Saturday, May 27, 2006

ME - IN NEED OF COMFORT; YOU - MERRY & OLD

It's pale and chunky and shot through with big, blue veins. Sounds like my aging thighs. But, trust me, it's something even tastier: a wedge of Amber Valley Blue Stilton, the "King of English Cheeses."

It's my latest purchase from Brits, a store here devoted to all things from the Emerald Isle. I've become addicted to this place, its squeaky wood floors and well-ordered shelves and all the prim, well-packaged things on them.

What is so comforting about British things?

I mean, I'm not a "comfort shopper," one of those people who try to spend their way out of existential angst by buying a lot of crap they don't need. I don't even understand that. When I get depressed, I just like to sit on my ass and feel sorry for myself. Comfort eaters I understand, because devouring a tub of cookies doesn't interfere with sitting on your ass and feeling sorry for yourself.

Not that I haven't made the occasional comfort purchase because I weakly succumbed to the notion that it would make my life better. Occasionally I get seduced by, say, a big row of pink fluffy towels at Target and have to buy some. But as soon as I get home I'm disenchanted. I realize that it's not the two towels hanging sparely in my bathroom that I really coveted, but the whole wall of pink, fluffy towels. It was the effect of 50 together — pillowy, plush, excessive — that touched my aesthetic. As savvy a consumer as I am, I can still be a huge sucker for marketing displays.

But this British stuff is the real deal. My enthusiasm for it doesn't wane. It lasts to the last drop of lemon curd in the jar, the last morsel of Wensleydale in the package, the last crumb of cream crackers in the cupboard. Then I want more. Whether I'm happy or sad, hungry or full, it's comforting on all occasions.

I was thinking the other day that the British know so much about the good things in life — sex excluded, of course — because of that whole empire deal. For centuries they just traipsed around the globe pillaging (the raping they left to the Spaniards) treasures and foodstuffs and culture and know-how from their many colonies. So you end up with this tiny little island in the North Atlantic that has a "Best of Everything on Earth" collection that no one else can rival. Pungent cheeses and creamy soaps and malty ales and milky toffee and fragrant teas and spicy chutney and tart marmalades and clotted cream and Portmeirion porcelain, for heaven's sake.

Not to mention treacle and port and currant chewing gum and mushroom ketchup and malt vinegar and crumpets and citrus curds and kidney pies.

And don't get me wrong. I'm not an Anglophile. I mean, I used to be. In junior high I could list every British monarch back to William the Conqueror. I could tell you which Bronte sibling wrote which book and when. I wanted an old MG. But my lust has mellowed. British accents tend to annoy me. British humor often fails to amuse me. Obsessions with the royal family, so tediously common, strike me as banal.

Still, I have a terrible weakness for certain British things, especially those that come in pretty packages that can be bought five blocks from my house.

God save my favorite store!

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

I'M NOT TRYING TO CAUSE A BIG SENSATION




Last night I was at the Last Feminista's watching a Nicole Holofcener movie, "Walking and Talking," which naturally got us to talking. And LF, who's just five or so years my senior, was talking about the relative merits of being born a few decades earlier or a few decades later. So afterward I was curious about this and sent him an e-mail that said, "Do you think you were born in the right generation?"

This is his reply:

Any formal training of the mind is bound to leave long lasting traces — scars, if you wish. So I'm sure you, KC, could readily find a legalistic evasion to many a question. In my case, the temptation is to deploy a bit of analytic-philosophy boilerplate and reply that the question is meaningless because I couldn’t have been born into any other generation and still be me. For instance, surely it is a small but irreducible part of who I’ve become that I had a “Disco Sucks” sticker on my high school locker? But I bailed out of that concept-parsing career [philosophy] to avoid drowning in stupendously uninspired professional writing. So let’s toss that cheap dodge.

I would say that I’ve been perplexed and disappointed by my contemporaries. But, hey, I was set up. Here’s the lowdown:

My formative environment was Hegelian. Not that any of the responsible parties had read old Georg; if you told them that Hegel was the second-string running back for the 49ers, most of them would have just nodded politely and asked if I liked football. It wasn’t informed, but they all had a thorough commitment to the dialectic of Progress. And I seem to remember that all of them walked around with smug grins because Progress had done smashingly well of late, and Middle America was on top of the game. There had been some tough scrimmage of late, but the play came out well: Civil rights was a success, the woman’s movement was soon to duplicate it, followed closely by the gays. (I don’t think that last bit was in our textbooks though.) And that all-important left tackle on the Progress team —Reason — was having a great game as well. The fraudulent Nixon Administration had been hounded out of Washington, and the national magazines were running articles on how religion was past its ascendancy and the churches here would soon be as empty as those in Europe, pressed into service just for the stray wedding or funeral. (This bit might not have been in the textbooks either.)

And on the international side, the nation was coming to terms with the fact that you can’t succeed in carpet-bombing ardent nationalists into submission, particularly when you misunderstand them to be some sort of geo-strategic agents. Besides the great enemy that supposedly justified killing all those Vietnamese, the Soviet Union was, to those who bothered to look, clearly moldering its way into irrelevance. So Progress was moving the ball and running up the score. Of course, there was the energy crisis, and the Japanese were wiping out all the U.S. car and steel plants with their better and cheaper goods. But that just meant our defense had to be Science. With the waning of the Cold War, we could melt down the military dinosaur and dive into the technologies of the future that would let us kick Asian butt. We learned the metric system in the early ’70s because the whole country was sure to be using it by the time we got to college.

And of course Progress would always mean Liberty, too. Civil rights and the related campaigns were assaults on institutionalized bigotry. We were going to be free of all that. The sexual revolution had kicked out the mores of a bunch of religious prudes. The signs of all this at my high school were promising. If you kept up pretty good grades and took a college bound curriculum, then you were on a program that let you come and go as you wanted. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the building; you had to step outside. (I would stand at the door and laugh at the kids who were freezing their asses off trying to look cool as they puffed away in February.) And while it might not have been on the books, the rule was that if you were smoking dope you had to act like you weren’t, but still get it stubbed out in time that any passing adults could pretend they didn’t smell it. Kind of an early don’t-ask-don’t-tell. It wasn’t all ideal: In a bit of rather bad timing, at the very end of the ’70s, the school nurse or somebody told a whole auditorium of us kids that while some of the sexually transmitted diseases were indeed unpleasant, none of them would kill us.

So there we were poised for what great things? Isn’t it some sort of hormonal imperative that youth must rebel against the oppressions of their elders? That’s where our Hegelian game had to go, right? Then why the hell in 1980 did so many of my generation vote for Reagan? And do it again four years later? Hadn’t we figured out that voodoo was no way to run a country? Here comes this reactionary who panders to the religious bigots and is idolized by those who cannot master the principles of basic accounting, and has the presumption to call the Soviets “The Evil Empire” when “The Rusting Regime” would have been more descriptive. Sure that senile old guard had chosen as its swan song to invade and try to occupy Afghanistan. But what kind of threat is a military where the grunts get more calories from vodka than from food? It is all fine and well that Reagan looked and talked better than your real Granddad. But that’s no reason to believe a B-movie actor with an unsteady grasp on reality.

Well maybe Progress is just a scam after all, but why be so quick to become a sellout? When university administrators started talking about reviving the principle of “in loco parentis,” lots of students thought it was a good idea. Or try the “War on Drugs.” My generation had been smoking plenty of pot for a decade and we were all pretty well convinced by the experience that it doesn’t do much harm beyond causing some serious munchies. Everybody figured it would be legal in a few years anyway. Then a bunch of propagandists came along with a plan to lock up millions of harmless people, and the reaction was to go pee in a cup for the employer.

But besides all that, why did my generation seem to truly enjoy listening to such bad music?

Maybe it wasn’t the whole generation that was set up; maybe it was just where I happened to be. For one thing, there were no religious nuts on my block. For another, the whole progress-of-the-decades thing might have been particularly easy in our homogeneous suburb. Civil rights was dandy when we had exactly one token black in our school. And the parents could all have faith in the real estates agent’s red lining. The smug grins would disappear fast if you mentioned the possibility of busing.

But perhaps I would rather have been part of an earlier generation that really was sold a grand vision of progress before being kicked in the teeth and hard. If so, do you get to pick your part? Isaac Asimov once told of a woman who was captivated by the idea of living back when there were household servants to do everything. So he asked her if she was eager to be a cook or a chambermaid? In my own case then, maybe I could be sitting in some quaint dive on the Left Bank in 1929 drinking cheap and bad wine because I didn’t write “The Sun Also Rises” or “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” and didn’t get that invitation from Gertrude Stein. But at least I would have liked the jazz.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

LOOK AT ME NOW

I haven't posted in awhile. I've told some of you that it's because I'm busy with two jobs, spring cleaning and an unrelenting social calendar, but the real reason is that I've been depressed about my wardrobe.

On the whole, I'm a fashionplate. Ask my friends. I am constantly wowing them with my Husky Boy jeans, assorted T-shirts and selections from my Birkenstock collection. I generally do a good job of keeping current, but occasionally I get busy and fall behind the fashion times by 10 or 15 years. Then I have to remedy the situation pronto with some purchases designed to update my look and restore my self-esteem. Here are a few things that my wardrobe lacks. Don't be surprised if next time you see me I am wearing one or more of them:

1. High-heeled blue flip-flops — These are not only beautiful, but are the ultimately sensible shoe. What could be more comfortable than having a piece of plastic wedged between two toes? Or more practical than a tiny rubber heel? Clearly they are the perfect walking shoe. And besides that, who doesn't have a thousand uses for aqua blue shoes made out of fly-swatter material?

2. School-girl plaid mini skirt — As I was viewing Internet porn for research, I happened to notice that this skirt is very trendy. I can't believe I don't own one already. I'm a girl. I go to school. So this is really more a question of need than want.

3. Thong underwear with witty writing on the triangle — I ordered this pair because one day I hope to marry a quiet librarian who enjoys Shakespeare and fine wine and witty sayings on underwear. I'm going to order some for me, also in pink, that say "Editors do it with style" and "Adjunct professors do it with discipline," or some other classy saying that will be sure to impress a lover. Maybe you all can give me some ideas.

4. Pink shorts with writing on the butt —I liked these better before I realized that they said "Dancer," not "Danger." I would prefer for people to look at my ass and think "Danger!" That would rule. A lot of your more upscale gals are wearing writing on the ass. Usually it is the name of a sports team or something like "P.I.N.K." I prefer candor, so I'd rather it just say "Look at my sexy ass" or "Get a load of my load." Or they could have personalized ass writing — like with license tags — where you write something in a kind of shorthand and challenge passersby to decode it. Something elegant, like GR8LAY.

5. Burberry condoms — Some of you might think I have as much use for a condom as a dog has for a typewriter. But the point of the Burberry condom is the point of the Burberry scarf. It's meant to be seen. Its actual usefulness is entirely beside the point. You know how you see a lot of people wearing real crappy stuff with a $200 Burberry scarf around their neck? It's like that one accessory brings their whole look together and negates all the crap. You don't see anything else but the scarf. It becomes the focal point. I figure if houseguests saw a bowl of Burberry condoms in my bathroom or the grocery bagger saw one fall out of my purse "accidentally," they'd automatically forget all the crap and assume some awesome things about my sex life. And if people think you're having awesome sex — expensive, awesome, plaid sex — you rise immediately in their estimation.

6. Black push-up bra with floral design — As I said earlier, I'm depressed. I could use a lift.

If any of you have other ideas for things that would look fabulous on me, I'm all ears.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

"LIFE ISN'T MEANT TO BE EASY" -Richard Nixon

I just watched "Walk the Line," the movie bio of Johnny Cash. Can someone please tell me how it differs from the story of Jim Morrison, the story of Jerry Lee Lewis, the story of Tina Turner, the story of Patsy Cline, the story of Loretta Lynn, the story of Ray Charles, the story of every other performer who has a story?

There's a humble beginning. A struggle against religion and/or convention. A lot of music. Some relationship turmoil. Self doubt. Coping with fame. Some kind of addiction. Pervasive sadness. Moments of enlightenment. Good box office. Hailed as a triumph of cinema.

It's all the same. It's all too easy.

I couldn't even finish watching the Johnny Cash film. Not because it wasn't a good movie, but because I felt like I had seen it a hundred times already.

I would rather have seen a documentary about him. I would have learned more. I would have had a greater sense of him as an individual. The history would have been more precise.

The film did make me want to buy more of his records — Did he and June Carter ever record "Time's a Wastin'"? — so maybe it works as a marketing tool for his estate.

Am I being cynical? Or is Hollywood grinding out the same biopic year after year and just changing the name? Or does fame itself, especially of the pop culture variety, have too predictable a trajectory to make for lastingly interesting cinema?

I tried to think of life stories that are inherently cinematic, that translate well — and originally — to film. Off the top of my head, I came up with the mathematician John Nash ("A Beautiful Mind") and the homophobic, gay, McCarthyite Roy Cohn ("Citizen Cohn"). Possibly "Nixon."

Others?

Wednesday, May 03, 2006



A FILM OF ONE'S OWN

I can't write a movie review to save my life, but I am pretty good at giving stars. The film "Friends With Money" gets a gazillion. It's the most satisfying piece of art I've experienced in years.

I'm reading a book called "Nature Noir," in which a park ranger talks about the "strange peacefulness at the center of catastrophe." This film is about the strange catastrophe at the center of peacefulness.

I'm no movie buff — I haven't even seen "The Godfather" all the way through; I think "Citizen Kane" is a snooze — but I know this is a good movie because I can't stop thinking about it. And I will think about it a long time from now. I will encounter certain people, and the way my mind will deal with them will be to say, "Oh yes, this person is behaving just like that character in 'Friends with Money.'" Or just like a combination of those characters. I would have seen this behavior before but would not have been able to articulate it without this Rosetta Stone of all chick flicks.

While I was watching the film last night with my friend George, I kept recognizing people I knew in the characters on screen.

And I recognized myself in all of them:

In the Jennifer Aniston character — a pothead house cleaner who drops out of life, who stops caring what happens to her but who clings to free samples of expensive face cream.

In the Frances McDormand character — a clothing designer who gets unreasonably angry when people are petty or ill-mannered, when the world doesn't go the way it should go.
She can't see the point in washing her hair. She says what she thinks.

In the Catherine Keener character — who realizes too late that she has done a monstrous thing in the mundane, who has an epiphany about a loved one.

In the Joan Cusack character — who is caring, rich and blank.

And the men. One might be gay but loves his wife to pieces. One is a borderline sociopath who functions well in the world. One is caring, rich and blank. One is boring, poor and beastly. They all have "problems with people," but only one admits it.

No one knows how to live.

How can a movie be so fucking great? This is Goddamn Virginia Woolf in 2006.

These characters are so real I'll have memories of them doing things they didn't do. I'll forget some things they did do. I'll want to see the film again. But I won't. It's like a magical conversation with a special friend that you can have only once.