Slighcarp and Grimshaw

Jeff and I watched a double-feature yesterday of Pippi Longstocking and Once. Fortunately, Once was only 84 minutes long because Pippi Longstocking feels like it could be a five hour movie. I don’t know how many of you have seen Pippi Longstocking, the original I mean, from Sweden in 1969. I remember seeing “The New Adventures . . .” with Mimi back in the day, but I’m pretty certain it is nothing compared to the plotless wonder that is the original.

Upon completion of the viewing, I was finally able to vocalize why I object to teaching plot to students as “a story needs a beginning, middle and end.” Beginning + middle + end does not a plot make. Pippi clearly had all three of those elements, but it did not have a plot, per se. Plot involves conflict. Plot involves that conflict developing through a series of incidents of rising intensity that culminates in a climax, a turning point after which nothing can be the same. Furthermore, the climax often comes at the very end of the “middle,” so the whole evenness of “beginning, middle, end” is but a lie we tell our students so we feel like they’ve learned something.

So, to sum up Pippi Longstocking using the inferior “beginning, middle, end” schema: 9-year-old Pippi comes to town to live in Villa Villekulla, her pastel colored house, with her horse and her monkey, but no parents. She meets Tommy and Annika, who conveniently live next door. Ms. Prysselius is scandalized and tries to get the police to put Pippi in a children’s home. They fail woefully, then seem to give up forever. Pippi gives away free candy to the local children, then free toys, all financed by her suitcase filled with solid gold coins. You see, her father is the Cannibal King of an island in the South Seas. The town’s local robbers catch wind that Pippi is loaded, and they try to rob her. They fail woefully as well, because Pippi is stronger than she looks: she can hold her horse above her head.

Umm, and then Pippi plays some more with Tommy and Annika. She ruins a coffee party. They play in a hollow tree. Pippi leads them in search of “spunk,” which no one knows the nature of. Tommy, Annika and Pippi take a balloon ride all along the coast of Sweden and frighten a drunk church custodian. Then Pippi’s father actually returns and Pippi beats him at arm wrestling. They have a large party where the person who eats the most will win a prize, though this prize is never seen nor mentioned again. Pippi’s father prepares to set sail again to return to the South Seas, and Pippi almost goes with him. But Annika is sobbing like a fool on the pier, so Pippi ends up staying.

Beginning: Pippi comes to town. Middle: Pippi plays, plays and plays some more. End: Pippi leaves–no, wait! She stays. What is most remarkable about the absence of conflict, and thus plot, is that there are two–two!–potential conflicts left almost untouched. Ms. Prysselius trying to get Pippi into a children’s home should be the kind of thing that can move an entire movie along, but Ms. P. seems a little preoccupied with, oh, I don’t know, coffee parties or something, to really pursue Pippi. And the two town robbers sweating to get ahold of Pippi’s pirate gold is also ripe for motivating a movie’s worth of plot, but they only try to steal her money twice and they are put off from the effort by nothing more than a cream cake in the face and a Pippi-doll falling from the sky (see above balloon ride).

The moral of the story: Do not F with Pippi Longstocking.

I will say this for the flick, though, I really liked it. Part of why I really liked it is because I imagined Lorelai and Rory Gilmore watching it (yes, I know they are ficitonal). The other part(s) of why I liked it are less clear, even in the sobering light of the day after. Jeff didn’t think he was going to be able to watch the entire hour and a half, but I knew I would make it and drag him along behind me. He pinpointed the nature of the film as “more compelling than interesting.” I agree. I felt compelled to watch the entire movie, yet not interested. Compelled by the erratic nature of what may happen next, not interest to find out what would happen next. Kind of like a horse being compelled to trot by a rider gently squeezing his flanks between her thighs. Yeah, I didn’t mention how often you get to see Pippi’s underwear. Let’s just leave it at that.

Now, this is not a politics blog. But I’m finding it very hard to stay away from politics given the awe-inspiring race between Hillary and Barack in the Democratic party. I happily got to vote this past Super Tuesday. From the beginning I have been a supporter of Hillary. Then I started to hear this buzz that if the Republicans nominate McCain (which it looks like they’re going to have to, like it or not), then Barack will do better against him than Hillary would. This almost swayed me into voting for Barack. But standing in the booth no part of me could not vote for a woman. A woman is running for President of the United States of America, and I got to vote for a woman. This is wonderful.

I found this screed in support of Hillary by Robin Morgan through the viral nature that is the intertron (and Slate.com) and reading it made me feel so powerful as a feminist. It made me feel how excited my mother is to have the choice of a woman in the presidential race.

Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of U.S. voters.

But then, I watched this video of comedians discussing the race for president on Slate’s video channel and my heart fell. I heard the death of Hillary’s bid for president. Among the Hillary analysis presented is the gem that Hillary Clinton is “like Optimus Prime fucked a bumper sticker.” And another, from Bill Maher: “People hate Hillary because they hate themselves,” meaning she’s a strong woman and people don’t like a person who is stronger than they are.

One moment, though, stands out as the one that broke my feminist heart. (Anyone else notice how often my heart is broken?) The sole Republican at the table proclaimed himself more liberal than Hillary: he is pro-choice, anti-death-penalty, and pro-gay-marriage. But, he says, “You could hold a gun to Hllary Clinton’s head and she’s never gonna say those things.” I think this is true. And it is, for me, Hillary’s death knell.

Here it is, two days later, and she has lost to Obama in Washington, Louisiana and Nebraska. Sigh.

We went to see Neko Case on Friday night in Tarrytown. Eric Bachmann opened for her. It was an excellent show and just reaffirmed my giant heart for Neko Case, the fact of which made Sarah feel less like a spazz. Which, admittedly, was a good reason for me not to have told her…

The theater was very old and looked like it was designed in sepia. They charged $7 for a can of Newcastle. I was nearly accosted by an elderly volunteer, but I suspect I could have taken him if it came down to it.

Neko’s singing partner was Kelly Hogan, whose voice is an excellent match what with both of them being booming voice kinda ladies. And between the two of them, the banter is pretty fantastically random, covering topics from urine-soaked Civil War buttons to the idea of Harry Nilsson as the “Master of Sadness,” arriving on a giant bong, complete with kickstand. Down time? Ha! No time for being down! Talk! Sing! Entertain!

I don’t see live music much anymore, but I’ll be damned if it still isn’t one of the better things in the world.

In a seasonally-unprecedented move (at least for a good long time), I have been digging me some songs–not compositions, not improvisations–actual, honest-to-goodness songs. Lots of good old Dischord bands, Smart Went Crazy, Lungfish, Shudder to Think as well as the golden age of mid-90s midwest indie rock–Rodan, June of 44, you know, that sort of thing. I even got the new Vandermark 5 album last week and haven’t even put it on yet. I guess I was due; I am nothing if not a mad-genre/artist/sound-obsessive listener. For the past year or so, I have been spending most of my time with jazz/compositional excursions/sound art, with a dab of pop here and there thanks to Sarah, but I’ve been neglecting a pretty damn healthy amount of my collection. I often make deals with myself about making my listening more egalitarian, but when it comes to it, I go in jags.

There is a nebulous list I keep in my head of records that I shouldn’t have sold away, and there is a very short, embarrassing list of records I’ve had to re-buy. The most recent was The Unanimous Hour by Lungfish. I bought, I’m pretty sure, in college, when my tastes were rarely my own, and it was all I could do to keep up with the constant inflow of music that my friends were listening to and recommending to me. So I bought it, and was in no position to appreciate a band that played the same riff over and over again for several minutes with a crazy man screech-shout-singing surreal lyrics over it. It was neither weird enough nor angular indie rock enough for me at the time. So several years later, I am reading something about something and it occurs to me that I should totally listen to Lungfish again and subsequently that I don’t own it anymore. Bullocks. So I had to buy it again, which is more annoying than it should be, since it’s out of print and so not readily available used and cheap. Oh well.

This is a roundabout way of getting to talking about the solo record of Daniel Higgs, the aforementioned lunatic singer from Lungfish, that I bought recently, called Metempsychotic Melodies. Mostly electrified banjo ragas, with his ranting over a couple tracks. It has the whiff of New Weird America, but it strikes me as more truly outsider art than most of the freak-folk stuff that often strikes me as disingenuous and trust fund hippie bullshit. I am being dramatic, yes, but it’s what I’ve experienced. This record is weird and surreal and truly different-sounding. It’s cool to hear something like I’ve never heard before, especially because I don’t know anyone else who’s listening to it.

And I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about it, and really, blog about it. I haven’t been reading as much since I don’t have a commute anymore, and I’ve been trying to read things here and there. I picked up Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, which is, at its core, a treatise on the trickster myth and an argument in favor of art that initially makes people uncomfortable, as well as a discussion of the meaning and contexts of those characters and people who make that art. I think this Daniel Higgs album might fall into this area. There is also an idea in the book that the trickster archetype is a traveler–a being or person who can’t settle, who has to live in the region between and tell stories of one place to those of another. I like this idea, probably because I am someone who likes being settled, who needs to have my stuff around and at the ready for me to look at and listen to and touch and eat. There is a part of me that wants to wander, that wants restlessness and the struggle to thrive. It was also a younger self that loved driving for days and crashing where and when I could or wanted–I’m old now, and I really like sleeping in my bed. So I am now among the throngs that look upon people who can live that way with some pity and some admiration, since we can always envy those entirely different.

I’m figuring out how/if to use this thought process in writing. I’m writing again, which is hell of cool, since I’m trying to accomplish something by the end of this year. Anything I can do to make my mind exciting is good. Every little bit helps. I swear.

Forever-love for Agent Cooper notwithstanding, my heart is broken.

It is Regents week for New York State, which means testing, testing, testing for the kids and lounging about bitching and wisecracking for the teachers. My particular schedule yesterday kept me in the school until 7pm last night. It’s not natural for anyone to be still at a high school at 7pm unless it’s Friday night and the spring musical is up. I tell you this so you may understand that the aberrant nature of my evening is the only explanation I have for the strange and doleful death of Heath Ledger. I was standing in the special education office, waiting to hitch a ride across I-95 from my assistant principal, when Jeff texted me to tell me he has to write three lessons by today “oh and heath ledger is dead”.

We watched “10 Things I Hate About You” in memoriam last night. In an effort to bulk up our bullshit movies to just throw on anytime, we bought it a few months ago when we saw it at Borders for a mere nine dollars and change. I remember when that movie came out, amidst a glut of other “teen comedies.” But “10 Things I Hate About You” is not your average teen comedy. Perhaps this is why Mrs. Kelly herself saw it six times in the theater. Six times. In the theater. Just take that in for a moment. I went with her twice. That means between the two of us we spent at least $56 to see that movie in high school.

“10 Things I Hate About You” is pitch perfect in its execution of vulgarity. It is not gross-out humor from the school of “American Pie.” It is more the vulgar comedy that runs hourly through my brain and keeps me sane in the long hours of talking only to high school kids. It is the vulgar comedy of 35-year-olds writing what they would have said as high schoolers if they had been 35-year-old writers at the time. (This is, by the way, how the writers of “Buffy” describe the dialogue on that show.) And the flick wastes no time getting the ball rolling. Cameron arrives in the guidance counselor’s office and Ms. Perky, the guidance counselor, tells him by way of introduction and welcome, “I’m sure you won’t find Padua any different than your old schools. Same little asswipe shit-for-brains everywhere.” I love that line every time.

And of course, the glue that holds the film together, Heath Ledger as Patrick Verona. Patrick Verona who is direct from the mold of my perfect romantic hero. He is outstandingly beautiful, he makes smart reference to Bianca’s potentially “beer-flavored nipples,” he gives Cameron (lust, Joseph Gordon Levitt, post “Third Rock” and pre “Mysterious Skin”) beautiful advice to keep pursuing Bianca because he should never “let anyone ever make you feel like you don’t deserve what you want,” and the whole while the school thinks he is some barbarian who once ate a duck– “everything but the beak and feet.”

How can it be that Heath Ledger is dead by an overdose of OTC sleeping pills? How will my teenage heart recover? Perhaps I’ll watch “10 Things I Hate About You” again tonight. Or this morning as I grade finals and mini-papers.

Jeff got the gold edition of “Twin Peaks” for Christmas, along with a crapload of other box sets (who are This Heat anyway?), and we have been enjoying it quite a bit. Jeff has been enjoying “Twin Peaks” for a number of years now. I myself watched some of it with Pinzler back in the days of yore, which I like to call College, but I’m pretty certain I didn’t understand the first thing about it. I remember asking Pinzler all the time what was going on. Only half of my questions were questions I didn’t know because I hadn’t seen the pilot. The rest were questions like, “Why is that lady wearing an eye-patch?” You know, the kinds of questions that simply cannot be answered about “Twin Peaks” because the concept of the show is derived from a town filled with characters and situations for which there are no answers.

It was about halfway through the first season when I realized, all of a sudden like, that Agent Dale Cooper is the perfect man. Audrey (who is the mother of Luke’s jump-the-shark daughter on “The Gilmore Girls”), an 18-year-old sex-bomb was all naked in his bed, and there was obviously some chemistry, and he politely refused her advances. He tells her he is going to get some French fries and rootbeer floats or malteds or something, she should get dressed, and then they’ll have a heart to heart. He is also, of course, completely beautiful.

For all the devilish, noir-inspired dirty doings happening in the small town of Twin Peaks, the men seem to be all the perfect men. I think if I had my personal druthers I’d go for Sheriff Harry S Truman, and not just because he’s the namesake of my place of employ, but because he’s a little rougher around the edges, which is quite to my liking. But then Agent Cooper comes back on the screen. He is so genuinely in love with coffee and pie and donuts. He tells the Sheriff to take his advice: everyday, give yourself a little gift. Take some time to read. Enjoy a cup of hot, black coffee. I want to give myself a little gift everyday. And he’s into Tibet. Agent Cooper is like if Fox Mulder were a sweetheart and not maniacal. I suspect he would kiss like Andrew McCarthy. And then he does something totally gruesome like jam his tweezers under the fingernail of Ronnette to pull out a tiny letter cut from a Flesh World magazine. Love it.

It makes me kind of sad that Jeff never has silly crushes on fictional women. That it’s just me who seems to get emotionally overinvolved with the men I see on screen. Sometimes it’s hard to be frivolous. And deep. At the same time.

Here’s your proof:

Inside the new Tom Cruise biography: Slate gets to the good stuff.

And, in case you were wondering what a Thetan does after death, here’s the straight poop from its Wikipedia page:

When a person dies – or, in Scientology terms, when a thetan abandons its physical body – they go to a “landing station” on the planet Venus, where the thetan is re-implanted and told lies about its past life and its next life. The Venusians take the thetan, “capsule” it, and send it back to Earth to be dumped into the ocean off the coast of California. Says Hubbard, “If you can get out of that, and through that, and wander around through the cities and find some girl who looks like she is going to get married or have a baby or something like that, you’re all set. And if you can find the maternity ward to a hospital or something, you’re OK. And you just eventually just pick up a baby.” To avoid these inconveniences, Hubbard advised Scientologists to refuse to go to Venus after their death.

I’m not sure I really appreciated how crazy Scientology sounds when you get into the minutiae of its mythos. It makes me like it more.

And for something entirely off the track of what this blog-thing is usually about.

I really enjoy swimming. It’s really the only form of exercise that isn’t soccer that I’ve ever enjoyed. I don’t like running, I don’t like lifting weights. I guess I like riding a bike, but not in a way that would count as exercise. But for some reason, swimming presented itself when I went to grad school. The first time I got in the pool, I made up my mind that I was going to swim five laps, and I wasn’t going to get out of the water until I had done that. It sucked ass–it took me almost 45 minutes, and my body was absolutely incredulous that I had done such a thing. I could barely hold up my pants to put them back on when I was done.

For some reason, I went back the next day. And the next. After several months, I was in shape and pretty pleased with myself. During the two years of school, I went regularly and it made me happy to do it. Then I had to leave, MFA in hand and get a job. This really cut into my 1. leisure time, 2. writing time, and 3. swimming time–surprise, surprise.

I’m on my third job in three months (a good thing, really!), and I am lucky enough to be able to work from home three or four days a week. I’ve decided to take this opportunity to get back to swimming on a semi-regular basis.

And here’s what it is about swimming that makes me thoughtful: swimming, experientially, is the action that most removes my mind from my body. In most every other thing that I do regularly, my brain and my body have to be on the same page, one intermingling with the other. Even when I’m walking down the street, it is a matter of where I’m going, why I’m out, should I stop and get something to eat while I’m out, look at that person, don’t get hit by that car, etc.

But while I’m swimming, it is as though my brain is simply floating in the machine that is my body. At this point, the strokes and the breathing needs are pretty unconscious, and my mind can do other things: think about writing, remember regrettable moments, concentrate on the motion of my limbs as they create momentum. It is the odd moment when I realize that I have no idea how many laps I’ve done, and then try to recreate my thought process to kind of count backwards to figure out where I am. I suspect (strongly) that other people who are exercisers have this same experience, but I thought it was worth noting.

I wrote more and better when I was in school and in shape. I don’t have the same amount of time to read and my general environment is very different than it was. The opportunities are fewer and farther between for me to immerse myself in poems and discussions of books. The onus is on me more now than it ever was to motivate myself to work on something for which I will not be paid. It hasn’t been working for the last year plus (although recent developments give me hope). Swimming seems to be something that I have been given back. Perhaps this will be a first domino.

Also. It snowed in Baghdad today. For the “first time in living memory.” I find this indescribably awesome.

Jeff and I for the first time are truly following a presidential campaign. We think part of the reason this is the first we’ve followed is simply that we were too young/in college the last time this happened. By “this” I mean simultaneous Republican and Democratic races for the party nomination. I think this year is terribly fun, too, because both parties have genuine competitions going on. There are no front-runners. Sweet. And, really, the Democrats are looking so much better than the Republicans.

So, Hillary teared up a little. I find this inexplicably weird and hardly related at all to her ability to lead the country. But it’s generated quite a bit of stir. Gloria Steinem herself weighed in on Hillary’s crying and her victory in New Hampshire in an op-ed in The New York Times. She says, among other things that should be obvious to everyone but sadly are not:

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

On an almost entirely different media front, The Young Turks– “the first nationwide liberal talk show and first live, daily internet TV show”–dissected the media reaction to Mrs. Clinton’s tears quite charismatically and thoroughly. Cenk Uygur, a host of the show, delivered a list of politicians’ moments of tears and the media responses those politicians incurred for their brief moments of heart. It’s worth watching all the way through as he shows that, by and large, when Republican male politicians cry it’s genuine and moving and sentimental. But, you know, if Hillary cries, she’s a manipulative bitch who has no heart.

I also like the argument, referenced by Emily Bazelon on Slate, that Hillary ended up winning New Hampshire not because she cried and showed emotion, but because:

[T]here’s the particular Hillary and there’s Hillary the First Democratic Woman Waging A Serious Run for President. We can have our doubts about the first one and still root, on some level, for the second. And even if we’re not certain we ultimately want her to win, we sure don’t want her embarrassed by a run of heavy early losses.

OK, that’s all the punditry I’ve got in me for an evening. It’s twenty to eight, and that means it’s bedtime for Sarah.