it down for the world to see. All this time, I've operated under the assumption that I was different somehow, special, more in touch with the populist ethos via the grassroots immigrant experience. But when I had to spend the night in the Amsterdam airport because even a one-night layover required a visa, I didn't feel any solidarity with the various undesirables -- African, Asian, Muslim -- who slept in the cramped airport seats next to me. And I certainly didn't feel any solidarity with this motley group of foreigners around me, all dressed up and staring with happy, shining eyes at the giant illuminated screen. I just felt embarrassed, alienated, and alone. I guess when it comes down to it, I realized, I've been American all along.
The screen was raised but the projector stayed on, casting a red-white-and-blue veneer over a portrait of George Washington. I stumbled out of the auditorium in mild shock, picking up my certificate and stuffing it into my bag. Like a half-delirious debutante, I made my way down the red carpeted steps and wove through the throng of friends and family that had gathered in the foyer to welcome their born-again American loved ones into the world. I hadn't eaten since the Dunkin Donuts bagel twist at eight; it was now close to two. Without stopping or looking back, I trotted hurriedly to the train station, "Proud to be an American" still pumping through my head.
When I got back into Boston, I was equal parts starving and exhausted, so I grabbed a Milky Way from a kiosk in the subway. I handed a dollar to the young Arabic-looking man working the counter and turned to go, but he called after me. I turned back, reaching for my wallet thinking I'd underpaid, but he met me with a half-sly, half-shy, all-flirty smile.
"Where are you from?" he asked sweetly.
"Ukraine," I replied, then almost slapped myself. Why did I still automatically do that? Why couldn't I just let go of these stupid essentialist truths? Of this semi-constructed foreigner persona? Why couldn't I let myself blend in?
"Oh? You here for school? How do you like Boston?"
"Yeah. Uh, it's nice."
"What's your name?"
I paused. He was looking at me with so much openness and adoration, it was hard to believe. I wanted desperately to tell him what happened today, to explain the mixture of absurdity and mortified revulsion I felt during those four long hours. To make a genuinely human connection with someone other than the only person I could ever truly count on to understand me, the scathingly ironic, rootless cosmopolitan voice inside my head. Instead, I mustered up all the coy femininity I could and gave him a friendly smile.
"I'll see you around," I said, and went to catch my train.
Like a plucky artisan in a sea of disinherited nobility, I acted cool and disinterested. I took a seat in an empty chair and opened up Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (volume one, chapter one: The Origins of Dialectics). There was still a good hour-and-a-half until the time printed on my invitation, but already the foyer was beginning to fill to capacity. Ushers dressed in suits and pastel ties flitting through the crowd, instructing people to have a seat and wait. Most did, either sitting placidly with their arms crossed or fidgeting anxiously with their invitations. A small but tenacious contingent, though, strode boldly up the stairs, as if they expected a second, higher tier of administration in the balcony above the rabble. "Why are people going up the stairs? Do we need to go up the stairs?" someone called to an usher. "No, no... they're just going to use the bathroom. Please stay here and wait," the usher said, a note of frustration creeping into his overly polite voice, and then went to chase down the upstart stair-climbers.
More and more people drifted in, and the noise level in the foyer rose steadily. When the ushers finally announced that we were to form two lines, left staircase for guests and right staircase for oath-takers, there was hardly any room to move. A thick snake of bodies began pushing itself up both staircases, forcing the ushers to chirp in barely-contained panic: "Careful, please! No pushing! Please, be considerate of those around you. There's plenty of time. Please, please -- proceed slowly." The snake did not relent. It just kept churning steadily up the steps, only narrowing at the very top, where two ushers were checking invite letters and green cards. I began to feel sorry for the ushers and their desperate politeness, as if they'd somehow been transported from their modern-day office jobs into the 18th century to act as slave-overseers and were really apologetic about it. They all spoke clearly and distinctly, drawing out every syllable like adults addressing well-mannered children. To break the officious atmosphere, they would ask how we were doing, or which countries we were coming from. I imagined there were quite a few people with actual titles here, well-educated dignitaries, respected professionals who examined the ushers with world-weary eyes. If they'd been more comfortable with the language, they'd certainly have knocked these provincial bureaucrats down a peg or two, but for now they were forced to nod and murmur deferentially. When I reached the top of the stairs, the usher took my invite and flipped it over to make sure I'd filled in the "Signed at____" portion correctly. "Excellent!" she said, her stern face breaking into a warm, motherly smile because I'd written "Worcester" instead of the popular mistaken answer, "Boston." She had the same smile on her face as my third-grade math teacher. "Yeah, thanks," I said acidly, snatching the letter back. Her grin faltered, but she had to move on quickly to the next person in line. "Worcester. Change that from Boston to Worcester. Do you understand me? Do you speak English? Where's your interpreter?" I heard her saying to the wizened old Asian woman behind me.
Before going into the main room, I went through a small convention hall, where a conveyor belt of teen volunteers handed out packets of citizenship information ("Learn About Our Flag!", "A Citizen's Handbook," "A Welcome From the President") and miniature American flags. A quiver of panic ran through me when I saw the flags, and my mind flashed back to high school pep rallies. Trying to suppress my tenth-grade instinct to run and hide in the girl's bathroom, I went to find my seat.
The auditorium was even more regal than the entrance. Elaborate marble balustrades lined the walls, along with framed oil paintings of the Founding Fathers, and the ceiling was a richly-stuccoed neoclassical confection dotted with pink and blue frescoes. But the centerpiece of the room, hanging in the front and covering up an ancient brass organ, was a giant screen with a moving graphic of a billowing American flag, with the caption "Celebrate Citizenship, Celebrate America" emblazoned in the center. The young man next to me -- mid-twenties, slender, dressed in all black -- took a picture of it with his phone and started texting rapidly. There was something familiar about the wariness in his gray eyes, the slightly defensive hunch to his bony shoulders, the ironic smirk on the corner of his lips. Russian, I thought and knew he was thinking the same thing about me. True to the iron-clad law of "Slavic brotherhood," neither of us said anything or looked at each other again.
We waited. For ages. For three hours, while the auditorium filled up with over 700 people. I read about dialectics (from Plotinus to Hegel) until my eyes started to glaze over, then closed them and nodded off into fitful half-sleep, waking up every time the loop of patriotic music broke off, paused for a moment, then restarted. The thought crossed my mind that when airlines hold people hostage in cramped quarters with no food or water for hours on end, it's a scandal, but when the Department of Homeland Security does it, it's a celebration. In the balcony above us, the "guests" were snapping pictures, waving homemade signs, playing with their toy flags. At noon, the ceremony finally started. The PowerPoint projector switched from the billowing flag slide to a five-minute film on the importance of immigration in this country (presumably assembled before the whole Arizona debacle). Amid the kitschy stock footage, I noticed an archival clip of immigrants arriving on Ellis Island, the same clip I'd watched over a dozen times in Yuri Tsivian's Soviet film class and analyzed for coded ideological content. I was still trying to remember what Tsivian had said about the peculiarity of the camera angle, the way it made the static ship look like it was moving, when somebody got on stage and led us in the oath. Just like in school during the pledge of allegiance, I couldn't bring myself to repeat it. I mouthed some of it -- "...bear arms," "without any reservations in my heart," "so help me God" -- and blah blah blahed the rest. A judge came in and officially approved the motion to make us all citizens, and everyone started clapping. Some people waved their flags. The PowerPoint presentation moved to the final slide: a rousing rendition of "Proud to be an American" over video clips of happy children running through wheat fields. I desperately fought off the urge to crawl under my chair.
Afterwards, we had to wait some more, this time for the elderly, pregnant, and disabled to come get their citizenship certificates first. There was a small commotion in the row behind me; somebody had lost their invitation, which it was necessary to have in order to receive the certificate. The Indian man sitting behind me found it on the floor and handed it over to its owner, who breathed a huge sigh of relief.
"Now that would be funny," the Indian man said, "if you lost it at the very last minute. They'd probably put you in the back of the line, and you'd have to start all over again. Another ten years."
The owner of the invitation laughed goodnaturedly, then said in lightly Arabic-accented English, "Yes, no kidding. It really has been ten years for us. We started before 9/11, and then after that, you know... everything slowed down. I can't believe it's finally over. It feels so good."
And, just like that, I didn't know what I hated more -- the overblown ridiculousness of the ceremony, or my own smug, entitled detachment from it. I hadn't waited ten years for this moment. I hadn't even waited ten months. I didn't really give a damn, because as inconvenient as it was to carry a Ukrainian passport, I never really had to worry about being searched at airports, or having the wrong skin color or accent, or being threatened with deportation to a country where I'd be arrested just for thinking half the stuff I think, let alone writing it down for the world to see. All this time, I've operated under the assumption that I was different somehow, special, more in touch with the populist ethos via the grassroots immigrant experience. But when I had to spend the night in the Amsterdam airport because even a one-night layover required a visa, I didn't feel any solidarity with the various undesirables -- African, Asian, Muslim -- who slept in the cramped airport seats next to me. And I certainly didn't feel any solidarity with this motley group of foreigners around me, all dressed up and staring with happy, shining eyes at the giant illuminated screen. I just felt embarrassed, alienated, and alone. I guess when it comes down to it, I realized, I've been American all along.
The screen was raised but the projector stayed on, casting a red-white-and-blue veneer over a portrait of George Washington. I stumbled out of the auditorium in mild shock, picking up my certificate and stuffing it into my bag. Like a half-delirious debutante, I made my way down the red carpeted steps and wove through the throng of friends and family that had gathered in the foyer to welcome their born-again American loved ones into the world. I hadn't eaten since the Dunkin Donuts bagel twist at eight; it was now close to two. Without stopping or looking back, I trotted hurriedly to the train station, "Proud to be an American" still pumping through my head.
When I got back into Boston, I was equal parts starving and exhausted, so I grabbed a Milky Way from a kiosk in the subway. I handed a dollar to the young Arabic-looking man working the counter and turned to go, but he called after me. I turned back, reaching for my wallet thinking I'd underpaid, but he met me with a half-sly, half-shy, all-flirty smile.
"Where are you from?" he asked sweetly.
"Ukraine," I replied, then almost slapped myself. Why did I still automatically do that? Why couldn't I just let go of these stupid essentialist truths? Of this semi-constructed foreigner persona? Why couldn't I let myself blend in?
"Oh? You here for school? How do you like Boston?"
"Yeah. Uh, it's nice."
"What's your name?"
I paused. He was looking at me with so much openness and adoration, it was hard to believe. I wanted desperately to tell him what happened today, to explain the mixture of absurdity and mortified revulsion I felt during those four long hours. To make a genuinely human connection with someone other than the only person I could ever truly count on to understand me, the scathingly ironic, rootless cosmopolitan voice inside my head. Instead, I mustered up all the coy femininity I could and gave him a friendly smile.
"I'll see you around," I said, and went to catch my train.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Hollywood will destroy us all
I keep meaning to write about my newfound obsession with late Milos Forman films; specifically, Amadeus, Leibniz, and the rhetoric of failure as theorized by 17th century theology. Instead, I spent today cleaning the house and watching Julie and Julia, as a result of which this post will be about... you guessed it.
Dinner.
When it comes to dining alone, I'm as guilty as the next lazy foodie of taking startlingly little care of what goes into my stomach. Often on solitary nights, "dinner" is an umbrella term for such diverse crimes against mindful eating as: microwave popcorn, raw veggie sausage, eggs (just eggs!)... and, when the old mood's really taken a nosedive, the classic sweet-savory-carby trifecta of Ben & Jerry's, brick of cheese, and a bag of salt and vinegar chips. Don't judge me. But once in awhile, and especially after watching the lovable culinary antics of Meryl-Streep-as-Julia-Child (and Amy Adams as, swear to God same exact face as a girl I went to college with, zomg!!), I start to feel ashamed that I always save my kitchen skills for the sometimes-appreciative masses, but somehow rarely think to splurge on myself. Tonight was one of those nights that I needed to be reminded of the independent existence of my own taste buds, apart from the influence of elaborate homecooked meals for friends and loved ones.
There is one major problem, however, with the cooking-for-one endeavor. When planning a meal for others, part of the fun is guessing their tastes and putting together something that syncs up, not just flavor-wise, but in sociological terms -- will it be something fancy, pre-plated, with garnish? quick-and-dirty finger food? a cheeky haute-cuisine adaptation of an old childhood classic? Especially since I never had anything resembling a standard American baseline to work from (I still have to read the box to figure out how to make Kraft Mac & Cheese or an Oscar Meyer hot dog), my flexibility in this respect is dizzying. I can happily cook anything for anyone, from just about any regional and class background... but when it comes to what it is that I want, I tend to start complicating things with all manner of useless intellectualism and second-guessing, all of which just leaves me starving and scraping clean a can of refried beans at 9 o'clock at night.
Luckily, this evening, I had a few solid parameters to work around. First was the fact that, probably due to Cinco de Mayo and summer being generally around the corner, I've recently become obsessed with all manner of salsas. Since I learned to roast peppers, I've been excited to show off by making things like a really tasty grilled pineapple and pepper salsa (bee-tee-dubs, this is a fantastic food site for the non-fussy non-pro) a few nights back, to go with some otherwise boring but oh-so-healthy broiled salmon. Second, in an early scene in Julie and Julia, Amy Adams is whipping up something that looked to me like salsa on bruschetta, which reminded me that I still had some red onion and cilantro in the fridge that needed using up fast. And lastly, after last night's epic dinner here -- an enormous bloody rare burger smothered in boursin and grilled onions/mushrooms, fries, onion rings, and a chocolate malted frappe -- I was understandably concerned aboutgout fresh vegetable intake.
So, in the interest in simplicity and healthfulness, this is what I had for dinner tonight: Mango avocado salsa on toasted pita bread, with homemade sangria. Proportions scaled to feed one person*; double for a cute, funky, dressed-down light dinner date that will most probably get you drunk (and/or laid!).
Mango avocado salsa
1/2 mango, diced
1/2 avocado, diced
1/2 beefsteak tomato, diced
1/4 red onion, ... you get the picture
1 Anaheim hot pepper, seeded, deveined, etc.
juice of 1/2 lime
juice of 1/4 orange
splash of olive oil
handful of cilantro, roughly chopped
pinch of kosher salt
Mix all of the above in bowl and refrigerate. In the meantime, toast some pita bread. I ended up experimenting (inadvertently, ahem) with lightly-toasted soft pita pockets filled with salsa and hard-toasted homemade pita chips loaded up with salsa. Though it was the result of a timing fluke, I actually preferred the over-toasted pita that led to chips. The crunchy chips/sweet-tangy-spicy salsa is just too perfect a combination to pass up.
Sangria
1/2 bottle of old/cheap red wine
1/2 bottle Orangina (or, in my cheapskate case, Stop & Shop brand orange seltzer)
splash spiced rum (Sailor Jerry!)
1 small apple, chopped
1/2 orange, chopped
1 lime, cut into wedges
ice
Combine all of the above in a pitcher. Or, in my aforementioned cheapskate case, an old coffee can, because you've never bothered to buy yourself a real pitcher. Cover, refrigerate for about an hour... or however long you can wait to start drinking. Yes, this serves one, on a Wednesday night, if that one is me.
And, for dessert, pick out and devour the fruit that's been soaking up all that alcohol. With some ice cream, maybe, if you're still lucid enough to be concerned with appropriate pairings. Otherwise, kick back with the entire David Bowie discography and call it a successful singles night.
Bon appetite!
*Sidenote: may require late-night raid on the cheese drawer and an impromptu peanut butter + fig jam + feta sandwich to supplement. So much for health!
Dinner.
When it comes to dining alone, I'm as guilty as the next lazy foodie of taking startlingly little care of what goes into my stomach. Often on solitary nights, "dinner" is an umbrella term for such diverse crimes against mindful eating as: microwave popcorn, raw veggie sausage, eggs (just eggs!)... and, when the old mood's really taken a nosedive, the classic sweet-savory-carby trifecta of Ben & Jerry's, brick of cheese, and a bag of salt and vinegar chips. Don't judge me. But once in awhile, and especially after watching the lovable culinary antics of Meryl-Streep-as-Julia-Child (and Amy Adams as, swear to God same exact face as a girl I went to college with, zomg!!), I start to feel ashamed that I always save my kitchen skills for the sometimes-appreciative masses, but somehow rarely think to splurge on myself. Tonight was one of those nights that I needed to be reminded of the independent existence of my own taste buds, apart from the influence of elaborate homecooked meals for friends and loved ones.
There is one major problem, however, with the cooking-for-one endeavor. When planning a meal for others, part of the fun is guessing their tastes and putting together something that syncs up, not just flavor-wise, but in sociological terms -- will it be something fancy, pre-plated, with garnish? quick-and-dirty finger food? a cheeky haute-cuisine adaptation of an old childhood classic? Especially since I never had anything resembling a standard American baseline to work from (I still have to read the box to figure out how to make Kraft Mac & Cheese or an Oscar Meyer hot dog), my flexibility in this respect is dizzying. I can happily cook anything for anyone, from just about any regional and class background... but when it comes to what it is that I want, I tend to start complicating things with all manner of useless intellectualism and second-guessing, all of which just leaves me starving and scraping clean a can of refried beans at 9 o'clock at night.
Luckily, this evening, I had a few solid parameters to work around. First was the fact that, probably due to Cinco de Mayo and summer being generally around the corner, I've recently become obsessed with all manner of salsas. Since I learned to roast peppers, I've been excited to show off by making things like a really tasty grilled pineapple and pepper salsa (bee-tee-dubs, this is a fantastic food site for the non-fussy non-pro) a few nights back, to go with some otherwise boring but oh-so-healthy broiled salmon. Second, in an early scene in Julie and Julia, Amy Adams is whipping up something that looked to me like salsa on bruschetta, which reminded me that I still had some red onion and cilantro in the fridge that needed using up fast. And lastly, after last night's epic dinner here -- an enormous bloody rare burger smothered in boursin and grilled onions/mushrooms, fries, onion rings, and a chocolate malted frappe -- I was understandably concerned about
So, in the interest in simplicity and healthfulness, this is what I had for dinner tonight: Mango avocado salsa on toasted pita bread, with homemade sangria. Proportions scaled to feed one person*; double for a cute, funky, dressed-down light dinner date that will most probably get you drunk (and/or laid!).
Mango avocado salsa
1/2 mango, diced
1/2 avocado, diced
1/2 beefsteak tomato, diced
1/4 red onion, ... you get the picture
1 Anaheim hot pepper, seeded, deveined, etc.
juice of 1/2 lime
juice of 1/4 orange
splash of olive oil
handful of cilantro, roughly chopped
pinch of kosher salt
Mix all of the above in bowl and refrigerate. In the meantime, toast some pita bread. I ended up experimenting (inadvertently, ahem) with lightly-toasted soft pita pockets filled with salsa and hard-toasted homemade pita chips loaded up with salsa. Though it was the result of a timing fluke, I actually preferred the over-toasted pita that led to chips. The crunchy chips/sweet-tangy-spicy salsa is just too perfect a combination to pass up.
Sangria
1/2 bottle of old/cheap red wine
1/2 bottle Orangina (or, in my cheapskate case, Stop & Shop brand orange seltzer)
splash spiced rum (Sailor Jerry!)
1 small apple, chopped
1/2 orange, chopped
1 lime, cut into wedges
ice
Combine all of the above in a pitcher. Or, in my aforementioned cheapskate case, an old coffee can, because you've never bothered to buy yourself a real pitcher. Cover, refrigerate for about an hour... or however long you can wait to start drinking. Yes, this serves one, on a Wednesday night, if that one is me.
And, for dessert, pick out and devour the fruit that's been soaking up all that alcohol. With some ice cream, maybe, if you're still lucid enough to be concerned with appropriate pairings. Otherwise, kick back with the entire David Bowie discography and call it a successful singles night.
Bon appetite!
*Sidenote: may require late-night raid on the cheese drawer and an impromptu peanut butter + fig jam + feta sandwich to supplement. So much for health!
Monday, May 3, 2010
Vanitas
Given the unseasonably warm weather this spring (80s in early May?), the citizens of the greater Boston area have shed their down comforter coats early to reveal both their soft white underbellies and snazzy new summer attire. The other day on the T, that neat cross-section of urban fashion, I noticed something a bit surprising: the appearance of high-waisted shorts and skirts... not on out-of-touch grandmas or soccer moms, but ultra-hip kids.
Maybe this is only surprising for my generation. I came of age at the peak of the great Low-Riding Pants Phenomenon of 1998-2002, when the mass popularization of the thong coincided with Old Navy jingles set to limbo music, enticing all 12-25 year-olds with the provocative query: "How low can you go?" I'm fairly certain that every sartorial cohort tends to place special and totally arbitrary emphasis on one particular part of the body. Today, that part of the body appears to be the legs: whether stuffed into skin-tight skinny jeans or leggings, highlighted by big clunky boots, or exposed via micro-shorts. But back in my day, legs were irrelevant, practically canceled out of existence by shapeless, baggy boyfriend jeans or voluminous circus-tent raver pants. The corporal focal point of my generation was -- appropriately enough for the early adopters of blogging technology -- the navel, flaunted through a combination of midriff-bearing tops and low, low, low-slung bottoms. To wear any pant, skirt, or short that rose higher than the hipbone was unthinkable. To be caught dead in a lower-body garment that actually covered the navel -- anathema.
Which is why seeing hip young things wearing skirts and shorts that creep up into the rib region is a so disturbing to me. Not because I think it looks stupid or weird (what fashion trend doesn't?), but because this is the first time in my relatively short life that I've been directly confronted by the cyclicality of fashion, the way it insidiously perpetuates itself by replacing one look, line, or silhouette by its opposite, thus casting all conservative hangers-on of the past into the dreaded territory of "so last season." Skinny jeans, this generation's answer to the wide-leg carpenter pants I still own and wear, were a harbinger, but the high waist silhouette is the nail in the coffin, the done deal of the late 90s as anything but a retro throwback to be ironically appropriated by future fashion aficionados.
But it's not just clothes that follow this pattern; everywhere you look, fashion is the guiding force that's quietly, relentlessly shaping our daily lives. Fifteen years ago, nobody outside of a 20-mile radius in Northern California gave a damn about organic produce; now, "green" and "organic" are the words of the day, used to move everything from vegetables to shoes and cars. Product packaging has changed, the color palette shifting from eye-catching neons to earthy browns and greens, the material mimicking Spartan textures like cardboard and burlap. Cheetos bags now come adorned with blurbs about the wholesome goodness of American corn. Overnight, we all became concerned environmentalists, just like, overnight, we decided that low-rise jeans look trashy, while high-waisted shorts look sophisticated and cool.
Except, "we" obviously didn't actually decide anything -- it was a complex interaction between a few avant-garde cognoscenti, a savvy team of marketing middlemen, and the massive weight of the American advertising machine. Countless focus groups, meticulous market research, and a sum total of months, perhaps years of intense number-crunching have all come together to instill in any sensible young person the absolute necessity of buying organic, rBGH-free yogurt from Whole Foods, as well as the equally inalienable necessity of buying high-waisted silk sailor shorts from Urban Outfitters. We sail through the aisles and proudly claim our product of choice, resting assured that we, unlike those unwashed masses who guzzle Go-Gurt and sport flares from last century, are in the know. And next season, when the restless winds of fashion again pick up and shift, we'll be forced to internalize a new necessity or risk becoming the cavemen fashion victims we despise.
In short, forget safety pins, leather jackets, and torn fishnets. The truly subversive fashion choice for this season's sartorial rebel:
Maybe this is only surprising for my generation. I came of age at the peak of the great Low-Riding Pants Phenomenon of 1998-2002, when the mass popularization of the thong coincided with Old Navy jingles set to limbo music, enticing all 12-25 year-olds with the provocative query: "How low can you go?" I'm fairly certain that every sartorial cohort tends to place special and totally arbitrary emphasis on one particular part of the body. Today, that part of the body appears to be the legs: whether stuffed into skin-tight skinny jeans or leggings, highlighted by big clunky boots, or exposed via micro-shorts. But back in my day, legs were irrelevant, practically canceled out of existence by shapeless, baggy boyfriend jeans or voluminous circus-tent raver pants. The corporal focal point of my generation was -- appropriately enough for the early adopters of blogging technology -- the navel, flaunted through a combination of midriff-bearing tops and low, low, low-slung bottoms. To wear any pant, skirt, or short that rose higher than the hipbone was unthinkable. To be caught dead in a lower-body garment that actually covered the navel -- anathema.
Which is why seeing hip young things wearing skirts and shorts that creep up into the rib region is a so disturbing to me. Not because I think it looks stupid or weird (what fashion trend doesn't?), but because this is the first time in my relatively short life that I've been directly confronted by the cyclicality of fashion, the way it insidiously perpetuates itself by replacing one look, line, or silhouette by its opposite, thus casting all conservative hangers-on of the past into the dreaded territory of "so last season." Skinny jeans, this generation's answer to the wide-leg carpenter pants I still own and wear, were a harbinger, but the high waist silhouette is the nail in the coffin, the done deal of the late 90s as anything but a retro throwback to be ironically appropriated by future fashion aficionados.
But it's not just clothes that follow this pattern; everywhere you look, fashion is the guiding force that's quietly, relentlessly shaping our daily lives. Fifteen years ago, nobody outside of a 20-mile radius in Northern California gave a damn about organic produce; now, "green" and "organic" are the words of the day, used to move everything from vegetables to shoes and cars. Product packaging has changed, the color palette shifting from eye-catching neons to earthy browns and greens, the material mimicking Spartan textures like cardboard and burlap. Cheetos bags now come adorned with blurbs about the wholesome goodness of American corn. Overnight, we all became concerned environmentalists, just like, overnight, we decided that low-rise jeans look trashy, while high-waisted shorts look sophisticated and cool.
Except, "we" obviously didn't actually decide anything -- it was a complex interaction between a few avant-garde cognoscenti, a savvy team of marketing middlemen, and the massive weight of the American advertising machine. Countless focus groups, meticulous market research, and a sum total of months, perhaps years of intense number-crunching have all come together to instill in any sensible young person the absolute necessity of buying organic, rBGH-free yogurt from Whole Foods, as well as the equally inalienable necessity of buying high-waisted silk sailor shorts from Urban Outfitters. We sail through the aisles and proudly claim our product of choice, resting assured that we, unlike those unwashed masses who guzzle Go-Gurt and sport flares from last century, are in the know. And next season, when the restless winds of fashion again pick up and shift, we'll be forced to internalize a new necessity or risk becoming the cavemen fashion victims we despise.
In short, forget safety pins, leather jackets, and torn fishnets. The truly subversive fashion choice for this season's sartorial rebel:
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Correlation, causation, snack-cakes
Apropos to all this foodie business...
I recently read this article in The Atlantic about the rise of obesity in America. This is how it starts:
The article goes on to tell the familiar story of the alarming increase in overweight Americans, from 45% of the total population in 1960 to 68% in 2008. It lays out the various problems in determining why the so-called obesity epidemic is happening and possible methods of curbing it. But what struck me was that opening paragraph. Read that passage again, skimming for content and making a few obvious extrapolations: in the 40s and 50s, Americans are smoking like chimneys... in the 60s, people finally wise up to lung cancer and start to cut down on smoking... around that time, they also start getting chubbier.... Today, Americans are probably the most stringent non-smokers of all the developed Western nations. We're also the fattest. Um. Wait.
I've seen scores of articles on obesity that compare today's food industry to the tobacco industry of yore -- manipulating consumers through advertising, tinkering with the addictive properties of their products, shadily shilling to kids and minorities. But nowhere have I seen anyone discuss the very glaring fact that heavy smoking drastically curtails appetite, both physiologically and physically, giving people less time to snack. Could it be that all this talk of increased sedentary lifestyles, overgrown portions, high fructose corn syrup, etc., are all missing the point? Could it be that, since the coming of modernity, we denizens of the developed, industrialized world are simply bored and looking for a quick, relatively cheap drug to keep us riding a dopamine high, and various mass-producing industries are happy to feed that need? Could it be that nicotine once did the trick, and now it's soda and family-sized Cheetos bags? Everyone loves to cite the "French paradox" as some amazing mystery of modern dieting. How is it that a society priding itself on staples like cheese, baguettes, and macarons can have the slimmest women in all of Europe? Is it because they have a happier, healthier, granola-crunchier relationship to their food? All signs point to not really. But, they sure do smoke a lot!
Anyway, I don't think I'm saying anything super revelatory, but it's strange that there hasn't been more publicized discussion of this. Given that recent efforts to cut down on smoking in various puff-happy parts of the world -- for instance, Japan -- have coincided with sudden mysterious spikes in obesity levels in those countries, speculation invites itself. What if, rather than plastering restaurants with calorie counts or encouraging unrealistic levels of athleticism in the general population, the solution to this "epidemic" can only come with the invention of a new drug, addictive and short-term euphoric but not detrimental to health? A real-life soma, perhaps? Scoff at the dystopian element if you will, but mark my words...
I recently read this article in The Atlantic about the rise of obesity in America. This is how it starts:
In 1948, Congress doled out $5 billion to Europe in the first installment of the Marshall Plan, the World Health Organization was born, a simian astronaut named Albert I was launched into the atmosphere (he died), and doctors in Framingham, Massachusetts, an American everytown that once was a seat of the abolitionist movement, began a pioneering study of cardiovascular disease. Its initial results helped persuade the American Heart Association, in 1960, to push Americans to smoke fewer cigarettes and, a year later, to cut down on cholesterol. Today, thanks to a long-running public-health campaign, Americans have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, they smoke less, and fewer die from cardiovascular disease. In fact, from 1980 to 2000, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease fell by at least half in most developed countries.
Would that we had had similar success battling obesity.
The article goes on to tell the familiar story of the alarming increase in overweight Americans, from 45% of the total population in 1960 to 68% in 2008. It lays out the various problems in determining why the so-called obesity epidemic is happening and possible methods of curbing it. But what struck me was that opening paragraph. Read that passage again, skimming for content and making a few obvious extrapolations: in the 40s and 50s, Americans are smoking like chimneys... in the 60s, people finally wise up to lung cancer and start to cut down on smoking... around that time, they also start getting chubbier.... Today, Americans are probably the most stringent non-smokers of all the developed Western nations. We're also the fattest. Um. Wait.
I've seen scores of articles on obesity that compare today's food industry to the tobacco industry of yore -- manipulating consumers through advertising, tinkering with the addictive properties of their products, shadily shilling to kids and minorities. But nowhere have I seen anyone discuss the very glaring fact that heavy smoking drastically curtails appetite, both physiologically and physically, giving people less time to snack. Could it be that all this talk of increased sedentary lifestyles, overgrown portions, high fructose corn syrup, etc., are all missing the point? Could it be that, since the coming of modernity, we denizens of the developed, industrialized world are simply bored and looking for a quick, relatively cheap drug to keep us riding a dopamine high, and various mass-producing industries are happy to feed that need? Could it be that nicotine once did the trick, and now it's soda and family-sized Cheetos bags? Everyone loves to cite the "French paradox" as some amazing mystery of modern dieting. How is it that a society priding itself on staples like cheese, baguettes, and macarons can have the slimmest women in all of Europe? Is it because they have a happier, healthier, granola-crunchier relationship to their food? All signs point to not really. But, they sure do smoke a lot!
Anyway, I don't think I'm saying anything super revelatory, but it's strange that there hasn't been more publicized discussion of this. Given that recent efforts to cut down on smoking in various puff-happy parts of the world -- for instance, Japan -- have coincided with sudden mysterious spikes in obesity levels in those countries, speculation invites itself. What if, rather than plastering restaurants with calorie counts or encouraging unrealistic levels of athleticism in the general population, the solution to this "epidemic" can only come with the invention of a new drug, addictive and short-term euphoric but not detrimental to health? A real-life soma, perhaps? Scoff at the dystopian element if you will, but mark my words...
Navel grazing pt. 2: lunch
A friend of mine once said, of the weird and unpalatable-to-Westerners traditional Czech foods like lardy pork and fried cheese -- "It's a starvation culture. Any place that's experienced hunger is going to have a different relationship to food."
That idea struck an unintentionally personal chord in me. In college, I went through a year-long experimental phase of eating no more than 1,000 calories a day. After losing 40 pounds and ending up the spitting image of an Auschwitz internee, my attitude to food had, quite fittingly, begun to resemble that of the Eastern European starvation culture from which I originate. Suddenly, something like chopped raw onion or cabbage was no longer just an ingredient -- with a little seasoning, it could actually function as a meal. More importantly, no scrap of leftover could go to waste. After years of mocking my grandmother and mother for their propensity to polish off foods that had obviously already gone south, I found myself blithely biting into soft, acrid fruit or hunks of stale, mold-speckled bread, all in the name of stubborn starvation-induced frugality.
A rather grim beginning for a lighthearted food blog entry, I realize, but this really does confirm for me that taste is nothing more a mechanistic response to environment and has the ability to get radically rewired. Though I'm fortunately no longer pathological about it, I still find that my attitude to food has a decidedly peasanty aura: when I cook, I like to make big, hearty meals that can get repurposed into creative leftover cuisine, and my favorite dishes tend to be eat-again things like soups, stews, and casseroles. I'm also obsessive about not letting groceries go bad, but actively tailoring my cooking to make use of anything that's in danger of entering expired territory. Lunch is the perfect example of this in action. It's a liminal meal, and as such is forgiving of a bit of derivativeness from the night before. When I cook during the week, my lunches tend to be comprised of dinner leftovers, sometimes hastily refurbished1, and sometimes as-is hunks of meat, fish, and veggies. On weekends, though, lunchtime is the time for quick and tasty pantry-clearing, ranging from a simple pasta sauce concoction2, to the more time-consuming strata or panade3.
At the midpoint of sophistication between these two culinary poles stands the exotic-sounding but actually stupidly easy and rapturously delicious Spanish omelet, otherwise known as frittata. I love frittata. It's the dish I make most frequently, and the thing I could happily eat every day, if the thought of skyrocketing cholesterol didn't give me slight pause. The greatest thing about frittata is that you can put literally anything in it -- and as much or as little of that thing/things as you want -- and it will be filling and tasty and good. All you need is some eggs and cheese, and the rest can be totally improvised. The basic recipe is this: take anywhere from 4 to 8 eggs (I usually use 5 for a 2-person meal), beat them up in a bowl with some seasoning and grated hard cheese of your choice, and throw them in an oven-proof pan along with whatever other ingredients you want to use (cooked veggies, meats, toasted bread cubes, herbs, greens). On medium heat, shovel the mess around the pan until the eggs begin to form curds but are still pretty wet on top (~3-5 min). Top with a generous handful of shredded cheese and pop under a broiler for a few minutes, or until the cheese on top is golden-brown and the omelet has pulled away from the pan. Let cool slightly. Take a moment to appreciate your tremendously privileged, well-fed position in life. Eat.
1 Take: a handful of shredded roast chicken bits, the last of the arugula beginning to wilt and cling to the bottom of the bag, the wedge of cheese that spared my knuckles from being brutalized by the grater. Make pasta, reserve cup of hot cooking water. Put arugula on bottom of large microwave container, finely dice cheese & throw on top of arugula. Pour hot pasta & water on top of greens and cheese, add a pat of butter, chicken & a pinch of preferred herbs & spices. Close container, shake, toss in school bag and waltz out the door.
2 The last roasted red pepper and the marinating liquid in the jar (I've since learned to make them yourself: highly recommended) + leftover soy chorizo from Vegetarian Wednesdays (new household tradition) + 3 cloves of garlic, minced + generous dousing of paprika & cayenne + olive oil and a med-heat pan = delicious quick pasta sauce.
3 Technically, this was my dinner last night and as such does not belong in the "lunch" category, but I still love my version of this recipe too much not to share: Take that half a loaf of stale bread you've got lying around your pantry/freezer, leftover cooked veggies (I used marinated & roasted broccoli, red pepper, eggplant, zucchini, and sweet potato), pantry protein of choice (a can of chickpeas), any other deliciousness you might have in reserve (a hunk of leftover polenta), a cup or so of shredded cheese (Parm & aged cheddar), and some stock. Cube bread, drizzle with olive oil, toast. Layer on bottom of 2-quart casserole dish, add layer of veggie filling, layer of cheese, and another layer of bread-filling-cheese. Top with hot stock, bake covered in 350-degree oven for 45 minutes, uncover & bake for another 15, top with more cheese & stick under broiler for another few minutes or so. Let cool 10 min, garnish with a little chopped greenery (basil) and dig in.
That idea struck an unintentionally personal chord in me. In college, I went through a year-long experimental phase of eating no more than 1,000 calories a day. After losing 40 pounds and ending up the spitting image of an Auschwitz internee, my attitude to food had, quite fittingly, begun to resemble that of the Eastern European starvation culture from which I originate. Suddenly, something like chopped raw onion or cabbage was no longer just an ingredient -- with a little seasoning, it could actually function as a meal. More importantly, no scrap of leftover could go to waste. After years of mocking my grandmother and mother for their propensity to polish off foods that had obviously already gone south, I found myself blithely biting into soft, acrid fruit or hunks of stale, mold-speckled bread, all in the name of stubborn starvation-induced frugality.
A rather grim beginning for a lighthearted food blog entry, I realize, but this really does confirm for me that taste is nothing more a mechanistic response to environment and has the ability to get radically rewired. Though I'm fortunately no longer pathological about it, I still find that my attitude to food has a decidedly peasanty aura: when I cook, I like to make big, hearty meals that can get repurposed into creative leftover cuisine, and my favorite dishes tend to be eat-again things like soups, stews, and casseroles. I'm also obsessive about not letting groceries go bad, but actively tailoring my cooking to make use of anything that's in danger of entering expired territory. Lunch is the perfect example of this in action. It's a liminal meal, and as such is forgiving of a bit of derivativeness from the night before. When I cook during the week, my lunches tend to be comprised of dinner leftovers, sometimes hastily refurbished1, and sometimes as-is hunks of meat, fish, and veggies. On weekends, though, lunchtime is the time for quick and tasty pantry-clearing, ranging from a simple pasta sauce concoction2, to the more time-consuming strata or panade3.
At the midpoint of sophistication between these two culinary poles stands the exotic-sounding but actually stupidly easy and rapturously delicious Spanish omelet, otherwise known as frittata. I love frittata. It's the dish I make most frequently, and the thing I could happily eat every day, if the thought of skyrocketing cholesterol didn't give me slight pause. The greatest thing about frittata is that you can put literally anything in it -- and as much or as little of that thing/things as you want -- and it will be filling and tasty and good. All you need is some eggs and cheese, and the rest can be totally improvised. The basic recipe is this: take anywhere from 4 to 8 eggs (I usually use 5 for a 2-person meal), beat them up in a bowl with some seasoning and grated hard cheese of your choice, and throw them in an oven-proof pan along with whatever other ingredients you want to use (cooked veggies, meats, toasted bread cubes, herbs, greens). On medium heat, shovel the mess around the pan until the eggs begin to form curds but are still pretty wet on top (~3-5 min). Top with a generous handful of shredded cheese and pop under a broiler for a few minutes, or until the cheese on top is golden-brown and the omelet has pulled away from the pan. Let cool slightly. Take a moment to appreciate your tremendously privileged, well-fed position in life. Eat.
1 Take: a handful of shredded roast chicken bits, the last of the arugula beginning to wilt and cling to the bottom of the bag, the wedge of cheese that spared my knuckles from being brutalized by the grater. Make pasta, reserve cup of hot cooking water. Put arugula on bottom of large microwave container, finely dice cheese & throw on top of arugula. Pour hot pasta & water on top of greens and cheese, add a pat of butter, chicken & a pinch of preferred herbs & spices. Close container, shake, toss in school bag and waltz out the door.
2 The last roasted red pepper and the marinating liquid in the jar (I've since learned to make them yourself: highly recommended) + leftover soy chorizo from Vegetarian Wednesdays (new household tradition) + 3 cloves of garlic, minced + generous dousing of paprika & cayenne + olive oil and a med-heat pan = delicious quick pasta sauce.
3 Technically, this was my dinner last night and as such does not belong in the "lunch" category, but I still love my version of this recipe too much not to share: Take that half a loaf of stale bread you've got lying around your pantry/freezer, leftover cooked veggies (I used marinated & roasted broccoli, red pepper, eggplant, zucchini, and sweet potato), pantry protein of choice (a can of chickpeas), any other deliciousness you might have in reserve (a hunk of leftover polenta), a cup or so of shredded cheese (Parm & aged cheddar), and some stock. Cube bread, drizzle with olive oil, toast. Layer on bottom of 2-quart casserole dish, add layer of veggie filling, layer of cheese, and another layer of bread-filling-cheese. Top with hot stock, bake covered in 350-degree oven for 45 minutes, uncover & bake for another 15, top with more cheese & stick under broiler for another few minutes or so. Let cool 10 min, garnish with a little chopped greenery (basil) and dig in.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The poetics of space
A house that is not my house. A bed that is not my bed. A soap that is not my soap. An eight-point compass with the directions rearranged. A globe that is not my globe. A fistful of waxy colored candy that is not my fistful of waxy colored candy. A sense of longing that is not my sense of longing. An ice-chip fisheye that is not the playing marble of my wayward youth. An orange peeled on a plate. A needle that is not my needle. A crooked door that is not my crooked door. A hush that is not my hush.
My biggest problem is these lyrical limbs, doctor. They're forever tangentially stretching, unfolding to encompass the expanse of one discrete space, yet always forgetting that even in the narrowest of confines, there exist hairline fissures deeper than ocean trenches, garbage pails more cornucopic than banquet halls, viscous stains more commodious than the cosmos. And always always always, at the moment of maximum contact, in the cradling embrace of the wood and plaster nook in the fleshy, fibrous crook, there's that rough slap from the back of the turned-away mirror, like the reddish blackness of the inner lid. You might say it's the place you can't see that you see from, (-- though you could say that about the overexposed negatives of someone else's vacation photos), the point at the fulcrum that ensures the pivot of the hinge, (the double-blind taste tests of someone else's dreams...) the desperate jump that proves the paltry surmountability of the abyss. (A door that is not a door to a house that is not a house.) I guess you might say that's the place I've been looking for, doctor, through the endless tessellated refractions on the right side of the mirror. Help me find it. That elusive blind alley where sight begins.
My biggest problem is these lyrical limbs, doctor. They're forever tangentially stretching, unfolding to encompass the expanse of one discrete space, yet always forgetting that even in the narrowest of confines, there exist hairline fissures deeper than ocean trenches, garbage pails more cornucopic than banquet halls, viscous stains more commodious than the cosmos. And always always always, at the moment of maximum contact, in the cradling embrace of the wood and plaster nook in the fleshy, fibrous crook, there's that rough slap from the back of the turned-away mirror, like the reddish blackness of the inner lid. You might say it's the place you can't see that you see from, (-- though you could say that about the overexposed negatives of someone else's vacation photos), the point at the fulcrum that ensures the pivot of the hinge, (the double-blind taste tests of someone else's dreams...) the desperate jump that proves the paltry surmountability of the abyss. (A door that is not a door to a house that is not a house.) I guess you might say that's the place I've been looking for, doctor, through the endless tessellated refractions on the right side of the mirror. Help me find it. That elusive blind alley where sight begins.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Navel grazing
Let's get serious for a moment and talk about a subject near and dear to my heart: food. Now, on a scale ranging from Kobe Beef And Quail Egg Connoisseur to Ketchup-stained Fried Food Schlub, I'm quite solidly in the middle. a) I'm more intrigued than horrified by KFC's Double Down (though I hear it's disappointing even for the non-gourmand). b) Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits is one of my favorite eating establishments, ranking easily among 400-dollar dinners at top urban eateries. c) I've been known to consider the following as meals in themselves: chunky peanut butter from the jar; an entire papaya, seeds and all; a can of refried beans. But, I also appreciate delicacies generally reserved either for the abjectly starving or the finer palates of the gustatory bourgeoisie: organ meats, fish eggs, mollusks.
That's why I was equal parts titillated and chagrined to read this, a week-long food diary by the New York Times' new food critic, Sam Sifton. Titillated, because the eye-popping calorie counts and daily drink totals redeem my own tendency toward hedonistic overconsumption. Three beers and a tumbler of bourbon? In the SSB household, we call that a Tuesday! Chagrined, because the people who commented on the entry were irascibly self-righteous. How can you eat like this? How can you drink so much? Don't you know that if you don't eat more vegetables/eat less bread/cut out alcohol and coffee and dairy and sugar... you'll DIE?!? Of all the myopic idiocy that happens online, it's incredible to find such a stupefying sense of moral outrage applied to the fucking food diary of a fucking food critic.
Since I'm not a professional eater, I won't bore all two of my readers with a similar project, a week's worth of food, calorie, and exercise totals (let's just say that, calorie-wise, I'm probably not all that far below Sam, scaled to relative size and gender). But I will bore you with the highlights of my typical daily meals, starting with my favorite and most important meal of the day: breakfast!
I love breakfast. If left to my own devices, I tend to wake up ridiculously early, and, generally, the thought of breakfast is what does it -- both because I have a fairly humming metabolism and tend to wake up starving, and because I have a hopeless caffeine addiction and always wake up NEEDING coffee. I love breakfasts out -- decadent eggy dishes, bagels and smoked fish, sides of sausage, bacon, homefries, and biscuits. I also love unconventional breakfast choices, like toast smeared with hummus, or goat cheese, or mashed avocado. But lately, I've settled on a pretty good, cheap, and easy basic breakfast formula. It is as follows:
Coffee
For the past four years, I've been making my morning cup of joe in one of these babies:
The technical term is "cezve" (pronounced "jez-vuh") and in the former Soviet Union, this is still how most people make their coffee. You dump in a few tablespoons of grounds, cold water, and maybe some sugar, put it right over the flame of a gas stove (electric works, too), and let it go till it boils (my little one-cup cezve takes exactly two and a half minutes). Take it off the stove, throw a tablespoon of cold water over the top to bring the grounds down, let it sit for a few minutes, and presto -- Turkish coffee. I'm no coffee snob, but I have no idea why this hasn't caught on yet in the States over the stupid, wasteful dripper thing. I've had French press coffee, so beloved of the hipster coffee-teriate these days, and it doesn't really taste any better. If it's the presence of grounds in your cup (horrors!) that bothers you, you can always strain it through a tea sieve before serving. Plus, cleaning a French press looks complicated. To clean a cezve takes ten seconds at the most: all you do is dump out the sedimentary grounds and rinse it under the tap. You don't even need to scrub. Hot new elite coffee thing in five...
Oatmeal with Parmesan
I got the idea for this somewhat unorthodox creation from cheese grits, which are among my favorite Southern foods, as well as cheesy polenta, a staple of the nouveau highbrow Southern cooking trend. If you can put cheese in other grains with such overwhelming success, I reasoned, then why not put it in oatmeal, that homely healthy breakfast staple? Don't get me wrong; I love oatmeal in all its forms. It's another one of those things I grew up with in the former USSR (hrm, pattern...): every morning, my dad would fix me a big bowl of oatmeal and butter, and every morning I'd burn my mouth because I couldn't wait till it cooled to dig in (hrm, another pattern...). Then, when we moved to the States, we discovered the relative benefits of Quaker Instant Microwaveable Oatmeal packets. Pros: It takes only a few minutes and one dish to make, and it's got a ton of sugar and weird freeze-dried fruit -- the cornerstone of any American teen diet. Cons: By ten o'clock, you're starving again. Having returned to the more wholesome "old fashioned" Quaker Oats in college, I could still never quite satisfy some inherent craving for a more rib-sticking bowl... until one day, midway through 3-minute microwave spin cycle, I threw in a heaping spoonful of ground Parmesan, stirred, and popped it back in the oven. The result was better than buttered oatmeal, or oatmeal cooked in milk or cream. It was creamy, cheesy, savory, and absolutely delicious. To this day, it's my go-to breakfast. I've experimented with various cheeses -- everything from lowfat cheddar (gross) to crumbled feta (doesn't melt right), but Parmesan is far and away the best. This dish will run you about 200 calories with two tablespoons of parm and your regular half-cup oatmeal serving size. You'll also get some protein, calcium, and possible weird looks from your significant other. Ignore. Enjoy.
Apple
Quite simply the single greatest fruit on the planet. Cheap, portable, filling, delicious. Living in places like Seattle, Ithaca, and Boston, I've been continually spoiled by excellent seasonal apple variety. I tend to go for Cortlands, Empires, Macs, and Honeycrips. Braeburns and Galas are okay, too. I get into Granny Smith moods sometimes, but I have terrible teeth and cringe when I sense the acidity eating away at my already paper-thin enamel. I have to be pretty desperate to eat a Red Delicious, but I'll still do it over no apple at all. Unless I'm in a very public place, I eat them whole -- skin, core, seeds, and all -- which means that anyone I've ever loved has had to put up with finding lone, disembodied apple stems strewn about their floors, desks, beds. Apples! The best!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my baseline breakfast.* Simple, filling, nutritious, and just a touch decadent. That's how I roll.
Tune in next time for Lunch and Dinner!
*I say baseline because it's rarely just that for the entire morning. I'm partial to crack-of-dawn five-mile runs, which means that around 9 or 10 o'clock, I need a caloric supplement to make it to noon -- some yogurt or cottage cheese right out of the tub, a spoonful of peanut butter, a (cough) blueberry cake donut from Dunkin Donuts (my favorite!). I am a hundred and twenty pounds of lean, mean eating machine.
That's why I was equal parts titillated and chagrined to read this, a week-long food diary by the New York Times' new food critic, Sam Sifton. Titillated, because the eye-popping calorie counts and daily drink totals redeem my own tendency toward hedonistic overconsumption. Three beers and a tumbler of bourbon? In the SSB household, we call that a Tuesday! Chagrined, because the people who commented on the entry were irascibly self-righteous. How can you eat like this? How can you drink so much? Don't you know that if you don't eat more vegetables/eat less bread/cut out alcohol and coffee and dairy and sugar... you'll DIE?!? Of all the myopic idiocy that happens online, it's incredible to find such a stupefying sense of moral outrage applied to the fucking food diary of a fucking food critic.
Since I'm not a professional eater, I won't bore all two of my readers with a similar project, a week's worth of food, calorie, and exercise totals (let's just say that, calorie-wise, I'm probably not all that far below Sam, scaled to relative size and gender). But I will bore you with the highlights of my typical daily meals, starting with my favorite and most important meal of the day: breakfast!
I love breakfast. If left to my own devices, I tend to wake up ridiculously early, and, generally, the thought of breakfast is what does it -- both because I have a fairly humming metabolism and tend to wake up starving, and because I have a hopeless caffeine addiction and always wake up NEEDING coffee. I love breakfasts out -- decadent eggy dishes, bagels and smoked fish, sides of sausage, bacon, homefries, and biscuits. I also love unconventional breakfast choices, like toast smeared with hummus, or goat cheese, or mashed avocado. But lately, I've settled on a pretty good, cheap, and easy basic breakfast formula. It is as follows:
Coffee
For the past four years, I've been making my morning cup of joe in one of these babies:
The technical term is "cezve" (pronounced "jez-vuh") and in the former Soviet Union, this is still how most people make their coffee. You dump in a few tablespoons of grounds, cold water, and maybe some sugar, put it right over the flame of a gas stove (electric works, too), and let it go till it boils (my little one-cup cezve takes exactly two and a half minutes). Take it off the stove, throw a tablespoon of cold water over the top to bring the grounds down, let it sit for a few minutes, and presto -- Turkish coffee. I'm no coffee snob, but I have no idea why this hasn't caught on yet in the States over the stupid, wasteful dripper thing. I've had French press coffee, so beloved of the hipster coffee-teriate these days, and it doesn't really taste any better. If it's the presence of grounds in your cup (horrors!) that bothers you, you can always strain it through a tea sieve before serving. Plus, cleaning a French press looks complicated. To clean a cezve takes ten seconds at the most: all you do is dump out the sedimentary grounds and rinse it under the tap. You don't even need to scrub. Hot new elite coffee thing in five...
Oatmeal with Parmesan
I got the idea for this somewhat unorthodox creation from cheese grits, which are among my favorite Southern foods, as well as cheesy polenta, a staple of the nouveau highbrow Southern cooking trend. If you can put cheese in other grains with such overwhelming success, I reasoned, then why not put it in oatmeal, that homely healthy breakfast staple? Don't get me wrong; I love oatmeal in all its forms. It's another one of those things I grew up with in the former USSR (hrm, pattern...): every morning, my dad would fix me a big bowl of oatmeal and butter, and every morning I'd burn my mouth because I couldn't wait till it cooled to dig in (hrm, another pattern...). Then, when we moved to the States, we discovered the relative benefits of Quaker Instant Microwaveable Oatmeal packets. Pros: It takes only a few minutes and one dish to make, and it's got a ton of sugar and weird freeze-dried fruit -- the cornerstone of any American teen diet. Cons: By ten o'clock, you're starving again. Having returned to the more wholesome "old fashioned" Quaker Oats in college, I could still never quite satisfy some inherent craving for a more rib-sticking bowl... until one day, midway through 3-minute microwave spin cycle, I threw in a heaping spoonful of ground Parmesan, stirred, and popped it back in the oven. The result was better than buttered oatmeal, or oatmeal cooked in milk or cream. It was creamy, cheesy, savory, and absolutely delicious. To this day, it's my go-to breakfast. I've experimented with various cheeses -- everything from lowfat cheddar (gross) to crumbled feta (doesn't melt right), but Parmesan is far and away the best. This dish will run you about 200 calories with two tablespoons of parm and your regular half-cup oatmeal serving size. You'll also get some protein, calcium, and possible weird looks from your significant other. Ignore. Enjoy.
Apple
Quite simply the single greatest fruit on the planet. Cheap, portable, filling, delicious. Living in places like Seattle, Ithaca, and Boston, I've been continually spoiled by excellent seasonal apple variety. I tend to go for Cortlands, Empires, Macs, and Honeycrips. Braeburns and Galas are okay, too. I get into Granny Smith moods sometimes, but I have terrible teeth and cringe when I sense the acidity eating away at my already paper-thin enamel. I have to be pretty desperate to eat a Red Delicious, but I'll still do it over no apple at all. Unless I'm in a very public place, I eat them whole -- skin, core, seeds, and all -- which means that anyone I've ever loved has had to put up with finding lone, disembodied apple stems strewn about their floors, desks, beds. Apples! The best!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my baseline breakfast.* Simple, filling, nutritious, and just a touch decadent. That's how I roll.
Tune in next time for Lunch and Dinner!
*I say baseline because it's rarely just that for the entire morning. I'm partial to crack-of-dawn five-mile runs, which means that around 9 or 10 o'clock, I need a caloric supplement to make it to noon -- some yogurt or cottage cheese right out of the tub, a spoonful of peanut butter, a (cough) blueberry cake donut from Dunkin Donuts (my favorite!). I am a hundred and twenty pounds of lean, mean eating machine.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
La Nouvelle Orleans n'existe pas
So, this past Sunday, HBO's big New Orleans-based series Treme premiered, to much fan-fare and excitement. I don't have HBO; I didn't watch it. But, in this postmodern day and age, I'd say that makes me most qualified to write about it. Right? Pace Baudrillard? Naturellement!
Having seen the previews and read a handful of reviews (Billy's is, of course, the best), I can say that I'm familiar enough with the concept that the creators are going for -- and, also, that I'm moderately perturbed by it. Like anyone who's spent a considerable amount of time in New Orleans, I, too, am guilty of constructing and perpetuating the standard mythologizing rhapsodies about the city. It's free! It's wild! It's an aesthetic and cultural roller coaster!, etc. However, happy as I am to wax nostalgic about a place that also happened to have been the locus of my coming of age, I'm skeptical about nostalgia in general, and deeply conservative regional nostalgia in particular. Treme, to me, seems like the culmination of a strange and somewhat schizophrenic fantasy project that started the minute the levees broke, sending thousands of evacuees to Google Street View to watch a shroud of murky green water creep over most of Uptown. Because, let's be honest. No matter how ethnically diverse the cast, the intended audience of this show is of the same demographic, the same class/race that inhabited said Uptown, and the one most responsible for propagating the aesthetic-cultural myth of the city in the wake of Katrina; i.e., a) affluent and b) white. It's a textbook example of a liberal white American coterie searching for authenticity vis-a-vis the ethnic Other, and, in the process, gently moving from the role of respectfully distanced observer to guardian, protector, patron... (izer).
So, this is where things get a little ookie. It's our (white middle-to-upper class) responsibility to preserve New Orleans culture, to rescue it from the twin perils of Bush-era neglect and post-reconstruction corporate whoredom. And, by all accounts, Treme has attempted to do just that, to squeeze as many insider references to the food, music, geography, politics, and social ritual of the city as possible into each hour-long episode. Except, with my dead sexy Masters in a minor regional literature, I can tell you exactly what happens when an artist attempts that kind of project. It's a tale as old as Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott: either s/he misses one detail and gets mountains of flak for sloppy inattentiveness and insensitivity to cultural specificity, or s/he compiles so much detail that the entire project sags under the weighty effort of being both super-studied and "genuine." But what's the point of being slavishly imitative of reality if a) reality is, by definition, ephemeral, fluctuating, and irreducibly prosaic, and b) if the kind of art we (white upper-to-middle class) like is all about opening up metaphorical channels, suggesting multiple readings and broader, cosmic connections? If art -- as opposed to, say, ethnography -- is more complex creation rather than reductive recreation, then how does the freezing of one particular temporal cross-cut of a place say anything about what that place actually is, was, or will be? And, finally, for a city so invested in authenticity and peculiarity, how does one reconcile the urge to perform this aforementioned freezing operation with the danger of reducing it all to a caricature, a kitschy tchotchke ready-made for tourist consumption? The more obscure and hermetic the references that get name-dropped, the more Google-fu will be performed by the adoring hip masses in order to decode them -- and, before you know it, your next door neighbor in Williamsburg knows more about muffulettas and second lines than your average inhabitant of the CBD.
I can address some of these concerns with the triple punch of empirical observation, social theory, and paraphrased chocolate snack-treat commercial: just as there's no one way to eat a Reese's, there's no one way to show a city. A city is a phantom, an astral projection, a collective hallucination based on Benedict Anderson's idea of the "imagined community." It's not just the sum total of underappreciated jazz musicians, giant grease-laden sandwiches, or parade rituals that one can research, catalog, and copy. It's an unquantifiable gestalt of every individual's experiences, wishes, drunken half-memories, and fantastical exaggerations. In short, and to bring this back to the part of the world I'm most scholastically qualified to discuss, it's the difference between 18th century sentimental travelogues and Gogol's Dead Souls. One is uncritically engaged in the contradictorily simultaneous praise and patriarchal protectorship of "the noble (peasant) savage"; the other is one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time. And it isn't because Gogol got the local costume right and Karamzin didn't -- they're both equally distorting and misrepresenting, but the difference is, Gogol can fucking write, and write he does: experience, fantasy, hallucination, the whole nine yards.
So, these are the questions I would like to ask the creators of Treme and everyone involved in the obviously Herculean task of the show's production: who exactly are you addressing, what exactly are you preserving, and why?
But maybe they've already answered those, or are planning to, or trying to, and I just need to get on the media boat and watch.
Having seen the previews and read a handful of reviews (Billy's is, of course, the best), I can say that I'm familiar enough with the concept that the creators are going for -- and, also, that I'm moderately perturbed by it. Like anyone who's spent a considerable amount of time in New Orleans, I, too, am guilty of constructing and perpetuating the standard mythologizing rhapsodies about the city. It's free! It's wild! It's an aesthetic and cultural roller coaster!, etc. However, happy as I am to wax nostalgic about a place that also happened to have been the locus of my coming of age, I'm skeptical about nostalgia in general, and deeply conservative regional nostalgia in particular. Treme, to me, seems like the culmination of a strange and somewhat schizophrenic fantasy project that started the minute the levees broke, sending thousands of evacuees to Google Street View to watch a shroud of murky green water creep over most of Uptown. Because, let's be honest. No matter how ethnically diverse the cast, the intended audience of this show is of the same demographic, the same class/race that inhabited said Uptown, and the one most responsible for propagating the aesthetic-cultural myth of the city in the wake of Katrina; i.e., a) affluent and b) white. It's a textbook example of a liberal white American coterie searching for authenticity vis-a-vis the ethnic Other, and, in the process, gently moving from the role of respectfully distanced observer to guardian, protector, patron... (izer).
So, this is where things get a little ookie. It's our (white middle-to-upper class) responsibility to preserve New Orleans culture, to rescue it from the twin perils of Bush-era neglect and post-reconstruction corporate whoredom. And, by all accounts, Treme has attempted to do just that, to squeeze as many insider references to the food, music, geography, politics, and social ritual of the city as possible into each hour-long episode. Except, with my dead sexy Masters in a minor regional literature, I can tell you exactly what happens when an artist attempts that kind of project. It's a tale as old as Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott: either s/he misses one detail and gets mountains of flak for sloppy inattentiveness and insensitivity to cultural specificity, or s/he compiles so much detail that the entire project sags under the weighty effort of being both super-studied and "genuine." But what's the point of being slavishly imitative of reality if a) reality is, by definition, ephemeral, fluctuating, and irreducibly prosaic, and b) if the kind of art we (white upper-to-middle class) like is all about opening up metaphorical channels, suggesting multiple readings and broader, cosmic connections? If art -- as opposed to, say, ethnography -- is more complex creation rather than reductive recreation, then how does the freezing of one particular temporal cross-cut of a place say anything about what that place actually is, was, or will be? And, finally, for a city so invested in authenticity and peculiarity, how does one reconcile the urge to perform this aforementioned freezing operation with the danger of reducing it all to a caricature, a kitschy tchotchke ready-made for tourist consumption? The more obscure and hermetic the references that get name-dropped, the more Google-fu will be performed by the adoring hip masses in order to decode them -- and, before you know it, your next door neighbor in Williamsburg knows more about muffulettas and second lines than your average inhabitant of the CBD.
I can address some of these concerns with the triple punch of empirical observation, social theory, and paraphrased chocolate snack-treat commercial: just as there's no one way to eat a Reese's, there's no one way to show a city. A city is a phantom, an astral projection, a collective hallucination based on Benedict Anderson's idea of the "imagined community." It's not just the sum total of underappreciated jazz musicians, giant grease-laden sandwiches, or parade rituals that one can research, catalog, and copy. It's an unquantifiable gestalt of every individual's experiences, wishes, drunken half-memories, and fantastical exaggerations. In short, and to bring this back to the part of the world I'm most scholastically qualified to discuss, it's the difference between 18th century sentimental travelogues and Gogol's Dead Souls. One is uncritically engaged in the contradictorily simultaneous praise and patriarchal protectorship of "the noble (peasant) savage"; the other is one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time. And it isn't because Gogol got the local costume right and Karamzin didn't -- they're both equally distorting and misrepresenting, but the difference is, Gogol can fucking write, and write he does: experience, fantasy, hallucination, the whole nine yards.
So, these are the questions I would like to ask the creators of Treme and everyone involved in the obviously Herculean task of the show's production: who exactly are you addressing, what exactly are you preserving, and why?
But maybe they've already answered those, or are planning to, or trying to, and I just need to get on the media boat and watch.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Rebirth
It's amazing how instrumental weather can be in shaping social consciousness. For the past seven months, I've had next to no awareness of living in a neighborhood with actual neighbors. When it's 30 degrees and the inappropriately festive sounding "wintry mix" is pouring from the sky, my universe shrinks to a chain of warm, closely confined spaces (home, subway, office, subway, home) linked by sprints through the intolerable wasteland of outdoor nonspace. And then yesterday, it's 70 degrees, dappled sun and resounding bird song. I'm reading out in the backyard and listening to the conversations in the house next door, where the windows are thrown open, Floor Two is calling the kids in for dinner, and Floor Three is hollering at Floor One in a boozy Boston accent:
"Paaaauuul.... You fuckaahhh... What are ya doin'? Come ovahhh and drink with us!"
"I don't have anything to drink!"
"We have stuff to drink! Get ovaaah heaaaah!"
And suddenly a lump of optimism swells up in my throat and I get kind of hopeful that a head will pop out of one of the windows and call me in, too. I'll come up to Floor Three and get handed a Bud Lite in a Bruins coozie, or maybe even a plastic cup full of Yellow Tail, and I'll deploy strategic local idiom in a chat about the weather ("That rain last week -- wicked crazy!") or pretend to know some rudimentary thing about sports ("Erm, yeah, how bout them Sox!"), and for once I won't feel like quite such a rootless transient, floating through 25 years of life with no national, regional, class, or social ties. I'm so friendly and easygoing and nice! I can fit right in!
It doesn't happen. But I have another four months, at the least, to doggedly hope it does.
"Paaaauuul.... You fuckaahhh... What are ya doin'? Come ovahhh and drink with us!"
"I don't have anything to drink!"
"We have stuff to drink! Get ovaaah heaaaah!"
And suddenly a lump of optimism swells up in my throat and I get kind of hopeful that a head will pop out of one of the windows and call me in, too. I'll come up to Floor Three and get handed a Bud Lite in a Bruins coozie, or maybe even a plastic cup full of Yellow Tail, and I'll deploy strategic local idiom in a chat about the weather ("That rain last week -- wicked crazy!") or pretend to know some rudimentary thing about sports ("Erm, yeah, how bout them Sox!"), and for once I won't feel like quite such a rootless transient, floating through 25 years of life with no national, regional, class, or social ties. I'm so friendly and easygoing and nice! I can fit right in!
It doesn't happen. But I have another four months, at the least, to doggedly hope it does.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Somehow, I don't think this is quite what Marx had in mind.
Internet for Democracy. Shut down the Euro Parliament. Now!
Internet for Democracy to me
Sign the petition @ http://www.internetfordemocracy.net/
"Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." Alan Badiou
We think representational democracy is a thing of the past. Its days are numbered. Few people in so-called Western Democracies can even be bothered to vote anymore. Indeed, representation can no longer be said to be representative.
We say it's time to embrace the internet era. The internet presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, in seizing the future and making a difference. Let people get involved directly in decision-making, let people decide what's best for them.
We, digital natives, web-enthusiasts, anarcho-activists and young european visionaries, strongly believe in the active rule of the Internet in the democratic process.
With this petition, we are demanding the European Parliament:
* Desists, with immediate effect, from all its activities. We don't want to continue paying the bill of an expensive and bureaucratic machine for something we can do better ourselves from the comfort of our armchairs.
* Transforms democracy into a real user-centric experience. We declare that representational democracy no longer works, nor is effective.
* Creates a brand new click-based model of democracy to replace the outmoded one. Political parties are every day more distant from the will of the people, and this is why they have begun to use social media for promotion. We want to take this further, to the core of the political process using the most advanced Web 2.0 technologies.
Sign this petition now! Let the people decide!
We demand the internet for democracy!
* * *
So, I have a few questions, "Internet for Democracy." First, who put me on your email list? Second, "click-based model of democracy?" Awesome! Is that like a Flash game? Third, I don't know about you, but I use Firefox 3.6.2 -- "Web 2.0" is soooo 2006. And, finally, I don't think your Quake fragging skills are going to help you dismantle European democracy. But thanks for playing! As a consolation prize, we hope you'll continue enjoying your universal health care, free education, and fancy local cheeses.
Love, your Yank friend and eternal (..ly snarky) comrade in utopianism,
SSB
Internet for Democracy to me
Sign the petition @ http://www.internetfordemocracy.net/
"Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." Alan Badiou
We think representational democracy is a thing of the past. Its days are numbered. Few people in so-called Western Democracies can even be bothered to vote anymore. Indeed, representation can no longer be said to be representative.
We say it's time to embrace the internet era. The internet presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, in seizing the future and making a difference. Let people get involved directly in decision-making, let people decide what's best for them.
We, digital natives, web-enthusiasts, anarcho-activists and young european visionaries, strongly believe in the active rule of the Internet in the democratic process.
With this petition, we are demanding the European Parliament:
* Desists, with immediate effect, from all its activities. We don't want to continue paying the bill of an expensive and bureaucratic machine for something we can do better ourselves from the comfort of our armchairs.
* Transforms democracy into a real user-centric experience. We declare that representational democracy no longer works, nor is effective.
* Creates a brand new click-based model of democracy to replace the outmoded one. Political parties are every day more distant from the will of the people, and this is why they have begun to use social media for promotion. We want to take this further, to the core of the political process using the most advanced Web 2.0 technologies.
Sign this petition now! Let the people decide!
We demand the internet for democracy!
So, I have a few questions, "Internet for Democracy." First, who put me on your email list? Second, "click-based model of democracy?" Awesome! Is that like a Flash game? Third, I don't know about you, but I use Firefox 3.6.2 -- "Web 2.0" is soooo 2006. And, finally, I don't think your Quake fragging skills are going to help you dismantle European democracy. But thanks for playing! As a consolation prize, we hope you'll continue enjoying your universal health care, free education, and fancy local cheeses.
Love, your Yank friend and eternal (..ly snarky) comrade in utopianism,
SSB
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Little pleasures
Lately, I've been pretty despondent about what I do and why I do it -- the state of the field, the seeming uselessness of teaching already smart and self-motivated Ivy League kids, the grand melodrama that is the perpetually crisis-ridden Humanities. It's easy to feel like it's all a big lie, like there's actually nothing good that comes out of this conveyor belt we've fetishized as "an elite education" except carbon copies of lawyers, junior executives, and investment bankers.
And then last night, on my way back from dinner in Cambridge, I ran into a former student of mine in the subway station -- harmonica slung around his neck and guitar in hand, thrift store work-shirt with sleeves rolled up, jamming in an unlikely trio with an adorable ragamuffin girlfriend and an old homeless guy. I hovered in the shadows and listened to them for a minute, then came up and dropped a dollar in his hat (sign next to which: "Have a nice day!"). When he recognized me, he broke into his trademark smile, radiating the easygoing goodness of an 18-year-old boy who still finds wonder and delight in every nook and cranny of life. "It's so cool that you're doing this," was all I could think to say. He continued to smile and just shrugged off the praise. "I'm here pretty often. Every weekend night, mostly." My train was pulling in and his girlfriend was giving him an inquisitive look, so I bade my farewells, parting in the classic geeky-teacher-trying-to-be-cool mode: "Keep on rockin' on!"
I never thought I'd be one of those educators who got emotionally attached, waxing lyrical on the merits of a particularly smart or cool student. I've had those teachers myself, and I always shrugged off any praise, too, finding it kind of embarrassing to realize that I was viewed as some diamond in the rough. But now that the roles are reversed and I've taught the creme de la creme for two years, I understand the tendency toward gooey joy whenever a kid doesn't stop at rote scholastic knowledge acquisition, but has that rambunctious, questing spirit that gave this country Whitman, Thoreau, and the Beats; that allows for beautiful and strange permutations of cultural production and self-fashioning; and that, in this "challenging economic climate," could use a resurgence in a major way. And while the cynical part of me knows that this spirit is the uneasy marriage of populist values mixed with rich white male privilege, mostly I'm just happy to see someone blithely, confidently take from both worlds, high and low, and forge ahead on a path that's slightly less beaten.
And then last night, on my way back from dinner in Cambridge, I ran into a former student of mine in the subway station -- harmonica slung around his neck and guitar in hand, thrift store work-shirt with sleeves rolled up, jamming in an unlikely trio with an adorable ragamuffin girlfriend and an old homeless guy. I hovered in the shadows and listened to them for a minute, then came up and dropped a dollar in his hat (sign next to which: "Have a nice day!"). When he recognized me, he broke into his trademark smile, radiating the easygoing goodness of an 18-year-old boy who still finds wonder and delight in every nook and cranny of life. "It's so cool that you're doing this," was all I could think to say. He continued to smile and just shrugged off the praise. "I'm here pretty often. Every weekend night, mostly." My train was pulling in and his girlfriend was giving him an inquisitive look, so I bade my farewells, parting in the classic geeky-teacher-trying-to-be-cool mode: "Keep on rockin' on!"
I never thought I'd be one of those educators who got emotionally attached, waxing lyrical on the merits of a particularly smart or cool student. I've had those teachers myself, and I always shrugged off any praise, too, finding it kind of embarrassing to realize that I was viewed as some diamond in the rough. But now that the roles are reversed and I've taught the creme de la creme for two years, I understand the tendency toward gooey joy whenever a kid doesn't stop at rote scholastic knowledge acquisition, but has that rambunctious, questing spirit that gave this country Whitman, Thoreau, and the Beats; that allows for beautiful and strange permutations of cultural production and self-fashioning; and that, in this "challenging economic climate," could use a resurgence in a major way. And while the cynical part of me knows that this spirit is the uneasy marriage of populist values mixed with rich white male privilege, mostly I'm just happy to see someone blithely, confidently take from both worlds, high and low, and forge ahead on a path that's slightly less beaten.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Style post-moderne
A few days ago, Anna Wintour, Michael Kors, and Natalia Vodianova gave a talk at the Harvard Business School about the increasing awareness and attempts at prevention of eating disorders within the fashion industry. This is a hot topic lately, especially as high-fashion magazines like Vogue and Elle are beginning to open up to the idea of featuring plus-size models, not just buried within their pages but front and center on their covers. Popular response has been overwhelmingly positive, though as feminist sites like Jezebel have been quick to point out, much of this new-found concern with health and "curviness" is self-congratulatory, vacuous, and more to do with PR than BMI.
I don't have much of an interest in fashion per se (in fact, I pretty much abhor the culture of obsolescence and the tautological tyranny of "style" that it breeds... but that's for another entry). I am, however, fascinated by this movement in the industry because, to me, it mimics exactly what's going on in a world with which I'm much more intimately familiar: literary criticism. Fashion's increasing concern with the "ethical" side of its art (castigating tiny sample sizes, banning cigarettes and alcohol from backstage, upping the minimum age of girls on the catwalk, etc.) mirrors the recent paradigm shift in lit. crit. from the detached Kantian gaze of formalist theory to the more "ethically engaged" post-colonialism and various other nouveau-humanist trends (the work of Elaine Scarry on pain and trauma, or Barbara Johnson on women and animal rights). And yet, in literary studies (as well as in fashion, I think), this movement has been contradictory and problematic at best. On the one hand, once the question of Kantian capital-B Beauty is broached, it opens up the floodgates of low- and middle-brow art as being of equal value for critical study -- which means fewer courses on elitist Tolstoy and more courses on popular Twilight. And, on the other hand, the whole move away from form has succeeded in denigrating the value of literary studies as such -- because if the whole point of a novel is what it tells us rather than how it does the telling, then what's the point of reading it at all when we can skim the Wikipedia article, listen to the podcast, or see the movie?
Similarly, if the fashion industry is so concerned about women and their health, why bother with the whole project of enthroning certain body types as being more beautiful than others? If a size 12 can be just as beautiful as a size 2, then why can't a size 6? Or a size 20? And if that's the case, then what's the point of fashion magazines? Obviously, I don't particularly like to see 13-year old size -6 anorexics strung out on coke and knocking their knobby knees down the catwalk -- nor am I Harold Bloom when it comes to the White Male Western Canon -- but I will say that it's hard to have it both ways: remaining the arbiter/impresario of a certain canonical aesthetic and opening up the door for a more friendly, popular, inclusive version of that aesthetic.
Then again, as Vodianova pointed out at the end of the talk, “It’s in fashion now to be healthy." The Harvard Crimson seemed to see this as a perfectly warm and fuzzy ending point for their article, but to me it's a disturbingly savvy take on the concept of fashion as such. The new "ethics," it seems, aren't any less detached or dehumanizing. They're just fashionable.
I don't have much of an interest in fashion per se (in fact, I pretty much abhor the culture of obsolescence and the tautological tyranny of "style" that it breeds... but that's for another entry). I am, however, fascinated by this movement in the industry because, to me, it mimics exactly what's going on in a world with which I'm much more intimately familiar: literary criticism. Fashion's increasing concern with the "ethical" side of its art (castigating tiny sample sizes, banning cigarettes and alcohol from backstage, upping the minimum age of girls on the catwalk, etc.) mirrors the recent paradigm shift in lit. crit. from the detached Kantian gaze of formalist theory to the more "ethically engaged" post-colonialism and various other nouveau-humanist trends (the work of Elaine Scarry on pain and trauma, or Barbara Johnson on women and animal rights). And yet, in literary studies (as well as in fashion, I think), this movement has been contradictory and problematic at best. On the one hand, once the question of Kantian capital-B Beauty is broached, it opens up the floodgates of low- and middle-brow art as being of equal value for critical study -- which means fewer courses on elitist Tolstoy and more courses on popular Twilight. And, on the other hand, the whole move away from form has succeeded in denigrating the value of literary studies as such -- because if the whole point of a novel is what it tells us rather than how it does the telling, then what's the point of reading it at all when we can skim the Wikipedia article, listen to the podcast, or see the movie?
Similarly, if the fashion industry is so concerned about women and their health, why bother with the whole project of enthroning certain body types as being more beautiful than others? If a size 12 can be just as beautiful as a size 2, then why can't a size 6? Or a size 20? And if that's the case, then what's the point of fashion magazines? Obviously, I don't particularly like to see 13-year old size -6 anorexics strung out on coke and knocking their knobby knees down the catwalk -- nor am I Harold Bloom when it comes to the White Male Western Canon -- but I will say that it's hard to have it both ways: remaining the arbiter/impresario of a certain canonical aesthetic and opening up the door for a more friendly, popular, inclusive version of that aesthetic.
Then again, as Vodianova pointed out at the end of the talk, “It’s in fashion now to be healthy." The Harvard Crimson seemed to see this as a perfectly warm and fuzzy ending point for their article, but to me it's a disturbingly savvy take on the concept of fashion as such. The new "ethics," it seems, aren't any less detached or dehumanizing. They're just fashionable.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Hypercubes
Dear Kazimir Malevich,
Goddamn you.
I have always wanted a tattoo. I know that in my society, this makes me bourgeois and thus beneath your contempt, but the idea of permanently yoking the arbitrariness of the body to the arbitrariness of a pictogram holds vast appeal for me. Pictograms are the bastard spawn of allegory and symbol, and thus, to paraphrase Benjamin, they are beautifully weighed down with the historic -- they last forever (in the case of butterfly tattoos, uncomfortably so) as both a testament to a specific socio-historic period and a timeless, abstract representation of a transcendent ideal. Though specifically what they mean will change with each new generation and each new reconfiguration of the social unconscious, the archetypal image base (the snake, the bird, the eye...) hasn't changed much over the centuries and probably never will. It is through this paradoxical ambivalence that these images show the endurance and continuity of the human project, as well as the transient, ephemeral nature of the individual human life. The universality and the lonely solitude of human existence. And, finally, they're all surface. Vanity, transience, death -- three great tastes that taste like cloying sweetness mixed with bitter ash together!
And yet. Every time I think about what tattoo I'd get, and I rack my brain for the most personally significant (ha -- see? bourgeois mos def!) pictogram, there is one image and one alone that slowly materializes on the glassy field of my retinas. Because once you see that image, and once you meditate on it in all its nihilistic, elitist, anti-human qualities, you can't quite ever see the world of mimetic, or even allegorical representation the same way again. It is all surface, and yet it is the ultimate denial of surface. It is adolescent braggadocio mixed with timeless insight. In short, if I could, I'd get it tattooed on my face.
Except, to reify this beautiful provocation of yours in cheap ink-on-dermis form would be to misunderstand everything that it aims for, to defuse any power of subversion contained in that image. It would be the ultimate commodification of dissent, and the timorous academic in me could never live with herself.
Kazimir, you bastard. I love you.
*Malevich. From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism, 1915.
Goddamn you.
I have always wanted a tattoo. I know that in my society, this makes me bourgeois and thus beneath your contempt, but the idea of permanently yoking the arbitrariness of the body to the arbitrariness of a pictogram holds vast appeal for me. Pictograms are the bastard spawn of allegory and symbol, and thus, to paraphrase Benjamin, they are beautifully weighed down with the historic -- they last forever (in the case of butterfly tattoos, uncomfortably so) as both a testament to a specific socio-historic period and a timeless, abstract representation of a transcendent ideal. Though specifically what they mean will change with each new generation and each new reconfiguration of the social unconscious, the archetypal image base (the snake, the bird, the eye...) hasn't changed much over the centuries and probably never will. It is through this paradoxical ambivalence that these images show the endurance and continuity of the human project, as well as the transient, ephemeral nature of the individual human life. The universality and the lonely solitude of human existence. And, finally, they're all surface. Vanity, transience, death -- three great tastes that taste like cloying sweetness mixed with bitter ash together!
And yet. Every time I think about what tattoo I'd get, and I rack my brain for the most personally significant (ha -- see? bourgeois mos def!) pictogram, there is one image and one alone that slowly materializes on the glassy field of my retinas. Because once you see that image, and once you meditate on it in all its nihilistic, elitist, anti-human qualities, you can't quite ever see the world of mimetic, or even allegorical representation the same way again. It is all surface, and yet it is the ultimate denial of surface. It is adolescent braggadocio mixed with timeless insight. In short, if I could, I'd get it tattooed on my face.
Except, to reify this beautiful provocation of yours in cheap ink-on-dermis form would be to misunderstand everything that it aims for, to defuse any power of subversion contained in that image. It would be the ultimate commodification of dissent, and the timorous academic in me could never live with herself.
Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling. You all wish to see pieces of living nature on the hooks of your walls. Just as Nero admired the torn bodies of people and animals from the zoological garden. I say to all: Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant.*
Kazimir, you bastard. I love you.
*Malevich. From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism, 1915.
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