Savannah Lee

I was having a hard time with the movie GANGS OF NEW YORK. The fact that I was watching it on TV as opposed to DVD did not help. This film can't survive being interrupted by commercials.

Also, I was expecting my husband to get home with our daughter any minute. Which would necessitate immediate bailout, since I honestly don't think there's a single scene which does not involve some kind of crime being committed, some kind of terror or violence or overt display of bigotry by the villains, or voice-overs about how to steal.

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Speaking of things that are just hopelessly inappropriate, my husband once went to a reading given by Andrew Vachss, the X-Tremely hardboiled crime-fiction writer whose most famous series is a bunch of books about scrofulous child-abusers and the equally scrofulous dark knight who avenges their victims. Well, due to what must have been some kind of dire misunderstanding, someone brought a kid to the reading. Fortunately, the kid was in the front row so Vachss could see him.

My husband told me how the bookstore owner introduced Vachss and informed everyone that Vachss would now give a reading from his latest book. Vachss smiled said "No, I won't." The bookstore owner, who apparently had not noticed the child in attendance, said "Why not?" Vachss gestured at the young guest. Directly addressing him, he said, "I'm glad you're here. But..." addressing everyone else, "I can't read from one of my books. I just can't." And that was that. The event moved on to the signing.

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Okay, back to GANGS. Given the poor conditions, I was really having trouble with the dialogue. I wasn't able to enter into the world completely enough to accept the archaic way everyone was talking.

But then the dialogue fell away. Leonardo DiCaprio's voice-over ceased; he had to shut up and concentrate, because he was going to waylay Cameron Diaz (exiting a house she had just robbed by pretending to be a maid) and get back the medal she had stolen from him.

In a passage of perfectly offhand brutality, the two blank-faced actors went at it. DiCaprio seized Diaz, Diaz kneed him in the balls, he recovered and slammed her against a wall, she got in another shot at his jewels and stuck a knife to his throat.

The efficiency of all this, by the way, further undermined the florid period dialogue. It was hard to believe that people who moved like *this* would talk like *that.* But right now, the excesses of the verbiage were actually pretty well under control. DiCaprio dared Diaz to kill him (more on this later), it became clear she wasn't going to, he seized the knife from her and turned the tables, and set about opening up her buttons. Under her oh-so-proper maid's dress was a riot of cleavage and stolen pendants. DiCaprio found the one that was his, yanked it off her, and then said "Suppose I help myself to the rest of it." Very much not meaning the jewelry.

"Suppose you do," came back Diaz like a gangsta.

So, of course, he put her dress back together and then covered it with his hand--not her chest, though that was underneath, but *the dress*--as if to say "You're safe with me, even though I'm not safe with you."

ARGH and then he TALKED! No. No, no, no. NO. I turned the TV off. I needed it to stop. I needed to just sit there with that pale hand on the black dress. I needed to let that settle in my head.

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Somebody should do a seminar paper, if not a master's thesis, on recent examples of movies where a woman holds a knife to her (present or future) man's throat and he dares her to kill him.

The little tussle between DiCaprio and Diaz takes its place with similar battles in the near-contemporaneous releases TROY and ALEXANDER. In TROY, Brad Pitt as Achilles wakes up to discover that his captive Briseis (Rose Byrne) has a blade to his throat and is trying to nerve herself to cut. In ALEXANDER, Colin Farrell as Alexander is traumatically reexperiencing/reenacting the violence he witnessed between his parents by shoving his new bride around on their wedding night, when she gets her hands on one of his knives and stops him dead.

All three scenes are notable for their similarities as well as their differences. In each case, the man genuinely lays down his life; he's not sure he's going to turn the tables at first. The moment when he realizes he will prevail comes earlier and earlier as the stories go further back in time: in TROY, Pitt gets the picture pretty quickly; in ALEXANDER, it takes a little longer; and DiCaprio, facing a near-modern woman, has the longest wait.

(Of course we should nod to the gun scene from GOODFELLAS, because it's the same principle even though the implement is different and the stage they're at in their relationship is different. Mafia wife Lorraine Bracco has discovered that husband Ray Liotta is cheating on her (iirc) and puts a gun to his face in fury. Liotta is in the most danger of any of these guys, since he's facing a full-fledged 20th century woman. But—she pays for her near victory. No chivalry for her. He smacks her right off the bed and makes a couple of things clear to her about how you have to act when your husband is a professional killer.)

Now let's dig into the differences. In TROY, Pitt's Achilles is sick of himself and his life. He *wants* to die--and, of course, he knows that he's going to. It's just a matter of when and how. So he's genuinely cold and detached through the threat to his life. When Rose Byrne starts talking, he knows right away she's not going to hurt him, so he starts sneaking his hands up her arms so he can turn her over. He figures if she can't give him release from his hellish existence, she can give him release of a different kind. Six of one, half dozen of another. Big death or little. It's all the same to this damaged man. (TROY, by the way, is a grievously underrated film.)

In ALEXANDER, the knife really isn't the point; it's the oedipal drama. Oliver Stone's Alexander is a grotesque puppet of his parents' dysfunctions, urges and ambitions. His confrontation with his bride is not the most important part of the scene. It's only the moment when she proves herself similar enough to his fierce, violent mother to fulfill his incestuous fantasies. Next thing we know, we've got his shadow writhing on the wall while his mother speaks to him in voice-over, leaving no doubt as to what's really going on in his mind.

GANGS OF NEW YORK's knife-to-the-throat ballet is the most sexual because the most sublimated. Also, the power contest between them is heightened because they're socially more equal. DiCaprio isn't a great prince or conqueror, he's just a guy; Diaz isn't his captive or given bride, she's an independent professional criminal.

In each movie there comes the moment when it's clear that the woman's not going to strike. In TROY and ALEXANDER, the increasingly confident alpha males proceed to distract their opponents by kissing them. In TROY, this makes the gentle character played by Rose Byrne soften. In ALEXANDER, the hardier soul portrayed by Rosario Dawson starts thinking maybe this loser might be man enough for her after all and decides to ride the wave.

Things are quite different in GANGS. DiCaprio doesn't sway Diaz, who is too formidable an adversary for that. He waits for an opening and strikes. Then he has a score to settle, and he's also torn between feelings of aggression and tenderness for Diaz. Giving her a bit of the former makes him realize that it's really the latter he wants. When he pats her dress closed, he's not only trying to undo what has happened between them, he's in a sense protesting the entire dismal violent world they live in; he's reaching for something higher, if only for a moment.

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So I turned off the TV, closed my eyes, and sat with all that for a while. It's always the worlds within the actions, the stories inside the story, the secret poetry, that gets me.

Dear Mr. Slash's Ghostwriter,

Slash did not actually say, of that one drug counselor, "He was the kind of New Age cowboy that can only exist in the American Southwest." Did he.

(I am paraphrasing that from memory, but let me tell you, in a rock star autobiography, a line like that REALLY stands out.)

No, I bet that was you, Mr. Slash's Ghostwriter. I bet that was you, unable to subordinate your writerliness to Slash's voice any longer. You had to show the flag. "It's just one sentence," I bet you thought. "No one will notice. Besides, he did get that point across, just not in those exact words."

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Here's what fascinates me about musicians. When it comes to the guitar, Slash can and does say things like "the kind of New Age cowboy that can only exist in the American Southwest." In fact, that sort of phraseology is well below his standard level of musical articulation. Yet when he talks, you'd never know it. The two kinds of speech don't reinforce each other. They seem to compete.

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Everyone should run right out and buy Robert Walser's "Running With The Devil," his brilliant study of heavy metal. Anyone who wonders what happened to the classical tradition in Western music will be variously appalled or delighted to learn that it grew its hair, plugged in, (I'd say 'got smacked out of its mind' but that would not actually be a change from how things were before) and likes to talk about how this chick and her mom came over one night and fuckin' blew every single one of us, man. It was intense.

Seriously. Just as the scribbling monks preserved the texts of classical Greece through the Dark Ages, a bunch of intentional savages are--even as we speak--preserving and embellishing many of the core structures and forms of classical music. Walser proves this extensively. Ozzy Osbourne is, properly understood, a kind of classical composer.

In each case, the light is being carried by agents of darkness. The medieval monks were at the heart of the violently ignorant and superstitious brand of monotheism that made the Dark Ages so dark. They were the vanguard of the movement that nearly killed what they preserved. Similarly, today's heavy metal musicians do not exactly go around advertising themselves as the next link in the chain of western classical music. (At least not the commercial ones.) But that's what they are.

The next time you crank up "South of Heaven," think of Bach.

I'm holiday-neutral. Don't love 'em, don't hate 'em. We have some low-key traditions--spend Christmas and New Years with my parents, eating See's Nuts and Chews and listening to Christmas music, or, if the resident soon-to-be-nine-year-old is in the mood, German heavy metal. (When they don't understand the words, anything goes.) We decorate a tree, we eat lasagna.

This is more or less what we've been doing for the past thirty years. I think it's the low-key, offhand traditions that last the longest. Entropy theory and all that. What takes less effort to maintain will fall apart less fast. I think. I might have that backwards. But it seems to be true in our case.

I do remember, though, that the cats were always distinctly unamused by even the minimal to-do. Wrapping paper in particular just bothered the hell out of them. And tinsel--where did we get off putting it up on the tree before they were done killing it? And those kitschy multicolored lights we always laughed about. Did we have no consideration for how stressful those flashy things were for a predator's hypervigilant nervous system? (Post-traumatic stress disorder is *default* for animals, even domesticated ones.)

If I remember right, and I may not, they tended to retreat to my room on the big day. That was great, because then I could too. One of them in particular would basically spoon with me when I lay down, he'd snuggle in tight against my stomach and then stretch out.

Melanie, Helen, Fatty, Commander, Tink, Harry, Toughie...merry Christmas, wherever you all are.

Hunting birds in sunlit fields, let's say. Why not.

You might need to register to read this essay by Kelly Valen about her disastrous experience in a sorority.

Briefly, Valen was date-raped and got blamed for it. By young women who, she claims, "had sex in our chapter room, in hot tubs, behind rocks. They participated in communal bulimic binges and coordinated the termination of unwanted pregnancies." And don't get the idea that they were open and honest about any of that, either. They wore "Laura Ashley prairie dresses." Hypocrisy was the rule.

So Valen's victimization was in no way a *human* problem for them, but an *image* one. ("They said I deserved my fate and further complained that I had brought shame upon them all.") And for whatever reason--probably because she came from a different background--these lovely young ladies did not afford her the same insider protection that they gave each other. No, it became clear pretty quickly that they were going to scapegoat her instead. They began 'pretext-stopping' her--finding little reasons to discipline her, like the fact that she wore sweatpants instead of the Laura Ashley uniform. Then, in a group confrontation, they ganged up on her and kicked her out.

Valen says she never recovered. In fact, and I'm totally serious here, she sounds like she has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. "It has left me anxious and cowering to this day...I've...[avoided] any kind of group female intimacy. I begged off on baby groups when my children were born and haven't been able to bear book clubs, the charity circuit, women's fitness classes or the country club scene. Even finding myself among a group of...mothers at my children's sporting events can trigger that familiar anxiety." When, years later, she meets the sister who led the pack in the confrontation, "my flushed chest and forehead betrayed my inner turbulence." If you've read anything about PTSD, those passages will constitute a conga line of red flags.

I hope Valen gets professionally assessed to see if she does in fact have PTSD. It's treatable by knowledgeable therapists and there's no reason why she should have to live her life constantly reexperiencing that old confrontation every time she's around more than one person with a double-X. (Set of chromosomes, that is.)

Valen might also consider that being dissed by a bunch of alleged Laura-Ashley-wearing crypto-sportfuckers should not be a tragedy. It should be a badge of honor. I once read something somewhere (sorry, no idea who it was by) which said "Making certain kinds of enemies is a sign that you're on the right track and God loves you."

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Valen's bleak description of human relationships, however, was *right* up my alley. "The gossip, the comparisons, the withering critiques...shark-infested waters of our own design...don't have a clue where we stand with one another...at once allies and foes." Yep. Among *groups* of friends (as opposed to individual pairs), that is the rule. As Sartre tells us, "L'enfer, c'est les autres." ("Hell is other people.")

Or as the Buffyverse put it in "Once More, With Feeling," "Understand, we'll go hand in hand, but we'll walk alone in fear."

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Someone once told me she approached her social life like starting a business. She was determined to be popular because it was a kind of currency. It was power, it was protection. It carried its own hazards, but she decided she was just going to stay vigilant and manage them. She most certainly did not go forth starry-eyed like poor Valen, actually *believing* all that bullshit about sisterhood. Not this person. No, she assumed the worst and went from there.

But although she played the game, she played it for different reasons than many others. So she actually did make some real friendships. She has some treasures. Some jewels of the heart.

So do I, but I found them in totally opposite ways from her. I found them in corners, on edges, at margins.

People who were hiding, like me.

I was re-reading Linda Mason's "The Working Mother's Guide To Life" (it's geared more towards mothers who work outside the home, but I like it anyway) and came across her tips for how to make everything go more smoothly with your toddler. "Lay out clothes the night before. Pack lunches the night before." That kind of thing.

But how does that save you time? Or even effort? It doesn't. It just shifts the burden to a different part of the day.

Of course that alone can be a good thing. Personally, I function a lot better early in the morning. That's why I use a slow cooker. I'm happy to chop onions at 5am. Different story twelve hours later. So I chop at dawn. But--I am *not* saving time or effort.

And it doesn't stop me from running into the typical problems people face. On days when I have looming deadlines and/or a kid or husband wanting some extra time, I don't make my AM kitchen date. If I can make it up at lunchtime, I do. If I can't, it's takeout time.

Here's the thing. In order to fix that, I would not have to *do* anything or adopt any technique. In fact, I couldn't even if I wanted to. There is no technique that can save you from your priorities.

We like to think there is, but there's not.

For me to get a home-cooked dinner on the living room floor every night (where we sit with our plates and watch SpongeBob), I would have to make a decision that cooking would come first. That would mean sometimes interrupting either my work or my family. And I'm just not going to do that. I have a choice, and I made it.

Same thing with housekeeping.

I once had one of those fits of self-improvement that will visit themselves from time to time upon the American citizen. I read Julie Morgenstern's "Organizing from the Inside Out"--a fantastic book. She, in fact, tells her readers flat out that being organized is a huge time commitment, and warns people to ask themselves if they're really in the right circumstances to make the effort. I respect her for that.

But again, what struck me was...it's not about systems or processes or techniques. It's about *priorities.* Morgenstern became organized the minute she *wanted* to. *That* was when she began devoting herself to making sure everything in her life was stored in an accessible manner in a logical place. *Then* came the systems, processes and techniques. But without the initial determination, the priority, the shaking-your-fist-at-the-sky display of Nietzschean will while you vow that "As God is my witness, I will never spend half an hour searching for the can opener again," forget it.

Personally, I don't lose the can opener that often. When I do, it's pretty bad, but most of the time I only have to look one or two places. I'm good with it. YMMV.

As a girl, I used to deny that I had maternal instincts. I did not think babies were cute. I did not play with doll versions of them. I did not dream of the day when I would have a real one of my own.

But you know what I did love?

When my cat would come and sit on my lap.

When one of my cats, like Tink or Helen, would curl up on my lap, I would close my eyes and be still. For once, an end to the thinking and the doing. I would put my hand on this surprisingly heavy little being and go with them to someplace in between this world and the next.

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My baby girl was born nine winters ago. In the early dark, I would lower myself into the rocking chair with her. Heavy for her size and very still she was, and warm. I would rock her for hours. And drift. Gloomy as it was, the room seemed unreal--just like a summer day could fade away, years ago, when one of my small emissaries came. From a future I had so misunderstood.

At Blue Texan, I found this link to the obituary of Elizabeth Harding, a novelist, essayist, and founding editor (or as Jason Epstein put it, "presiding sensibility") of The New York Review of Books. She was ninety-one.

"Love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor" was how she described her New York life of the late 1930s and early 1940s. She lived with a gay man, she braved the smoke of the jazz clubs, she dropped out of her PhD program (as daring an act as entering it in the first place back in those days). She wrote.

Her marriage to poet Robert Lowell was long and troubled. She must have been humiliated by his act of airing her dirty laundry in his 1973 collection "The Dolphin," but she rose above it by refusing regret. Must have been the steel of that deliberate southern graciousness within her. She was a Kentucky girl.

Thank you, Blue Texan, for letting us know.

I was over at Shapely Prose and read fillyjonk's "Everyone's an expert and nobody's right." It attacks the perspective of people who think that weight control is simple (this is often called "calories in/calories out"), that overweight means a lack of self-discipline, and that fatness is somehow unhealthy or unnatural.

The "calories in/calories out" perspective, like most simplistic dogmas, lacks a sense of history. I spent years of my life sitting in art history classes, and by today's standards, pretty much everyone was a "fattie."

Raphael's "The Nymph Galatea" of 1512-14 is a freaking SEA of flesh. If those little putti flying around had to come down, put on clothes, and go to school today, their parents would get fingers pointed at them for letting them be "fat." And look at the fleshy arms, rounded stomachs, and ripe apple-faces of the women. As for the men--they're muscular, but they ain't skinny; they've got heft and belly.

Believe me, that is not an exception.

Feast your eyes on the perfectly rounded face and deep, smooth flesh of Caravaggio's "Bacchus."

I must warn anyone with a fear of "fat" that they might want to avert their eyes from Rembrandt's Artemis.

Similar warnings in effect for his Danae. This one was always one of my favorites--look how Rembrandt, the *real* master of light, shades and illuminates Danae's form.

Titian would never have been able to render the texture of Europa's flesh like this if this wasn't what people really looked like then, if he hadn't *seen* what he depicted. Photorealism, eat your heart out.

I could go on. Believe me. If you sit in an art history class, you learn that the well-upholstered body was the *norm.* Not the exception. The artists of the past took for granted the rounded arm, the rounded cheek, the rounded chin, the rounded stomach. This is how people *were* back then. These artists *saw* flesh as soft, and you can see they loved it for its softness, its depth of texture, its ability to curve to the light and hence create shadow. Flesh gave these painters something to *do.*

And as the images click by, hour after hour, class after class, you inevitably realize--this is our natural state. This is how humans are. We're not skinny. We're like otters and seals, we're voluptuous.

(Yes, guys too.)

So the next time you see something about the "obesity epidemic," just consider it a return to normal.

But when it comes to professors who long for the manly pagan virtues, and are therefore sorry that the movie version of BEOWULF shows the tracks of "the pale Galilean" in its hero's guilty psyche, something has to be done.

Philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma nods in the direction of enlightenment when he says that "our more gentle, egalitarian and diplomatic society" does not, of course, approve of the "social hierarchies, patriarchy, and chauvinism of older honor cultures." But, he nonetheless argues, these honor cultures had "the strong men of action who always seem necessary to save the family or tribe or village."

Oh really! So it was actually ancient Norsemen that discovered penicillin, invented vaccines for smallpox and polio, put human boots on the moon, and got computers talking to each other. Not us faggy, ineffectual moderns. 'Cause it's "brute strength and tribal loyalty" that gets it done, not cleverness and cooperation. Glad we got that cleared up.

But Asma sheds a tear for pagan pride. Proud pagan men used to "fight, protect, take, and defend." Yes, they were men, they were MEN, he tells us, "do[ing] the things they were built by nature and nurture to do." But oh no! Then came "the counterintuitive assertion that 'Blessed are the meek.' Humility and submission became praiseworthy postures." Oh, what a harsh on our Conan the Barbarian buzz.

Okay first of all. Men of the Christian era did not exactly stop "fighting, protecting, taking and defending." And "humility and submission" were rather swiftly reserved for women, gays and the poor--but then, with the exception of homosexuals, those groups were SOL under the pagans too. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But I have to say...as a freely chosen ideal rather than a posture one is beaten into...WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HUMILITY AND SUBMISSION? If our goddamn world leaders would show a little of it, we might not be killing ourselves and our planet quite so badly. I think humility and submission is a *great* idea for those big pagan strongmen. As the world-renowned philosopher Spiderman (or was it Batman?) put it: "With great power comes great responsibility." (No, it was Spiderman. Batman said "There is no knowledge which is not power.") Ancient pagan strongmen *sucked* at responsibility. So have two millennia worth of monotheistic rulers, but at least there is the *ideal* that they should be humble.

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Pride versus humility?

Look at the Iliad. When is anybody going to point out that the big humanizing epiphany of Achilles--"ZOMG, other people hurt just like I do! When I killed Hector, I took him away from people who loved him!"--is completely pathetic? Emotionally, the man is at the level of a three-year-old. These are the wages of the strongman ethos. Or, as Asma puts it, "excess and immoderation." Yeah. You could say that.

Jesus, by contrast, was a true hero. He didn't start any wars. He didn't take any captives. No women went into slavery on his account. He didn't aggrandize his ego. He tried, in his way, to free people. When his disciples knelt before him, he raised them up and called them his friends. Later, he himself knelt and washed their feet. He crossed tribal lines rather than reinforcing them; he wanted Jews and Samaritans, Romans and zealots to get along. His casting out of demons, his raising of the dead, and his talk of worshiping, not in temples, but "in spirit and in truth," can be read as powerful symbols of escape from emotional dysfunction, resignation and superstition. When his actions angered the powers that be, he did not meet them with violence, but with rational argument; remember his testimony at his show trial. And when the moment came, he had the courage to die.

Much as the Church itself has done to stamp out and kill that Jesus in the name of its own power, that Jesus is there in the Bible like a ghost in our culture's machine. And that Jesus, the Jesus of egalitarianism, reconciliation, cooperation, rational argument, and personal liberty and happiness, *is* modernity prefigured.

I will take that over brute force and tribal loyalty any day. Manly pagan heroes are good for certain kinds of fantasy. But in terms of what sort of world I'd rather live in, well, I'm still waiting for the Kingdom, my dear Jesus. I'm still waiting for the Kingdom, even though I know that it's in me.

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In the archives, though, they're not.

We live near a cemetery.

Sometimes in the summer, my daughter and I will walk over and look at the stones. She's at that age where she's fascinated by people's dates. By the shape of life.

Last night, we were driving past our little city of the dead when I saw colored lights. I looked, and someone had put a tiny Christmas tree complete with lights near someone's grave.

I like to think it made the recipient smile. It sure did me.

They had their own beauty, those purple nights of streetlights bouncing off the clouds.

The moment they set upon me is always the same. My body turns into an empty elevator shaft and I sink down inside and disappear.

Once I make it back up, I discover I'm under new management.

When, usually a year or two later, they finish with me, I feel them wash out of me like dark water.

Phobias too. They'll land on me like buzzards and start pecking, then decide they've had enough of me and fly off for tastier carrion. And what do you know, I can breathe again, or drive again. Who knows why? Best not to ask. Best to just leave it alone. "Keep your head down," advises Lyle Lovett in a song for our coming totalitarian times. "For if you do, they'll never know."

Food. Sometimes I eat more and sometimes I eat less. My body waxes and wanes like a slow moon, taking years to change states. I don't know why.

Inside myself, I'm restless; outwardly, I'm still.

I've been told I don't feel like I own my life. But I own my mind. I own these words.

One of the neat things about studying art history is doing comparisons. Very often, in an exam, an instructor will throw up two slides by different artists which have some major differences and some less-obvious, but significant, similarities. (There are *always* less-obvious but significant similarities. The instructor would not make the comparison otherwise.)

Your job is to dig into all this as hard as you can in the time you've got. You learn a particular way of thinking pretty quickly--it's important to get at the similarities first, because those are going to be more elusive but more telling. Make a quick nod to the most glaring and undeniable differences, but then get right going on the similarities, which will actually bring the differences back around into relief as you analyze them.

Once you've learned to think that way, you can carry it over to pretty much any area you're interested in. (E. Annie Proulx and Stephen King!)

In fact, once you've learned to think that way, it's hard to *stop* thinking that way. Your mind starts automatically searching for bizarre yet potentially fruitful comparisons. Odilon Redon's "Cyclops," for example, and Courbet's "Man with a Pipe." They are, after all, both portraits, albeit one is of a mystical giant looking over the figure of a reclining nude from a distance, while the other one is of the real Courbet himself and is close and immediate. But the Cyclops has the same sensitive bearing, the same sense of deep psychology and personal resonance, as the more realistic Courbet. And the more realistic Courbet still indulges in a self-mythologization which brings us back to the legitimately mythical Cyclops.

(You'd never use that particular comparison for an exam, of course--it's too out-there. But just for your own thinking, it's a good exercize.)

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Around 5am today, my mind got going on "Rocket Queen," the schizophrenic final track from Guns N' Roses' 1987 barnstormer "Appetite for Destruction," versus "Moment With You," the obscure revenge song which haunted the forcibly-outed George Michael's 1998 collection "Ladies and Gentlemen."

And see, that's exactly the kind of thing you want for a good comparison. It's nice to have a little bit of asymmetry in there...a minor work from Matisse, for example, versus a famous but not cliched one by Picasso.

Let us dutifully present the context: "Rocket Queen" is a dubious tribute to a female friend of GNR singer Axl Rose, while "Moment With You" is an even more dubious tribute to the police officer Michael accused of having entrapped him into sexual behavior in a Los Angeles bathroom.

Differences: duh, one is a screaming nail-gun of hard rock, while the other is a distant, mournful slow-disco pop track.

Similarities: Both songs negotiate sexual encounters. Both songs function as self-portraits of the singers, giving a snapshot of their world, or at least their sexual world. In Broadway-musical terms, these are the "third songs," the "I want" songs. "Here I am, and you're a rocket queen," blares Rose. "Hey, this won't take much time," murmurs Michael. "We won't touch, we'll just wait for signs."

Right there in the similarities, you can start to see the deeper differences. Rose in this song inhabits a fantasy world which he happened to have been making every effort to live out (the legend with this song being that he actually screwed someone in the studio to get the female-orgasm track). But Michael's stripped-down, resigned narrative is the antithesis of fantasy. Nobody has Rose's kind of aggressive, self-glorifying, public-persona fantasies about cruising men in toilets.

Rose self-consciously emphasizes his decadence ("I've seen everything imaginable...I've had everything that's tangible"), whereas Michael doesn't have to. The circumstances pretty much speak for themselves. What *he* does, impossibly, is bring the sweetness of his early work to this bleak place. It's there in his sad voice. It's there in his plaintive words, "I wanted that moment with you."

Which brings us to another interesting difference. Rose, for most of "Rocket Queen," is lit up with fury. Michael isn't. Which is odd. Michael's got a reason to be; he's writing a poison valentine to the man who he believes deliberately entrapped him. Yet what comes through in the song is not anger. Instead, there's regret, sweet sadness, sly backhanded compliments ("what a way with your hands you had"). Loneliness. ("We don't touch, do we, baby.")

But Rose, as furious and badass as he is throughout his own song, eventually comes around to a poignant sense of loneliness as well. He stops showing off and starts thinking. ("I hate to see you walking out there, out in the rain.")

And so he resolves on a note of reconciliation and redemption....whereas "Moment With You" doesn't really resolve at all. It fades. It takes all of its hurt, regret and unfulfilled desire and slips away.

They were both outlaws in their time, Rose and Michael, though Rose looked the part and Michael didn't. The culture winked at Rose's kind of bad boy, though he'd racked up numerous accusations and rumors that he was capable of hurting people. It gave no quarter to Michael's, no matter if their only weapons were words. Rose felt like he had something to brag about. Michael felt like he had something to hide.

Rose envisioned contact.

Michael, the opposite ("We won't touch").

Yet we read what they're talking about as the same experience.

That's the most interesting conundrum of all.

Let me put you in the old green car with me and my dad thirty years ago. I'm in third grade. He's driving me to visit my beloved school-friend Perry. In the hospital.

This is not our first visit. It won't be the last. Perry's injury is not the fleeting, easily fixable kind. It's not the kind that's fixable at all.

(Obviously, Perry is not his real name.)

Oh, let me pick the best day. Let me pick the day that I saw Perry walk again. There he was in his pajamas, walking on his own two legs down the hall. I ran to him with a scream and we threw ourselves in each other's arms.

#

Some months before, Perry had suffered a catastrophic accident that left him brain-damaged.

I was protected from the full horror of this by my age. I couldn't see what it was going to mean for the future. Besides, as far as I was concerned, Perry wasn't different at all. He didn't talk the same...for quite some time, he didn't talk at all...but that didn't matter to me. It was his spirit I'd loved. It was the love in him I'd loved. That, if anything, was heightened by the stripping away of everything else. Yes, he was still Perry in every way that mattered.

I saw no loss. I saw no real change. I only saw my friend.

When he walked again at last, my heart burst with nothing but joy.

I never looked behind me to see what my father must have been struggling to hide. I can't imagine being a grownup in that situation--learning of the accident, knowing its full extent, knowing that a dear, kind boy had essentially been robbed of his future in a single moment. I don't know how my father, seeing the bitter triumph of those halting steps, kept from pounding the walls and screaming at God. He would have taken it on himself if he could have. He would have put himself in Perry's place in that accident. Without blinking. Without ever looking back.

He saw what was coming. I didn't.

#

I gave you the best day. Now here's the worst.

I'm in fourth grade now. Perry has just come back to school. As a special-ed kid.

He's standing in front of me on the playground in a yellow raincoat. We are ringed by unfriendly eyes. He's looking at me in confusion.

The heightening of his love is no longer a blessing. It's a curse. People are laughing at him for following me around. Worse, I don't know what to do. I don't understand what he wants, except to be with me. But how? We can't play. We can't talk. In the hospital, it was different; all we needed to do was just be together.

We can't anymore.

"No!" I tell him. "No. No."

That...he understands. He doesn't understand why. He never will. He'll never know it's killing me. That's okay, I deserve that. I deserve to be the bad guy. I *am* the bad guy.

He gives up, his last act of love to me, and goes back to the other special ed kids.

They don't keep the special ed kids in one school, they shift them around. He'll be gone soon.

#

This is why I refuse to learn lessons from things. I refuse to believe things happen for a reason. It's a lie. What reason could there have been for my friend to lose so much in one instant? What reason could there have been for him to have to endure losing me too? And hey, why was I left on my own in a situation where I didn't know how to handle him? I was nine years old. Why didn't one of the teacher aides that the government still paid for back then come and do something? It's not like nobody knew we were friends, that I had visited him every week in the hospital. Couldn't somebody anticipate that I might need a little help relating to him in these different circumstances, and with all these people pointing fingers at us and laughing?

Maybe they thought love would conquer all. *Here's* a lesson for ya: it didn't.

But though defeated, it didn't die. It still hasn't. I love you, Perry.

And the day you walked again will always be like new to me.

Do I even need to tell you that she's nowhere close?

"No, honey," I said. Again.

"My thighs are big," she complained.

First of all, no they're not. And in this case, that's important, because it goes to the heart of her self-perception. She is perceiving something about herself that is objectively not true. (She still eats, though, by the way, and is completely pleasure-driven in her eating. And I intend to keep it that way. Oh yes I do.)

What her thighs *are* is *packed with muscle* from five years of--and I know this is the root of the problem, but she loves it so much--dancing. Pound for pound, my daughter could kick your ass inside out. But how do I tell her that in a good way? In this culture, "strong" or "powerful" are code for "fat" when applied to women's bodies, and undesirable in and of themselves.

I pretty much want to kill everybody. Certainly everybody who has ever had anything to do with any kind of visual media in the 20th century, because the photographic image is the root of this entire evil. Where paint is generous to flesh, welcoming it for its infinite variations of texture and light-play, photography is hostile. Mechanical as it is, photography worships the hard, the flat, the absolute. It *can be made* to love the softness of our natural otter-shape, but given its choice, it would have us all be Futurist machines. The more we started to photograph ourselves, particularly in moving images, the thinner and harder we wanted to be.

#

I love Marinetti's honesty, by the way, in that Futurist manifesto:

"We want to glorify war...militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman."

His bitterest enemy couldn't have said it better.

The beautiful ideas which kill. And contempt for woman.

Notice that children were so far beneath Marinetti's grandiosity that he couldn't even be bothered to mention them.

#

Despite the wishes of Marinetti, modernity has been more than kind to us girls. It's given us physical and mental freedoms that the lovely women of our painted past couldn't have dreamed of. But the thing about female existence, and you may have noticed this, is that it doesn't work. Every dream, when achieved by women, becomes a nightmare.

Modernity mitigates but cannot change this fact.

Protection from the hazards of combat and toil long ago became gender apartheid.

Yet the chance to work rapidly became the obligation to work. Many of us are torn away from our babies when they're three months old.

The chance to be active and strong, and glorified in beautiful films and photographs, became the obligation to be skinny.

But let's be clear that the size-acceptance crowd should be careful what they wish for. The minute we all decide fat is beautiful will be the minute girls start getting force-fed like in Mauritania. Yes, force-fed, as in "Of course they cry--they scream." That being a candid admission in this article, made without shame or remorse, by a woman who runs a force-feeding farm.

This appalling practice is starting to be curtailed...but not exactly in an inspiring way. "We're fed up of fat women here," says a man in the article. Great! Wonderful.

Let's keep going. Notice how modesty, in the parts of the world which went that way, became forced covering.

Yet the cultures where women *can* be beautiful are, yes, cultures where they *have to be.* From corsets, crinolines and girdles to cosmetic surgery to TV shows where loudmouths tell you what to wear, we are hounded.

Which I guess is what the world has always done to foxes. Hounded them, heh.

We're prey animals. Yes inherently. Which is what causes everything to go wrong. Every dream to become a nightmare every freedom to become an obligation every liberty a cage. Our tragedy is that this does not curtail the depths of our souls.

But of course that's also our triumph. Nothing. Can measure or contain our souls.

#

I quoted these words from Lyle Lovett before, and I'm going to quote them again: "Said disillusioned keep your head down, for if you do they'll never know. They'll have no answers to their questions, and they will have to let you go."

We'll fall silent into the arms of the protective kind of secrecy. We'll cheat cruelty where we can and steal happiness everywhere.

I brought out some cookies this morning, and my baby girl and I ate them for our breakfast with a smile.

I was thinking about my old cat Harry today.

Yeah, it's 'day' for me already.

Anyhow, his full name was 'Eve Harrington Cat.' As in the Bette Davis movie "All About Eve," which is the story of an understudy who usurps an actress's leading role. Harry kind of snuck into our lives the same way. I think he was the last indoor cat my parents and I took in...well, Toughie moved indoors eventually, after a year or so of living on our porch. But Harry was the last one we took in specifically as an indoor cat. I think we already knew I was allergic, so taking him in was like having one last chocolate on Christmas Eve.

Harry was our second stray, but the first one who had lived on his own for a long period of time before finding us. Or that's what we assumed, based on the fact that he was our first and only cat who could really hunt.

And I mean really. Harry didn't fuck around. I once came downstairs in the middle of the night to...

Okay, this is why I had my husband install a jump. Be advised that I am now going to talk about formerly living animals whose livingness was terminated by Harry. If that bothers you, stay away.

If, on the other hand, you've owned a farmhouse for forty years, you *love* to hear about cats killing vermin, you're fascinated to see that such behavior could take place in town as well as on a 10-acre country spread, and in fact, you think Harry might actually *be* that stone-cold stalker who lived in your barn for a few years back in the early 80s before moving on...

follow me.

Who was your first lover? Was he young and corn-fed but sly behind the eyes? Was he frankly older and dissipated? Did he want to trade his years for yours?

Maybe he was someone where they'd drag you out and kill you if they knew—you, or him. Or *her.* Strange fruit waiting for the tree. Did you feel the skull behind the skin?

Was it stupid? Did you do it just to get it done? Did you *wish* you had that clear a reason? Did you even want to? Or did you just tell yourself you did because everyone else seemed to. You didn't have the nerve to say no. And maybe, given the circumstances, that was for the best.

Or was it long-coming, with a friend. Did you breach each other in a bed of years. The years of your friendship. The years you'd waited and secretly known what would come (and how, but just not when). Was there laughter. A slight pang, knowing that there would be no sudden strangers for you now. But a sweet one, because you've got what they can only dream of. You have to pick your dreams. The cost of this one is a cost you understand.

Or maybe that was actually the *end* of your journey together, your last act of love to each other, and now you were free to see what lay ahead of you.

Did you feel like you were ugly? Have you figured out yet how nuts that was? Are you going to figure out that how you feel about yourself now is still nuts?

Are you going to get your nails done? Do something about them finally? You've never been able to manage them. You don't understand how the others do it.

Shut the door out there and turn around. It's dark in here, isn't it. Do you like it or do you hate it? Do you know your way around?

Where does your crazy live? Have you bumped up against it in this blind place? Have you held its hand? Has it held yours? Do you get it from one particular side of your blood? One particular person?

#

I know how I got mine. From whom.

I barely speak to him these days. Even though I admire him. *Because* I admire him. Because I know what I owe him, both good and bad. I know what he gave me and I know what he took from me, with those words of his, and I thank him for both.

But I thank him by not speaking to him all that much these days.

It's going to be him and me at the end, though, after the ice is gone and the gates have come down. Just like it was at the beginning. I will put my head down, I will smile, I will invoke our years, and I will become his passenger again. And under his red wings I will survive. He will do this for me if I need him to. For me and my own passenger. He will do it even if he's dead. He'll find a way. He'll rise up in my blood. He'll take me over. His work will be complete. I will become him. I will become his terrible mother.

I already have. The other side of the clan would never talk this way. Their crazy is a whole different kind. I've got *his.*

I've got wings.

#

Who was your first? Did he see all this in you? Did he want to set it free?

This morning I sat in the car and watched snow collect against the spot where the window joins the door.

The crystals were exactly that--barbed, spiky, adamant. It was cold enough that they kept their individual shapes. It was like watching unforeseen alien rocks pile up. Cruel rocks for a planet even worse than ours.

#

Okay.

I see snow as tiny spikes, I see female existence as unworkable, I remember my cat for his kills, and all I wanna know is where your crazy lives. On this almost-worst-of-all-possible worlds.

Would you believe I'm actually really quite cheerful? Louisa, tell them I'm really quite cheerful.

Of course that probably doesn't help. What's worse? Someone who reels with horror from the tiny spikes and the dark epiphanies, or someone who's actually kind of excited at figuring all that out because it explains so much? Someone who can enjoy a hot fudge sundae while staring at the skull.

The snow was beautiful. It really was. The tiny spikes, barbed like strange arrows, were beautiful.

Enough to kill me.

The first thing I did was become not-myself. I became a man, a postman in fact, a pale one with a face no one had ever seen.

He took the pills and got out of his clothes. Onto his back he pasted his "forwarding stamps," which in this particular dream were a very normal everyday item. Crinkly and dark iridescent blue, they were meant to ensure that his body would be "forwarded." Everyone knew where. It was so obvious, no one needed to say it or even think it.

Decorated with plenty of forwarding stamps, our well-drugged mailman then walked around behind his windowless white apartment building to a compost shitpile. He climbed on top of it. In his world, this was a meaningful and accepted suicide procedure. He arranged himself in a fetal position.

At that point I separated myself out from him. It wasn't that I didn't want to finish committing suicide, it was that I didn't like how I was getting there. I felt sick from all the pills, the shit was kind of gross, and I could no longer ignore that there were some ethical problems with taking myself out of my family. I was going to have to back out and Embrace Life. So I walked away from the postman, who, as far as I know, completed his death and has been properly forwarded.

The problem was that, when I was him, I had swallowed the pills too. I went up to one of those vague not-really-anyplaces that you often see in dreams which was meant to approximate an office. Without ever actually using a telephone, I called 911.

"Mumble mumble mumble," said the indifferent dispatcher.

I waited.

Nothing more.

"Um...what did you say?" I humbly asked.

"I said check into the Jerry," said the now-very-annoyed dispatcher, who hung up.

Fortunately, I was too sedated to be alarmed by the lack of help. I walked barefoot down an unpaved road that was simultaneously dusty and muddy, with the worst features of both. I passed rows of front desks like old western saloons. Cosmetic-surgery front desks, private-dressing-service front desks, electroshock-therapy front desks, a front desk where Sandra Bullock in a black-and-white tennis dress was freaking out because she would never be as thin as "they" wanted her to be.

I came to a feminist suicide recovery front-desk where the clerk offered me a 500% discount on part of my stay. (I think it had something to do with the second weekend.) When I declined the discount, the clerk said "Are you sure?" and I realized I was being stupid and took it. The desk clerk handed me two tennis balls and a racket and pointed me towards a row of mud-brown courts with broken nets. This seemed to be the plan for detoxing me.

At that point my husband arrived to visit me. He was not particularly thrilled by what I had done (and he'd found out about it how...?), but was focused on the tennis-intensive recovery ahead.

Someone gave me a tiny, almost doll-sized glass of orange juice.

Then I realized I was going to have to explain to my mother why I was in a feminist suicide recovery clinic. I was so embarrassed by that that I woke up.

#

It was a *long* time before I got back to sleep.

For some reason, I couldn't get into the mailbox for a few days. I particularly apologize to Dee, who emailed me re "Size Acceptance Through Art History 101" way back on the 13th (which is the Pleistocene era in bloggy terms).

Okay, long story. I was going to post nice things about my husband, but he was embarrassed, so I lost *two* perfectly good posts for today, and then I had all these errands to run, and meanwhile I'm not getting any of my *other* work done, so I'm just dropping in to say that I won't be dropping in today.

I have been reading size-acceptance blogs and CR blogs. I have read Junkfood Science and this post from CR practitioner skinnybitch, who used to be a science writer.

The Junkfood Science lady *and* skinnybitch each explain, from a scientific perspective, why all that pro-diet stuff/all that pro-obesity stuff is wrong and why being fat is actually better for you/being fat is actually horrible for you.

Seriously. They both use exactly the same "but how was the research done and what kind of spin did the writers use" approach to demonstrate why being fat is actually better for you/being fat is actually horrible for you.

Whaaaatever.

What *does* seem to be clear is that diet and exercise have a much more limited effect on health than you might think. If you read Junkfood Science's post of 12/17/07 (all permalinks are currently broken) and in particular click on the 'anti-aging diet' link inside it, it certainly looks like eating your veggies and going to the gym won't make you younger on the inside, or make you live longer, or make you not get cancer or heart disease. But at least anecdotally, they *can* make you feel better right here and now on a day-to-day basis. And who knows, maybe that's enough. But on the other hand, if you're busy...

This whole dialogue is ridiculously puritan anyway. Like an adult child of dysfunction, our country cannot shake free of its childhood.

My daughter was not feelin' it this morning. School was getting to her.

I explained to her the fundamental truth of our society, which is that school exists to train us for life in our culture. It's so we can get up when we have to get up, go where we have to go, do what we have to do, and deal with whoever's there, day after day.

Hearing the blunt reality didn't help, though, and I realized that this was *not* about properly understanding and contexting her experience (which tends to be the be-all and end-all for me). This was more about pent-up emotion.

"She needs," I thought, "a Two-Minutes Hate."

You know, the thing in George Orwell's '1984' where everyone stands in front of the screen and screams and shakes their fists and throws things in an orgy of rage against whatever they're told to. It's a means of social control, but one which does provide stress release for the people it's used on.

Now of course you don't want to *call* it a 'hate.' Nor do you want to use it, as Big Brother did, for scapegoating. Those things are, shall we say, doubleplus-ungood. But just as a pure release of angst...there's a baby in the bathwater.

I turned to my girl and said "We're going to have a Two-Minute FRUSTRATION."

And for two minutes, I whipped up her frustration ("More! More! More! Yeah!") and she screamed and hollered gibberish which was meant to stand for the "really bad words" in her mind. And lo and behold, she was (scratchy-throated but) smiling at the end.

George Orwell: parenting expert.

The extremely disturbing thoughts this engenders about the apparent parallels between childhood and living in a supertotalitarian state shall be left for another time.

Who recently ended her sellout 5-year Vegas run.

You'll notice if you click on that link that her closing night was compared, unfavorably, to Bjork's debut elsewhere in the city. "Humph!" goes the brief article. "Celine Dion sells out, while Bjork doesn't."

Now...Bjork's lackluster ticket sales *are* infuriating. She's a real original and she deserves better. But...in what universe is she even in competition with Celine Dion? It's apples and oranges.

I can understand being angry that a unique presence like Bjork doesn't get as much attention as she should.

But getting angry at *Dion* for it? As if Dion took what was rightfully Bjork's? Um, no. No, that makes no sense.

While reading closing-night notices for Dion, I found this epic and fascinating critical struggle with Dion and what she represents. (Its highlight is the brilliant, brilliant point that, whereas Dion may be schmaltzy, so is everyone else: "punk rock is anger's schmaltz." Man, I *loved* that. I had to sit with it for five whole minutes, just running it around in my head. "Punk rock is anger's schmaltz." That's beautiful.)

So anyhow. The article comes from the perspective, shared by many cultural gatekeepers, that the Celine Dion phenomenon is one of the worst misfortunes ever to have visited itself upon late twentieth century popular music. It reviews a book--an entire book--in which a critic manfully decides to question this assumption and forces himself to listen to Dion's music.

First of all, it's really shocking that a professional critic should only now learn to "admire a well-put-together taste set that's alien to our own." Shouldn't the ability to do that be a prerequisite for the job? Shouldn't a critic be able to say something like, for example, "I personally don't like the Young British Artist movement, but I can see that this installation piece by Tracey Emin perfectly expresses its goals and does so with a dash of self-aware humor, and is therefore a successful work"?

And this is important. Because here's the thing: if you're talking MOR power pop, *Celine Dion is pretty damn good.* People who are angry *at her genre* and take it out *on her* don't seem to understand that. If I was stranded on a desert island, I could do a lot worse than being stuck with a couple of Celine Dion CDs. I would be very grateful to end up with songs like "It's All Coming Back To Me Now," "Seduces Me," "Taking Chances" (especially since she quotes one of my all-time favorites, Eurythmics' "Here Comes The Rain Again"--and very effectively too). Yes, even "My Heart Will Go On." It's not my favorite, but I most certainly do not hate it. I reserve that for songs like Rod Stewart's "Love Touch," the inexplicably heavy airplay of which, back in its time, left me permanently scarred.

I guess the other thing is that some people are bothered by the open emotion ("schmaltz") in Dion's work. She's not distant or ironic. She's not small or self-effacing, with one of those pinched little-girl voices. She doesn't do quirky songs about private angst at 2am. She's operatic, actually, going big every time. I don't see why people who listen to heavy metal, another "big" and operatic form, don't appreciate that. To the extent that I like Celine Dion, it's *because of*, not despite, my history of cranking Pantera's "Cemetery Gates" and Queensryche's "Suite Sister Mary" at every opportunity.

So I appreciate her and I don't think the criticism she's gotten has been fair. Particularly not if it's come from people provinicially locked into their own "taste set," who have to listen to her music for several months to train themselves to evaluate its merits independently of whether they personally like it.

#

And there was one detail about that last Vegas show that really got me.

Dion refused to cry.

We fixate on differences between us that aren't real (language, ethnicity, most aspects of culture) and deny differences between us that are (individual physiology, personality).

The English edition of Der Spiegel online has an impassioned, eloquent and moving response to the UNICEF photo of the eleven-year-old Afghan child bride.

I loved this essay agree with it wholeheartedly. "Love, tenderness, beauty, individuality and respect...human rights" must be fought for. Anywhere we see a human being's future or dreams being truncated, we should intervene--sensitively and respectfully, but definitely. Because, as Johann Hari put it in this excellent column, these are *not* "western" values. They are *human* values. They occur spontaneously in human hearts everywhere, no matter the culture. They have always been there, at war with our more brutal side. They are as human as our inhumanity. They are native to every land. Whatever, wherever and whenever, I'm on their side and I want them to win.

#

But this essay, which I love, mischaracterizes--even as it embodies--cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism does *not* mean--or it's not supposed to mean--that you "approve" of everything. What it means is that you try to understand *why* things are the way they are in a given culture. Instead of *just* being outraged, you stop and think.

Leon de Winter does exactly that. He understands the child-bride system perfectly well, and he concedes implicitly that, if he were in the same circumstances, he'd probably do the same thing. ("The man in the image is oblivious of his wrongdoing. He's only doing what his forefathers did. Sticking to traditions increases the chances of survival.")

*That* is relativism: *understanding.* Not condoning.

For example. Boy, this is going to be touchy. Please understand that I mean no disrespect, I'm not judging anyone's choices, and I'm *not* trying to make an equivalency between the two practices. To the contrary, I'm deliberately going to pick a practice that we in our culture find totally normal and benign and even necessary.

So.

A case can be made that the common practice of putting young children in day care is cruel.

Very often, young children--toddlers in particular--are deeply distressed to have to separate from their parents day after day. In fact, mothers and fathers are often very unhappy about this too. Scenes of tears on both sides are common at day care centers.

An outsider who sees this level of unhappiness day after day could very much be forgiven for concluding that we are a culture of barbarians.

They could look upon our many justifications of the practice as nothing more than shockingly callous rationalizations. ("After a few minutes, your child will get distracted and stop crying, so no worries!!" "There's no proof that it damages kids in the long term!!")

But if they threw that in our faces, we would say "Wait a minute! You don't understand the situation! It's more complicated than that, and besides, there *is* no proof that it damages kids in the long term!"

But. Nobody denies that, very often, a lot of unhappiness surrounds this practice.

We are willing to ignore that unhappiness because we feel it serves a more important purpose--earning money, self-actualization, whatever.

And most importantly: nobody, but nobody, sees it as an oppression issue. We concede that children forced to separate from their parents against their will can be unhappy, that they can experience "separation anxiety," but nobody sees it as a violation of their rights or spirit or humanity or will. That kind of language just doesn't get used. No, you see, it would have to be something *serious* to count as that, not just forcing them to part from their mothers yet again despite them pleading not to.

I think you see my point.

Our culture forces kids to do things that make them (sometimes really, really) unhappy too. Not things that are quite as drastic as getting married at eleven...but to a screaming two-year-old trying to cling to his mommy as she pries him off her to go to work, you better believe it *feels* that drastic. I mean, why the hell do you think the kid is screaming? Some random reflex? No, the kid's *heart is breaking.* As far as it's concerned, with its extremely limited cognition, its world is collapsing in that moment.

And hey, how about this? I ran across this during some routine work-avoidance a few days ago and my jaw fell open in horror--not because it was so unusual, but because it was exactly the opposite. It's a story about the bullying that Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) endured at school. "'People would push me around, say they were going to beat me up after school, chase me.'"

Yet she had to go back, day after day. And just live with it.

We do not question the mandate that all kids must go to school. When some of them experience that level of abuse, we just sort of say "Oh, that's too bad." Noises are made, but nothing really changes, and nobody questions the system. It would not occur to anyone to suggest that Victoria Beckham was really, truly being damaged by this. Made *unhappy,* sure. But damaged? Her integrity violated? To the point where someone should have taken her out of school? To the point where someone should have *closed the school entirely and all others like it,* given that it fostered such brutality? Um, no. Nobody would ever suggest *that* as a solution. It's impossible to even conceive of.

But someone from a different world would suggest *exactly* that. It's the most logical thing to suggest. If this system of mass education produces large numbers of routine sufferers like Victoria Beckham--and indeed it does--then away with it!

At which point all our minds melt down, because if we didn't have this system, what *would* we have? What would we be? How would we adjust, how would we live? If you pull that one thread, the entire thing starts to unravel, taking everything down with it and causing a huge mess.

Do you see the point of relativism now?

And do you see how blind we are to our own forms of barbarism? Don't get me wrong, I'll take our forms over the forms you see in Afghanistan any day. But we are, in many ways, a staggeringly brutal culture. Our own yearning after beauty proves it. We wouldn't love it so urgently if it wasn't so imperiled in our own world.

Take Beckham's childhood suffering again. How can "love, tenderness, beauty, individuality and respect" exist in such a life as anything other than a sad little dream? It can't. We have to acknowledge that such a childhood would have been every bit as bleak as that Afghan child bride's.

We believe that it was redeemed because she got to grow up to be Posh Spice. In spite of everything, she got to choose what to do with her life, and in her case, her choices appear to have worked out pretty well. That, in our culture, fixes everything.

And again, I do agree that it's far better than the alternative--a bleak existence where you do *not* get to choose to be Posh Spice.

Humanity has won some significant victories in our world and these need to be protected and shared.

But humanity, in our world, also has a ways to go. Working out how to get there without causing other groups (like mothers) to suffer and lose is our challenge.

Hey. If we'd thought about that thirty years ago, instead of being so eager to give the Soviets a Vietnam in Afghanistan, maybe that eleven-year-old would be in school today.

And maybe her daughter, born twenty years from now after her mother would have been solidly educated and established in a career, could have experienced the *solution* to school--the next, more humane evolution.

Too bad, isn't it.

It started around 5am. He threw his hand out in sleep and I captured it. Crushed it to my face and breathed his rough skin.

We drifted like that for a while and then he stirred. Opened out his fingers like the arms of a sea anemone and brushed my cheek.

Such a simple, simple act, a caress, a tender caress. We call it that because sometimes prosody is the only alternative to blithering "RAINFALL SPARKLES STARSHINE SNOWFLAKES TRAILING SUCKLING yeah you know that feeling you get of your guts caving in when someone suckles you that's simultaneously heaven and hell and it means LOVE!!!"

A dedicated Beat would do it, but the rest of us generally choose discretion over valor and say "a tender caress."

It moved to my lips, which were dry, and lingered there...

...and there I will leave you.

The evergreen bush outside my window is glazed with ice. It rained yesterday evening, then froze--*really* froze, it's ten degrees now--during the night.

In the wind, the stiffened boughs don't ripple. They lunge back and forth aggressively like fascist dance. The ice gleams in permanent teardrops on each tip.

When I was ten, I stopped imagining myself.

Up until then, I'd done things like draw pictures of myself as a grownup. I'd imagined which of the boys in my class I'd get to marry. I was in love with Perry, and drew domestic scenes of myself in his living room taking care of his children and his doily-covered coffee tables. I was *attracted,* though I didn't quite grasp the difference, to a redheaded boy who I imagined would pick me out of a lineup of other girls and take me home with him.

(Yeah. I had no idea what concubines even were back then, and probably wouldn't have understood if you'd told me, but I still managed to imagine being one. Albeit in a T-shirt and jeans. Well, Marx did say that we're at our most reactionary when we're at our most instinctive, and there ain't much that's more instinctive than a second-grade girl when confronted with a cute little redheaded boy.)

All of this stopped completely when I was ten. All of it. Not just the naive romantic fantasies, but everything. I kept drawing grownup ladies, but they were no longer me. I kept imagining them doing things and things happening to them, but they were no longer me.

This felt right and natural to me. Better. I was more comfortable without a self, without a dog in any of the hunts I drew over pages and pages and hours and days. Soon I forgot that it had ever been any other way.

Lately I've been visited by unknown women in dreams who are hostile and threatening until I recognize that they're me. Then they disappear. They have nothing to tell me or show me except that they're me. They have no message, they have no truth, they have no wisdom or long-buried wishes to offer. I'm going to have to find those things for myself. If they exist.

#

Hard snow, frozen to the trees, does not scatter in the wind. It stays in seemingly artificial perfection, bobbing up and down on those icy green fingers.

One day, I'll look, and it will be gone. I won't have seen it melt away. I won't have seen the teardrops fall.

I wish I had been born in Asia. Maybe Japan. Or Finland. Technically 'western,' Finland is ethnically and linguistically distinct; no one knows exactly who the Finns are or where they came from. They're an enclosed, silent, eyes-downcast sort of people whose nonconformity sometimes spectacularly escapes the confines of their minds. They have no words for "he" or "she;" everything in Finnish is neutral. And each word has a different form depending on how you're using it, so it's one of those languages where you don't need to mind your order when you talk. Spew you words the out can just, and people will know what you mean.

Finns understand the gesture which has no meaning but what you give it. The self you dropped out of. The way you *feel* just like everyone else, but don't always quite express it the same way. Start talking about black dragons or something.

Hard teardrops in the distant winter sun.

Merry happy etcetera to all.

Outside my window the sky is lavender. The snow below has picked up the echo.

My mother knew it would cloud over. She was achy. Her bones never lie. They're little pain oracles. They hurt her with the truth.

Just in the time I've written this, things have gone dark. What's left of the sky is blue-gray and fading.

The darkness of winter isn't velvety soft like the darkness of summer. The darkness of winter is sad and bleak. With luck, the places where we hide from it are comforting. I don't just mean our homes.

I saw "The Incredibles" last night on TV. This is the animated Disney movie of a few years ago about the family with conveniently metaphorical super-powers. Their powers drive both the plot and their character development, which interact and start reinforcing each other in the incredibly tight Disney way. There's ElastiGirl, the mom who can "stretch." There's the super-strong dad who really isn't--not in his heart, where it counts. There's the little boy who's (literally) too fast to keep up with...

...and there's the angry teenage girl.

She can turn invisible and create force fields which repel everything. See what I mean about tidy metaphors? I'm not snarking here. I really admire this. It's like some high-powered guitarist once said about the music of Aerosmith: You have to be brilliant to be this simple. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but it's not--it's Zen.

But what's really significant about this girl, because she's a girl, is her hair. For 90% of the movie, she lets it fall in her face, a symbol of her internalized anger at the world. Then all of a sudden, riding home in the limo after (what we think is) their final triumph, the father notices something. "Violet! You put your hair back!"

Yes, Violet is now wearing a hairband. Her face is fully revealed.

She feels self-conscious and struggles a bit, but then decides to own it: "Yeah."

And we're all supposed to have a warm glow. She's emerging from her self-imposed prison!

I felt myself going south.

As if this were not enough, we have a repeat of this moment a couple of false endings later. Violet is at a school function, and not only is her hair tied back, she's wearing COLORS!! And not just any colors. PINK!! And the boy she's been crushing on--he notices. "You look different," he offers.

"I feel different," says Violet with an air of slight wonder.

At this point I was so mad I needed somebody to talk me down. I was yelling "What do you want with that little vanilla wuss!? Go date Keanu Reeves in 'River's Edge!' Or better yet 'My Own Private Idaho,' where he's got a dog collar!" (Um, not out loud. This was family time.)

But that's Point 1. The idea that an angry, enclosed girl needs to get over it before she can find a member of the preferred gender is a truly baldfaced, shameful lie. I was an angry, enclosed girl. Know what I did? I went out and got me an angry (but not at women), enclosed guy with all the trappings that would make an angry, enclosed girl's heart go pitter-patter.

(Note that I do not necessarily recommend the whole edgy-trappings thing. In this case, they were not bad signs, but your mileage may *really* vary on that. The great thing about being an angry, enclosed girl, however, is that you are wary, watchful, and ready to withdraw at a moment's notice. Remember--you turn invisible and throw up force fields, right? Otherwise you're not really angry and enclosed, you're something else.)

So are we clear about this, though? You do not need to tie your hair back, metaphorically speaking, in order to find That Special One and walk heedlessly in spring rain with hands entwined. In fact, it's much better not to. After all, while you're traipsing through the puddles, you're going to want to discuss the broken BDSM in Wedekind's "Fruhlings Erwachen." You're going to want someone who can appreciate that, not someone who's going to wait for you to finish and then start talking about intramural volleyball.

("Schlag mich! Schlag mich!" With no safeword or risk-awareness--now *that* is a girl with problems.)

Point 2: Even if Violet's black clothes and hair-chador *are* holding her down...so what? Her anger is part of her strength--a passive strength, all invisibility and force fields, but a real one. Not easily impressed. Self-protective even in the grip of a crush. Keeper of her own counsel. Holder of her own center. Defiant of the culture. A girl who effaces herself, who refuses all prettiness, pink, and openness, is not necessarily *just* self-punishing. If there's a passive form of Kali the Destroyer somewhere in the Hindu universe, she's it.

...Yeah, I know. I'm literalizing the metaphor. See, it's really not about being angry and enclosed. That's just the form that Violet's unhappiness takes. The pink clothes and the hairbands...that's not about abandoning her sinister wisdom, that's about becoming *happy.* "I feel different," she says.

By which she obviously means "better."

How can you argue with that.

I wish I knew.

I was a freshman in high school. Down in a basement somewhere, I was taking a Haitian dance class. The instructor, a German woman named Renate, was very serious about Haitian culture and taught us the songs to Papa Legba with great care. I still know how to respectfully invoke him, although I have forgotten how to say goodbye.

I didn't know anyone in the class, but I discovered one day that one of them knew me. After our last session, a scrawny little woman with an enormous Carly Simon mouth came up to me and said "Are you Savannah?"

"Um. Yeah."

"You went to [name of private school] with [name of her son] that one year!"

Ah yes. First grade.

Although I did not remember this woman's son, I definitely remembered that school, a hellish place where (for example) two best girlfriends were forcibly separated because they were "too close." In other words, it was a school run for and apparently by a troop of rhesus macaques, those cockroaches of the primate world, whose exuberant viciousness makes "Lord of the Flies" look restrained. If you want to find something to blame for the yuppie ethos, blame this school.

That was the place where I developed the healthy Violet-esque antipathy towards life which I still maintain today, although age has softened my stance to one of shoulder-shrugging indifference. Seriously, though--once you've tasted rhesus macaque society (Expensive Private School Version), you...well, hmm. Actually, the world is full of people who react the totally wrong way, and start going "I'll *make* them accept me! I'll change! I'll become perfect! I'll bleach my teeth and go to the gym and fix my nose and always be clean and nicely dressed and I'll conform and then they'll LOVE me!!"

I submit that not even the most deluded narcissist, having gone to this school, could ever believe that. Furthermore, I can't imagine that anyone would ever *want* anyone associated with this school (or anyone else, just to be on the safe side) to love them. Believe me, it's a frightening thought.

Case in point: this woman.

Certain things were understood between us once I knew who she was. I had not just had a *bad* year at that school, I had had the kind of year that could fuel a Robert Cormier novel. People were Not Nice to me.

How was the mother going to handle that? Apologize and talk about how there was less awareness of peer culture in the mid-1970s? Ignore it and simply ask me how I was doing these days?

Ha-ha.

No, she beamed at me in thrilled surprise. Taking my hand, she told me, "Look at you! You turned out PRETTY OKAY."

You will forgive me for not having been entirely sure what to say to that.

"You did!" she assured me, as if I'd been waiting all those years for her personal stamp of approval. "You really did!"

#

Cognitive dissonance is when a mind tries to encompass two contradictory realities at once.

Haiti is the graveyard of the Taino Arawaks who, having been conquered by the Spanish, could not withstand their cruelty. West African captives were imported to take the Taino Arawaks' place beneath the boot and lash. Meanwhile the territory passed into French hands. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Haiti became the scene of "the only successful slave rebellion in world history." Arguably, it has spent the next two hundred years paying in blood for its defiance. As the French colony Saint-Domingue, it was wealthy--or its European overlords were wealthy. Under the control of former slaves, it has been kicked and beaten, and blamed for lying on the ground, for the past two dismal centuries.

This is the crucible of Haitian Vodou, whose dances and songs we were learning from Renate. We were learning the suppressed, misunderstood religion of a battered island, where the living descendants of African captives walk with the ghosts of the murdered Taino Arawak.

This class was not a place, in other words, for the values that that woman espoused: conformity, popularity, looking right, "turning out okay" (even if in spite of everything). This class was the opposite--the dissonance. This class was dedicated to the powers which would eat those values and spit out their bones, if any yuppie was stupid enough to venture too far into the shadows of Port-Au-Prince.

What was she *doing* here? Getting exercise? How did she dare sing the songs to Papa Legba? Didn't she know? Didn't she feel?

But then, why should she. I'm sure, to her, it was all just a curiosity. Or worse, perhaps an object of her oh-so-tremendous empathy. But no, I'm banking on ignorance. It's amazing what certain people don't know about their dark places, so to speak. It's amazing what certain people don't know about history's "losers." It's amazing what certain people don't know about the heart.

Or the lives of others.

Or at least I *think* they're the words of Bernice Reagon-Johnson. I googled her, but couldn't find the article I was thinking of. I googled her key bite, "hitting all the steps," but still didn't find the article.

Let's talk about that, though. Hitting all the steps. Reagon-Johnson, a founder of the magnificent Sweet Honey in the Rock, gave an interview once where she talked about the importance of exactly that. She herself had moved through her life and career step-by-step, and she said she didn't trust anyone who didn't do likewise. She looked for people who "hit all the steps" and built in depth and experience.

Sit through an ad and read this article about Barack Obama's lack of stewardship of the Subcommittee on European Affairs.

He has failed to hold any policy hearings with the Subcommittee, essentially skipping this duty and the opportunity it represents.

Why does this matter? The Subcommittee on European Affairs could have given Obama a lot of real-world, real-time experience in dealing with foreign policy--not to mention a lot of specific knowledge. And he'd have been ready for it; he already knows very well what needs work in our relationship with Europe. (Everything, actually, but if you read the article, you'll see he mentions specifics.)

So why hasn't he done any policy hearings with this Subcommittee?

Well...it's kind of hard to find the time to do that when you're running for President.

Author Joe Conason describes this as a "conflict between ambition and experience."

I.e.: Is he hitting all the steps? Or is he trying to skip over one or two? Is he saying to himself, "But I do know what the issues are"--and he does--"and I'm already a million times more prepared than the guy we've got now"--and he is--"so I can just jump over this one and it won't really matter"?

I'm of two minds. Ideally, Obama would have waited, concentrated on his Subcommittee, developed a ton of valuable experience and knowledge, and *then* run for President.

Unfortunately, the reality is that our election system is driven by celebrity. If Obama had hit all the steps and waited five to ten years, he might not have been famous anymore. He could come back and say "But I've put in a decade on the Subcommittee on European Affairs and gained priceless experience and knowledge!"...

...and this country, and its media, would SO not care. That's a fact. That is a simple, hard fact. That's why Chris Dodd (from my home state of Connecticut), a man who has been in the Senate longer than God, who knows how to govern, and who actually stands for something, is not a serious contender for the Presidency.

So if you believe you have something to contribute, if you believe that even the less-experienced version of you would do a better job, NOT than the properly experienced candidates, but than the bunch of high-profile yahoos who actually have a shot at winning, then you just say "The hell with the steps" and start jumping.

And that is why this country is in the toilet right now, flushing its own head and thinking it's surfing.

Grr!! It's not online yet.

But the latest issue of Psychology Today, the one with the naked people on the cover, has an article about clergymen who undergo crises of faith.

As you might imagine, this is a touchy issue, because people depend on clergy to shore up their own faith. If these authority figures start feeling doubt, all bets are well and truly off. It's scary.

So what happens?

Congregations shoot the messenger.

Take Bishop Carlton Pearson, profiled in the article, who led a 5000-member Baptist church. He experienced what looks to me like a genuine revelation, ironically enough. Triggered by a TV show about famine in (iirc) Sudan, he had a vision of all the suffering on earth and realized that hell is not a place we go after death. It's right here. Pearson lost his belief in the literal interpretation of Scripture; in fact, he lost his belief in Scripture entirely, though he retained the sense of a loving and benevolent Presence who promised salvation to all.

With the courage of a prophet, Pearson marched into work the next Sunday and shared his revelation with his congregation.

Well.

As the article drily notes, "his fortunes plummeted." He lost his church and, according to the article, he now preaches to a congregation of one hundred.

This is the same exact guy; one can presume that he lost no eloquence or power when he lost his conventional faith. But no one wanted his eloquence anymore when it began to disturb instead of comfort, when it began to question instead of to provide answers.

The irony here, and I'm sure anyone who's ever been within fifty feet of a Sunday school class will have already noticed it, is that Pearson's journey is in fact Christlike. If you actually read the Gospels, Jesus himself took a wrecking ball to the comforting certainties of his day. He took authority on himself to heal, he said that the Sabbath was made for man rather than the other way around, he excoriated the Pharisees, and he made a point of keeping company with the reviled and the downtrodden. He insisted that the Kingdom of God, which he claimed was already present around us, included the first-century equivalent of crossdressing atheist hustlers on drugs. He said that we ourselves were going to have to figure out exactly who and what he was--he wasn't going to tell us.

(By the way, this puts Jesus squarely in line with a long tradition of gloriously rowdy Jewish prophets like Elijah and Isaiah. He was speaking as a Jew, to Jews, in a well-established Jewish tradition; he was not starting a new religion. It was Paul who did that.)

But back to his message.

Only a very small, and not particularly select, band of people wanted to hear this. (It was his healings which, combined with his seemingly political remarks about "the Kingdom," made him famous enough to start scaring the authorities--and he constantly carped that nobody around him understood what he was actually SAYING. "Can't you people see that I'm not talking about bread!?" "Let those with ears to hear, hear.")

(Oh, and for those who are saying "Yes but Savannah, what about his remarks about the Law." There's a remark of his where he appears to be insisting that everyone has to follow the Mosaic Law, which makes him look like a traditional religious legalist in spite of everything. I submit, however, that he was snarking. Look at his phrasing--"Not one jot or tittle of the Law will pass away. Heaven and earth will pass away before the Law will pass away." Do you see the telltale exaggeration? Imagine it being said by Denis Leary in full angry rant mode--"Oh yeah, the LAAAAAWWW. Not one jot or TITTLE of the LAAAAAAWWW will pass away. Heaven and EARTH will pass away before the LAAAAAAWWW will pass away." Jesus is not upholding the Law, imho, he's mocking it. Doesn't that make much more sense with all his other stuff about how the Pharisees are hypocritical whitewashed tombs? And why it's okay to heal people on the Sabbath after all, because the Sabbath was made for man rather than the other way around? And how someday we will worship, not in temples, but in spirit and in truth?)

Anyhow--the path of clergy who question their faith is actually prophetic. They're saying what people most need to hear right now, and therefore, least want to. Doubt is the frontier territory of faith. It takes, in fact, tremendous faith to doubt--faith that you can walk through that door and find something on the other side, faith that you can change your understanding of things without losing them. You'll notice that for an atheist, I'm awfully fond of Jesus. I can tell you that once you've truly loved him, you always will, even if you have to start meeting him outside the walls.

That's where he always was anyhow.

Broken fortunes and all.

There's no *good* explanation for why my husband and I ended up watching "Music and Lyrics" yesterday. But I liked it anyway, although Drew Barrymore's typically eccentric heroine took some time to shake out and become who she really was.

What's most interesting about it, though, is that it's essentially a piece of professional fan fiction. It's a sweet little fantasy of what might have happened to Andrew Ridgeley, the "other guy" in Wham!, had he not left show business after Wham!'s dissolution. (And after one solo album, about which the less said the better. In "Music and Lyrics," Hugh Grant's faux-Ridgeley released a disastrous solo album too. When he meets someone who actually bought it, he insists on paying them back.)

There's no doubt that Grant's character is based on Ridgeley. His erstwhile partner went on to greater fame, as Ridgeley's did. Life is a laugh to him--not always a happy one, but a laugh nonetheless--just as it appears to be for Ridgeley. If Ridgeley ever did articulate a philosophy, he would almost certainly pick Errol Flynn's "I allow myself to be understood abroad as a colorful fragment in a drab world."

I wonder what the movie would have been like if writer-director Marc Lawrence had been free to do whatever he wanted. The 'rules' for romantic comedies are incredibly rigid, and Lawrence was not always successful in following them from an authentic place. That's true brilliance, and it's the kind of brilliance Wham! had as well--to be able to make pop formulas look natural. Def Leppard was like that too.

As it was, much of the conflict between Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore felt obligatory rather than organic. It seemed as though Lawrence was more interested in how someone like Ridgeley might *feel* about having survived his time. A Disney team would have figured out a way to symbolize that so it *became* the plot. Lawrence didn't. I think he saw the plot requirements on him as a burden or distraction.

#

The thing that really made me laugh, though, was an argument between Grant and Barrymore. At the eleventh hour, they've been ordered to write a last verse to their new song. But things are breaking down between them personally and Barrymore is upset. She starts whining: "I can't do this! I can't get inspired!"

The appalled Grant cries, "Inspiration is for amateurs!"

That line leaped out of the movie at me. It did more to present Grant's world, his ethos, the whole *point* of a band like Wham! (fictionalized as PoP), than anything that came before or after.

Plus, it's true.

Okay, this is a link to Eros Blog, which is, as the name implies, a sex blog.

It is not actually a post about sex, though. It's a post about blogging, and it's worth a read.

Bacchus, who runs Eros Blog, is commenting on another sex blogger's decision to disable comments on her blog. He seems to feel that her decision, while understandable, is kind of lonely, and that it wouldn't work for him: "though my *writing* might be better [if I wasn't self-censoring in anticipation of comments], my *blog* would be worse, if that distinction makes any sense."

Commenters mostly came down on the side of having comments. Despite numerous bad experiences, they spoke of the "community" engendered by comments.

It was really interesting to read. It made me think back, actually, to my senior high school yearbook.

Departing seniors were asked to provide their addresses for the yearbook. I didn't see the point of this. I wasn't against it, exactly, but I wasn't for it either. In the line they provided, I wrote "You won't need to find me."

This engendered rumors that I was planning to commit suicide. Which at that juncture of my life would not have been a bad idea.

But no; I actually just meant what I said, which is that I wanted to turn into a wisp of smoke. (I do realize that, technically, that is *not* what I said. Hey, I got as close as I could. *You* try writing that you want to turn into a wisp of smoke in the address line of a Catholic school yearbook.)

So they printed my address anyway without my permission, and life went on.

When I started this blog, I didn't have comments, because it never dawned on me that anyone *would* want to comment. This blog isn't about amateur BDSM or professional BDSM or size acceptance or calorie restriction or atheism or homeschooling or atheist homeschooling. Or the wondrous individuality of Finns or the carnival of disaster in the Middle East currently being wrought by the moral and intellectual midgets who've hogtied our country.

Instead, it's about evening light, ice teardrops on frozen trees, black cats rolling dead squirrels around the living room, and the beautiful darkness of birth. It can be capricious too sometimes. I did not want to insult anyone by presuming that they should have an opinion about any of that.

That particular idea of courtesy--"I will not implicitly pressure you by leaving you an opening to write something;" "I will not suggest that what I've written should make that kind of claim on you"--is odd in this culture but inherent to me. It's one of the reasons I keep wishing I'd been born in Japan.

But of course, if you follow that logic, it quickly turns itself inside-out: how can you presume to make the decision for someone? Just as shyness can look like coldness, that kind of courtesy can too. So I had one of my American moments ("Whatever") and figured I would print my address, so to speak.

Having done that, I should probably figure out how to answer comments on the dang thing myself. It'd be only polite :)

And I suppose it would be only polite to add that you're welcome here, although I reserve the right to enforce the Golden Rule on you if you don't enforce it on yourself.

#

It's odd to think that just twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a blog. I remember standing on the wet black pavement which was the outdoor foyer of the Omega Institute, with the dining hall up the hill to the left and what was then called the "Deli Lama" straight ahead. Parking lots and campgrounds were to the right and a secret path to one of the class buildings lay behind. It smelled cool and green, and it was all there was; there were no invisible filaments binding us, there were no chattering streams passing through our heads and bodies. Inside and outside were more clearly delineated, and it was necessary, for me at least, to pay *slightly* more attention to the outside, because it was the computer. That's the thing. It was the machine. (What I've just described to you was its web--a bunch of different addresses, linked.)

Well, *for me* it was. Others had already moved on. The man I was about to meet that very year (I predicted in German that he'd end up a Democrat living on a chicken farm, and he threw back his head and laughed) had long since gone post-Neuromancer in life. He was a hacker in the pure sense of the word.

I never took him to Omega.

To the place it was back then, I never can.