The Manic Room!

If Daryl Dies We Riot, or Why We Watch The Walking Dead

2015-10-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

Next Sunday, AMC’s The Walking Dead returns to live television, and its legion of fans can’t wait to veg out and eat up the season six premier. I have been accused of cultural elitism from time to time, but no show has gotten its teeth into to me the way The Walking Dead has. It’s so delicious, and there’s no obvious reason why its hoard of fans are drawn to it. The Walking Dead, while well-made, falls short of shows like Breaking Bad and Sherlock in terms of quality: Andrew Lincoln isn’t likely to steal any Oscars from Benedict Cumberbatch. Likewise, TWD—by necessity—falls short of a franchise like Star Trek in terms of vision: the characters are cut off from any sense of larger humanity. They cannot know what has happened to their world nor seek to fix it. Rather than a grand vision of an optimistic interstellar future a la Trek, TWD is an intimate peephole unto the end of our race. It’s kinda depressing actually, at least on the surface of it. So why is it that next Sunday by 8 PM, come hell or high water, I, along with a massive herd of Americans, am going to throw my phone in the other room and park my ass on the couch to take in this grim vision of our fleeting future? Indeed, anyone who doesn’t watch the show must be wondering what all the fuss is about. What's the big deal? I have wondered myself…

While the dystopian vision of the end is as old as Science Fiction itself (consider, for example, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is in turn predated by Mary Shelley’s The Last Man), anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed a proliferation of post-apocalyptic books, film, and TV since the release of the expanded edition of Stephen King’s The Stand in 1990. For some reason in the 90s—which gave us Deep Impact and Armageddon—we were really concerned with asteroids and, more importantly, avoiding the onset of the apocalypse. Since the millennium, we’ve become obsessed with survival after the end. Prominent examples include 28 Days Later (and its sequel), the completion of The Matrix franchise (begun in 1999), The Day After Tomorrow, Snowpiercer, the Zac Snyder remake of George Romero’s The Dawn of the Dead, the rebooting of the Mad Max franchise, reality television’s Doomsday Preppers, The CW’s teen targeted The 100, World War Z, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road (and it’s film adaptation)…just to name more than a few.

It seems that our longstanding interest in end times is broad, pervasive, and on the increase. And is it any mystery? No matter the ideological perspective of the viewer, the vision of the end presents itself persuasively to a broad range of American viewers. Those of us on the left consider the prospects of global climate change with a healthy amount of trepidation. Those of you on the right see the destabilization of your belief in objective Truth—as embodied in the legal redefinition of the family and the embrace of multiculturalism—as a harbinger of the end times. Beyond politics, we all suspect the ability of government to cope with less politicized threats to our existence such as technological advancement, pandemic, and scarcity of necessities such as food, water, shelter, and healthcare. Post-apocalyptic texts then offer a way of confronting such anxieties in the mediated form of imaginative fiction. As Frederic Jameson claims in his seminal examination of SF, “Progress vs. Utopia,” the seeming unreality of science fiction provides the opportunity to look at realities which are far too traumatic for most of us to consider…and certainly not within the realm of entertainment.

But the negative prospects of apocalypse only tell half the tale. While the apocalypse is something to be feared, it is equally—and possibly even more so—an object of desire. The apocalypse is a fantasy. The Armageddon brings with it wish-fulfillment. In announcing the end, isn’t the religious fanatic’s primary emotion one of triumphant glee? And in secular terms, the post-apocalypse allows us to imagine the end is not the end. It gives us hope where we feel hopeless. Humanity will endure and narrowly survive pandemic or climate change or the misguided creations of corporatized science. In fact, we may even—in some fantasy of our Darwinian or spiritual superiority to others—come out the other side better off.

However, while this survey does much to explain the appeal of a waxing subgenre more broadly, it does little to explain the specific appeal of The Walking Dead.

Certainly, The Walking Dead participates in the critique of capitalism that has supplied the core of the zombie subgenre since George Romero launched it with Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Martin Shkreli made news recently when he purchased a
patent for a drug and jacked up the price 5000%.

It is my belief that even the most conservative members of our general population feel just as much angst about corporate capitalism as Bernie Sanders does. How can anyone of any ideological stripe believe deep down that our perverted version of capitalism fairly rewards the best among us? How many among you truly believe that your slice of the pie is the size you’ve actually earned? How many of you owe your happiness to our economic culture? ...That’s what I thought.

I’m trying to avoid veering off into a discussion of TWD’s spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, but it serves to begin with one of the most ridiculed scene in the too maligned show’s early run, the scene in which Madison plays the iconic American board game Monopoly with her children, Alicia and Nick. Those who ridicule the scene miss its symbolic import. In a textbook case of dramatic irony, we are watching a trio of characters play a game whose rules no longer apply. Even Alicia’s complaint that the game is “so evil,” nothing more than “kindergarten capitalism,” strikes us ironically hollow. In this apocalypse, all the ideological underpinnings of capitalism, all the ways in which it attributes value, are rendered meaningless. Far from an objective and absolute arbiter of who contributes to society and who drags on it (think Mitt Romney’s makers and takers), capitalism’s entire method of evaluating society is treated like a Michonne’s samurai sword treats a walker.

The most pervasive representative of the show’s ideological critique is embodied in its most revered character, Daryl Dixon. Throughout the show’s fourth season, a number of characters attempt to guess what Daryl was before the walkers took over. Daryl evades the truth, but eventually we learn the answer: he was nothing. Unless you consider serving as your father’s punch toy a social function, Daryl previously fulfilled no function in society. And as an uneducated backwoods redneck who merely subsisted on moonshine, methamphetamine, and rodent meat, Daryl retains his sense of inferiority. However, the weakest of the survivors, Beth Greene, is able to drive home to him that his terms of self-evaluation are outdated.

In the seasons 12^th episode, “Still,” Beth has decided, much to Daryl’s annoyance, it’s time for her to have her first drink. In her defense, Beth suspects that she’s not likely to enjoy long term survival, and Daryl gets on board, locating a backwoods shack with an attached moonshine distillery. When Beth asks him how he knew to find such a place, Daryl explains that he grew up in an eerily similar household. It is in this discussion that Daryl reveals his pre-apocalyptic identity and persistent lack of self-esteem. It is at this point that Beth predicts, “You’re going to be the last man standing. You are. ...You’re going to miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon.” Despite the fact that his previous society valued him as little more than excrement, Daryl is now the definitive survivor. Rather than the group’s least important member, Daryl is arguably it’s most important. His skill and familiarity with weaponry place him as among the most adept in dealing with threats from both walkers and other groups. In a world without grocery stores and restaurants, he is essential to the group as a skilled hunter and tracker. How can you place value on the man that brings home the possum…er, bacon? In a world where no authority demands adherence to the social contract, he is trustworthy. Among all of our survivors, he is the only one that we can imagine surviving all on his own. He is so skilled, that as a member of the group he certainly gives more than he receives in terms of protection. When Beth informs him that he is likely to be the last human alive, we know she’s right. Fittingly, at the episode’s conclusion they burn the shack—and with it, his outmoded self-evaluation—to the ground. So, in taking the least valuable and transforming him into the most value, The Walking Dead demonstrates the radical arbitrariness of ideology—capitalism most obviously, but all ideology really, for we could perform a similar analysis of how the show confronts issues of, say, religion or race. So, every viewer—especially those thinking that their slice of the American pie is even smaller and less appetizing than a squirrel carcass—confronts the possibility that such valuation is arbitrary, that they could be among the most revered in another version of civilization.

And it must be noted that this radical arbitrariness of ideology extends to leftism and liberal humanism as well. How relevant are the terms of debate over such issues gun rights? How carefully are we asked to consider the efficacy and justice of torture? And while Rick Grimes and his followers repeatedly try to reestablish faith in such ideals as democracy or charity or the inherent value of human life, such ideals are repeatedly undermined by apocalyptic realities. So while the radical contingency of ideology does pull the rug out from under conservatives’ stubborn insistent on timeless Truths, leftists and liberal viewers must also readily accept a demand to adapt their methods of interpreting their world.

Now, it might be tempting to respond that TWD’s survivors live in a horrific world, a chaotic nightmare that demands we listen to threats identified by people of other ideological stripes. There may be some truth to that sentiment. It is possible that show is saying that we have a choice: a chaotic and horrific end to human civilization or a validation of ideologies we believe to be ridiculous: somehow bible-thumping gun nuts and eco-terrorists must find common ground. It’s possible I guess…but I’m attracted to the notion that The Walking Dead is not a nightmare at all, but a fantasy. We in fact envy the survivors and their freedom from our chains. While Rick and the group must endure real anxieties inherent in the daily fight for survival, they are compensated with everything that our version of late consumer capitalism denies us. And what is that? The key lies in Beth’s prediction, not that Daryl will be the last man standing, but that when he is he will miss her…

As Frederic Jameson has explained, the banishment of anxiety in modernity has come at the price of all of the rest of our emotions as well. While we do not deal with primal threats, all of the rest of our relationships—those to our family, our friends, our romantic partners, our work—have become mediated by material goods and the consumption by which they are acquired. Our children know we love them, not because we protect and provide for them, but because we buy them toys that lose their appeal once they’ve been removed from the packaging. In our sexual lives, romance has become an inconvenience and sexual partners are disposable; we’ve gone from dating to online dating to swiping right and hooking up. Why become invested when we can always shop for another person online? We’ve banished all difficulties from dating, but at the price of companionship. Even our sense of self is purchased and donned in mass produced clothing that rides around in socially coded automobiles. We’ve eradicated boredom, but we eat in front of televisions and ignore the people with whom we share the meal. We all stumble about, staring into our phones, believing all the same tired conventional truths, looking for something to buy that will make us happy. Consume. Consume. Consume. Together, but all alone. Maybe the bloodlust we have for the weekly zombie massacre TWD enacts is the embodiment of our own self-loathing, because the sad truth is, we are zombies. We are the walking dead.

Not so with Daryl, Beth, and Rick. Not so with any of the survivors of The Walking Dead. When they get bored, they think about their lives, they interrogate its meaning, they read, they play music, and they talk and get to know one and other. But it’s always more than that. Because their survival depends upon their humanity and the strength of their relationships. It’s a truism on the show that no one can survive on his or her own. And even if Daryl Dixon could possibly survive on his own, his participation in the group only further reveals the value of relationships. Without the others, we suspect he’d feel his life to be pretty meaningless. By the show’s third season, the members of the group refer to the others as family. Far from hyperbole, family seems an insufficient term…for the most precious commodity in the world of The Walking Dead is another person that can be relied upon to help you in a fight, to share food with you, to watch your back, to tell you the truth. And so we envy the characters of The Walking Dead because we feel the loss of such ways of relating to one and other. At best, such relationships are something we can watch played out on the television each Sunday evening this fall.

Read a (Short) Classic!, or Five Reasons to Turn Off the Fucking Television

2013-01-11T11:34:00.001-06:00

Now, I consider myself a generally well-read person. Sure, my yet-to-read-list is still quite long, and in actuality it’s a list that I find growing longer rather than shorter. It’s kinda like that old truism: the more you read the less you’ve read...or something like that. Now, being educated in the liberal arts is it’s own sort of class issue; it’s not like being rich or born into family (though those class attributes tend to lead to access to education). I'll even admit I’m predisposed to dislike people who are wealthy or are born into culturally elite families. Yes, I guess I’m prejudiced against people who won the lottery the day they were born. And, sometimes, with my education, I end up on the receiving end of similar resentment. (That'll teach me). Maybe they think I was born rich or something. Or maybe they just buy into the ideology of education that undergirds the assumptions of corporate America and politician’s obsession with “productivity.” They tout the value of “useful” degrees—like engineering or computer science or business—usually at the expense of psychology and philosophy and history and, of course, English. You know, the study of all the stuff that makes us human.

Yet, sometimes I end up in conversation with someone who seems not so much resentful as envious. Some covet the opportunities I’ve been lucky enough to take advantage of. They’re like these modern day Jude Fawleys that just never got into the hallowed walls...yet. I love these sorts of people, and these days we give them a better shot at learning. I should know: I’m one of them. They’re my favorite students because when they discover that my classes ain’t no bullshit classes, they take all of them. I teach to the top of the class and find that more students decide to meet me there than I had ever expected when I got into this game. And sometimes—more often that you’d expect—these people confess to me a desire to read “the classics.” They too want to be “well read.”

And good for them. But what are these classics? And where should they start? Well, that is certainly up for debate. They’re probably old, like before the advent of television or even radio or film. They probably use a vocabulary that is broader but also a bit antiquated. But they are by no means some monolithic thing: if you read a “classic” and decide that you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some other "classic" that you might. And I really do feel that reading older texts is a powerful experience. Older texts have certainly broadened my vocabulary as well my overall sense of language. But my favorite part of reading older texts is learning how people used to live. The 18^th and 19^th centuries are quite modern by historical standards, but unless we read their novels, we probably have no sense of their day-to-day lives. I like having a sense of how life in the 1720s or 1790s or 1860s or 1890s went on…and those would indeed be four very different lives. Moreover, authors represented life very differently with the techniques of their various ages, and there is something really special about text that predates the visual culture that dominates our lives today.

Okay. I’m off my soapbox. You get it: I want you to read a classic or three. Since classics are inherently challenging due to the use of a broader and antiquated vocabulary, generally longer sentence structures, and less frequent paragraph breaks, I am going to focus on suggesting some shorter texts. If you don’t like one, try another. So-called classics are usually cheaper to buy since they’re not under copyright and readily available at libraries. And while many classics are quite long (reading was what people used to call watching TV), some of the best are very short and should make any reader’s bucket list. Finally, even if you were “forced” to read one of these way back in high school or college, I might suggest trying them again in adulthood. Among the most amazing aspects of reading is that books change as the reader changes: as I grow further into adulthood, I find that my reading experiences become more…meaningful. And there is just something quite different about the experience of elective reading. So, here goes. We’ll call this list “Aaron’s Favorite Short Classics (Whatever That Means)”:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1819): From Boris Karloff to Mel Brooks, we all know the pop cultural incarnations of this tale, but the book is nothing like the pop cultural resurrections of the Monster. Mary Shelley first conceived of her “hideous progeny” in a dream she had during the stormy summer she spent in Switzerland in 1816. Back then, she was not Mary Shelley, but Mary Godwin, a mere 18-year-old girl who had eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley…who was already married. In order to escape some of the social repercussions of their unconventional relationship, they opted to spend a summer near Geneva.
The weather was awful. Luckily their neighbor was the second most famous man alive, the dashing poet Lord Byron. As her brilliant husband forged a deep friendship with Byron, Mary sat in on what must have been some of the most profound conversation of the age. And when they decided to have a ghost story contest, Mary gave life one of the greatest novels ever written from the material she assembled from those conversation, the natural beauty of the Alps, and in her own profound struggle with the problem of authority in a time of democratic revolution.
The text itself is fascinating as the letters of an Arctic explorer encloses the narrative of Victor Frankenstain…which, in turn, contains the narrative of his Monster. And yet all three stories are the same story of alienation best articulated by the Monster himself. No, Shelley’s monster doesn’t grunt; he is among the most reflective characters in fiction, poignantly giving voice to our ambivalence toward paternalistic authority…you know, how we hate “the government” but are quick to make use of government services, etc. Such ambivalence is thoroughly explored in numerous and varied embodiments of the Law: Victor’s family business is not science, but government, multiple characters are subject to miscarriages of justice, and Victor is saved at one point by the benevolent magistrate, Mr. Kirwin. The book is significant to literary history for umpteen reasons. It is an astute expression—probably the best in novel form—of the Romantic literary mode (I don’t pretend I’ll convince you to read Wordsworth). The interpretations of Nature are truly profound. Along those lines, the book stands out as an example of the afterlife of Gothic fiction. And yet it is also probably the first example we have of a science fiction novel. The ways in which we represent the android, AI, and the (mad) scientist today in fiction and film are founded upon Shelley’s work. Without Frankenstein there is no Blade Runner. It is simply one of the most important books ever written in the English language…and it’s only about 150 pages long. This text should be at the very top of any reading list.

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot (1861): “George Eliot? Never heard o him,” you say. So I say, “It’s not a him; it’s a her. George Eliot was the penname of Mary Anne Evans, and she was one of the greatest novelist of the greatest age of the novel.” Eliot was a contemporary of Charles Dickens; although Dickens was waaayyy beyond having any rivals or competitors, Eliot was probably the next most esteemed weaver of tales of the Victorian era. Her later works—Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda—are grand in scope, pitting the individual decision making process against the epic grandeur of “History.” Indeed, Middlemarch, in my humble opinion, is the greatest novel ever written. But it’s a stylistically complex, thousand-page dissertation on the minutiae of morality in decision-making. It doesn’t even get really good until about page 250. And that’s why you haven’t heard of George Eliot. Still, no one should go into the ground without having engaged one of the best writers to walk the planet (I think she is the best, ahem). So, I offer for your consideration Eliot’s 200-n-some-odd-page fable of alienation and redemption:

Silas Marner had once been a happy and involved member of his community. But after a treacherous friend frames him for a petty theft of church funds, Silas’ reputation is destroyed, his fiancée breaks their engagement, and he is ostracized from his community. Embittered, Marner finds his only solace in the hoard of gold he accumulates as a reclusive weaver in a new town. Over the years his hoard grows and grows as his eyesight becomes more and more myopic. When Marner discovers his hoard has been stolen, he is distraught and on the verge of giving in to an all-consuming grief. One night, a child wanders in his door. When the near-sighted Marner first looks upon her, he believes someone has returned his gold. But what he is actually looking at are the curls of the golden-haired little girl who has been left and orphan. I’ll stop there (as if that isn’t enough), but let’s just say that I cried like a frickin baby when I finished the book. Seriously. Like a baby. Read it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890): Among my favorite of Wilde’s of witty turns of phrase is his affirmation that “a true friend stabs you in the front.” More than anything, Wilde, who was predominantly a playwright, dealt with the façade of public discourse in both his employment of humor in his satirical plays and the tragedy that was his biography. Victorian notions of propriety produced numerous social side effects—including a developed economy of opium abuse, prostitution, and pornography—all enjoyed via the rampant double lives of Victorian “gentlemen.” And since everyone who was anyone seemed to be pretending they were something and someone they were not, Wilde—the first modern homosexual—was of course married. Along this theme of the divorce of image from so-called “reality,” Wilde constructs the tale of the young and handsome Dorian Gray, a man who seems to all the world an angel. What becomes a prime example of the Gothic revival of 1890s begins as a somewhat ordinary novel of manners in the studio of renowned artist, Basil Hallward, as he is placing the final touches on his masterpiece, a portrait of Dorian. At the instigation (seduction?) of one of Hallward’s friends, an older dandy named Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian realizes for the first time that his angelic beauty will fade as time and the scars of life are written upon his face. In a fit of despair he wishes that the picture should age in his place, that this object should bear, not just the mark of time, but also (and more significantly) the marks of his sinfully idolatrous life. Dorian’s wish comes true, and it’s at that point that so-called “reality” recedes as the more horrifying reality of double lives leads Dorian down the path of debauchery. The novel is beautifully written and an amazing achievement for a writer who’s noted for a different form. Dorian is himself one of the great villains of literature; his unbounded desire places him in the tradition of Milton’s Satan. And yet the story is thoroughly modern. This sense of modernity comes from not only its objectification of the image but also from the (barely) repressed homosexuality that pervades the text. And Wilde is far too complex a thinker to simply reject social performance as false: as a person who reifies art, Wilde actually prioritizes the creation, the symbol, the performance as the thing which has true value. But what to make of a character whose villainy results directly from reconceiving their life as an aesthetic, as a performance, as the very highest form of art?

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824): This text is easily the most obscure on this list. In fact, you may have difficulty getting your mitts on Hogg’s novel without ordering it from Amazon. Anyhow, Hogg was a Scottish author that was connected to the literary greats of his age as an editor for the Edinburgh Review, a prominent literary magazine, in the early part of the 19^th century. (Remember, this is a highly textually culture. So that job was kinda a big deal). The text is challenging because it is steeped in some of the religious politics of Scotland the previous century. In addition, the book is not a straightforward novel but rather a “found text,” a confession exhumed with the body of a suicide, Robert Wringham. This fictively found text is prefaced by a long introduction by the fictive editor. The two work together to tell the story, yet they are often inconsistent in ways that are puzzling to a degree that challenges the very nature of interpretation. Essentially, the story interrogates the Calvinist theory of predestination, that one was saved through grace rather than works. The novel centers on a religious zealot, the aforementioned Robert Wringham, who believes he is saved and fosters a venomous antipathy for his supposedly damned biological father and his older brother, both named George Colwan. Robert and George the Younger each see the other as a persecutor of sorts and the various versions of the story represent each of side of their sibling rivalry. Yet one day Robert meets a new friend, a man who identifies himself as a foreign prince and seems to subtly shift shapes, taking on the aspect of anyone he’s talking to or about…including Robert. This “prince” convinces Robert that since he is saved, Robert is justified in taking any action necessary—no matter how unseemly—to promote his theology. God would of course expect him to as a defender of the faith…and that’s when the fun starts. Make no mistake, Hogg’s novel is a challenging read because it is so unusual, but I promise that you never have or ever will read anything quite like this profound and sinister little text.

Dubliners by James Joyce (1914): Dubliners was written and published much later than any of the other texts on this list, but I’m going to fudge the definition of classic a bit. And it’s not a novel but rather a collection of short stories that are thematically related. Of course, James Joyce is best known for impenetrable (post?) modernist epics the likes of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Now, I wrote my undergraduate honor’s thesis on Ulysses and I can’t really say that reading the book is a very enjoyable experience, unless you’re into figuring out puzzles. Or maybe it’s better to put it this way: Joyceans are the Trekkies of the literary world. Anyhow, in the rearview mirror I came to view the book as so self-indulgent that I’ve never even cracked the cover of Wake. But Dubliners is a different animal altogether. Joyce composed these stories when he was very young (between the ages of 18 and 22 if memory serves), and he chose to focus them all on exceedingly ordinary figures from the various strata of Dublin in the early part of the twentieth century. All told, the fifteen stories—fourteen of which are very short—seem to work together to generate a picture of a society in which money problems, alcohol abuse, and the Catholic Church play fundamental roles. Most of the stories seem to be about schoolboys and priests (it’s not what you’re thinking), but my favorite is “Eveline,” the story of a girl attempting to decide whether or not to elope with a sailor she’s fallen for. The story is only three of four pages long but it is delightfully complex and requires a few readings in order to see all of the symbolic connections and read between the lines. Often is seems that reading Joyce is less like reading a story and more like reading a poem, and while that may be too much to ask for a thousand-page novel it’s certainly appropriate to these beautifully crafted compositions. The final story, “The Dead,” is much longer than the rest and has been classified as a novella. As such, it is more demanding; however, if you enjoy the stories it is one of the best and truly a profound reading experience. It concerns the visit of Gabriel Conroy and his wife to the annual Christmas party thrown by his aunts. Joyce uses the chaos of the party quite deftly to make the various plot lines reflect meaningfully on one and other. After the party, Gabriel has an epiphany regarding the relationship between the living and the dead, an epiphany that teaches him his life is not at all what he thought it was. But in the end, Joyce is a master of craft rather than plot. And fortunately for you, his best work is not contained in his long and impenetrable novels, but in this collection of short, breathtakingly crafted tales.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895): Most of you at least know of Wells as a result of Orson Welles’ (no relation) notorious performance of War of the Worlds in 1938. Wells is certainly a key figure of the development of the SciFi genre, and I’ve always been most interested Wells’ first novel. It is likely that this novel gave rise to the entire time travel subgenre of science fiction; so, if you like The Terminator or Back to the Future, you have Wells to thank (but, of course, you have Mary Shelley to thank for Doc Brown). In fact, Wells coined the term “time machine” in this novel. It is the story of the unnamed Time Traveller, a steampunk long before there was steampunk. He ventures into the future expecting to find what human hubris will expect to find: progress. While at first this future seems to live up to the Time Traveller’s expectations, he finds that an unimaginable horror—the return of the oppressed Morlocks—undergirds this seeming utopia. Many of you know the tale, but it really is quite brilliant that Wells’ dystopia is posited first as a utopia. The novel becomes a deft and humbling commentary on the future of our species from a scientific rather than religious or otherwise idealistic perspective. My favorite portion of the book involves the Time Traveller’s escape in which he travels further and further into the future millions of years (and what would actually take billions of years) to the near death of the sun as a swollen red giant. It’s a chilling vision. Yet the novel is more often viewed as a commentary upon psycho-social stratification in our own time. The Morlocks and Eloi represent the ultimate consequences of social stratification, a theme that remains relevant as our income gap continues to widen at the present historical moment. And then there’s the fact that common folk in our country won’t even think about the fact that their cheap phones and clothing and food is provided to them by virtual slave labor in our nation and others. The return of the oppressed anyone?

A few further suggestions: Persuasion by Jane Austen, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

The Greatest Novels of All Time!, Or Some Contemporary Novels I Liked

2012-12-22T00:28:00.000-06:00

Occasionally someone—a friend, a relative, even a student—does something really weird: they ask me what they should read, presumably because I teach English, right? Normally, I am so caught off guard that I don’t know how to respond. Are they asking me for what they should read for their enjoyment? Am I going to have any idea of what they might enjoy? Are they asking me what they should read…you know, to be well read? Or to just seem well read? And am I even a fit judge? Ah, who cares…I dream up such lists all of the time: they’re called syllabi.

But way back during my undergraduate days, I sheepishly admitted to a prof at UCSD that I just wasn’t all that well read. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry: you will be.” And by god, he was right. And here’s how it happened: simply put, I just started reading…a lot…like habitually. Or as Naomi Lebowitz used tell students about writing essays, it’s just like eating a mammoth sized bowl of spaghetti. You eat a few bites and it still seems just as daunting a task. But if you keep after it and quit worrying about your progress one day you’ll be really fat and have sauce all over your face. Er…you know what I mean.

Anyhow, I’m considering a multipart guide here, and how far I go with it will depend upon how interested you and I remain in the topic. At some point I will tackle some classics; I will make the case for some authors that you’ve never heard of; and I might offer thoughts on how to approach some of the more intimidating fields of readership, like Shakespeare. But we shall see… First thing’s first. I don’t know where you are as a reader. I’m going to assume that you “like to read” or you wouldn’t be much interested in this post at all. And some of you have read far more deeply and differently than I have. For those eggheads, just take all this as my humble reflections on books and stuff.

Now for our first entry, I’d like to encourage my fellow readers to consider trying a book that isn’t something you’d normally read. Maybe it’s longer than your usual, or maybe it’s different in style or subject matter. As you’ll see, I like my books like I like my sex: long, hard, and fictional. In addition, maybe you have read and enjoyed one of the books on the following list. If so, maybe you’ll take my concurrence with your taste as reason to give one of the others a go. So here’s my first list: there are seven books on it (because I’m against doing ten upon ethical grounds) and in no particular order.... Let’s call it, “Contemporary Novels Aaron Has Read in the Last Year and Enjoyed Immensely” [continued after the jump]:

"I'm sorry that I write too compulsively to write
up to the standards of my actual talent," said King in my imagination.

The Stand by Stephen King: King is the best-selling novelist of all time, but that’s not why I’ve placed The Stand on this list. Many readers have read something by Stephen King, but he is a very…um…how do I say this politely…inconsistent…yes, an inconsistent author. If you’ve only read Christine or Carrie, you are not quite aware of what King is capable of. While oftentimes King seems no more than a hack, at other moments he creates at a level that rivals any of our great novelists. Foremost, I think it’s helpful to find exceedingly long books worth reading…and The Stand is really fucking long, like way over a thousand pages. But many of the greatest novels lie unread because potential readers dismiss them because they are “too long.” Yet, long books can accomplish creative goals that just are not possible in four-, or even five-, hundred pages. And if The Stand isn’t ambitious, it isn’t anything. The first third of the novel details the near extinction of the human race as a result of a superflu pandemic in a manner that is gripping, realistic, and utterly horrifying on multiple levels. The remainder of the novel concerns the struggle for a miniscule percentage of survivors to rekindle human civilization. And, if that weren’t bad enough, they’ll have to overcome King’s finest villain—Randall Flagg, a man that is both startlingly developed and a pure demonic emptiness. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. Anyhow, the complex narrative follows numerous interweaving paths and digressions, one of which is one of the finest stretches of a novel I’ve ever read: trust me, you will never forget the short-lived partnership between Trashcan Man and The Kid. I just wish I could be there to see the look on your face….

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick: It never fails to amaze me how many people have never heard of Philip K. Dick…and yet you know many of his stories because they’ve been developed into films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and, yes, A Scanner Darkly. Recently an emeritus at my institution remarked (and I’m paraphrasing) that Dick was a visionary but just not a very good writer. And maybe that’s why he isn’t read more or more of a household name. Anyhow, it’s just not true. He’s certainly idiosyncratic, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Blade Runner) was one of the most popular reads in my SciFi course this term. But even if SciFi isn’t your thing, then Scanner is still a book you should read. The novel concerns the melancholy drug-addicted have-nots marginalized from a materialistic, mass-produced culture. Sound familiar? The story centers on Bob…or is it Fred? You see Fred is an undercover police officer who is also Bob a dealer thoroughly addicted to the thoroughly deadly designer-drug, Slow D. And the trippy thing is, not even Fred/Bob is sure who he really is…or whether he’s actually two people. The novel is both hilarious and poignant; it’s very tightly composed, really crisp; and Dick features a slew of a zany characters that are both funny and uncannily recognizable as drug addicts. If you’ve ever dealt with addiction, directly or indirectly, this novel will hit home.

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis: I was tempted to place American Psycho on this list, but I didn’t want to alienate anyone from ever taking any of my reading suggestions ever again. Why? I’ll address that in a future blog. Anyhow, after reading American Psycho, I wanted to see what Ellis could do with less utterly offensive material (you must admit that it takes a rare talent to piss off both Gloria Steinem and Wayne LaPierre), so I read Less than Zero. And I was disappointed. So disappointed that I would have given up on Ellis had I read it first. But AP is so well written that I decided to give him one more chance, and boy am I glad that I did. The Rules of Attraction centers on a bizarre love triangle between three students, one of which is Sean Bateman…Patrick’s little bro. Sean isn’t quite a sociopath, but he’s the next best thing. These “lovers” attend a fictional liberal arts college in New Hampshire in the 1980s. If you love the 80s, you’ll love the pop-culture references. Anyhow, it's less the story that's ground breaking and more the manner in which it is told. The novel is composed of first person narrative fragments from not only the three main characters but numerous minor characters as well (including characters from Ellis’ other works such as Patrick Batemen and Clay from LtZ and Imperial Bedrooms). The overall effect is postmodern…but not predictably so. It’s not simply that characters have a unique voice or a different interpretation of events; it’s that they construct their texts selectively in ways that tell us almost as much by what they choose to deemphasize or amend or change or contradict or neglect altogether. And while you will not feel as emptied out as you might at the conclusion of American Psycho, you will wonder about whether anyone is even capable of a genuine emotion…much less an expression of one. Oh, and it’s somehow really funny at the same time…weird. Deal with it. Rock n' roll.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: Stephenson’s post-cyberpunk yarn has already attained the status of a classic. Like other cyberpunk novels, Snow Crash is set in a near dystopic future in which a computer savvy hero (aptly named Hiro Protagonist) does battle with a plutocratic overlord (the blustery telecommunications monopolist L. Bob Rife). Both Hiro's partner (the cynical 15-going-on-30-year-old who goes by YT for yours truly) and nemesis (a vicious, nuclear weapon toting Aleut called Raven) are vividly rendered and captivating. And yet it’s Stephenson’s tone that is truly refreshing. Rather than the undercurrents of melancholy or resentment or outright paranoia that characterize most cyberpunk, Stephenson seems to say, “Sure, the world is going to hell in a hand basket, but let’s see who might have some fun in all that polluted anarchy and chaos.” At a deeper level, Stephenson considers the viral affinities of language and technology in the process of human history. Don’t certain ideas go viral via rhetoric? Stephenson intelligently explores this capacity for people to be reprogrammed. This book, which served as the inspiration for Google Earth among other apps and products, is part Quentin Tarantino and part Thomas Pynchon. It will blow your fucking mind. Generally, readers from all backgrounds love this book like they love ice cream and cute little puppy dogs. It’s nearly impossible to not love this book. If you haven’t read this book, you need to get up off your ass and go to Barnes and Noble right now. Go on. Get moving. You can read the rest of this blog later….

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: Since no Pulitzer was awarded in 2012, Egan’s latest is still the reigning Pulitzer winner for best novel. But is this book even a novel? It says it is on the cover, and it’s certainly not a book of short stories. Maybe it’s something in between… Actually, I don’t know why someone didn’t think of this sooner. It’s kinda like a Robert Altman film on paper. Think Nashville or Short Cuts. Each chapter delves into a revealing slice-of-life of a character that is somehow intertwined with a collection of former punk-rockers who now work as record executives and public relations specialists and whatnot. Some chapters appear in third person narrative and others are in first; some are conventional in form, while others are in the form of magazine stories or power point presentations. It’s pretty wild. And while we never get to know any character really well nor have the time to identify with and root for any one in particular, we get something really unique out of this book. For a thoroughly postmodern novel, all the stories seem to point to one idea, expressed by over-the-hill guitarist Bosco: “Time is a goon.” It sure is, isn’t it? But our awareness of this “truth” (is all metafiction postmodern?) is not built through any conventional modernist symbolic structure; rather, the almost Faulknerian sense of the weight of the past accrues as we suffer the small triumphs and tragedies of small lives that are oddly similar to our own…though they really aren’t. It really is an odd reading experience all around, but Egan successfully grants each chapter a life of it’s own. I’ve never read a book quite like it.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: Wallace’s suicide a few years back was a loss that has cost our culture dearly. His unfinished The Pale King garnered a Pulitzer nomination, and we can only imagine what he could have accomplished with his seemingly infinite talent. There is a certain mythology surrounding Infinite Jest. In the wake of its release, I recall Infinite Jest being lauded as the next Ulysses. And whereas Billy Corrigan failed miserably in creating The Wall for Generation X, GenXer Wallace certainly approached Joyce, Pynchon, Gaddis et al with this text. However, do not be intimidated: whereas most of these long and complex postmodern epics are virtually unreadable, DFW’s text is utterly fascinating. Granted, it is a very long and at times self-indulgent text: DFW (as Wallace is affectionately referred to by his fans) provides endnotes to an already ridiculously detailed text…some of which are 10 or so pages long. Yet the cool thing is that every detail in the book is extremely entertaining, a feature that becomes ludicrously ironic seeing as the American obsession with being endlessly entertained is the theme of the novel. Basically, the book concerns a tennis academy, a neighboring drug residential treatment center, Quebecoise separatists, the Prettiest Girl of All Time (a.k.a. the PGOAT), a crooner President obsessed with cleanliness, and the most entertaining film ever made. Oh, and you might wanna read the cliff notes to Hamlet first (Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio…). If I could talk you into reading one book that you would never read, it would be this book. In my judgment, Wallace’s masterpiece is the GBOAT, but who the fuck am I anyhow?

Neuromancer by William Gibson: In a short story entitled “Burning Chrome,” William Gibson first coined the word cyberspace. That was 1982. Shortly thereafter Gibson published his first novel and pretty much gave birth to the cyberpunk genre. But here’s the problem: due to Gibson’s Spartan style, the book poses a surprisingly difficult read. The only basis for comparison for Gibson’s understated style that I’ve been able to dream up lies in James Joyce’s Dubliners. Is that a grandiose statement? Probably. But Gibson is an uber-talented stylist and reveals the world in which cyberspace cowboy Case becomes the pawn of the rogue artificial intelligence Wintermute almost as if you also live in that world, almost as if you were familiar with the paranoid settings of Night City, the simulation matrix, the Sprawl, and the archipelago of space stations orbiting a decrepit and dark planet Earth. But more than just a visionary, groundbreaking, and iconic text, Gibson utilizes everything from AI and programming constructs of dead people to out-of-body prostitution and even Rastafarianism to probe the Cartesian problematic of being. Mind blown. It’s can be a challenging read, but its one of the best novels of the postmodern era, hands down.

'Cross'-Purposes in Ben-Hur

2012-12-16T12:10:00.000-06:00

Despite the tragedy in Connecticut (which, as the father of 5-year-old, I feel no ability to comment upon further), I sat down on Friday to prepare for this post by watching Ben-Hur. As I’ve noted in a previous post, Charlton Heston has proven a particularly difficult figure for me to like as a result of his desperate and bitter advocacy for white, heterosexual, Christian men as well as his unnuanced and extremist promotion of the NRA. And yet I love his films, especially Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and the SciFi classic The Planet of the Apes. He’s a great actor from a great age of Hollywood cinema.

Though Heston was once a Democrat who supported JFK (and RFK) for President, some of Heston’s iconic films go as a far as to promote a conservative ideology. The parting ofthe Red Sea in The Ten Commandments is most certainly a landmark achievement in film…yet it’s one—yaawwwn—that I can do without. But then there’s my favorite Heston film: Ben-Hur. It’s simply the greatest epic film ever made. Problem is that the epic backdrop is one with which I have a clavicle or two to pick: Ben-Hur’s struggle for freedom in the Roman Empire is set against the story of Jesus Christ. In fact, the film begins with the Nativity and neglects to introduce the title character for more than 20 minutes (for the sake of comparison, by the same point in Diehard, Hans Gruber had already taken over Nakatomi Plaza). The film (and novel upon which it is based) is even subtitled A Tale of the Christ. Hurm. What to do? I don’t really have a problem with Jesus. In fact, I kinda like the dude. Besides, he’s dead anyhow and can’t do any further good nor ill. So it goes. It’s living breathing Christians that frustrate me to no end.

All you war-on-Christmas lamenting, single-issue voting, vaginal ultrasound promoting, ‘traditional’ marriage protecting, children’s crusading, grand inquisitor trusting, sweater vest sporting, generally judgmental people annoy the fuck out of me. I know, I know. Not all Christians are right-wing fundamentalist fascist assholes. But your political avatars sure are, and Rick Santorum makes we want to throw up everything I ever ate in my whole life. What Christian leaders ever advocate voting liberal? I can’t think of any even one though Jesus was, in fact, a hippie born in a barn who preached against materialism and handed out free stuff to poor people...like food and healthcare. But none of that is Christian in a theocratic political rhetoric obsessed with two issues: abortion and gay marriage. And here I thought that Jesus was all about passivism and curing sick people and feeding the hungry, or that’s what they told me in Bible school anyhow. But based on the public discourse of Christianity, I guess I was wrong. It’s kinda made it hard for me to like anything to do with Jesus. And that’s the problem I’m coping with here during this era of the Cold Civil War. Even though I’ll never be a Christian I’d sure like to be okay with the fact that you are.

And yet, despite all of my issues with Christians and Heston and the NRA, I somehow managed to sit down and watch Ben-Hur. After all, ‘tis the season… Sh. Quiet. It’s coming to an end. [continued after the jump]

There’s Judah Ben-Hur taking his sister and mother to Jesus for some free healthcare. He’s hoping the young rabbi’ll cure their leprosy. Too bad. The House of Hur walks in just as the trial is coming to a close and the crowd has already chosen Barabbas over Jesus. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Hm. Actually, the message of Ben-Hur (one in concert with that of the Gospels) is really quite nice after all. God came among us as a member of the lowly, poor, disenfranchised rabble. He stood up for the meek, for the least among us. Clearly, Jesus is meant to represent the highest ethical positions an individual can take. Charity. Empathy. Selflessness. Yet, as he gains a following, his growing influence angers the power structure. And that power structure has at its disposal the popular propensity for bloodlust. Judah’s own trials result from his rejection of Roman excess—personified by his turncoat friend Messala—early in the film. So of course, Judah Ben-Hur rejects Roman citizenship as the film comes to an end. Why wouldn’t he? Look at these people. Not only was crucifixion that culture’s preferred method of justice, but these people fed social pariahs to lions and compelled prisoners of war to compete as gladiators…to the death. What a bunch of fucking sociopaths, eh? What ever happened to the discus?

Judah, one of the few reasonable people in the crowd, witnesses the Crucifixion with bewilderment. He just doesn’t understand man’s inhumanity to man. Why? We are meant to identify with Judah’s commonsense angst. That’s the whole point of the Passion, right? To empathize with the victim of a public execution so that we can aspire to ethical high ground staked out by the hero of the Christian mythos? Maybe back then, before the Crucifixion, we would not have known what we do, but as a result of the Christ’s horrific death we are now capable of being responsible, right? We know better, and the persistence of the symbol—trust me, I grew up Catholic—is so that we can never forget. We advance culturally, no? (Unfortunately, the Christian power structure would opt to burn heretics at the stake well into the 18^th century).

The problem is that has nothing to do with why I loved that movie so much as a kid. In fact, everybody knows what’s so great about the film. It’s not the Christian message: it’s the chariot race. The entire reason the Judah Ben-Hur even has the option to turn down Roman citizenship is that he wins the Roman chariot race that director William Wyler placed at the very center of the film’s narrative. And it is awesome. So bear with me.

You see, when Prince Judah Ben-Hur refuses to inform against Israelite rebel plotters early in the film, Messala makes an example of his friend in order to solidify his own power. Judah is pressed into slavery upon a Roman naval craft, but he rises from this position of slavery, thanks to the patronage of Quintus Arrius, to compete against Messala in the chariot race, the true climax of the film.

The scene begins with the parade of the quadrigas, chariots drawn by four horses, in honor of the new Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Maybe you heard a him. Frank Thring is perfect in the role. Pilate demands items from a valet without deigning to acknowledge the man then cries, “Hail Caesar!” When the crowd reacts with muted enthusiasm, Thring takes the time to scan the crowd with disdain, leaving his Roman salute to hang in the air in a manner eerily reminiscent of the Nazi “Zeig heil!” The whole effect is to heighten our sense of anticipation that is whetted one last time when a quadriga’s jumpy horses commit a false start. But now we’re all settled in again. Pilate drops his kerchief. And the starters lower their banners. And we’re off…

Now Judah’s primary challenge during the nine-lap race is to avoid coming anywhere near Messala’s chariot, whose wheels are equipped with some serious looking blades. Messala can mercilessly whip his horses with impunity as the other charioteers repeatly back off. Despite this precaution, one of the nine charioteers overturns his quadriga on the first turn to the audible delight of the crowd. I guess chariot race fans aren’t all that different from NASCAR fans: they’re here to see some crashes.

On the second lap the Corinthian charioteer makes the mistake of passing Messala on the outside; of course, Messala simply cuts him off as they approach the turn, driving his blades into the Corinthian’s wheels. His shredded chariot comes out from beneath him and he is dragged along by his quadriga until he loses his grip. He’s all alone on the track as the other charioteers approach at full gallop. He dodges the first chariot, but is brutally trampled by the next. I have shown this scene numerous times in the classroom and this particular sequence never fails to elicit a gasp even from this supposedly desensitized generation. It’s at this point that any audience realizes they are in for an exceptionally violent spectacle. The crowd cheers.

The race is so perilous and grueling that, by the fourth lap, only five of the chariots are still in the race. Judah is in last place, but he begins to make a move here. He has the inside track by lap five, but Messala pins him to the pole as they approach the wreckage from the previous lap. The collision nearly throws him from his chariot, but our hero is somehow able to climb back in, thereby avoiding the Corinthian’s grim fate. A Roman sentry minding the track is not so fortunate and is run down by Judah’s chariot. The crowd cheers.

On the seventh lap, Messala is repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to lodge his chariot’s blades into Judah’s wheels, merely succeeding in grinding away a decorative potion of Judah’s chariot. However, Messala comes up with an ingenious solution on the penultimate lap: he realizes that rather than whipping his own horses, he can simply turn his lash on Judah and promptly begins to thrash his rival. Somehow Judah is able to catch the whip and wrest it from Messala, but as they tangle their wheels get caught. As Messala’s chariot pulls to the right, his left wheel is ripped from his chariot. Messala is not quickly trampled like the Corinithian; he both hangs on to his own quadriga as the horses from the trailing quadriga gradually take him under. With Messala’s mangled body lying nearly lifeless on the track, Judah can coast to victory.

Now I have watched this scene dozens of times with friends, family, and students, and with unanimity viewers attribute the greatness of this scene to realism: it’s as close as we’ve ever been to anything like a real Roman chariot race. I suppose that this is the triumph of epic film: it brings the epic backdrop to life.

But there is a problem here at the level of meaning, of ideology. If we are ultimately meant to identify with the Messianic sufferer of a violent public execution and reject the know-nothing crowd’s bloodlust, in the film’s most iconic scene were are expected to do the exact opposite: we are meant to identify with the Roman crowd’s passion for violent spectacle, one that maintains an eerie similarity to our own fascination with auto racing. So while the film purports to endorse Hebraic revolutionary culture over Roman imperialism, the crowds that thronged to see the film did so in order to become immersed in that Roman culture. There are countless forgotten films that promote the meaning of the Passion, but the only reason that this film persists in its cultural relevance lies in our enjoyment of Wyler’s mimesis of Roman excess. It’s virtually indisputable. I would go so far as to say that the only purpose of the supposedly Christian theme is to assuage any guilt we might feel for having indulged in pagan bloodlust.

Now, the contradictory nature of Ben-Hur does not make a bad film nor is this feature unique. In fact, the supposed “message” and the basis for enjoyment of American cinema very often exist in contradiction. I could rattle of a dozen examples, but one prime example comes to mind:

At the end of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999), Lester Burnham dies with a smile on his face at the very moment he resolves his mid-life crisis. You see, he had what he wanted all along, and it was just up to him to accept his lot in life, to change his attitude in order to see that he had a beautiful life. Now don’t you feel good? Problem is, that wasn’t why anyone liked that movie. We don’t identify with Lester’s serenity in death; we identify with his angst in life. We want him to blackmail his boss. We admire him for having the courage to drop out, to smoke weed and flip burgers and buy a red sports car, to tell his wife what a bloodsucking, materialistic byatch she’s become. We even understand his lust for his daughter’s friend…and will cut him slack so long as he doesn’t actually consummate the fantasy. It's all very gratifying and provides the enjoyment for watching and rewatching the film.

A morally ambiguous Wayne stands haunted by his empty batsuit.

You see, we are a divided and contradictory nation, an irrational people, an irrational species. And it seems that the only films that remain both intelligent and consistent explore questions in place of providing where there really are none. So it's quite fitting that we often do not see the contractions written into single artifacts from our mass culture. What else would you expect from a nation that subjects its citizens to virtual strip searches because someone almost set off a shoe bomb in a plane but cannot—and likely will never—do anything about mentally disturbed people committing mass murder with guns? I want to believe that this does not make us an inherently bad people, but just a people that knows not what we do….

Love Parts: A Tabloid Fantasy...

2012-12-10T18:04:00.001-06:00

I can’t for the life of me remember what we were watching on television, but I can remember what we talking about…which is pretty weird if you think about it. Anyhow, sometime after the Thanksgiving feast, I informed my parents that one of my childhood friends was going through a divorce. It happens. In fact, it seems to be the thing to do these days. I wouldn’t exactly know. I’m not married. Never have been. Probably never will be.

Of course, my mother and brother offered platitudes, but I wondered whether my father had even heard me. He seemed entirely occupied with channel surfing until, all of a sudden, he decided to offer his two cents…as he is wont to do….

“I never liked that guy.” Funny, I hadn’t realized he’d ever met my friend’s estranged husband. “He though he was real hot shit.” He did? I met the guy once…I think. The only impression I ever had of him was that he didn’t make much of an impression. He was like some white dude with some hair. And he had eyes and clothes and stuff. Oh, and he ate…I definitely remember him eating. But never mind all of that.
The old man was on a roll. He proceeded to sketch out a quite fascinating character. The old man presumed knew to know this type, the type that starts of nice then slowly devolves into mental abuse soon to be followed by “a little smacking around.” It reminded me of something out of Dostoyevsky. Boy. You woulda thought this guy woulda made more of an impression on me. Of course, he was most certainly “fucking around,” probably even “spending a lot of jack on some young girlfriend,” maybe even "in hock" over it. Okay. That's enough. This has gone too far. Someone has to say something. ...Hey! I’m someone! [continued after the jump]

“You don’t know him. You don’t know a damn thing about their marriage. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Okay. Maybe that phrasing was impolitic.

“Why do you always have to contradict me? Ever since you were a teenager…” Oh, boy. Here we go again. Suffice to say that the whole thing ends with my father brooding in solitude, salvaging his self-respect by occasionally shooting me a dirty look while repeatedly muttering something like “I know. Trust me. I know….” In defense of the poor old guy, his fantasy of insight into the private lives of others is nothing unique in our society. Why’d I have to chastise him? What good did it do? Oh well…

When I return from break, we’re finishing up Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in my Horror Fiction course. It’s not the most literary text, but there’s more there than you’d think. Besides, at this point in the term I have to schedule a less ambitious curriculum if I want to avoid alienating every last student on the roster. In fact today I’m going to cut the discussion short and just show a few clips from Neil Jordan’s film adaptation. What? Anne Rice wrote the screenplay. It’s justifiable…kinda.… Besides, the kids’ll thank me.

"What the F did you say about me?!"

“Oh, god. I hate Brad Pitt.” This is said by Morgan. She’s an odd duck. She has a back row attitude, and yet, for some reason, she sits in the front row and insists on participating in class discussion. (Note to self: I need to quit giving them class credit for that.)

“Really?” There’s like a 3 to 1 female to male ratio in all of my lit classes. I thought girls liked Brad Pitt. Maybe he’s getting into that old “creeper” category. He is nearly 50...nearly. Yes. The big five-oh. While I'm not even near the big five-oh, I’m constantly worried that everything I know is too old for my students. I’m just too old. That must be it. “What? Is he too old now?”

“No!” She’s disgusted with me. I don’t understand. I'm too old. “He cheated on Jennifer!”

Now, I want to say something like are you fucking kidding me?!...but I can’t say that. And before I can formulate any appropriate response I notice that just about every student in the class—the guys too—are nodding in agreement. Isn’t this old news? I’ve been cheated on more recently and I’m over it. It’s not that I don’t love Jennifer Aniston. I do. There are three women I would trample my own grandmother to sleep with: Alyssa Milano, Claire Danes, and Jennifer Aniston. (Jennifer, call me.) But I really don’t care about her personal life, past or present. You mean rich and famous actors have trouble maintaining long term relationship?! Shocking. I’m shocked. Can't you tell?...

The next day I have to run by the grocery store after work. It’s a weekday, which means that I’ll have to cart my daughter along with me. I try to avoid that, but I need get my blood pressure medication refilled. Even though I don’t smoke and run like a thousand miles a week, I have high blood pressure. Shocking, isn’t it?

Yeah. I'd pay for that.

In the checkout lane I peruse the covers of magazines. They range from shameless tabloids in the vein of The National Enquirer to the purportedly reasonable People. These are the ancient vampires of our increasingly vampiric journalism. I prefer the shameless tabloids: at least they don’t insult my intelligence by pretending to care about the celebrities they feed on. There’s a star that’s anorexic for every one that has "let herself go." They have the photos to prove it. There are plenty of crotch shots and cheaters. There are pictures of Disney stars stumbling out of night clubs. I can honestly say that I’ve never been interested in this stuff. But someone is. There’s a whole industry right here in the checkout lane. I guess the people who aren’t obsessed with sports or politics (like I am) have to be obsessed with something. We all need a guilty pleasure. Who am I to judge? But why would I stop now?...

Later in the week I’m on facebook. I’m friends with a number of my former high school students. One of them has just posted a status update. It reads: “Every time i see the name ‘Courtney love’ i just want to vomit” [sic]. At first I was all like, "Hey, she's talented," but then I couldn’t figure out why any of my students would even know who Courtney Love is…then I remember that she was Kurt Cobain’s wife. Duh.

Now, only a very few of the popular bands from my youth maintain relevance to today's youth. We call them Millennials. You’d be surprised to learn who has and has not made the Millennial cut. Apparently, even though you can still add “palooza” as a suffix in place of “fest” (and even though Dave Navarro can always get a reality television show), not very many of my students have never heard of Jane’s Addiction. Primus? Ha! Beck? Forget it. They know (and love) the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rage Against the Machine? Yes. (Remember how Paul Ryan cited liking their music (but not their ‘lyrics’) as a way to seem hip and youthful?) But only Nirvana garners the sort of godlike status from Millennials that Gen Xers lavished upon Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Are these kids still blaming Courtney Love for Cobain’s suicide? My student claims that that’s not the case, but I sure remember trying to blame her myself. She didn’t seem genuinely sad enough in that interview she gave to MTV. She failed to appease my grief. I had tickets to Nirvana at Lollapalooza...you fucking bitch.

Yeah, I know: lame. Totally lame. Hey, I was 19. I got over it…and in short order. Why? Because just a few days after Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, Love’s band—Hole—released their second album, Live Through This. It’s a really good album. Just about every song rocks you down to your ovaries. Seriously. Love has voice that has both the gravel of Joan Jett and the more conventional aesthetics common to numerous female vocalists. In her slurred modulation from angel to gravel to scream, Love’s voice is the grunge incarnation of gender issues.

A few months later (it musta been the following fall), Hole gave a performance at a local club called Soma. A bunch of us from—and I mean a bunch, like at least half a dozen—went to seem them.

CT was there. Hal B was there, weren’t you Hal? And Hal B’s chick, Susan. Oh, and Darr was there. Can’t forget Darr. Were you there, GMoney? I was there. We sat around drinking Mickery's big mouths before hand and I'm pretty sure Hal had like two or three doobers tucked in among his Parliaments. Anyhow, that night Courtney Love wasn’t a girl rockstar. She was a rockstar. She was legit. She was a hot mess. She was kinda hot…kinda. And she was also kinda gross, which made it even better. She like plants her left foot on a monitor and you can see up her dress all the way to her crotch and she really doesn't give a fuck. At one point she even crowd surfed. Seriously, like when does that happen? She passed right over us and I think Darr's face got stuck between her ass cheeks. He was so proud of himself. As Hal B recently recalled, “She was a massive trainwreck, but also really captivating.” That’s about right. I've been to many, many forgettable shows and that was NOT one of them. Great show.

Is this the nice girl you want? Guess again...

But for some reason she’s just not well liked. Beyond blaming her for Cobain’s death (which is idiotic), people complain that she’s greedy in trying to claim Nirvana’s royalties. Or they say that she’s a bad parent. Or they ridicule her drug use. Or they simply say that she’s “nasty”…that word seems to come up a lot. Hello? She’s a rockstar. Look at these complaints. Oh, you say you're upset that this rockstar is a sexually promiscuous spendthrift that uses drugs and doesn’t really focus on parenting? Shocking. I’m shocked. Can’t you tell? I trust that you also have ethical issues with John Lennon, right?

So what I am shocked (or maybe merely outraged) by is how we’ve judged her by the very double standard that her persona symbolizes a rebellion against. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll does: it rebels. If you give any currency to the above complaints then you are missing the whole point that her “nastiness” is a resistance to gendered expectations of appropriate behavior, a critique of social norms surrounding women. Her band is called Hole after all. Doll Parts...Pretty on the Inside...get it? Maybe you'd prefer Katy Perry. Or Avril Lavigne. Or Miley Cyrus. Or Pink. Booor-iiing. And the reason they are so boring is that they are a product of music industry calculations. As a result of these calculations--they know that you will judge women in mass culture by a double standard--female "rock"stars are too often saccharine simulacra of the their male counterparts. And as a proud parent of a daughter, that makes me want to vomit.

Oh, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in 1996. So there. So, if that doesn’t quite square with your fantasy of insight into the private turmoil of her life, well, then deal with it. Rock n’ roll.

The Politics of Fandom; or, The Boots are All Reverbed Out

2012-12-07T23:28:00.000-06:00

Those who know me will know that I have very little to be disappointed about with regards to the recent elections. Having said that, I found myself often disappointed in process of the campaign. The whole way it all went down. You know. The usual liberal complaints. Money seemed to dominate the nature of the discourse. The media promoted horse races and conventional thinking rather than raising new issues. No one advocated for peace. Or civil liberties. Or gun control. Or proposed any new ideas to address the crisis in K though 12 education. Or the environment. Or poverty.

Instead we got a whole lotta fear and loathing. Fear and loathing. Fear and loathing. Blah blah blah.

But now is the winter of our discontent as we go through the Reconstruction phase of our Cold Civil War. So nothing—no nothing—disturbed me further than the incoherent diatribe offered by one of my heroes at the Republican National Convention. I mean, I knew Clint Eastwood was a Republican…but I didn’t know he was one of those Republicans. Maybe I was in denial, but after he starred in a Chrysler commercial during that last Super Bowl, I just assumed that he was the sort of centrist GOPer who took one look at the Tea Party and said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll be quietly voting for Obama this time. Call me back when y’all finish your deprogramming.” But alas…in a performance which awkwardly evoked all of my dead grandparents at once he engaged in a garbled angry tussle with an empty bar stool. Oh well. [continued after the jump]

Why am I so disappointed? Good question. I guess I find it hard to like people when I learn that they believe the unbelievable.

I don’t really mean that I don’t like them…I just find myself in what I call the melancholy of ambivalence. How does one love people whose ideas are reprehensible? You know, I recently tried to date someone who actually believes—get this—that Michelle Obama tried to get Sesame Street to change the Cookie Monster into the Veggie Monster. Hey, I gave it the old college try. At the very least I could do to her what George W. Bush did to the country, right? Justifiable? No? Hm....
Then there’s a friend of mine who’s out of work. He’s a scientist, a biologist…with a PhD…from my alma mater…who doesn’t believe in global climate change. I’d really like to root for him. I really would....
Of course I reserve my greatest ambivalence for my Fox “News” watching parents…you know, the ones who couldn’t afford my college education. Luckily, I won some scholarships…but I borrowed the rest from the Feds. The 'Rents are off the hook, but I’m on it for a small fortune. I might pay it off before I retire. Nowadays the 'Rents are looking forward to Social Security and Medicaid. Of course I’ll be among those paying for their retirement. Humph. No, no, really. I’m fine with all of that. Why? Because I’m a liberal. But I do get angry when I think about the fact that they vote for people who want to take that away from my generation when I’m paying for theirs. I guess that was the whole motivation for that CSN song “Teach Your Children”: you can’t teach your parents much of anything. They won’t have it. Don’t waste your breath.

And this is a real problem. I don’t know about you, but I need to love. If you know me, it might surprise you that I say this because that sounds pretty light hearted. But I’m often testy and grumpy. I like to spend time alone. I become easily annoyed when you people get in my way…especially when you fuckers are holiday shopping or on your way to work. The nerve.

Which, of course, means that I’m not very lovable. But that’s precisely why I need to love. Because it’s only through my ability to empathize with you that I avoid turning on myself, hardening into that testy, isolated asshole. I am in continual danger of allowing my visits to the melancholy of ambivalence to become a permanent residence among fear and self-loathing. And that’s why I love art. It bridges that gap between you and me. If I’m not ready for the human race, I can indulge one of y'all's creations in order to become one of you yet again. And Clint Eastwood is just one of those artists….

Empathy is, after all, a desirable trait in a teacher.... In proposing the final paper for my Comp I classes this term, a research paper on the role of ideology in film, I offered up one of Eastwood’s best as a possibility. In fact,—if I’m hard pressed—I will acknowledge that Unforgiven (which Eastwood both starred in and directed) is my favorite film. I think that Eastwood does with cowboys in that film what Alan Moore does with superheroes in Watchmen: he envisions the western hero—the assassin with no name—as a reality. William Munny (just some Bill who’s after money) ends up scarred in exactly the same fashion as the prostitute he’s paid to avenge. When, at the end, the Schofield Kid attempts to justify their murderous actions with the easy truism that their victims “had it comin’,” Munny retorts with Eastwood’s signature nihilism: “Kid, we all got it comin’.” There’s no easy sense of good and evil. There’s no redemption. There’s no ultimate meaning.

In Eastwood’s art there are no easy truths. I cannot say the same for his politics. So it goes.

* * * * *

So it goes? Easier said than done. I just cannot shake my utter disappointment with Eastwood. I honestly do not give two shits about many of the other pop cultural figures that play for the political knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers. So while I enjoy Bruce Willis or Adam Sandler or even that deranged coot Jon Voigt, I just am not all that surprised that they lack intellectual subtlety. In fact I’ve only ever been as conflicted as I am over Eastwood with one other actor: Charlton Heston.

That’s right. Charlton Heston. I love Charlton Heston. At least, I love his work...a lot. As a child I near wore out a VHS tape of Planet of the Apes. It was one of the first we owned. Heston’s iconic line—“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”—eventually became lost in the fury of an electronic blizzard. And it was right about that time—this was the early 80s—that Heston (who had once considered running for Senate as a Democrat, who had championed LBJ’s gun control legislation, who had marched with MLK, who had opposed the Vietnam war) was born again as the most devolved of right-wing nutjobs, a gun-toting, race-baiting culture warrior that would make Todd Akin look like particularly media savvy version of Bobby Kennedy. After all, we all remember Heston’s other iconic line, the threat that concluded the sort of brazenly reactionary NRA speech which came to characterize Heston's latter years: “From my cold, dead hands!”
How does one love that man? Good question.
But if I can love that man, then maybe I can make it through Christmas dinner listening to regurgitated Fox talking points without storming out in disgust. From his cold, dead hands, eh? What to do? What to do? But we shall have to ponder that question in our next visit to The Manic Room!...

Are You Better Off?

2012-09-08T02:06:00.002-05:00

We call the politicians who hold elected office our “leaders.” And just maybe that’s what is wrong with America. The guy I voted for last time around inspired us to “hope” and convinced us to make a “change,” a change of party and culture. The problem is that “hope” and “change” are not policies: they are concepts, one-word concepts to shape the brand “Obama.” It's just marketing. The guys he runs against always seem to be for “freedom” or “country first” or “believing in America.” Maybe you voted for McCain, or maybe you plan to vote for Romney. Anyhow, we probably vote with a more similar attitude than you realize. We pull lever for the empty term and then expect the empty term to make America just peachy. We decide that, when candidates say “freedom” or “hope,” they understand that term exactly as we do, exactly as all Americans do, and that we will get freedom and hope.

But that’s not how it works. The thing that gives me hope may dash yours, and your freedom may come at the expense of mine.

Campaign slogans and sound bites are symptomatic of naively ideological thinking. They are meaningless expressions. They are not true, but they are not lies either...

Rather such phrases are empty. And they place the human race in peril. When a candidate’s ideology breaks down, or indulges nuance, or might alienate a constituency, they pull the wool over our eyes with a meaningless term, a term that we can give meaning to to gain an illusory sense of security. It’s kinda like voting for a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. It’s kinda like moving the couch over that stain on your living room carpet so that you can imagine the carpet as stainless when it really has this congealed scum of blood and dog shit ground into it.

And then we just expect hope and change to lead. Likewise, if we elect believing in America, we will have the same expectations for that meaningless drivel. And what happens as a result?

Democrats elected another candidate on the notion of “change”: William Jefferson Clinton. And then we just let him do his thang. He found it rather difficult to pursue a traditional liberal agenda, so he decided to pass NAFTA and Welfare reform and repeal bank regulations like Glass-Steagall (those were all things that Republicans liked). You see, Americans like a winner, a guy who can get some shit passed...and that was some shit. So Bill Clinton turned “New Democrat” (which I call “Republican Lite”) and cruised to a landslide reelection. That’s where “change” led us.

So when Republicans say that we can’t just blame W for the financial crisis, guess what: they’re right. We can also blame Bill Clinton’s conservative economic policies.

Huh? What? You weren't aware that Clinton and Bush and Obama (yes, even that “socialist” Obama) all pursue a right wing economic agenda? I’m not making this up: it’s called neoliberalism, or monetarism. It’s sort of a three pronged demonic pitchfork of deregulation, “free” trade, and consolidation of economic power in the Fed, the IMF, the G20, and-- Oh, what’s that? You’re bored? Good. Coz that brings me to my main point.

We can mostly blame ourselves.

Why? Because we don’t care. We are tired. We are bored with such trivialities. I know, I know. I get it. I have a job and a kid. It’s hard enough to remember to pay my bills on time and scrape up some semblance of a social life. How can I possibly expect you to take the time to get informed and politically active? Because that’s what we need to do. It’s all we can do. And it’s do or die.

Instead we vote like frightened people in the dark. We run right and stumble into Freddy Kruger and run left and collide with Jason. So then we run back right… Isn’t that Mitt Romney’s argument this time round? Wasn’t that Obama’s last time? And Clinton’s in ’92? The differences are a matter of degree rather than kind.

We are told that our politics are polarized. It’s true. One side if for raping us up the anus once a month and the other side plans to do it on an hourly basis. Is that too crass? Okay. One side plans to deregulate, globalize, and consolidate economic power over a period of decades while the other plans to do it in a period of months. I’m voting for Obama because a) it will give us time to stop it from happening and b) he might accidentally appoint a couple of Supreme Court justices that will help us stop it from happening.

Why is it crucial that we stop it? We have been fighting wars for over a decade and another with Iran looms like an angry black mushroom cloud on the horizon. Neither party questions the militarization of our foreign policy or the paramilitarization of our police forces. We have serious issues surrounding a scarcity of resources. The planet is getting hotter and more crowded. We are already seeing pressures on energy supplies and access to medical care; soon we will see pressures on food, shelter, and clean water. Are your kids making you too busy to care about this stuff? These are serious, long-term issues that cannot be addressed by slogans that serve as the mask for greed. It’s time for the public to embrace an ideology of pragmatism, and ideology of compromise, an ideology that places our politicians on notice that they will be led by us. We are the leaders, not them. They are the public servants.

Do you know what a technocrat is? We need technocrats, men and women who will legislate in order to solve problems rather than adhere to ideologies. Do we want to reduce the number of abortions? Okay, fine. The notion of overturning Roe v. Wade is impractical and divisive and would bring an end to abortion...and it ain’t gonna happen anyway so let’s quit fighting. What policies will both reduce abortions and respect the individual rights of mothers? Turns out there are quite a few. That’s called a compromise. That’s called pragmatism. What's next?

Oh, and it must also be an ideology of patience and long term thinking. The political perspective I’m advocating isn’t about the unemployment rate or the monthly jobs report. Who cares how many jobs are created if they pay half of the jobs we’ve lost. That’s one charge Republicans make concerning “Obama’s” recovery—that the new jobs aren’t as good as the old jobs. And, guess what: they’re right. But that been true of every economic downturn since, at the very least, the late 70s. As a result of recessions, unionized manufacturing jobs become non-union manufacturing jobs. As a result of recessions, insourced high-tech jobs become outsourced high-tech jobs. You want fries with that?

Obama didn’t cause this change. Bush didn’t cause this change. It’s kinda a funny coincidence that this change seems to coincide with the televisation of Presidential campaigns. Hm. Weird.

Of course, a small set of über wealthy people have other ideas about who our public servants serve. In fact, they pay to disseminate politicians’ empty rhetoric. The Pols get to keep their jobs, the greedy get richer, and we get the shaft. In addition, we are encouraged to blame and even hate all sorts of innocent groups: blacks, gays, immigrants, teachers, unions, teacher unions, atheists, Jesus freaks, and, yes, lawyers and corporations and the rich. As much as I hate to say it, we probably need corporations and rich people…but that’s not to say that the system isn’t slanted towards these people. Ever wonder why so many politicians are former lawyers and businessmen? Where are the academics, the scientists, or artists? I mean we even get the stray quarterback, but never an artist. But I digress…

In a nutshell, no matter who wins the election in 2 months time, economic conditions will continue to erode for about 90 percent of us…and the environment will erode for everyone. But there is hope, real hope, hope I can define. We can have a government that solves problems. Last summer when the rag tag Occupy movement banged a few drums in the streets, some politicians decided they should start taking the idea of “fairness” seriously. Oh, you think that the Occupiers were a joke? That’s my point. Even that small of social movement can grab the politicians by the nostrils in this media environment.

So, right now, you are complacent, but I hope that will change. I hope you will get involved. I hope that no matter whom wins that you will grab him by his big ole ear and make him look at what’s wrong and demand that he do something about it. Ask for an explanation of the policy and try to understand how it’s supposed to work. Oh, and don't judge a policy before it's even implemented. Do you hate Obamacare? Do you know what it does? Have you seen whether or not it works? And for Pete’s sake don’t call him--whether it's Obama or Romney--a socialist or a reactionary or a fascist either. After all, our “leaders” are just a reflection of us. Want better leaders? Try becoming a better, and better informed, citizen.

But Seriously...LOL

2012-08-19T23:30:00.002-05:00

In the realm of technology, I tend to be something of a luddite, a person who is comfortable with the way things are and reluctant to jump into anything “tech-y” with both feet. While I was an early adopter of the cell phone (summer 1999), I didn’t buy a smart phone until earlier this year. My first CD player? Christmas, 1990. In fact, I went off to college in 1993 without a personal computer. When I changed majors from biology to English, I liberated an electronic typewriter from my parents’ home office. That was 1996. But since I’m in the education game, I've come to terms with the fact that I need to get on board with new technologies before my colleagues start whispering about my peculiar relationship with my overhead projector.

Having said that, once I take on a new technology I tend to run with it. I check my phone a couple times an hour these days. I visit four or five websites on a daily basis. And after a friend convinced me to create a Facebook profile in 2008, I began an obsession with “sharing” my “status,” pictures of my daughter, videos for songs I’m diggin at the time, and, most often, politicizing. I am a political junky...have been since the ’84 election. I was probably the only nine-year old in Chesterfield that had a resentment against Ronald Reagan. And when my senior-year American Civ teacher asked if anyone in class knew who Bob Packwood was, I was, of course, the only student who could name the then Senator from Oregon; he'd recently had to resign because he was sexually harassing his female aides, I informed the class.
Politics is an important part of my actual, real life personality. Not surprisingly, it is also a part of my virtual personality. I post any interesting articles I read, news clips I see, and, yes, I used to (like three months ago...ahem...okay! okay! it was like last month) get in stupid debates in comment threads. But after reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize winning book on Lucretius and the epicurean philosophy, I’ve been tempted to recede from the electronic, and hence political, world...just a bit. But who am I kidding? It’s election season!

And, besides, what else would I do on Facebook?

Apparently, this usage of Facebook is not appreciated by all of my “friends.” Recently, I have come across status updates that say something like, “Facebook used to be fun. Now everyone just posts politics and news.” I’m tempted to chime in…to chide you for being such a frivolous person...but that's your business so I resist that temptation…tho maybe I’m giving into it here…in this blog post. Why?

Over the past couple of days I’ve been doing my small part to dispel the lie that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as “Obamacare”) cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. I know full well just how much you care about that important issue. (This point of policy is not the point of this post, so if you want my take, just ask. I anticipate an overwhelming number of inquiries, so please be patient. I'm understaffed.) In response to my posting of an enlightening editorial in The New Republic treating the Romney-Ryan campaign's hypocrisy on the issue, one of my “friends” added the following comment: “Can't you just start a blog and leave all of us carefree Facebookers in peace?”

Oh, the irony. Anyone who is friends with me in any way, shape, or form knows that I write a blog (very occasionally these days…more on that in a note at the bottom).

Of course, I found this highly insulting, but that wouldn’t provoke me to write a blog post. More to the point is that Facebook is an open forum, a place for me to be me and you to be you…virtually. Seemingly, this individual felt that I had violated some unwritten rule of Facebook. Odd, dontchya think? Still, I am wondering what Facebook is for? Did I violate some rule? What is Facebook's purpose? Dunno… Dunno… Some of my “friends” I don’t even know, and some of my closest associates in real life aren’t on the book. And does any of my Facebook ranting on taxes or infrastructure or foreign conflicts or human rights or debt debacles do any good? Dunno… Dunno… There probably is no single answer to these questions.

And, just as interestingly, people often use Facebook in ways that irk me too. Yet, I have found a way—actually quite a few ways—to cope with the horrifying experience of laying eyes on a somewhat annoying post. Here goes:

1. You can accept that people are going to post things that annoy you and move on to the posts you are interested in. This is what I do when you post pictures of your cat. Or when you share a meme that glosses over a complex aspect of being with a sappy and sentimental cliché. Or, in a subtype of the preceding, you post a quotation from the Bible. Or anything else you post that makes me feel a little embarrassed for you.

2. You can “hide” posts from individuals who habitually post things that annoy you. You will remain “friends,” and they will never know that their posts never see the daylight of your news feed. This is what I do when you continually post pictures of your cat or habitually try to get me to come see your country band or post “status” updates that amount to telling me that you are buying milk or are cleaning your apartment or car or are headed to the doctor…again and again and again. This is a great option when you don’t want to insult someone by utilizing the tactical nuclear weapon of social networking, which leads me to…

3. You can defriend people. That’s right. You can defriend people. This is what I do when people say something I find downright offensive. Unless I am blatantly confronted by your racism or sexism or homophobia, I will probably not say anything. But if you post something racist, I will probably defriend you. This is what I did to the asshole who told me to start a blog. And you know what, if I offend you with my posts, you can feel free to defriend me. Agreed?

There. Now I hope we all feel better. Now I can return to my crusade to save the world from the evil forces of Right Wing Extremism and you are now armed with the skills to avoid my crusade. And I will likewise remain blissfully ignorant of just how cute your cat is because I fucking hate cats. Have a nice day.

[Note: I realize posts have been rare these months. I will continue to update The Manic Room when I have something to say, but I am currently engulfed in other creative projects. Thanks for reading.]

A Castle in Brooklyn, or Hip-Hop Heaven

2012-05-07T23:28:00.001-05:00

When Whitney Houston died of a drug overdose some weeks back, her passing inspired the sort of public mourning that makes my skin crawl. I mean, what was so great about her that her passing was any more significant than any other stiff listed in the obits that day? And, more to the point: did you seriously grieve at her passing? Were you filled with melancholy? I was dubious on all points. She led a train wreck of life, and her death seemed little more than TMZ fodder. So, why is it that I now find myself participating in public mourning over the passing of Adam “MCA” Yauch? Good question. [continued after the jump]

As a professor of first year writing, I am constantly searching for ways to bridge the gap between myself and my students. I mean, I’m cool, right? I leave my shirt untucked over designer jeans. I pomade my hair in ways inconsistent with the laws of gravity. I look at you with eyes framed by red Ray-Bans. I wear sneakers; in fact, it’s all about the sneakers. I could button and tuck and khaki and tie, but the sneakers on my feet always belie the fact that I’m down, that I’d rather be causin’ a ruckus and raisin’ the roof, that I’ve spilled more cheap beer than you’ve ever drank, ya’ little ankle-biter.

Still, every once in a blue moon one of those little ankle-biters questions my cred. In fact, a few semesters back, some socially-retarded, red-headed kid who had yet to finish up puberty audaciously poked at my sense of style: “You can tell that you really think you’re cool…but you’re not. I mean look at those shoes.”

It was that last part that left me stunned. “My shoes? These are Stan Smith Adidas. I think the Beastie Boys would approve.”

“The Beastie Boys? The Beastie Boys aren’t cool.” I was momentarily stunned, but I quickly assessed the source: no matter how much younger he was than me, this kid was certainly not cool. I looked around the class for resounding contradiction. It’s a teacher instinct. I do this whenever some student says something crazy, like that Hamlet is decisive or that writing won’t be very important for their professional success…or that the Beastie Boys aren’t cool. But all I found were nodding heads and eyes filled with pity, as if I were the last kid in class to believe in Santa.

This was not possible. It’s not just that the B-Boys are cool: it’s that they are the very definition of cool for my entire generation. This naysaying must be a St. Charles thing: certainly across the river the more cosmopolitan youth would know better.

Now I live in Clayton, but the only young people I know in Clayton are the baristas that work in the coffee joints where I grade. So later that afternoon I marched up to Kaldis to do some research. The line was rather long that day, but the rather curvaceous brunette working the counter seemed to be just what I was looking for. She had on t-shirt and jeans that she had bought at either Nordstrom or a thrift store; more importantly, she was wearing sneakers. Perfect.

The line hadn’t gotten any shorter, but now I was at the front of it. It was kinda difficult with all of the impatient clearing of throats behind me, but I was able to share with her the entirety of the above anecdote. “So, whaddya think?” My desperation was palpable.

“Well…” She seemed reluctant to hurt my feelings. “My dad likes their music.”

“Well, my dad likes the Beatles but that doesn’t mean that they’re not cool!”

“Um…the Beastie Boys aren’t…the Beatles.”

“I’ll have a tall coffee…black.”

* * * * *

I’d turned twelve in February of 1987 and was really not very comfortable with where this whole puberty thing was going. And I’m not talking about the hormonal thing so much as the social results that hormones brought about in my peers. February of 1987 represents the depths of 80s culture. Many of the cool bands from earlier in the decade had disbanded—like the Police—or surpassed their prime—such as Van Halen. U2’s The Joshua Tree would be released the following month, and GNR’s debut wouldn’t come until the summer. And while Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were around, I was not nearly cool enough to have any inkling who they were. Frequent readers of this blog know that I use popular culture to anchor my sense of self more than any therapist would recommend, and at this crucial juncture I identified in nothing I saw in the world around me.

And that’s when the bad people showed up at the party.

We didn’t have cable. And I didn’t party. Hell, I didn’t even know they were a hip-hop act. I mean, the song had a friggin’ guitar solo. But for some reason the first glimpse I had of B-Boys shouting demands into a phone was something that was me, and I was not alone…. We had to fight, my fellow Gen Xers! We had to fight for our right to party! But, more immediately, I had to buy that album.

When I popped it in the tape deck, I was at first confused. This is rap? I’m white: I don’t like rap. My mother was horrified. “Beasty Boys?! It’s beasty alright!” I decided I liked rap after all.

My poor mother. When we went on vacation to California that summer, the tape came with us. We made a long drive up the PCH toward Carmel, and I rode in the back of the station wagon with my cousins Donny and Danny. In those dark ages before smart phones, we had to get a little creative.

Donny had the boom box,

Danny made the noise,

and I brought the tape of the Bees Tea Boys.

We dedicated the trip to learning “Paul Revere” word for word. I forget who played Mike D, MCA, and AdRock, but I still remember the little story the three bad brothers had to tell…word for word. And by the time I entered junior high, I’m sure I knew every word of every rap.

And then Joshua Tree came out. And then Appetite. And then Mother’s Milk. And I survived puberty with a sense of self intact, boys and girls…

Is it that cultural phenomena like the Beastie Boys tend to shape our experience, or did they just always seem to show up as my life entered formative moments?

In the year between my junior and senior high, the whole family uprooted and moved to Ventura, California. It was a traumatic teenage apocalypse, and the whole mess caused me to cling more tightly to the release in July of ‘89 of what may be the B-Boys best album: Paul’s Boutique.

As my class set to finish up junior year and inherit the seniorship of Ventura High School, The B-Boys released the seminal Check Your Head, an album that would easily coexist with the new grunge sensibility.

By the end of freshman year at UCSD, the frat parties would always—and I mean always—feature tracks from each of the Beastie Boys first four albums. And when Kurt Cobain killed himself that April (a formative event in the history of my generation like it or not) the Beastie Boys (along with Smashing Pumpkins) would replace Nirvana at the top of the bill. They followed George Clinton and the P. Funk All-Stars in funking an undulating sea of fans in the best concert I have ever been to…hands down. And, thus, like many other Gen Xers, the B-Boys grew to form an integral portion of the soundtrack of my life. And I am not alone.

* * * * *

Just last Thursday, the day before Adam Yauch passed away, a student asked me in front of a class whether or not I had ever been to Lollapalooza, which she is visiting for the first time. I assumed the role of grampa in the rocker.

“Why, yes, youngun’, I certainly have. But back in my day, you didn’t go to Lollapalooza: Lollapalooza came to you. You see it was started by Perry Ferrell, but you don’t know who he is. I went in 1994. And, get this: my ticket read, ‘Lollapalooza featuring….” I paused for dramatic effect. “’Nirvana!’” A rumbling gasp circulated the room. “But as you all know, Kurt Cobain killed hisself in that fateful year. Instead, we saw a double headliner of Smashing Pumpkins and the Beastie Boys. But they’re not cool anymore….” And there I looked down and expected to be sad for a little minute.

“Yeah they are!”

I don’t know which student said it, but I looked up to see most of the students nodding in agreement. And I felt a little warm and fuzzy…and I’m not nearly sentimental as I am nostalgic. The B-Boys are cool again. Amen. And that’s a true story.

So, when the graying temples and tired eyes of Generation X tell you that MCA’s death makes them sad, it’s not because we are fascinated with a train wreck. It’s because, to us, the Beastie Boys are the very symbols of fun, and youth, and cool. The Beastie Boys are fucking cool, and when Adam Yauch died we kinda feel like fun and youth and cool died with him…and that fucking sucks.

Mental Ginger

2012-03-04T21:56:00.004-06:00

Lincoln Blvd and Rose Ave

As this is my first visit to The Manic Room, I will start slowly. Perhaps this post is a response to the last post, containing an answer to the question posed, "Who is going to crack through our oblivion?" I also envision this writing as a "how-to." Before I launch fully into the substance of this writing, let me give you a preview of the how-to that will be contained herein: following reading this essay, you will be able to listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as you've never heard it before.

I begin with a brief anecdote. I remember sitting in the parking lot of a local laundromat at Rose and Lincoln in Venice, California. Considering what comes next it, it must've been 2004. Looking across the lot, I saw a blue Ford Aerostar minivan, a child sitting in the shotgun seat, windows rolled down, his mother not there. The child was listening to the radio. As it was the summer of 2004, of course he was listening to "Hey Ya" by the Outkast.

The song had just begun and the child was already bored. It was the end of the summer and clearly he had heard the song hundreds of time. I watched him flip through the radio stations, pausing for a second on each station to hear the endless dribble issuing forth from mainstream radio. The child cycled through the entire dial and returned to you "Hey Ya." I literally watched him shrug and the begin bobbing his head to what is arguably the catchiest tune of this generation. [continued after the jump]

I here digress for a moment to point out that this is one of the saddest pop songs I have ever heard. This song is about Andre's inability to maintain his relationship to the sexiest women in existence, Erykah Badu. Just as "Ms. Jackson" was about the fact that Erykah's mom knew Andre was no good, this song is about the fact that Andre IS no good. You can hear it in the chorus, "oh oh." Listen to his wails as the song fades out. I digress.

Though the child had no doubt heard the song hundreds of times that summer, to the point where third teir presidential candidates were referencing it, (Wesley Clark anyone?), faced with the onslaught of mediocrity on mainstream radio, he had no choice but to put it back on and bob his head. You see, I would argue that there is something inherent to this song, some inherent quality that makes it great. We have no doubt forgotten, because at this point almost 10 years later, we must have heard this song a thousand times, literally.

* * * * * * *

I remember where I was the first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I was in my mom's Mazda Protege, picking up my friend, Torrey, in the morning on the way to school. He had recorded the song onto an audio cassette directly off of MTV. For those of you younger than 20, an audio cassette was a small plastic box that contained two reels of magnetic tape, onto which, the music was literally written and then read by a magnetized tape head, and MTV was a television network where all of us would hear music for the first time.

Now, I am generally a skeptical person, especially with new things. This is to say that there is a conservative streak in me. In spite of this, the effect was nearly instantaneous. I don't remember experiencing anything like it before or since. I immediately loved the song and for the next few months leading up to an epic RHCP-Nirvana-Pearl Jam, concert at the end of 1991, I had my first taste of what an earlier generation had called Beatlemania. But you all know what happens next. I was a junior in high school. For how long can anything remain cool to a sixteen-year-old?

Ten years later, well before I observed the child in the parking lot, I remember being perturbed that a profit motive had taken this song away from me. There is no way that I would have been able to play this song enough times own my to kill it. It was mainstream radio and its drive to play it and play it again and again ad nauseum and then play it again, that had killed this song for me. And dead to me it was. But I made an astonishing discovery.

Before I relate the discovery, led me intentionally digress into food theory for a moment. The question here is, "Why do the Japanese serve pickled ginger with sushi?" I have been told that the purpose is to cleanse the palette between sushi, that when a new dish is served, one can savor the new dish without tasting the remnants of the last dish on one's tongue.

As stated, this digression was intentional. Let me make myself clear, by returning to my astonishing discovery. My discovery begins with my becoming a fan of the digital hardcore act, Atari Teenage Root. ATR are perhaps best known not for any one song, though I might recommend, "She Sucks My Soul Away," "Destroy 2000 Years of Culture," "Revolution Action," or "Get Up While You Can," but more for pushing the boundaries of what constitutes music, being one of Gen X's first attempts at culture jamming, having a band member named Carl Crack, and for their unyielding stance against Western hegemony. During my anti-authority phase (I'll let you know when it’s over), I loved them and would roll around the west side of LA, singing "Revolution Action."

Which brings me to the discovery. It must have been 2002, because I remember "The Seed 2.0" by Cody Chesnutt and the Roots being big. One day, after an intense ATR session, "AND I'M RUNNING DOWN A BACK STREET! AND I'M NEVER GIVING IN!" I happened to flip the radio to KROQ. I was on the Santa Monica exit of the northbound 405 and "Smells Like Teen Spirit"came on the radio. There was this new feeling I had never experienced before. It wasn't nostalgia (oh, I remember the first time I heard this). It was like ATR had cleansed my palette and I was able to hear the song for exactly what it was, beyond my dim recollections of how hip or not hip I was in high school, beyond the endless airplay, beyond the countless imitators, perhaps even beyond Kurt's intentions, to the pure art of it. It was beautiful. ATR had freed the song from the burden of its cultural context and for that brief moment the song was able to be only what it is and I was able to appreciate it for this.

Kurt had no idea that Teen Spirit was a brand of deodorant. For Kurt, that simple song was about breaking through our oblivion. Unfortunately for us, David Geffen funds healthcare for the wealthy with the song's residuals, Kurt has long since joined Jimi, Jerry, Janice and Miles at the great session in the sky, and we are left with M.I.A.'s middle finger as our revolution action. I wonder though, can Alec Empire and crew still destroy enough of the last 2000 years of oblivion to give just five minutes of mental clarity, that Kurt might have a shot at showing us the possible once more?

Down the Rabbit Hole...

2012-03-03T02:07:00.003-06:00

In my previous post—yes! I know it’s been a while—I remarked on the centrality of Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality in The Matrix, the most successful film by the Wachowski brothers—er…siblings. The film was a commercial success and, as many commercial successes will, became the target of much criticism. Admittedly, some of the acting just isn’t very good…and, yet, the film is so good as to more than make up for what is normally a crippling deficiency in filmmaking. But more to my point is that some of the criticism misses the key point of the film, indeed of most science fiction: SciFi isn’t about the Future or the Alien or the Technology or the Other—it’s about us, here and now.

Ya see, intellectual critics of The Matrix—and, to be clear, I am defending only of the first film, and not the sequels, which strike me as not much more than a money grab—like to argue that the Wachowskis misapply Baudrillard’s theory. They argue that the movie asserts a “real world,” one which Neo can see with his “real eyes,” one to which Morpheus—in an unforgiveable act of bad faith—misapplies the Baudrillardian term “the desert of the real.” Maybe they are correct. The movie relies upon notion of “good guys” and “bad guys”: Neo—the messianic “one”—is the messenger of Truth; the “good guys” aim to bring humans back to a reality. And, of course, notions of objective morality, truth, and reality are quite inconsistent with just about any post-structural theory, Baudrillard’s included. But bear with me for a moment as I attempt to delineate how the film—upon reflection—works to offer a Baudrillardian critique of our culture. [continued after the jump]

At the moment I’m teaching King Lear in my Brit Lit I course, and I’ve noted that, at first, it strikes students as odd that some of the most profound insights into Shakespeare’s tragedies come during moments of comic relief—I’m thinking particularly of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. And, hey, if it works for the Bard it can work of the Wachowskis, no? Among my favorite scenes in the film is just such a scene of comic relief, the moment that immediately precedes Neo’s first reentry into the Matrix, a seemingly unnecessary scene in which Morpheus’ crew in the Nebuchadnezzar compares and contrasts their Spartan fare with the food they “ate” whilst integrated in the Matrix. Mouse, the ship’s Fool, points out that their gruel resembles “Tasty Wheat,” a fictitious brand name that one can only presume denotes Cream of Wheat™.

Mouse: Do you know what it really reminds me of? Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat?

Switch: No, but technically, neither did you.

Mouse: That's exactly my point. Exactly. Because you have to wonder now: how did the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like, huh? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example, maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything. Maybe they couldn't figure out...

Apoc: Shut up, Mouse.

Mouse’s comedic point is that their lives are one of absurd uncertainty because these future humans—in a rather fantastic scenario of science fiction—have been deprived of a vast portion of their lives by a lie of virtual reality. But the genius of the comic relief is that it refuses to let the viewer rest in the comedy of a philosophical conundrum that is purely fantastical. Mouse’s ridiculous conjecture leads him to an explanation for a phenomenon with which we are all quite familiar—the curiously transportable flavor of chicken. Take any of the most exotic meats: rabbit, frog legs, turtle, rattlesnake. What does it taste like? Chicken. Hell, one even remembers jokes referring to the female genitalia on this one, and what more embodies “everything” than that?! In a subtle fashion we are pressed to relate to the inauthenticity Mouse’s—as well as the other crew members’—experience.

The moment is far from isolated. Who can forget the moment later in the film—just as the crew attempts to leave the Matrix just following Neo’s visit to the Oracle—in which Neo experiences déjà vu? The sequence opens with a particularly Reevesque line:

Neo: Whoa, déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you just say?

Neo: Nothing, I just had a little déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you see?

Cypher: What happened?

Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it, was it the same cat?

Neo: Might have been, I'm not sure.

Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.

Neo: What is it?

Trinity: Déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Some of the pleasure of this sequence derives from the ironic explanation for a rather uncanny experience for which we—humans living at the turn of the millennium—have absolutely no explanation. Once again we relate to the Nebuchadnezzar’s crew; once again we wonder whether we are living in the Matrix. The repetition of the trope provokes a certain paranoia, a concern that “THEY” are telling me what chicken tastes like or “THEY” are causing my déjà vu. “Is there somehow a possibility that I myself am living in a virtual reality?” And what’s the Wachowskis’ point in provoking such paranoia in the viewer?

To answer such questions we must return to the common critique of The Matrix, that it belies Baudrillard by allowing the “good” guys to bring the “Word,” the “Truth” from an external, objective “reality.” But what is the nature of that “reality”? Recall that Trinity initially guides Thomas Anderson/Neo to her by encouraging him to “follow the white rabbit” in what becomes an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books. When Anderson finally meets Morpheus he offers him a choice of two pills—the red pill and the blue pill—one of which will allow Anderson/Neo to leave the Matrix, or, in Morpheus’ terms, “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes...”

The moment resembles the iconic eat me/drink me episode from Carroll’s tale, but note that Morpheus’ employment of the allusion contradicts our expectations; rather than figuring the supposed “fake” world—the Matrix—as Wonderland, Morpheus unexpectedly figures Neo’s life with him and his crew as Wonderland. When Neo takes the red pill and both goes through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, he wakes up to the “real world.”

And, again, what is the nature of the “real world?” Well, it’s a post apocalyptic nightmare on which a few scant humans struggle for survival on flying space ships that run from squid-like predatory killing machines. Yup, that sounds real to me. And what is the nature of the “fake” world? Oh, it’s an American megapolis—actually, Chicago, a fact that viewers fail to note because Chicago is so “normal”—around the turn at the millennium. The skyline is dominated by mirror-windowed skyscrapers adorned with corporate logos. Thomas Anderson works in a cubicle in one of them. He has a boss that gives him a hard time for showing up late to work. We get the sense that he resents authority figures in general and dislikes his job. He feels his post-modern discontent when, as Morpheus explains it, “you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Now you tell me: what sounds more like the world you live in? I think you get my drift. Any notion of “good” or “truth” or of a “real, authentic world” is located in the most absurd imaginative space of science fiction; conversely, the space that is the focus of the film’s Baudrillardian critique closely resembles the life we live, right here and right now.

So, what the movie offers in an extended critique of the inauthenticity of post-modern human experience. Rather than simply using Baudrillard in some disingenuous attempt to add intrigue to some greedy SciFi plot, the Wachowskis make a similar point Baudrillard makes in his critique of Disneyland, amusements parks, and fantasy spaces in general…albeit from a different angle. You might be surprised to learn that I’m planning a trip to Disneyland this month; hell, you might cry hypocrisy in my obvious enjoyment of fictions cinematic, novelistic, and poetic. But you see there is nothing wrong with the falsity of Disneyland or a Las Vegas casino or even of a CGI F/X laden film: the problem with Disneyland, as Baudrillard points out, is that it hides the fact that the rest of our so-called reality is fake, it hides that simulacrum that is the real world of Mid Rivers Mall Drive or Boone’s Crossing or the Galleria or downtown Clayton.

The sterilized opulence of downtown Clayton must be the “real world,” never mind the fact that poverty dominates rows of houses little better than shanties situated just a few blocks to the north… Do we even have room for Darfur in our imagination? Do you even think about Africa—the largest populated continent on the globe—when you think about “the world”? Ya see, we semi-consciously use the explicit falsity of the New York, New York Casino to hide the fact that the “real” New York is now a cliché, is touristy, is a place that a person can’t even really live unless they are ungodly wealthy. In fact, most “New Yorkers” live in places that we would not even recognize as “New York.” The Wachowskis make the same point—and do so even more clearly and more obviously than Baudrillard—by locating a narrative in two spaces, an absurd space that we buy into as, at the very least, more authentic than the one that so closely resembles our own. It’s really quite something when you think about it: that we can so thoroughly see our own world as a grand lie when placed in opposition to a dystopic future at the very bounds of our imaginative capabilities…. That should really say something about our culture.

And you object, “But certainly you do not mean my reality is inauthentic.” And I say, but certainly I do. And you retort, “By Jove, you don’t!” And I reply, “By Juno, I do!” You see, it’s not simply that we are all living a lie. It’s that within our reality we are consistently cut off from the truth. It’s that we live in a society that is dominated by a mass media which conditions our very way of understanding, of speaking about, and of imagining our world. And that’s a whole new hall of mirrors: it is precisely a “world that has been pulled over our eyes.” You see The Matrix is just a movie. It’s a fiction. It’s a lie. But it tells us what it is. So, what the hell is cable news? You tell me.

I’m not even going to take the time to criticize the rhetoric of right-wing extremism: the Tea Party and Fox News are the Disneylands that merely lend credibility to relatively benign simulacra that are MSNBC and the Democratic Party. It’s not the right-wing nuts that need to be called out; rather, it’s the wolves in sheep’s clothing that claim to represent the rational needs of the people that need to be shown for what they are. Allow me to explain how such an avid leftist as myself can make this claim….

My favorite MSNBC pundit is Rachel Maddow; she’s good at what she does. Lately she’s worked to ask why it is that the GOP continues to pursue controversial legislation limiting access to women’s reproductive health. It’s such an obvious political loser, so why? Good question. And her answer is correct: it a long term strategy to draw the political debate, the public’s sense of “normal” to the right. Off the bat, Maddow’s insight demonstrates that the notion of “normal” is subject to revision, is a function of a rhetorical strategy. So, what’s real about that?

Yet, even more crucially, the best of the cable news commentators takes two actions that only serve to derail any conversation about rebooting the entire system. First, she takes the bait. I’m not gonna say that women’s reproductive health isn’t important; I’m the father of a little girl, so I’m well acquainted with the seriousness of the issue. Yet, fighting for such issues would have been like Martin Luther King fighting only for the right sit at lunch counters. Come on! A political battle over contraception doesn’t even deserve consideration, and yet somehow in our “reality” it sucks the air out of the room. As such, cable news commentators are merely entertainers who fight battles, not wars.

Second, she never points out the true culprits: the Democrats. Look at Obama. He’s so happy to stride to “the middle,” to play the reasonable adult in the room, as if the Civil War should have ended in a compromise, a new half-slavery of sorts. He’s happy to provide a reasonable compromise on contraception rather than direct Eric Holder to start investigating bankers. Look at what we have for an alternative to Republican Party; look at the post-Clinton “new” Democrats. The “stimulus” was mainly a tax cut containing only $60 billion in infrastructure spending. The affordable care act isn’t a horrible bill because it’s “government run healthcare”: it’s a horrible bill because is giveaway to insurance corps dreamt up by the Heritage Club. Don’t believe me? Ask a good lefty like Chris Hedges. How different is our foreign policy under Obama as opposed to Bush? I don’t see much difference. It’s like we have a Republican Party and a Republican Lite Party. Coke or Pepsi. Who is gonna put a Wall Street Banker in jail? Who is gonna end privately funded political campaigns? Who is gonna make the media legally responsible for telling the truth? Did you know they weren’t? Who is going to oppose the coming war with Iran? Who is gonna end insider trading by members of congress? Who’s going to point out that we didn’t even have winter this year?

Who is gonna stand up and say we need to reinstitute democracy in this nation? I’ll tell who is not: Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. And you won’t hear that reported on MSNB… or even Fox News…. We’ll still be arguing about the President’s birth certificate.

In my darkest moments I envision a collapsing society leading to the end of our foolish race. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s all worth it. Should I even bother to rant and rave? Should I even bother to vote? It is the vision with which Agent Smith taunts and torments a captive Morpheus as The Matrix comes to a climax:

Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from, which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization…. I'd like to share a revelation I had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.

The central irony here is that Smith returns a figure of speech for a feature of the computer realm borrowed from the biological realm upon Morpheus: it is the computer virus that is the most destructive force in the virtual world. Is the human virus the most destructive in ours?

So, who is going to come from outside of this simulation to save us? Who is going to crack through our oblivion? So, who’s gonna show us that we can unplug…the “news” or senseless assertions of "common sense" or folly masquerading as "conventional wisdom"? Who could even get us to acknowledge that we are all victimized a grandly irrelevant show? And most importantly at this moment, who is going to show us that we don’t need to fight this war with Iran? Who is the One? Is there anybody out there?

Knock, Knock, Neo. The Matrix Has You...

2012-02-20T23:50:00.002-06:00

Performance reviews are never really enjoyable; in the teaching biz they can be downright harrowing. Normally, someone in a position of authority sits in on your class. You give them a lesson plan ahead of time and then they judge you based upon what you do in one class on one day. Moreover, as one of my colleagues like to say, teaching an English class is kinda like playing jazz: it involves a lot of improvisation, a lot of riffing off the vibe thrown out by your class mates. Some days, the students and I, we’re groovin’ to same vibe; other days…well, we’re havin’ creative differences. So how can one person really judge what I do by sitting in one day, watching us, messin’ up our dynamic? Well…they can’t.

I had some really bad experiences with performance reviews when I taught high school. The administrators saw what they wanted to see, and they wanted to see that I was bad at my job. Why? Simply put: I didn’t fit in. Was I bad? Well, I wasn’t good: I was a first year teacher. While I’m still no “master teacher,” I’m a lot better and I think I’ll continue to improve.

Observations and performance reviews at my current job have been an entirely positive experience. Still, I will never quite get over the trauma of a politicized version of the process that surpassed the paranoid fantasies of my most nightmarish visions of “observation.” —They! Are! Watching!— So, even as I accept that we need some quality control, at some level I will always consider the corporate performance review as just another manifestation of post-modern bullshit, another example of what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulacra.”

Who is Jean Baudrillard? What are simulacra? Funny you should ask that, because Baudrillard’s work was at the center of a class that I taught just last week, a lesson that was the subject of…an observation!

In my second semester composition class, I rely on a sci-fi theme. In addition to actual stories by people like Mary Shelley and Ray Bradbury, the course textbook also includes a number of theoretical texts, not actual stories but “philosophical” texts that offer ways of understanding stories. These readings, by people like Sigmund Freud and Jean Paul Sartre, can be quite intimidating for my students, so I pair them with movies rather than written texts. This way the students can experiment with these complex concepts without also having to contend with an intimidating primary text. Jean Baudrillard is the author of the theoretical text that I pair with the best known film by The Wachowski Brother’s, The Matrix. The excerpt, called “The Precession of Simulacra,” comes from Baudrillard’s seminal book, Simulation and Simulacra.

Haven’t heard of it? That’s okay, but it has become a rather well know philosophical text. In the book, Baudrillard offers and extended and damning critique of American-style, mass-produced popular culture, an entire system of living that is based on…well, nothing really. I use the example of Corporal Klinger to introduce students to the concept. Presumable, once upon a time, Max Klinger dressed like a man and behaved in some semblance of sanity. But then he gets drafted. He’s trying to get out of the Army, so he begins to cross-dress and indulge his every mad impulse. He becomes a dissimulator, a liar…but it doesn’t work. No one believes that Klinger is gay or crazy. So, why does he keep doing it? Why does he go from dissimulation to…all out simulation?

This is not a pipe. It's not. Really, it isn't.

If everyone knows the lie is a lie—including the liar—it’s no longer a lie. Klinger’s behavior becomes its own purpose. In fact, I would go far as to claim that Klinger is supposed to be a bad liar. It’s even funnier that way. It’s entertaining. Who cares why he does what he does? It’s a trope of the situation comedy. Are any tropes of television comedy “true”? Do you have a stock catch phrase? Is dad always the fool? Is the neighbor always zany? It’s not true…but it’s not a lie either. Rather, mass culture has no relation to the truth at all. It’s just a show.

This lack of relation to truth and falsehood goes far beyond the strictly defined realm of entertainment. Think of political rhetoric. Do politicians or the media ever bother to define terms like “freedom”? Why do “liberals” always call themselves “progressives”? And why do Republicans insist on referring to the “Democrat” party? Isn’t part of our issue with our leaders a suspicion that they don’t believe in any of the ideals in which they claim to believe?

Do we even want them to be honest? Do we want to know that they have sexual desires? Or that they’re friends with people in the opposing party? Or that they’re really atheists? Or that they are susceptible to corruption? Or that they have all gotten their positions through privilege and good fortune and owing favors to rich people? And is the fascination with politics of any more substance than our fascination with sports or soap operas? Does it really matter who’s president? I wonder…

And what is the fascination with the news? Isn’t it just another show appealing to our thirst for sex and violence?

And what is Coca-Cola? Is doesn’t have cocaine in it. And what the hell is a cola nut anyhow? And who really cares? By and large, cola beverages don’t contain ANY cola nut.

And what’s in McDonald’s? And where does Starbucks coffee come from? And why does it all taste the same? And what is “free” or “fair” trade? And was Steve Jobs really a hippie? Where was my iPhone made? Who made it? Is China a “communist” country? And what’s the point of a performance review? And does political correctness serve to make bigotry better? And what about affirmative action and global warming and the organic food industry and on and on and on… Who the fuck knows?

These bits of simulacra add up.

We live in a “reality” constructed of bricks of simulacrum.

How many seconds are you awake before you confront mass culture?

My iPhone wakes me up.

These simulacra are not lies…but are equally not “true.”

So, according to Baudrillard, we live in a simulation. Our brains are so polluted by bullshit that our existence is now virtual. We only know that main street is real because the Sunset Strip plays the role of fantasy land. We only know that Mitt Romney is moderate because ultra-conservatives are now promoting barriers to reproductive health. We only know that Obama is liberal because so many people call him a socialist. There is no objective reality in mass culture, for “reality” is defined in relative terms. Nothing is normal; our expectations rely upon the new normal.

Likely, if you know anything about Baudrillard's book you either a) attended graduate school in the humanities, or b) are major fan of the Wachowski Brothers. In an early scene in the Wachowski’s The Matrix, Thomas Anderson, a hacker a.k.a Neo, answers the door to Choi, a client who wishes to purchase some pirated software from Anderson/Neo. In fact, Choi tells us everything that we need to know to figure out the film—that Anderson, our “own personal Jesus Christ…need[s] to unplug”—yet we are so wrapped up in the ideology of Anderson’s reality that we fail to interpret the situation. When Anderson takes money from Choi and closes the door, we expect that he has gone to retrieve his pirated software. This is in fact the case, but he does so from a book, a hallowed out book, a hollowed out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra.

At once, this homage to Baudrillard should strike us as apt and ironic—apt because The Matrix takes a constructed, false reality as its subject; ironic because this film is as stylized a piece of popular culture meant for mass appeal as I can conjure. And, yet during that lesson, something happened, something clicked for students. One even said, “I didn’t realize that there was so much to The Matrix.” And what is there to The Matrix? Or, as Morpheus puts it, “What is The Matrix?” Well, we’ll have to get to that next time.

To be continued…

You Haven’t Seen The Graduate?!

2012-02-12T15:44:00.000-06:00

One of my coworkers likes to tease me about my reaction when she has not seen a film I deem iconic. You haven't seen Miller's Crossing?! But these days I use one of her favs, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s first notable appearance in our mass culture, as the central text of my pre-collegiate, developmental writing course. I ask students to complete a number of descriptive exercises leading to a descriptive essay. I used to ask the students to compose an analysis of the role of one image in the film, but I’m scaling back, allowing them to be a bit more general. I’ve learned that developmental writers just need to put sentences together, and yet I can’t help wonder whether my students are able to identify with Ben.

Young people today are just so…odd. You wonder how they achieve any complex psychological understanding given that they’re perpetually hooked into their newfangled texty machines. I know, I know: every generation finds a certain, sick comfort in denigrate the next. Kids these days! But, seriously, do these ‘Millennials’ ever even cease enjoying commodities long enough to realize that they’re unsatisfied by them? I wonder. And, yet, they still seem to identify with Ben...at least for the moments during class when I make them put away their goddamn phones. Don't make me take that phone away!

But who am I to judge? I hate to admit it, but I didn't see Mike Nichols’ classic until serving as a graduate teaching assistant for film courses at Washington University. In my defense, our access to media was far more limited in the dark ages of the late 20^th century. Back in my day, when you subscribed to HBO, you got exactly one (1) channel. Streaming? Nope. Netflix? Nope. Blockbuster had some older films, but if they weren’t in stock, you were S.O.L. Of course, some ghetto theatres that played older films (remember? they used to charge a buck). In the good ol’e days you had to actively seek out media, and I guess The Graduate never made it to the top of my list.

Hal B, AP, & CT

Then I went to college: my roomie, Hal B., and I didn’t even have a television in our dorm room freshman year. And cable wasn’t even available in the on-campus apartments that we lived in sophomore year. That year Hal B. and G-Regulator, J-Money, CT, and I got our hands on a VCR and amassed enough tapes to establish a satisfying rotation. We self-medicated, ate microwave burritos or mac-and-cheese out-of-the-box, and watched Coming to America, Star Wars, Up in Smoke, Dazed and Confused, and Fasttimes at Ridgemont High over and over and over again.

Hal B, AP, CT, G-Regulator, J-Muny

I know that I remember those times as happier for me than they were…but that’s how I remember them through the lens of nostalgia. We smoked and drank home-brewed beer and listened to new grunge albums and went to parties and concerts. I don’t know…maybe I wasn’t happy, but I felt alive and young. That’s for sure. Or maybe I was happy and I just didn’t know it. And then junior and senior year went pretty much the same way and then I graduated…with ‘high honors’ and rather vague plans about going to graduate school….

But that could wait. I was going to take a year off to travel. I had already travelled quite a bit, but I wanted to hunker down in this great place in the Spanish Basque country, this little jet-setting jewel of a town the likes of which one only finds in Latinate regions: San Sebastian. And it was more of the same there. Parties and shenanigans and, for the first time really for me, girls. Parties and girls. That’s really all I was really interested in when I was 22 and 23. I lived to revel. Can you blame me? Hey, at least I read a lot during the day (on the beach…while drinking beer and smoking). Okay: so, admittedly, I had issues. And I had limited funds. So, ultimate I had to cut my “year” of travel short…by eight months…and I did the one thing that was never in my post-collegiate playbook: I moved back in with my parents.

I spent weeks lying around depressed, just drinking beer. And then I got a job…and stayed depressed…and kept drinking beer. I won’t bore you with the details, but moving back home is productive in only one capacity: it compels young people to move forward in life, to mature, to make some feeble steps toward adulthood. Eventually I paid off my debts, earned a pretty sweet deal at Wash U, and moved into my very own apartment.

And little did I know that along the way I had imitated art, had spent a Benjamin Braddock-like summer coming to terms with my own lack of clarity for my own life, had (contrary to every thought running through my pea-brain) experienced the grand irony of joining with the mass of human experience in my abject post-adolescent feelings of isolation and alienation, of the absence of any option in life that seemed ‘mine.’ Imagine my amazement when, among my first teaching assignments, I first laid eyes on Nichols’ film.

Not only does The Graduate narrate the story of coming to terms with the end of one’s adolescence – I’ve done that well enough right here. Rather, the film perfectly figures – in extensive use of motif and metaphor – the fundamental alienation of integration with our adult world as well as the emptiness of maturation. That is, there really is no answer for the loss of one’s youth other than to accept that it’s just gone. From the opening credits to the closing shots of the film, The Graduate is a seamless and focused expression of the melancholy inherent in getting older. And, yet, it’s funny. Really, really funny.

The film opens with a close-up of Ben’s characteristically catatonic gaze as he waits to deplane at LAX. And from that moment on, I could write a paragraph or two about nearly every shot in the film. The film is not ‘perfect’ in its artistry, but even its imperfections lend the film a charm and awkwardness characteristic of its protagonist, and, more importantly, of its viewer. For I suppose that the very reason that this film is so important to myself and others is that each image of Benjamin is like an uncanny mirror into the past – Benjamin is the viewer.

As the credits roll, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” begins to play. Ben, wearing a dark suit, is pulled along on an airport people-mover. Framed to right of the screen, he does not walk forward, as do a handful of blurry figures in the foreground. The credits appear in front of the white, cinder-block wall that forms the background on the left of the frame.

Toward the end of the credits, the scene cuts to a piece of black luggage moving along a conveyor belt; of course the luggage is also framed to right of the screen and also in front of a white wall over which appear credits. And if the visual metaphor has not sufficiently impressed itself upon the viewer a sign reading “Do they match?” appears in the foreground. Of course, Ben retrieves this piece of luggage at the end of the shot. So, before we’ve had a word of dialogue, Nichols has effectively established the fundamental reluctance and lack of agency with which Ben approaches his future.

As “Sounds of Silence” ends, a shot of Ben leaving the airport dissolves to a rather gloomy close-up of our protagonist, gloomy in both mood and outward appearance. The details of the shot set-up are important. The high-contrast lighting leaves pools of light along one side of Ben’s face. His skin wears a sheen of perspiration, and his eyes gaze off into a nothingness below the plane of the shot. A large aquarium forms the entire background of the shot, lending the impression that Ben’s head is actually under water. A small harpoon-wielding scuba diver decorates the aquarium’s habitat. The only sound we hear is that of the aquarium’s filter bubbling. Ben himself sports neatly parted hair and a shirt and tie drawn to. Since he is lying back in bed, the tie further constricts his neck. Many other details of the ensuing shot work to underscore Ben’s general apprehension to live a life of expectations laid out for him by his parents, emblems of post-WWII parenthood. But the most intriguing element of this opening shot is how perfectly it establishes the central motif of the film: water. In what follows, I doubt very much that I’ll say anything new. In fact, let's just call my analysis plagiarism with a purpose: I just want to compel you to feel the value of this film, to watch it, or to watch it again, and to understand just how special a film it is. It would be a shame to let such a treasure drown in the over-abundance of media available to us in this age. So, go on and click "read more"...

Ben is hiding out in his room because he delays joining the homecoming party thrown in his honor. (Neither party thrown “for” Ben in the film features a single guest below middle-age.) Among the anonymous adults in attendance, only two stand out. The first, Mrs. Robinson, will provide the central plot element of the film in making herself available to Ben – sexually – later in the evening. The second, Mr. McGuire, will not make another appearance in the film…though he does provide one of the most famous words uttered in American cinematic history: “Plastics.” Significantly, Mr. McGuire delivers his simple, and simply unsatisfying, vision for Ben’s future on the Braddock’s pool deck, with the cement pond in the background.

After rejecting Mrs. Robinson’s indecent proposal, the film cuts to a second party “for” Ben: his 21^st birthday party. Mr. Braddock is making quite a speech for his friends while simultaneously cajoling Ben – who waits behind the scenes – admonishing him to “not disappoint everyone” in modeling and demonstrating his birthday present: a scuba suit.

The shot cuts from a shockingly funny image of Ben in full diving gear to a POV shot out of the diving mask. We see Ben’s parents egging him on into the pool. We see the awkward flippers rise and fall. But the only sound we hear is that of Ben’s Vaderesque breathing. Not only does an obedient Ben enter the pool and swim around, but, when he attempts to emerge, his parents push him back under. He stares around into the artificial blue nothingness, mechanically breathing.

And then the film cuts away from the POV shot to one of my favorite images in the film: a shot of scuba-clad, harpoon-wielding Ben standing on the bottom of the pool. He has become the diver in his aquarium. The camera floats away and Ben’s diminishing image becomes occluded by the artificial murk of the pool. Here the monotony of Ben’s breathing is interrupted by a “sound bridge,” the cinematic inclusion of sound from the following scene, a convention that ties two scenes together. The sound is of Ben on the phone with Mrs. Robinson. And we know that it is out of his overwhelming sense suffocating desperation at the hands of his parents that he has decided to take up Mrs. Robinson on her offer.

After sealing the deal with Mrs. R, the film fades into the one of the most revered montage sequences in film history – it is the antipode of the of those sports training sequences typified by Karate Kid or Rocky IV, the type hilariously ridiculed on South Park. During the “Sounds of Silence” montage the artistry of the shot composition and editing generates a seamlessness to Ben’s summer as he moves from his beer-drinking lounging by the pool to his repetitive rendezvous with Mrs. Robinson. Essentially, the Braddock household and the Taft Hotel become one space of drifting.

At the end of the montage, Ben goes for a final swim, diving into the pool, swimming to the surface to leap upon—

The shot unexpectedly cuts during the action of leaping on a pool raft to bend Ben landing, post-coitus, onto Mrs. Robinson’s body lying on a bed at the Taft.

At this point, Nichols again utilizes a sound bridge. We hear Mr. Braddock asking his son, “Ben, what are you doing?” Ben turns back in bed toward the camera. The scene cuts in a faux reverse shot to Mr. Braddock standing by the edge of his pool.

We hear Ben answer: “I’m just drifting. Sometimes it’s good to drift.” And it’s true, literally and figuratively. While Ben has no direction, he has been able to use Mrs. Robinson to drift.

The use of the water motif dries up a bit at that point, though it does resurface as a few other useful moments – as Ben’s parent’s pressure Ben to take Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, out on a date...

...or as Ben’s arrives on a rainy day to pick up Elaine for their second date.

I’ll allow you to explore the film for yourself…because that’s what I want for you, that’s what those whose choose to appreciate film deserve, and that’s what such a beautifully wrought film deserves.

What else could I say about The Graduate? I could elaborate on the structure of the montage sequences. I could dissertate upon the Oedipal characterization of Mrs. Robinson and her similarities to Mrs. Braddock. We could talk about the use of black and white in the mis-en-scene as ways of constructing the paths available to Ben…and Elaine. Similarly, we could explore the use of light and shadow, the use of wide-angle, telephoto, and zoom lenses. We could discuss Ben’s car, an Alpha Romeo. We could explore fathers or religion. In fact, even in a rundown, I am bound to leave out numerous important elements of the film. I have not mentioned the astounding nature of Dusting Hoffman’s and Anne Bancroft’s performances: they are underrated. The film is hilarious. The film is poignant. The film is never simple or sappy or sentimental or clichéd. It is as close to perfect as any film I’ve ever seen. But most obviously, I could try to tell you what I think of the film’s ending, an ending unlike any other, a really perfect ending.

But that would be to rob you of the primary joy of the film. So, just promise me to see the film. Promise me that you will think about its conclusion, that you will talk it over with whomever you watch the film with. And I’ll promise not spoil it for you…

Davidson's Wholesale Retraction

2012-02-01T19:49:00.000-06:00

Today at school one of my Students came by my Office, which is pretty darn Odd considering that it’s only Week Three. The young Woman strutted in like she owned the Place: “So, word on the street is that you love Mitt Romney.” Turns out that she’s pretty Sharp and knows how to use Google and read my previous Blog entry. Well, at least she’s reading some high quality Prose in her spare Time.

Anyhow, the whole Experience got me thinking. Should I, as a molder of youngish Minds, publically express political Opinions? Maybe not. I do like Students to work through their Ideas for themselves, and Lord knows I held some knuckleheaded Beliefs in my early 20s, beliefs that I would still hold had some Adult tried to convince me that I was Wrong.

In addition, I began to think that I might be hurting some of my Conservative Friend’s feelings. Yeah, crazy: I have some conservative Friends, a fact more shocking than that I have conservative Family…coz you know what they say about picking Friends and Family. And, of course, my Intention had been anything but to Offend. I merely wanted to promote the Notion that ultimately a Liberal could consider Mitt Romney just as undesirable a President as Newt Gingrich. I was attempting to lend Peace to the Fringe of the GOP base. Still, in comparing the later to Satan and the former to Jeffrey Dahmer, I may have jumped the shark so to speak. As a result, I offer the following Retraction:

Firstly, Newt Gingrich is not Satan; he is clearly a Mortal Man no better than the Least among us. I mean one would have to be quite Mortal in order to pursue Impeachment of President Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky Affair whilst as the same time cheating on one’s second Wife with one’s third Wife. But of course, the prosecution of President Clinton had nothing at all to do with sexual mores or appealing to values voters: Gingrich came after Clinton because he lied to a Federal Investigator, Kenneth Starr. Does anyone know why Starr was Investigating the President's personal Life? Hmm... Anyway, lying to a Special Prosecutor is pretty bad. Clinton had said that he didn’t have Sex with Lewinsky. But he kinda didn't have sex with Lewinsky; I mean, Sex involves placing one’s… Well you get the point. But still, that Impeachment had Nothing at all to do with Sex. Just like calling Barack Obama the "Entertainer in Chief" or the "Food Stamp President" and offering to visit the NAACP to offer them Jobs instead of Food Stamps has nothing to do with Race. Nothing at all…

Secondly, Mitt Romney is not only NOT a serial Killer: he’s not even a more mundane form of Sociopath. He believes in Stuff. You know, like stuff with Values and Principles and stuff. In fact, he’s so wrapped up in Values that he donated more Money to his Religion – the Mormon Church – than he paid in Taxes last year…and that’s not a joke about Mitt not paying his fair share. Mitt Romney gave more than one million dollars to the Mormon Church last year. You see: he has Values. Good old fashion Christian Values. You know, like believing the Second Coming has already happened…here in America. You see Joseph Smith found these gold tablets and...well…never mind. Anyhow, the Mormons believe in good old fashion values, Paternalistic Values, a Father centered family…if you know what I mean. And some of those Fathers – most of which have only one Wife despite what you’ve heard – get to become Church Elders. And they even allowed African Americans to serve as Elders as far back as the Dawn of the Civil Rights Movement…way back in 1978. And these Elders are great men: some of them have even heard of Feminism. And then they’ve some really core American beliefs involving Missionary work and Alcohol and Caffeine and...Underwear…. So, Mitt is clearly no Sociopath: he’s a Man of good old fashioned American Mormon Values.

In sum, I apologize to my Students, my Friends of all Parties and Factions, my Family, and, most of all, the Candidates themselves. I should not have besmirched your Honor nor descended into Name-Calling. I’m very sorry. I only wish the Candidates could be so Contrite. Did you hear that Newt did not concede Florida? did not call Mitt to congratulate him on his Victory? in fact that he did just about everything he could to aver that he was in the Race until the Bitter End? Can you say third party bid, Newt? This is gonna be great!

Ire of Newt, Claw of Mitt

2012-01-30T20:47:00.002-06:00

This term I am fortunate enough to have drawn Brit Lit I, and it is my intension to expose my students to portions of one of the most, if not the most, important epic in the English language: John Milton’s Paradise Lost. According to Christian mythos, about seven or eight Millennia ago (give or take a begat), Lucifer, the Fallen Angel, swam across the great Chaos from the fire and brimstone of Pandemonium to a Paradise on our own Earth. Upon arrival he took the form of a Serpent and persuaded Eve to partake of the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is for this transgression that we are cast out by the Almighty into a world of Toil and Trouble. And it is also for this transgression that Snakes and Serpents are required to slither along the Earth, for in those times they are said to have walked upon legs.

Now, why Eve opted for Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, I could never quite figure out. I mean, there was another tree in Paradise: the Tree of Life. And one thing I could really go for is more Life and less Knowledge. Oh well. Maybe she was hungry. Or maybe I should just accept that the Devil made her do it. Lord knows I’ve used that excuse….

And not coincidentally, it is only with such logic that I can explain the return to political significance of the aptly amphibiously handled Newt Gingrich: the Old Fellow made us do it. Now, if you are at all familiar with the author’s politics, you might guess that I would regard the prospect of a Gingrich Presidency with an overwhelming mixture of revulsion and fear. You would be wrong. In fact, this Serpent on legs might be just what America and the world need to get back on track. I mean, if arguing against straw men, stereotyping marginalized groups, insulting the opposition, and generally inciting fear and hatred in order to win, win, WIN isn’t good enough to fix our problems…then I fear we are beyond Salvation. But I’ll have to save a more extended case supporting a Gingrich Presidency for a future blog. For our concern here is not whether Newt’s return should happen, whether or not it is Good News; rather I am merely stating that Newt’s return has happened and that it matters.

In fact, a week ago I was prepared to proclaim the nomination of Salamander Grinch a mere formality. He was surging in both the national and Florida polls. And, let’s face it, Mitt Romney is the political equivalent of Michael Bolton: as long as he’s in the background no one notices, but as soon as someone turns up the volume the chorus shrieks, “Turn that shit off!... Now!” And, hey, for all the toxicity of Cynops, the firebelly Newt, no one would ever condemn this half-man/half-serpent as anything less than entertaining. I mean, despite Milton’s best intentions, Satan steals the Epic…and it is for this reason that William Blake once said that “Milton was of the Republican Party without having known it.” Can you imagine the sorts of galling insults that the Gingrich campaign would have trotted out in an attempt to beat President Obama? My guess is that by the time November rolled around, Stephen Colbert’s parodies of SuperPAC attack ads would have seemed quite sober by comparison.

But, alas, Newt seems poised to lose tomorrow. It seems that the Serpent’s lisp has not succeeded in seducing us sufficiently… SSSSSSSSSSsssssssssssssss….

But never fear folks. For those of you who hate the Kenyan, European, Socialist, Fascist, Jeremiah Wright lovin’ Muslim Obama, the GOP has something for even better than Newt fucking Gingrich: Mitt Romney.

I know, I know. He’s boring. But hear me out.

Ya see Satan is Evil. He has a moral code…whereas Mitt has none. Whatever you need him to say he believes to get elected, that’s what he will say. He will distance himself from Reagan and then extol Reagan. He will sign RomneyCare and then oppose ObamaCare. He is pro-choice then pro-life. He's for Senate Bill 5 and then against it. ...that’s just off the top of my head. And the challenge isn’t in any attempt to figure out what he really believes, because Mitt Romney doesn’t believe anything at all...other than that he should win. Mitt Romney is even better than Evil: he’s a Sociopath. Children, he’s the ultra-rich son of Governor that’s been running for President longer than my daughter has been alive. Not only does he not care about the poor: he has no concept of the problems that they face, and, even better, he doesn’t care. And really, what’s worse than hating the Other? I’d say that it’s just not giving a shit about them. Satan wanted God and Man to feel like he felt. Boring old Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t hate anybody: he just wanted to molest your corpse and then eat you.

Come on GOP! You don’t want to make liberals miserable. Hello! Been there, done that. Does George W. Bush ring any bells?

No, no. You want to cut us out entirely…and then molest our corpses…and then eat us. That’s the only suitable revenge for our having elected an African-American moderate to the Presidency. Romney 2012.

The Clash of Civilizations...Tandoori Style

2012-01-09T16:02:00.000-06:00

On February 11, 1990—in what seemed an utter impossibility at the time—42 to 1 underdog James “Buster” Douglas vanquished the then undefeated “Iron” Mike Tyson. In his previous fight, Tyson had dispatched Carl “The Truth” Williams in 93 seconds, and we all knew something was wrong with “Iron” Mike when Douglas made it out of the first round. And the rest is groping for your mouth guard history…

I remember the fight, or rather my emotional reaction to the fight, vividly. Like just about everyone else in America at that time, I was captivated by the spectacle that is Mike Tyson. I knew next to nothing about the ‘sweet science’ but watched each of his fights with the fervor of a Roman at the Coliseum. I skipped rope, practiced upper cuts, wasted hours playing Nintendo’s Punch Out!, mastered an impression of the fighter’s high pitched lisp, purchased black Reebok high-tops, would’ve had lines carved in my ‘fro had I had a ‘fro. You name it….

Also, February 11^th happens to be my birthday—I turned fifteen.

But most importantly, my aunt got married that day in a small ceremony attended by only the bride and bridegroom, my grandparents, the groom’s brother and sister-in-law, my parents, my brother, and I. What’s that? Eleven people? I suppose there must’ve been a rabbi or minister of some sort, but I don’t really remember: I just wanted to get to the dang reception—which was going to be held at some fancy French restaurant in Santa Monica called Panache…whatever that meant—so that I could catch Tyson’s inevitable destruction of Buster Douglas. Oh, and one more thing notable about the ceremony: my new uncle, one Chander Oberoi, was Indian, as in East Asian Indian, and my aunt…well, she’s not.

Watercress soup. Yuck.

There had been a set menu, which saved us the trouble of having to order, and my father and I stole off to the bar to catch the fight. I returned to the table with a bad taste in my mouth to find that the first course had arrived: watercress soup. The dun fluid inhabited a broad shallow bowl. Outside of the dash of herb (parsely?) splashed in the middle, the soup looked like something Oliver Twist would have turned down.

“What the hell is this?” I asked staring at the bowl.

“Shhhhhhhh!” Hissed my mother. “It’s watercress soup. Just eat it.”

Man oh man, this night wasn’t getting any better. I picked up the spoon and took a sip. Dear God. The soup was cold, and it had less flavor than it had color. It was like pureed water chestnuts or something…only with less flavor than water chestnuts. And wasn’t the chief attraction of the water chestnut it’s crunchy texture?

“It’s cold!”

“It’s supposed to be cold. Quit complaining. There’s more food coming.”

“Yeah. Great. I can’t wait.” Needless to say, the remainder of the food was equally colorless, tasteless, and without texture. I later came to understand the restaurant’s moniker with a significant degree of irony.

Ya see, this was the end of a rather long week for me. I was fifteen and my grandparents were in from out-of-town and I had been forced to do nothing but the very thing that any 15 y/o worth their salt avoids at all costs: spending time with family. Yuck. I mean we’re talking a week straight with the most boring and embarrassing people on the face of the planet. My only companion in suffering was my 13 y/o little brother, Brandon, and he was even less equipped than I to deal with this trauma. His visage had assumed a sort of sublime gaze, a look not unlike the acceptance with which medieval martyrs must’ve ascended the gallows. In short, he was no help. To make matters worse, the GM is sleeping in my bed, the GF is in bro’s, and bro has called dibs on the couch. I’ve been relegated to some sort of pad thingy (which my mother politely refers to as a ‘futon’) on the living room floor. Each morning I wake up to find that I’ve been shoved off said pad by the aging family dog (who’s begun to smell like only an old dog can smell, btw). But what’s the point of sleeping anyhow? Ya see, my grandparents have to wake up at like 4:30 in the AM in order to get an early start on their arguing. “Where the hell is the newspaper?!” “Why’d you make the coffee so strong?!” “Clean up after yourself!” “Quiet down! Can’t you see people are trying to sleep?!”

Not to worry, during mealtimes, the grandparents are far more pleasant. Apparently, in my family, the patriarch feels that his place is founded on randomly informing his grandchildren that Roosevelt was justified in interning “the Japs” (that’s how the GF routinely referred to Japanese-Americans). “But, grampa, we didn’t intern German-American’s.” He dismissed my logic with a chortle and went back to shoveling potatoes into his mouth.

Oh! And I had a Cute Little GirlFriend at the time, whom I’d had the opportunity to have over for precisely one (1) family dinner; she was the daughter of a well-off family headed by a judge, an African-American judge. Now at that point I was so utterly excited that a girl deigned to speak to me much less serve as the CLGF, that I could pretty much do nothing except think about her. “So, gramma, did you like, Rachel?” I should’ve known better. She informed me that she didn’t believe in the mixing of races. “But you’re Jewish!” She still didn’t believe in the mixing of races. “But you’re Jewish and grampa isn’t!”

“…”

“And, and, and, when you got married in like the 40s, the Nazi were off killing people…coz they were Jewish!” She was shocked that I could compare dating “that Black girl” (that’s how she referred to my CLGF) to the horror that her people suffered in the holocaust. “Oh, brother.”

My brother and I circa 1990.

Of course, the GPs’ issue(s) with me was not the real issue, for I, their grandson, was merely dating someone who wasn’t white whereas their daughter was marrying an East Asian Indian. In short, my grandparents approached this whole matrimonial process more like a normal and sane person would approach a funeral…and they were losing their fucking marbles…and driving the rest of us crazy in the process. My brother shuffled around like a mental patient on Thorazine, my mother exemplified a textbook case of the Stockholm syndrome, and my father had taken to heavy self-medication courtesy of Dr. Jack Daniels. So, as I finished off my cardboard tart at Panache, I’d decided that I’d had it. I was made as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore. Besides, the grandparents were going home in just two more days. I pushed the plate away, uttering, “Thank God this ordeal is about done with.”

“Yup,” said my mother. “Just the rehearsal dinner tomorrow and we can go back to our normal lives.”

“The what?”

“The rehearsal dinner?”

“I know I’m no expert when it comes to mating rituals,” I belted forth in a frenetic whine, “but don’t those normally come before the wedding?!”

“Yeah, well, we’ve got to recognize Chander’s family too. Finish your pie.”

* * * * *

So, the following afternoon, a Sunday, we’re all packed into my father’s Chevy Astrovan which is stuck in traffic along US Interstate-5 en route to some place inland from Compton and Long Beach called Artesia. Nice place. Turns out there’s a ‘Little India’ there, and that’s where Chander’s brother and sister-in-law have a starter-home. The GM, sitting shotgun, keeps harping on my father to slow down; rather than inform her that he’s in stop-and-go traffic and, therefore, not really moving much less driving fast, he just keeps one hand on the wheel and both eyes on the road. The bro and I place an over-under on how long it’ll be before he’ll snap. I take the under. In the van’s middle row, my mother nods at the GF's pontifications as he surveys East L.A. in much the same attitude that W. flew over the Gulf Coast post-Katrina. My brother is no longer capable of audible speech: at this point he mostly just drools.

Eventually we make it into Artesia, and we’re not in the barrio any more, Toto. It’s not like the upper-castes are ridding around on elephants or adolescent boys are hauling rickshaws or anything. But we are clearly in a realm that the GF cannot believe exists in these United States of America. A number of the shops have the word “market” on their deity-spangled signs—as in Taj Mahal Bengali Market or Sanjay’s Madras Market. The storefronts are adorned with colorful saris and statuettes and hookah-looking-thingies. You can smell the curry spice in the air as the distant notes of sitars float over the hum of automobiles. The heat and dustiness of inland California make Artesia a plausible Hollywood substitute for New Delhi or Bombay…

And it’s becoming readily apparent that the grandparents had thought the worst was over, had thought that the wedding ceremony would prove the nadir of the trip, had thought that nothing could frighten them more than giving their daughter away to a man of another race, but they now find themselves right in the middle of the Other and are suffering full-scale anxiety attacks. My grandfather looks like he’s been drugged and awoken in a strange time and place; he’s Gulliver tethered to the Lilliputian beachhead. My grandmother can no longer even muster the energy to criticize my father’s driving. This is great.

That’s right. I’ve suffered. I’ve slept on the floor next to the elderly, foul-smelling cocker spaniel. I’ve awoken to daybreak arguments about such crucial topics as drinking the last of the grapefruit juice, burning the toast, and stealing the crossword puzzle. I’ve endured my grandfather’s unthinking racist claptrap. I’ve suffered my grandmother’s denigration of my Cute Little GirlFriend. And I have not been permitted to see the CLGF in days, days I say! Any protests on my part have been dismissed with no more than a wave of the hand. They’ve driven my brother and my parents insane, which only leads to further suffering on my part. And then I spent my birthday—my fifteenth birthday!—at a ceremony—a long and boring ceremony!—followed by a hoity-toity meal devoid of all taste and texture. To top it all off my hero—my heretofore undefeatable hero!—lost to a man named “Buster”! Did you hear that? Buster! So, suffer! Suffer I say. It’s all I have left. I can no longer find joy in anything but the suffering of others. Why stop at Artesia? On to Bombay!

So, we meet up with Chander’s fam at a restaurant called something like Artesia Curry Palace. All I know is I’m three courses away from being done with these people, after which I can get back to my happenin’ 15 y/o life. We’re seated in the way back and the mood at the long, banquet table is chilly to say the least. But I’ve checked out. I’m a short timer. And once I turn 16 and get my car I’m barely going to see anyone I’m related to ever again so help me god. So bring out the watercress soup or whatever it is you people are going to make me suffer through because in a few short hours you won’t have Aaron Proctor to kick around anymore. I’m at rock bottom and I’ve got nuthin’ to lose. Do your worst! Because I know, Grampa: I know that no matter how much I hate this food, you will hate it more.

I’m at one extreme end of the table and Chander and his brother are huddled with a soft-spoken server at the other extreme end. I’m certain that the meal they’re ordering is meant as a form of cultural revenge upon the Proctor clan, and I’ve been warned by my mother that I am--under pain of death--required to, not only eat whatever they order, but actually pretend that I like it. Soon after the conclusion of the confab, we are swarmed by servers dropping successive waves of small dishes, none resembling any food I’ve laid eyes upon heretofore.

Well, that’s not exactly true: the first dish, which Chander calls poppadums, resemble a sheet of tortilla chips that someone forgot to cut up prior to frying. These poppadums are accompanied by bowls of sauces called chutneys. Even those these chutneys don’t look like any salsa from Tacos Jalisco, the parents set to, comforting themselves verbally with “just like chips and salsa.” Of course, the grandparents take little comfort in the supposed familiarity of Mexican food. And those chutneys are wonderful. There are mango chutneys and pickled chutneys, and citrus chutneys and spicy chutneys and sweet chutneys. Some are smooth and some are chunky. Some are red and others are yellow or green. And they all smell of the spice gardens of the world.

And before I’ve time to come up for air I’m eating fried bits of chicken and cheese and vegetables, but they’re not just fried: they’ve got this infusion of spices which are all subtly different in both taste and smell. And then there are beds of rices, long-grain odoriferous basmati rices which breathe saffron and jasmine. Baskets of bread arrive, naan bread, a clay oven baked flat bread. They’re covered with butter and garlic and tandoori and have chicken or cheese or vegetables in them. And I’m ladling gravies—coconut curries, tikka masalas, mahknis, rogan joshes, madras curries, vindaloos, and even a fahl—each spicier than the last, all of which surround more chicken and lamb and cheese and shrimp and nuts and potatoes and peas and lentils. My mouth is on fire, a sublime fire, a fire of ecstasy. And, as I shovel it in like only a 15 y/o boy can shovel it in (and after a week of subsistence on a GP-friendly diet), I suddenly realize that everyone is looking at me.

My mother has a small mound (mostly white rice) in the middle of her plate which she’s been pushing back and forth. My father and brother have been making faces at their larger heaps. My grandfather has a single bit of pompadum on his plate and my grandmother has—like Gandhi—refused to eat anything, has thrown all concern for decorum to the wind, has in fact sent her plate away so that her resolve on this issue may not be questioned. And they’re all looking at me, even the members of East Asian Indian delegation, with uniform blank stares of astonishment. In retrospect, it seems likely Chander’s family was merely shocked at the sheer amount of food I had ingested whereas my family was coming to grips with the fact that I actually liked this food, this James “Buster” Douglas of world cuisine. I set my fork down and wiped my mouth with a linen napkin.

“Hey, it beats the hell out of watercress soup.”

“…”

“Seriously? You don’t like this?”

“He’s a weird kid,” my grandfather proclaimed.

“Whatever. More for me.” And I dug back in….

It's Not Easy Being Green...

2012-01-02T18:17:00.005-06:00

Last week my daughter had a midmorning dental appointment, and, rather than take her back to daycare, I decided to spend some quality time with her in a futile attempt to lessen her resentment toward me in her adolescent years. A seemingly congenital resentment towards one’s parents is about as close as the Proctors get to a family heirloom.

While this December has proven quite mild, it seemed a bit too cold to tolerate a bike ride or trip to the playground—too cold for me, that is—the little ‘uns have an innocent imperviousness to the elements more akin to the Neanderthal than Homo Sapiens. So, to make a long story short, I decided to take her to a matinee. Now I was hoping to get her to agree to see The Muppets again. I know, I know: it wasn’t as good as The Muppet Movie or even The Great Muppet Caper, but have you been to a children’s movie lately? Hell, have you been to a grownup movie lately? Who was it that said you would never lose money underestimating the intelligence of the American public? Well, Hollywood has proven that axiom true…for the most part. And Li’l Stinky was not interested in going with me to watch Kermie make time with Piggy again. Hmm. Maybe I should quit obsessively singing “Rainbow Connection” in my more than slightly askew Kermit voice. The loverrrrs, the dreamerrrrs, and meeeeee!!!! Anyhow, her refusal now pitted father against daughter in some fierce negotiations.

Now, I was well aware that she wanted to see the latest installment in the Alvin and the Chipmunks saga—Chipwrecked. And though her attempt to formulate the word ‘chipmunks’ (which it takes her like 18 seconds to say more like chick-monks) is quite cute, I was not going to allow a viewing of this assuredly craptastic cinematic disaster to go down. Why? Well, I don’t particularly enjoy or even see the humor in listening to people talk after inhaling helium. It’s like 13-year-old boy humor. And I don’t like pop music. So, why would I want to hear Lady Gaga at massive RPMs? There is a certain level of annoying that is beyond the zone of humor. I don’t like squirrels. They’re just rats with fluffy tails. I mean, is there any difference between a chipmunk and a squirrel? I don’t like Jason Lee. Bro! You were in Chasing Amy! What happened to you? I do like David Cross. Bro! You were in Mr. Show! And Arrested Development! What happened to you? And the whole mixing of live action and CGI is immoral. I mean a good percentage of the parents in the audience likely experimented with LSD in their youth and could potentially be liable to a flashback. In that case, who is going to watch my child while I’m trying to get those nasty singing squirrels off of me? Get the squirrels off of me! Get them off! …Ahem. The remainder (of the parents) likely saw Avatar and is still trying to recover. So, my job is to get Li’l Stinky interested in some film—any film—before she recalls the existence of this latest Chipmunk atrocity. I should be able to outsmart a 4-year-old. Right?

So, an hour later we are seated in the theater in the Galleria watching Chipwrecked. I’m drowning my sorrows in unbuttered popcorn and Coke Zero while she is reveling in her like 13^th consecutive victory over her father. Oh well, I may as well make this useful. Maybe I can add Chipwrecked to my list of films for the Pop Culture class. Maybe it’ll fit the ideological analysis assignment, for it seems that the obviousness of a movie’s ideology is inversely proportional to its quality….

Man, oh man. If I had been this agreeable to her mother, I might not be single at this moment. Aw, who am I kidding? I’m a single guy. I look at the world as a single guy. Outside of my parental responsibilities—which are indeed many—I instinctually plan my life concerning me and only me. When I go to the grocery store, I think, “Hm. What would I like to eat?” (Lil’ Stinky really doesn’t eat anything except steak and her own toys.) When I get off of work, I think, “Hm. What do I want to do?” When I decide whether or not teach extra courses, I think, “Hm. How much money do I need for me?” And when I go on a trip, I think, “Hm. How much money do I have for me? And where do I want to go?” You get the point. In fact, you are probably thinking, “So what, Proctor? What’s wrong with that?” True. True. I am single, so why should I really consider anyone else? The problem is that it goes much deeper than that. Let’s put it this way: ‘single’ has become a semi-permanent identity for me. I am ‘single’ in the same way that I am a teacher or the same way that I like to run or prefer long novels to short ones. It’s who I am.

Me, last summer in the South Pacific...

Ya see, I think as a single person even when I’m in a relationship. I wake up in the morning momentarily surprised that there is someone here. In the bed. With me. It could really be anybody under that cover. I get home from work and hear something going on in my kitchen. “Shit! Am I being robbed?” And when she informs me of our plans on Friday…and Saturday…and Sunday, I struggle to recall having asked her out. Did I even ask her to move in? I honestly cannot remember. I can't even remember why she wanted to move in. Why would she want to move in? Look at this place!... It just doesn’t sink in for some reason. I can’t get it through my thick skull. And this is a real problem. A real fucking problem. Because. Because. Because… I’m lonely. Okay. There. I said it. I’m 36. I like being a dad. I’ve got a job I like. Everything is wonderful wonderful wonderful. But I’m a bit lonely at times. So, let’s do something about that, Proctor. Let’s quit being so picky. Let’s start being more considerate of others. Okay? But, first, let’s start being present in the present and try to pay attention to this piece of garbage you are witnessing only because you are trying against your own nature to be a half-decent father…

And there really is a wealth of assumptions at root here in the ideology deployed by the makers of Alvin’s weltanshauung. I mean there’s all sorts of stuff about single fatherhood right there in good ole Dave, right? He didn’t really want to be a father. He wasn’t ready to be a father. He didn’t even accept fatherhood until Uncle Ian began to exploit the ‘Munks. And here in this movie, Alvin is working out some sort of guilt. He’s a mischievous little bugger. Is it all really just a ploy, Alvin? A test just to make sure that Dave’s love is unconditional? But now you are really afraid aren’t you, Alvin? You are afraid that Dave’s love isn’t unconditional. You fear that, now that you are lost, Dave will not come to your rescue. He’s already back home doing a touchdown dance in an empty and clean house. Tonight he’s got a date with a girl that’s like waaay out of his league. And he might even be able to bring her home for once. Bow-chik-a-bow-bow. And she’s like three times too hot to go out with him, and—

And that it occurs to me that there’s something else at work here. There’s something that is not accounted for in the neatly packaged little reduction that I’m preparing for students. There are not three chipmunks: there are six. A boy set and a girl set. Alvin (the cool, fun one) is with Britney (the attractive, fun one). Nerdy Simon gets an equally nerdy, bespecatcled Chippette (that’s seriously what They call them—Chippettes). And fat Theodore seems uninterested in the fat Chippette who presumable only condescends to pair up with Theodore when an occasion requires a date. They are so unattractive that they’ve accepted asexuality in lieu of each other. Holy shit. They are teaching my child, and all of the other children in the theater, and all of the other children that have ever seen one of these Alvin and the Chipmunks movies—which has to be like every child in the Western world—that they are to find an equivalent of themselves in the other gender or accept asexuality. Holy shit! This is horrible. This is fucking horrible! Do you know what this means? Do you have any idea what this means?!

This means that I’m Theodore.

Come here, dear Reader, and take a look in the mirror with me. Look at me. Just, look at me! Will you?! I know you’re taller than me, but stoop down a bit. Do you see it? It’s a bit like George Costanza with more hair and bigger ears, no? Okay, okay. Maybe it’s not all that bad. So, my female equivalent would have a few gray hairs, and little extra around the middle, and a kinda large set of ears…and a big nose. That is O-Kizzay. I will survive….

But what about that personality? She’ll want to be left the fuck alone a LOT. I can tell you that. Like you won’t be able to talk to her in the morning before she’s had her coffee…or when she’s reading, which’ll be all the fucking time…or when she’s tired or watching something on the tele. She’ll rant about politics incessantly, and like I already know we’re head to H.E. double hockey sticks in a hand basket. Enough already. She’ll be gone running for hours at a time, and, no, thank you, she’ll not want a running partner. But then all of sudden she’ll get needy and want your attention—like out of nowhere she’ll turn from introvert to extrovert on a dime without a moment’s warning in a semi-schizoid fashion. She’ll want you to listen to her problems, but won’t feign more than like ten seconds interest in anything you have to say—she’ll just go on whining about her family or work or whatever. And then there are the resentments. She’ll have a list of like 80 people that she just absolutely cannot stand, cannot be in the same room as, cannot even go to a place where they might be, would change jobs, move, and alter religions to avoid these people. “We can’t go to that restaurant. That asshole Joe Blow goes there sometimes!” And she won’t ever want to make any plans in advance. Everything’ll have to be by the ear. No reservations. No trips planned ahead of time. No commitments to hang out with any particular friends or family members. In fact, she will not under any circumstances be willing to ever hang out with any member of your family. Okay, maybe she’ll be willing, but she won’t like it. Never. Not under any circumstances. Unless, maybe, there are sexual favors involved….

Whew. What a catch! I guess it’s not such a bad thing that I’ve become so accustomed to the single life.

And I guess that’s why I wanted to go see The Muppets again. Ya see, in Jim Henson’s world, there really aren’t many ‘equivalents’—hence the running joke in The Great Muppet Caper that Fozzie and Kermit are twin brothers (a photo of their father shows a green Bear with bugged out eyes). Henson came out of the different times in American ideology, the late sixties, the ‘Me Generation’ that asserted and validated individuality. And, of course, the whole fiasco that is a Muppet movie revolves the unlikeliest of romantic duos—Kermie and Miss Piggy. Piggy is…well…a pig. She may have pretty hair and nice big doe eyes…but she’s a pig. I mean, she has a snout, guys. And at one point in Caper, Kermit describes her as having ‘sturdy’ legs. Moreover, she’s rash and bossy and self-centered and, well, sometimes, she’s even downright violent. Hiiieeeyyaahhh!!! Ring any bells? And even her Oh, Kermie often seems affected and even downright manipulative….

But I’ll take her, people. I’ll take her. I’ll take her because there’s not a person out there who isn’t deeply flawed. I’ll take her because just about everyone is petty and self-absorbed sometimes. I’ll take her because we’re all gonna get downright ugly as we get older. I mean, she has pretty eyes. But, mostly, I’ll take her because she’s not me, and the last thing I want is to be paired up with my ‘equivalent.’ And it gives me hope that somewhere out there is a rainbow connection, folks. Somewhere out there I’ll find a lover. Somewhere out there I’ll find a dreamer…just so long as I don’t find another me.

Tarantino's Case for Style over Substance (Abuse)

2011-12-18T14:21:00.010-06:00

There’s just something riveting about Amanda Plummer. She’s ugly as sin, but you just can’t look away. And I’ll never forget the first time I saw her lecherously hiss, “That’sss a lot of walletsss. Pre-tty sssmart.” Tim Roth’s initiation of the diner robbery that bookends the film merely serves as a platform for Plummer’s frenetic delivery of one of the film’s signature lines: “Any of you pigs move! And I’ll execute every last muther fuckin one of ya!” The frame freezes on Plummer and surfs straight into Dick Dale’s finger slide entrance to his iconic “Miserlou.”

The first time I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the opening felt like plunging over the first peak of a roller coaster. It was the sort of vivid and visceral movie-going experience I’ve had only a handful of times—Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Eastwood’s Unforgiven—one of those times when you know full well that you are seeing a special film for the very first time. And you just don’t want it to end. [continued after the break: click "read more"]

But there is something very different about Pulp Fiction once we give it a second viewing…or even a second thought. What I mean is that in Goodfellas, Scorsese demystifies the mythology promoted by Coppola in The Godfather saga. After all, Harry Hill’s punishment is a life as an ordinary schmuck. In Full Metal Jacket—by starting with basic training—Kubrick emphasizes the psychological damage of military indoctrination as opposed to merely focusing on the experience of war. And in Unforgiven Eastwood produces a reflexive and reflective film; it is a film in which the western’s primary modern icon reexamines the genre and undermines its enjoyment of violence by asking a very serious question: what does it mean to kill? And what does it mean to lionize murderers in our mythology? As such, Unforgiven is the last western…at least the last one that matters….

But what is the importance of Pulp Fiction? What does it mean?

After seeing the film, our little clique headed over to Carrow’s—a family restaurant not unlike the one knocked over by Ringo and Honeybunny in the movie—to rehash the film. More than just getting into the spirit of things, we went to Carrow’s coz Erick, our only friend with a real job, waited tables there; the rest of us were piss-poor college freshman, and when we’d show up Erick would groan and roll his eyes coz he knew we’d take up a table waiting for scraps. Also, we were always loud…and sometimes, some of us weren’t entirely clear head. “Be cool, everybody! This is a party!” Well, we thought it was a party…

This night we immediately all started shouting at each other re: the significance—or lack thereof—of Pulp Fiction’s nonlinear narrative. I’m pretty sure I was on the side of ‘significance’ whereas Robin Todd, a filmmaker himself these days, took the side of ‘lack thereof.’ And I’m also pretty sure that I won just coz I tend to yell more. But I digress...

Some viewers like to make the narrative more complicated than it really is. Essentially, Tarantino removes a large and significant portion of the story—a section bounded by Jules’ two recitals of adapted biblical verses that he calls “Ezekiel 25:17”—and places it AFTER the final chronological event of the story, Butch and Fabian riding off into the sunset on dead Zed’s chopper.

Now, one would assume that such narrative manipulation occurs for thematic purposes—some insight offered by the missing piece lends meaning to story that the film would not otherwise so forcefully express. Michael Corleone’s announcement to his family that he has joined the army in 1942 dissolving to his monstrous solitude in the final shots of The Godfather Part II comes to mind. In fact, the whole parallel structure of GFII serves as a good example of what I mean here.

So, let’s get to work.

Now, not many student writing ticks drive me up the wall more than a reference to “hidden meanings” in a text. I detest the idea that students equate poetry to CIA encryption or something. I should show them Pulp Fiction: there’s not much hidden here, but it is quite poetic. And the interpretation doesn’t involve decoding so much as it merely asks that we use our noggin for a sec.

Jules recites Ezekiel 25:17 and mercilessly assassinates Brett—he’s a hit man: that’s his job. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. When Rosanne Arquette’s little brother (er…sister) pops out of the bathroom guns a-blazing and entirely misses Jules and Vincent, the dynamic duo blow him away, much to our cinematic delight. Significantly, Jules attributes their survival to divine intervention.

Later, when Jules confronts Ringo and Honeybunny in the diner, Jules recites Ezekiel 25:17, but this time he spares Ringo. It seems that Jules has decide to quit “the life,” decided to “walk the Earth like Cain,” a decision that Vincent ridicules. Of course, Vincent gets killed coming out tha shitter by the boxer he had earlier insulted, Butch Coolidge. So, the apparent ‘message’ of the film supports some simplistic and undefined spirituality over the self-centered gratuitous gluttony and violence of thug life. Okay.

Now does anyone really believe for one second that that sentimental crap is the point of the film? Of course not. To a significant degree, Pulp Fiction exhibits an ideological sleight-of-hand akin to that invoked by James Cameron in both Titanic and Avatar—two godawful films that have somehow managed to make a shit-ton of money. Ostensibly, the ‘message’ of Titanic is that women should seek out—in fact, they deserve—the authentic love offered by the working class male. Of course, Jack has to die in the end to avoid what Slavoj Zizek has identified as the real catastrophe offered by the film, the spectre of Rose’s actually having to live a life of poverty in 1910’s New York. No one wants a rich girl to suffer.

Similarly, Avatar thieves the story and themes of Dances with Wolves to promote some hodgepodge of back-to-nature, anti-corporate, anti-militaristic environmentalism. Did Cameron even bother to notice the Left’s appalled reaction to Kevin Costner’s revision of the White Man’s Burden?

Screen shot from Avatar, a crappy movie.

Of course not. Ya see, the story and the themes…and even the actors themselves persist as secondary concerns, necessary evils if you will. Coz quite clearly the whole point of Avatar is to unthinkingly immerse one’s self in a technologically generated 3D spectacle. The ultimate enjoyment of the film comes in its culminating battle, a synthesis that is even better than the real thing. Isn’t that the goal of CGI? to make the synthetically generated even better than the real thing? Well, that, and to make a shit-ton of money for Rupert Murdoch….

But the real insult is that we took Avatar (and Cameron and Titanic) so seriously. Do you recall any controversy surrounding a film that allows to feel that we would do something about the disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples, the imperial use of our military, the subordination of our environment, and on and on…without doing anything more than paying[1] to see the film?

Ya see, I do recall quite a bit of controversy surrounding Pulp Fiction. Hell, Bob Dole cited the film as an example of our moral decay without even having even seen it! And it wasn’t just the Family Values folks that were out trying to Sister Souljah the film because…gasp…it makes us laugh at killing! And, yet, no one seemed to offer that the violence undermined the film’s ‘core message.’ Hm. Suspicious. Like most of my friends, I had already seen Reservoir Dogs. We were all anticipating the follow up. Why? Two words: straight razor. So, if the film hadn’t been exceedingly violent we would have demanded our money back. We knew better than to take the film seriously…at least in any conventional sense.

Among the many controversies I recall surrounding the film was its lack of “realism.” Particularly, some criticized Vincent’s use of an antiquated syringe, one no ‘real’ heroin addict would use. Such a complaint fails to realize that anachronisms—from Jules Jheri curl to Mia’s reel-to-reel 4-track player to the entire scene at Jack Rabbit Slim’s—form a developed motif in the film. In fact, the anachronisms are part of a larger priority of placing style over substance, and never has a film found more justification in prioritizing style. In fact, the film consciously undermines any attempt on our part to ‘take it seriously.’ For example, when POW camp survivor Captain Koons (played by Christopher Walken) brings Butch his father’s watch, he does so with the tale of the sentimental importance of the watch.

The gold watch was purchased from the very first company to make wristwatches in Knoxville, TN by Butch’s great-grandfather, Doughboy Ryan Coolidge. And of course the watch came home to accompany each succeeding generation of brave Coolidge men in their turn at patriotic service. The watch is an heirloom passed down the line of patriarchy. The watch is meaningful…that is until Koons reveals how the watch returned from Vietnam. Here, Walken’s diction shifts from sentimental and wistful to downright crass. Ya see, Butch’s father hid the watch the only place he could: his ass. “He’d be damned if any slope was gonna get their greasy hands on his son’s birthright.” And when he died—of dysentery no less—Dooley hid the “uncomfortable hunk of metal” up his own ass. Now that sounds like a keeper.

On a similar note, what is truly great about Butch’s rescuing of Marcellus Wallace? If you don’t recall, we all know very well that Maynard and Zed are perverts who are going to rape Butch and Marcellus? I mean, does “bringin’ out the Gimp” leave us in any doubt? So, Butch’s decision to go back and save his enemy offers the possibility for all sorts of meaningful explorations of forgiveness and moral hierarchies and such. But, come on, this is Tarantino.

Ya see, Butch needs the right weapon to do the job in style. A hammer? Nah. What else do we have here? A baseball bat. Hm. Oh, wait, here’s a chainsaw. Can I use this? Hm. Wait a minute. Awwwww, sheeiit! Is that a fuckin’ samurai sword? Oh, hell yeah! And then Butch is going back down the stairs. We see the door. We see his hand moving toward the door. What’s this? No. No! You’re not going to show it. You are not seriously gonna show it! And, of course, Tarantino shows the unshowable. And not only that: he has Ving Rhames bent over a pommel horse or something.

So what does it all mean? Well, above all, Pulp Fiction is a film made by a man who just loves guy movies. Gangster movies and Kung Fu movies and Blaxpoitation films and Action movies and Film Noir and Caper films and Buddy movies and Horror shows. Shaft, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Guns of Navarone, and The Seven Samurai are just around the corner, bound to just show up in any Tarantino film. And Pulp Fiction is a film the reuses the glowing briefcase and the three-way standoff featured in such films (and he’d already used the latter in Reservoir Dogs). And so why does the film feature a nonlinear narrative? Because it’s fuckin’ cool. That’s why.

So rather than the narrative structure supporting a theme, the theme is mere ideological sleight-of-hand used to support an enjoyable narrative structure. I mean, come on. He’s gonna walk the Earth like Cain? So, why is it that anyone with any taste can recognize that special quality in Tarantino’s film whereas Cameron’s opus reeks[2] worse than a land fill? Wherein lies the difference between a film that prioritizes style over substance and a film that strikes us as merely devoid of substance? Well, what we like most about the 'messages' of Cameron’s films is that they are just. And what we like least about them is that that they inconvenient. As such Cameron’s films kill two birds with one stone: we get to feel just without having to do a damn thing about it. I don't call that style. I don't call that substance. I call it substance abuse.

But what we like most about the 'messages' of Tarantino's films is the form thy take--their style.

Pacifism? Meh. But “walking the Earth like Cain” sure sounds like some badasssss shit….

Saving one’s enemy? Maybe. Do I get to use a samurai sword?

Showing respect to the Big Man’s wife? So long as she doesn’t Disco on to me too much.

Passing down family traditions? Birthrights? Um. You hid that where?

Hey, in the end, it’s ugly as sin…

…but you just can’t look away.

[1] The proceeds of which go to a shameless, right-wing media mogul.

[2] To which I make only one exception: Terminator.

Tree-Hugger: An (Online) Genealogy of Morals

2011-12-09T16:49:00.008-06:00

How can I possibly be related to you?

Recently I was shocked to learn that, not only theologians, but scientists now assert that every last human being on the planet—white and black, Christian and Muslim, Cardinal fan and Cub fan alike—are all—yes, ALL!—descended from a single female, dubbed “Mitochondrial Eve” by geneticists, and a single male, “Y-chromosome Adam.” I stumbled upon this astonishing scientific fact in a Jeremy Rifkin talk animated by the Royal Society for the Arts. Rifkin’s idea is that, since we are all related, it may be possible for all of humanity to identify as one large family. I’m skeptical.

And before you run off half-cocked to start spreading the “good news” that the Bible had it right all along, allow me to burst your bubble: scientists believe that the genetic “Eve” lived about 200 thousand years ago whereas “Adam” lived only 60 thousand years ago. How does this happen? I’m not exactly sure, but Adam must have been quite the Casanova in a small, yet uniquely successful population entirely descended from Eve. Frankly, I find a large degree of peace in that 150 thousand year gap, for it avoids the truly frightening question posed by literal Creationism: where did Seth’s wife come from? For there is only one answer to THAT question: she would have had to have come from the same place that Seth, Cain, and Able came from. A sister. Or, even worse: Seth procreated with Eve herself. Ug. Ew. Yikes!

"Calvin Klein! Isn't he a dreamboat?"

And of course incest is the fundamental taboo upon which civilization depends. Don’t believe me? Just go ask Freud or Oedipus…or Marty McFly. No, no, kids, the fundamental taboo is not murder. In fact, according to Freud the threat of capital punishment was first used to prevent—you guessed it—incest. We are just fine with killing certain people in certain situations, but the mere contemplation of mommy-son action is enough to make us wanna gouge our own eyes out or, dare I even mention, listen to Huey Lewis songs. Gag me! But don’t worry: the genetic Adam, his many partners, and their progeny were probably cousins…very distant cousins. Whew! …though incest would certainly go a long way toward explaining the nightly news. [continued after the break: click "read more"]

And yet one can certainly empathize with the Creationists in one respect: their religious mystification is the product of a desire to know where we came from and why we are here. And don’t we all want to know the answers to those questions? About a week back, my daughter and I were watching a program on the news that mentioned the existence of DNA. “Daddy, what’s DNA?” Now, that’s difficult to explain to a 4-year-old. Before I knew it, I was Googling pictures of babies, fetuses, zygotes and eggs, constructing a narrative back toward her origins. “You see, you are half mommy and half daddy. Get it?” “But daddy, how did your DNA get in mommy’s belly?” Given my current relationship (or lack thereof) with her mother, that is a question I ask myself from time to time, but I’m just not going there with baby girl. I think I changed the subject to something with lots of sugar in it.

That said, I get what motivates Creationists and children the world over, for I’ve sought such answers for as far back as I can recall—which brings me to my grandfather, a man I hardly knew until I was 7 or 8. You see, Ye Olde Man liked to stare into bottles, and my parents limited my exposure to him until he sobered up in the early 80s. From then on all was hunky dory as far as I knew, and, as a benefit of the new normalcy, we held weekly family dinners at my grandparent’s house. To celebrate his reformation, one of my aunts bought the Olde a music box that played “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” As a sort of new family ritual, someone would wind up that music box after dinner and, to show his good humor about the whole business, the Olde would swirl his ice tea in a rocks glass and sing along in an affected slur. You see, it was all hunky dory. At least it seemed that way until I was about ten….

That’s when I first became curious about my own genealogy. I drew out a tree on a yellow legal pad with three generations on it. That’s all I knew. And the strange thing is that that is all most adults know. I mean, maybe people know something about their great-grandparents, but rarely can anybody rattle off the name of their great-great-grandparents. It’s pretty odd if you think about it. Wouldn’t grandparents tell their grandchildren about their grandparents? So, I took the next logical step: I decided ask my grandparents about their parents and grandparents at our next get-together.

My grandmother told me that her father was Harry Goldberg and her mother was Rose Pravda; both forenames were Anglicized versions of Yiddish names, Ruchel in my great-grandmother’s case. I later learned that Harry came over on a ship from Gdansk to avoid conscription into the Russian army during World War I. Ok, cool. I filled in that branch on my legal pad and turned to my grandfather.

At first he just acted like he hadn’t heard me, but I just kept on pestering him. His parents were Orville Proctor and Thelma Martin. Ok. Down on the legal pad.

Now they weren’t immigrants, so who were their parents? My grandfather pursed his lips for a moment... All of a sudden, he pounded his open hand on the table and looked at me squarely: “My dad’s parents were Richard and Pearl.” Before I could even begin ask him about his mother’s family, he had pushed back his chair and gone out into the garage for a smoke. Hmm. I decided not to ask my maternal grandparents about any of this nonsense…

About two years ago, I saw an ad on TV and began tooling about Ancestry.com. I think I got some sort of free trial, so I figured what the hay? At the very least I wouldn’t anger or upset anyone by compelling them into their past. Initially, I didn’t get very far. I’d type in a name and the search records didn’t seem to have a thing to do with anyone in my family. But I soon realized that the census takers weren’t all that picky about how they spelled my ancestors’ names; so on my mother’s side, in addition to Lockner, I tried Lochner and Lakhner and even Lakner. Eventually I had a break in the case, a census record with names of not only my great-grandparents but all of my grandfather’s siblings. You see, census records come in quite handy to the American genealogist, a convenience provided for in our Constitution in fact. But all too often the trail grows cold for the amateur genealogist in any attempt to trace roots back to the Old World. In the case of my German-Irish mother’s family, I struggled to get further back than my great-great grandparents. My great-great-grandmother Margaret O’Grady (nee Darcy) followed her daughters over at the turn of the century, shortly after her husband John died in Ireland. My great-great-grandparents Bertram and Adeline Rudolph came over from Germany separately, meeting here in St. Louis shortly after the Civil War. They had three sons who all died before attaining manhood. Death is a common theme in genealogical research. Life is hard now, but in the old days life was thoroughly fraught with tragedy….

Daniel Darius VanLeuvan

I did have one grand success on my mother’s side as my great-great-grandfather Daniel VanLeuven had the great fortune to marry into the family of a prominent Mormon. It turns out Mormons are crazy for genealogy. You see, in addition to all that insanity about magic underwear and the ill effects of caffeine, They believe that They can baptize the dead and make more Mormons. To this end, They’re amassing a databank called the “Millennium File” through which They hope to account for every human being that has ever lived. I’ve even heard that Ancestry is a grand plot on the part of the LDS to turn our deceased ancestors Mormon. Hmm, do They charge extra for that?

At any rate, an embarrassing number of my ancestors actually chose the Mormon religion. So, the Millenium File contains records of the VanLeuven clan going way back, to Ontario in the early 19^th century, to New York in the 18^th century, and from Holland to New Amsterdam in the 17^th century. I’m not sure how much of that I buy, but I like to imagine Pierterse Van Leuven sailing over from Holland around the same time that Milton was composing Paradise Lost….

My 4x-great-grandfather's headstone.

On my father’s side I had pretty much the same experience; I’d get back 4 or 5 or 6 generations to the person who came over from the Old World and lose the trail. In typical male fashion, I exhibited some determination on the patrilineal branch and learned more than I had expected. I learned that my great-grandfather Richard Proctor abandoned his wife and children. He turns up some years later in the state penitentiary down in Arkansas, and that’s the last we hear of old Dick Proctor. Maybe he died in prison. His father, Lafayette William Proctor, owned a colorful moniker and a mass of farmland in southern Illinois. And his father, Harris JW Proctor, died while serving in Grant’s Army of the Tennessee at the battle of Shiloh on 6 April 1862. In fact, Harris is buried in the national park at Shiloh alongside dozens of other members of the 46^th Ohio Infantry; I even found a picture of his tombstone on the park’s website. Amazing.

Yet, the details surrounding my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s death are not the most significant discovery that I made in all of my genealogical research. You see, my great-grandmother Thelma Proctor (nee Martin) died on 6 Jun 1937 during the 8^th year of the Great Depression. Hard times. My grandfather was only six when his mother died. He started smoking by the time he was seven and ultimately died of a smoking related illness. He must have run about the streets during the days, dirty, shoeless, and hungry. He was an intelligent if unimaginative man. So, who answered his big questions? Who explained things to him? He would have had little to do but skip school and cultivate bitterness. I guess that has something with why he liked to stare into bottles. Who knows? It’s all small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

For, in the end, how do I get my head around two amazing facts? On the one hand, I am the result of a woefully incomplete family tree already containing over one-thousand people. Each had to fight for survival in a world of disease and poverty. Each had to fall in love at with a particular person. I mean, I could write a whole piece on the unlikelihood of my parents even dating much less having me. And each ancestral couple had to conceive at a precise moment in order to get one specific egg and one specific sperm to produce another of my ancestors, who also had to live and fight and strive and love. This astronomically unlikely occurrence had to recur for tens of thousands of years just for me to sit here writing this piece.

And, yet, in an overpopulated globe of 7 billion people of different races and creeds and cultures, masses of souls who feel the strangeness, not only of the foreign Other, but of their own neighbors, all those that fight wars and hate each other and remain indifferent to the wealth of suffering all around us—we are all descended from two people. But it doesn’t stop there: in addition, every human that has ever lived throughout recorded history is, as a matter of scientific fact, descended from those two people. The starving child in a South American slum, the proletarian in North Korea, the Wall Street billionaire, the President of the United States, Shakespeare, Joe McCarthy, Lou Gehrig, Julius Caesar, me, you…everyone is the direct descendant of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam. It’s a scientific fact. And I can tell you that without renewing my Ancestry membership.

And yet I cannot believe that we will begin to conceive of each of our fellow beings as our own family. And I cannot begin to explain the nightly news….

New American Gothic: Hardboiling the Coen Brothers

2011-12-03T13:30:00.016-06:00

Among the numerous fringe benefits of my profession, I get to concoct harebrained schemes; but not only do I cook them up: I indulge them, make them realities…well, realities in my head. And the fun doesn’t end there, kids: before I think them through, I like to go and share them with people. We’ll call it stunt blabbing or daredevil gum-flapping.

The primary victim of my struggle to delineate between reality and fantasy happens to be my department chair. She’ll be sitting in her office at a desk over-flowing with work wearing either a look of deep concentration or “where the hell do I even begin,” and all of a sudden I’ll pop my head into her open door: “Hey, Karen! I’ve got an idea!” I have to admit, I get a kick out of her jumping about two feet out of her chair. I mean, if she didn’t want to be interrupted by me, she shouldn’t have left her door open, right? I’ve noticed that she’s given up coffee since hiring me.

That was a few years back and by now she’s figured out how to better deal with me. Rather than rationally explain to me why I can’t teach Beowulf in Old English or take a class on a field trip to Seattle to reenact the WTO protests, she merely waits for me to finish, after which she calmly distracts me back to world of reality. “Proctor, have you given that 101 class their grammar diagnostic yet?” So, the other day, instead of even seeming to notice that I’d just proposed teaching Ulysses in my freshman composition course, she asks me if I have a DVD copy of The Source, a biopic about the Beat Poets starring Dennis Hopper, Johnny Depp, and John Turturro.

“Never heard of him,” she says.

“Who? Kerouac?!”

“No! That last one…Turtle.”

“Oh, Turturro? He’s been in lots of stuff. He was the racist son in Do the Right Thing.” She’s starting to put a face to the name. “He was in Miller’s Crossing.” I’m losing her. “He was the Jesus in The Big Lebowski.” Nothing. “He’s been in a bunch of Coen Brothers’ films!” Eyeroll.

“Ooohhhh, the Cooowwwen Brothers. It’s a generational thing. You young people and your Coen Brothers.” Huh? The Coen Brothers are “a generational thing”? At first, the idea struck me as odd, but the more I thought about it, the more is seemed downright preposterous. So, I did some research, and, turns out, the Brothers’ last three films—in a row!—have been nominated for the Academy Award^®for Best Picture, and No Country For Old Men won the award (for which the Brothers also won Best Director). One of the three—A Serious Man—received no marketing and featured no star power, yet is still a truly great film. A fourth—the absolutely unforgettable Fargo—was nominated for the award in the 90s. In addition, some of their best work has received no recognition from the Academy. [continued after the break: click "read more"]

For starters, if you haven’t seen Miller’s Crossing or The Hudsucker Proxy, you should. Now. Seriously. Get up out of your chair and go rent or illegally download them immediately (that's a joke).

In Miller’s Crossing, the Brothers revisit Dashielle Hammet’s Red Harvest just as Sergio Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars and Kurosawa did with Yojimbo. But this time, it’s not only riveting: it’s funny. At a key moment in the film, a group of rival gangsters march our protagonist, Tom Regan (Gabriel Byrne), deep into the woods at gunpoint where Regan must show them the body of Bernie Bernbaum (Turturro). Now, we all know that Regan didn’t kill Bernbaum as ordered, so we anxiously anticipate that Regan’s body will replace the vacancy in the woods. Yet, almost magically, at the climax of the scene, just as the goon Eddie Dane is about to shoot Regan, the troop stumbles upon an unrecognizable, decomposed corpse dressed in the gangland garb of the era....

Of course, any hardboiled suspense in a Coen Brothers’ film must be cut with their truly unique brand of humor. In The Hudsucker Proxy , a farce set in the 1950s, a seemingly naïve mailroom clerk, Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), repeatedly attempts to climb the corporate ladder by sharing a drawing of his invention to puzzled co-workers. You see, it’s just a drawing of a circle. In response to their puzzled looks, he attempts to clarify with, “You know, for kids!” Ironically, Barnes is promoted—all the way to the top—but only in an underhanded attempt by one of the corporate bigwigs (played by Paul Newman in his final substantial role) to devalue the company’s stock. Only at the end do we realize that Barnes is the inventor of the hula-hoop, and the innovation undermines the corruption at the top of the corporate ladder. It’s certainly a special brand of humor that relies on the surprise that the sucker to which the title alludes was actually just a misunderstood, eccentric genius all along….

Is this your homework, Larry?

In addition to these six titles, The Big Lebowski is now a full-fledged cult classic. Men, if you find yourself at a holiday party with a bunch of strangers, just walk up to a group of men, put on a German accent a la Sprockets, and say, “Vare iz da munny, Lebowski? Ve are NIHILISTS! Ve believes in NUSSING! NUSSING, Lebowski! You vunt us to cut off your JOHNSON?!” Okay. Okay. Don’t do that. People will turn away from you twirling their index fingers at their temple, but sharing lines from Lebowski has become a universal rite of passage in male bonding. Lawyers, bartenders, and English professors alike, lines from the film like “Is this your homework, Larry?” or “The Chinamen’s not the issue!” or “Do you have to cuss so much, Dude?” or “They fucking pissed on your fucking rug!” elicit a pseudo-Pavolvian response of salivating approval. And, yes, In n’ Out^® has really good burgers….

Dad always chose the family viewing.

At this point, I have cited seven great films, and I have yet to mention my favorite Coen Brothers film of them all, the very first one I ever saw: Raising Arizona. On a weekend night in what must have been 1988 or ‘89, my family headed to the video store, Movies to Go, a smallish chain of rental shops that would soon be bought out by Blockbuster^®. That’s what we did on the weekends, and for a number of weeks in a row my mother, my little brother, and I had strolled past a cover that caught my attention: it had some hicks laying out in lawn chairs on it and, oddly enough, one of them was a baby with sunglasses on. At the age of 13, I was quite the film critic: I was certain it was stupid movie. By this time, my adolescent sense of aesthetics had cultivated a taste for action films, preferable one that featured aliens and the line “The Sarge is dead, man!”

Now if I wanted to get something I liked, it was always best to go to the video without my father. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time watching movies that my daughter wants to watch. Such was not my father’s approach to family entertainment: dad always got his way. I became a baseball fan, frankly, because I had no choice: my father wasn’t watching fucking cartoons—he was watching the fucking Cardinal game dammit! So thanks to the old man, by the age of eleven I had seen such family-friendly classics as The Godfather Part II, Once upon a Time in America, Body Double, and A Clockwork Orange. (Note to self: make appt. w/ therapist). So, when my father selected the movie with the hicks in the lawn chairs, I performed all the eye-rolling and groaning mandated by pubescence, but I knew that I was going to have to settle for that stupid movie about the baby wearing the sunglasses. What followed must characterize many first exposures to the Coen Brothers’ imaginative universe….

Hi hankerin' for Ed.

In as zany a premise as I can conjure, a bungling convenience store robber named H.I. “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) cultivates a romance with a police officer (Holly Hunter) named Ed—short for Edwina, of course—during a series of bookings. Shortly after their marriage, they learn that Ed is “barren,” and they cannot adopt due to Hi’s checkered past. As Hi explains in the film’s epic exposition, “Biology and the prejudices of others conspired to keep us childless.” Fortuitously, the wife of a local unfinished furniture magnate named Nathan Arizona—he guarantees his deals with the catchphrase “…or my name ain’t Nathan Arizona!”—has given birth to quintuplets. So, Hi and Ed decide that they are justified in kidnapping one of the Arizona children to raise as their own.

Of course, the film is funny. ALL Coen Brothers’ film are funny (even No Country to a degree) and Raising Arizona is among the funniest. During the police investigation of the kidnapping, the detectives ask Mr. Arizona what the baby was wearing. Incredulous, Arizona shouts, “What was he wearing?! He was wearing his damn jammies! They had Yodas and shit on ‘em!”

And the yucks come fast and furious throughout the film. When Hi finally cracks under the pressure of family life and decides to knock over a convenience store (a rather strange addiction indeed), he grabs a package of diapers, pulls panty hose over his face, and approaches the cashier brandishing a gun: “I’ll be takin’ these here Huggies and whatever cash you got.” Of course, Ed doesn’t approve and refuses to play getaway driver. “Hurry up! I’m in Dutch with the wife.” So, Hi decides to hijack a driver on the road, who calmly asks, “Son, do you know you have a panty on your head?”

Yet, beyond mere entertainment, Raising Arizona represents a complex exploration of desire and morality in an unjust society. Hi’s real dilemma lies in his inner conflict: on the one hand, he thirsts for the significance, meaning, and depth of family bonds, while on the other he cannot resist the allure of outlaw adventure. What man cannot identify with that inner conflict? Does this conflict not embody the very choice between single and married life? Between youth and middle age?

As an attempt to have it both ways, the kidnapping of Nathan Jr. unleashes dual forces of karmic retribution. First, Hi’s past comes a-calling in the form of the Snoats brothers (John Goodman and William Forsyth), whose escape from prison is rendered as a birth from the primordial ooze of the penitentiary sewage system. As a more abstract form of Greek fate, the bounty hunter Leonard Smalls first appears to Hi in a dream on the very night of the kidnapping. During the climactic battle between Hi and Smalls, Hi pulls aside Smalls’ vest to reveal a Woody Woodpecker tattoo that matches his own biceps tattoo. When Hi inadvertently destroys Smalls, who was sold on the black market as a child, McDunnough whispers a surprisingly earnest apology in the moment before the explosion. As such, the bounty hunter becomes Hi’s doppelganger, his uncanny double, the very embodiment of both his crime and his sense of guilt, the simultaneous irrationality of his childish id and the long arm of the tyrannical law.

After all, throughout the film, a perpetually puzzled McDunnough fails to rectify the antagonism between his attempts at self-efficacy with any authority in his society. While “they say” that “that sumbitch Reagan…is a good man,” Hi can only grope for an explanation: “Maybe his advisors are confused.” As Hi ponders a justice system is supposed to rehabilitate criminals, his experiences with the revolving door of prison lead him to imply that incarceration is an unusually cruel form of revenge against the criminal. At his final parole hearing, one of the board members warns Hi not to just tell them what they want to hear.

“No, sir,” Hi says.

“’Cause we just want to hear the truth.”

“Well, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear.”

“Boy, didn’t we just tell you not to do that?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Well, okay then,” concludes the board member, echoing the meaningless refrain of authority in the film. And, of course, Nathan Arizona—the man conflated with the state—cannot live up to his advertising: his real name is in fact NOT Nathan Arizona, but Nathan Huffheinz. “Would you buy furniture from a store named Unpainted Huffheinz?!” Or as Hi’s foreman says, “It’s a crazy world.” To which Hi replies, “Someone oughta sell tickets.”

Though the film was produced on a modest budget of 5 million dollars—it was only the Brothers’ second film—the Brothers spent wisely and the film is notable for its technical mastery. In addition to Cage and Hunt, the Brothers exhibited a keen eye for inexpensive talent and recruited the likes of Goodman, Forsyth, Frances McDormand, and M. Emmet Walsh before any was well-known. Hi’s showdowns with the Snoats Brothers and Leonard Smalls (Randall Cobb) are unforgettable battles, and the chase scene that begins in the convenience store forms a one-of-a-kind sequence. In his attempts to escape the consequences of his criminal relapse, Hi travels by vehicle and foot through streets, track homes, backyards, alleys, and a grocery store, attracting police, gun-toting store clerks, and stray dogs along the way. In addition to the epic and lengthy exposition (among the most masterful I’ve seen), the film boasts creative and expressive editing that utilizing matches on action to seamlessly transport us in time and space, threading the film together in a grand unity. Finally, the Carter Burwell soundtrack is more than notable. After viewing the film, I walk around the house hollering Burwell’s orchestration of yodeling and banjos for the next few days. I’m sure the neighbors love the film as much as I do….

Seriously, Proctor?

Now, to be clear, I am not making the argument that Raising Arizona is the Brothers' best film: I am merely explaining why it is my favorite Coen Brothers film, and any fan could make a legitimate explanation for any of the films alluded to in this piece. Still, I’m going to conclude with an admittedly provocative, even grandiose statement: among Western filmmakers, no one has accomplished more than the Coen Brothers (with the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, who, incidentally, never won Best Director). How many great films has Francis Ford Coppola made? Or Robert Altman? Or Oliver Stone? Or even Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen? Think about it. I would add The Man Who Wasn’t There, Barton Fink and Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? to the Brothers’ total. Am I missing any? That makes eleven strong films for the Brothers. We should also consider that Hitchcock made films during the prolificacy of the studio era. I would offer the same defense to those of you who would counter with Frank Capra or Elia Kazan or John Huston. And I love the films of William Wyler, King Vidor, and Billy Wilder as well, but film production was a much simpler venture during the classical Hollywood era. And, most importantly, the Coen Brothers aren’t even finished yet; in fact, if their last three films are any guide, they are just getting started. And as Jews from the upper Midwest, the Brothers’ make films that appeal to viewers from heartland and coasts alike. Their movies are entertaining on the most superficial level but also deeply concerned with questions of culture, mythos, and metaphysics, placing them among the most important American artists working in our time.

That’s it! On Monday, the last week of the Fall term begins, and we’re all up to our eyeballs in work, especially the department chair. But, who cares? Someone needs to do something about this! I think I’ll pop in and propose a new Film as Lit course—The Hardboiled Genius of the Coen Brothers. I imagine that after settling back into her office chair, Karen’ll shake her finger at me and shout, “Proctor! Have you given that 101 class its exit exam yet?!”

“No, Karen. Sorry. We still have to finish My Own Private Idaho and write up the timed essay.”

“Who’s in that?”

“Keanu Reeves and Flea.”

“You're showing your students films starring insects now?”

“You don’t know the Chili Peppers?” Blank stare. “Give it away now?” Nothing.

“Is this some Gen X thing?” Huh? The Chili Peppers are “a Gen X thing”? At first, the idea struck me as odd, but the more I thought about it, the more is seemed downright preposterous….

From Costa Rica to Costa Coffee: Bad Coffee is better than No Coffee

2011-11-29T18:47:00.003-06:00

When I was small, my parents made a family brunch just about every Sunday. It never struck me as strange then, but looking back it seems a grander production than was justified by our little family of four. I can still smell the plates of scrambled eggs, the crispy bacon layered over paper towels, bowls of stringy hash browns, the grapefruit halves, blueberry muffins, orange juice, tomato juice, and, of course, coffee, pots and pots of percolated coffee.

After the meal I would dally at the kitchen table with my parents because it seemed part of the family ritual, a ritual organized around coffee. For as far back as I can remember (I must have been only 3 or 4), my parents would drink coffee and talk, and I would drink “nick nick” and listen. I was under the impression that “nick nick” was half-coffee, half-milk; I later found out that instead of coffee, my mother had substituted black tea. Humph! When they were kids, back in the good ol’e days before cigarettes caused cancer, I’m pretty sure they got the real deal. But what difference does that make? For a four year old, the amount of caffeine in black tea was certainly something, and I had already begun to identify as a “coffee person.” Indeed these were the innocent days of what has become a caffeinated life. And little did I know then that coffee would play such a crucial role in forming my sophisticated, worldly identity.

I can’t remember my first cup of coffee, but I do remember shifting from taking sugar to going without as far back as high school. You see, I’m a man of refined tastes. I own a Chemex and a cafétiere. Any coffee drinker worth her cream knows that coffees are as complex and wondrous as any fine wine out there: I once had an Ethiopian that began tart like apples but finished with the strangest note ever. What is that that? Is that a hint of…blueberry? And to this day I’m just a coffee and milk guy, a purist, an evangelist of the whole bean. Nothing fills me with more dread than the thought that I might accidentally ingest sweetened coffee. Seriously. And don’t get me started on “flavored” coffees. Coffee already has flavor: that’s why I love it. A Sumatran coffee tastes nothing like a Kenyan or Colombian or Hawaiian. With the natural variance of coffees from around the globe, who needs the addition of Hazelnut or Cinnamon? Or both?! “Flavored” coffees are for politicians, heretics, and felons. “Flavoring” coffee is like doodling on a Van Gogh or tinkering with a line of Shakespeare. It’s perfect as it is…. [continued after the break: click "read more"]

These guys work really hard for very little money.

Well, not always. I mean there’s some really bad coffee out there. But coffee drinkers around the world agree: bad coffee is better than no coffee. In fact, it seems odd to think that most people drink bad coffee. Why? Because it’s cheap, sometimes even free, a price that must be some sort of miracle of American corporate capitalism. Despite the fact that the coffee must be flown in from the four corners of the globe, it’s cheap enough to be free. At a lot of places that you have to wait or work for even a few minutes, it’s just sitting there. Free. For the taking. To anyone. So, what could a third-world coffee farmer (much less a farm worker) possibly earn? Maybe that’s why they call is “free” trade. Hmm. Someone out there is getting the used grounds on this deal….

Anyhoo, for “cream” we dump in a “non-dairy” powder to form an evil concoction the likes of which Henry Jekyll never dreamed. And voilà! Is it even coffee? It has caffeine in it. The brown liquid produces a scent that triggers dopamine receptors. It’s hot, and the “creamer” readily dissolves producing a coffee color. And if you get beyond that taste of dirty dish-water, it does taste something like coffee. But, still, is it coffee? Maxwell House certainly doesn’t taste like a bean that a Central American peasant took out of the ground with their bare hands. And will we one day wax nostalgic for the days before non-dairy creamer caused cancer? But, hey, I’ve gotta have my caffeine. So, if my fix leads to global warming or me dying of cancer or a Costa Rican living in poverty, well, I’m just not gonna think about that. I mean, what can I do? Coffee drinkers just gotta take the bad with the good.

At one time—in the days before the coffee shop revival of the 90s—there was almost nothing but bad coffee in the world (by which I mean my world, middle America). If you think Folgers is bad, have you ever had Folgers Crystals, or Nescafe? My God! The thought recalls memories of dragging my butt through spring finals week my sophomore year. During my third all-nighter in a row (before a Physics exam), we had gone through all the coffee. You should have seen the desperation in the residence hall. Oh, the horror! As the panic set in, I can recall the sonorous moan of collective weeping. In the suite across the hall, students were on the phone WITH THEIR PARENTS—you know, those people we only contacted when we were out of money. It was a scene defined by hysterics and desperation that I have mentioned to therapists no less than three times. Thankfully, my roommate, a green haired kid from Frisco named Hal, always seemed to have the good “stuff,” in this case two bottles: one of Mini-Thins, an over-the-counter stimulant abused by over-the-road truckers, and another of Nescafe, a dehydrated form of coffee invented for GIs during WWII, a wonder of the atomic age.

Hal offered me dibs. I hemmed and hawed, but my rule of thumb was to always select the least illegal option offered me by people with green hair. When Hal popped the top on the Mini-Thins and muttered “good shit,” I felt more secure in my choice of the Nescafe. Hmm. What to do? I couldn’t possibly drink the stuff. Should I try to dissolve in a Coke? Should I make a sort of paste in an attempt to get it down more quickly? Hmm. I began spooning the freeze-dried crystals directly into my mouth and washing them down with desalinated tap water. I know, I know: but what my solution lacked in wisdom or creativity was certainly made up for through sheer bravado. By the time that the burning sensation had spread upward from my nostrils and into my ears, I judged that the caffeine in my system would get me through to my last exam. My digestive tract has never fully recuperated from the mass stripping of stomach lining; I was, after all, ingesting a dehydrated acid. But I am wiser for the experience. And I got an A in Physics.

Imagine my dismay when I arrived in England for my junior year abroad. Yeah, yeah: they are a tea drinking nation, but who knew they didn’t drink coffee AT ALL?! That is, except for Nescafe…but that option was now thoroughly out of the question. No worries, mate. I got with the programme and became a tea drinker, but I quickly realised that tea drinkers aren’t anything like a coffee drinkers. Tea is about much more than the tea, and so much more…social. Whereas coffee is normally a solitary experience that arises from the fiendish need for caffeine, tea seems about the need for people: you simply must have tea WITH someone. So, I had to make a friend, a half-Welsh half-Italian bloke named Moksha (his hippie parents named him for the Hindi word for “enlightenment”). And, of course, only an ill-bred savage would offer a teatime guest ONLY tea; civilisation depends upon providing your guest with a finger food or a tea biscuit. “Mok, can I offer you a cucumber sandwich? A digestive biscuit?” Of course, we Yanks have a difficult time sustaining anything like civilised behaviour. But I was able to fake it for 10 months…for the most part. Oh, hell! I tried the best I could….

When I returned to the UK last summer, I was relieved to discover that the McCoffee industry had taken root in Jolly Olde Englonde. Phew! Moksha was equally pleased because he’s half-Italian, and we all know Italians love their coffee. Of course the British now have Starbucks, but the most prominent franchise is the ubiquitous Costa Coffee, a version of Starbucks that plays up its faux-Latin roots. Fine, fine. Wink, wink. Your Cockney baristas are delivering to my palate a brew of Central American origin. Sure, I believe you. But there’s just one problem: as it turns out, Europeans don’t really distinguish between espresso and coffee. Our filtered coffee is an oddity, a curiosity, an unusual cousin of café that most Europeans just can’t get their heads around. So, if you happen to find a Starbucks, you can get a regular cup o’ Joe, but unless you are in a touristy area of London, you will probably have to settle for a watered-down espresso—the pejoratively named “Americano”—at Costa Coffee.

Oh, and there’s one more problem: Costa’s espresso sucks. “Pardon me, Moksha, you do realise that this coffee really isn’t very good?”

“Hmm. Yes. I know, mate. Pity.” Mok pauses a moment to mull it over while staring at the paper cup. Then he looks back my way with a devilish grin. “But bad coffee is better than no coffee….”

On Dave Grohl’s Best Day

2011-11-25T18:33:00.000-06:00

WE WERE STANDING in the kitchen of his London townhouse when Mok said something like, “We’re going to Milton-Keynes.” I gave him a blank stare. Milton-Keynes? I had not run across the name in my tourism research. Was this some tennis facility named after a 17^th century poet and a 20^th century economist? After all, it was the day of the men’s Wimbledon final. What does a poet have to do with tennis? Mok was beaming a childlike ear-to-ear grin. “Do you want me to just tell you then? We’re going to the Foo Fighters’ concert at the Milton-Keynes Bowl, mate! Surprised?” We’re going to see who doing what in the where?

In the midst of my confusion, I instinctively scanned my repertoire of polite-lies-to-tell, selecting, “Oh, thanks. I like the Foo Fighters.” Foo Fighters? Really? Freakin’ Foo Fighters? Don’t get me wrong: I came of age in a flannel shirt…but times have changed. About all that remains of my teen angst are three holes I don’t wear earrings in anymore. Once upon a time, my ideal Saturday night involved at least two illegal activities; but I’m just more interested in Sunday mornings these days. Now, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard to plaster a goofy grin of gratitude on my face if Mok had said we were going to Soundgarden or Primus…or Pearl Jam…or even Alice in Chains with that new singer…or maybe even the Smashing Pumpkins with just a baldheaded Billy Corigan as the only original member. (Honestly, I’d prefer Alanis Morrisette to Foo Fighters.)

At this moment, dear reader, you may be wondering what it is I have against the Foo Fighters. I can probably best explain by going back in time, or at least into my memories of time, a memory of 17 years ago when I wore flannel, mutton chops, long hair, hoop earrings, and Doc Martins….

In 1994 I had just figured out that I didn’t know everything, but I was still convinced that no one over the age of 30 knew much of anything. I was a freshman in college living in San Diego, and the best part about living in San Diego was that I could see just about any band play so long as I was willing to hitch a ride on a modest road trip. That year I saw Pink Floyd at Jack Murphy stadium, Rush at the San Diego Sports Arena, and Pearl Jam at the San Diego Civic Center. Late in the summer I saw Bad Religion open for Neil Young and Pearl Jam (that’s right, I saw them twice) at Golden Gate Park. I saw Hole at a club called Soma, Primus at the Delmar Fairgrounds, and Sublime on the UCSD campus. Come to think of it, I also saw The Ramones, Skankin’ Pickle, They Might Be Giants, No Doubt, and fIREHOSE at free shows on the UCSD campus. Let’s just say I saw so many bands that I can’t remember them all and you haven’t heard of them all. But the show I was looking forward to above all others was Lollapalooza headlined by Dave Grohl’s band, not Foo Fighters of course, not a grunge band but the grunge band: Nirvana. And everyone knows that Kurt Cobain on his worst day is better than Dave Grohl on his best day.

The choice of Nirvana, the iconic grunge band, as headliner of Lollapalooza was a natural one. At that time, Lollapalooza was a touring music festival. Rather than a multiday concert in Chicago, Gen Xers across the nation could witness Perry Farrell’s redefinition of the mainstream one day and one city at a time. Some kids even followed the tour. And now that Jane’s Addiction had disbanded, the festival needed an iconic headliner, needed Nirvana, to keep it going. And I was going to see it. But as you know, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the spring of 1994. I’m sure he was having a pretty bad day.

Ob-la-di ob-la-da, life goes on. The tour’s organizers decided to replace Nirvana at the top of the bill. So, when I handed my ticket marked “Nirvana” to the ticket taker at the gate to the CSU-Dominguez Hills campus, I was really going to see a dual headliner of Smashing Pumpkins and The Beastie Boys. And Dave Grohl was unemployed. That was all a long time ago….

They say that every 7 years each cell in your body (with the exception of the central nervous system) has been replaced: every seven years you are a new you. And if I was working my way to Aaron 3.0 in 1994, I have now just finished becoming Aaron 5.0: Mr. Proctor. I’ve traded contemporary grunge for intellectual prep, Docs for Sketchers, Dickey’s for designer jeans, and I no longer have chain attached to my wallet. For cris’sakes, I’m a dad now. I wasn’t in England to stand way too close to thousands or half-naked people, urinating outdoors, walking around looking for the damn funnel cake tent. Where’s the goddamn funnel cake?! I had invested an ungodly amount of time and money to participate in a conference, a literary conference, a poetry conference. I had written a paper! Hello? I was to supplement this serious endeavor with some rather solemn literary rituals: a visit to Westminster Abbey to visit Chaucer’s grave, a play at the New Globe, reverential visits to the Shelleys’ Albion House (where Mary wrote Frankenstein), Keats’ home on Hampstead Heath, and an out-and-out pilgrimage to the Lake District and Dove Cottage. This trip was to be an act of joining with the great bordering on the spiritual. But there I was, in the Milton-Keynes Bowl, half-naked, eating funnel cake, in desperate need of a clean bathroom.

"Boy, there sure are a fucking lotta ya'," says Grohl.

And we’re not talking a paltry few thousand here. Apparently, Foo Fighters are mighty well liked in the UK. Though we arrived at 3 PM for an 8 PM concert we had to park more than a mile away from the Bowl. We trudged in a continuous line of thirtysomethings dressed like twentysomethings along a wooded path strewn with empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and remnants of fast food. Occasionally groups of men would stager into and out of the woods adjusting their zippers. The heaps of garbage grew in proportion to the stench of urine as we came closer to the venue. The hike quickly became a metaphor for the (failed?) maturation of my generation.

When we arrived at the Bowl, we found a long line waiting to enter a venue surrounded with innumerable food and beverage tents, circus performers, and carnival rides. A monstrous Ferris wheel peeked from the trees on the horizon; it spun next to a mammoth flag pole flying both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. When we finally wove our way into the Bowl, we found ourselves among a sea of sixty-five thousand people. (I would go to see U2 (the band that Bono is in!) later in the summer, and they didn’t play to sixty-five thousand.) And this was the second show: Foo Fighters had drawn sixty thousand the day before. “Isn’t this great?!” Mok was beaming.

Jimmy Eat World has taken the stage as will Death Cab for Cutie and Biffy Clyro in the ensuing hours. We find an acceptable plot off to the portside of the sound tent: we are near a concession stand and a bank of port-a-loos; we have just enough room to sit on the ground between acts. All the while more and more Brits are packing in closer and closer to the stage, making it harder and hard for them to return with umpteen alcoholic beverages from the banks of tents clearly marked “BAR” that flank either side of the bowl. Here and there fights break out. Men hoist “girls” dressed in outfits that they haven’t fit into for at least 10 years (did they ever fit into them?) upon their shoulders. Some “girls” fall, some go crowd surfing, and a growing number pass out in shaded areas. Small groups of younger fans sit in circles smoking hash. By the time Biffy Clyro is finished, I am starting to notice women off to the side vomiting, and not all of them have a friend to hold the hair out of their face. Did I mention that I don’t drink anymore? Did I mention that I’m a dad for cris’sake!? This is a complete fiasco. How did I tolerate these people in my youth? Mok is having a ball, pumping his fist, singing along. Did he go off and smoke some of that hash while I wasn’t looking?

Grohl plays at the Milton-Keynes Bowl in July, 2011

And here comes Grohl with what looks to be a metallic-blue, hollow-bodied Gibson of some sort. Here he comes running up and down this catwalk thing that he always has jutting out into the crowd. He frantically strums a D-chord and then puts his hand to his ear like he’s Hulk Hogan or something. Are all these rockstars from some alternate universe free from male pattern baldness and grey hair? “Boy, there sure are a fuckin’ lotta ya.” Grohl is drinking a beer now, and he seems genuinely surprised. In fact, he seems more surprised than I am at the raucous crowd brimming out of the Milton-Keynes Bowl.

Then they launch into a song. They have a million songs, and I can’t think of one but I know ‘em all. They’ve got the one about the hero and the one that sounds like the hero song and the one that sounds like that one too. Oh, and they have “Everlong”: I know that one…that one’s actually pretty good. And I know “Big Me,” but they don’t play that one. Between songs Grohl engages in “crowd participation.” Usually, he runs up and down that catwalk. Sometimes the crowd goads him into chugging a beer. But mostly, he repeatedly expresses shock and amazement at the size of the crowd. They have never headlined a show this big. And that’s when it occurs to me that I have seen Foo Fighters before. How did I manage to forget until now? It was spring 1995 I think. Mike Watt had left fIREHOSE and was doing a solo tour of small—really small—clubs. Grohl was his 2^nd drummer; Pat Smear and Eddie Vedder (yes, that Eddie Vedder) were playing guitar. Opening were Vedder’s side project, Hovercraft, and Grohl’s new band. They hadn’t released an album yet. There were about 300 people there. It was fun I guess.

So, you’ve come a long way Dave Grohl. And, with sixty-five thousand rabid Foo-heads here just for him, it seems that this is in fact Dave Grohl’s best day ever. And I’m here to see it. And on Dave Grohl’s best day, he is no Kurt Cobain. Look at him running around up there. Chugging beer. Having fun. This isn’t grunge: it’s grunge on Prozac. These songs are all pretty and indistinct and…and…fun. This crowd isn’t angst-ridden. You aren’t even Gen-X anymore: you’re all on Prozac.

Look at Grohl chugging another beer. That’s like the fourth one. They go away and come back for an encore. And. They. Just. Keep. Playing. There they go. And now he’s back again, just him and a guitar telling us all how much this concert means to him. Now he’s going to do something that he hasn’t done on stage for a very long time: he’s going to play drums. The crowd goes wild. But he’s not going to play with Foo Fighters; he’s invited out bluesman Sea Sick Steve to play guitar and sing and John Paul Jones (yes, that John Paul Jones) to play bass. And they do a real deep grooving delta rocking blues number. And Dave Grohl is no Kurt Cobain, and I’m a dad. And Mok and I live on different continents. And we’re both getting old. And I discover that we are both having fun on Dave Grohl’s best day. And Cobain has been dead a long time now. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da….