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.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Saints and sinners
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?
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?
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Blank generation
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.
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
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.
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.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Bear life
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.
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.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Who dat
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.
[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.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Nail-gazing
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.
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.
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