Soviet Southern Belle

There's God in the mountains and the people living under the sea

2010-11-26T19:46:00.001-08:00

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.

Walker: Zombie Ranger

2010-11-16T22:38:00.001-08:00

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.

Magic eye

2010-09-19T16:59:00.001-07:00

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.

Post/riposte

2010-09-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Big game

2010-09-02T00:16:00.000-07:00

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.

RE: Fighting like a girl

2010-08-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Gender troubles

2010-08-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Potentialities

2010-08-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Hearts, brains, and guts

2010-07-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Naturalized

2010-06-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Hollywood will destroy us all

2010-05-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

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 about ~~gout~~ 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!

Vanitas

2010-05-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

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:

Correlation, causation, snack-cakes

2010-04-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

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:

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

2010-04-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

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.

The poetics of space

2010-04-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Navel grazing

2010-04-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

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.

La Nouvelle Orleans n'existe pas

2010-04-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Rebirth

2010-04-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Somehow, I don't think this is quite what Marx had in mind.

2010-03-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

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

Little pleasures

2010-03-28T06:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Style post-moderne

2010-03-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Hypercubes

2010-03-25T07:36:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

Techno-logic

2010-03-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

I know this whole Chatroulette thing is probably a gimmick that will quickly fade and be replaced by the cool new Internet thing... but this pretty much blows my mind. Welcome to the future, where art is YOU!

Antichrist

2010-03-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

When it comes to Lars von Trier films, I'm no slavish devotee. My experience has tended to be wildly ambivalent, ranging from lovelovelove (Dogville) to hatehatehate (Dancer in the Dark), but rarely corresponding to popular taste or the views of most critics. I didn't read too much about Antichrist before watching it yesterday afternoon, but a depth of critical immersion isn't exactly necessary to know, prior to viewing this uber-controversial film, what most people think. The briefest skim in the temperamental waters of the Internet yields the following iron-clad judgments: Antichrist is sexist! misogynistic! exploitative! sensationalist! and, worst of all, pretentious! While a small minority continues to insist on its place at the top of best-films-of-the-year lists, the casual moviegoer was obviously horrified and disgusted.

I don't want to make too much of my powers of cinematic analysis, but from very early on, about the first ten minutes or so, the following thought began to float around in my head: Oh, interesting... Lars von Trier is making a film in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky. And, lo and behold, the final frame is a dedication to the Russian filmmaker and the years of his life-death. Now, I'm probably more likely than most to see the Tarkovsky connection -- Slavic stuff is what I study; plus, I just really like Tarkovsky. But I'm pretty shocked that nowhere in the handful of professional reviews that I read did I come across any mention of this facet of the film. I guess everyone was too hung up on Willem Dafoe's dick and Charlotte Gainsbourg's vadge to notice?

The Tarkovsky connection is clearly crucial, but even before we get to that, let's start by addressing the first of the disparaging evaluative terms in that shopping list from above: sexism and misogyny. Obviously (obviously!), a film that opens with a shot of three miniature figurines of Grief, Pain, and Despair and features an analyst counseling his wife through the trauma of losing a child by taking her to a place called Eden is not going to be TRUE FACTS realism. A talking fox about halfway through should be the final tip-off that we're dealing here with a little thing I like to call "allegory." (Incidentally, if you have no plans to see this film, just watch this one scene. It's the best.) And, like any allegorical world, this one is primarily concerned with the separation of good and evil, though with one interesting twist. At one point, the wife (Gainsbourg) -- who'd been writing a thesis on the titillating subject of "Gynocide" before the accidental death of her toddler son -- says to the husband (Dafoe) that over the course of her research, she'd slowly come to realize that since humans have a violently bestial streak in them, and that women are closer to nature and hence to the world of this violent bestiality, then the violence inflicted on them by centuries of witch-burners and inquisitors was, in some ways, justified.

This, I guess, is where a good feminist is supposed to flip her shit. Except, this is first and foremost a really penetrative insight into the murkiness and borderline schizophrenia of Christian morality (where does evil come from? how can God allow it in the world? is nature inherently evil or Edenic?), and only secondarily a gendered debate. As long as we're dealing with allegorical figures -- and I'd argue that we are: Man, Woman, Child are about as archetypal as you can get -- it seems silly to see this all through the reductive filter of sexism or misogyny. But since a gendered reading is in order, I think it's useful to look at it in the terms of the late, great Barbara Johnson, and acknowledge that von Trier is actually quite bold in his willingness to focus on the "infanticidal" language of the bereaved mother, whose somatic investment in procreation does make her "closer to nature," as opposed to the abstract/aesthetic "procreation" of a man. As pointed out by Johnson in her seminal essay Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion, female poets have been using this kind of language for years when discussing the fraught topic of childbirth and death. They internalize the accusation of bad parenting and increasingly see a dichotomy between creating art and creating children. The fact that the wife in the film faces a very similar dilemma and consequently suffers a massive mental breakdown points to the way gender both organizes and deforms our experience of the world.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's get back to Tarkovsky. As I said, I'm no slavish devotee to von Trier's brand of cinematic epatage, and I think that the "message" I just outlined above would have been a lot more successful -- and a lot less misunderstood by mainstream viewership, though I'm sure he revels in that -- if he were a better filmmaker. What seriously holds this movie back is that while von Trier loveloveloves him, he doesn't actually seem to get Tarkovsky. Sure, he gets the thematic focus on the natural world and the surface cinematic tricks: slow motion, long tracking shots from strange POVs, mixing black-and-white with color and non-diegetic opera with diegetic silence, as well as the great iconic stamp of the Tarkovsky film (actually stolen from his mentor Sergei Parajanov, who in turn stole it from Aleksander Dovzhenko, but who's counting?): the ethereal, otherworldly shot of wind rustling through a field of grass. But unlike the polemically-charged von Trier, Tarkovsky's representation of nature is always highly agnostic. In fact, it's pre-Christian, in the sense that good and evil do not exist as categories. This allows for some ageless, intricate, transcendental meditations on life, death, and existence, but it also creates some of the most hauntingly primordial visual tableaux ever committed to celluloid. Once you've seen something like The Mirror (one particularly beautiful scene here), you'll never look at a rainstorm or a forest the same way again; and yet, paradoxically, you'll feel like Tarkovsky must've somehow pulled those images straight out of your deepest, darkest childhood memories and fantasies. For all his attempts to recreate this Tarkovsky-esque primal scene -- and for the handful of successes that he has viz. beautiful, haunting imagery -- von Trier ultimately ends up relying on too many stock elements and clichés and never quite makes it work.

And that's where the question of pretentiousness comes in. Of all the scornful adjectives heaped on Antichrist, this is perhaps the only one I actually agree with. Not only is there an unimaginable amount of bombast involved in making this kind of film, but there's clearly a tremendous lack of self-awareness in making the opening scene (NSFW, obvs)...

eerily resemble this:

(Sorry, could only find this clip in German -- but somehow, that's even more appropriate.)

Again, one could point to Tarkovsky and say that his films are the source material for the art-house clichés from which this Simpsons parody spring. But I think it's important to press the question: what makes something truly original, stunning, and beautiful and what makes something flat-out pretentious? There is, of course, the etymology of the word: if it's clear that an artist is only "pretending" to be something -- to be Tarkovsky, for instance -- then it's pretty hard for his/her work to be original or stunning. But I think, ultimately, what it comes down to is skill. Pretending and being are actually quite slippery, and what separates the one from the other is a lot of self-confident mastery over the medium. Though he uses the techniques of other filmmakers, Tarkovsky doesn't pretend to be anybody but himself; moreover, his best work doesn't pretend to offer any easy answers, any Meaning with a capital M. Like his agnostic presentation of nature, his films resist the pull toward facile, pre-programmed interpretation, challenging the viewer to think beyond conventional allegory. Von Trier, for all his notable effort, can't quite get there.

Macademia

2010-03-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was gorgeous: one of those pioneering spring days when the city suddenly blossoms with stoned street performers and knock-kneed teenage girls in too-short skirts. I had a doctor's appointment and arrived at the office in shorts and a tank top, meeting the jealous stares of nurses and reception staff who'd been inside their concrete fortress since the wee hours. "Is it true that there's.... sun?"

While waiting for my name to be called, I sat near an elderly man, who looked oddly familiar, and started on the last chapter of The Poetics of Space ("The Phenomenology of Roundness" -- you just can't get any more Continental). Then the elderly man's name was called, and I realized that this was not just "an elderly man," but one of the most important scholars in my field, author of numerous canonical texts and protege of Roman fucking Jakobson. I'd seen him at various colloquia and seminars, but something about seeing him in a doctor's reception room -- leafing through a dog-eared doctor's office copy of Time magazine while waiting for a nurse in Hawaiian print scrubs to check his blood pressure and cholesterol -- just didn't quite click in my brain. I was still mulling this over as I lay on the examining bed in a flimsy paper sack and the doctor poked and prodded me in every intimate inch of my body, all while droning on about the weather. "It's supposed to be 70 degrees on Saturday! Feet up into the stirrups, please."

From the diary of Witold Gombrowicz:

Thursday

How should I explain why existentialism did not lead me astray?

Perhaps I was close to choosing an existence, which they call authentic — in contrast to a frivolous temporal life, which they call banal. That is how great the pressure of seriousness is from all sides. Today, in today’s raw times, there is no thought or art which does not shout to you in a loud voice: don’t escape, don’t play, don’t poke fun at yourself, don’t run away! Fine. I, too, in spite of everything, would also prefer not to lie to my own being. I, therefore, tried this authentic life, full of loyalty to existence in myself. But what do you want? It can’t be done. It can’t be done because that authenticity turned out to be falser than all my previous deceptions, games, and leaps taken together. I, with my artistic temperament, don’t understand much theory, but I do have a nose when it comes to style. When I applied maximum consciousness to life, in an attempt to found my existence on this, I noticed that something stupid was happening to me. Too bad, but no way. It can’t be done. It seems impossible to meet the demands of Dasein and simultaneously have coffee and croissants for an evening snack. To fear nothingness, but to fear the dentist more. To be consciousness, which walks around in pants and talks on the telephone. To be responsibility, which runs little shopping errands downtown. To bear the weight of significant being, to instill the world with meaning and then return the change from ten pesos. What do you want?*

*Emphatic emphasis all mine.

Would you be an outlaw for my love?

2010-03-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

More YouTubes. RIP, Alex Chilton. A lot of people (self included) wish you'd stuck around a little longer.

PS - I'll be needing that CD back, you!

Smart smut

2010-03-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

All I could think when I watched this video was: someone should tap these kids to star in a modern cinematic adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. And then I realized, oops, there already is one.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out that Henri Bergson derided Kant for his view of all the sciences as "frames within frames." According to Bergson, the world could not be classified into ready-made concepts, just like, according to Bachelard, the metaphor of the drawer that Bergson loves to use when discussing concepts cannot be reused to teach Bergsonian theory. For Bachelard, it is ultimately the new, rich, and surprising poetic image rather than the old, static, expected metaphor that has the potential to surpass traditional philosophical discourse, since it has the potential to unite the disparate fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and phenomenology and truly penetrate the depths of human consciousness in a way that each of these separate disciplines cannot.

Whether or not I think Bachelard's project is ultimately successful (I haven't yet finished the book, but it makes for some seductive whiskey-drunk reading on a spring break night, I'll tell you what), that's exactly how I'd describe Gombrowicz's novels. In the hands of a realist novelist, actions are framed within two-dimensional diegetic space in a neat, neutral, unobtrusive tableau -- the epitome of the Bergsonian drawer/frame/concept. I'm thinking of Tolstoy, the master of this game... specifically, one of the greatest showstoppers in any novel ever written, the horse-racing scene in Anna Karenina, wherein the adrenaline-pumping race and the gruesome injury suffered by Vronsky's horse is presented in meticulous (if heightened Sir Walter Scottean) realism, gesturing gracefully, elusively to the inevitable tragedy bubbling up alongside their passion.

Gombrowicz, in contrast, conjures up the realist tableau only to destroy it, obsessively continuing the process of framing and reframing, rejecting any naturalness that might have been present in the connection between the event and the its signification/interpretation. Take the opening scene from Pornografia (in Danuta Borchardt's recent translation), for example:

He was served tea, which he drank -- but a piece of sugar remained on his little plate, so he reached for it to bring it to his mouth -- but perhaps deeming this action not sufficiently justified, he withdrew his hand -- but withdrawing his hand was something even less justified -- so he reached for the sugar again and ate it -- but he probably ate it not so much for pleasure as for the sake of behaving properly ... towards the sugar or towards us? ... and wishing to erase this impression, he coughed, and to justify the cough, he pulled out his handkerchief, but by now he didn't dare wipe his nose -- so he just moved his leg.

In this one-sentence scene, the narrator manages to overload a few insignificant actions with a pathological amount of significance and, in doing so, destabilizes the narrative project as such. The reader might follow along the first or second of the narrator's dogmatic interpretations of the tea-drinker's action, but it isn't long before we start to question the ability of this narrator to extrapolate truth from such trivial details (it is no coincidence, I think, that Borchardt's hardback boasts Milan Kundera's appraisal of Gombrowicz as "one of the greatest novelists of our century" -- Un~~bearablelightnessofbeing~~reliable Narrators Club!). And yet it is precisely because of the sheer ingenuity of this narrator to create the most bizarre analogies and metaphorical connections in the most mundane (and not-so-mundane, decidedly "literary") events that this novel is so incredibly seductive. If ever there was a text that embodied Bachelard's utopian aesthetic-psychoanalytic-phenomenological project, this would be it, but the kind of findings of this poetics of inner space are decidedly less refined or, uh, French.

In fact, in crafting this kind of fiction, I think Gombrowicz answers back to Bachelard's main fault: he points out how contaminated human consciousness is with all kind of literariness, with undigested chunks of other people's stories, or with our own desperate, pathological desire to cast ourselves in the role of director/author of the petty spectacle of our lives. By always having to express our thoughts not in primal images, but in an acquired language (even if what we're expressing is the primal image!), our experience of the world is inseparable from our experience of pre-narrated reality. And, with all due propers to Steven Pinker and the new gang fronting the "back to images" linguistic movement, I'd say that's one of the profoundest -- and scariest -- lessons that literature can teach us.

Words, words, words

2010-03-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

I remember the first time I read Derrida. It was my second year of college, but for at least two years before that magical moment, I'd already been throwing around terms like "deconstruction" and "différance" without any knowledge of how they fit into the Western theoretical canon. Actually reading Derrida (some photocopied snippet from Of Grammatology, I think, for an Intro to Lit Theory course) only solidified my arrogant assurance of my own brilliance and superiority. I rushed home and, at the first chance I got, gleefully blurted out, "Everything is a language game!" to a philosophy major who'd been lecturing me on the finer points of Hegel and Kant. I probably felt just like an entire generation of post-WWI European schoolkids upon discovering the quasi-mystical kabbalah that was Marxist-Leninism. Grand theory of everything: discovered. Mysteries of life: solved. Check and check. So... worker's rally, then nip of gin and some foxtrot?

Reading Leibniz's Monadology (with excellent commentary by George MacDonald Ross), I'm reminded again of that bittersweet moment when all the complexities of the universe are crystallized under the aegis of one theoretical framework. Sweet not just because we as humans are lovers of orderly patterns, but also because, as Ross points out, many of the esoteric or just plain kooky aspects of Leibniz's philosophical system have recently been vindicated by the 20th century discovery of quantum mechanics. But bitter, too, for precisely that reason. Ross says the following of the modern-day application of the monad:

The Leibnizian point is that you can escape from this infinite regress only by postulating ultimate entities which do not have the properties of matter. Quantum mechanics comes quite close to this, despite the concept of a smallest possible but finite quantity (which is what ‘quantum’ means), since the characteristics of space, time, motion, and causation at the sub-atomic level are almost unrecognisably different from the macroscopic level. The same goes for relativity theory and very large magnitudes.

It's nice to know that what a century of scholars thought was crackpot theorizing is actually somewhat sound. But who's to say that in a hundred years, we won't look back at the quantum explanation of matter with equally patronizing mirth as we do at Leibniz's monad -- or Aquinas's immaterial angel. "They were brilliant thinkers," we'll say of the men and women who, today, we consider cutting-edge experts in capital-S Science (c.f. capital-T Truth), "and if they'd only had Technological Innovation X and Mathematical Breakthrough Y, they'd have finally reached what we know today, which is that matter is actually Z!" We'll still read their work, of course, but stripped of that transitory eureka power, the everything-finally-explainedness that makes the world make sense, it'll be mere logical cartwheels. Esoteric word-play. Nothing but... a language game.

We know what gravity is. We have all the mathematical formulas, the experiments with feathers and bowling balls, the variables and coefficients. But not a single person in the world can actually explain it in anything other than those terms. What's the point of all this endless theorizing, abstracting, parsing the world into terms and numbers that have as much relation to reality as g-force does to a brick dropped on my toe? It's moments like this that either the capital-T Truth of Neo-Platonism (aka, religion) or the quietus of a bare bodkin (aka, David Foster Wallace) seem really attractive. Or maybe I just need to get the hell out of grad school.

Grad skool

2010-03-10T17:17:00.000-08:00

When he reads, the one afflicted with acedia yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to reading for awhile; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep, but not a very deep sleep, for hunger then rouses his soul and has him show concern for its needs.

Evagrius Ponticus, 4th century AD

How very unpleasant is wisdom to the unlearned, and the unwise will not continue with her. She shall be to them as a mighty stone of trial, and they will cast her from them before it be long. For the wisdom of doctrine is according to her name, and she is not manifest unto many, but with them to whom she is known, she continues even to the sight of God. Give ear, my son, and take wise counsel, and cast not away my advice. Put your feet into her fetters, and your neck into her chains: Bow down your shoulder, and bear her, and be not grieved with her bands.

Ecclesiasticus, 2nd century BC

Misery and the Muses

2010-03-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

There's been a flurry of recent news stories like this one on the positive effects that depression has on our ability to think critically, rigorously, and methodically. What's funny is that in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin critically, rigorously, and methodically explains how the link between depression and the intellect originates in Classical antiquity, with the figure of Saturn/Cronus. Cronus, the allegorical embodiment of depression in ancient Greece, was associated both with intensely absorbed contemplation and madness. Then, in the Renaissance, the image of Saturn/Cronus as ambivalently pensive/psychotic thinker was reinterpreted in a new conception of intellect -- what today we might call the absent-minded professor. And, in the baroque, this figure was again reread: the brilliant, hermetic, distanced-from-the-world monkish thinker was now the embodiment not of brilliance, but of the degenerate, fallen state of the world, in which even the loftiest heights of intellectual investigation would could only explore the manifest phenomenal realm of worldly things and never touch the transcendental, noumenal, Godly realm. Thus, in the 17th century, Robert Burton writes an "Anatomy of Melancholy", where he digresses into the inevitable tendency of scholars in his and every age to fall victim to fits of the most abject, pathetic, mental and physical feebleness -- i.e., depression. It's one of the greatest texts ever written in the English language, beloved of Samuel Johnson and Emily Dickenson. It's also a terrible thing to read while in grad school.

My point is that all the sophisticated technology and scientific advances of cognitive science over the course of centuries and centuries of human existence have simply succeeded in confirming the neurological mechanism for something that was already well-known to Pliny and Plato. Moreover, all the sophisticated technology and scientific advances of cognitive science over the course of centuries and centuries of human existence have figured out the effect, but not the cause, despite the fact that they're clearly part of one and the same vicious circle. Smart people get depressed because they realize the limits of their consciousness. Then, they hyperfocus on the limits of this consciousness, like self-harmers picking at the crust of their wounds. If they happen to be employed in academia, they harness their special powers of attention long enough to write a few monographs, maybe get tenure, and drink themselves to death (and, if they're really smart, they bypass the whole professional academic thing, write one brilliant book, and shoot themselves in the head on the Spanish-French border).

Congratulations, world! Once again, you've proven yourself to be an uninterrupted chain of more of the same, with no risk of transcendence is sight. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.

Theory/Praxis

2010-02-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

If you read this blog with any semblance of regularity, you've probably picked up on the fact that I'm into video games. I am by no means hard-core, and I'm also in grad school, so the occasions during which I immerse myself in marathon pixel-killing sessions are not as frequent as I'd like them to be. But. I like video games -- playing them, reading about them, and talking about them with people who play them a lot more than I do. And, for the most part, I have no moral quandaries when it comes to their crudity, violence, and general purposelessness. As I've written before, I think gaming nihilism is kind of a lovely thing. However, there is one video game that I love to play, but that I also have significant moral trepidations toward. That game is Rock Band.

Rock Band: A Theoretical Quagmire (or, how theory destroys everything you love)

The problem with talking about Rock Band is that every list of pros that can possibly be generated in favor of the game will also create a list of corresponding, corollary cons, depending on which social theory one holds dear.

Pro: Rock Band allows people who have no musical talent to feel intimately connected to the process of making music.

Con: You're not really making music when you play Rock Band. You're making what Baudrillard would call hyperreal music, exchanging any ounce of actual creativity you might have tapped during your time in front of the TV for an act of (expensive!) media consumption. Instead of the not-always-fun real act of musical creation -- with all its frustrations, disappointments, and knock-down-drag-outs with your bandmates -- you're being spoonfed the soft cream of rock star ego, skimmed of any real substance.

Pro: Rock Band exposes kids to different genres and music time-periods than what's represented on mainstream radio. In this way, it subverts the hegemony of bland pop by sneaking in classic anthems of alienation, sexuality, and violence.

Con: When the proverbial "everybody" started their own band after hearing The Velvet Underground play in the late 60s and early 70s, I'm not sure anyone could have predicted that this act of rock'n'roll bravado would lead more or less directly to six-year-olds belting out "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the comfort of their suburban living rooms. But it did. The fact is, music has been co-opted and defanged for a long, long time, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, or to try to go back to a mythical era when the sight of Elvis's gyrating hips was as dangerous as a Soviet missile. Be that as it may, it's still highly problematic that Nirvana songs, Black Flag songs, fucking Dead Kennedys songs¹ appear on Rock Band -- pruned, streamlines, and with lyrics altered to suit the game's family-friendly rating. No less problematic is the fact that, for any contemporary band, the new benchmark of being established is no longer going gold or platinum or selling out a bunch of shows. It's getting a song on the Rock Band soundtrack. When "alternative" (if that label has any meaning left whatsoever) and pop are collapsed into one homogeneous playing field, there can be no question of the former destabilizing or subverting the latter; rather, everything is subsumed under the rubric of "pop," and music becomes a reified commodity whose sole purpose is to shill Nike products and more copies of Rock Band².

Pro: Rock Band is not a monolithic entity. It's customizable, and, as per the "tactics" of Michel de Certeau, it can be modulated to serve the needs of its player. It lets you bond with your friends by creating alternate virtual personae, cooperating instead of competing, and cementing your friendship through catchy, accessible pop music.

Con: Since I just learned it, I guess I'll apply Bourdieu's concept of "habitus" here.³ When you play Rock Band, you're not just playing a more or less neutral game like cards or checkers -- you're internalizing an entire system of values and fun that can't exist without said game, and your social relations will be structured accordingly. Eventually, you will no longer be able to imagine a world where Rock Band isn't an integral part in your socializing. Habitus turns to doxa, and your subjective experience of the game will turn into the objective reality that Rock Band is "just the funnest, so leave me alone and let me play my fun game, stupid theory!" i.e., Desires socially-conditioned! Agency illusory! Story at 10.

I don't have any real solutions to all of these pressing paradoxes. I'll probably still play Rock Band at every chance I get. I can't do anything truly musical to save my life, and I guess I'm okay with false consciousness and bad faith if, for just one night, it makes me feel like a rock star. I'm only human.

¹ Remember that time when we actually cared that a Dead Kennedys song was going to be used in a Levis commercial? ... yeah, that was 20 years ago -- this is now.

² Frank, Thomas. "Alternative To What?" Conclusions slightly dated in today's high-tech world, but still far and away the best article on the alt-rock paradox of the 90s and beyond. See also: Frank, Thomas and Matt Weiland. Commodify Your Dissent.

³ Peer review welcome here. I'm still shaky on my Bourdieu.

Oh. My. God.

2010-02-23T18:50:00.000-08:00

*

Photoshop is the new Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres!

Seriously, though. We've had artistically-deformed female anatomy since 16th century Mannerism. With all respects and propers to the ubiquitousness and veracity claims of today's 'shopped images, it's still kind of funny that people freak out like this is a New Thing.

* One of my favorite paintings of all time. Of all time!

Subcultures!

2010-02-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

(Did I mention that I love them?)

On a hung-over Saturday, there is literally nothing better in the world than eating microwaved Totino's Pizza Rolls^tm and watching videos of South African crypto-rave-rap.

Your official introduction to the greatest thing on the Internet:

Taxijam presents Die Antwoord from taxijam on Vimeo.

The first time I stumbled upon the (unintentionally?) comedic rap stylings of Die Antwoord (warning: NSFW sound), I was mildly intrigued, but I couldn't force myself to slog through all five and a half minutes of that first video -- it seemed to teeter too precariously on the edge of painful ridiculousness. But after having read a few articles about them on Pitchfork (1,2), I'm starting to come around. The most amazing thing about this band is that its positioning in the liminal space between conceptual art and "third-world" rap (so hot right now) only underscores the tremendous mutability and potentiality of the gangsta aesthetic. The entire concept of hustling, with its insistence on impresario-like showmanship, carries with it a not-so-secret tinge of unabashed fraudulence. The subtext is straight out of P.T. Barnum's playbook: a sucker (favorite rap insult) is born every minute, and we're here to make money off of them. And yet, paradoxically, the lyrical content of rap is all about genuineness, of keeping it real and representing... something -- usually, a neighborhood, city, state, or coast. As I mentioned in my previous discussion of subcultures and nationalism, the link between turf and self is a seductively universal one.

In the hands of non-Americans, though, the bipartite structure of charlatanism and solemnity is taken to a whole new level ("next-level," to use Die Antwoord's parlance) as the inherent artifice of the rap persona is highlighted and the contradiction factor ratcheted up a few notches by the use of American-born rap to rep a "genuine [insert nation] style." And yet, as with Lil Wayne's consciously ridiculous take on "Fuck Tha Police," heightened self-awareness and promiscuous appropriation does not necessarily equal worse or degenerate art. I would argue that, on the contrary, by doing away with kitschy sentimental notions of earnestness and originality in the lyrical voice (I mean, seriously, nobody wants Ke$ha to think she is Keats), rap as a genre is more liberated, more thoroughly postmodern, and has much more potential to create bizarrely awesome new things. This has its ups and downs, of course (cough, Ke$ha), but in the end, I think we can all agree that the freaky carnival side-show that is Die Antwoord makes the world a better place. Totally zef.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

2010-02-18T18:55:00.000-08:00

Today, I helped edit footage for a documentary on cigarette smuggling in Eastern Europe. I'd already done quite a bit of transcription and translation prep work -- hours of tedious mp3-playing and agonizing over how to dejargonize the elliptical mishmash of Ukrainian/Russian/Sovietese of border guards and customs agents. But today, I actually met with the filmmaker and editor at their cozy home-base overlooking the Charles and got to see the tangible fruits of my labor -- a highlighted print-out script representing the admixture of a few ghostly audio files and the random rare language serendipitously embedded in my brain. And this fruit was ready to be peeled, pared, and made into near-finished-product salad.

My only previous experience with film editing was on a field trip to the Harvard Film Archive, where I got to fiddle with a strip of The Man With the Movie Camera on a real-life Steenbeck. Unfortunately, the Mac-alicious contemporary version of this technology is somewhat anticlimactic. After watching the editor cobble together some frames through the time-honored technique of drag and drop, I realized that, as with Photoshop or html, it was probably something I could teach myself if I ever had the inclination (more on this later) and a weekend to spare. Nonetheless, it was thrilling to witness an undifferentiated lump of footage go through a pixel thresher and emerge as a choppy but utterly coherent storyline -- so thrilling, in fact, that I may have gasped and grinned and otherwise broadcast my delight with such infantile eagerness that the editor was a bit taken aback. "It's just so... cool!" I kept gushing, to which she responded with a resolute, "... is it? I guess." This is what the Lumiere Brothers' first audience must have been like.

I'm beginning to suspect -- and my reaction to Film Editing 101 only serves to confirm the suspicion -- that the singular feature uniting most grad students in the humanities (and literature especially) is a combination of moderate to above-average intelligence and total fucking idiocy. Of course, I mean the latter (mostly) in the Dostoevskian sense: humanities people are the holy fools of the world, the simpleminded Alyoshas who delight in miracles and magic and other increasingly marginalized byproducts of good, sober Protestant-work-ethic capitalism. We don't like real science; we like "evolutionary biology." We don't like real psychology; we like Lacan. And we certainly don't like to realize that the very stuff we study (be it film, literature, or art) is made by human hands, out of earthly matter, and is in many respects the end result of a very un-magical labor process. We may pay lip service to this realization by appending "historical context" and "reception history" to the bulleted list of interests on our CV, but that's not why we get into what we get into. We're in it for the illogical, the irrational, the fantasy cults of Beauty and Genius. Which is why, behind even the nice young professional editor using a perfectly utilitarian software editing program, there lurks the secret hand of the divine.

Which brings me to the corollary of the above suspicion: this is also why most grad students in the humanities (and literature especially!) are totally incapable of creating art. It's not just the old "... those who can't, teach" chestnut. I think it's specifically that, in spite of our extensive knowledge of the craft behind our object of study, we (and admittedly, I'm abstracting from personal experience here) are so enthralled with magical thinking that creation, rather than interpretation or explication, feels unbearably... well, mundane. When reading about various authors' writing habits, for example, I've often found myself marveling: You mean I actually have to write out a draft of a story? And take notes? And then revise? Agony! Why can't the divine hand simply guide my pen through three hundred pages of unimpeachable perfection? Sing to me, O Muse! Et cetera. And sitting at the editing table (well, computer desk) today, I found myself simultaneously enamored with the product and trying to elide the realia of the process; i.e., that the narrative was being created not through some chimerical Kuleshovean theory of montage, but through the simple act of cutting and pasting.

This is where the aforementioned inclination part comes in. I could write a story, or even make a film. I have, I should hope, the intellectual capacity and the creativity to maybe, possibly make something good. What I don't have is any Protestant work ethic, and that, my friends, means one of three options for my kind: PhD, Pizza Hut, or public high school. There is no middle ground.

V-Day special

2010-02-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a lot of Baroque poetry lately. In an article on the devices of the genre, specifically the conceit (something I may be appropriating extensively these days, ahem), I came across something I probably already knew intuitively but had never thought about in so many word. The author was arguing that the sonnet was the perfect Baroque poetic form because the profession of love carries with it the favorite Baroque antithesis: sensual, near-ecstatic earthly pleasure on the one hand, and, on the other, the realization that this pleasure is transient, brief, destined to wither and die.

This isn't just a Judeo-Christian concept, of course. Buddhism relies almost exclusively on this feature of mortality, but it seems to have found a much healthier coping mechanism in its mantra of cheerful self-abnegation. Christianity, though, is obsessed to the point of neurosis with desire, and, in fact, often tends to whip up the ecstatic frenzy factor while trying, very nominally, to curtail it. In that sense, my own relationship to desire is a very Christian one. In moments of pleasure, I find myself reacting with a weird ecstatic-melancholic hybrid, already lamenting the inevitable loss of happiness that the ravages of time will enact. And the impulse to write, in catalog form, the chronicle of my life is yet another manifestation of this antithesis -- trying desperately to fix a memory within a static frame, but at the same time mourning the imperfection of that fixture, the irretrievable loss of experience and visceral pleasure.

Thing is, seeing as how the melancholic factor is tied so intimately to my experience of happiness, pain becomes contaminated with pleasure. Not to put too sadomasochistic a point on it, but it's the awareness of transience that, paradoxically, brings significance (weight, as Kundera would say) to events. The hug, the kiss, the.... well. A desperately sweet kind of immobilization -- like trying to pin a live butterfly.

Ca$h money

2010-02-13T07:39:00.000-08:00

In the past three years, I've owned five different Bank of America debit cards. Two were lost to identity theft. One was sacrificed in the name of matrimony. One suffered debilitating paralysis when I forgot its PIN number, and the last expired of natural causes. The long and short of it is, I'm no good with plastic. Every time I approach an ATM, I feign the blank, blasé stare of those ahead of me in line for the infernal machine, but secretly, what I'm always thinking is: Please, please, please work for me this time. As one can deduce from the above, the statistical level of success for this ATM rain-dance is approximately the same as a New England weather reporter's. I do not, in point of fact, make it rain.

I've noted earlier that my relationship to money is characterized by willful distrust and magical thinking. Yet, in spite of having no concept of "responsible spending," and in spite of earning a salary that would make a Starbucks barista laugh, I've somehow managed to be able to buy everything I've ever needed -- mostly to the tune of alcohol, food, and plane tickets to exotic foreign and domestic locales (in descending order of necessity). Whenever the routine ATM error message occurs and I can't get my hot, greasy mitts on the "hard-earned" cash trapped so pathetically behind the impersonal glass screen, I always think of how my father talked about not getting tenure: "You do your job, and at the end of the month there's a check in your box. Then, one day, there's no check." The pitiful way he said this -- curled around a full glass of whiskey, deep in the throes of the depression that would haunt him for years because of this one stupid professional snafu -- terrified me. I never wanted to feel like that, like somehow I'd slipped through the cracks of some nice consistent system and plunged into the bowels of Kafkaesque chaos.

But the older I get, and the more times I'm frozen out of my own stupid bank account for months on end, the more I realize that while I may have inherited many of my father's irrational fears, this one is something we feel fundamentally different about. Because when I do get that error message, I just laugh. (Well, curse profusely, and occasionally give the machine a light kick. Then comes the laughing part.) With all the truly terrible things that can happen to a person over the course of his/her life -- illness, fire, robbery, rape... -- what's the point of worrying so much about obviously temporary monetary glitches? I guess it helps that I don't have any Alpha-Immigrant hangups, and it helps that I do have a plucky American in-home support system (who knows a thing or two about Roth IRAs). But what's particularly useful to acknowledge, and what I'm probably going to end up teaching my parents the hard way one of these days, is that the fastest way to misery is thinking there's some teleological relationship between the goodness of your soul, the strength of your innate talents, and the presence or absence of that paycheck in your box. My father, with all his talk of the superiority of acetic monks over his lowly fallen self, has been circling around that realization in the form of mystical religiosity for a long time, but those pesky bourgeois values (order = virtue! check in box!) just keep sucking him back. I want him, and mom, too, to accompany me to an ATM one day. I want things, as usual, to go bad. I want to see my parents express the cringing horror they always do when something like this happens, and then I want to point to that error screen and say, "See? Look, it's all so stupid. It's a broken calculator, just a bunch of crossed wires and bad code. It's annoying and frustrating and will take a lot of shit work to fix, but guess what? Ultimately? It. Isn't. Real."

Of course, things might change once kids come into the picture and I am tempted by the trap of giving them "the best of everything," whatever that is -- but hopefully not too much. If there's one thing I want to retain of my twentysomething self, it's the ability to parse through bourgeois bullshit and come out none the worse for wear.

To the break of dawn

2010-02-12T14:04:00.000-08:00

Three things you should know about Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans:

First, see it.

Second. The reptilian eye. To say that Werner Herzog has an abiding fascination with man's bestial nature is a bit of an understatement. However, I think Bad Lieutenant is one of his best cinematic treatments of not just the somewhat banal human/animal comparison, but the more eerie attempt to view reality through the cerebral mechanisms of other species. The menagerie of (mostly non-mammalian) creatures in the film is lingered over obsessively by the camera eye. We are shown extreme close-ups of a sinuous snake moving through water; the ethereal fins of a fish swimming in a shallow cup; the warty skin, hissing mouth, and blank double-lidded eye of iguanas; even the exploded guts of an alligator hit by a car. All of this animal fetishization creates strange parallels between the unhinged sociopath that is Nicholas Cage at his finest and the dimly predatory, amphibious reptiles swimming, slithering, and shuffling their way through the (Bad) Lieutenant's life. Interestingly, this heightens the film's already notable exercise in destabilization and detachment. At any given moment, nothing is as it seems. Not only have all the generic cues (is this a B-movie or an art-house gem?) gone out the window, but the very notion of being emotionally invested in the on-screen action begins to wear thin with each successive bizarre twist of the plot. And yet, there's another axis of the film -- the mammalian one, if you will -- that's all big-eyed dogs and cute babies, and that doesn't ever let you get too far from cheering, gasping, and otherwise suspending your superior pomo disbelief. A fine line, and Herzog nails it.

Third. I love that the entire film was shot on those days (either mid-August or, most likely, sometime in March, when the heat isn't so oppressive) when dark storm-clouds roll over half the New Orleans skyline and cast everything in a particularly gloomy slate-gray hue. This is hands-down my favorite New Orleans weather, the kind of days made specifically for leaning over a porch rail, smoking a cigarette, and contemplating the mysteries of the human experience. So many films shot in "The South" tend to go for the yellow filter -- either gently vaselined to denote the sentimental South, or loudly overexposed for that insistent tone of edgy social commentary. Bad Lieutenant doesn't play that game, and it also doesn't mess around with Katrina kitsch. Aside from one FEMA marking on a door, there is no obvious visual reference to Katrina, and even the neighborhoods they show, roughed up though they may be, are not even a tenth as post-apocalyptic as much of the real CBD and Midcity still is. I felt like I was watching the pre-Katrina city that I remembered from my first three years of school -- a city that didn't need a massively destructive hurricane to be moody and poignant.

Bonus! Xzibit!

Conceit

2010-02-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

In high school, I couldn't stomach the packed lunchroom, with its overwhelming odor of ground taco meat and pungently flowering adolescent bodies. Instead, I'd go out into the ninety-degree Mississippi midday, sit on the edge of a picnic table crowded with loud impervious black kids, and apply a ballpoint pen to my left arm. Over the course of the forty-five minute lunch period, that arm would sprout delicate curlicues, arabesques, symmetrical patterns, or amorphous blobs, depending on my mood and level of dedication. Very often, I'd bleed my pen dry. After half a day of scan-trons, motivational posters, gum-caked radiators, and sad wilted ferns in the main office, I needed to reclaim some small part of myself, to stake it in the name of beauty and artifice. Paper wouldn't do; I needed to feel the ink on my skin, and to wear that ink as one part defiance, one part mystical apotropaic shield protecting me from the numbing force of reality. Lately, I've been getting that same urge to scribble on my flesh -- although this time, not pseudo-henna tattoos on my hands, but intricate art nouveau orchids on my cheek, blossoming from apple to temple. Instead, I apply tasteful eyeliner, shadow, mascara, and, as a last resort to quell my teeth-gritting frustration, the occasional splash of glitter. The numbness presses into me, and I can't seem to find a good way to press back.

I spend a lot of time worrying that I will never be able to transcend this level of ornamental artisanship, to transfer those lines to a less ephemeral medium. So much of my personality demands defiant postures going hand-in-hand with raw self-expression, but that's the stuff of high school. If I could only learn to stop loving that dumb white girl with the ink-smeared arms and cabaret makeup. If only she could learn to embellish anything but herself.

Synaesthetic kitchen glossary

2010-02-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

Crave

v. to strongly desire a hard, crispy, heavily-salted snack -- including but not limited to: 1) crunchy cheese sticks, baked cheese crackers, or other assorted permutations of heat-hardened carbohydrate and lactose enzymes, 2) tortilla chips slathered with cheese, meat, guacamole, and/or salsa, 3) sea salt and vinegar potato chips

Moist

adj. of or relating to Duncan Hines cake commercial cakes; fork-tender; emitting a generous oozing of frosting and/or rich, sweet sauce upon contact with cutlery or teeth

Splurge

v. to drench in salad dressing, including but not limited to -- Italian, ranch, Catalina, warm bacon, raspberry vinaigrette; the squirting sound/motion of dressing being forcefully ejected from a plastic bottle

Succulent

adj. used only in reference to a particularly tasty crab leg

Platter

n. syn: hedonism

Transubstantiation, cont'd

2010-02-06T17:09:00.000-08:00

Today was a quiet milestone in my time as amateur chef: it was the first time I ever made good old-fashioned New Orleans style roux.

Having eased my way into the world of temperamental flour-based sauces with a recent foray into homemade béchamel (which I suppose one could argue belongs within the roux family), I didn't feel too intimidated... though I do admit, at one point, to frantically, mid-stir, instant messaging a fellow New Orleans expat and pleading for him to tell me when it was supposed to be done. The final product looked like thick chocolate fondue and tasted like smoky heaven, so I believe I can say with some modicum of confidence: mission accomplished. Tomorrow, we'll see how the gumbo turns out.

Though I'm usually a spontaneous throw-shit-together kind of cook, I definitely feel that there is a time and place for fussy dish babysitting. I'm especially enamored with time-consuming stirring processes, which always put me in the meditative trance of a Shakespearean hag contemplating the future in her roiling cauldron. Conveniently, stirring also tends to be the catalyst for certain brands of alchemical magic -- hard grains of rice suddenly softening, plumping, drawing warm, rich moisture into their naked hulled bodies; mealy flour and shimmering oil fusing into one paste-thick composite, passing through various stages of darkness, from vanilla creme to caramel pudding to full-on Hershey's; stratified layers of liquids and solids succumbing to Brownian motion and condensing into a hearty stew.

When I was in 6th grade, I wrote a story about the accidental creation of the world by two ur-Beings experimenting with a soup recipe. Clearly, the magic of métissage, in the best sense, has never worn thin. What was once handfuls of discrete substances has become a gestalt of colors, textures, and flavors, with only a teasing hint of the elements it has absorbed. And although I might know some of the basic science behind it (about as much as Alton Brown has ever taught me) I still prefer to see that split second -- when rice turns to risotto, flour and oil to roux, chocolate and hot cream to ganache -- as a dash of otherworldly charm in our otherwise quite charmless universe.

(T)omb(r)es à paupières

2010-02-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

So, I finally got myself a small notebook-style planner -- because it's one thing to muse abstractly on the virtues of organization, and another thing entirely to start a project as sprawling and unwieldy as a dissertation without the slightest fucking idea how to parcel it into digestible chunks.

*

If you're like me, you have a hard time shopping. If you're like me, you're also 25 years old and have not yet managed to accrue any credit because you are yet to own your first real big-person credit card, so if you are like me, I'm sorry. But, at any rate. If you're like me, shopping is an ambivalent endeavor, at once gratifying and horrible. Gratifying, because living in this country and stepping into a supermarket instantly makes you feel so incredibly wealthy. Just behold this subsidized bounty! A few measly dollars for age-defying greasepaint guaranteed to smooth, tone, enrich, and take years off your complexion! A handful of coin for a cellophane packet of brightly-colored undergarments! Mere pocket change for a variety of sugared waters, overflowing with sucralose, electrolytes, and B vitamins! What do I need B vitamins for? Who knows! The bottle assures me they're part of a "hydration trifecta," and in my sandpaper-lipped, feverish state -- which takes hold of me whenever I step foot in any kind of store and is only slightly aggravated by the mischievous rhinoviri currently replicating in my body -- I snatch up three 32 ounce bottles. Here, in this moment, pressing the molded plastic to my chest, I have at last shattered the fairy ring of direct deposits, credit transfers, and online bank statements. Here, as I clutch this screaming purple liquid, the ethereal wealth that has been floating in cipher form through some cosmically immaterial realm, anchored to me only through easily-forgotten passcodes and PINs, is materialized. Here is the glory of the transubstantiation.

And then I get to the makeup aisle.

Shopping for sustenance (sustenance? screaming purple energy drink in "grape and other natural flavors" is sustenance now?) is one thing. But shopping for any personal accoutrement, be it liquid, gas, or solid, is another beast entirely. Here I can stand for twenty minutes staring in despair at a collection of shimmery eye makeup, wondering with infinite seriousness which one of these miniature palettes best reflects my inner being, my soul, my eternally Platonic glassy essence. This is where the creeping horror comes in, slowly washing over my body in the layer of sweat that results from standing too long under fluorescent lighting in a heavy coat and assorted winter knittery. All of these diminutive plastic vials, tubes, hinged compacts, bottles, and jars cast their reflective glare at me, novice and amateur that I am, as I make my way timidly down the infinitely long beauty aisle. And that feeling of triumph, of satisfaction with the cornucopia of the world that just came from my impending purchase of sickness-dispelling energy drink, it's all seeped out of me. Because here is death staring me square in the face. She is smiling, radiant, illuminated through a complex triangulation of airbrush, floodlight, and Photoshop. Like the embittered middle-aged director in Synechdoche, New York, she is telling me that I am young now and only playing the part of someone who knows about the despair and decay of the flesh, but that the real irony is that I'm on my way to knowing that lesson all too well. No amount of B vitamins will save me. No amount of Visa Power Rewards Points^tm will save me. No amount of Revlon Perle 011 Lilac Shimmer^{NEW! NOUVEAU! NUEVO!} slathered on my rapidly aging corpse will save me. Like my short-lived rhinovirus companion, I am doomed to an inglorious end. After a brief stint of tormenting my biosphere, my energy will wither like a paralyzed spirochete's, and all that frenetic motion and dreaming of conquest will have been for naught.

*

Okay, "post to blog!!" checked off today's lengthy planner to-do list. Now, uh... on to reading the entirety of Les Mots et Les Choses? I don't think I've quite gotten the hang of this parceling thing.

Pastry items

2010-02-02T14:31:00.000-08:00

A lot of my life feels, to overuse the empty cliche of my generation, random. This randomness operates at both the macro and micro levels -- my academic and avocational interests; the clothes and jewelry I acquire and wear; my inability to properly descend or ascend a staircase, because I'll suddenly, inexplicably, last-second decide to take two steps rather than one, inevitably losing my balance and looking like a flailing pinwheel-armed idiot.

That's why I'm so fascinated by people who seem immanently ordered, exuding a soothingly coherent stability and scientific repeatability in everything from folding a shirt to eating a meal. I like to observe these people as they undertake some mundane task and mentally record the steps and their sequence. Sometimes, I do this to steal the script and later, secretly, replicate these sequences in situations I find particularly perplexing (dealing with waitstaff/store clerks/bartenders springs instantly to mind). But I also just take childish, gleeful pleasure at the elegance of a particularly ordered performance, wherein every detail is invested with infinite precision and care. I'm sure the observed parties would be surprised by the joy these undoubtedly unconscious, mechanized actions bring to me, and it's possible that they would see their reliance on rigidity not so much therapeutic as neurotic. But like the crucial role that nymphs or angels play in the fantasy life of dreamy pre-teen girls, these mythical ordered beings, leading lives so completely alien to mine, are absolutely essential to my view of reality. It's nice to get the occasional visitor's pass into their world.

Libertinage dangereux

2010-01-30T18:26:00.000-08:00

Over at Videogum, my favorite recurring feature is The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time. What makes it so great is that they don't go for the obvious dreck -- anything from the Scary Movie franchise or starring a cross-dressing Eddie Murphy, for instance. No, they go straight for the jugular of movies that people (sad, misguided people) actually might have liked, movies that were packed with Important Ideas, trying-too-hard movies that may, in their time, have been envisioned as Oscar-bait.

Having recently watched The Libertine, I immediately found myself composing a mental HFTWMOAT review, and now that my impotent rage has waned to mild irritation, I think I'm finally fit to type it out. And lest ye worry about spoilers, let me stress that this movie is already as spoiled as the rubbery carrots that have been slowly putrefying at the bottom of your fridge for the better part of a year. Have no fear. I've taken the bullet, so feel free to sit back and observe the carnage.

The biggest problem with The Libertine is that it starts out with so much promise. Here we have a sultry-eyed Johnny Depp (yes!) in period costume (yes!!) playing the "notorious rake," satirical poet, and general bisexual orgy-having man-about-town, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (yes!!!)... and aside from a few nipple-slips, there's hardly even five total minutes of erotic content (uh, what?). In the opening scene, Johnny (you know you've got a potential disaster on your hands when the main character has the same name as the actor) stares straight into the camera and deadpans a sultry monologue on how he is "always up for it" with women and men alike, how we should all think about him the next time we shag, and how we're really, really not going to like him. Oh, how right he is.

Though this intro is probably the most titillating part of the whole film, already there are signs that something is rotten in 17th century London. For all the hotness of hearing Johnny Depp pepper his blithely artificial British accent with an assortment of period-appropriate obscenity, I couldn't help feeling like this was more of an audition piece than the first scene of a major Hollywood film. Any minute, I expected Mr. Depp to bow his head, then raise it again, fixing the camera with a Tobias Funke style shit-eating grin, triumphantly declaring: "aaaand scene!" It's fairly bizarre that he was so incapable of getting into a part that was clearly written for him, and it's even more bizarre that a large chunk of the central plot revolves around Johnny giving acting lessons to an aspiring Shakespearean leading lady (played by the wasted talent of the lovely Samantha Morton, who for some inexplicable reason is always referred to in film diegesis as the "plain girl," when it is clear that in real life she would be referred to as "smoking hot.")

And that's just the start of the troubles. Because when the movie picks up, it becomes clear that everything Johnny Depp just said viz. pricks and cunts and other teasing hints of sexual congress is a complete and total lie. For a film about a libertine, called The Libertine, there is shockingly little in the way of libertinage. Nothing, in fact. It turns out that Johnny is married to a beautiful, if somewhat frosty English heiress and loves the shit out of her in the most doofy, boring, unlibertine-like way. And then he falls in love with Samantha Morton's character and goes head-over-heels for her, also in the most doofy, boring, and thoroughly adolescent way. This movie should have been called The Failed Hetero-normative Love Conquests of Mister Johnny Wilmot, Aged 28 and been rated PG-13. It could've starred Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles and played well to the early high school set. In fact, the only love scene in the whole damn two hour spree of terrible is so cloyingly candlelit, soft-music-accompanied, passionately makeouty, and utterly fake that its predecessor can only be the canonical "first time" scene of a teen dramedy.

And, lest you imagine that this two-hour-long simpering soft-core lovefest could somehow be ameliorated by the continued presence of a dashing Depp in ruffles, frills, and wanton curls -- sadly, you are mistaken. Not even that pleasure is given to us, the much-abused fangirl/boy audience, because halfway through the film Johnny gets leprosy and spends the next hour horrifying us with peeling skin lesions and an artificial nose.

Along with the alarming lack of sex in a movie that promises it in buckets, there is also a ridiculous attitude toward the idea of libertinage in general. The OED defines a libertine not only as a lusty Don Juan, but as someone "acknowledging no law in religion or morals; free-thinking; antinomian." At first, it seems that this ubermensch-y definition of a libertine is being taken quite seriously, albeit with the characteristic ham-fistedness of a directorial debut. The King invites Johnny back to court so he can use his powers of charisma to charm people into backing various monarchic policy, but Johnny balks and refuses to be a royal puppet. "I know it's fun to be against things, but there comes a time when you must be for things, as well" -- actual quote from "The King," played by an egregiously fake-nosed John Malkovich. Subtle! But. The rest of the film belabors the point that being against things is inherently bad, that it ruins your life, that if you do it too long, you'll catch leprosy and have to wear an artificial nose (though still not one as ugly as Malkovich's putty prosthetic). In other words, this is a good old-fashioned morality play, and a boring and predictable one at that. It's also pretty transparently "topical." In the stunningly unwatchable "climactic" last scene, the leprosy-ridden Johnny finally performs his long-awaited service to His Majesty, crashing a session of Parliament and giving a rousing speech on the importance of trial by jury. As this film was released in 2004 -- right around the time of the heated debates on the restriction of habeas corpus for terrorist suspects -- Johnny's speech is clearly meant to win some hearts and minds with cheerily vacuous liberal self-congratulation. Except: Johnny is still all leprotic, and he's still hopelessly in love with a woman who doesn't love him back, and his only literary legacy is a poem called "Signor Dildo." He's a miserable wreck, and he's the poster-child for the anti-"War on Terror" camp? Is that really the artifical-nose-wearing, weeping-sores face of a "free-thinking, antinomian" individual? The face that launched a thousand Neo-Cons, I guess.

Other assorted outrages:

John Malkovich's fake nose. Honestly, it's just the worst. The horror could easily have been averted if they'd stuck to full-face closeups, except some brilliant cinematographer decided to film an entire scene with The King in profile in front of a really bright sunset. You can literally see the real tip of John Malkovich's nose twitching under layers of glowing, semi-transparent putty. Awful.

Female stereotype count: Hooker with a heart of gold? Check. Endlessly faithful and devoted wife? Check. Bitchy judging mother? Check. Ambitious girl who knows that love = failure and thus becomes a cold, loveless shrew in order to be successful? Indeed.

The last scene, where all the brash and bravado from the opening have given way to a desperate, teary-eyed Depp pleading for the audience to like him. It's just too, too much. If you're really so desperate for public approval, Johnny, maybe you should just stick to pirates -- that's something people seem to like.

Saints and sinners

2010-01-29T06:14:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of things that I love about New Orleans -- and if you're around me for any length of time, you'll hear me expound on them... excessively.

But perhaps my favorite thing about the city is its willingness to suspend time and reality and get really drunk and rowdy at the drop of a hat; or, as this article on NOLA and Saints fans puts it, on "Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Halloween, days that end in ‘y’..." (add to this list: Southern Decadence aka Gay Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, Art for Art's Sake, Voodoofest, Swampfest, French Quarter Fest, Soulfest, Po'boy Fest -- and these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head). We all agree that there's something wonderful about official holidays, when the genus Working Stiff is given an arbitrary reprieve and told to putter around the house in jammies instead of slaving away in the pursuit of Das Kapital. But, obviously, it's much more wonderful to have holiday be the rule to the work-day exception, and in New Orleans, that it is. When I found out I'd gotten into grad school, for instance, it just happened to be in the middle of the month-long affair that is Mardi Gras season -- which means that I wasn't alerted via post (not functioning) or email (wasn't checking it), but by a phone call from my mom, who'd been rung up by the department secretary and told in a concerned and slightly baffled voice that I'd officially been accepted but hadn't yet responded. Did I then instantly rush off to bang out a humble, conciliatory email, dripping with gratitude and obsequiousness? Not really. From what I recall, I went around triumphantly banging on the doors of my roommates, then filled a flask up with whiskey and drunkenly biked through Uptown to catch a parade. Priorities.

Of course, this kind of hedonistic atmosphere is not conducive to getting things done, and all the petty and not-so-petty corruption in the state of Louisiana notwithstanding, all levels of infrastructure there are as dependable as will-o-wisps. But, really, who cares about getting things done? In other cities, people live for the weekend, that brief sliver of time into which is squeezed all of sweaty, unwieldy, genuine human experience. In New Orleans, people float from carnival to carnival, each new instantiation of which appears with the mechanical regularity of a roving cloud-platform in a level of Super Mario. The weekends are mainly for sleeping. Unfortunately, going from the latter paradigm to the former feels like being violently thrust from a lush, technicolor utopian dream into a black-and-white German expressionist film. There's no way to adjust -- and, sadly, no way to get across to your new fellow wage-slaves just how wonderful institutionalized irreverence can be.

And, to wit, I leave you with this little gem of NOLA reality (culled from the gchat status of one of my former students -- thanks, Dan). What other city would have the brass to use fine art as gambling chips in a Superbowl wager? Well, Indianapolis, I guess... but who wants to live there?

Blank generation

2010-01-26T16:20:00.000-08:00

A longish, but amazingly epic article on the state of "indie" music today. Also, quotes from Thomas Frank. Love.

Even though it feels weird to admit as an alt-looking 25-year-old, I've never been a huge music fan. Maybe it's because my formative years were spent in Seattle circa 1993-2000, where everyone from the kid behind the Pizza Hut counter to the homeless guy on the street-corner was guaranteed to know more obscure indie shit than thou. I did my time -- pored over a hard copy of The Stranger every Friday while skipping pep rallies, went to Sonic Youth and Pavement concerts at Bumbershoot, and made my share of jokes about Death Cab For Cutie as they got really big -- but generally avoided the bulk of the rabidly cultish indie scene, which felt too hopelessly contradictory and trendy to ever traverse. Or maybe it's the simple fact that I was never able to listen to anything but ambient noise or wordless jazz when reading or writing, and the latter two things always took precedence and ate up most of my time. Whatever the case, college pretty much confirmed my dilettantish stance towards music; my friends were into college radio, and I was happy to feast off the crumbs of knowledge they'd occasionally toss my way in the form of mixes and mp3s. I went to see a lot of good shows (New Orleans was unparalleled for that, bless her), but I still never really actively sought to unravel the Gordian knot of the contemporary music scene. Music was a lot of things to me -- meditative background, emotional refuge, dancing/drinking accompaniment, wooing currency. But it was never the focus of my intellectual energy, and thus never my life.

This has been changing lately, and I wonder if it's indicative of a personal attitude shift or a generational one. I realize that a huge chunk of credit goes to, ahem, certain illicit downloading technologies that make the acquisition of music frighteningly, mindlessly simple. But with that simplicity comes a healthy heaping of boredom, jadedness, and ennui that inevitably follows disposable culture, which I sense emanating heatedly from many of my friends who've been into music for much longer than I. Maybe I'm lucky to have missed the indie music craze of the 90s and early 00s, since it's allowed me to preserve a certain naivety and childlike eagerness about things that most people are already on their third degree of ironic removal from (my latest infatuation is Of Montreal -- need I say more?). Whatever the case, I'm certainly grateful to catch things in their twilit baroque phase. Being much more accustomed to the post-mortem flavor of literary criticism, the academic in me is so much happier to study things after they're dead.

Shiny happy plastic people

2010-01-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

If you follow IvyGate (not that you should), you're familiar with a recent minor scandal from the wonderful world of the Cornell Greek system. No, not the Pike house getting shut down (god, are all Pikes terrible, no good people? I thought it was only the chapter at my undergrad campus, but apparently, I was wrong). I'm talking about the Pi Phi Sorority Dress Guidelines Debacle of Twenty-Ten (parts 2, 3, and 4 also choice).

Cornell was my first and only experience with a real-live Greek scene. I'd always figured that the whole point of those frat party things was to provide alcohol to (i.e., not-so-subtly lubricate) pretty underage girls, and going to school in New Orleans made that moot for me. But when I first walked into a Cornell frat party, I realized there was something else I'd been missing -- a certain aesthetic of opulent, upper-class hedonism that I'm sure only the top soror/frats actually have and the rest shamelessly copy. Amid tables groaning under the weight of food, drink, and dripping candelabra, scores of beautiful girls in prom-worthy gowns draped themselves around guys whose three-piece suits made them look like 50-year-old mafiosos instead of pimply young adults. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was just a bunch of kids playing dress-up ("Look, I'm Princess Di!" "I'm Diddy!" "I'm Paris Hilton!"). Except these kids were drunk, up way past their bedtime, and, most importantly, practicing skills that would be crucial in their future upper-middle-class social strata. Over the course of the party and the ride home (in a shiny Lexus, natch), I watched the boys network and the girls husband-hunt in a manner so scripted that it could've come straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Business cards were exchanged and lewd overtures were made, and by the end of the night I learned more about the New York I-banking world and my roommate's methods of keeping warm in Ithaca winter than I'd ever cared to know.

But I digress. My favorite thing about the Pi Phi (famous alum: Valerie Plame -- I guess some girls network, too) dress-code is that it explains a mystery my naive, plebeian self had never quite been able to grasp; namely, why it is that when I show up to certain functions, I'm always an awkward drop in a sea of identically-dressed girls. This happened a lot when I started dating a law school student, of course, but it was also a sporadically occurring phenomenon at specific places in town. I once attended a downtown wine tasting gala where every (and I mean every) woman was wearing a three-quarter-length black dress. I'd chosen a bright red chinoiserie-print mini and got catty stares the whole night (though that may have been more the result of getting tipsy and inciting several men to passive-aggressively fight for my affection on the dance-floor). Where do they learn this stuff? I'd wonder, dreaming up all kinds of unlikely scenarios involving print media, signifiers, and social conditioning. Well, little did I know that there are literal memos passed out, and that I literally missed them.

Having recently mused on the still weirdly classist Brits, I guess I should also point out how bizarre the American instantiation of the class system is. Because, even after attending one of the most expensive private universities in the country, I'd never felt caste inferiority till I got to that frat party (and then, even more so, Ye Olde Ivy Bedecked Monstrosity where I'm currently enrolled). But the thing is, the classism here is so vestigial, so virtual, so... well, made up -- there's really no difference between being middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-upper-class in terms of what you can know, buy, or wear -- that, above a certain poverty level, you can choose to present yourself as anything whatsoever. And the fact that a quite sizable subset of society still chooses to present itself as some thrice-removed elitist fantasy from a blue-blood Stepford time that never was... is, well, kind of sick. It's sort of like that parable about the baby elephant that's trained to stay put by having a branch tied to its leg, and then when it gets older, all a trainer need do to immobilize it is tie a twig to its toe. Except instead of a twig, what we have here is top shelf liquors, mani/pedis, and boutique evening-wear.

Then again, this could all just be an East Coast/New England thing. In the South, the tendency is toward the exact opposite -- gleeful downwardly-mobile slumming. And maybe it's all equally dumb and just a matter of acclimation, but somehow, that feels so much more honest.

Bear life

2010-01-25T17:39:00.000-08:00

Nudity good for you, story at 7?

Anyway, dumb article, but it gives me an excuse to bring up something I've been meaning to discuss: social nudity. Due to the onset of perilously icy street conditions, I've started running at the gym on a regular basis, and since I have to commute to use my free campus gym privileges, that means I've also started taking advantage of the gym shower. The last time I actually changed in a locker room was probably middle school, so I was fairly shocked when I first walked in to the ladies' changing area and found myself surrounded by a preponderance of casually naked flesh. The facility I frequent is not the main (read: undergrad) gym, and in the quiet interim between semesters it was home to mostly bookish, middle-aged types -- faculty, staff, extension school students. But these women seemed to have no problem stripping off their smart business casual streetwear and ambling around the locker room in what god gave them, while I huddled timidly in a corner and used the old 6th grade "T-shirt as tent" trick to put on my sports bra and shorts.

I mean, it's not like I'm some peevish stickler for decency. I recently watched a documentary on the Black Bear commune in the mountains of Northern California, and the whole thing made me pine for the 60s, radical utopian lifestyles, and the freedom to roam au naturale under the tender coastal sun. But nudity in the context of a tiled, fluorescent, antiseptic gymnasium is not the sun-kissed, romp-with-the-goats nudity of a California commune. In fact, it sort of gives me the heebies. Possibly, this has to do with aforementioned middle school connotations, but more probably, it's also a matter of historical/cinematic conditioning: any time you pack a lot of naked women into a small space with showers, I can only think of one thing (as, by the by, does Milan Kundera in this part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being).

But aside from all that, I find myself confronted with an uncomfortable voyeur guilt-spiral dilemma. It goes something like this: in our society, despite the prevalence of porn and porn-like advertising, we don't get to see a lot of real women naked. Hence: real women naked is an inherently fascinating sight. But! In polite bourgeois society, we're supposed to rigorously deny our urge to ogle and plant our roving eyes squarely on the cold tiled floor. Or, as Al Pacino so eloquently puts in the best law-cum-Devil movie of all time: "Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow." Of course, if we were all traipsing around Black Bear Ranch, the metaphorical (or actual) trip would probably dictate the opposite: look till you get sick. It's the weird contradiction of "it's all out there!" coupled with "... but don't make eye contact" that sticks in my craw.

Interestingly, as classes have started up again, more and more ponytailed gazelles have flooded the locker room -- snapping gum, chatting about parties, and taking time out from a gazillion extracurriculars to whittle invisible millimeters of flesh from their already immaculate 20-year-old frames. Yet, in spite of their clearly superior muscle-to-cellulite ratios, it's the younger generation that remains fastidiously clothed, while the older women proudly parade around their various levels of saggage (although for the most part, they're still impressively fit -- this is the health-conscious upper crust of the Northeast, after all). I can't help feeling like there's some deeper story about the trajectory of feminism here, with all its false starts and unexpected retrogrades. I also can't help feeling kind of like my stupid, deathly self-conscious 6th-grade self when I bring my clothes into the shower stall to change. What am I afraid of? Some snot-nosed undergrad scoffing at my off-brand panties?

I wish I were as good at making radical statements as I am wasting time ruminating about them. Stupid Kundera and his stupid moral exhibitionism problem has ruined me for life.

Who dat

2010-01-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

So, maybe I missed out on voting in that Landmark Historical Election and all... but at the very least, I comfort myself with the thought that I might become a citizen in the year that a team I actually care about wins the Superbowl. Patriotism win.

[Private blog: Mardi Gras, Feb. '05]

Maybe the constant tube-feeding of paranoia from this administration has finally gotten to me, but my mind instantly screamed conspiracy when the Patriots won the Superbowl.

Also, at Bacchus last night, the New York float featured a plane aimed directly at the Statue of Liberty. I think the theme was sports teams, and they were attempting to convey the general idea of "The Jets," but that still was one motherfucking hilariously offensive oversight on the part of the float committee.

It's Lundi Gras and I've got a bottle of cheap champagne with my drunken claw marks all over it.

Nail-gazing

2010-01-23T22:10:00.000-08:00

Seven months ago, I lost a toenail to a dishwasher unloading accident involving one calamitously dropped glass Pyrex baking dish, a night of excruciating pain, and a paperclip heated over a candle to release a tide of pooled blood. The nail didn't die right away. Instead, it went the way of Terry Schiavo: massive internal hemorrhaging, then a vegetative state that persisted for another month, while I stubbornly coated the deadened husk with layer after layer of glossy purple polish and insisted it was still functional. Then one fine day, I decided I'd had enough of the charade and peeled it off from root to tip, exposing the raw, puckered reality underneath. I spent the record-high heatwave summer in Texas wearing closed-toed shoes and cursing fate.

But waking up every morning and padding to the shower, I'd also quietly observe the strange miracle that is the regeneration of living tissue. Nails, I discovered, don't grow back at all like I'd imagined. There is no dainty moon-shaped sliver of starter nail that patiently, concentrically expands like the rings in tree trunks. Instead, the flesh on the face of the digit quickly hardens into what Nabokov's Aunt Maude in Pale Fire calls "scarf skin." Then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, this fibrous tissue fuses into a yellowish chitinous pseudo-nail, more reminiscent of a jagged tusk or claw than the delicately polished, glassy substance coating the human fingertip. The pseudo-nail expands like a fungus, colonizing the digit and threatening to take over the other, healthy appendages. But then some strange alchemical twist occurs, and the erstwhile misshapen, evil scrap of cells gets smoothed out by an unseen hand, until, square millimeter by square millimeter, it begins to resemble something human.

Seven long months have gone by -- friendships have begun and ended, unexpected turns of fate brought strange victories and stranger surrenders -- and all there is to show for my recent cellular reconstruction project is a slight horny protuberance, the vestigial remains of the fungus-like pseudo-nail, which I am now loathe to snip off, signaling as it would the ultimate act in a riveting drama of life, death, and rebirth. The new nail is glossy and pink, as smooth and innocent as a newborn babe. I don't quite trust it yet. It has a lot to learn.

Ah, yes.

2010-01-22T06:19:00.000-08:00

Vindication by 4chan = bittersweet.

This is why ~~we can't have nice things~~ I simultaneously love and loathe Internet youth subcultures.

White fright

2010-01-19T12:39:00.000-08:00

So, with that overly judgey and self-righteous last post in mind, I did exactly what I criticized people for doing: after six years of totally neglecting it, I got back into Haitian history. Inevitable.

Somewhere between watching Max Chancy's 60s documentary Haïti, J'accuse (sorry, non-francophones, it's in French) and rewatching The Serpent and the Rainbow (based on a book I've unfortunately not read), I found myself blown away by how a certain idea about blackness has gone through the spin cycle of history and resurfaced somewhat twisted and warped in American pop culture. If you're unfamiliar, The Serpent and the Rainbow is an 80s Wes craven film, set in Haiti on the eve of the US-orchestrated overthrow of "Bebe Doc" Duvalier. Though not by any means a great film, Serpent and the Rainbow has the unique benefit of offering a different perspective on the zombie genre than the traditional American line of George Romero et al., the latter of which has less (though not entirely nothing) to do with race and more with a certain Western Marxist class critique. Serpent and the Rainbow, on the other hand, returns the genre to its race-based tribal roots, so to speak. It also makes zombification less of an allegory and more of a reality, since the premise of the film is that Haiti's Tonton Macoutes, Duvalier's secret police, use voodoo as a tool to control the helpless native population.

What I found fascinating about this premise is that it falls right into what Chancy says about the Duvalier regime: through constant, systematic terror, both Duvaliers not only managed to quell dissent, but in fact to internalize fear within each citizen, psychologically and politically paralyzing the population. For anyone who's ever studied a political cult of personality, this is nothing new -- Stalin did the same thing, sucking even sane and stable satellites like Czechoslovakia into whirlpools of self-inflicted bloodshed, and ensuring that a morally and fiscally bankrupt regime could essentially run on empty for a span of decades without any significant popular revolt. But what Chancy points out is that it is precisely the race factor that kept white Western superpowers unwilling and uninterested in interfering with this brand of fascism. Voodoo lent an exotic, quasi-mystical air to the whole thing, making it seem like some quaint ethnographic feature of the Haitian atmosphere, rather than a tool in the hands of a Western-educated dictator.

But that last bit should not be ignored. The Duvaliers weren't savage jungle warlords; they were degree-holding, university educated, cosmopolitan rulers. And whether or not the Papa of the dynasty was actually insane (there's certainly room for speculation, given his poor health and bizarre behavior), it's clear that he milked the "voodoo" angle for all it was worth -- calling his secret police, essentially, "The Boogeymen," and declaring himself Baron Samedi. We Westerners can laugh at this primitive nonsense all we want... until we remind ourselves of our own leaders' proclivities for ingratiating themselves into native cults. For all of our love of fetishizing, exoticizing, and Hollywoodizing the black other, the religion and power dynamic at home is all too similar.

So, back to Serpent and the Rainbow, where the white man (Bill Paxton) and the white man's system (democracy) rides in on its shining white horse and saves the day. Of course. It's the late 80s, apartheid is finally crumbling, we're all singing "Ebony and Ivory," and life is good. Okay. Well, cut to 2009, when, on the eve of electing a black president, the kids of this great nation are playing a little game called Resident Evil 5:

Serpent and the Rainbow redux! White man and pretty light-skinned black woman fighting zombies created by political instability! "Africa" is shorthand for anywhere with poor black people!

Now, I'm not saying I didn't play and enjoy RE5. I did, because it was a good game, and the absorbingly cinematic quality greatly contributed to that goodness. But there's no doubt that the image of blackness it presents -- machete-wielding, bile-colored blood-spewing, inherently susceptible to evil -- is uncomfortable at best. It reminds me, again, of what Chancy says about Haiti: cycles of corruption, violence, fascism, all of it is seen by Westerners as a matter of "negritude," i.e., a "black thing." And even when there is some attempt at a neo-colonial critique, as with the nefarious Umbrella Corporation and distinctively Aryan Albert Wesker orchestrating the zombie outbreak in RE5, the ultimate takeaway (featured on all the interface graphics) is that of contagion in the form of hideously mutated blood. Because what the Progenitor virus does to (white) Wesker is make him a near-invincible superman; what it does to the black population of "Africa" is turn them into ooze-dripping, brainless killing machines. Uh, nice. So, we're back to basic miscegenation and eugenics all over again -- dovetailing perfectly with the explanation for the mechanics of zombification in Serpent and the Rainbow: "It's a powder... a poison... that runs through the skin... to the soul."

Serpents and rainbows

2010-01-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

While it's nice to see the generous outpouring of support for Haiti from celebrities and private citizens alike -- Twitter and Facebook all-calls, charity concerts and telethons, donations of everything from tour proceeds to planes -- I can't help but wonder where all this public outcry was through 30 years of the Duvalier regime, one of the most ludicrously corrupt, backward, and savage kleptocracies to ever exist in the Western hemisphere. Between the two of them, "Papa" and "Bebe Doc" Duvalier oversaw the siphoning of millions of dollars in GDP and charity money, created a private terror death-squad much like Ivan the Terrible's 16th century Oprichniki, and, apart from ordering the torture, rape, and murder of tens of thousands of people, were also famous for being completely fucking nuts. And throughout most of these three decades, the US firmly continued its tacit financial support, because there couldn't be another Cuba, and better dead than red.

To make the obvious, and by now totally hackneyed comparison, it also took mass devastation for anyone to pay attention to the fact that Louisiana was a cesspit of poverty and political corruption. Doesn't this just give credence to the idea that natural disasters are a sign from the heavens for us to pay attention to what's happening on earth? -- an idea that implicitly feeds into the Pat Robertson-style logic of God as wrathful panopticon. Why does sudden, unexpected destruction fill us with so much awe and reverence, while an ongoing repetition of man-made destruction just makes us yawn and change the channel?

And, obviously, the "throw money at it!" strategy sounds like a good one when faced with an unprecedented natural disaster, millions dead or missing, and an entire national infrastructure destroyed. But isn't that sort of what led to Haiti being the wreck it's been since Toussaint? You can generate all the charity money you want, but the bigger the unattended honey pot, the greater the chance that some rabid bear like a Papa or Bebe Doc will come along and gorge himself on it.

Quick lessons for the New Naturalization Test

2010-01-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

Thank you for your interest in becoming a citizen of the United States of America. Your decision to apply for U.S. citizenship is a very meaningful demonstration of your commitment to this country and we applaud your efforts.

They wanted a nation ruled by laws, not men.

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

A. Principles of American Democracy

1. What is the supreme law of the land?

I first learned to write with India ink in square, slim notebooks of lined paper. These housed my first strings of letters, meticulous repeated and trapped between two dark borders. When we moved, I got a new notebook in school, bright yellow with funny cartoon children holding enormous pencils and sailing on roller skates across the cover. Each page had lined paper, but it also had an empty box for drawings. The first thing I drew was the view I remembered from the airplane: wild, loopy pillows of pink and blue clouds. A few pages after that came a picture of myself wearing red, white, and blue and holding a microphone. Underneath, in awkward, ugly print, I scribbled: "We sang at the 4th of July. My favurit song is Yor a Grand Old Flag. I likk that song." I was six, and I had never written in pencil. It was exciting, but the most exciting part was watching a graphite smudge get slowly devoured by the rounded tongue of a Pink Pearl, then immediately writing over the watery blur underneath. Nobody cared about the mess.

B. System of Government

32. Who is the Commander in Chief of the military?

March 19th, 2003. we had a quiz in freedom class today. i woke up early to study the wrong chapter in my freedom book, so of course i failed the fuck out of that motherfucker. pardon my freedom.

les vacances sont finies.

Map of the United States including state capitals.

I've lived in California, Washington, Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, and Boston. Utah is an alien landscape of hollowed-out stone, backlit by the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen. Texas sports a giant blue fishbowl for a sky. In Florida, there are glow-in-the-dark jellyfish floating in the ocean. Except Minneapolis/St. Paul, I've never been to the Midwest, but I imagine it as scattered pockets of clean, well-lit strip malls populated by the terminally blond. Two places I'd like to see are Phoenix and Baltimore.

AMERICAN HISTORY

60. What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?

I didn't know that I was white until high school. Until then, I always checked the "other" box on surveys and standardized tests. On the school bus, the girls all fought each other to play with my hair. They'd braid it, let it go, and laugh when the braids instantly unraveled into a mess of frizzy cornsilk. In Mississippi, a teacher asked me to join her dance team, "for color balance." When we danced to "Bombs Over Baghdad," I got real cornrows for the second time in my life (the first was in Mexico), and the girls all laughed again. "Why are white girls so tender-headed?"

B. The 1800s

71. What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?

Sign on a float during the Krewe de Vieux parade, Mardi Gras 2006: Buy us back, Chirac.

C. Recent American History and Other Important Historical Information

81. Who did the United States fight in World War II?

From ages 8 to 11, I spent at least an hour a day at the home of the sixty-year-old Jewish man who lived across the street. He taught me how to play dreidel and invest in the stock market. His Anglo-Protestant wife taught me to make Jello eggs on Easter and cooked me pancakes on Sunday mornings. In middle school, after I'd moved to a different part of town and stopped seeing them so much, we were learning about the Holocaust. When I came home and reverently told my father that the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened in all of history, he got upset and wrote a letter to the school, suggesting that they devote at least some class-time to the other holocausts: Ukraine, Armenia, Yugoslavia. I was so embarrassed that I never delivered it.

INTEGRATED CIVICS

By learning this information, you will develop a deeper understanding of the United States and its geographic boundaries, principles, and freedoms.

A. Geography

88. Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.

My senior year of high school, two classmates and I took an unchaperoned graduation trip to New Orleans. At Cafe du Monde, we met three boys from Texas who told us they were 21 but couldn't have been a day over 16. The one in the cowboy hat, who the other girls thought was the cutest but I didn't, took a special liking to me. He told me, in confidence, earnest blue eyes watering slightly, that I had the perfect body to be a stripper. We walked through the Quarter and stopped by the Mississippi River, where on one side of the bank, a team of amateur biologists was measuring the water toxicity, and on the other side, a naked fleshy homeless woman was taking a swim. "I bet you won't," I whispered, and the boy in the cowboy hat promptly stripped, goaded by hoots of encouragement from his friends. Wearing only his hat and white cotton jockeys, he jumped in. One of the amateur biologists crinkled her nose and informed us that there are at least fifty known carcinogens in that water. I may have smiled.

ENGLISH TEST

To help you prepare, USCIS released a reading vocabulary list found below.

Father of Our Country
right
Flag Day
How
lives/lived
pay
want
a
we
largest
American Indians
colors
dollar bill
free
fifty/50
red
taxes
white

Teenage suicide (don't do it)

2010-01-15T22:16:00.000-08:00

This year, one of my Christmas presents was a collected essays edition of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus -- which, it still being winter break and me having no real responsibilities, makes for some poignant subway reading on my way to and from the gym. Camus was my first French existentialist love (Sartre was too brittle and thuggish for my refined adolescent taste), but I'd always been more into his novels than the cut-and-dried philosophy, so I'd never read Sisyphus in its entirety. That's probably a good thing, though, because I'm sure it's more palatable the closer you get to the 30-year-old expiration date that Camus places on all human hopes and dreams. Any younger, and you're still convinced that this world might have something better to offer than arbitrary struggle against pain and death, so his whole theory of the absurd might not go down quite so easily.

For the Too French; Didn't Read crowd, the basic premise behind the parable of Sisyphus is that our life on this planet is completely absurd. The only thing of which we can be certain is our resounding ignorance in all matters of philosophy, science, and religion. Furthermore, our individual and collective hopes, dreams, and strivings -- all traces of our existence -- will unquestionably be obliterated in the centuries to come. Only those who foolishly delude themselves with thoughts of a god and an afterlife [foolishly because of the two quick death-strokes with which Camus punctures the idea: 1) if we have free will, then God allows evil in the world, which is antithetical to our idea of an omnipotent and benevolent God, and 2) if we have no free will, then God is himself evil because he makes us suffer, and, again, life is absurd] can possibly continue to hope for something better than a finite lifetime of pain, confusion, gradual decay, and death. Hence, the human race is Sisyphus, that poor sap whose punishment was to roll a giant rock up a hill, only to have it roll right back down again, for all of eternity. We toil and sweat and live for nothing.

So, again, especially great reading before and after an hour on a treadmill.

What fascinated me, of course, was Camus' reliance on Dostoevsky to bolster his point. Now, anyone who knows me and has heard me expound on this subject knows that I've been a lifetime member of Team Tolstoy. And anyone who knows what Team Tolstoy is all about would place better odds on Jews and Arabs skipping hand-in-hand down the streets of Haifa than a devoted member of TT breaking ranks and spending a few leisurely afternoons with a full-blown 400+ page Dostoevsky novel (it's kind of a thing in Slavic circles... similar to Camus v. Sartre, I guess, but even more firmly entrenched). Sure, I like his shorter stuff (stories, Notes from the Underground), and I'm okay with The Brothers Karamazov, but only because the 50-odd pages of The Grand Inquisitor story make the rest of the hack genre-fiction and schlocky theology padding worthwhile. So, it is with all due gravitas that I report to have picked up a dog-eared copy of The Possessed at a used book store the other day, in order to get to the root of Camus' allusions. I took one for the Team.

Camus isn't just interested in telling us that life is absurd; after all, everyone from Diogenes to your 13-year-old emo blogging neighbor down the street (no relation) has been gracing us this rather unshocking revelation. What Camus is really interested in is suicide -- specifically, why more people don't commit it, since we all at one point or another have to deal with the unsettling feeling that all of this pain and frustration is just not fucking worth it. That's where Dostoevsky and The Possessed come in. In this novel, a character named Kirilov is writing a book on this very subject. During a heated conversation with Kirilov, the narrator, who is horrified by the idea of suicide, exclaims, "'Man fears death because he loves life!'" To which Kirilov replies:

"That's a base idea and in it lies the whole hoax!" His eyes flashed. "Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now everything is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That's how it's been arranged. We are given life for fear and pain, and that's where the swindle lies. Today man is not a real man. One day there will be free, proud men to whom it will make no difference whether they live or not. That'll be the new man. He who conquers pain and fear will be a god himself. And the other God will disappear."

Decades of canonical existentialist writing, of which Camus is only a germinal part, has taken this quote as a solid, universal maxim -- life sucks, forever and always. But I'm curious if the change of time and religious fervency hasn't changed the equation. In Sisyphus, Camus also talks about experience as the lone principle that makes sense in an absurd world. Since this, our all-too-human mortal life is the only one we've got, we may as well throw caution and accepted morality to the wind and have as many experiences as we can. Quantity over quality. (He refutes this somewhat, but not, I think, entirely.) And when I put this idea together with Dostoevsky's vision of the world I wonder...

Yesterday, I didn't leave the house at all. Hell, I barely left the living room couch. And yet, at the mere push of a few buttons, I had access to: hundreds of films and TV shows, new and old, streamed directly to my computer; countless articles and texts to read, share, comment on; innumerable hours of music of every conceivable genre; a dizzying array of pornography; a network of digitally-linked humans to chat with; and, in case all that wasn't enough, three video game systems with dozens of hours-long immersive gaming experiences to choose from. And it's not because I'm rich or noble or otherwise special. My dad came to this country with exactly fifty dollars to his name. I earn my monthly pittance, about as much as your average Starbucks barista, to teach kids about Dostoevsky and thesis statements.

My point is, we educated elite in the land of exorbitant wealth and nuclear stockpiles have, for all intents and purposes, stopped believing in God. But we certainly haven't gone all Kirilov on everybody and flocked to cliff-sides like lemmings. Maybe Dostoevsky's world -- a dark, dank Russia still functioning on de facto slave labor, simultaneously enthralled to medieval thinking and every passing current of misunderstood "liberalism" that floated its way from the West -- maybe that world was, for the most part, a cruel hoax. But I think the American experiment with utilitarianism has shown that it doesn't always have to be. Even if it's couched in the form of media oversaturation, bad-faith pleasure-proliferation, or just plain and simple False God of Capital, I for one welcome the death of the old God and the rise of our new Experience overlord. What keeps me on that treadmill and loving every minute of it is the pursuit and enjoyment of experience, and the knowledge that I'll never come close to exhausting its horizons. And what keeps me from getting burned out by the width of that infinite horizon is the knowledge that for others who aren't quite so lucky, it's not quite so infinite. The possibilities that I was (stupidly, arbitrarily, unimaginably felicitously) given, the ones that most of us have in this country and others like it, are just too damn precious to waste. And if that sounds dangerously close to Christian rhetoric, so be it. I'll happily plunder the moral system without any of the dogma.

So, in closing, if I can enjoy Dostoevsky, there might be hope for us yet. Also, blame Camus if I slaughter you in a race. It's all in the existentialism.

Love

2010-01-13T17:25:00.001-08:00

I love this:

That is all. The dream of nontraditional sustainable living continues.

Red tape

2010-01-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

Today, I got fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security.

These and other exciting soundbites brought to you by the N-400 Application for Naturalization, aka Application for Citizenship in the Greatest of Great Nations Ever, The United States of America!

I was a little apprehensive at first. My last dealing with the DHS was back when they were still called Immigration and Naturalization Services. In those day, all of their employees seemed to have been culled from the small percentage of recently naturalized who'd barely managed to scrape by the English and Civics portion of the application and now took their position of bureaucratic power as a mandate to harass and terrify all future applicants (apparently, they hadn't gotten the memo that the quota system had been abolished in 1965). Memorable moments at INS headquarters include the time my parents and I were herded into a tiny room by a furious man of indeterminate African origin and viciously berated for presuming to think we were worthy of receiving green cards. I was 13 at the time and had no idea why he was so angry, or why he thought two scientists from the former USSR were such a threat to his and the nation's security. My parents, more used to receiving arbitrary tongue-lashings from petty bureaucrats, just kept their heads down and took it. Strong contender for top ten worst moments of my life.

So, needless to say, I went into my appointment today with slight trepidation. This was step two, before the final interview but after the reams of paperwork in which I assured the good people of the DHS that I am not a terrorist, communist, Nazi, prostitute, or "habitual drunkard" (okay, there may be room for quibbling on that one). I even scrubbed my fingernails clean of chipped black nail polish, so I wouldn't look like quite such a delinquent. I went in with a smile, let a nice gloved Asian man apply alcohol strips and blotters to each of my fingers before smooshing them against a small glass screen, watched the psychedelic whorls of my unique human genome appear on a computer in front of me, and went on my merry way, smelling of rubbing alcohol and powdered latex.

While my fingers were being processed by the administrative organs of the greatest superpower known to man, I thought about how odd it is that we still use fingerprints to identify people. I mean, for The Year 2010, it seems a bit archaic. Can't we do cheek-swabs a la Gattaca already? Or, better yet, what happened to the whole dystopian tattoo bar code idea? I'd love one of those! No more filling out forms in triplicate just to prove who I am? Sign me up; I'll check my Orwell at the door.

So, all in all, the process was surprisingly painless. I like this kinder, gentler (if you're white and speak English, anyway...) DHS. They even had customer service cards! I gave them all "excellent"s -- I carry no grudges. Now, I just have to sit back, twiddle my non-terrorist/communist/Nazi thumbs and await my interview, which should be fun. That's when I get to take the English test (gee golly, hope I pass!) and answer some questions about the Constitution and Congress or something. I'm actually getting sort of excited about this. No more spending nights in "unwanted illegals" ghettos at airports. No more dirty looks from customs officials. I'll get to vote and ~~find creative ways to skip~~ report cheerfully for jury duty. Finally, I'll be a real boy!

Retweet

2010-01-12T19:11:00.000-08:00

[From: private blog, January 12th, 2006]

Delta = change over time

I head out for New Orleans tomorrow, and rarely have I been sadder about leaving my stifling Mississippi cubby-hole. Returning from Ithaca on a clean air and frostbite high, I was anxious about seeing the South with clouded Northern eyes. New York was so much the ideal metropolis -- a giant steel and concrete octopus whose robot arms reach as far as the Catskills to carry the pulse of modernity into even the most remote mountain communities and ex-hippie communes. After experiencing the mess of organic tentacles that is New Orleans, the Holy Shit factor was high. But what I'm starting to figure out is that cities are simply the abstract ideal to which people in the region aspire. New York, being America's archetypal city, is this country's urban poster-child: immaculate cultural programming, fluid mobility, and a hermetical seal over a self-contained yet fully integrated system. This description not only applies to the city itself, but to the myriad of communities contained within it. However, to stretch that characterization onto each individual resident is ridiculous. Nobody is all New York, all the time. While many of us are indeed striving for that kind of automated efficiency, we still have to face the fact that, sometimes, nigiri at Nobu and an opening at the Met does not hold the same appeal to carnal pleasure as Popeye's chicken and Will Ferrell.

Which is where Mississippi comes in. When I stay here, I feel like I can let my rigid posture slump a little. Every city I've lived in has left some sort of imprint, but this Southern burg is like a lopsided down pillow placed at the small of my back. What it brings is bittersweet relief from progressive pretensions, as well as a unique chiropractic realignment. My mutant power has always been adaptability. This has not come by nature, but by a hell of a lot of painstaking nurture -- on the part of personal dedication, but mostly due to outside influence like the fall of the Soviet Union, cutbacks on governmental scientific spending, and one giant fucking hurricane -- and I think I've finally gotten a goodish grasp on the art of smelting and refining to suit an endless variety of molds. A lesson for a goddamn lifetime. When I come here to this itty-bitty backwater and enjoy myself so thoroughly, and when I'm mature enough to refuse the label of "slumming it" to describe my visceral enjoyment, this is when I know progress has definitely been made. Mississippi is not a slum. It is the other side of the coin, the broken backbone on which places like New York, both mentally and physically, are created.

If nothing else good comes out of this year, I've walked away with quite possibly the most important discovery in all my twenty-one years of life: the ability to keep myself sane and satisfied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, beats manic ecstasy in four out of five blind taste tests. Peace out, Mississippi. See you in the spring.

Reverse frontierism

2010-01-12T07:40:00.000-08:00

The faster the new semester approaches, the more eager I am to kill what remains of my brain-power. To that end, and having exhausted all of the more mainstream trash-TV¹ fare on Netflix instant watch, I've jumped continent and raced through a series and a half of the British teen drama, Skins.

Skins is basically like Dawson's Creek -- if Dawson's Creek had rampant profanity, nudity, substance abuse, raves, and gay sex². So, in short, it's amazing. To the Puritan Americanized eye, it's like a cornucopia of possibilities one could never imagine existing on the small screen, let alone acted out by a cast of teenagers. For instance, if you've ever watched any American teen drama, you'll be familiar with one of the stock settings: a neutral "club" where all the characters frequently gather to discuss their current fiasco, but where no alcohol is served and nothing whatsoever is smoked unless it's a Very Special Episode. As a doe-eyed innocent and gullible kid, I was convinced that every town had one of these cool "teen clubs," where teens go to have important teen conversations that are pivotal to their teen character development (and, in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to hatching elaborate vampire-killing plans). Only much later did I realize that this was all pure fantasy, that the closest venue of this kind is probably Starbucks. Skins skips all this elaborately coded trickery and just puts the kids in a damn bar already, with beer, cigarettes, and speed in tow.

True story: in late middle school/early high school, my girlfriends and I jointly composed a similar kind of teen drama. It was called Shattered Tapestries. We were each responsible for a character, around which one issue would be centered, and we all tried to one-up each other by packing in as much crazy drugs, sex, and delinquency as we could, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that none of us had yet had any experience in any of these departments. In fact, I have to wonder if our little homemade production didn't somehow end up in the hands of the BBC, because many of the plot and character arcs are downright eerily similar (my character was a girl with a tall black-haired, blue-eyed bisexual boyfriend, for instance... hmm).

Anyway, my point is, for all the swagger about this show being so true to life, OMG, etc., there's clearly more than a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of the young, hip writing team. After all, you probably don't get to be a writer for a BBC network by downing Class As like Tic-Tacs and spending every night hammered in someone else's house. No, you're probably a tad rowdy -- just enough to give you insider knowledge of some pharmaceutical lingo and the latest dance moves -- but mostly clean, sober, and professional. Your wild side only comes out at the keyboard.

The problem is, when I'm watching something like Dawson's Creek, I can roll my eyes and groan at all the obvious fakery, the layers of buttercream frosting padding any potential kernel of reality. With Skins, though, I'm totally thrown off my guard. It's British! What do I know about Britain! Maybe they really do have glo-stick raves all the time! Here are some questions that I have about Skins that I would like to have answered by a real live British person one day:

1. Do you have glo-stick raves all the time? Are you aware that The Great House Music Craze of '96-'02 has come and gone? Why are you still wearing those pants?

2. How is it that 17-year-old students with no jobs and no other sources of income (some of whom don't even have parents!) are able to constantly purchase a veritable mountain of drugs? I mean, I can understand an allowance of petty cash being squandered on the odd ounce or whatever, but these kids are smoking weed and chewing pills about as frequently as they're having glo-stick raves; i.e., all the time! Is this what socialism actually means? Can you please publicize that?

3. Are you really still so classicist? Why are all the rich (sorry, "posh") kids evil?

4. How and why did Dev Patel become the breakout star of this series? I mean, really. He's adorable and all, but boy is he a terrible child actor. Just atrocious.

5. "Safe?" Is this real life slang, or quasi-slang that no one actually uses in conversation (aka, "dope")?

There are a myriad of other questions and conundrums, but I almost don't want them answered. I'd prefer to continue maintaining the illusion of England as a magical place, a liberated place, a kingdom of wonder and fantasy, with perfectly-sculpted cheekbones and blacklights for all.

¹Honestly, though, my taste in "trash-TV" is fairly pedestrian. I've long ago lost the stomach for any kind of reality show, televised competition, or original MTV production, which pretty much leaves me with back-episodes of Intervention -- and that's only a last resort for when I'm very, very depressed.

²Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be Gossip Girl (which I've never actually seen... though, come to think, I don't know if I've ever made it through a full episode of Dawson's Creek, either). However, even making that comparison goes to show how ridiculously sheltered/sheltering we 'mericans are as a culture, and how selectively puritanical. I'm given to understand that while Gossip Girl has plenty of raunchy indications, it runs on the CW and therefore can't possibly contain any actual adult content. Compared to Skins, it sounds like the Hollywood billowing curtain shot: all innocent innuendo, no sinful meat.

Quote-unquote "fantastic"

2010-01-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

I can see why a number of critics have expressed the sentiment that The Fantastic Mr. Fox is the best movie of 2009. It's certainly one of the best, if not The Best, film Wes Anderson has made, though claiming the latter might make me dead to my husband and devoted Royal Tenenbaums acolyte (at the least, he should be comforted by the fact that the protagonists of both films share more than a passing similarity and quite a few memorable catch-phrases). Something about the claymation medium -- obsessively detail-oriented, childlike but imbued with a higher level of sophistication than 2-D animation, verging on T.S. Eliot levels of slippage between the American and British paradigm -- is insanely perfect for an Anderson production. And the plot, while peppered with all the trademark Andersoniana (master plans, goofy sidekicks, failure, daddy issues), actually manages to simultaneously coalesce and transcend some of the hang-ups that have plagued the characters and action of earlier films and made them feel too formulaic and phoned in. I doubt I was the only one who was disappointed by this in Darjeeling Limited, where the predictably quirky, neurotic characters could only find redemption through cheap orientalist epiphany. Fantastic Mr. Fox, in contrast, returns the focus to Anderson's strongest, most convincing creation: the Royal/Steve Zissou archetype of the lovable bastard.

Anderson has a lot of fine lines to walk when taking on this theme in the context of a PG-rated "kids' movie" (though there were plenty of kids in the theater with me, I'm inclined to disagree on both the rating and the wisdom of bringing small children to see this often very disturbing, very adult film -- will we ever start rating things according to actual content and not number of boobs or f-bomb?). The fact that he manages to do it so effortlessly is nothing short of astounding; it's one part ingenuity bordering on genius (substituting "cuss" for profanity, for instance, creates a cheeky subtext without sacrificing any atmosphere) and one part aforementioned childlike precocity, for which I'm sure some credit must also go to Roald Dahl (which came first, Anderson's obsession with twee, precocious children or Roald Dahl's twee, precocious child protagonists, one may never know). The fact remains that Anderson takes on the allegorical animal story, a genre practically as old as storytelling itself, and keeps it from descending into lax Disneyan morality or dry didacticism.

Because I'm working on allegory for my dissertation, I couldn't help being captivated by the particular tension that the allegorical form presents, a tension Anderson exploits to muddle the familiar black-and-white binary morality of Aesopian animal tales. According to Walter Benjamin, allegory is often misidentified and misunderstood to be a lazier, lesser method of aesthetic creation, the poor cousin of symbolism, which tends to get a lot more hype. Allegory is perceived to be worse because it seems to offer a one-to-one relationship between what's on the page/stage and the thing it represents in the real world. In the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, the shallow allegorical reading goes something like this: Fox = man, Fox's wiles and tricks = man's savage nature, tempered by the stamp of modern civility. But, in practice, allegory is never quite so simple. Even after getting immersed in the diegetic reality of the film, I found myself questioning the "fox = man" equation and continually replacing it with "man = ?" To me, that's the true power of allegory -- affirming your own prejudices and preconceptions, and then gently shaking you into realizing just how little they really tell you about the world. Is man a "wild animal," or is this our own private escape fantasy? How important is inner nature, anyway, and isn't it at least partially constructed? Because in the end, "fox" is a man-made archetype, a trickster culled from human features, human frailties, and human triumphs. And yet, whether it's artificially implanted or not, Fox's essential nature is unquestionable. It's what makes him unique and, well, fantastic, but also what makes him maybe not the most exemplary human being. This is perhaps the finest fine line that Anderson walks, since it borders on slipping into the trite "everybody's special in their own way!" miasma of the RBBEAW^* generation. Luckily, instead of sugar-coating this rough pill, Anderson lets the message retain a bitter tinge (after all, Fox's antics nearly kill everyone he's ever loved, and the tension between his domestic and public personae is never entirely resolved in spite of the expected happy ending). In short, I think Anderson has finally found a way to distill the essence of his other anti-heroes (the absent father, the charismatic rake, the eloquent charlatan) into a form that both foregrounds and forgives their shortcomings. It's not that the one side or the other, animal or man, wins out in the end, but that both are combined into the contradictory, clashing force of human nature, in all its ambivalent glory.

^*Raised By Boomers, Everyone's A Winner; shamelessly stolen from McSweeney's.

On not having seen Say Anything

2010-01-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

Though my knowledge of Brat Pack features is fairly comprehensive, I've somehow missed what is arguably the cornerstone of the genre: that classic John Cusack vehicle, Say Anything. The DVD of this film was given to me by a friend about a year ago, along with the heartfelt promise that we'd get together to watch it one day. To date, this promise remains unfulfilled, and the DVD sits unopened on a shelf, attracting dust with its clingy shrink-wrap polymer.

A year of not watching a film is a lot like a year of the day before Christmas. There is quite a bit of restless poking of the outer packaging, some experimental shaking, maybe a bit of sniffing. There is, of course, also endless speculation on the contents. Is it a doll? A game? A pony? One might argue that, in this instance, I have more to go on than the utterly inscrutable boxed gift, but I disagree. Just as the size and shape of a present's packaging gives clues to its content without really limiting it in hypothetical scope, so too does what little I know about Say Anything (it's a love story, John Cusack is in it, at one point he stands outside a girl's window with a boom-box playing Peter Gabriel) reveal the shape of the film without necessarily limiting the myriad of possibilities contained within the teenage melodrama structure.

In the deepest recesses of my imagination, the plot of Say Anything unfolds in a Borgesian labyrinth, with countless twists, turns, blind corners, and dead ends. During my darker moments, the action takes on a tinge of noir -- there is a spare black-and-white shot of an alleyway, with the faint echo of heels on cold, rain-drenched cobblestone streets clattering somewhere beyond the frame. Tight three-quarter shot: an unlit cigarette hangs from the lip of a hatted stranger. Raising his hand to touch a match to the tip, his face becomes visible from under the shadowy brim. It is John Cusack. Cut to boom-box and Peter Gabriel.

Other times, when my humor is more conducive to comedy, the boom-box Peter Gabriel scene is followed, after three seconds of deadpan prep, by the sudden appearance of a projectile banana cream pie. There are even days (and I'm not proud to admit this) that I imagine the censors to have been entirely too lax with the PG13 rating, since they somehow greenlit that thoroughly titillating scene of the teenage lovers caught copulating in flagrante by an unexpected cable guy, who gamely unstraps his utility belt and joins in on the fun. (The climax of this scene is, of course, punctuated by the heartfelt warbling of Peter Gabriel.) To me, Say Anything is more than a film. It is a Schrodinger's cat. A vortex. A rabbit hole of infinite possibility.

I will never watch Say Anything.

Descartes before the horse

2010-01-08T20:07:00.000-08:00

As promised, more dubious insights-- erm, meditations on Avatar... this time with 75% more links and up to three times the geekery!

Pandora is an interesting choice of nomenclature. Though I could write a hell of a lot on the myriad of mythology- and religion-based associations (fyi, Greek Pandora = Christian Eve), I'm going to go the less literature-grad-student route and talk about video games. To those familiar with recent PlayStation 3 games, this choice to call the planet Pandora is interesting because it's also the name of the alien planet in one of last year's big, hyped-up new releases, Borderlands. In fact, while there's certainly no conscious cross-pollination at work, there's more than a titular resemblance between the Pandora of Avatar and that of Borderlands. Both are fundamentally hostile places, both are populated by a particularly nasty breed of mammal-lizard hybrids¹, and both are home to a precious resource for which many humans would happily kill (though in Borderlands, that's actually a positive thing).

Of course, this kind of environment is far from new. Most sci-fi geeks pick up on the Dune thing right away. Additionally, the friend with whom I saw Avatar -- ironically, the same girl I saw Titanic with when it first came out! -- pointed out that the Na'vi are suspiciously similar to the Aiel in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy series, since, among other cultural overlaps, they also greet each other with the phrase, "I see you."

But gaming and sci-fi/fantasy have been eager bedfellows from the start, and given the title of the film, Cameron invites the gaming comparison first and foremost². Avatar the film is, after all, one giant, breathtaking, gravity-defying cut scene. Not that I mean to downplay my own enjoyment of it by putting it in these terms. I simply mean that Cameron has tapped into the whole "immersive" idea so often talked about with reference to video games and made it a big-screen reality. I spent much of the movie with thumbs tingling for a controller, and when Jake first gets to inhabit his avatar body and takes it for a barefooted jog, I totally teared up. In a sense, we're all Jake Sullys, living dull gray lives, dragging around dull gray limbs that don't function nearly as well as we want them to, and the idea of having a fantastical meat puppet to play with is what makes first-person shooters like Borderlands³ so addictively fun. Not only are you controlling a character, but in some ways you are that character, and you live and die through his/her experience.

What appeals to me about both Cameron's concept of the avatar and the gaming equivalent is something I've been interested in since I first saw Ghost in the Shell⁴. In Avatar, it's safe to say that Jake Sully gets the easy way out of the human-or-avatar conundrum. I don't want to drop spoilery spoilers, but let's just say he gets his gigantoid blue avatar and eats it, too. In contrast, Ghost in the Shell deals with the matter at a much higher philosophical level, engaging both Descartes' evil demon problem and the larger issue of the brain in the vat. What would it really mean for someone to inhabit an avatar? Would they go crazy wondering which part of their life, the avatar-life or the human-life, is the true one? And even after they'd made their choice to be one or the other, would they forever be haunted with thoughts that maybe, just maybe, a part of their true self, their "ghost" or whathaveyou, is forever stuck on the other side of the fence?

Obviously, it's not an ontological dilemma we'll be faced with anytime soon (I can turn the damn console off anytime I want, I swear!), but as technology advances, it might. I still wonder whether I'd be the kind of intrepid soul who'd jump aboard the virtual reality/cyborg body boat (I always take this rhetorical position in arguments about the brain in the vat or cyborgs in general), or whether, probably more in line with what I actually know about my own psychic limitations, I'd be unable to go through with it.

One last word on Borderlands. I've been waxing rhapsodic over the cover art for quite some time now, and here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Aside from the lovely Mad Max nod, I think it brilliantly encapsulates a certain facet of the gaming experience that's not often discussed by serious gamers who try desperately to sell the idea of gaming as serious business; that is, the gleeful nihilism, the sheer joy of literally melting your brain cells by engaging in hours upon hours of killing pixels. Now I'm wondering if my reading it this way doesn't provide an insightful Rorschach test into my own overly-conscious consciousness, and if someone (an ex-Marine, let's say...) who'd just see it as "Cool pic, bro," wouldn't be a hell of a lot more suited for a cyborg body in the first place.

¹Compare the skag of Borderlands to the thanator from Avatar. Essentially the same chimerical beastie.

²It's a shame that the actual game tie-in to the movie turns out to be, anecdotally, a piece of shit, but I think that just goes to show how much money, technology, and personal investment are available to the movie industry and not the gaming industry, despite the fact that games are capable of meeting or exceeding movie profits.

³To the purists: yes, yes, I know. It's not quite entirely an FPS; it's also an RPG. Get over yourselves.

⁴For the anime neophyte: this series originated in manga, moved to the small screen, then spawned movies, video games, and gave the Wachowski brothers the idea for The Matrix. The premise is fairly simple: William Gibson-like cyberpunk future, cyborg bodies. The protagonist, a busty ass-kicking babe, was outfitted with a cybernetic body at age 9, and the series revolves around the question of whether or not she truly has a "ghost" or soul.

SCIMITAR (err, Avatar)

2010-01-07T22:11:00.000-08:00

I have every reason in the world to hate Avatar. For starters, there's this whole debate about Hollywood's downright uncomfortable portrayal of race, which points out that the storyline is essentially a mash-up of Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, Pocahantas, and The Last Samurai. Which is true. There's also this argument from Slate's Movie Club, from which I quote this pithiest of insights:

One of Avatar's many unintentional ironies (they have to be unintentional, right?) is how, even though it's about the use of technology to transcend technology and return to a noble precapitalist Eden, the movie itself is a triumph of both technology and capitalism.

Amen. These are just a few of the critical strands that raise my hackles and make me want to dismiss the whole thing as a corporate monstrosity whose sole purpose is to sell Big Macs to obese suburban youngsters. Oh, and let's not forget this. On a whim, I just Googled "Avatar orientalism," and this was the first hit (note to self: stop worrying so much if your mom/PhD adviser/landlord reads your blog and just make it available to search engines, already -- at this very minute, someone out there is desperately Googling "falling Paul de Man strip-mall" and coming up woefully empty-handed!). That blog post doesn't specifically mention Chateaubriand or his seminal work in the native-girl-makes-good genre, Atala, but when I first saw the splashy posters of Zoe Saldana all pliant and seductive-eyed, I immediately thought of that, mixed in with the Persians from 300, and how everyone got all up in arms about their overt sexualization -- but, of course, a girl being sexualized in Hollywood is like falling off a log, so.

As I said, I have every reason to hate Avatar. Every reason to walk out halfway through when I went to watch it tonight, in all its ridiculous 3D glasses glory. But, no. I sat through the whole thing -- and grinned like a blithering idiot through all two hours and forty minutes of it.

Here's the thing that no review of Avatar will tell you about Avatar: spoiler alert! it's about American cultural mythology. I know, I know... you might protest that I always reduce things to American cultural mythology, possibly because I still don't feel fully 100% integrated into your Borg or whatever, and that's just how I happen to approach your strange, inscrutable culture. But this time, I really mean it. Avatar is a glorious paean to America's perception of itself, in full-on technicolor rainbow capitalist mass-market new hoozit splendor. And guess what? Spoiler alert! America is pretty fucking cool.

But let's be clear here. There are ways of showcasing America's perception of itself that lack any self-awareness or sophistication, but unwittingly expose the ugly reality behind blind, narcissistic jingoism. Avatar is a far more nuanced exploration of the hidden binary framework behind America The Allegedly Beautiful, and in a way this answers some of the criticism about the storyline being dated and redundant. At heart, Avatar does what all those other movies (Dances with Wolves, espcially) do, but much more balls-out extravagantly, by merging the two archetypes nearest and dearest to American hearts: cowboys and Indians. And somewhere in that unstable melange, a nation was born -- or, perhaps more accurately, a nation's belief about itself, which is no less powerful.

Allow me to elaborate. The main character of the film, Jake Sully, is a typical American cowboy. Now, when I think of the archetypal American cowboy, I don't necessarily think Clint Eastwood or John Wayne; no, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s, and the first mental image that cowboy-as-archetype conjures up in my mind is that scene from Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know the one. Indy is in the marketplace, fighting all sorts of devilish Arabic bad guys (I'll hold off on the orientalist critique on this one, because it's fucking Indiana Jones, okay?), and just as he's done demolishing all of the lesser minions, the big boss with the scary swords comes out to play. Big Boss does an impressive sword routine, almost certainly taught to him by his father, and his father's father, and etc. etc. And then Indy pulls out a pistol and shoots him in the face^*.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an American cowboy. He has no time for silly rituals, costumes, or tribal dances. He's not going to play by centuries-long rules, because he recognizes their inherent absurdity. And that, like it or not, is why America is on top of the game of global domination. It doesn't play by the rules. It doesn't really care about your Tree of Life, or your fuzzy-wuzzy quasi-Taoist global ecology movement, and especially not about your stupid glow-in-the-dark Ancestors. It just comes along, shoots you in the face, and gets what it wants for it and its own. And that's who Jake Sully is. He breaks the rules. Spoiler alert! He tames the big fucking dragon that nobody else can tame, because instead of cowering in fear, he just flies a little higher and jumps on the back of that sucker. And hell, that's obviously why the hottest chick in the village falls for him. Why else would she risk life, limb, and tribe for some ghostwalking schmuck? Why? Because we girls love our Dirty Harrys and our Indiana Joneses, and all those other untameable bad boys who might break our hearts, and who just need some sweet, sensual, monogamous-for-life-because-the-Tree-of-Life-SAID-so lovin'. Or so I've heard.

But, obviously, the cowboy thing is not all there is to Jake Sully. And, as I've mentioned, it's always that noble savage, doe-eyed native girl -- from Atala to Pocahantas -- who's instrumental in coaxing it out. Because the cowboy thing is not all there is to America, either. America loves its unrepentant opportunists, but it also loves the underdog. Again, see here. I'm not sure if this is the product of a long-standing colonial/continental inferiority complex, but there's definitely a hidden streak in the American popular imagination that gets off on thumbing its nose to "the man." The scrappy underdog versus slick establishment dynamic is omnipresent in Hollywood film, perhaps nowhere more clearly than that other great Harrison Ford franchise, Star Wars. The battle between Empire and rebellion has been the building-block of countless features, both big and small screen (the brilliant Firefly being an outstanding representation of the latter), and this dynamic relies to some extent on the sheer, ridiculous hopelessness of the battle (arrows and dragons and Nature against machine guns, yeah sure) but most importantly on the inevitable triumph of blithe idealism, no matter how absurd. And it's this tree-hugging, grassroots-network-forming, Obama-electing, kinder-gentler facet of America that saves it from being a complete monster. Because while America may steal your land and plow over your civilization, it will still continue to offer its children the attractive alternative of saying to hell with it, jumping ship, and going native. All the unobtainium in the world (seriously, UNOBTAINIUM; surreptitiously add that to the list of reasons why I should hate this movie) can't buy the things Jake Sully really wants. He wants to live free, to fly, to run, and to sex his hot 8-foot-tall blue girlfriend. He doesn't want to be generalissimo of the space brigade, or the head honcho of a big multinational corporation, or an orthodontist. He doesn't even really want to be chieftain of the Na'vi tribe. What he really wants is what this movie sells to you for a measly 10 bucks (with free 3D glasses! Does not include the price of popcorn): visceral pleasure. And on that front, it delivers. In buckets.

This is getting about as absurdly long and bloated as your average James Cameron fare, so I'll leave possible talk of the geeky-gamer implications (aka my favorite topic ever: CYBORG BODIES) for a future entry and close by giving the final word to Science. Sort of. According to Google, one hit of acid costs about 10 dollars. Avatar cost about 200 million dollars to make. So, if 200,000 people go see this movie instead of taking a hit of acid -- which is essentially what this tripped-out glo-light thrill-ride accomplishes -- the US economy will actually benefit, because that money will leave the realm of untaxed under-the-table transactions. And this is why James Cameron spending the GDP of a small nation on one movie makes sense. Yes. At least, I think this is how economics works. I don't know; I just read books.

^*May not be actual shot in the face: this scene comes to you from the working memory of my eight-year-old self

Tranche de vie

2010-01-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

There is exactly one (1) good thing about New England winters. It is as follows: after the sun has set and the sky is dark, there is an occasional perfect melding of light, nature, and man-made contrivance, such that a smooth carpet of snow -- virgin white, totally unsullied by the vulgar gaping cavities of footprints -- is gently illuminated by the powdery pink-and-blue rococo tinges of strip-mall neon. It's as if these exact hues, which had just minutes earlier been present in the twilit wintry sky, bled out of the heavens and into the very earth itself, leaving the former black and blustery and the latter quietly luminescent.

Other than that, New England winters can pretty much suck it.

Of all the many affronts to human dignity that this world of ours offers, none are quite so painful as the remnants of heavy and prolonged snowfall. It is only then that the veil of modern convenience is ripped away from us, and we are exposed to the reality of a universe that has no concern for our safety, well-being, or sock dryness. It is also this time of year that highlights the reality of America's pedestrian existence as the halfhearted sham that it is. Sure, in summer, we can pretend that it's no problem to take public transit and trundle around to get where needs going. But in winter, all you need do to realize your pitiful place in the navigational hierarchy is look at the sad, neglected state of most sidewalks: caked in the yellow-gray detritus of snow plows, under which lurks the menacing frozen ooze of ankle-breaking ice. In stark contrast, a mere hour after the flakes start falling, the roads are as meticulously salted as the hallowed ground of Carthage. Thanks a lot, "America's Walking City!"

Obviously, I took my first long snow walk today, and obviously, I fell. Of the many affronts to human dignity that this world of ours offers, the absolute hands-down worst is slipping and falling on ice. Actually, probably the very, very worst moment in all of existence is that infinitesimally short instant when you realize that the ground you've stepped on is not the solid footing your boot was searching for. You know what's coming, and though you might splay out your arms to steady yourself, or make some sort of "oh oh ohgawd" noise to draw the attention of helpful passers-by or, at the very least, friendly dogs who might summon help, in the end you are powerless to stop your body's downward momentum. Paul de Man, with his esoteric interpretations of Schlegel and Benjamin, links falling with irony -- according to him, just as the fall makes us momentarily terrified that we will henceforth exist in a perpetual state of falling, so, too, does one instance of irony open up the possibility that everything around us is ironic and therefore chaotic, meaningless, absurd. Every time I fall, all I can think of is de Man's smug Belgian face breaking into an "I told you so!" grin, and then shuffling off to go mutter something pejorative about the Jews. Well, screw you, too, de Man. I like Benjamin better, anyway.

Діаспора

2010-01-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

Let the record state: I love subcultures. Big ones, small ones, ones as big as your head. I love the simultaneous exclusivity and community-building of flashily displayed signifiers, be they dyed hair, Ed Hardy T-shirts, Timberland boots, or LOLspeak. My favorite thing about spending time in large, open areas through which herds of people migrate -- airports, train stations, mall food courts -- is watching the unspoken interaction of all these signifiers, the chaotic jostling of colors and brands. I especially love the zeal showcased by the younger members of the species, whose entire bodies, in spite of an insistent outward display of boredom, act like quivering antennae, submitting a dozen urgent signals to everyone in range: Hello, world. I may look young, but I'm actually really into The Clash, and also I like old-school gaming systems, but not ironically, unlike this SpongeBob T-shirt, which is sort of ironic, but if you look closely, you'll see there's actually a delicate vein of innocent, childlike love, too, which you'll find I also exhibit in relationships, and you may find charming if you're the Prince Charming type. But as evidenced by this studded belt, I'm obviously too smart to fall for the Disney princess cliche, because I'm actually very mature for my age. Even though it has very little to do with what I'm working on for my PhD, my favorite work done in an academic setting has been stuff on subcultures, and despite feeling somewhat dated, the Bibles of my inner bibliography include such sine qua nons as Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus (unabashed shill for Lipstick Traces, the wackiest, most engrossing pseudo-academic, quasi-Marxist, mostly-memoiristic cultural study ever published by Harvard University Press).

...which is probably why I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to diaspora communities; aka, the reified remains of old foreign subcultures.

I've never seen it cohesively stated, but I'm almost certain that someone has already made the comparison between marginal ethnic communities and contemporary subcultures. The similarities are too seductive: both arise as a product of a too-broad and thus somewhat alienating dominant culture. For ethnic communities, it's the big multiethnic empires of the past two centuries (which is why Bavarians, with their Weißwurst and lederhosen, seem so much more authentically German than the cosmopolitan Berliners, giving us two German archetypes in the American popular consciousness -- quaint, robust lederhosen-clad peasants and soulless Bauhaus urbanites in black turtle-necks), and for subcultures, it's the global juggernaut of bourgeois conformity and capitalist mass culture. Also, both are created by a system of signifiers that turn the dominant hierarchies on their heads -- for example, ethnic communities subvert the official state religion by injecting it with old pagan practices, and subcultures revel in taking ordinary objects (sneakers, safety pins) and turning them into signs of rebellion. And, finally, both are selectively celebrated and repressed, according to the political climate of the day. Sometimes, it's in the dominant culture's favor to trot out the subculture as a symbol of diversity and freedom, and other times the subculture represents too much of a challenge to the universalizing rhetoric of the dominant culture and needs to be stamped out. Sometimes, the time-table for these cultural mood swings is incredibly narrow: one day, Stalin is singing the praises of the diverse Soviet nationalities, and the next, it's terror and the Gulag for Jews, Gypsies, and Ukrainians. Similarly, one day the Putin administration is heaping scorn on the cultural degeneracy of the Western-influenced Russian rap phenomenon, and the next day, this:

So, okay, the affinities are legion, but what complicates the matter is when ethnic communities emigrate and form diaspora communities, which are a strange hybrid of the ethnic and cultural categories. Take, for instance, this New York Times article on Veselka, the East Village Ukrainian diner. There are repeated mentions of hippies and beatniks who used to frequent the place in the 60s -- ostensibly, for the Counterculture Grand Central location and good, cheap food. But, obviously, I think there's more to it than that. I think subcultures naturally gravitate to ethnic joints because their signifying systems are extremely compatible. Moreover, these days, both the New York subcultures and Veselka have gone mainstream; the place was featured in the abysmal Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, for god's sake. Age-old story: something a few people love becomes something marketed to the masses, and all of a sudden you get Michael Cera selling you a Hollywood hipster fairy-tale.

Which brings me to my last point about the similarities between ethnic and contemporary subcultures: an uncomfortable dynamic of authenticity and artifice. Contemporary subcultures, as constantly evolving, living-breathing things, tend to cycle through signifiers at a dizzying rate. While it's fun to trace their trajectories (the reggae of the British slums moving to high-class London art students moving to American rock bands moving to Bob Marley posters on 1 out of 3 college students' walls), it's hard to ignore the artifice behind the whole subcultural enterprise. For instance, there may be some small percentage of early adopters or true aficionados who could argue that reggae was their music, or that punk was their style, but for the majority of the members of these subcultures, it was theft, pure and simple. Of course, that's part of the fun -- would dyeing your hair electric red and pretending to be an alien be so captivating if it weren't for the underlying acknowledgment of ridiculousness, sham, performance? But artifice and ethnic community don't mesh quite so well. Part of the marginalized ethnic project is, again, to continually insist on the authenticity of its cultural experience, in contrast to the artifice of the dominant culture. In diaspora communities, this insistence on authenticity continues to play out -- except the dominant culture is now American mass culture, with the ethnic acting as the marker of authenticity against the conformity of corporate capitalism. See: Gogol Bordello.

As someone with a toe in both worlds, I find the overlap equal parts fun and disturbing. Fun because, hey, my personality was forged in ethnic kitsch, and there will always be some part of me that gets off on foreignness as elite, exclusive subculture. But also disturbing, because this just hammers home how tendentious culture really is, and how insignificant ethnicity really is, except in self-deluding fantasy. And these days, I'm more comfortable with that level of self-delusion in the form of an American teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt, rather than a folk costume, if for no other reason than the disposability and mutability of the former as compared to the latter. But maybe that's just the impending citizenship test talking.

Fuck the police: three ways

2010-01-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

In Postwar (a breathtakingly thorough overview of European history since WWII), Tony Judt makes an interesting claim about the progression of popular culture in the 60s and 70s. According to Judt, immediately following the violent, radicalized, leftist youth movements of 1969 -- the French student movements, American civil rights, second-wave feminism, various Marxist and pseudo-Marxist organizations -- came the much more solipsistic, hedonistic wave of the Sexual Revolution. Judt is fairly skeptical of the purity of the former trend, but the latter is clearly even more of a problem in his eyes, representing as it does the full-on self-indulgence and navel-gazing of the adolescent Baby Boomer.

While I was reading Postwar over the summer, "Mrs. Officer," that Lil Wayne song, was on heavy rotation on the radio. Arguably the best lyric in that song is, of course: "And all she want me to do is fuck the police." (Ha ha because it's about wanting to have sex with a female police officer, get it?) So, with Judt in mind, I wonder if it's not so outlandish to say that radicalism is generally replaced by a decadent period of sex and solipsism. When NWA first sang "fuck the police," it was all about violent machismo mixed with political subtext, heavily in line with the aesthetic principle of a Weather Underground^* or Black Panthers-style organization, but already declawed enough to venture into the mainstream. Today, when Lil Wayne sings his version of "fuck the police," it's self-conscious, childishly naughty, and totally harmless -- on par with the saccharine sex of early disco or the stage antics of Sir Elton John.

When I first thought of this brilliant cultural analogy, I saw the Lil Wayne "fuck the police" moment in Judt's terms: a degenerate version of the slightly (only slightly) more "pure" NWA moment. But when I was reminded of it by Ryan over brunch today, his argument for the Lil Wayne version really stuck. Ryan was much more willing to give self-indulgence the benefit of the doubt, and I can see his point about it being more honest with respect to the whole enterprise of pop music in general. By the time NWA came out with that song, rap was already appearing on MTV, marketed toward a suburban, white audience, and thriving on the manufactured controversy. Lil Wayne's whole "Young Money" project, in contrast, is unapologetic in its anti-topicality. From start to finish, it's pure, childish fantasy -- youth culture at its most honest and, arguable, at its best.

Which brings me to "Fuck the Police" mark 3: the 2001 song by J Dilla. So, a new iteration of the cycle through a return to radical, politically-conscious machismo? The circle of life, it moves us all?

^*Ironically, but further bolstering my rap dichotomy, the "Weathermen" moniker is being used today by a contemporary rap group recycling the NWA-like sound and ideology.

Edumacation

2010-01-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

Kids want "practical" college majors; smart people collectively roll eyes.

Disclaimer: I'm coming at this from an elite Ivy League angle. In theory, I can see how more trade-school-type majors might actually be great for kids who aren't shooting for upper corporate management or presidential candidacy. In theory. In practice, I'm pretty sure "practical" majors at state universities will become the next decade's "Computer Science" (too broad, totally useless) or "Animal Husbandry" (too specialized, totally useless), and will just end up swindling and short-changing an underqualified, overeager, superfluous workforce.

I hear this kind of stuff coming from my students all the time -- they're all experts on the national rankings of every major and the star professors of every field, rattling off the pros and cons ("Econ will eat your soul, but you'll be rich," "nobody in their right mind majors in Art," "the only good thing about VES is free pizza") like talking heads on cable news networks. I figured this was just an Ivy thing, but I guess there's also a generational difference at work. When I went to college, I had absolutely no clue what rankings were. I was more interested in the New Orleans music scene, Mardi Gras, and, as a distant third, less-commonly taught languages. It also never entered into my head to plan a major that fed into a career. I took classes because I thought they were interesting, challenging, or both. Not to say this attitude toward higher learning was the norm or that it's actually ideal; it presupposes a certain personality type -- absent-minded professor, let's say -- that works for naturally grad-school-minded individuals, not ambitious go-getters who keep the world functioning. But it still dampens my spirits every time I hear a student with mind-blowing writing skills and an impeccable aesthetic eye express doubt in a Humanities major, because it's not highly ranked and won't set him/her on a career conveyor belt like neuro-bio-econo-whatever. In my darker moments, I wonder what's the point of teasing these kids with poetry or Russian novels, if it's all just a distraction from problem sets and lab reports?

The biggest problem with the "practical" undergrad major at a top-ten school, though, is that it doesn't actually teach anything. A class with 300 students, four TFs, and one dazzling star professor has all the heuristic sophistication of a feeding tube. Information goes in, and the same information, hastily chewed and poorly digested, churns right back out. But what use is information these days? Anyone can be a temporary expert in anything, and anyone can write (or assemble, or buy) a paper on any popular subject. On the surface, everyone wins: the star professor promotes his/her new book, and the students all get As (or, at the very least, B-, the "gentleman's F" of the Ivy Leagues). In reality, though, these kids increasingly think they're experts in their field and expect to be treated and paid accordingly, when they've just barely scraped the scummy surface of reality with one baby-pink toenail.

In a class with ten students on a subject that isn't "practical" and popular, the game totally changes. Instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle of jargon, they're suddenly expected to think, rethink, and, in the process, generate the themes of the course on their own -- something that many students coming from conveyor-belt fields are totally incapable of doing. Not to rehash the somewhat tired arguments of this article by William Deresiewicz, but there's definitely a tendency toward groupthink, playing it safe, not rocking the boat at major universities, and given the radical, idealistic history of the American institution of higher learning, it's dispiriting to see the Polo-wearing contingent confidently taking over. I mean, they've been there all along, but at least they knew about Machiavelli, Marx, and Matisse along with marketing.

On anti-intellectualism

2010-01-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

I have this problem. I think of it as my Savonarola side, named for the fifteenth-century monk who called for the bonfire of the Renaissance vanities and made famous the phrase "Vanitas vanitatum," which I kind of want tattooed somewhere on my body (Irony Win). The Savonarola side of me often kicks in late at night, after I've had a few drinks and have managed to extract myself, whether physically or mentally, from whatever social entanglement has come my way -- dinner with friends, rollicking house party, or even quiet evening alone with the husband. Suddenly, an internal switch flips, and all I can think is how incredibly repetitive and futile are all the conversations that human beings tend to take up: politics, religion, art, life. Everything becomes a tasteless gray mush of words, chewed and rechewed till stripped of all vital juices. And this ruminant cud gets passed from one mouth to the next with such revoltingly gleeful self-importance that I just want to drop out of the human project entirely, go live in a cave or a newspaper lined trash-bag cocoon somewhere far from the madness. I know how trite and childish it sounds, but, unfortunately, I also know some very un-trite and decidedly un-childish folks who had the same idea. Diogenes, among others.

The funny thing is, my religion-obsessed father has expressed an eerily similar sentiment. During a drunken rant at last summer's family gathering, he said he was glad to know there were acetic monks living in caves somewhere, because their piety was probably keeping the world from going straight to apocalyptic hell. When pressed on the matter ("If you like them so much, why don't you become one?"), he said he wished he could, but was just too weak -- read: too enmeshed in the meager pleasures of the bourgeois lifestyle, the regular paycheck and modest house and nuclear family. Well, minus the fundamentalist religious streak, I tend to feel the same way. If I had an ounce more testicular courage, I'd give the finger to my secure career path and go herd sheep in Argentina, because, at heart, I don't have much more faith in the purity of the organized intellectual pursuit than I do in corporate law or investment banking. Unfortunately, the play-it-safe bourgeois in me always seems to win, and it's only in dark moments of self-flagellation that I let Savonarola come out and put a match to my personal stacks of crepe and tissue tchotchkes, the pretty intellectual idols I've accumulated and used to decorate my inner chambers.

It's not that I hate intellectual endeavors, or the people who pursue them. I have massive respect for those few brave souls who manage to combine intellectual proclivities with an equally strong capacity for enthusiasm and love toward their arbitrary field of choice. Those are, hands down, my favorite kind of people. The problem is, in spite of everything, I've never felt like one of them. I can't quite get myself to see the forest for the trees, and the one big tree of knowledge is that we're all going to fucking turn to worm food one fine day, so why even bother. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

In other news, Happy New Year!

Triumph of the shill

2009-12-31T10:20:00.000-08:00

My first, visceral reaction to watching Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was: this is awful. My second, more intellectualized but still fairly visceral reaction was: This is The Marriage of Maria Braun without any of the psychological subtlety. Tarantino, never one to hide his influences, steals with gusto from the visual and cinematographic aspects of Fassbinder -- he, too, features a pretty, predatory blond protagonist (Shoshanna) fond of indulging in spectacular acts of cruelty, wearing red, and taking a black lover for scandalous social effect (sadly, it still feels "scandalous" to include an interracial relationship in a major motion picture, simply by virtue of the fact that, outside of Tarantino films, it never happens). Exhibit A:

Maria Braun

Shoshanna Dreyfus

This much of Tarantino's borrowing is fairly obvious. What's less obvious to me is why he chooses to take this particular character from German postwar cinema and refashion her in his favorite geeky comic-book-nerd revenge fantasy role. I mean, it's clear why he needed the strong female lead. As a story, the whole "Basterds" shtick is the epitome of one-dimensional, something even the one-dimensional story king himself could never pull off. It's one thing to pitch "band of Nazi-killing Jews who win the war!!" to a well-lubricated Hollywood party crowd, and another thing entirely to translate this into a film that doesn't come off as grossly distasteful and/or totally ridiculous. True story: I once read a children's book about a little American girl who hears about all the terrible things happening in Germany during World War Two, flies to Berlin, and shares a sandwich with Hitler on a park bench, thereby convincing him that he should stop being mean to the Jews. I'm pretty sure Q.T. read this book, too.

So, obviously, to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of indecency and infantilism, there needed to be a truly human face in this film, a likable, sympathetic face -- and not zany character-actor/incomprehensible accented Brad Pitt or "The Bear Jew." But why Maria Braun, an archetype of ruthless femininity and an allegory for the ambivalent nature of German industriousness? To me, there are two possible reasons. First, ruthless femininity is clearly what gets Tarantino off -- and not just the traditional plucky resolve of the Hollywood "tough girl," but the downright sexualized sadism of a Shoshanna or a Beatrix Kiddo. In the strongly polarized-by-gender world of the film, not all revenge fantasies are created equal. The men indulge in more traditional skirmishes and espionage, while the women (both Shoshanna and Bridget von Hammersmark) use their bodies to penetrate into the heart of the enemy lines and destroy them from within. What Tarantino seems to have missed from Fassbinder, though, is that the body is not like a gun or a sword; it tends to carry the imprint of violence on itself much more corrosively. Maria Braun is brought down by the very same venomous hatred that propels her throughout the film. Over the course of Fassbinder's film, she transforms from an admirably courageous survivor to a soulless monster, willing to devour or destroy everything in her path. Of course, for Shoshanna, this is moot -- she goes down in a convenient blaze of glory, probably because Tarantino was uninterested in exploring the more complex dimensions of his own project. And therein lies the trouble with revenge fantasies, and especially historically motivated ones. What, in the end, distinguishes the gleeful killing spree of The Basterds' death-squad from that of the Nazis? Where does one draw the line between romanticized freedom fighter and guerrilla insurgent? Between fantasized/sexual and real, historical violence? In the opening scene of the film, we are shown the devious methods by which a Nazi commander finds and machine-guns a group of Jews hiding in a French farm house -- after watching this gut-wrenchingly real slaughter, it's impossible not to see the stylized slaughter of the Nazis at the hands of the fictional Basterds as a chilling reminder of how actually capable we are to commit unspeakable acts against fellow human beings, and how that's not necessarily something that needs to be cheered for.

And, speaking of history, I think this explains the second connection between Maria Braun and Shoshanna -- the national allegory. In one climactic scene, Shoshanna is shown painting streaks of red on her cheeks, which highlights both The Basterds' self-proclaimed "Apache" fighting tactics and the brief mention of Karl May, the German writer of tremendously popular schlocky novels set in the Wild West. Contrasting this with the Socialist Realism representation of nationality in the film-within-a-film, Nation's Pride, Tarantino makes an interesting analogy between the two kinds of national imagining -- the official political dimension, which emphasizes heroicism, and the unofficial, popular dimension, which revels in rooting for the scrappy underdog. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, the former version of the nation is obviously suspect from the start, with all the heroic men in society reduced to cripples or ghosts. But the latter version, the one Tarantino suggests is so quintessentially American (or, more precisely, Hollywood, which for Q.T. is pretty much the same thing), is shown to be just as potentially damaging and false. Maria is the scrappy underdog, but there's no way a viewer can call her ruthless social climbing a good or heroic thing, not even in the anti-hero sense. In fact, what Maria shows is the dark underbelly of the German national myth -- the fabled ability of the German people to work with efficiency and zeal to achieve a goal, be it the rebuilding of a nation after catastrophic war losses, or the eradication of an entire ethnic minority in the name of "progress."

Unfortunately, instead of deconstructing his own national myth with the same level of sophistication, Tarantino blunders right into the most egregiously distasteful stereotype of national self-imagining, the very stuff that Fox News is made of: the great American savior complex. Instead of going beyond the hackneyed cowboy aesthetic of a Karl May, Tarantino celebrates it with the same blaring fanfare that led George Bush to hang that unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" poster -- another act of imagined national triumph, equally flawed and, in the end, downright laughable.

Sinema

2009-12-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

Now that it's officially winter break, I've dusted off my painfully neglected Netflix account and restarted my love affair with foreign cinema. It's on!

The other night, I ate gruyere on ciabatta baguette as I watched this:

First of all, can I just say that almost everything I see written about this movie is dead wrong? Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage... Um, did we watch the same movie? Sexual rampage? Suzanne, the main character, has two or three on-camera relationships (no sex shown) with boys, meant to imply that she's a goddamn teenager with a head full of hormones and a troubled relationship with monogamy. She's hardly banging hobos for kicks, y'all. The Netflix blurb is even worse, and makes it sound like a movie about child abuse. Again, what? Of all the themes to focus on -- growing up, being sexually precocious, dealing with your parents' divorce, dealing with puberty -- who decides that the reason the sweet little girl suddenly becomes a turboslut is because she gets smacked by her dad?

At any rate, French cinema is kind of ridiculous. All the reviewers also laud this film as being super edgy and original ("Pialat is the French Cassavetes!"), except it's sort of a self-conscious retelling of 200 Blows and every Francois Sagan novel ever (especially Bonjour Tristesse). Also, the Freudianism is overwhelming and painfully heavy-handed ("Ha ha ha, when he says 'moment,' it sounds just like 'mommy!'"). Everyone is in love with Suzanne -- her dad, her brother, her brother's friends -- but Suzanne only really loves her dad, who's selectively protective and ultimately a bombastic, self-important turd (played by the director, of course, ho hum). Her mom is the menopausal, hysterical wicked witch of the west. I'd be more upset by this schematic treatment of familial relationships (again, all the reviews I've read are really into the "painfully real" family dynamics) -- except this is essentially exactly how my aunt's family functioned. She married young, had two adorable blond daughters, had a terrible relationship with her husband, went totally hysterical nutzoid, husband left for another woman, daughters who were already painfully damaged by years of bad family mojo proceeded to go off the deep end. I've seen that exact look of hollow trauma in their faces, and I can't help link their desperate and predatory relationships with men to the missing father figure in their lives. So, I spent the entire movie-watching experience wavering between "this is stupid, no family really works like this" and "well, shit, maybe Pialat really is onto something." I'm still trying to work that out.

Anyway! Do you know Sandrine Bonnaire?

Because you should. She's sort of the Lindsay Lohan of the 80s French cinema scene, except instead of starring in some terrible stripper movie and then dipping back down into the cocaine spiral as her "comeback," Bonnaire did one of the best, most gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing movies of all time:

She's fantastic in both, of course, but I love her in this film. Her honest, sensual, but slightly haunted face works so well as a canvas for all those familiar teenage-girl emotions to which we of the fairer sex can, I'm sure, all relate -- wanting sex, feeling dirty for wanting sex, wanting sex even more for feeling dirty for wanting sex... At one point, the line "I'm not 15 anymore" is uttered, and it just hits home. So. Hard. God, that incredible dilation of time between the ages of 13 and 21, when a year can seem like an eternity of hard-fought experience. Which, I guess, is ultimately the biggest problem with this film, because in true French fashion, it tries to allegorize this localized temporal experience in a really dumb way. Pialat makes "I'm bored, I'm fed up, I want to kill myself" sound like an existential statement, rather than the typically tempestuous psyche of a prematurely jaded teenager. But for those of us who have been there, it's both a delicious vindication (I wasn't the only teenage turboslut!) and a confrontation with the little monster we once were (only once...?). If only for that (and Sandrine Bonnaire!), definitely worth a watch.

Girls, games, grenades

2009-12-29T13:18:00.000-08:00

Naturally, just minutes after I bare my geeky girl-gamer^* soul to the resonant echo chamber of the Internet, I read this. Synopsis for the tl;dr crowd: old TED talk video from the ringleader of the Purple Moon game series, marketer of "horizontal" rather than "hierarchical" games for girls, inspires Jezebel contributor and avid girl-gamer to rehash all the problematic talking points of the Purple Moon "games for girls" project.

Now, there are a lot of obvious things that irk me about this video -- most glaringly, the idea of "giving girls what they want!" that totally ignores the by-now practically sacrosanct Judith Butler et al. literature on gender as a social construct. Or, in layman's terms: exactly what is it about pink, unicorns, and tiaras -- or, for that matter, "horizontal social bonds" -- that's "naturally" feminine, and how do we know it's not just the "natural" product of a century of Disneyian social conditioning, from cradle to grave? O hai, obvious feminist social theory is obvious!

No, but what really gets to me about "games for girls" is something else. It's an argument that's seeped into the well of our collective conscious even more insidiously, so much so that nobody seems to notice when they're drinking the Kool-aid. It's the idea that girls need didactic games, because girls are special, delicate creatures that need to be nurtured and protected. They need to be taught how to navigate those tricky social bonds (despite the fact that they're naturally good at it...?), to be guided to make the right choices and be happy, friendly, and popular. I can see how this is a more delicate matter to discuss; in spite of the many leaps and bounds our civilization has taken in the past century-long race to gender equality, girls are still limping behind boys, getting tangled up and drowning in the swamps of body dismorphia, beauty magazines, and the Industrial Wedding Complex. Nobody wants another generation of starvers, purgers, cutters, hysterics, and bridezillas. But to suggest that video games are the proper media for conveying a healthy social message is to overlook the decades of actual reality: most people play video games to transgress boundaries (to kill, steal, speed, fly), not to reinforce them. And to suggest that girls need this kind of nurturing more than boys, who obviously seem to do alright in our society despite hours of mind-numbing, gore-splattering shooting and fighting games -- well, ma'am, tha's just plain sexist!

It is my humble and, I think, empirically-justified opinion as a girl gamer that this is all the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what video games actually are. To me, video games are the epitome of a medium that actively challenges any kind of essentialist assumptions about reality, showing that our morality is (ba-ba-BAH!) a construct that we're happy to set aside in order to frag the hell of our best friend and get that sweet 10-person kill streak. They're an escape, a fantasy, a gleeful descent into the depths of the Jungian abyss. Everything else is just well-marketed educational software. And as great as Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego were, I certainly hope no child of mine, girl or boy, will ever be satisfied with that kind of light didactic fare.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be off "horizontally" bonding with some zombies. Via chainsaw.

^*With all the propers going to this lady and her aggressive deconstruction of the term... but I'll still use it, because goddamn do I love me some alliteration.

Top tens (cont.)

2009-12-29T09:07:00.000-08:00

Top ten gaming moments of the decade (in chronological order):

1. My earliest young adult memory of obsessive gaming was being glued to my high school boyfriend's computer, surviving on a diet of honey-roasted peanuts and playing Warcraft 3 into the wee hours of the morning. The undead campaign was my hands-down favorite. A love was born.

2. By now, it's a dude-bro cliche, but when Halo first came out, it was a revelation. My senior year of high school, I spent my entire spring break playing through a cooperative campaign with a bunch of college boys in their communal living room, where the occasional Mississippi cockroach the size of a dollar bill would blunder across the carpet and cause a three-minute stomping frenzy. But even that didn't stop us from playing.

3. During a short hiatus between killing aliens and killing demons, I got really into The Longest Journey, a quirky adventure/puzzle game. The fantasy element was okay, but I was really in it for the proto-cyberpunk. Also, I will forever be a sucker for games with hot, spunky female protagonists.

4. Two words: Diablo 2. I started in high school, and in college I got my own Battlenet account. Ever faithful to the unwritten rule that girl gamers play girl characters, I played a sorceress with a badass frost skill tree. My favorite was the jungle level -- probably because this was the year I was taking my first lit theory courses, and I liked that the cute baddies in tribal masks were called fetishes.

5. Quake 3 was just a recreational hobby until my boyfriend downloaded a Tank Girl skin for me. After that, the hours between classes were mainly spent annihilating things with a rocket launcher. It's a wonder I ever got any homework done.

6. Morrowind returned me to immersive role-playing games. I've probably wasted a solid week of my life jumping around Vivec to get my acrobatics up to 100. Again, when in god's name did I find time to read all those Russian novels?

7. If ever anyone has cause to doubt that I am a tremendous dork, I'd like to state for the record that, in college, I was an active member of a Dance Dance Revolution club. To this day, whenever I hear a J-pop song, I still have the urge to perform a combo.

8. Naaaaa na na na na nuh-nuh-nuh Katamari Damacyyyyy!

9. During the inauguration of Barack Obama, I was flipping between televised footage of downtown D.C. and the city's deserted post-apocalyptic doppleganger in Fallout 3, where my character, a pink-haired gunslinger named Precious, was busy blowing the heads off slavers. Truly, an historic occasion.

10. Tie game! I currently love everything about Borderlands, aka Diablo with Guns -- the spunky girl character with the elemental-heavy skill tree, the slash-and-burn looting game concept, the comic-y Mad Max aesthetic. But last night, as I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, I realized that I'd been to that exact plantation. Neato. Also, what a mind-blowingly perfect FEMA allegory. Also also, I still love the undead.

Top tens

2009-12-28T17:08:00.000-08:00

Top ten meals of the decade (in chronological order):

1. Making truffles and egg nog on New Year's with my high school boyfriend -- my first true gourmet culinary experience. The ganache stained my favorite pair of jeans, which I continued to wear well into college and only recently threw away. Every time I saw the stain, I thought about that night: licking chocolate off my fingers, offering sips of spiked nog to my boyfriend's tee-totaling Southern Baptist parents, then staying in his room until three in the morning. Too, too sweet.

2. I was meeting my college boyfriend's parents -- American diplomats working in China -- for the first time. We went to Martinique on Magazine for lunch, and it was there that I was introduced to the glories of the warm duck confit salad. It almost made me forget my desperate attempt to hide my eyebrow piercing and sound friendly and intelligent. It was also the first time I ever saw anyone take a sip of the wine that had just been brought to the table... and refuse the bottle. I didn't even know you could do that.

3. The defunct Gaia in Ithaca, NY, where, for the first time in my life, I had a three-course, fifty-dollar meal. I remember the dessert wine the most fondly. It tasted like the thick, heady mysteries of adulthood.

4. The first time I had Sonny's, a one-room barbecue shack in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, run by a four-fingered black man named Roosevelt Nichols (RIP). I can still smell the smoke under my fingernails and in my hair. Every subsequent time, I ordered the half chicken, and every time, I gave up using a fork.

5. My first crawfish boil, in a tiny trailer-park town on the Louisiana/Mississippi border. I wore a short red miniskirt and ravenously took down a whole miniature civilization of boiled spicy crustaceans; later, some of the members of my boyfriend's family privately expressed concern that I might "break his heart." After drinking five Bud Lites and still being sober, we went out for birthday-cake-flavored sno-balls. Sadly, I never did get to go fishing.

6. Senior year, oysters on the half shell at Cooter Brown's, after a day of playing hookey and wandering around the French Quarter on the arm of my beloved Southern gentleman. I bit into one -- salty, cold, delicious -- and spit out a pearl. The coda to my checkered college experience.

7. Homemade Thanksgiving dinner with the lady who took me to Gaia. I'd traveled eleven hours by bus to visit, but everything melted away after the first bite of truffled cheese and the first sip of wine. I can still rattle off the menu from memory: sausage puffs, taleggio flatbreads, the most amazing sage stuffing, roasted root veggies (that I helped peel, in true soldierly fashion), celery root puree (godly), and goose. It was then that I started to rethink my disdain for the bourgeois lifestyle.

8. After being dazzled by Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, we stumbled upon an alley dive that served skewers of things boiled in a cauldron of miso broth and then seared on an open grill. The oyster mushrooms were my favorite -- lacy, earthy, salty, and, true to Tokyo fashion, slightly alien but incredibly delicious.

9. On Valentine's Day, we had reservations for two at Helmand. Unfortunately, on Valentine's Day, there was an ice storm, so I had to wait while he trudged through the wall of sleet to hail a cab. By the time we made it to the restaurant, the roasted pumpkin was the warmest, most comforting appetizer I'd ever tasted. I still wonder if the rumor about the place being owned by Hamid Karzai's cousin is true.

10. Instead of buying engagement rings, we went out to a 400-dollar meal at Abacus in Dallas. The scallops were the best main course I've ever tasted -- like biting into the culinary version of a French kiss. We ordered dessert wine... a whole bottle. The waiter was visibly shaken.

Open source

2009-12-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

By nature, I'm a very nervous person. Since early childhood, my brain has been a veritable cerebral nightmare factory, breeding hundreds of irrational fears, from the mundane (monsters under the bed, terrors that go bump in the night) to the somewhat more esoteric (robbers and rapists at every corner), to the downright peculiar (leaning back too far in reclining chairs, porch beams splintering and collapsing under a misplaced heavy step).

But by nature, I'm also a person who, as an abstract rational position, hates nature and feels a great deal more satisfaction fighting it than succumbing to it. Case in point: when I was younger, I had terrible lung capacity. I'd get winded after a brisk walk, which made my first forays into vigorous exercise a nightmare of wheezing, gasping, and pulmonary incineration. Now, after five years of teeth-gritting, face-numbing, vision-blurring runs, I'm a member of an elite coterie of individuals who can manually inflate a balloon animal. This kind of dedicated self-antagonism doesn't come easy, and it can often degenerate into full-blown obsessive compulsion. See: years 19 and 20 of my life (actually, don't, ugh). But when done right, and healthily, there's no better feeling in the world.

Case in point: motorcycles. Exactly one year ago, I hopped on the back of my brother-in-law's bike and clung desperately to his broad firefighter shoulders as he executed a cheeky weaving maneuver. I was petrified -- with absolutely no control over the situation and vivid mental images, in slow-mo crash-test dummy fashion, of my bones hitting concrete at 60 miles per hour and exploding in a fireworks of splinters and gore, this had all the markings of a deep-seated phobia. Today, I hopped on a bike -- my own -- and pulled the same weave on a straightaway of dappled sunlit highway. My fingers were raw and half-numb under a pair of ratty gardening gloves (naturally, in a house with half a dozen motorcycles and thousands of dollars worth of paraphernalia, no gloves are small enough to fit my girlie hands). But I could've stayed out there for hours, for days, for weeks on end. In the most cliched of ways, I felt myself fuse to the bike in a way I'd never experienced before, and every fluid movement rippled through my flesh, infusing the soft vital tissue with an injection of indestructible rubber and chrome.

I'd like to be better at applying this philosophy to other, less adrenaline driven, facets of my life. It isn't just fear that I resent as something that comes naturally to me; there are a myriad of other dark complexes I'd love to flush out. Unfortunately, outside of the Star Wars universe -- Spike was showing episodes 3-6 last night, and you better believe I was glued to that TV -- they're harder to confront head-on. I'm going to try, anyway, though. Worth it. So worth it.

Bragging rights/I am so tired

2008-11-27T16:44:00.000-08:00

I made this:

Cream of butternut squash soup

Broccoli-rabe cornbread casserole with ricotta-Gruyere topping

Caramelized Brussels sprouts

Mashed sweet potatoes

Oven-roasted leg of lamb

Buttermilk biscuits

Cranberry sauce

Chocolate and pear stuffed crepes

Lemon meringue pie

Pumpkin pie

I win at Thanksgiving.

Conceit

2008-11-08T05:21:00.000-08:00

The morning after the election, I woke up with head pounding from beer and champagne, and stomach churning from pizza and chocolate. When I stepped outside into an unseasonably balmy, misty morning, it struck me that this felt exactly like Mardi Gras day: damp, swampy air mingling with a sickeningly sugary hangover, a slate-gray sky that eliminated the horizon and merged invisibly with the slate-gray city, and the people walking the streets all looking especially haggard but illuminated from within by some secret energy. What was most similar was that it felt like the culmination of a frenetic, stressful, and ultimately drunken few days, and that the final and official holy day to which all those minor precursors were leading seemed too ghostly and surreal by comparison.

Like any good Mardi Gras, scenes from the previous night kept flashing through my mind in detached fragments. Me watching Fox News all afternoon, while the presentation I needed to be typing languished on a dimmed laptop screen. A bug-eyed woman screaming something about Black Panthers and race riots into the smug face of Shepherd Smith. Then, suddenly, sitting in a roomful of lawyers and one Sarah Palin cardboard cut-out, festooned with the Mardi Gras beads I'd brought to liven her up and baring waxy, laminated teeth at us from the corner. States being called, and the collective cheer when Katie Couric dubbed Massachusetts "the bluest state." The jaw-dropping moment that was Pennsylvania. Flipping to Comedy Central and hearing it first not from CNN holograms or MSNBC ticker, but Jon Stewart that Barack Obama is president of the United States of America. Champagne toasts and muffled sobs.

It didn't seem real that morning, and it still doesn't. In New Orleans, the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras are about suspending your everyday reality and replacing it with something ecstatic, surreal, and fundamentally unsustainable, so that by the time you get to Mardi Gras day, you've wallowed for so long in the anarchic whims of the flesh that you've finally succumbed to them. By sheer inertia, I've dragged myself out of bed on that perpetually misty Tuesday for four years in a row and hauled my tired, protesting body to the last parades, Zulu and Rex. Except I've never made it to Rex -- that's the big one you can always catch on TV and looks just like the glossy postcards sold in every souvenir shop in the French Quarter: all fancy feathers, sumptuous masks, and the snowy white King of Mardi Gras presiding amid his KKK-esque horse guards, hoods and all.

Zulu for me has always been the real grand finale, the black travesty of the official white carnival. It comes off badly in frozen stills, which only capture the burnt cork blackface and grass skirts like a flat caricature, some kitschy parade of Little Black Sambos. In reality, it feels much more menacing, especially when venturing too far into the territory of the Magnolia projects to find parking and a good spot to stand. Every year, there's a moment when you can look around and spot small coteries of hipsters, progressive college professors, and students from Tulane and Loyola sticking out like awkward blemishes on all-black family barbecues and raucous sidewalk celebrations. Every year, it was a reminder of how white and non-Southern I am, despite all the years I'd spent living in this culture and thinking of myself as hip and with it. And now that I'm back up North in "the bluest state," I can't help both liking and resenting those American Apparel-clad kids who biked through the streets of Boston with Obama emblazoned in red, white and blue on their backpacks; or even the waspy lawyers who teared up when he was giving his acceptance speech. It feels like they can never get the significance of what happened on November 4th if they've never set foot below the Mason-Dixie line, never stood at a Zulu parade, or never even been in a crowd like the one in Hyde Park unless it was a Janet Jackson concert.

But that's just the elitist in me, the part that uses the "foreigner" label to clamor for a special, objective understanding of this country. The sharp self-righteousness has been gradually sloughed off of me every time I realize that most of the people I meet have an equally valid claim to outsider status, and that this willingness to see oneself in opposition to, rather than the essentialist product of a society is something uniquely American and undeniably appealing. It started with the Puritans and continues to this day in fundamentalist Christianity, animal rights activism, environmentalism, radical feminism, LGBT, and BDSM. They're all working off one model: if it's broke, we can fix it, even if it means redefining the definition of "it." Or, as it was perhaps a bit more eloquently put: we'll never stop trying to make a more perfect union. And, to wit, those skinny white kids in DNC swag have just put Barack Hussein Obama into the highest office of the great U.S. of A.

I wasn't thinking all of this on the morning after election day. I was leaning against a cold concrete wall to stifle some queasy hangover shakes, waiting for my bus and barely noticing when it pulled up to the stop. Hurriedly, I scrambled to pull out my wallet, but when I reached into the front pocket of my backpack, what I pulled out was a handful of Mardi Gras beads. Laissez les bon temps roulez.

Revelations

2008-10-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

Walking through Midtown Manhattan on an unseasonably warm October Saturday afternoon, there is a moment where the sun is still up a few dozen miles in any direction, but it's already dusk inside the walls of the high-rise fortress, and the sky is a weary post-apocalyptic pink, and the glass and gold storefront windows cast vermillion reflections on the flushed faces of tourists with backpacks, and Eastern European teenagers with Macy's bags, and black-clad businesspeople shouting into their headsets...

"You went to New York this weekend? What did you do there?"

"Well, it was only a day trip. Just a lot of walking around."

... and the sewers emanate a humid fog that reeks of feces, which gets caught in the oily yellow glow of the food carts that illuminate the treasures of the street vendors' wares -- gleaming bronze pretzels with diamond-chip salt flakes, obsidian leather purses, the cheap glass beads that Manhattan was bought with, copper shawarma nuggets studded with pockets of raw garnet...

"How nice! Did you go to any museums?"

... and gradually, gradually the sky darkens and we hit Central Park, and the only light is the paltry stream from the street-lamps and the brighter feverish neon glint on people's skin that obscures their features, sharpening only their waxy, vampiric pallor and the hungry hollows of their cheeks, and it is in these moments that I know how the ruddy peasant of the pre-industrial world felt as she took her first timid steps onto this concrete Babylon and shuddered with horror and delight.

"No, unfortunately. I wanted to go to MoMA to see the Kirchner exhibit. But by the time we'd walked from Chinatown to Times Square..."

... and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast full of blasphemous names, having ten heads and seven horns, and the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet and adorned in precious ornaments and pearls and precious stones having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and unclean things of her immorality. Upon her forehead was written a name, a mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the earth, and I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints of the earth and the blood of the witnesses of Jesus, and when I saw her I wondered greatly.

Vanitas vanitatum

2008-10-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

The other day, I found out that the infamous 16th century ascetic monk Ivan Vyshenskij -- the Girolamo Savonarola of Ukraine, who spewed bile at Renaissance learning, vainglorious Catholics, and other worldly vanities -- lived in the town where I was born. In his honor, here is a short poem:

Chasing tongue with vodka,

cognac and Akon at a disco called Versailles....

Rubber tubing cramps as the nurse administers the glucose,

useless, and days later my stained clothes sprout moldy tumors --

Lutsk.

Something to declare

2008-09-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

I've been in Ukraine for the past two and a half weeks and haven't had a single urge to sit down and write, probably because I've long ago figured out that I can only have one set of feelers fired up to twitch at the world, absorptive or regurgitative, and this trip was definitely about sucking it all in. But now that I'm back in Boston and have stacks of cardboard boxes and academic red tape to tackle, the best distraction from beginning-of-the-semester stress is sitting down at a keyboard and methodically rehashing. So, without further ado, and in reverse chronological order:

By the time Ryan and I touched down in Amsterdam, I think we were both ready to leave the Eastern Bloc. About three-fourths of the way into the trip, I already found myself shamelessly hankering for a bar that served french fries instead of ten kinds of soggy salad swimming in mayonnaise, as well as a proper stand-up shower and cushy white toilet paper. But most of all, I was excited about returning to a world where everyday service industry encounters wouldn't make me feel like I'd reached out my hand to gently pet a dog and received a gory flesh wound for my troubles. After the unsmilingly grim Eastern Europeans, the Dutch were like blue-eyed, apple-cheeked cherubs, lilting away in their peculiarly cheerful Germanic English and punctuating every other phrase with an upbeat "yep." Maybe that's why I was so blithely optimistic in the passport control line, assuring myself that there'd be no problem with leaving the airport to spend our night-long layover in a hotel. I'd done it before with my family, and I figured this time could only be more clear-cut, seeing as I would be in the company of my American citizen husband. Tired but chipper, Ryan and I scooted ourselves up to the counter and presented our passports to the smiling young Dutchman. The smiling young Dutchman took our papers, thumbed through Ryan's American passport like a flip-book, and handed it back with the all-clear stamp. Then he picked up my passport, and his smile faded a little. He looked up at me with a slight frisson of pain clouding his aquamarine eyes. "You cannot go out without a visa," he said. Then he flagged down another smiling female coworker, who took us to a small room, let us wait for five minutes, then smilingly repeated the same short, sweet sentence. Non-EU or non-North American passport, no dice.

I'd like to blame exhaustion and the stress of traveling for the waterworks of hot, childish tears that tumbled out of me as I dug around futilely in my purse for my discharged cell phone and the number of the hotel I'd reserved, so that I could call and cancel in time to get our money back. Ryan, trying his best to comfort me, took control and called from a pay phone, then laughed and joked as we wandered the airport in search of somewhere to crash. Tucked away on the upper tier of our terminal was a so-called "comfort seat" section, full of backward-reclined chairs populated by a veritable internat of stranded undesirables. Two Southeast Asian women were curled up in impossible-to-sleep positions under complimentary Northwest Airlines blankets, eyes shut tight and limbs immobile. A gaggle of Georgians ignored the sleepers and talked boisterously, made friends with an itinerant Singaporean, then set up a laptop to stream a YouTube video of some loud, whacky Eastern European variety show. A Muslim woman and her husband took turns nursing their sick child, one wheeling him around in a stroller around the "comfort chairs," while the other got onto a small rug laid out toward Mecca and silently prayed to Allah. This was where we spent the night, bathed in the glow of the overhead florescent lights and a steady stream of never-ending muzak.

Instead of all the Western European comforts I'd been dreaming of, I ended up eating potato chips for dinner, brushing my teeth in an airport bathroom sink, and getting no more than an hour or two of stiff, aching sleep. When two of the Georgians came into the bathroom as I was washing up and asked if I minded that they smoke, I wanted to tell them I didn't mind if they set the whole damn airport ablaze. I began to understand the grim visages of my compatriots in Ukraine, the way they shifted their gaze downward and refused pleasantries. Even if they'd never been out of the country, I'm sure they're well aware of the label placed upon them by the rest of Europe: poor, backward, helpless, and ready to flood the borders at the drop of a hat. Unlike spoiled little me with my flashy green card and effortless Americanness, they're made to feel that kind of subtle humiliation every single day. Doesn't matter if you're a checkout girl in a Kiev supermarket or a PhD student at Harvard. It's a simple Pavlovian response: if you're treated like a dog, your canines start to itch for some soft, coddled flesh.

2008-08-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I had the quasi-surreal experience of helping move my brother-in-law into his freshman dorm. The kid's a good one -- thoughtful, kind, and a hell of a lot more independent and mature than I'd expect the second-youngest in a family of five to be. But he's been living with my husband semi-permanently and me intermittently for the past six months, making it all too easy for us to forget that he's still just an eighteen-year-old boy reared in a provincial Texas town and his mother's doting arms. All things considered, he acclimated himself quite spectacularly to the boring post-grad married environment of Ryan and I: got himself a job and a PlayStation 3 and spent many a quiet night with us, drinking lots of beer and watching trashy scary movies. That's why I was so surprised to hear him say he was nervous about the whole college thing. I couldn't imagine this suave, svelte six-something stud being nervous in an environment full of awkward, sheltered teens fresh out of high school. But I quickly realized that hanging out with us was not exactly the same as forging a path through the complex social circles of American Higher Learning Institution. There will most likely be much alcohol-fueled devilry, not a small amount of futile eleventh-hour cramming, and girl drama like nobody's business. And as hopelessly permissive as we were with the kid, it's still a world of difference for him to really live on his own and really be expected to make his own decisions full-time. So different that I'll split infinitives about it. It'll be good for him; he needs some young blood. Because if there's one thing that moving somebody else into a freshman dorm can accomplish, it's making you feel hopelessly old.

But apart from the not-so-subtle age difference between me and the pimply-faced youngsters gearing up to start their journey through the American academic conveyor belt, what's even more surreal about yesterday's experience is this whole "brother-sister" relationship I've come to acquire with three random boys over the span of two years. Having spent my whole life dividing young eligible males into the subclasses of "...I can have sex with," "alcoholic second-cousins I see once in three years," and "pink Polo shirt wearers," it feels odd to develop a strong but sexless emotional bond with an attractive male. My brothers-in-law are all great guys, and it's a refreshing change of pace to want to dig around in their brains and hearts, not their pants, to find out what makes them tick. Perhaps this gives hope to the proverbial male-female "friend" myth? ....Or, perhaps, simply reestablishes the female only-child as the quintessential man-eating succubus.

Edit: And, in the grand tradition of the American sibling relationship, I've just been asked to make a beer run for the bro and his new little college friends. This is too cute; I might just shed a tear at the checkout line.

A Moveable Feast

2008-08-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

Habitually, I monitor the trajectory of my life through meals, because days when dinner is potato chips and candy are markedly different from days when dinner is frozen lasagna; or midnight diner delivery; or half a loaf of Tuscan bread and a brick of Gruyere.

For example, yesterday started off with an ill-omened brunch at a Boston taco place. To be perfectly clear, Boston, aside from maybe some rut in Cowboy Spurs, North Dakota, is the worst possible US city for Mexican food. This is not some essentialist claim to "authenticity" for the cheese-logged concoctions of Texas or the lettuce-y salad bowls of California, but rather a sober statement of quantitative comparison. In Boston, "Mexican" means one of three things: a large burrito, a taco, or, if you're very lucky, a quesadilla. The end. In Texas, the menu of Mexican foodstuffs can stretch for pages and pages, ranging from traditional Tex-Mex to offbeat nouveau fusion to pure exercises in gluttony and death by cheese. Knowing all this, however, makes me no less desperate for some sort of meat in a cornmeal filling, and even though I'd actually be in Texas later in the day, I gave in and went to the cheap Taqueria down the street. Standing in line, I noticed a small sign that advertised lengua, and my hopes for a decent Boston Mexican experience began to grow. The guy behind the counter gave me a skeptical look when I blithely ordered my boiled beef tongue, and the cashiers whispered something to one another in Spanish, probably to the tune of "silly white people," but I got my tongue tacos and sailed out the door. Not surprisingly, Boston Mexican let me down once more, as the meat was pretty rubbery and bland. But it still had enough of that velvety tongue essence to do the trick. Tongue: the meat so good it tastes you back.

My second meal experience of the day was no less of a cultural collision. I was in the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina and had an hour layover before my flight to Dallas. Walking through the terminal, I mentally checked off one terrible airport dinner option after another ("NASCAR Cafe? Ex. Manchu Wok? Ex. Chili's Too? ...seriously?") before finally hitting gold. I skirted past the crowd of soccer moms clamoring around some bagel place and slid into the lengthy, all-black line at Bojangles Chicken and Biscuits. Alright, so it's no Popeyes, but I'll take what I can get. As I was waiting, middle-aged white woman saddled up to me and, with a desperate look in her eyes, said, "I'll pay for your meal if you'll let me cut in front of you." Being the pushover that I am, I just laughed and waved her through. Turns out she was also a Southern transplant living in Boston, and, even more heroically, had come from a totally different terminal, paying off one of those beeping motorized buggy drivers just to get some real Southern food.

Unfortunately, Airport Bojangles was experiencing a severe chicken shortage, meaning I had to wait twenty minutes for my damn breast-and-wing dinner. I was coming off a months-long fried chicken fast, so I waited stoically, ticket in hand, gritting my teeth. The others in line were not so patient. The poor manager ran around trying to placate the hungry masses and ended up handing out dozens of free drinks. Finally, I leaned over and politely asked the kid working the soda fountain if I could please get a cup of water. "Don't be shy, get more than that, honey!" murmured an attractive young black woman waiting next to me, who'd handled the situation far more adroitly and already pumped the manager for free sides and biscuits. But it looks like I've officially been spoiled by Northern self-sufficiency and accountability. I waited in silence, got my chicken just as my plane started boarding, and had to eat in the cramped middle seat between two people shooting me looks of rancorous envy for my styrofoam container of grease. Their biscuits are but a pale Popeye shadow, but I might have to seditiously admit that the chicken is about on par.

And, finally, to round out the day: a late evening second dinner of chips, salsa, mojitos, and flan, capped off with what's quickly becoming my preferred trashy redneck beverage of choice: the indomitable Bud Lite Lime. You know you've done a day right when you start off with tongue and end in a twist top. Success.

Levels of addiction

2008-08-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

As expected, last night was a prototypical exercise in childish sulking. I trudged through the rain to the corner liquor-and-grocery, picked out my dinner of a) peanut butter M&Ms (delicious) and b) sweet potato chips (... nutritious?), then had to angle awkwardly around a couple of what I can only assume were young resident physicians, standing in the middle of the cramped booze section and talking loudly about how so-and-so was "totally septic!" -- they're way more charming on Scrubs. Since I at least had the foresight to avoid a whole bottle of wine on the shaky foundation of aforementioned "dinner," it took me awhile to decide on which pint-sized single would make me look the least like a lonely alcoholic. I finally picked out some crappy hard cider that tasted like apple-flavored Mad Dog, but for a night of commanding undead armies in a dark, empty apartment, there could probably be no better choice to drink straight out of the bottle. Basically, I'm twelve, but with a liquor ID.

It's supposed to storm again today, to which I can only say: OMFG NO. If I miss another flight, I may not be so innocent in my choice of sulking. I wonder if you can get kicked out of an airport for purchasing a bottle of duty-free liquor and consuming it inside the terminal? Only one way to find out.

Missed connections

2008-08-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

There's something inconsolably pathetic about a cancelled evening flight. On the long bus and subway trip back from the airport, I felt like the straps of my bags were the leashes of dogs eager to burst forth into the unknown, but instead I had to reign them in wearily and drag them, whimpering, back home. The rain didn't exactly improve my mood; neither did the snot-gargler and crotch-grabber sitting next to me, who spent the twenty-minute airport shuttle ride contemplating something very fascinating inside my right ear. And now I'm back in the apartment it took me three hours to clean and put in order this afternoon, packing everything away and destroying all traces of my two-week life there so that the movers could do their job more easily. It's almost funny, really. Toiletries trapped inside taped-up cardboard, towels and linens smashed together with dirty clothes in the hamper, all the leftover food in the cupboards thrown away. Nothing but boxes and a bare mattress for the next sixteen-some hours.

My life this month was supposed to be on its way to positively domestic. Finally, I was going to do some of that nesting I'd read about, maybe get my act together and start playing the part of a "wife," whatever the hell that is. And yet here I am, musing indifferently that the next time I'll be able to shower might be around nine or ten tomorrow night, if I'm lucky, and contemplating a run to the liquor store for a therapeutic evening of solitary beer and video games. Pretty much like every other night this month, except with even less in the way of creature comforts. Joy.

The thing about the karmic wheel: I tend to take it all, bank or bust, with the same level of complicity. And once that bitch starts rolling downhill, I just let it draaaaaag me down.

Mana from heaven

2008-08-13T04:33:00.000-07:00

The reason why I'm never terribly disheartened by serialized misfortune in my life is that, true to the pseudo-peasant belief system instilled in me by my mother and grandmother, I'm very superstitious. I have no patience for "serious" religions, but my love of ritual and magical thinking rivals that of any incense-burning, Celtic-music-listening, RenFaire-costume-sewing nouveau pagan. Just ask Husband the Lawyer, whose sober pragmatist influence on me has been tenacious but spotty, continually running into walls of willful idealism when capital-C Concepts are discussed. So of course, when bad things happen to me in succession, I placate myself with the gooey New Age theory that balance will always be restored in life, and that a string of goodness must be just around the corner. Not saying I'm proud of it, but it works.

Well, after the draining long-distance love thing and the Great Moving Debacle of Aught-Eight, I've been overdue for this alleged "good" for quite some time, which must be why it all rained down on me in the past few days. First, there was the alchemic transformation of old acquaintance into new friend over a beautiful Pixar film (WALL-E, holla), sausage 'n' beer, and impromptu drunken Twinkie consumption. Then, there was a Princess Bride Quote-Along, which dropped me into a sold-out theater full of what can only be described as "all my ex-boyfriends, aged 13-20." There were inflatable swords involved. Then, a series of mundane minutiae involving work and money I'll refrain from discussing, being as I am all humble and ladylike, but simply insist in passing that they were awesome.

And, finally, to crown my goodness glory, I spent the better portion of last night playing a newly-purchased Warcraft III. Because, while video and computer games have eaten months (if not years) of my life, I've never actually bought one. Shamefully, I was always that proverbial pretty girl user who mooched off the consoles of others, loitering around boys' apartments and dorms at all hours in cute outfits, just waiting for a chance to get my hit. But now... now! Drunk with adult purchasing power, I feel it's high time to atone for my adolescent sins and fully embrace the pixelated world I've only loved in short, illicit bursts.

Magical thinking is fun, but there's something to be said for clearheaded, goal-oriented action done in good faith. Something that I fully believe is acquired in part by commanding armies of ghouls and orcs. Consequentialism, here I come!

Pilgrim's progress

2008-08-11T04:18:00.001-07:00

I did a lot of walking this weekend. Since summer school is over and I have a week of nothing before leaving for Dallas and then Ukraine, the next five days are spread before me like an enormous oil slick, whose edges disintegrate and blur into the shimmering horizon. It's also been overcast and stormy practically all month in Boston, adding even more fodder for hours-long restless, lonely rambles. Last night, after a particularly epic thunder session that twice killed the power and made the windows rattle in apocalyptic fashion, the rain finally gave way to a glowing twilit sky covered in the haggard remnants of storm-clouds. I threw on my husband's old Harvard Law sweatshirt, the one I'd cheerfully defaced with an anarchy A just a short year ago, and set off for a hike around Brookline.

After living in the graffiti-and-broken-glass neighborhood down the hill, it's still a shock for me to walk down block after block where the only sounds are fountains, wind-chimes, and the plaintive shrieks of spoiled children. After eight o'clock on a Sunday night, the only people out are men in bermuda shorts being tugged around by the family dog, and women in yoga pants immersed in their power-walk. The street side of the sidewalk is lined with recycling bins, all neatly sorted into plastic produce containers, flattened cereal boxes, and bottles from expensive booze. To the house side, tall roses and sunflowers lean out from mulched gardens to graze the shoulders of passing pedestrians. At the top of the hill, there's even a house that sports a row of tomato vines right on its front lawn, the fruit ripening in blissful self-assurance of never being stolen or trampled. Dusk settles slowly around the colonial-style houses and puts a soft focus filter over the yellow light in each window.

It must be quite the pretty sight when you're behind the glass of one of those warmly lit windows and look out onto the blue-black street. But I was shuffling aimlessly in the dark, hunched over to hide in my hoodie, the hems of my baggy jeans soaked in puddle water. I realized then that the letter emblazoned on my chest was taking on a very different meaning from the one I'd intended when I shuttled my time between Allston and Cambridge and still thought I should épater le bourgeois. Who am I kidding with the rebel loner business. More like: A lone, prowling wolf in a world of happy fatted lambs. A bedraggled outcast slinking through the safe suburban shadows.

Loss and gain, again

2008-08-09T04:03:00.000-07:00

My body is mysterious and erratic. Every once in awhile, I go through periods where I suddenly lose my appetite. The sense of hunger remains, but it's about as fruitful as a trapped rodent trying to claw frantically out of a trash can. If it gets too restless, I shove some colorless, packaged, frozen thing down my gullet to calm the pesky ruckus, but I remain disdainfully distant from its cause. After a week or so, my pants all hang sadly off the twin peaks of jutting hip-bones. After a month, the flesh slowly creeps from my shoulders and leaves a deserted playground of nooks and shadows. Of course, these wasting spells are inevitably followed by some equally sudden internal flip of the switch, wherein, like last night, I find myself getting ice cream and chicken wings for dinner, then standing in the kitchen at ten o'clock at night, smearing herbed goat cheese and ginger-fig jam over the fourth, fifth, and sixth slice of fresh farmer's market bread.

It's too bad that there's an entire teenage subculture devoted to the former syndrome, while the latter has never found so broad and fetishized a following. I'm sure there have been times where my xylophone ribs and naked elbow joints have elicited envious fascination from the Hot Topic-wearing set, but I'd much prefer to be somebody's gluttonspiration.

Indulgent self

2008-08-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

I know I just got done lamenting the oxymoronic permanent transience of my existence yadda yadda etc., but. Sometimes I change my mind and secretly love it.

I love waking up as early as I want and padding through an empty, echoing apartment, putting a pot of Turkish coffee on the stove, and watching the pink glow of the dawning sky reach the exact shade of the flowers on the mimosa tree outside the kitchen window. I love filling up the tub and reading, half-immersed in hot water, until the steam warps the spine of my book. I love losing track of meal times and grazing on fruit, bread, and beer at odd hours of the day, standing over the sink to catch errant juices and crumbs. I love spending days in a wife-beater and a pair of torn boy's boxers with the words "Stocking Stuffer" printed on the back, not ever folding my clothes or cleaning up my tea cups, and generally living like a child whose "Home Alone" dream was centered more on the voicing of an elaborate internal monologue than on wild parties or potato chips and ice cream at midnight.

But the thing that I love probably the most is falling asleep every night to the plaintive metallic hum of the subway train, a sound I instantly associate with childhood summer trips between Lutsk and Kyiv, the rocking rhythm of the top bunk, and staying up as long as my eyes would let me to watch the sleeping Western Ukrainian countryside rush past the grimy train window. These are all only child things, moments and memories that get collected with the same loving care as delicate sea shells or semi-precious stones, and it's hard to pay the proper reverence to them when you're living with someone else. No matter how low-key, the presence of others always somehow interferes with my sensory organs, scrambling the signals I spent so much time cultivating. Ten tons of shit scraped aside, I'm glad I got this chance to fine-tune.

Bourgeois dream; or, Solzhenitsyn R.I.P.

2008-08-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

The past week has been a steady series of foiled expectations and dashed hopes, the most glaring of which involved, of course, moving. After a day of frantic packing and cleaning, the hubs and I loaded up a rental car, circled the new building ten times to find parking, waited for the concierge for half an hour in a stiflingly unventilated lobby, and were finally greeted with the joyous news that the former tenant had decided to stay for two weeks past her lease. We've been temporarily housed in a similar unit on the sixth floor ("What a view! Think of it as a honeymoon suite!") and assured that by the time we return from our Eastern European vacation in September, all of our belongings would be hauled back down to our real apartment on the second floor, free of charge. We're also getting a pass on rent for the month... all of which would be nice, except for the fact that after living alone for two years in a filthy student ghetto, the last thing I want to be doing for the final two weeks of the long-distance relationship between my husband and I is coming home to bare walls and cardboard boxes. In fact, the only thing that got me through the past month, nay, year, was the giddy daydream of hardcore nesting: elaborate floor-plans, kitchen wizardry, and Martha-Stewart-meets-D.I.Y.-punk crafting projects to make our house a home.

Well, scratch that one. Stuck settling again, buying plastic cutlery and four-dollar knife sets from CVS because it makes no sense to equip a kitchen that's only temporarily mine. Temporariness. Transience. The kind of feeling that was already familiar when I was eight and already a veteran of no less than three major cross-country moves, not to mention one involving traversing continents. When I was eight, my mother was the one who got stressed and cried, while I busied myself playing with packaging detritus. Moving is sad, I'd say to myself, but empty rooms are the best for cartwheels. Now I'm eight thrice over, and I'm the one who bursts into tears at the prospect of dealing with landlords and electric companies. And across the twin seas separating us, the Atlantic and my frustration, my mother now spreads her unconvincing over-the-phone balm: "Don't worry! Don't stress! It's nothing, nothing!" I don't buy a word of it. I remember how much it wore on her, this living out of half-unpacked boxes. I remember how much it wore on me, quietly and insidiously, and how amazed I was to visit friends' houses and see the stolidness, the weighty reliability and immobility of their furnishings.

Not surprisingly, I've adapted quite well. Ran little errands today in between reading, stopped by the local bakery for a fresh loaf and tore into it with my hands when I got home. Pirated wireless at Panera, drinking coffee for three hours while I worked on a Russian essay. Now pirating wireless at "home," cheap cereal box fan rigged up to keep me cool and drinking tea from an ancient plastic Mardi Gras cup. The same kind of life I've been living for the past year, but in a bigger place and nicer zip code. All the tears of frustration have been squeezed out. At least there's Imperial Stout in the fridge and the neighborhood is great. Time, again, always and once more, for a little antici...pation.

Humility

2008-07-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

Not yet August, but already the temperature has crossed into "unbearable" territory -- especially from nine in the evening until one in the morning, when it seems that all of the heat absorbed during the day by the sun-baked skin of this apartment building seeps into my room and forms thick, brackish puddles around my bed until sunrise. For the past three nights, this has made sleep pretty much impossible. I finally broke down and moved my sole fan, cheap white plastic the size and shape of a cereal box, to the foot of my bed, securing it in back with the giant plush Snoopy doll I'd found on the street two years ago. The strategically-placed stream of cool air helped cut the heat, but within minutes it began to gnaw at my ears, which have always been sensitive to drafts. I grabbed an old orange bandana and tied it around my head, Amy-Winehouse-cum-Slavic-Grandmother-style, and flopped back into bed. Dirty feet hanging off the rickety second-hand bed, single sheet twisted and tossed to the side, boys' soccer shorts and a ragged T-shirt from high school, face full of bandana and glistening night cream. Just another night watching the waning glow of the computer screen attract a cloud of spontaneously-generated summer fruit flies.

O hai, I go to Harvard and am married to a lawyer.

Twins

2008-07-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I spoke briefly on the phone to my cousin. In her usual rapid-fire, giggle-punctuated Ukrainian, she wished me a happy birthday and expressed her excitement to see me and my husband in August. "Husband -- it's so hard to believe I'm even saying that!" she blurted out, then handed the phone back to my mom.

For someone I see all of once in two or three years, I have a very conflicted relationship with my cousin. We grew up together and were close enough in age to be sibling-like competitors. She was always a prettier child: cornsilk blond hair, enormous hazel eyes, and the pillowy lips of a Lolita in training. I was taller and darker-haired, wore glasses, and had a tightly-pressed cupid's bow mouth destined to brush against more pencil ends than boys' lips. She did gymnastics, which held back her puberty until well after mine, but the minute she quit, voluptuous breasts and hips sprouted from her tiny, taut frame, giving her the proportions of a Barbie doll. She was also a good artist, more mischievous and imaginative than safe, good girl me. The only advantage I had was one of familial consensus: my grandmother hated my uncle, my cousin's father, and adored mine. In her eyes, I was always the favorite granddaughter -- the first, the smartest, the serious and studious one.

After my parents and I had already moved to the States, on our first trip back to Ukraine, I remember lying on my belly next to her and watching her sketch color pencil pictures of beautiful girls performing elaborate gymnastic maneuvers. She made a game out of it, deeming me the "judge" that had to rate each picture on a one to ten scale, with decimals. I played along at first, but her standards were much higher than mine. If she accidentally drew a girl's leg too long, or if a neck came out a centimeter thicker than a toothpick arm, she'd savage the performance: "Oh, look at that cow trying to do the splits!" she'd laugh, scribbling 4.7 at the top of the page in bright red pencil. I was jealous of her drawing skill and of the astonishing contortions she could perform, right out of those drawings, jutting out her full lips as she kicked one leg back towards her head and pulled the ankle over her shoulder. But when we came back home and developed our Ukraine photos, I realized that in every single picture with me and her standing together, she was on her tip-toes, craning her neck so she could appear to be my height.

The last time I was in Ukraine, we went out to a nightclub together, and she tried for the first time in years to have a serious talk with me. She sat chain-smoking and downing the cheap mix of vodka and fruit juice popularly referred to, in suitably utilitarian Soviet fashion, simply as "drink." She wasn't doing sports or art anymore, or much of anything, for that matter. She'd just graduated from the Ukrainian equivalent of undergrad with a degree in pedagogy but lamented that she hated teaching. Every now and then, she'd take an occasional job as an English tutor, which is where she said she got the money for clothes and makeup and going out. That, or a "boyfriend" whom no one in the family had ever seen, and to whom she'd mysteriously disappear for hours at a time, returning drunk and flushed and giggling manically. When we were on our way to the nightclub, given a ride by nameless middle-aged "friends" who owned a car and matching track suits, I caught a glimpse of a wad of dollars in her purse. But even under the pancake of foundation and tiny sequined top, drunk from cheap liquor bought with dirty money, she was still just as touchingly beautiful, beautiful in all the ways I could never imagine myself being. Slurring, but still shooting out her nervous staccato, she told me how glad she was that I was there, how much she wished we could have grown up together, how she wished we could talk more about everything.... And then the sparkle in her hazel eyes dimmed, she turned away to light another cigarette, and that was that. I wanted to tell her I knew and understood everything, that I wasn't judging her. But I was. She'd been harsher at it as a kid, knowing well before I did how these kinds of things were measured up, but if my judgment developed later, it also ran deeper, much deeper than hers. I went home that night and had a quiet, somber conversation with my mom in the kitchen so my grandmother couldn't hear.

My parents are there now, and the last I heard from my mom over the phone was, "She looks good. Normal." Most of me was contented with that description -- the part of me married to a terrific man, attending the best school in the world, and on the fast track to happiness and success. But there's a secret part of me that still sees sketches of gymnasts marked with red ratings, and that part knows that it's largely a matter of circumstance. If the situation were reversed, it knows I'd be the one straining every muscle, craning and clawing desperately, and pulling every dirty trick in the book just to gain an extra inch.

The mirror and the lamp -- The crate and the barrel

2008-07-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks, I'd been trying to think up some devil-may-care adventure to have on this birthday, as some sort of last hurrah to youthful indiscretion. But the other day in Russian, we were examining the subtle difference between the verbs "настроиться," "расстроиться," and "перестроиться." The elegantly cropped-haired, dame d'un certain âge professor scribbled the root, which relates literally to tuning a stringed instrument, on the board. Then she waved a hand covered in chalk dust and egg-sized gemstones and purred in her deep, throaty Russian: "You know, it's like with children. They'll get worked up [настроятся] about something and then when it doesn't happen, they'll be disappointed [расстроятся]. Adults are different; we just shrug and say, I'll get over it [перестроюсь]." In my mind, a little melody played out: cheerful whistling at first, then discordant piano keys clashing, and finally mellowing into the velvety, imperious sound of a champagne glass struck with a fork. I blushed and reconsidered my birthday options.

So today, instead of taking the cheap Chinatown bus to New York City and spending the day trying to look purposeful as I wandered the length of Manhattan, I went out and bought three thousand dollars worth of furniture for my new apartment. Not only have I never paid that much money for furniture, I've never paid that much money for anything, ever, in my entire life. The experience was surreal and vaguely numbing, making me understand why it becomes so easy for the rich (or not-so-rich and thus hopelessly in debt) to spend increasingly absurd amounts of cash on increasingly useless things. There gets to be a point -- I'd put mine at the 500 dollar mark -- where you feel a giddy watershed effect and the digits lose all meaning. All that becomes important is the fact that things are attainable, that you can point to them and say "yes" and "I'll take it," and suddenly a piece of the world gets carved off the slab and handed to you, gutted and gift-wrapped.

Probably my favorite fairy tale character ever has always been Aladdin, and not just because of the feature film and subsequent, spun-off Saturday morning cartoon. Even before I watched the Disney version, I'd had an illustrated Ukrainian children's book that contained, among other stories, Aladdin and Ali Baba. Much like every deprived Soviet child, I was a secret aesthete at heart, yearning for beauty in a world of gray Stalin-era cinderblock housing, and my nascent orientalism instantly made me latch onto these characters and fuse them together into one. The "Persian" stories offered immense luxury and ornamentation; instead of reading the text, I'd stare at the pictures of Aladdin reaching up to pick the scintillating forbidden fruit from a magical ruby-encrusted pomegranate tree, or the one of Ali Baba opening the treasure chest and raking his long, sinewy fingers across a heap of ducats and countless tangled ropes of pearls. Only one thing really troubled me: why was Aladdin "The Diamond in the Rough?" The story never said, and Disney certainly didn't make it any more clear. I never bought the flimsy "pure of heart and gentle of spirit" veneer that Walt & Co. tacked on and still couldn't figure out why Aladdin was special, why he could get the lamp when no one else could. It was only recently, reading Kierkegaard, that I thought about it again.

Whoever knows that happy moment, whoever has appreciated its delight, and has not also felt the apprehension lest suddenly something might happen, some trifle perhaps, which yet might be sufficient to disturb all! Whoever has held the lamp of Aladdin in his hand and has not also felt the swooning of pleasure, because one needs but to wish? Whoever has held what is inviting in his hand and has not also learned to keep his wrist limber to let go at once, if need be? ["In Vino Veritas"]

Well, it certainly wasn't Aladdin's ability to let go that garnered him the whole "Diamond in the Rough" moniker, just like Ali Baba couldn't help draping his rough, frail body with the treasures in the Forty Thieves' cave. But maybe it was precisely this weakness that made the lamp and cave call to them, honing in on vacuums of avarice and luring them to a glut of plenty. Aladdin could wish and wish and Ali Baba could draw from the well of treasures in the cave forever, and neither would ever slake his rapacious thirst. I think this is the part that Disney glossed with sunny songs and the comedy stylings of Robin Williams: Aladdin is a hero not because he is good, but because he, like most children, is a greedy despot with the power to wish unflinchingly, unhesitantly, always for more.

I realize now that Aladdin was my hero not because I resembled him in the least, but because I'm absolutely his opposite. I was never a demanding child, and I'm not even close to a demanding adult. I never knew what to wish for as a kid, and I haven't gotten any better at it now. For the past two years, I've lived in a cheap, shitty apartment in a cheap, shitty neighborhood, dragged home free or nearly free furniture and thrift store clothes, and been perfectly content with the garbage, the bums, and even waking up to the sound of rustling late at night, turning on the lights, and being greeted by the cheerfully industrious face of the resident mouse. I've also been in a long-distance relationship for the past two years, and, aside from a few breakdowns, I've been generally complacent about the fact that I get to see the man I love a maximum of once a month. Hell, right after we got married, I we lived with his two younger brothers in a one-room loft. My husband worked, I lay on the couch reading Either/Or and watching the kids play video games, we went to Six Flags once. It's not that I don't want things; I just never want them to be any certain way.

But the lamp begs to be rubbed, and I've always wondered what it would be like to be the kind of person that could, Xtina-style, rub it the right way. Today, for the first time ever, I could feel my fingers tingling the way I imagined Aladdin's did while reaching for that ruby pomegranate, or Ali Baba's for the ropes of pearls. After dropping nine hundred on bedroom trappings alone, I stole away to the food court of the local Asian grocery and ordered myself a huge platter of Korean fried chicken. To the palpable horror of the decidedly un-Persian-style "oriental" onlookers, I snatched up a breaded wing, shimmering with grease and scalding-hot sticky-sweet garlic sauce, and tore in. I polished off the meal in minutes and, with rapaciousness satisfied, stomach leaden, and finger-tips singed, I went back to the furniture store and made the rest of my purchases. And then I went and got a hot fudge and butterscotch sundae. This is secretly why I never became an Aladdin: I've always been more into the real, not the ruby, pomegranates.

So, I guess today I've figured out the Aladdin mystery, as well as a little bit about how and why I'm tuned the way I am. And now I've popped the cork off a bottle of chilled, carbonated French hard cider and am letting myself live in a blissfully drunk cloud for the rest of the day. As the Russians say, "перестроюсь" -- I'll get over it, but literally, I'll recalibrate, retune, remake myself from the inside out. Probably not all the way towards the extreme of enjoying the daily dropping of Benjamins, but far enough to exercise some firm demandingness once in awhile. Now that's a birthday wish I can get behind.

A Report to the Academy

2008-07-16T15:52:00.001-07:00

Summer is an especially irritating time in Cambridge. Aside from the heat and related sewer stench wafting from the colonial-era gutters, all the walkways on campus are cluttered with enormous groups of Japanese tourist. Last spring's trip to Tokyo -- where even the most important-looking businessman was ready to come to a dead halt in the middle of a busy city street to help the confused White Devil read his map -- made me much more sympathetic to this demographic. But when you're late to class and attempting to run across Harvard Yard with ten pounds of books strapped to your shoulders, the last thing you want to see is a group of smiling Asians posing on the stairs of the library. Because, of course, this signifies that any effort on your part to cross between them and their photographer will inevitably ruin the picture they've traveled thousands of miles to have taken, thus ensuring that you'll have to waste at least three minutes idling in front of the Kodak moment or finding longer alternate paths to reach your destination.

But the worst are the guided tours, obviously led by drama majors better suited to declaiming incendiary snippets from The Vagina Monologues. What makes these spectacles so bad is that they happen on a semi-hourly basis, and that their scripted speeches never change, subjecting the innocent bystanders of the Harvard community to an endless loop of anecdotes about the Widener family or juicy tidbits about which famous Hollywood starlet stayed in which dorm. After just two years, I feel fully qualified to give these kinds of tours. All I need is a crimson hat, a big red sign, and a dignity lobotomy.

Today, as I was waiting at a crosswalk, I cringed when I heard the telltale carnival-barker shriek coming up behind me. "Stick together now! We're about to begin!" The crowd was composed of twenty-odd Japanese tourists in matching tan jumpsuits, and they all craned their necks at the sight of the Yard's front gate. I prayed for a green light. "Okay! Now! As some of you may have noticed..." The light was still red but the traffic had stopped, so I quickly stepped onto the street and hurried across as fast as heels on cobblestones allow. "... the local Cambridgerians are notoooorious jaywalkers! That's because local Cambridge driving law is unique, in that pedestrians always have the right of way!" This is what monkeys must feel like in their cages, I thought, still hurrying to put as much distance between myself and the tour as I possibly could. I'd always thought being considered a "tourist" was a terrible thing, but never in my life have I been more underwhelmed by the prospect of being taken for a "local." Even after I'd made it to my department, I still couldn't shake the feeling that if I turned around, I'd be met with a blinding flash from a camera and a jumpsuited little girl's excited grin. "And this is Harvard Yard. And this is Widener Library. And this is a Cambridgerian -- look, she's growling! Probably just ready for lunchtime."