Photo taken in Banksy Tunnel, London
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12/04/2009
Eloise and the Plaza
We had a drink at the Plaza the other night. We drank pink champagne and sat on red cushions. I couldn't stop thinking about Eloise, my long lost fictional love, scampering around this rosy urban labyrinth.
12/03/2009
The Cult of Beauty at What Cost?
I had a very strong reaction to a picture of Patti Smith the other day. As I gazed at the fur under her raised arms, I felt guilty and envious. That peek of hair made me think that when it came to being at home in one’s own skin, I was all talk and she was all action. The feeling was akin to meeting a vegetarian and being forced to reflect on my own carnivorous hypocrisy—lamenting the cruelty of the meat industry and recommending grave documentaries on bestial torture to friends, only to throw back some BBQ during my lunch hour. Staring at the picture, I felt that Patti was the real thing and I was just the synthetic version; as though all the depilatory agents I put between me and my own naturalness had seeped into my pores, making me more chemicals than ideals.
Every day, I’m whacked over the head by the peculiar merger of economics and aesthetics that is the beauty industry, but why don’t I whack it back even harder? When I go to buy shampoo, I’m bombarded by all the things that are “wrong” with me. As I trawl the aisles of my local drug store, I’m haunted by the mantra of capitalist sexual desire – if I want to be a dish, I must buy; I must transform. I’m assaulted with serums to “tame” my curls, torture products to burn or rip off my body hair, shelves of deodorants to police the malodorous, to spritz and swab away all olfactory souvenirs of the real me.
The messages are everywhere in these insecurity museums: my grays need dying, my eyes need lining, my lips need sticking, and my lashes need to be blackened with a magical mystery goop. My fat needs to be siphoned, burned, starved off, dieted away, thrown up, exercised into absentia, or downright scared out with diet pills that could make me turn all Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on you.
I almost always leave the store feeling like there’s nothing natural about my body that isn’t monstrous and in need of “fixing.” It’s as though my drug store is trying to tell me that I don’t even deserve to be a woman if I’m not the poster girl for culturally-sanctioned sexy; which seems to involve being odorless, and by the end of my shopping spree, soulless and penniless. Yet, a lighter change purse isn’t the main issue here.
My real purchasing problems are the shoddy ideals I’ve subtly bought into. If I hadn’t, I would just grab my shampoo, ignore the attempts to systematically deconstruct my self worth, and get the heck out of dodge. But I don’t. I go home, stew about it and then write articles like this one. True, at least I’m giving it thought and taking myself to task about it, but I still feel weak for being another casualty of the beauty machine. How I can tear my body apart and then expect to be happy living in it?
In the oppressive environment of my local apothecary, I’m often seized by the urge to rebel by doing something supremely “unladylike,” like passing gas while waiting in line for the register. Most of all, however, I long to tell the other pharmacy casualties that there’s something perverse about these shops that harm while supposedly selling healing; and then invite them to join the farty party. I fear that the reason I don’t let a loud one rip, however, is that the images of ladyhood that I’ve been fed have penetrated deeper than I would ever want to admit.
Both as a woman and as a writer, I suffer from an inner split on the topics of sex and beauty. My dilemma stems from the fact that I embrace sexuality and aesthetics in my life and writing, but witness daily the fallout of these industries that I must rail against. This leaves me straddling two starkly different belief systems. I enjoy watching the beautiful people in films, but bristle when that is all they are valued for; I love fashion photography, but I’m against the promotion of anorexia and insecurity; I’m a supporter of frank portrayals of carnality, but not of the objectification that often accompanies explicit coupling on camera. As you can imagine, these polarized ideals present many challenges.
I trace some of this ambivalence to adolescence. Because they are not the focus of this piece, I will spare you a viewing of my teenage psychic scars; but I will say this: receiving external affirmation of a body that has changed and betrayed you at every turn is deeply baffling. When someone complimented my appearance at, say, 13, I remember feeling like the real me was some sort of beastie that had everyone fooled, working the levers inside of a normal-looking teenage girl.
But, even more than that, I remember the relief in discovering that I did not resemble the ogre that I often felt like because of all the shocking physical transformations I was undergoing. The craving for that spark of recognition becomes deeply ingrained in the teenage girl and the grown woman can spend a lifetime coaxing it out. I dealt with this by becoming the class clown. I sought to gain the acknowledgment I longed for by making people laugh; but even a clown stands in front of the mirror wondering if she’s ever really seen by the people around her.
I have been trying to make myself stop asking that question since adolescence. This involves discarding the parts of myself that I acquired through the pull of societal imperative and seeing what remains. One clear case of this was my abandonment of the Brazilian bikini wax. The last time an unfriendly woman briskly tore my hair from down there, it occurred to me that it was time to go au naturale. Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean that I think any woman with a landing strip is not liberated. In fact, if there’s anything I’ve learned from my own struggles with these issues, it’s not to judge anyone for their decisions because they have a metaphorical pharmacy of their own to face.
The whole Brazillian episode led me to wonder why industry-designated sexy is so sterile and, well, unsexy. We lose so much of ourselves when we’re convinced that we must eliminate all bodily reality in order to be attractive. Sure, I put the kibosh on the Brazillian because it was painful and because it seemed perverse to undergo that pain to fit some societal ideal; but there was something else, too. It suddenly dawned on me that, if I defined sexiness as embracing the unstoppable forces that are our bodies and their needs, defacing my private areas in the name of sexiness was the pinnacle of unsexy.
With consumer society behind it, the cult of beauty is a stubborn rival. It seems that all this purchased “hotness” is supposed to land me the only perk the world believes to be the provenance of women—sexual power. But what of my potency that doesn’t adhere to that ideal? I remember asking a friend in college if anyone had ever made any comments about her armpit growth. She turned to me, smiled beatifically, and asked, “Would it matter if they had?” She had a point.
It seems that the only way to claim your right to be just-as-you-want-to-be starts by unapologetically being just that; and I admit that I’m still working on getting there. I will keep striving to rebel against my daily dose of beauty brainwashing by examining my beliefs while blasting Patti Smith, but it would be nice to live in a culture that didn’t dose me to begin with. I’ll tell you one thing, if I discover that my pharmacy has a cream or powder for a hairy woman with opinions, I’m revolting.
Originally published on Sex in the Public Square
12/02/2009
12/01/2009
Herb and Dorothy
If you recall my first post on The National Arts Club, that same enthusiastic Chairwoman, Sharyn Grossman, inspired me to join their film committee; and after last night’s showing of Megumi Sasaki’s documentary, Herb and Dorothy (2008), I couldn't be happier that I did.
It’s one of those documentaries that reminds you why you love film, and in this case, why you love art. The Arts Club was an appropriate place to have this epiphany, as it has housed the work of some remarkable artists over the years, including that of Will Barnett, an artist featured in the documentary.
The film was so striking because of Herb and Dorothy Vogel themselves; on the salary of a postal worker and a librarian, they have quietly amassed one of the most formidable contemporary art collections in history. Oh, and did I mention that when it came time to share it with a museum, they gave it to the National Gallery…for free?
The images of these two white-haired people--Dorothy smiling serenely, and maybe a little shyly, and Herb smirking in that mischievous way some older men have--milling around their tiny apartment stuffed full of turtles, cats, and art is very touching. They never had kids, and as they proudly show us their treasures, it becomes clear that the art has been their children.
The Vogels purchased pieces based on what really moved them. As the director pointed out during the question and answer session that followed the showing, the Vogels remind us that art is not about acquiring some esoteric vocabulary, but about looking and loving.
One man in the audience patiently waited his turn and then asked how he could start a collection. There was a pause as the Vogels puzzled over someone who had allowed so many thoughts to come between his eye and his heart. "You just start buying stuff you like," Dorothy answered.
Featuring artists from Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Chuck Close, the film is a Valentine to contemporary art and the people who love it.
11/30/2009
11/28/2009
11/27/2009
Ten Signs that You Should Scrap that Piece of Writing
Every writer faces this proverbial fork in the road: You have pounded out what you hope will be the creation that will transform the literary landscape, but you smell something rotten and fear it may be your writing.
Sometimes this is merely the overactive inner critic; but most of the time this is the voice that will save your literary career. It’s a fine line, but one that must be examined.
Just remember, the great, sprawling masterpieces actually require more fine-tuning. The greatest writers are often virtuosic nitpickers and visionary verbal mechanics, always tinkering with and adjusting the written word.
It’s important to learn to recognize when something is not perfect as is; when it needs more editing; and even when it needs to be scrapped—as heartbreaking as that is.
Just remember, it’s possible that your piece is brilliant but misunderstood, but it’s also possible that it’s time to take the garbage out.
Here are some signs to help you determine when it is time to move on to new printed pastures:
1) If it needs explanation, apology, or perverse amounts of liquor to be enjoyed.
2) If you have an inexplicable itch to tell your editor that your cat ate it.
3) If you recall reading something almost exactly like it, but it’s not, like, plagiarism; and what the heck, people love nostalgia…right?
4) If you privately wish someone would hack into your computer and give it a little character.
5) If you use the phrase “that is to say” more than you actually say.
6) If it came to you in a dream, on acid, on a spiritual retreat, or on the toilet.
7) If you’d rather drive a needle through your eye than reread it.
8) If you think it could best be described as “Proustian.”
9) If your protagonist is a hooker with a heart of gold that is not played by Julia Roberts.
10) If you think it would be a pitch-perfect candidate for a verbal lobotomy.
11/26/2009
Question of the Week
If Megan Fox is "self-manufactured," what are all these hands doing to her at the beauty factory?
Film Noir
Film Noir has darkened my mind, but lit a little light inside. When I close my eyes, I see fatal women.
11/25/2009
The Sound of a Broken Reed
Charley Gerard, the director and composer for the Broken Reed Saxophone Quartet (BRSQ), possesses a rare collection of talents not often seen together. Versatile and virtuosic in his playing and composition, he has a way of coaxing the beautiful from the unexpected. With his diverse influences—from jazz and swing to Latin and classical—and his liberal tapping of the imagination, his arrangements are thoughtful and exuberant, and his performances are as formally impeccable as they are playful.
You have only to hear his recreation of the Vivaldi Classic, “Four Seasons, Four Saxes, New Four-Casts” in The Sound of a Broken Reed to know that you are listening the work of a deeply talented composer. Gerard fuses fun listening with dissonant sound. He is even good at the elusive, imprecise science of improvisation, while maintaining a strong sense of control when playing his arrangements. His headier music often functions as a mosaic—artistically assembled bits of sound strung together by his expert composing and the perceptive performances from the BRSQ group members. Together, they transport their audience everywhere, from New Orleans jazz clubs and the swinging sixties, to the Baroque period and the pages of poetry and popular culture.
The BRSQ is comprised of five players that rotate in the quartet--Chris Bacas, Jenny Hill, Alden Banta, and Tom Olin, in addition to Gerard. As its name implies, the group is as linked by its sense of humor as it is by its unique sound. The group does justice to Gerard’s innovative compositions; the diverse and extensive experience of each of the members is amply reflected back in the cumulative sound.
"A Whole Lotta Led: A Suite of Led Zeppelin Songs" (including “Whole Lotta Love,” “Heartbreaker,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Kashmir,” and “Loving Maid”) are recompositions that yield a seamless, super stylish Zeppelin-Gerard hybrid that will knock your musical socks off. The songs feature unlikely, yet ultimately satisfying, pairings. The strength of this section stems from the highly literate nature of Gerard’s music. His compositions don’t merely speak to one another; they engage in dialogue with the whole history of music, resulting in unusual and extraordinary creations, such as “A Whole Lotta Led.”
Gerard wrote “Rock Garden,” in his twenties. Its final movement, “Now Start Again,” is a remarkable piece. It opens with a fugue and closes with a technically impressive musical conversation, or really more of a shared monologue, between the saxes. This is one of the places where Gerard’s music takes on that mosaic quality--revealing music to be a series of intercommunicating sounds that form a whole only by “talking” to one another. With its formally impressive structure that somehow yields a playful sound, the piece is one of the Broken Reed’s best.
They say great texts play with one another and the same holds true for music. The humor in some of BRSQ's more serious pieces highlight their earnestness and this lively weight renders them achingly alive.
11/24/2009
Portrait of the Poet as a Teenager
Inside me there is a skirted issue
beginning to bare leg, a measles of infrastructure
so vast and vat deep that I am beginning
to see earth worms ascending while I sleep,
the true knowers of the blackness.
I like to write like this.
I like to sit before my night window
and cry for no reason, I like to bask
in the casualty of sorrow
I am sitting in my chair trying to make a decision
I am sitting in my head trying to make a decision
I am sitting in my decision trying to make a decision
and coming up empty every time.
My beautiful mistakes haunt me
like the radioactive candy apple at the fair
that I never should have eaten.
As a poet, I have grown accustomed
to hanging my life on a sign post
so that I am always three feet away
from being exposed.
There is in me a leaving of home
mourned years before it happened.
I cry for a place I never had,
years before it was gone.
It’s hard to avoid filling the painful moments
where self is right up against
the sand paper tongue of experience,
or to put it in my own words
instead of bookish pram:
How difficult it is to feel pain come apounding
and not turn a deaf eye on it,
to drown out the dance of the vengeful fairies
with a stout brew of human howling.
Afterwards, when things grow quiet,
there is a tremor on the inner side of my skin
and I expand and regrow in the forever
of that one silent moment.
I never stop speaking and writing,
jitterbugging my mouth onward,
as though the more speech I release,
the closer I come to expressing
the whole of me in music
like the slurrings of the dylanous Bob,
an untuned tribute to the uneditations of my sound.
Sometimes I sit alone on benches at night,
surveying the medicine cabinet of time,
without the glamour of moonlight
and say, "this is just so, this is just so."
Mornings, I awake to the sound of my own breath
folding my arms like shortened stilts,
body loosened with sleep, and say, “this is me.”
Other times, eyes covered in scales, with a trembling from within,
the smoky shape of pain, I must touch hands to face,
whispering, “this is still me.”
Strained seams of sadness run through my body,
which would be a forest if these feelings were trees.
Pained laughter, summits of laughing gas sorrow, fill the air.
Yesterday I sat, chaired and loaded, sentencing,
warily dipping fingertips into mind,
giving coffee water to my soggy brain.
Too much spinning leads to nervous laughter
and thoughts that must be kept from one another.
The mania and longing, the hair tearing late nights
distilled into words.
I am reddened, raw and tender.
I sit here with all this mangled light inside me,
coming to the surface, water swirling, inevitable
froglegging to my world without end.
Internal swaying of reeds captivate more
than earth’s sinking shadows, so I stay.
Cut me open and you will find words,
smoky, deconstructed sentences, a multiverse of language
that builds huge structures while I’m not looking.
Hunched on this rainy night, waiting,
window coated by light-discovered drops of rain,
suddenly, written water starts to flow.
The thought land uncovered tells me secrets.
Listening, I write them down obediently.
I float narratively backwards, letting my fallen words
drift behind me. In me is the windmill of rebirth,
reinvented wing-shadows unhinged.
These words are tiny sky-aspiring ink legends
that know so well the earthen ballad,
but blind and tongueless, they know nothing
of the work they do. Sitting here, I can sense
my remembered hallucination-life.
Positioned towards so many memory encoded moments
set to be reversed in sky-logic, I am drawing
pleasure and pain sketches in my ruled notebook.
These lettered entrances to my netherlands,
my recombined alphabet stew, makes this fallen alien life
feel more familiar somehow.
I am walking through some thought forest,
my limbs beating time with the tentacles of trees.
these woods have become my night playground,
my inexplicable junglegym, and I need nothing more
than tonight.
Weather vane points to the second chapter of memoir-to-be,
uncanny these summered texts so ripe with beginning,
wise with knowing their own illiteracy,
reading instead the unremembered lyric,
the wizard, the word.
11/23/2009
The K&K Gallery Opens in Williamsburg
Plenty of people claim to inhabit their art, but Kevin Kunstadt and Andrew Kenney have actually moved in.
With the ingenuity of trendsetting Williamburgsters, these two have converted their storefront living space into the K&K Gallery.
I went to their opening on Friday night and was impressed with the thoughtfully paired photographs, whose tones were alternately luminous and shadowy, abstract and focused, quiet and loud.
We showed up well after 10 and the crowd was still milling about, admiring the art, dancing to music, spilling out onto the street.
Tucked behind a curtain were the artists’ rooms, a lone moped, and what might have been my favorite photograph of the night—an arresting shot Kunstadt took in Brazil of a helicopter just hanging out in the hazy air.
Kunstadt and Kenney are mild-mannered and refreshingly low on the pretension meter. It seems that they are the real deal: two talented, young artists who want to pry open the hermetically sealed vault of New York City art and toss some young artists in.
So take a trip to 109 Broadway in Williamsburg one of these weekends between 12 and 6 p.m. and have a look for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.
11/21/2009
11/20/2009
House of Leaves: Rewriting Reading, Writing, and History
The time has come to talk about my favorite novel. In House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski uses the house in the title as a trope for the challenges of written testimony. Here, he has secured himself a space outside of time and narrative from which to survey both.
The inner flap reads: “House of Leaves by Zampanò with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant,” (two of the characters) with no mention of Danielewski. This is followed by an introduction from an edgy countercultural youth (Truant) who claims to have found a collection of writings in the home of an old man who has recently died (Zampanò).
The papers he finds are Zampanò’s scholarly analysis of The Navidson Record, a documentary by yet another one of Danielewski's characters, the world renowned photojournalist, Will Navidson. The film catalogues Navidson's exploration of the house he moves into on Ash Tree Lane that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
With input and copious footnotes from still more authors and critics real and imagined, the text addresses the physical and psychological world that Navidson examines. The quality that makes Navidson’s house different from the average home is that it suddenly develops new doors, staircases, and hallways; and this tortuous structure becomes the novel’s central metaphor for writing.
The labyrinth at the heart of the novel is not only a single location that the characters explore, but also a symbol of the intricate structural composition of the narratives of each of the authors, including Truant, Zampanò, Danielewski, Navidson, and even Navidson's wife, Karen, who also contributes a short film to the novel’s roster of texts.
Since the majority of the critics and authors mentioned either do not exist, or exist but did not say what the novel claims they did, House of Leaves critiques writing's truth claims when it comes to representing individual and communal history.
Danielewski is not at all interested in our progressing right-side-up through his literary phantasmagoria. Clearly, authorship is being turned on its head as unstable meaning is filtered through multiple creators. But how do we read a book like this? Easy: we have to change the way we read.
Danielewski is not concerned that we locate an answer; rather, he wants us to note how each new interpretation changes the labyrinth of the narrative structure. In this way, Danielewski demonstrates that the trajectory of history, or present reality, can be altered.
That one writer’s analysis is not an absolute truth is made clear to us as readers of a heap of invented criticism. In a novel that is comprised of stories from multiple authors, as well as criticisms of these authors that we are forced to engage with as though they were, like us, real outside readers, we are confronted with the changeable nature of written “truth.”
In the end, the house represents not merely language, but metalanguage. It is the commentary on all stories, both fictional and historical; it's a chance to rewrite reading, writing, and history.
11/19/2009
Going to the Movies Alone
Somehow, even after yesterday's film noir binge, there's still room for more. This is one of my favorite places to be. A screen, an overpriced soda, miniature chocolate candies, and my mind runs away from me.
I love the reacting faces of the audience. Cradled in darkness, there's a suspension of self-consciousness. I know I make my strangest faces there.
Going with someone else is a shared experience, but alone brings its own thrill. It's rare to feel that anonymous and yet so far from lonely.
There's nobody you know sitting next to you, reminding you of your other life. Your whole existence for those two hours is right there in those lights flashing through the darkness.
11/17/2009
Vietnam Mon Amour: Remembering Full Metal Jacket
Somewhere among the Vietnamese whores, sadistic drill sergeants, and soldiers who know as little about their souls as they do about why they are fighting, there is Full Metal Jacket. From boot camp to battleground, the film explores the contours of degradation, dissolution, and destruction that was the Vietnam War.
In the first section that takes place during recruit training, R. Lee Ermey is brutally good as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, a man bursting with an arsenal of creatively hateful jokes. A former Marine Drill Instructor, Ermey was brought in to coach the actor they had originally chosen for the role. He was hired after yelling obscenities for fifteen minutes without flinching while being pelted with tennis balls. Now that shows real dedication to dehumanizing epithets.
The demise of Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) is one of the most disturbing in movie history. He is a weak and troubled recruit whom the protagonist Private James T. "Joker" Davis (Matthew Modine) helps out at first; but when Joker participates in his bullying instead of defending him, Private Pyle is changed forever; and the result is unforgettable.
The wonder of Kubrick is that he can assimilate disparate emotive elements while maintaining his cerebral style. He is one of the only directors who could integrate the holy (cinematographer Douglas Milsome’s almost spiritual understanding of lighting renders the barracks otherworldly); the hilariously disturbing (Hartman’s high jinks); and the horrific (the war’s obliteration of the spirit) into one film--and often into one scene.
Kubrick combines a light soundtrack and moments that could be accompanied by a laugh track with the dehumanization and unintentional beauty of battle. The resulting paradoxical emotions echo the sensations of war. In the end, the film's demons, at once intoxicating and repulsive, reach out of the screen and possess the viewer.
11/16/2009
11/15/2009
Cinematic Call Girl Comparison
Charactonyms, copious hairdos, call girl chic.
Gloria Wandrous
Holly Golightly
This is another photo from my pilgrimage to the Banksy Tunnel in London. It grabbed my imagination and hasn't let go. If you look closely, you can see the house I built for myself in their wings. I still live there.
11/13/2009
The Soul?
Photo taken in Banksy Tunnel, London
And now words, lyrics to the song I often sing,
notes passing each other with gazing recognition.
One note, eyes turned skyward, hands outstretched,
was overheard saying, “What crazy world is this
that I am swimming, sailing past myself?”
With the elongation of certain syllables, I make a house of straw
for my head, songful as of late, to slumber in.
I sound the trumpet to make quiet the halls,
then send my flood of music, an army of fearless sound,
to clear all obstacles to the sleepy witchcraft
of my unseen soul.
But souls shouldn't be discussed in poetry;
it is tiresome, and with these words,
I sleep.
11/12/2009
A Donnie Darko for Tots!
Finally, a Donnie Darko for tots! Combine Donnie Darko’s apocalyptic bunny friend, preternatural phenomena and sharp commentary on contemporary society with a spoon full of sugar, and you get The Last Mimzy. The film is adapted from Lewis Padgett’s (husband and wife team C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner) acclaimed 1943 short story, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.”
Their title and pseudonym allude to Lewis Carroll (Charles Ludwidge Dodgson) and his “Jabberwocky” poem from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. With a score from award-winning composer, Howard Shore, including a collaboration with Roger Waters ("Hello I Love You"), the movie is a trippy affair. Like the literary works that inspired it, The Last Mimzy gazes at the world through an unusual lens.
A first glimpse through this lens reveals a world where the kids talk like adults and worship at the altar of technology. In keeping with the film’s motif, Noah (Chris O’Neill as one of the two sibling protagonists) loves his videogames. His sister, Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), is a ten-year-old who peers at the world through large eyes and loves astronomy. Leigh Wryn’s subtle performance channels the stubborn love and innocence of childhood without being overly sentimental.
The family spends Easter vacation on Whidbey Island, whose untouched beauty serves as an antidote to modern society. The camera follows them as they arm themselves with boogie boards to explore the natural world. Noah and Emma find mysterious objects floating in the waves that give them powers ranging from teleportation and psychokinesis to telepathy.
The mysterious objects also increase the children’s intelligence. Noah, an average student, suddenly spawns a genius science project using his newfound ability to communicate with spiders, while Emma’s brain development shoots off the charts. One of the toys is a semi-organic, nanotechnological marvel in the form of a stuffed rabbit named Mimzy. Mimzy provides Emma with information about the present and future world. Like Calvin with Hobbes, the crux of their special bond is that Emma is the only one who can understand Mimzy.
Noah’s teacher Larry White (Rainn Wilson) serves as the children's guide to their new, supernatural world. Larry is no average instructor. He wears an earring and tries to make the listless youngsters comprehend the cultural pollutants that are poisoning their society; however, the pencil-twirling children don’t appear overly concerned about the implications of their downward sloping civilization. A sleepy blonde girl raises her hand and lazily inquires why “they” don’t do something. Larry replies, “Who is this ‘they?’ ‘They’ is all of us.”
The roots of Larry’s quirks are revealed when the film takes us to his home, complete with a meditating girlfriend, Naomi (Kathryn Hahn), with whom he reminisces about prophetic dreams and trips to Tibet. When Noah starts doodling mandalas, it is Larry who recognizes that he is drawing symbolic representations of the universe.
As a work of art, The Last Mimzy is limited by the tender age of its audience, which is the only imaginable culprit for a corny ending after such graceful handling of difficult subject matter. As a children’s movie, however, The Last Mimzy is a gem. The film has taken guff for being convoluted, but this is because its greatest strength and weakness is its mind-blowing ambition and originality. Children deserve a movie that makes them think and feel. From Lewis Carroll’s dream child to Robert Shaye’s perceptive directorial touch, The Last Mimzy is the work of creative giants.
11/11/2009
The Poetics of Garbage
I will never be able to fully explain why the images of floating sea garbage in the New York Times have so completely captured my imagination. Perhaps it's the title of the accompanying article, "Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash."
This headline comes to life in my mind, floating and expanding alongside so much other detritus that I allow to hover there, including my college ID number, the number of times I've been in love, and other bits of worthless preciousness.
Maybe my fascination with these photographs has something to do with Don DeLillo's Underworld changing the way I conceived of garbage. After reading it, trash was transformed from smelly refuse to metaphor for the mental and physical possessions of a people, the most fascinating of cultural artifacts.
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear "garbage" is often a sloppy remix of what we've eaten for the last few days; but what about the treasures? Going through the non-goopy portion of someone's trash reveals the truth about them.
Counter to our capitalist education, we are not so much what we buy as what we throw out. What people purchase represents who they want to be. Shopping lists are fraught with longing. A certain kind of scarf encapsulates neatly in its fibers all that we hope to become.
What we throw away, however, reveals who we are, whether we like it or not. The litany of litter carries a very telling rhythm of denial. We are the love letters we "didn't" read, the wrappers of whole chocolate cakes we "didn't" eat alone, and the terrible stories we "didn't" write.
By this logic, we are all the islands of garbage that we "didn't" unleash on the floating world.
11/10/2009
The Roadtripper's Guide to the Galaxy
Level One lives in the conversations and experiences of everyday life. There’s nothing wrong with this level, but there's an invisible barrier between you and something deeper that you can sense, but not see.
Level Two is a more meditative level. This is where the people who get labeled “dreamy” live. A conversation here wanders from the polite social script of a Level One, to land suddenly in the more ethereal space where words flow effortlessly between two minds, meeting briefly in the middle, mixing gently, before returning to their cerebral homes. These conversations leave one feeling peaceful, understood, and a little less alone. The best brand of Level Two can even restore hope in the world and the self.
But Level Three is another universe. Even someone who experiences transcendent moments on the regular doesn’t come here often. A Level Three will change a person forever. Like the two previous levels, it can be experienced alone or with another person.
When alone, it looks like this: Say you’re walking to the subway and everything around you looks pretty standard, but suddenly you feel like you’re wearing a new pair of eyes, as if someone you can’t see has just put them on you and everything is different.
Nothing seems negligible; everything is luminous and renewed. You notice everything. The people moving up and down the stairs of the subway are composed of different shapes and colors. You realize that the shorthand we use kills things. Their skin isn’t beige; it’s red and blue, and there are even tinges of green.
The shapes of the buildings are not arbitrary; they are lines that meet and separate. They speak to one another and to you, asking you not to ignore the way things go together when you think they don’t, and don’t when you try to make them by thinking they do.
Everything unifies. The gleams and reflections of the streetlamps, the headlights, your newly discovered eyes, and something unseen that you somehow know is newly lit inside you, all meet in one node of white-hot sensation. The fruits of the fruit vendors are the same as the rods and cones of your eyes where all that light is being transformed into electrical signals.
A shared Level Three looks like this: You are talking to someone and he or she can receive these signals. This isn’t the average conversation where you have a thought, communicate it, and then wait to see what percentage of it has been lost in the shoddy game of telephone that passes for talking. Rather, everything else falls away till you are firing impulses like buckshot directly into the other person's brain; and neither of you will ever be the same.
Our road trip discovery of a similar taxonomy of experience was one of these rare moments. As my friend drove, the electricity of our Level Three mixed with the radio signals and the sunset outside, urging our car onward.
11/09/2009
11/08/2009
Dear David Foster Wallace's Spirit, please lead me to your shuttered peaks of verbal lunacy, your beauti-full of madness word kingdom. Sincerely, your partner in longing.
11/06/2009
Perfume: The Nose Always Knows
The impossible happened. Patrick Süskind’s “unfilmable” novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, was adapted for the big screen (2006). This was no easy feat because scent, the book's theme, is difficult to portray cinematically.
Some critics have pointed to the film's political undertones, even interpreting it as an allegory of the Third Reich. The producer, Bernd Eichinger, is no stranger to this subject, having gained international acclaim for The Downfall, a Hitler biopic. Apparently, Eichinger had been bugging Süskind to let him at Perfume since its publication in 1985. His perseverance paid off.
The film does an impressive job with a difficult concept. Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola Run), no stranger to frenetic subject matter, had a tricky job with this tale of a homicidal perfume maker. The result is a charmingly bizarre hybrid that plays like the love child of Chocolat and Silence of the Lambs.
In this nightmarish fairytale, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is born, despite his mother’s efforts to the contrary, in a filthy fish market. The scene of his birth is perfectly executed and particularly striking; the pressure mounts as the baby’s heart struggles to pump amidst the many pounding elements of the market, climaxing in Grenouille's only real achievement— his own life.
Years later, on a rare outing, he comes upon his first victim (Karoline Herfurth). The camera masterfully highlights the pieces of her that obsess him; she is all bosom, shocking red hair, and plums. The search to preserve this experience through scent starts as a troubling fixation and leads to the composition of his master scent, the essences of 25 virgins, finishing with the lovely Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood).
Perfume is an ode to the nose; it opens with a dark shot of Grenouille’s face, with only his sniffer eerily lit. The film is slow in many places, but the result is a disturbing examination of the horrors and pleasures of the senses.
11/05/2009
11/04/2009
Weekend Waltz with the Bartender
Those who neither drink nor over-think won't recognize this dance. “What the bloody bleep is this windbag going on about?” they might ask. But to the thought- and drink-heavy, these Friday night drinking dynamics, this weekend waltz with the bartender, will be all too familiar.
Let me write a picture for you: It's the weekend and someone, inevitably, wanted to go to a bar. I'm standing, holding my wallet. Sometimes things run smoothly and I walk away with the frothing fruit of my labors, but sometimes there are road bumps on the way to imbibing, especially if the establishment is bustling.
Now, I must be careful here. If I'm too passive, I will wait, awkwardly holding my money and conspicuously drinkless, for an inordinate amount of time. On the other hand, if I'm too pushy, I will remain similarly awkward and drinkless.
My friend and I were talking about this the other weekend, wondering whether these bartenders really didn’t see us, or whether making us stand there, dollars blowing in the beer breath, was their own bar version of philosophy, a Nietzschean will-to-power-trip.
This power trip involves making you stand alone at the social apex of a weekend, inelegantly shifting your weight, seeking things to do with yourself, pushing strands of hair behind your ears and suddenly becoming fascinated by your phone, by your surroundings, by something in your bag, all in order to avoid making eye contact with the world of people around you who already have their drinks and are talking happily with friends.
In a way, it was easier in the days when I smoked because this waltz would be the perfect time to light up. Although, perhaps I should thank my lucky stars that I quit because if I could still smoke whenever I was in humorously uncomfortable situations, I might be dead by now.
11/03/2009
Staging a Coup Against Writer's Block
Although I often suffer from its opposite, verbal diarrhea—that most unfortunate state in which mediocre words indiscriminately pour forth--no writer is a stranger to the dreaded squeak of the brain valve shutting off that is writer’s block.
My lexical obstruction often stems from the anxiety that what I create won’t be groundbreaking. On bleak days, I suffer from premonitions of shame—the nagging foreknowledge that what I’m fervently typing away at won’t be something that will cause me to beam. Yet I find that in writing, as in life, that stranglehold of perfectionism will only assure that I create less, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
In my bouts of blockage, the act of going on is what is commonly referred to as a leap of faith; but on a deeper level, it’s what Kierkegaard (the originator of the concept) actually called it, a leap to faith. You don’t leap with knowledge that everything will be okay; rather, the great hope on the other side of the leap is faith itself.
The concept is so stunning not because it is without doubt, but because it exists in the face of it. You will never stop having writer’s block, but you do have to take that writing leap, even when you have no faith that you’ll reach the other side of tour de force. In the end, the coup you stage is not against the block, but against your own voice that whispers, “you don’t have it in you.”
Abstract concepts aside, the single most effective laxative that I’ve found to combat textual constipation is stubbornness. You just have to storm past it, treating it as though it isn’t even there. How do you do this? By never allowing yourself to stop writing, even if you fear that it’s a load of hooey that will culminate in kindling; even if all you’re writing over and over is, “I’m a hack,” you must keep on writing. Sure, your output might look a little like Jack Torrance’s in The Shining from time to time, but you’re a writer; you’re allowed to be a little screwy.
11/02/2009
Sometimes, when it gets to be a certain kind of dark, I get that childhood feeling that I just might disappear.
11/01/2009
Katt Williams' Pimpadelic
With a name like Pimpadelic, I wasn’t expecting this interweaving of footage from an interview with comedian Katt Williams (First Sunday, Norbit, Friday After Next) and clips from one of his performances to be quite so cerebral. The whip-smart Williams reveals himself to be a man with a mission, constantly striving to reach the next level of comedy.
The portrait that he paints of the comedian is not, as he puts it, a “happy-go-lucky” one. He stresses that the jester’s role is one of hard work, copious preparation and the attitude of a disbeliever--a trust no one sensibility that keeps the mind sharp.
In his assessment of the methods behind his success, we start to recognize the degree of thought that goes into each gag; but his greatest gag is his transformation in the name of humor. The soft-spoken, brainy guy in the interview emerges onstage as the pimped-out, loud-mouthed purveyor of the “N” word. Yet, when he describes the 5-blunt rotation of chilling with Snoop as a “ghetto track meet,” we see Williams the wordsmith again.
This guy is darn funny, and the intelligence that crouches behind his façade of inanity makes him darn funnier. His quips are built on a keen understanding of sociopolitical issues that is framed as an ignorance of them. Pimpadelic reveals Williams to be what all of the best comics are, an irreverent cultural commentator.
10/30/2009
The Future of Media
Where Are We Now?
It’s no secret that recent changes in media have radically recast our world. Our lives have become data for us to slice, dice and share with other slicers and dicers. Of course, this invites certain snafus, but it also opens up whole new galaxies of innovative possibility. People are no longer willing to take their cues from Big Brothers. With the rise of social media, citizen journalism and user-generated content, everyone can be a part of the conversation—and usually about a thousand conversations at once. As we can see from the current measure of the human attention span--the ubiquitous 140 characters or less--with new formats come changes in how we absorb information. I realized that I had caught the multitasking bug when I found myself listening to a podcast while reading an article. Some claim that this sort of thinking in two directions at once is more productive, while others argue that it hinders retention. For me, it depends on the day. There are times when I can barely focus and times that I swear I could wash my hair, devour my daily news and write an article all at once. Please note, I am usually wrong about this one, a fact that becomes all too obvious when I emerge with dirty hair, no new knowledge and a page full of excrement. What is Our Media Future? Although everyone’s trying, nobody can predict the future of media--not even Eric Schmidt, the superhero I like to call MediaMan--but I will add one more opinion to the fray. Although everything seems to be migrating online, this doesn’t mean that the mobs chanting “print is dead” are entirely correct. People are still reading books and magazines in paper form. I’m guessing that print will take on a role akin to radio in the time of the televisual—functioning as a supplemental tool in the the annals of knowledge. I think the biggest change, however, will be in outlook. More and more, identities and ideas will be viewed as democratic and dynamic rather than static. This will lead to a climate in which the media is for the people and by the people, with all the innovation and mess that comes with that shining ideal. This trend can be seen in the new Twitter lists. People are no longer awaiting official tastemakers; they are forming their own tastes and then unleashing them on the world. It will be interesting to see the transformations these imagined communities of social media undergo. When I look into my cultural crystal ball, I see a future in which countless pieces of moveable text have replaced facts in our understanding of knowledge. Ultimately, if you’ll pardon a technologically antiquated metaphor (I’m over 25 now, practically over the hill), a given community will be defined less by its music and more by its cultural mixtape. Excuse me, I have some mixing to do.10/29/2009
Things I Wish I Saw More Of
Rebels
Redheads
Female cabbies
Flying trapezes
Cartoon characters come to life
Cars driving themselves
Trumpets and horns
Freckles and moles
Monocles on someone besides Mr. Peanut
Talking horses other than Ed
A repository of intellectual provocation
All the teeth the tooth fairy took together at last
10/28/2009
The Brave New World of Cultural Curation
Recently I've become really interested in the concept of cultural curation, or the aggregation of floating, creative tidbits that hover all around us, on the internet and in books, films and mouths.
Curation, often thought of as the exclusive domain of cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, has evolved to encompass other media.
In digital curation, electronic data are collected and preserved, or put in simpler terms, you collect the cool stuff you find online and share it with others.
This new way of conceiving of curation not only represents a shift in media, but it also presents a sort of paradigm shift, with the figurative replacing the literal in many cases.
When you expand the significance of curation, it's no longer limited to concrete exhibits; these days, many brave souls seek to curate the mental.
Instead of going to a musuem and enjoying a collection of paintings, you might frequent certain blogs where you savor ideas, memes, snippets of digitalia.
One of the most marvelous examples of such a site is Brain Pickings. Here, Maria Popova leverages her own substantial mental dexterity to take the concept of curation to new levels. She goes beyond data collection to ideological revolution.
Her aim is to zero in on new or overlooked thoughts that have the power to change everything. Here's a cultural tip, take a look at her site and replace that tired, old apple with an epiphany a day.
10/25/2009
Strangers in a Strange (Wine) Land
California’s wine country is full of stories and that wacky grape elixir has a way of drawing them all out. There’s a lot to keep track of in Sonoma and Napa because both the wines and the people serving them present you with items to store in your mental bank--names, histories, characters.
A woman that we met at one of the friendlier wineries had left her Office Space style job in Jersey City to work at a Napa winery and play in an Electro-Bluegrass band (talk about a change of life). She had lively eyes and was able to draw deep connections between the complexity of the wine and the larger world around it. When I left, I felt like I had had a life lesson rather than just a wine lesson.
“This one would go really well with a grilled eggplant,” she told us as we sipped, reminding ourselves not to guzzle. As she offered up more food pairing suggestions, she followed the geometry of our drinking motions with those alive eyes of hers as though she were lending us her lover rather than merely pouring us wine.
Everyone we met was as passionate about wine, but not everyone was as sweet as old lively eyes. After our tour of the Robert Mondavi Winery, we sat around the table, tasting what we had ostensibly just learned how to make. The MC of this event was the punchy tour guide whose obvious pride in the Mondavi wine empire impressed us, but whose obvious resentment of the people on the tour and their questions, didn’t.
From the look she gave us when we drank our Pinot Noir too quickly to experience the metamorphosis it undergoes upon exposure to air, we knew it was strike three; but we just weren’t clear on what the previous two strikes had been. By this point, with a good deal of mental snickering, I had begun logging our faux pas in the inner notebook of my mind to be deposited here later. They ranged from minor gaffe to egregious indiscretion in the etiquette of wine tasting department.
Our gaffe involved fluttering excitedly to two generously-pouring wineries in the course of 15 minutes without eating first, and having to take a lengthy walk through the vineyard--shotgunning tortilla chips from an earlier Mexican meal all the while--before we could get back on the road.
We committed our chief indiscretion (that proves its richness by making me laugh even as I write this) at our second winery. We entered, buoyed by the confidence of not having made fools of ourselves at our first winery, only to flub the last tasting at our second. We were genteelly (we hoped) sipping what we would only realize later to be one of the best wines of the trip--a peppery white wine for which my mouth still waters, and I am not a white wine gal--when it happened.
I suppose neither of us were paying too much attention, so busy were we with smiling stupidly at each other and clinking our glasses together every single time we drank. After we clacked our newest samples and grinningly sipped, we confessed to the wine lady that there was something a little odd about the last vino; she had described the heavenly tones we could expect and they were nowhere to be found.
She summoned the kindest smile she could and said, “I thought it was strange that you were cheersing with the water, but to each his own.” In our embarrassment, we quickly did the only worse thing we could, and briskly chugged the water intended to be poured out after it had done its cleaning job, in one shamed gulp.
Yet our trip was not limited to shaming. It was frequently filled with kind, wise, wine souls, like sailors who knew and loved every dip of the waves. A woman at one of the last wineries we went to had black hair and the face of a 40-year-old, though she swore she was 60 (it must be the health properties of the wine, I knew we were both thinking).
She poured for her customers in a room covered with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and she was just as pretty. When she saw that we loved the red Zinfandel, she pulled out the Reserve, which she swore she never gave to anyone. We were happy, whether or not her oath held true.
The highlight of the evening, however, came when we all got a bit more comfy (read: buzzed) and one very elegant woman pulled smelly cheeses out of her Louis Vuitton bag, telling me I could “cut her cheese” whenever I pleased. Now, that’s wine country for you. Over the course of the trip, many wine and food gurus tried to convert me to the jubilant California wino way of life. I must say, as I thought of the sad-angry faces of my fellow subway mates, I was almost converted.
10/23/2009
10/21/2009
The Virgin Suicides' Journey to Screen
Jeffery Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides, appeared on the scene in 1993. In 1999 Sofia Coppola adapted it for the screen in her directorial debut of the same name. Coppola wrote the screenplay for the film and was fiercely protective of the project. She was concerned that Nick Gomez’s script (the director who had a shot at writing the screenplay before she did) had upped the sex and violence quotient and would not be an authentic representation of the book. "The Virgin Suicides" is an exemplary feat of adaptation; Coppola’s screenplay stays faithful to the book, transporting significant chunks verbatim. Her script, which distills the book down to its most vital parts, is not so much a rewrite as a visual re-imagining of Eugenides’s written world.
The book tells the story of five sisters whose lives, and subsequent suicides, obsess a group of teenage boys who have appointed themselves custodians of their memory. Like detectives, they piece together “the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women” through interviews and bits of evidence. Although they may not complete the Lisbon puzzle, their lifetime of obsessive dedication does result in quite the tale.
The conservative community is appalled when the youngest Lisbon girl, Cecilia, is found floating in the family bathtub after her first suicide attempt. The tragedy isolates the sisters, turning them into the intriguing outcasts of their conformist community. As a result of Coppola’s respect for Eugenides’ creation, the plot and structure of the movie are almost identical to that of the book. Early on, the voice-over (Giovanni Ribisi’s spot-on man-boy rumble) tells us that “Cecilia was the first to go,” as we are confronted with the image of a young girl’s body floating in a tub of bloody water.
From costume and décor, to gossipy dialogue, Coppola deftly depicts both the small-town feel of the 1970s community and the Lisbon girls' personal world; but it is with the more personal aspects that she excels. With its whimsical explosion of girlish possessions, the set of the Lisbon home is packed with symbols of the girls’ budding womanhood and imminent deaths. Cinematographer Edward Lachman’s shot of the house in all the different phases of light between day and night captures perfectly the inert sadness of the creatures within.
Most importantly, Coppola's treatment of the suicides is tasteful rather than exploitive. When the boys get inside the mythic house, a hanging saddle oxford is all that we are shown of the suicides. Just as the inaccessibility of the sisters makes them more desirable, withholding visual access creates a morbid curiosity in us. The image is more powerful because we are forced to imagine the upper hanging parts of a dead girl we cannot see.
Although there are some serious issues that the movie doesn’t broach--with all its focus on downy limbs and sublimated desire, it can gloss over the book’s commentary on race and class, for example—in many ways, it picks up where the words leave off. Its use of voice-over capitalizes on the evocative qualities of the text by coupling them with the aural and visual power of film. Coppola's intuitive grasp of the material draws the audience into the tragic and dreamy world of the film so effectively that, regardless of sexual preference, you'll find yourself obsessed with the Lisbon girls, their world, and why they left it.
Jeffery Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides, appeared on the scene in 1993. In 1999 Sofia Coppola adapted it for the screen in her directorial debut of the same name. Coppola wrote the screenplay for the film and was fiercely protective of the project. She was concerned that Nick Gomez’s script (the director who had a shot at writing the screenplay before she did) had upped the sex and violence quotient and would not be an authentic representation of the book. "The Virgin Suicides" is an exemplary feat of adaptation; Coppola’s screenplay stays faithful to the book, transporting significant chunks verbatim. Her script, which distills the book down to its most vital parts, is not so much a rewrite as a visual re-imagining of Eugenides’s written world.
10/20/2009
Where in the World is Roethke's Soul?
Animism, or the belief that nature has a soul, only provides a partial explanation of poet Theodore Roethke’s relationship with nature. He doesn’t merely believe in the existence of a soul in nature, but rather he identifies with nature to the extent that he believes in the existence of his soul in nature. In his writing, he often describes the spiritual process by which he merges with nature. This invocation of the natural world and his expression of the parts of himself that he finds in the process place the reader at the core of his mystical experience.
The protagonists of Roethke’s poems appropriate the language of nature as a mode of self-expression. Ill at ease to the point of misery when surrounded by matter of the human world, the speaker of “Dolor” laments the “inexorable sadness of pencils…The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher” (1-6). Roethke’s narrators feel as much kinship with nature as they do alienation with humanity. The speaker of “Slug” says of the slimy creature, “I longed to be like him, and was,/ In my way, close cousin/ To the dirt” (78). Accordingly, in his notebooks, Roethke admits that he can project himself “easier into a flower than a person” (135). Therefore, it is not through human objects, but through natural objects that he seeks to express his complicated and painful inner life.
Roethke’s speaker in “The Lost Son” invokes the natural world to communicate his feelings. As he dwells on the memory of his father’s greenhouse, he asks his power of expression to manifest itself in nature: “Voice, come out of the silence./ Say something/ Appear in the form of a spider/ Or a moth beating a curtain” (20-24). Here, he uses nature to gain access to a part of himself that he feels unable to reach on his own.
When Roethke’s narrators find themselves unable to get in touch with their innermost thoughts and feelings, they undergo a mystical transformation. As he puts it in “The Pure Fury,” “”Stupor or knowledge lacking inwardness…Every meaning had grown meaningless./ Morning, I saw with second sight,/ As if all things had died, and rose again./ I touched the stones, and they had my own skin” (1-7). In this way, the haze that covered the speaker’s inner truth is cleared when he is reborn as a part of nature.
Roethke’s poems reveal the painful emotions that he finds hard to express without the help of nature. In “The Pure Fury,” the speaker laments: “The appetite for life so ravenous/ A man’s beast prowling in his own house,/ A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood/” (16-18). Here, he depicts the hunger for being that consumes him through the image of a wild animal let loose in the safety of his own home. The use of the nature metaphor doesn’t hide his feelings, but rather vividly conveys the experience of a man whose desire for life is so intense that it turns against itself and consumes him instead.
Roethke’s use of nature doesn’t impede the confessional nature of his poetry. Although he deals with his emotions in the realm of nature, this is not a ploy to disown them. On the contrary, they are still very much his own, but have merely been projected onto nature as a means of coping with them. Since Roethke sees nature as the realm of spiritual truth, for him, to examine his emotions within that context is to see them in their most profound clarity. In “Unfold! Unfold!” he says, “At first the visible obscures:/ Go where light is” (56-57). A deeply mystical poet, Roethke takes his reader there, for, in his mind, “deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light” (130).
10/19/2009
Where the Wild Things Are Invented
A few of the reviews have taken cracks at Spike Jonze’s re-imagining (directing and co-writing the screenplay with Dave Eggers) of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. In doing so, they miss the film’s most visionary aspect—its vivid study of storytelling. With painful acuity, Jonze captures how authors (Sendak, Jonze, Eggers), but also all people (Max, his mother, the audience members), must construct stories about their world so that they can live in it.
“Where the Wild Things Are” ushers the audience into the inner world of Max (Max Records), the little boy from Sendak’s story who runs off to a wild island of his own imagining after being naughty to his mother (Catherine Keener). The process of story making is ingeniously captured in a shot of Max’s mom, shown from his perspective, telling him she could “use a story,” and then typing up the fanciful tale he tells. In this instance of good mothering, she honors his creations by requesting and recording them.
When Max arrives on the isle of the Wild Things to be their king, they ask him to build them a world without pain. Max’s failure to protect his wild new family from suffering serves as a reminder that no matter how well-constructed the utopia, the dystopian inevitably creeps in. In keeping with this, Jonze spares us nothing, not even the pile of human bones that is all that remains of the previous kings.
In short, the bad reviews are humbug. The film’s motor is Max’s imagination and its potential for transformation; in a comic, meta-moment, even the Warner Brothers emblem has been drawn over with wolf ears.
Every shot and line of dialogue reflects Max’s creative methods of confronting the rage, hope, and heartbreak of childhood. With characteristic whizzing speed, Jonze refracts Sendak’s story through the whip-smart, aggressively beautiful prism of his own cinematic storytelling, while still maintaining its original light.
10/18/2009
10/16/2009
10/15/2009
Going Gaga for Gay Rights
I realize that there's a hint of kitsch to the details of her performance--the big, blonde wig ablowing in the wind, the sunglasses gesturing towards hidden tears, the howled "are you listening?!" that is part inspiring, part horrifying, the Judy Garland quip that fell flat--but there's also the undeniable importance of her act, and even of what the Lady herself has come to stand for.
Gaga is a fascinating figure of counterculture, an activist for the right of all people to live out loud. She employs a shockjock sensibility that borders on the Howard Sternian, but uses it to empower her observers, rather than doling out spankings to porn stars à la Stern.
As her appearance in Washington demonstrates, she fights for her public's quality of life, demanding for them the same things she demands for herself: the right to freedom of gender, sexuality, and self expression, even when the outcomes strike others as outlandish.
I believe her when she identifies addressing the Washington crowd as, "the single most important moment" of her career. I mean, let's not forget that those suspenders hold up the pants that cradle her own equal opportunity genitalia (or at least the small, symbolic dildo that represents it).
In the end, as a result of her bizarreness and balls (heh heh), she is able to deliver the statement, "I refuse to accept any mysoginistic and homophobic behavior in music, lyrics, or actions in the music industry," which amounts to a declaration of cultural war, a revolution of words.
Have a look for yourselves and let me hear your thoughts.
10/14/2009
The Mermaid's Song
The first breath I took
was not air but water.
I was born a fish woman
in the salt of the sea.
My hair was long then,
mouth unfolded as always,
but I did not drown
in my water, my world,
my womb of the sea.
The first time I walked on land,
my knees pointed in all directions
and I lost my way.
The first time I knew a man,
it was terrestrial,
but I could still hear the sea.
Our bodies were dyed brown
by the mysterious mud of the earth
and the ocean of air that hovers
between the pasty thighs
of the clouds and their skies.
He said I smelled of the sea.
The first time I knew a man,
I gave up my fish tail for legs
so I could wrap them around him,
tangle my mermaid’s hair with his,
souvenirs of the sea.
I told him quietly in his ear
that if another tongue
were to take the place of mine,
I would drown him, drown me.
The first time I knew a man,
I was still of the sea.
Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood
10/13/2009
The Manic Pixie Dream Tramp
Marc Webb’s “500 Days of Summer” (2009) reveals the anatomy of a failed fantasy. The doomed days of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) are presented out of order, yet the trajectory will be all too familiar to any man who has ever had his heart stolen. One scene in particular captures the sting of amorous expectation squelched: when Tom reunites briefly with Summer, a split screen shows his expectations on one side and the reality on the other. This clever construction captures onscreen that sinking feeling that comes when soaring hopes go splat. But there’s something else that happens when romantic dreams descend: the rise of the gorgon.
The Summer character has been labeled what film critic Nathan Rabin calls the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” (MPDG) and Jezebel’s Sadie Stein deems the “Amazing Girl." Rabin coined the phrase to describe that cheerful, mysterious, compulsively loveable, but ultimately empty, female filmic creature sent to awaken the potential and happiness of somber male protagonists everywhere.
The Manic Pixie figure is merely a projection of the longings of the male lead; but there’s something else at play in the various articles written on this gal, be she Amazing or Manic Pixie: anger and resentment. The male writers have had their hearts broken by her and the female writers have lost men to her. In her piece, Stein is open about her jealousy of the real-life Amazings she has known.
Yet, the emotions surrounding the MPDG run deeper than mere resentment. They are Amazing Manic Pixies only while they are loved. Before that, they are merely everyday women, and afterwards, they are harpies. It seems that the MPDG is just the vamp, the tramp, the femme fatale before she destroys the fantasy of the male lead (as in the “expectations” versus “reality” scene). When Summer is loved, she is the normal woman imbued with paranormal significance, but when she trashes the romantic comedy formula of boy meets girl, boy marries girl—and let’s not forget that co-writer Scott Neustadter is open about the fact that he’s out for romantic vengeance—she starts to resemble those fatal women of film noir.
Ultimately, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the flipside of the man-eater—just another invention to protect the frightened male mind from female potency. If you squint your eyes, you can see snakes starting to peek, Medusa-like, out of Summer’s 1950s hairdo after she dashes Tom’s dreams.
10/12/2009
Faulkner's Magical "Maybe"
Jennifer Burg, Anne Boyle, and Sheau-Dong Lang claim that Faulkner’s stories can leave unseasoned readers with a “jumble of incidents related through the ramblings of memory, but this “jumble is not a flaw in his writing, but rather the way he constructs his characters’ identities. In his short stories, “A Rose for Emily,” “Race at Morning,” “Mountain Victory,” and “That Evening Sun,” the protagonists are characterized by their recognition of irreconcilable oppositions in their identities.
While most authors will resolve their characters' conflict in the interest of the reader’s comfort, Faulkner highlights their ability to recognize that a choice between opposing adjectives is a linguistic fiction, not an ontological revelation. Because no real human being is ever absolutely one thing or the other, he is able to write characters who inhabit the space between conflicting perspectives, and are therefore so realistic that their confusion can be felt through the pages.
Faulkner's characters appear authentic because, like real people, they inhabit neither presence nor absence, but the flickering space in between. He creates his characters with the knowledge that every representation bears the mark of what it is not. It appears that Faulkner’s quest is to keep the world of ideas safe from any pronouncements that would limit possibility for his characters. He positions his created people not in what they are or what they are not, but in a third space, the “maybe” that leaves all possibilities open.
In his characterization, Faulkner seems to be inspired by the concept of “negative capability” created by a poet he greatly admired, John Keats. Keats defined the term as a writer’s capacity to inhabit “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” In Faulkner’s story, “Race at Morning,” soon after telling the young protagonist that the gun was not loaded during the hunt around which the story centers, Mister Ernest deems "maybe" "the best word in our language." He revels in the power of perhaps because he recognizes that there's a certain imaginative thrill to inhabiting uncertainty.
In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner explores even more incomprehensible outposts of human conflict. When the townspeople finally gain access to Miss Emily’s home after her death, they find a corpse, but more horrifying still, a pillow that holds a strand of gray hair and the indentation of a human head. Through Faulkner's nuanced depiction, a wrinkled pillow and a single hair reveal the story of a woman who killed her lover only to lie next to his corpse over the years. Faulkner himself attributes this impulse to Emily’s inner conflict, that "she knew that you do not murder people...she was expiating her crime." “A Rose for Emily” is an allegory of divided humanity. Miss Emily is aware of the moral boundaries she transgresses, and her way of seeking forgiveness, according to her author, is to cradle the life she has taken.
Faulkner imbues his protagonists with an awareness of language’s complicated role in identity formation. In “Mountain Victory,” the protagonist Saucier Weddel says, "Our lives are summed up in sounds and made significant...especially if you are unfortunate enough to be victorious." Weddel cleverly understands that his life is constituted through language. He theorizes that it is the winner who gets to construct the world in words, and that, if this is the case, he would rather be the loser (he is referring to the Civil War, yet also to life itself, it seems).
As in the case of Wedell, Faulkner’s characters’ dilemmas remain irreparable because he refuses to superimpose false solutions that reconcile conflict. Instead, he lets their contradictions be their defining characteristics. They are not defined by the aftermath of a resolved fixation, but by the ongoing clash of its internal divide. Even when they try to solve their problems by defining themselves by one side of the split, instead of choosing between one space or the other, they only succeed in positioning themselves once again in the third space of indeterminacy. Remarkably, it is this very spirit of ambiguity that gives Faulkner’s characters their lifelike essence because it echoes the conflict through which actual human identity is constructed.
In “That Evening Sun,” the Compson family’s African American laundress, Nancy, is terrified that her absentee husband will return to punish her for her infidelity. This terror manifests itself in a sound that is “not singing and not unsinging.” What makes Nancy a character of such eerie depths is that Faulkner positions her neither as a singer nor as a non-singer, but in a third space, as though she had begun to sing before the book came to be and was suspended mid-action by the fact of being written. This strange circumstance leaves her in an evolving state-of-being that resembles not fiction, but truth.
Like the citizens of the nonfictional world, Faulkner’s invented people continue to search for an ultimate truth; but their author demonstrates that, regardless of efforts to pin them down, people (real or created) are creatures of contradiction. Despite Faulkner’s characters' quest for clarity, in the end, it is the "maybe" to which they cling for a sense of identity. Perhaps this is because Faulkner realizes that, although language often forces choice, no human ever truly chooses, but rather floats back-and-forth between extremes. Language may be Faulkner's tool, but he does not accept its reductive tendency. Instead, it is as though he believes so wholeheartedly in the reality of his characters that he introduces two opposing possibilities and lets them navigate the metaphysical terrain themselves without forcing them to choose between the flickering moments of presence and absence.
10/10/2009
Being away from the city is like quitting smoking--panicky and peaceful, like a fast train squeaking to a halt.
10/09/2009
A Night at The National Arts Club
I had The National Arts Club
experience the other night. Founded in 1898, the club itself is as lush and
dramatic as the members, performers, and artists who fill its Gothic Revival
brownstone in the Gramercy Park area. Upon entering, I was greeted by a parrot
and a collection of beautifully textured people and paintings.
While I was there, I caught the film committee’s presentation of Donald Boggs’ striking documentary, “A Ripple of Hope.” The film traces the tense moments before and after Robert F. Kennedy’s speech announcing the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The showing was followed by lively conversation led by the committee’s effervescent chairwoman, Sharyn Grossman.
Boggs’ expert interweaving of the importance of King and Kennedy culminates in a shot of the Landmark for Peace Memorial that shows the two dead idols reaching out to each other from their metal confines. At the film's end, the audience was filled with the faces of people who had just relived a powerful slice of history.
10/08/2009
Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen as Psychological Text?
In light of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are coming out on October 16, let's take a serious look at Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. This strange and wonderful book explores the rich possibilities for identity exploration in children’s literature. That the text is for young people (as the picture book format implies) is crucial because the story of the Night Kitchen is one of discovering and claiming the earliest threads of selfhood.
With the question “Did you ever hear of Mickey?" Sendak propels his reader into the world of the Night Kitchen. This world is characterized by Mickey’s varying identity formulations. He falls “through the dark,” “out of his clothes,” “past the moon,” and “into the light of the night kitchen?” The question mark following “night kitchen” highlights the mercurial nature of his transformative journey.
In the course of his cosmic, culinary travels, Mickey progresses from a sense of oneness with his surroundings, to a sense of difference. As the night bakers craft their “delicious Mickey-cake,” Mickey informs them: “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!” In this way, a 34-page book comprised mostly of images manages to convey the complex psychological processes of ego formation in early childhood.
Sendak’s text explores the developmental progressions of youth in the light and playful format of a children’s picture book. In the Night Kitchen reveals that medium doesn’t determine intellectual rigor, but only the manner in which it will be presented. This teaches the dedicated critic to seek the deeper meanings of the text regardless of format. This also teaches dedicated critics that if they find themselves naked and falling through the universe into the kitchen of the night, it’s not insanity, it’s personal progress.
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