I don’t typically compile a “ten best” list each year as I find the entire ritual a narcissistic and even imperious performance of one’s own taste. This year, however, I decided to get off my high-horse and share the most outstanding films I saw this year. After all, I am highly credentialed in film studies/analysis, so it would be criminal of me not to share that expertise with the lay public. Be advised, however, many of these films will prove difficult to see, especially if you live in some God-forsaken, cultural backwater.
1. Seven Tangerines (Poston)
Reportedly shot for less than $50,000 without permits in an abandoned brownstone in Queens, Jack Poston’s Seven Tangerines succeeds less as a well-crafted work of cinema than as a raw document of extraordinary writing and acting. As a play, Seven Tangerines never even made it to off-off-Broadway, Poston staging only six performances at a rented community center in Astoria before taking it before the camera. For many productions, that would be a mistake. But here there is a sense that Poston and co-star Jakov Lund, May-December junkies slowly freezing to death in a Bronx tenement, might have over-cooked their characters if they had waited any longer to capture them on film. And the ending remains as haunting as it is enigmatic– do the two men, at the brink of unconsciousness, see the face of God, or is it merely the lights of a police helicopter? Thankfully, Poston allows the viewer to make his or her own decision.
2. The Winter of the Mouse Friend (Fu)
On the surface, Su Jing Fu’s study of a girl’s dormitory during the Cultural Revolution may seem like a straightforward celebration of female bonding and empowerment. When a small and very bedraggled mouse wanders into the dormitory during the first winter snowfall, the girls nurse it back to health and make it their communal pet, going to great lengths to hide their furry friend from their harsh housemother. The charm of the premise gradually mutates into something more sinister, however, as Xiaobai (“Whitey”) becomes hostage to the various interpersonal struggles between the roommates. Cantopop singer Denise Ho Wan-See is surprisingly good as the dorm’s primary villain, Bao-yu, manipulating her peers for chocolates and other favors by constantly threatening to reveal the mouse’s hidden den in the wall.
3. Jacques et Jacqueline (Courbet)
Hopes were not high after comedian Ricard Courbet’s first feature, Les Idiots sur un Bateau (2009), a broad physical comedy set at a failing yacht rental yard in Nice. And Courbet probably did himself no favors in the follow-up by playing both “Jacques” and “Jacqueline,” combative fraternal twins brought together by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. But Courbet surprised everyone by crafting a rather poignant character study amid all the requisite yucks, making Jacqueline in particular a stealthily tragic composite of poor life decisions. And while the ending set-piece with the frozen baguettes and broken teeth was a bit crass, overall it didn’t derail this surprisingly complex portrait of sibling rivalry turned bittersweet affection.
4. Zero-Muybridge-One (Muybridge/Locklear)
Experimental cinema can often be unbearable, and on paper, Zero-Muybridge-One looks like it would be no exception. Digital artist Camden Locklear has digitized every single frame of Edward Muybridge’s foundational “motion studies” and then re-sequenced them according to a cryptograph derived from the texts of Walter Benjamin. The effect is a haunting flow of sepia-toned light and shadow punctuated by furtive images that struggle to cohere on screen. Horse and cat strobe toward one another from opposite sides of the frame. A tumbler appears to somersault in and out of oblivion. A nude man strides into the very maelstrom of modernity itself, chin held high as he enters the new century with what we can now see was a sadly misplaced sense of confidence. Credit too must be given to Philip Glass’ architectural scoring that gently accents the emerging images even as it stolidly anchors the overall flows of amorphous light.
5. Yellowknife (Slidell)
Two painfully shy teenagers, he from Vancouver and she from Montreal, find themselves “exiled” together for a summer in the remote wilderness of Yellowknife. While their fathers work together on a geological survey, Marcus and Claudette negotiate a relationship they know is both inevitable and doomed, brought together by their mutual distaste for life in the wilderness and yet knowing their time together will be over come September. First love is an old story, of course, but director Felicity Slidell does an excellent job here undercutting the genre’s more maudlin elements by refracting them through the precocious sophistication of her leads. There are a few missteps (the scene where the young and still awkward couple happen upon moose copulating in the woods flirts a little too heavily with the American Pie series), but overall a touching meditation on the millennial generation’s turn at “summer love.”
6. El vano heredarán la tierra (Urueta)
Transplanting William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair from Regency England to the slums of contemporary Mexico City is an audacious move, as is placing a 14 year-old male hustler in the role of Becky Sharp. But Urueta’s satire of the links between social mobility and sociopathology shares Thackeray’s at times misanthropic eye for the often brutal violence underlying custom and convention. And by removing the “Amelia” character entirely, some might even say Urueta has improved on Thackeray.
7. Tarantula (Emmerich) 
Given his last three spectacularly interesting failures (10,000 B.C., (2008), 2012 (2009), and Anonymous (2011), many suspected that Roland Emmerich might just have one truly outstanding film in him struggling to get out. Who could have known that Emmerich would finally strike gold in a remake, especially considering that his 1998 attempt to reboot Godzilla was such a giant reptilian turd? And yet, in reimagining Jack Arnold’s 1955 classic of an irradiated spider on the rampage, Emmerich achieves an emotional depth wholly absent in his turn at the Godzilla franchise. Wisely, Emmerich transforms Arnold’s creepy-crawly Other into a more sympathetic fellow citizen of earth, one that never asked to be trapped in a laboratory much less forced to ingest radioactive grain. In a testament to the director’s subtly in making us identify with what is, after all, merely a CGI program, our attachment to the giant spider is really only apparent at the very end. As “Tarantula” looks down with his 8 eyes, seemingly betrayed by his former scientist protector (played with surprising verve by Tara Reid), we hope for just a moment that the seemingly inevitable laser blast and explosion will not come. But of course, as it must, it does. So far Emmerich’s Tarantula has not found a U.S. distributor, but hopefully that will change in 2012.
8. Reflections (Corday)
Very few people have had the opportunity to see the first feature film by avant-garde video artist Christian Corday, but fortunately I was invited to a screening last month for 25 or so people at the artist’s new loft/studio in DUMBO. It is truly stunning, and I highly recommend you try to see it should it come to a theater near you (although that’s probably unlikely—given the film’s formal and thematic complexity, it is likely only to play in New York City and Los Angeles for the foreseeable future). Corday begins with an odd but intriguing premise. “A” and “B”, married artists in Chelsea, decide to cover every surface of their apartment/loft/studio with mirrors. From there, they decide that all of their daily interactions—both in and out of the house—will be conducted through mirrors as well. Gradually the inevitable happens. Their identities become ungrounded and uncertain, eventually transferring between their two bodies. From here the film engages a series of metaphysical dilemmas—what happens when “A’s” subjectivity is in “B’s” body, and vice versa? Original, profound, and utterly unsettling—it’s a must see for anyone with an interest in film, philosophy, or both.
9, The Royal Disease (Dankworth)
Excruciatingly detailed bio-pic of Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany and fourth son of Queen Victoria. Leopold lived a short and troubled life, his hemophilia keeping him under the watchful eye of his mother the Queen. Dankworth’s film only has time to sample a few of Leopold’s many failures at love, focusing primarily on his combative relationship with his overprotective mother. But the true star here (no offense to Jude Law’s turn as Leopold) is the set and costume design. Shot entirely on location, The Royal Disease’s painstakingly accurate reconstruction of every costume, object, and room of its Victorian milieu unfolds almost as a type of time travel. One forgets they are watching a movie so complete is the immersion in period detail. Elegantly stunning and highly educational.
10. Up My Own Asshole, with Vigor (Farren)
Playfully self-reflexive morality tale of Hollywood manners, focusing on a screenwriter who sets out to write the most damning critique ever of the Hollywood system, only to find himself co-opted at every turn by the very system he detests. While this material can often lead to a type of insufferable navel-gazing, Farren very effectively foregrounds the film’s recognition that it is nothing more than navel-gazing, thus allowing it to gaze even deeper with absolute impunity. Amanda Seyfried has a wonderful turn as the embattled screenwriter’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, a “granola” type constantly hectoring him to do something more “useful” with his life (until, of course, she lands a role herself in a network mini-series). By now, one would think the public would be tired of “insider” tales of Hollywood’s glamour and duplicity, but Up My Own Asshole, with Vigor proves the genre still has yet to exhaust its creative possibilities.
Tag: video
January 21, 2012
Ten Best List
January 21, 2012
Sandy Filler
The current teaching quarter is kicking my posterior…so before the next real post, please to enjoy this trio of sand related videos.
thanks to Jacob Smith for bringing this wonder to my attention.
Bonus Sand:
January 21, 2012
Exploded Fortress of Solitude
If you plan on being in London anytime in the next couple of months, I recommend you check out the new exhibit by American artist, Mike Kelley, at the Gagosian Gallery (6-24 Britannia Street). 
For those who don’t know Kelley’s work, the Kandor series is an ongoing sculptural project based on the “shrunken city” of Kandor featured in the silver-age Superman comics. The capital of Krypton, Kandor was miniaturized and stolen by the evil Brainiac moments before the destruction of Superman’s home planet. At some point, Superman himself came into possession of the tiny city and its citizens, securing them beneath a large bell jar in his fabled Fortress of Solitude until he could find a way to return the Kandorians to their normal size (a task that took some 20 years of comic book time). Fascinated by the fact that Kandor, as inked in the comic book, seemed to mutate into different forms with each new appearance, Kelley has over the past decade translated several of the comic panels into large sculptural form (Kandor 14 is to the left). Like much of Kelley’s work, the Kandor series plays with Freudian exchanges between the popular unconscious and the unconscious popularized, presenting Kandor as an insistent and quite literalized symptom of Superman’s boyhood trauma. In many ways, the sculptural pieces expand upon a reading of the Superman mythos that Kelley first introduced in 1999 with Superman Recites Selections from The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, a video that
presents exactly what the title suggests–Superman reading The Bell Jar to the bell jar that hangs over Kandor. If you find that as hilarious and as poignant as I do, I highly recommend taking a look at the 
The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction project (EAPR) is to be a 365-part video/sculptural series addressing the “repressed” blank zones of Educational Complex. Each EAPR is a promiscuous mix of personal memories, pop culture, and standardized “recovered memory” scenarios. The London show debuts #36 in the series, “Vice Anglais,” which imagines the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti staged as a Hammer horror film. Rossetti, displaced here as “M’Lord,” leads a gang of perverts on a subterranean tour of debauchery, loosely organized around Rossetti’s own famously salacious biography. Particularly stunning is the sudden appearance of M’Lord’s muse, Golden Rod, an ambulatory yet mute corn cob creature apparently visible only to M’Lord. At another point in the video, M’Lord wanders alone into a cavernous chamber and encounters–without explanation–the seemingly abandoned Kandor 10B.
The London show also features a number of sculptural works independent of either the Kandor or EAPR series. Topo Gigio Topographical Model (detail at left) is a particular favorite of mine in its odd mixing of the whimsical and the creepy, a difficult tone that Kelley is particularly adept at achieving, here and elsewhere.
So if you’re in the vicinity of Kings Cross, stop by and take a look. The exhibit runs through October 22 and the catalog should be available shortly thereafter.
December 14, 2011
The Jims Organic Smut Acid Story by Matthew Duverne Hutchinson
Why organic smut acid?
In 1893, my great-grandfather James set out to destroy an obscene painting at the Chicago World’s Fair. At the time, very few resources existed for people like my great granddad—simple folks with a simple passion for destroying pornographic imagery and satanic idols. Back in those days, if you were lucky enough to track down a strong enough acid for the job, chances are it wasn’t very good for your body or the planet, as great granddad soon found out. After settling for a second-rate hydrochloric that left the painting mostly intact and his eyeballs badly burned, Jim set out on his life’s mission: create the world’s first hypoallergenic, all-organic acid for throwing on immoral things.
A commitment to quality
Great Grandpa Jim always believed that going organic didn’t have to mean sacrificing quality. Today, our family’s continuing passion for great acid insures your family a perfect smut burn time after time. Over the last century, we’ve refined our signature acid blend one ingredient at a time. The sulfur used in Jim’s Organic Smut Acid is always cultivated the old-fashioned way—lovingly unearthed in small batches from our cooperatively-owned volcanic salt domes. We do it that way not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.
Though times may have changed, our family’s commitment to making the world’s finest organic smut acid hasn’t. And as immorality has evolved, so have our products. Have you (through no fault of your own) encountered offensive imagery on the internet? Our two gallon Earth’s Way Acid Bucket is perfect for dumping on desktop computers, while our Pocket Sunshine Pack is just the right amount of acid for throwing on your smart phone. Your acid, your way.
Fact: whether you want to or not, you are going to encounter graphic, decadent smut in today’s world. Pictures of men and women doing things to each other that no decent human being should ever see. And it can be difficult to look away. Extremely difficult. There was that one video that was getting e-mailed around—you know, that one with the twins on the shrimping boat? For months, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Even now, I’ll be at JCPenny trying on some work slacks, and the A/C vent happens to be directed just the right way up my pant leg and there I am on the deck of that boat again. The smell of foamy brine in my nose. The strange and unfamiliar sounds of those twins in my ears. And it is precisely at times like these that I’m so grateful to have a wholesome, pesticide-free acid to throw on that A/C vent.
Stewardship for a changing planet
Let’s cut the crap. Is running a family-owned throwing acid business going to make us rich? No. Does the increasingly litigious nature of our society make it difficult to stay in the acid business? Certainly. Are we aware of the allegations made against our company by both privately organized citizens’ advocacy groups and the federal government? Yes. Do we believe they are founded on anything more than jealousy and a patent misunderstanding of our way of life? No. Will we start paying taxes on what we rightly believe is our sovereign territory high in the mountains of West Virginia? No. Because that’s the way great granddad Jim would have wanted it. I know this because I have spoken to his ghost.
At the end of the day, at Jim’s Organic Smut Acid, we still believe that a healthy body begins with a balanced lifestyle: exercise, diet, laughter, protecting the borders of the land deeded to you by the archangel Uriel, and throwing acid on anything that makes you sexually aroused. Simple values. Simple results. From our family to yours, we hope you enjoy using our acid products as much as we’ve enjoyed creating them for you.
December 14, 2011
The Long Walk: A Column About Washington: The Ballad of Thom Moore by Alec Bings
The first thing you might notice is the silence. It’s not an empty office; people hover amid cluttered desks and gray cubicle walls and piles upon piles of unclaimed campaign paraphernalia. But the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit space prickles in its muted hum—and with nothing to drown it out, a laptop’s thin audio draws attention. That audio is the focus of a huddled few, and their moods are darkening.
It’s December 3rd, and this small group—cloistered in Herman Cain’s campaign headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa—is learning of their boss’ exit from the race via streaming video. It’s shocking, certainly, as yet-unaware staff members elsewhere in the building are still moving furniture to make room for staff from the national operation arriving to prepare for the caucuses next month. Volunteer sign-up sheets hanging on the wall indicate names slotted to work through the upcoming week.
Reporters on hand to witness these last official moments from within Cain HQ describe only tempered grief from paid staffers. But it’s a different story amid the volunteers. One woman who had supported Cain since January is described as “overcome with emotion” and her son, Thom Moore, speaks to a reporter with tears welling in his eyes.
“I feel like I’ve lost my best friend,” Thom says.
“I lost control of any capacity that I had,” Thom says.
“It’s taking everything in me not to fall apart,” Thom says.
This hyper-emo gut-reaction to a campaign’s end is distressing but hardly atypical. Certainly the fact that Thom’s heartache comes thanks to handsy dimwit Herman Cain doesn’t make for reduced pain. If anything, the rending of garments in Iowa and elsewhere gives Cain’s semiserious ego-cruise an air of tragic grandeur it never frankly deserved. But the passion it apparently created in his devotees is instructive.
Campaigns make for rough business. When people find themselves shoving their life’s priorities down a notch to work for free on behalf of a stranger, it triggers something approaching sacramental. With campaigns in a constant battle against time, volunteers often take on consistently greater commitments than they ever expected in a kind of Peter Principle of emotional availability. These true believers often don’t talk about anything save the campaign. Their near-pathological devotion causes them to live in an endless loop of Panglossian daydreams exploding with possible paths to glorious victory. And yet, at the end of all that energy and all that effort, just about everyone’s political messiah steps up to a microphone, waves, and admits that it was all for nothing, sorry. In the peak of a campaign, true believers can feel awfully alone; on the day their raison d’être goes extinct, that desolation becomes self-consuming.
In our modern political era, campaigns for president tend to emanate from the candidate—one who is either rich or charismatic, but usually both. These contests base themselves around the virtues of the person, and policy platforms simply follow along. This is true for the brief candidacy of Herman Cain—the man literally works as a motivational speaker—but also for success stories à la the movement around then Sen. Barack Obama. A candidate’s enthusiasts are obsessives of the individual first and foremost—and for these diehards, a loss is a drastic outcome akin to a death.
That brand of interminable, personal agony is a far cry from life among Washington’s federal employees. Working in this city offers up a more pragmatic milieu; once you’re in the suck, you can see the world for what it is. There are greater causes, bigger fights to be waged. Staffers move from congressmen to higher-ranking congressmen or from federal agencies to the White House and back, all striving for the same goal. It’s a thousand-year war that was here before we arrived and it will outlive our short stay. Which is all to point out that the world of national politics stands in pretty stark contrast from the individualized crusades found in your quadrennial primaries and caucuses. Look, we’re used to failure. Wizened D.C. staffers have a habit of locking their shoulders on the “shrug” setting. It doesn’t matter which party you belong to—amid all the compromised wins and temporary fixes, there is inescapable disappointment in D.C. But it is rare for Washington lifers to respond to disastrous outcomes in the manner of young Thom Moore. We’re frustrated like everyone else—more really, the inanity is truly terrifying up close—but our balled-up fists are directed more toward the rancid system than some toppling of a personal hero who promised to change the world.
To put it another way, we’re constantly approaching tragedy here—let me check my calendar for the next scheduled government shutdown—and we’ve learned to roll with it. Think about most folks’ virginal experience with national politics. They usually get their first bite at the apple working on, or at least caring about, a campaign. “I was never interested in politics until Candidate X came along,” they say. And, inevitably, as the more quixotic candidates start falling by the wayside, fanatics with their fervency-coated beliefs are destroyed by the loss. Sure, that feeling doesn’t go away; even hardened political operatives suffer badly after defeats. But for the uninitiated, the devastation seems to demand a force majeure clause to free them from emotional liability. For most defeated candidates, their exultant season on the national stage is gone. That moment for their volunteers is also past. In the end, it’s necrophilistic to spend too much time there.
At least, that’s how Washington works. To care too greatly about a loss or a disappointment or some specific renegade asshole in a position of power is an intensively seriocomic gesture. The world of campaigns is the place for idealist purity, as perhaps it should be. Yet the dirty secret of presidential politics holds that no matter which Republican wins the nomination, their governance—should they win the White House—would be essentially identical to each others’. (For the purposes of this discussion I am not factoring in a President Ron Paul, as I’m not sure but I think there’s a decent chance America would revert to a barter economy.) With any GOP win, party honchos will fill the administration with the same members of their establishment, put the same Supreme Court justice nominees on the bench, etc.—kind of like President Obama surrounding himself with the Clinton alumni network. And as Republican nominees abandon their hopes over the upcoming year, their followers will move closer to the cognitive restructuring they have coming their way, a melancholic drifting from differentiated perfection toward an inevitable systemic conformity. And in that sense, I sympathize with Iowa’s Thom Moore and his rapturous agony. Welcome to hell, kid.
December 6, 2011
Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting: Column 31: Moral Hazard and The Chubby Blue Line by Susan Schorn
Alexis Madrigal feels bad for John Pike.
The UC-Davis cop who pepper-sprayed a bunch of students last month inspired Madrigal’s sympathy because, as the Atlantic editor put it, “Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too.”
Perhaps Madrigal’s own agency is somewhat constrained (in the sociological sense) by the structure of his Atlantic editorship. Maybe the demands of his job nudge him toward nuance even when it’s contraindicated. Maybe that’s why he cautions, “If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.”
Nonsense. In fact, we can vilify both, quite handily. There’s no need to separate Pike from the institution; John Pike is the institution.
Lest you think I have no sympathy at all for Lt. Pike, please remember: I like hitting people. It brings me joy. So I sympathize with Pike, in a way that perhaps Alexis Madrigal can’t, because Alexis Madrigal has never (I presume) punched someone in the face and thought, “Oh, yeah.” Being faster, or stronger, or more skilled, or more devious, or just plain luckier than someone else—even if only for an instant—is a rush. It’s a thrill. And it makes me feel good about myself and about my life.
However, I do not admire this trait in myself. In fact, I think it’s despicable on many levels, and I’m regularly appalled by how strong and persistent and integral it is to my personality. But I’ve long since abandoned any hope of changing what is evidently a very primal element of my character. Instead I manage it by limiting my expression of these feelings to the strictly defined arena of martial arts sparring. This keeps me out of trouble. The legal kind—and other kinds too.
The structure of the sparring ring constrains me. It enforces an essential honesty by ensuring that I will not do all the hitting. It requires me to risk something—a lot of things, actually. Apart from hurting, getting hit makes me feel slow and stupid and weak. It leaves me shaken and envious and angry about life in general. A certain amount of that is, I firmly believe, good for me.
Sparring is structured to make you experience both sides of power. It distributes risk and reward more or less equitably between the participants. Whatever thrill you get out of dominating or attempting to dominate your opponent has to be paid for, at market rates. There are no free lunches in the ring.
I suspect John Pike has had a lot of free lunches. And yes, that’s due in large part to the structure in which he functions, the UC-Davis police force. But not entirely.
Let me put it this way: One of the most irresponsible things a human being could do would be to put me in body armor and a helmet, hand me a weapon, and point me toward a crowd of troublemakers. I’m not saying I’d end up macing a bunch of defenseless teenagers like Lt. Pike did, but I couldn’t vouch for my good behavior at, say, a Westboro Baptist Church protest. With the risks to myself reduced practically to zero, and the domination of others simplified to the touch of a button—how easy it would be to brush aside the better angels of my nature (who are a pretty scurvy crew at the best of times) and enjoy only the positive side of power. Free lunch!
Like I said, it would be irresponsible for anyone to put me in that position. It would be doubly irresponsible for me to put myself in that position. I know what I’m capable of, better than anyone else. I know I need a different kind of structure if I don’t want to end up acting like an asshole.
Sure, if I were empowered by some system to pepper-spray whoever the hell I wanted, I could blame the system for my behavior. If I had been trained by a system, my worst tendencies nurtured and fostered by the system, its structures, its policies—I could blame the system. And if I were a chicken-shit bully, that’s exactly what I’d do.
But the ultimate blame, in the greatest measure, would belong to me. Because I joined the agency. I took the training and the paycheck. I shaped myself to the system and imbibed its policies, and used my brains and my body to enact them. Presumably I got some sense of professional fulfillment out of the transaction as well.
Social structures may constrain human agency, but we have—in this country at least—considerable agency to choose the structures that will constrain us. For example, I chose a system that requires me to wear a plastic mouthguard and allow people to kick me. John Pike chose a system that put him in body armor and gave him permission to gas students who disobeyed his commands. I’m not saying that makes me better than him, necessarily. I’m just pointing out that one of us is currently the subject of four separate Tumblrs, and it’s not me.
We not only have the power to choose the structures we operate in; we also have tremendous power to resist their constraints from within. When we resist, we can change the structures, as well as ourselves.
The students at UC-Davis understood this better than Lt. Pike. One of them, a post-doc named Kristin Koster, spoke eloquently about witnessing the pepper-spraying incident. “When you protect the things you believe in with your body," she explained, "it changes you for good. It radicalizes you for good.”
And, I would add, when you protect the things you’re paid to believe in with shiny weapons, that can cause pain and suffering for others without any risk to you, it changes you for bad. It radicalizes you for bad.
The student protestors risked their safety in order to challenge the university and its duly sworn representatives. “Here are our bodies,” they said when they plunked themselves down, en masse, on a sidewalk. “Show us the limits of your decency.”
And John Pike showed us. He used a biological weapon instead of a can of spray paint, but he basically graffitied a big “FUCK YOU” across the student body of UC-Davis. We supposedly admire law enforcement officers because they risk so much to protect us. John Pike risked nothing. That’s not good policing, or even over-reacting. That’s abuse of power.
And what was the official reaction to Lt. Pike’s actions? Police Chief Annette Spicuzza claimed Pike and his fellow officers were in danger; that students had “cut them off from their support.” In this official version of reality, a small peaceful protest is re-imagined as the Battle of Bastogne, with a circle of cross-legged, jeans-wearing students assuming all the menace of several divisions of Panzers, while John Pike acts the part of Patton’s Third Army, smashing through the enemy line to relieve the siege.
UC-Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi initially said she was “sorry for what happened,” as if apologizing for an unruly spouse who had gotten drunk and pissed on the carpet at a dinner party.
It’s as if these people can’t even see the video everyone else is watching. As if their YouTube Safety Mode is set to “Unquestioned Authority.”
People aren’t born with that kind of reality filter. They have to build it for themselves. Those structures Alexis Madrigal is talking about, the ones that constrain us? Yeah, we build them around ourselves. We strengthen them every time we see or take part in an exercise of power that isn’t equitable—unless we make some attempt to balance the scales.
When you don’t regularly experience both sides of power, you make bad choices. Over time, those choices add up. When you have a high-status title, and everyone listens attentively to you; when you carry a weapon and strut around barking orders at people who are either too meek to stand up to you or too polite to tell you what an ass you look like, you forget that the real world isn’t actually structured in a way that assures you victory, control, respect, and continued power.
In short, you run into a little problem that economists like to call “moral hazard,” and I like to call “not getting kicked in the nuts often enough.”
Hitting people, pepper-spraying them, and similar abuses of power, have the potential to yield significant benefits for those who employ them. Under normal circumstances, they also have costs, or “consequences.” I punch you in the solar plexus; you kick me in the temple. I pepper-spray you while you are legally exercising your First Amendment rights, and I get sued and thrown in jail. When you create a system that maximizes the benefits of power and eliminates its costs, people in that system have little incentive to curtail their use of power. That’s not “constraint”; it’s unwarranted license.
Oddly enough, this is exactly the problem that the UC-Davis students were trying to draw attention to when Lt. Pike gassed them. They were protesting massive tuition and fee increases prompted by the general economic collapse. They objected to the fact that they and their school were being punished for the bad behavior of bankers (some of whom sit on the school’s Board of Regents), who took risks with other people’s money and got bailed out with federal tax dollars. Moral hazard, you see.
What to do about all this? How to change the structures that caused all this violence? My own experience with moral hazard in the sparring ring leads me to propose the following solution for the corrupt financial system the UC-Davis students, and the Occupy movement, are protesting. Every time a banker, CEO, broker, or other fiduciary agent loses, steals, or gambles away a million dollars of someone else’s money, we should refrain from plucking a million dollars from the public treasury and handing it over to the risk-taker. Instead, we should designate some neutral third party to kick the offender in the nuts (or punch them in the head, if they’re female, though that’s statistically pretty unlikely). This system restores the balance; it reintroduces risk in an immediate and meaningful way, and it doesn’t involve the SEC. Everyone wins.
And because I understand his position all too well, I offer this advice to Lt. John Pike, if he ever wants to rejoin decent society: Dude, you have to apologize. Big time. And you’d better mean it, and you’d damn well better look like you mean it.
And what should you do after that, Lieutenant? I could recommend some soul-searching, or meditation, or anger management classes. But what you really ought to do is take off your body armor (it looks like a tight fit on you anyway; I imagine it chafes), find the nearest boxing gym or martial arts school that will allow you through its doors, and get into the ring with someone roughly your own size. Take a couple of shots to the head, maybe a kick in the groin. Act as tough as you want, and pay for it out of your own pocket for once.
See if it’s worth the price.
December 2, 2011
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November 18, 2011
Gyros to Heroes: A Column About Sandwiches: Immortal-licious by Lindsay Eanet
“I want a sandwich named after me.” — Jon Stewart
- – -
It’s in ingrained in our nature, this desire to want to be remembered, to leave a legacy that will echo through the ears of your great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond. There’s something delightful in the prospect of having a sandwich named after you—it’s no Purple Heart or Great American Novel or registered charity, but some people just want to be thought of while strangers are ordering lunch.
That being said, there are a number of strategies one could take when seeking to get a sandwich named after them. Let’s walk through five of them, and where you could go about it.
Strategy I: Create One
Productos Extremeños — Getafe, Spain
The ‘Bocata Karen’: Wheat bread, chicken, brie, lettuce, honey and apples.
Variety is never a bad thing, but to the sandwich enthusiast, it can be terrifying. Upon entering the innocuous café near the university campus, you are met with thousands upon thousands of pieces of brightly colored paper, each with the name and recipe of a salad or sandwich a customer created. There is already a twinge of sadness building. Even if you do make the greatest sandwich ever and have it named after you, will people be able to see it amongst the others? Will anybody know? You’ll know, the voice replies, and that’s all that matters.
Notice the smile creep across your face when the women behind the counter calls you “honey pie,” hints at an Extremaduran accent through the English. Take a bite and immediately experience remorse. Not because the sandwich you’ve created tastes bad—in fact, the opposite—but because this feels like the draft before the masterpiece. You know you can improve upon the design.
You return to the sandwich shop three times a week for the next month, taking notes from each colorful scrap of paper on the wall, slowly watching your travel savings and your waistline develop a strange inverse relationship. Each time, you draw ever closer, each marriage of bocadillo baguette to filling a step towards sandwich Areté. Once you have reached it, and if it is an original design, the women behind the counter will write it down on one of their colorful sheets of paper and tack it on the wall, signed with a declaration of Muy rico! and a smiley face.
Strategy II: Earn It
R U Hungry? — New Brunswick, New Jersey
The Fat Maleman: Cheesesteak, mozzarella sticks, marinara, bacon, hot peppers, French fries, named for Voorhees, New Jersey mail carrier Dave Goldstein.
It’s February—Rutgers is in the throes of basketball season and New Brunswick is in the throes of a slushy, dismal mess that makes walking to class and home from the bars feel like cheating death. The cold makes your stomach long for a blanket, something thick and comforting. The growl lurks and ripples at the base of your gullet under all those layers of winter wear.
You begin to have reservations as you approach the truck. Five fat sandwiches, half an hour and the custom sandwich is yours. You watched that one show on the Travel Channel where the guy who does all the eating competitions failed. His strategy was all wrong, you think. On the ride up to New Brunswick, you and your accomplices discussed where he failed. The vegetarian burger would have been too starchy, you offer. The textures of meat and meat substitute did not meld harmoniously in his digestive tract. You will watch your companion confidently attempt the competition fail. Coming up on 26 minutes and several bites into the last Fat Darrell, your companion will stumble to a nearby trashcan and expel everything into it like a frantic mother bird. In a sick and sadistic way, it will make you want to conquer it more.
Goldstein, he who carries letters in his hands and sandwiches in his belly, finished three Fat Kokos (Cheesesteak, mozzarella sticks, fries and marinara) and two Fat Cats (double cheeseburger, fries, lettuce, tomato, mayo and ketchup) in a record-setting 27 minutes and 50 seconds to earn his spot on R U Hungry’s custom menu. You could do it in 27:49 if you tried. It will be over in a flash and all you will remember of the ordeal is searing pain and the salty, chewy, runny goodness of mozzarella sticks in the first bite and glory will be yours.
Strategy III: Be A Celebrity
Flashback Diner — Boca Raton, Florida
The Elton John: Charbroiled chicken breast topped with cheddar cheese and bacon.
This somehow seems the most effective strategy, but also one of the riskiest, as depending on how your career goes, the ingredients of your sandwich will be a bit of a crapshoot. There are really only two steps to this strategy: the first is to become a celebrity (any kind will do, but film star tends to work best) and the second is to try and be likable. I wonder if celebrities, when they go about their daily business, ever think about what would go into a sandwich named after them.
If you are disappointed with the sandwich, a la Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, you can always try asking Ted Danson to switch with you. It probably won’t work. But at least you can pick the capers off.
Strategy IV: Ask Nicely (on National Television)
Jaws Jumbo Burgers — Farmington Hills, Michigan
The “I Want A Sandwich Named After Me” Dave Letterman Burger: ground sirloin, bacon, American and Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard, pickles and grilled onions.
Find a way to get on national television. The easiest way to do this now it seems is to either be a celebrity (see Strategy III) or become Internet-famous. Create a viral video of yourself doing something ridiculous and attention-seeking. Tweet it to all your friends. Watch it spread until one day you get the call from a local talk show. Go on said show. Do the bit the audience wants to see, and then ask for the good sandwich artists of America to erect a bread-and-meat monument in your honor. Today, you are a Pharaoh.
Strategy V: Befriend A Chef
The Blackstone Hotel — Omaha, Nebraska
The Reuben: Rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut, named for Reuben Kulakofsky
(Disclaimer: This is one of several origin stories of the Reuben and should not be taken as sandwich gospel.)
There is already a beer waiting for you when you sit down. These are friends you’ve met with at the same bar for what has felt like eons but has probably only been about two years. You met the first one at some work thing or some terrible cocktail party or Bikram yoga because you just weren’t sure what to do with yourself when you first moved to this city.
Neither of you knew anyone else there and thus stuck together, discovered you disliked all the same people but thought that new Decemberists album was pretty great so the next week you were invited to this weekly meeting at this lovely dive, the kind of place where the knowledge it exists makes you feel like a friend has just told you they’re in a secret relationship with a rock star—this space is ours, and it is lovely.
You’re usually the only group in on a Monday at that hour, so the folks in the kitchen begin testing new snacks and things on your group. You get to know the people preparing your meals—their backstories, kids’ names, blood types. They get to know you and why you moved there in the first place. The exchanges turn into a strange friendship, and as your ‘regular’ status is cemented, a sandwich is custom-made in your honor. It’s written on the menu board in colorful chalk, and suddenly you feel like you could live here forever.
November 14, 2011
Sarah Walker Shows You How: How to Ride a Train by Sarah Walker
First, decide that you need to go to the dentist because the guilt of them reminding you of your six-month checkup, two years after your last six-month checkup, is just too much. They keep calling and sending little postcards, no one you know keeps in that good touch with you. Note that the term “general dentistry” is both funny and frightening. Make sure that your dentist is a two-hour train ride away in your hometown, because it’s a good excuse to see your mom, and also to have her pay for it because only billionaires and some select millionaires have dental insurance these days.
Then, time your walk to Penn Station so you get there exactly when the train is boarding, because every extraneous second spent in Penn Station is the worst second, despite the fact that the woman who announces trains has an incredibly soothing voice. She sounds like a really great fourth grade teacher or a cool aunt. Penn Station also plays classical music, offers beer in plastic to-go cups with straws, and show videos of police dogs in action. You know what? Penn Station isn’t that bad. If your train were delayed, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
When your train is an hour and a half delayed, and you are over the classical music (way to have NO WORDS, classical music!), and there are only so many times you can laugh when you hear Soothing Voiced Lady say, “trains to Ronkonkoma,” and who cares about a video of dogs, you want to see REAL DOGS, you may once again come to the conclusion that Penn Station is The Worst.
When your track is finally announced try to act nonchalant as dozens of people swarm to the gate. Resist the urge to yell, “We’re all going to get on the train so everyone JUST CHILL OUT, OK???” Also note that now is not the time to teach the course you’ve been developing, “Personal Space and the Value of it to You and Everyone Around You 101.”
Board the train and find an empty row. Sit next to the window and place your bag so it sort of spills over onto the seat next to you, not so you’re blatantly keeping a seat, but just enough so it doesn’t look inviting. Pull out a copy of Arrive: The Magazine for Northwest Business Travelers, from the pouch in front of you. Read an article in Arrive: The Magazine for Northwest Business Travelers about a cheese shop in Brooklyn. Put the magazine in your bag, because there’s a photo in there of a handsome cheesemonger that you want to show your friend. Jot down an idea to start a magazine called Train Mall, which will be like Sky Mall, but for trains. Look around you to make sure that no idea thieves have seen you do this.
Make phone calls that you secretly hope are broken up because service is spotty on the train. Shout into your phone, “Sorry! I’ll call you back, service is spotty on the train!” Then note that there are several prominently placed signs that read QUIET CAR, and you’re getting mean looks from people. Sheepishly put away your phone.
Walk to the dining car and purchase one (1) can of Coca Cola, one (1) mini bottle of white wine, and one (1) packet of peanut M&M’s. Consume the white wine. Return for another mini bottle because you realize that it would be irresponsible, nay, disrespectful to your dentist to eat M&M’s before your appointment. Recall that once a traveling scientist/dentist came to your elementary school and performed a demonstration of how soda damages your teeth by dipping a giant model of a tooth attached to a string into a vat of Coke, and when he pulled it out it was all brown and eroded and steaming. Conclude that although that might have been a traveling scientist/dentist propaganda scare tactic, it’s probably safest to stick with wine.
Listen to music for a while and keep turning up the volume because why is it so soft? Your headphones might be broken. Then notice more mean looks from people around you and realize that your headphones are not plugged in and you’re just blasting music from your phone in the Quiet Car. At least you introduced them to a cool song. Nevertheless, again, sheepishly put away your phone.
Feel the need to explain to your fellow passengers that your recent behavior is not representative of who you are. Stand up and say in a strong voice coupled with confident hand gestures, “I am one of you! I am a very considerate person who would never disturb the Quiet of this Car! Please believe me!” Then start a slow clap. When no one joins in shout, “I’m not on this train to make friends! I have enough friends!” You might be drunk.
As the conductor approaches, show yourself out of the Quiet Car. Spend the remainder of your trip in the Dining Car, where people understand you.
November 8, 2011
No Fear of Flying: Kamikaze Missions in Death, Sex, and Comedy: Its All Gonna Break by Michelle Mirsky
My month with the Blond Poet was, on the surface and in all other ways, a terrible idea. Two hopelessly broken writers in the midst of ending marriages start frantically screwing between poetry readings and art shows. “You’re in trouble,” said the injured poet, his bruises still visible. “I’m trouble for you. I don’t want to, but I’ll hurt you…”
And I, the grieving mother, replied: “Well, don’t hurt me, then. You don’t have to, you know.” No way was this ever going to end well.
The night I meet the poet, it has been one week to the day since Lev died. With the mourners mostly gone, I’ve begun to feel convalescent, frayed. I’m still on leave from work, alternately sleeping all day and climbing the walls. I accept all invitations. I arrive late to this reception on the roof of an art space downtown (The elevator up plays a video loop of “The 900 number” by The 45 Kings, interpreted into sign language). I am so hungry, but have missed the food. My friends feed me wine instead. A girlfriend has arranged to introduce me to this poet, having shown me a photo of him on her iPhone a month earlier. In the photo, he stood in a dressing room, a bearded blond in a light blue suit. The pants of which were, it could be argued, much too tight. When we meet in November, the poet is wearing a winter vest and dirty grey jeans. A season has passed. He is handsome despite the stitches in his lip and scrapes on his arms, the result of a bike wreck in which a car hit him and he went flying; his second serious accident in a year. He has no sense of humor about this. The night on the roof, his eyes keep finding the part of my leg between tall boot and short skirt.
The poet doesn’t laugh at my jokes on the roof, but he’s listening. When he smiles, his expression reads as suspension of disbelief. Some drunk twenty-something girl the poet knows spills a full glass of red wine into my purse. Everything is soaked. She doesn’t apologize, keeps talking about semiotics and fashion. Her boyfriend rolls his eyes. I excuse myself to the restroom and throw away most of the contents of my purse. I try to shake the wet warmth out of my head, but it’s mingled with the cold and I become fog. My legs are goosebumped from sitting on the roof for too long, and from meeting you. You’re blond; have a beard; are a poet. You’re tall and indignant. You have watched me this whole night. You have kept up. You are mine; like a mink cape I want badly enough to steal from the coat check. I think all this, I try to sop it up but the wine has soaked into everything.
It gets cold and late and couple of us move across the street to a restaurant with cowhide pillows and a fireplace and drink more red wine. In the lounge of the restaurant, I show the poet three of my tattoos. Later, he tells me this moment is when he knows he’ll see me naked. Afterward, while we wait for the valet to bring our cars around, I touch his stomach with the palm of my hand and I ask if he’s kissed anyone yet with his busted lip. He says he hasn’t, but he’d be game to try. I’ll bet you would, I say. And I drive off. Or at least that’s how it happens in my head.
The next time we meet, everyone plays Threes at a dance party in a printmaker’s studio. People have their own dice. One girl has fingerless gloves. It’s legit. Everyone looks French or bohemian or East Coast preppy. I win some money, lose it again, and make an excuse to drive the poet and his bike home (he doesn’t have or want a car, content to keep bouncing off cars indefinitely, it would appear). We spar about music all the way to his place. He says my favorite New Pornographers song is not the best. The best, he says, is on Twin Cinemas. He can’t remember what it’s called. We should go inside and he’ll play it for me. To which I reply: “What are we, 15?” But I go with him. “Sing Me Spanish Techno.” Yeah, that’s a good one. We make out on the couch in his freezing house with no heat till our lips hurt and I’m fairly certain I eat his stitches at some point.
There’s an abundance of research out there around grief and loss—some dry and some colorful—that points to sex as solace. This holds up mostly for men, who (per the research) typically intellectualize their pain and look for physical release in the wake of sorrow. Women are deemed “feelers.” I don’t exactly know what this means. What I do know is this: sex with the poet was like meth and opium stirred into a bottomless glass of warm milk; intense comfort after which I could not sleep. Too much was never enough. Morning: he would kiss me awake and we’d tear each other limb from limb, he’d make me coffee with honey and trace his fingers on my shoulders while I drank it. In between sips, I’d rest the mug on his divorce papers. Noon: we’d hide under heaps of blankets, warm and rushed. Night: he’d bring glasses of water and wine to bed for us, help me off with my boots and we’re back under the covers, not sleeping.
We carried on a nonstop, rambling intellectual conversation that never became an argument, never a debate. Me: “Semantics is my God.” Him: “Semantics never saved anyone. Except Bill Clinton.” The rapport was fast and strong and natural—which, in turn, made us both uneasy. It was not a good idea for two people as broken as we were to get too relaxed. The worst was yet to come for each of us and we both knew it. In the meantime, we were busy drinking Malbec and eating fancy cheese and warm olives. He tells me one night as he opens the car door for me that he’s trying to impress me. I tell him I’m impressed. We are like younger versions of ourselves. New. He touches me constantly. He cannot watch me across a table, on adjacent stools, sitting quietly, without grabbing some part of me and us falling. Words fail me. I say things anyway. I think: I want to memorize him and text him to my friends. I think: I love him. One night while he was dressing to leave, I buttoned his shirt for him like we were a couple of settled old folks. He smiled. Kissed my face. I scratched his beard.
The company of the poet and his cadre of art-makers made me anxious that I wasn’t writing, that I had strayed so far from what I’d always done. So I wrote. At first I edited old stories. Then I started re-working abandoned ideas in a new voice. The poet was encouraging. He never asked and I never offered to let him read anything of mine. He woke early each morning and wrote before biking to his office. I preferred to write at night. If we’d not spent the night together, he would text or call me first thing to check-in and I’d rouse myself, join the world. A routine. Like clockwork. I wrote, now. Again.
- – -
There is this kind of construction crane—the sort you have to get a whole crew of skilled workers to assemble before you can build the thing you needed the crane to lift into being. These cranes are stories tall and when they begin to take shape, they appear sturdy, permanent. And as you watch one getting built, you think you’re watching an end unto itself, but it’s the making of the means. The moment when the crane-not-structure realization hits you is confusion, longing, recalibration of expectations and a little bit of awe. I recount this analogy at lunch one day with the poet. We pull apart our grilled salami sandwiches and wipe grease from our fingers as we talk. Building these things—this marriage, this home, this family—and then dismantling them: my life thus far has been spent building a crane I needed to build the life I was building all along. He says all women want everything to turn into something, to evolve. But I don’t think he’s right. He tells me that he’s moving to the East Coast (he doesn’t). I feel like maybe I shouldn’t see him again (I do).
After he watches the ghost of a drunk John Berryman being interviewed on the BBC, the poet lets his beard grow like rambling weeds for weeks. He tells me about Berryman over breakfast one Saturday morning. My broken cell phone calls my ex-husband and leaves this conversation on his voicemail. The poet’s not-blue eyes are deep and wet. He tries to tell me he’s breaking down. I try to hear him, but I can’t help. I’m not here to help. He writes lines of poetry about my hair, my skin, my tattoos and texts them to me. I watch him read 40 of his poems (none of them are about me) on a stage at a bar. That night, I predict it. The end:
Me: You’ll read me like a book, till you’re sure know the story. Then you’ll put me back on the shelf and not open me again.
Him: No, not like that.
Me: You’ll see. I’m the poem that wrote you.
Him: Go to sleep, little girl. [ snore ]
The End, after so much banging, is all whimper. The poet breaks up with me via text message because he doesn’t want to help me move my car. He immediately starts sleeping with a 23 year-old blond cheerleader from the Midwest. There is talk—among our mutual friends—that he has had a minor breakdown, an after effect of his bike wreck(s) et al, and he simply couldn’t handle the intensity. Maybe he just needed to fuck more and new people to solve his ontological despair. It doesn’t matter. We never spoke again. Not one time ever. That was it. Fin.
In the winter, months after we are done, I buy his new book—a book he was putting the finishing touches on when we met. I pre-ordered it the first week it was available and hoped that in the months I’d have to wait for it to arrive from his small press, I’d finish pining, sober up. When the time came, it took me by surprise. I had been home a week with the flu. Chills and shakes and hallucinations. The first day I could get out of bed, I went to the mailbox and the book was there in a hand-labeled envelope. I read it cover to cover. Cried. Sobbed, really.
At its core, the book is about deciding to leave comfort behind, and then upon burning bridges, changing everything, starting a new life—realizing the new life is just as deadened and even more brutal, but you can’t go home, because you belong nowhere when all is said and done. It’s about divorce. It’s about being an artist. It’s about being in your thirties. It’s about all of these things or none of these things. And it is brilliant. It made me feel better, somehow, that of all of the things I had gotten wrong, he most certainly was not a shitty poet.
Months later I will run into him on the street. I am on a date with a tall, handsome inconsequential fellow who is holding my hand at the time. I see the poet but it doesn’t register until he’s passed me that I had actually just SEEN THE POET. I hear the friend who’s walking with him call out my name, I turn around to look and I yell back, wave. We don’t stop. We keep on, walking in opposite directions. The poet sees me too now. He looks haunted. I’m the ghost. Or, at least, that’s how it happens in my head.
