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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.